Father.

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

March 27, 2022 + Smithtown

I.

When I served a church in Boston I attended a presbytery meeting where they  debated the appropriateness of calling God by the title, "Father."  One side of this debate had people coming to a microphone and waxing sentimentally about how we should call God father because God was a loving daddy, just like their own wonderful fathers who meant so much to them.  The other side featured presbyters tearfully bemoaning the fact that calling God "father" only served to remind them of their own fathers who were terribly abusive and neglectful.  They couldn't call God father.

I felt frustrated by this conversation because, well, when did theology become a referendum on our parents?  My dad was great.  But I never confused him with God, for crying out loud, let alone vice versa; and he was a minister!  I mean, we're Presbyterians: we do not believe God to be merely a super-duper version of a human.  God is beyond our comprehension.  We can at best only try to make helpful analogies and use careful metaphors, images, and symbols; and that hardly even gets us close to beginning to have any hope of understanding God.

Jesus and the Bible use a lot of very different, sometimes even contradictory, images for God, because together they hopefully throw light on the kind of relationship God has with us.  But to assume that calling God a "father" means that our experience of a father defines who God is for us, doesn't make any sense to me.

Furthermore, using a particular metaphor for God is not supposed to somehow validate, or divinize, or authorize, or prioritize the literal thing being used as a metaphor.  At Jesus' baptism, God appears as a bird.  But we don't therefore declare that all birds, or even all doves, are somehow godlike.  Jesus calls God a shepherd, but we have never instituted a "divine right of shepherds," or placed them in an exalted social position because they are supposedly like God.  We certainly have not given hens or, housewives, or lambs, or rocks, or mighty fortresses, some kind of special, privileged divine status either.   

The only instances in which we decide that the literal thing we are employing as a metaphor must therefore be specially blessed and godlike are when we compare God to a powerful man: mainly a father or a king.  In those cases, we manage to declare that because we talk about God as a "father" or a "king," that therefore the human fathers and rulers in our lives are somehow due the reverence, obedience, authority, and status we accord to God.  It should come as no surprise that this interpretation was developed and enforced by... fathers and kings.

In the Western church of which we are a part, this corruption of the biblical metaphors was further compounded by some medieval theologians who decided that not only was God a Father, he was a particularly bad one: abusive, cruel, heartless, and violent, so paranoid and ruthless that he will punish with eternal torture people who dare to cross him, even over the most minor technicality.  This father even demanded the torture, suffering, and bloody death of his own son to placate his psychotic rage over his wounded honor.  For some Christians, this is actually the gospel!  

It is no wonder we have had generations of people who love Jesus, but God?  Not so much.  If this is the God that people think they are praying to when they call God father, I can see why they have a problem with it.  But the idea that God is a homicidal tyrant who implicitly gives some kind of perverse divine authorization to vicious despots is not the God Jesus depicts in the father in today's reading.

II.

Jesus uses many metaphors and images for God in his ministry.  We get three of them here in Luke 15, culminating in the waiting, loving, forgiving father of this parable.  Jesus uses the image of God as a father often, including in his essential and model prayer, of course.  It was at the time a fairly radical thing to do because it claims an intimacy with and connection to God that is close to identity.  Jesus' audiences frequently react with astonishment and even alarm when he talks like this.  When he calls God his Father, people assume Jesus is practically making himself equal to God, and they occasionally say so. 

Jesus uses other metaphors for God, of course, including some explicitly feminine ones.  A couple of weeks ago we talked about God the mother hen.  Earlier in this chapter we see God represented as a housewife.  People understood back then that God's Wisdom and Spirit are both feminine, but that gets lost in English.  The one  he uses probably the most, though, is "Father."

I wonder if this isn't because it describes a figure and relationship in dire need of redemption.  Fathers and kings were the top dogs, front and center in his society.  They wielded the most power, owned most of the wealth, and generally controlled everything.  Therefore, they did the most damage.  He devotes a lot of his ministry to cleaning up the messes of bad fathers and kings.  Jesus lived in a patriarchal culture... just like we do, by the way, for all we have done in the last few decades to slightly mitigate it.  

Jesus knows that the hegemony of men is a big problem.  Three of the gospels make a point of stressing that Jesus does not come into the world because of the will or action of a man; it was between Mary and God.  So there was no man out there who could appear and claim custody or biological parental rights over Jesus.  He even says there will be no fathers in the Kingdom of God, and that we should not call anyone our father, which is his way of saying that his beloved community will have no bosses, no kings, no tyrants, no emperors, no self-important, entitled, privileged, pampered boys who get their own way all the time.  In all the gospels Jesus' authority is exercised in ways precisely and pointedly opposite to the ways fathers usually operated: he was non-violent, non-dominating, non-controlling, and non-owning.  

Given everything his ministry is about, it is inconceivable that Jesus intends that calling God "father" mean he empowers men.  In fact, he more likely calls God "father" to actually negate and critique human fatherhood.  He presents God as like an alternative father.  We call God father because we need to have a good father somewhere.  We don't call God "mother" quite as much because, well, we don't have to.  Human mothers are generally doing just fine.  They're not out there starting wars and exploiting workers and raping the earth and beating up their spouses and sexually abusing children.  Mothers do not need a heavenly replacement.  

III.

In this parable, when Jesus does clarify what he means when he calls God "Father," he confronts us with a kind of father unlike any father we have ever experienced, one whom we would not necessarily approve of as a good father.  This is neither the loving daddy or the abusive tyrant.  What Jesus shows us is someone else. 

I mean, look at this guy!  People in Jesus' time, and also in ours if we let ourselves, would notice what a spectacular weirdo the father is in this parable.  The younger son is so irresponsible, disrespectful, and mean that he demands to be paid his whole inheritance in advance, which is basically wishing his father were dead!  And the father responds by just unconditionally giving him the cash?  Seriously?  And when the son goes off and predictably proceeds to blow it all and come slinking back home, the father not only accepts him back, again unconditionally, but runs down the driveway to welcome him after frantically looking out the window for him every few minutes for the whole time he was away!  For an adult male in that culture to run at all was considered shameful!  And he not only accepts the returning son; he throws a huge, expensive party for him!   

The father in this parable appears to suffer from some kind of dementia.  He is unimaginably, irrationally, impossibly forgiving and generous!  This is not our sentimental memories of our loving daddy.  My dad would not have put up with this.  (Not even from my little brother.)  He loved us and part of that love was providing limits and boundaries and rules and necessary consequences for bad behavior.  Where in this parable is the courageous and difficult "tough love" that real good parenting often requires?  I mean, wouldn't love really mean asking the son to show, beyond the pretty, well-rehearsed speech, that he really had changed and come to himself?

The previous little parables in this chapter are the same.  What actual shepherd jeopardizes ninety-nine valuable sheep to go off to find one that wandered off?  That would be crazy!  What housewife tears her home apart to find a single lost nickel, then invites twenty people over for dinner because she found it in the couch?" 

When Jesus calls God "Father," he means God is like this crazy old guy in the parable who can't help himself: He has to give.  He has to welcome.  He has to cherish.  He has to forgive.  He has to love.  He has to pour out his heart for the beloved, especially when they take the trouble to come home in humility... but you know he would have done it anyway. 

This is what Jesus means when he calls God "Father."  He shows us God's nature as the One who is so wildly profligate and promiscuous and generous that he even makes the rain fall and the sun shine on good people and bad people alike, who provides everybody oxygen to breathe and food to eat.  God's very essence is eternal, self-emptying, unconditional love.  God pours that love out in creation so that it becomes the ground and character of everything.

IV.

That's what is going on on the cross, where Jesus demonstrates for us how God's arms are stretched out in welcome and blessing of the whole creation, and how God's very life-blood gets poured out on the Earth to permeate, infuse, fill, and sanctify everything.  

How tragic is it if we decide to see instead Jesus placating a cruel father who demanded his blood as a condition of forgiving us.  It reminds me of the older brother in this story, who lives with this father receiving this flow of his goodness and bounty every day, and yet who has nevertheless convinced himself he is a slave forced to work for it all!  He chooses to see this same pathologically generous and forgiving father as a merciless abuser demanding incessant labor!  And now he is rewarding bad behavior!    

It is we humans, invariably led by men, who choose to manufacture and live by lies about God's honor and wrath and retributive justice and demand for productivity.  We invent a violent, punishing god who authorizes us to oppress and exploit others.  While the real God, the God of love and forgiveness, we crucify. 

At the same time, even in our acts of unspeakable cruelty and injustice, like the horror of crucifixion, only serve in the end to reveal God's Presence continuing to shine infinite blessing and goodness on the Earth and on all people.  God's love transforms our evil into goodness and our death into life, whether we like it or understand it or not.  The truth always shines through our lies; God's reality always wins over our fantasies.  Sometimes it just takes a while, is all. 

And God is always ready and willing and eager to welcome us back home, no matter how comprehensively we have screwed up, no matter how many times we fail rehab, no matter how much damage we do to ourselves and others, no matter what bad decisions we have made.  This is good news indeed for wayward children and parents alike.  We can't stop God's goodness; working against it only brings pain and sorrow into the world; so why not go along with it?  Why not do things God's way, as counter-intuitive as it seems to us?

In response to the ignorance, paranoia, and hatred we experience from human authorities, Jesus witnesses the true king and true father, the true sovereign and true authority, the true Source and Creator -- and the true Mother, Shepherd, housewife, bird, wind, light, rock -- who overcomes, negates, and overrules our illusory, egocentric agendas, including the belief that anyone gets to dominate anyone else.  As the true Lord, God erases and washes away our self-centered patterns and habits of lordship, replacing them with humility and service.   

That's the God who calls us as disciples and witnesses.  That's the God whose  agents we become by the power of the Holy Spirit.  That's the God who gathers us into one community of believers, who trust in God and follow Jesus' Way of love.

It is through us now, the people who have been redeemed from lies and restored to the truth, that God's love -- God's forgiveness, generosity, compassion, blessing, and joy -- continues to pour into the world.  All we have to do is let it.  All we have to do is come to ourselves.  All we have to do is come home. 

+++++++ 

The Fox and the Hen.

Luke 13:31-35

March 13, 2022 + Smithtown

I.

Jesus is in Galilee, doing his healing thing, when he is interrupted by some members of the Jewish sect of the Pharisees who tell him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.”  Herod was the petty king whom the Romans allowed to be their agent in administering Galilee and some other areas east of the Jordan. 

This may be taken as a warning or a threat.  On the one hand Jesus was usually in conflict with the Pharisees, and they may have just wanted him to be rid of him.  On the other hand, some Pharisees could have recognized Jesus as a fellow Jewish teacher who deserved to be protected from a slimeball like Herod.   

In Jesus’ reply he refers to Herod as a “fox.”  It is not a compliment.  Our view of foxes today is kind of benign and Disneyfied, but in Jesus' day people understood foxes as sly and violent predators.  I once had a cat who was rescued from the jaws of a fox by the heroics of a neighbor.  That was a fifteen-hundred-dollar Vet bill.  So I get that foxes can be dangerous.  If you are a smaller animal or bird, a fox is liable to grab you and eat you at any time.  Which seems to be the leadership model that Herod was going for.

This Herod is the son of Herod the Great, who tried to snuff Jesus in Bethlehem as a child, and ended up massacring a town full of infant and toddler boys.  Earlier in the gospel this younger Herod beheads Jesus' mentor, John the Baptizer, who was criticizing him for marrying his brother's wife.  So to call him a "fox" is an understatement, and perhaps even insulting to foxes; Herod was a corrupt, immoral, and brutal ruler.

In those days as in ours, subjugated, colonized, conquered populations were ruled by terror and mass murder.  And violence hangs over this passage, and increasingly over Jesus' continuing ministry, as he heads towards Jerusalem.  He mentions this destiny from time to time so that the disciples don't have inaccurate expectations (not that that worked), plus anyone hearing this gospel would have known the basic facts about what happens to Jesus when he gets to Jerusalem, that he is headed for a veritable den of foxes.  Herod was small potatoes compared to Pontius Pilate who represented the awesome power of the Roman Empire, known for leveling cities and putting entire populations to the sword. 

Meanwhile, Jesus is simply continuing his ministry which he describes as "casting out demons and performing cures."  In other words, he is liberating people from spiritual, psychological, and physical disease.  Jesus is known for giving away free health care, and it is making him quite popular.  This puts him is on the radar of ruthless tyrants like Herod who will always resent anyone more popular than they are.  Plus, Jesus is explicitly doing things the long-promised Jewish Messiah was supposed to do, and while the coming of the Messiah would be a great thing for the people, but for the ruling kings?  Not so much.  So Jesus is a threat.  And Herod has put the word out that Jesus' life is at risk as long as he is in Herod's jurisdiction.

Jesus is already headed for the State-line anyway.  But Herod does not have the power to obstruct Jesus’ plan.  If it weren’t for the gospels no one would even remember Herod.  He’s not nearly significant enough to get in the way of Jesus' movement.  

II.

Jesus is headed for Jerusalem, where he knows he will be killed.  He is a prophet, and Jerusalem is the place where prophets like him get lynched.  Jesus says, “It is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.”  That’s because Jerusalem was the site of the Temple, which was the only place where sacrifices could be made.  When prophets are killed they serve as martyrs, witnesses, which is a kind of sacrifice.

People like Herod, Pilate, the establishment in Jerusalem, and national leaders in many other times and places were following the tried and true method of enforcing national unity and social stability by means of sacrifice.  That is, they identified people as threats, common enemies whom the people could get together to oppress or kill.  It is a common way that anthropologists observe different cultures use to maintain unity and order.  And we still do it today.  

We could call it scapegoating, but it is a bit more than that.  Empire always needs to gin up enemies and get the people to take out their fear, rage, and desire on them, as a distraction, so that the people don't bother to look around them and realize who is really oppressing and exploiting them.  

We can always identify tyrants because they are constantly throwing up targets for us to fear and hate: look, those immigrants!  Muslims!  Transgendered people!  The Gay agenda!  Socialists!  Critical Race Theory!  They're trying to take everything away from you!  They are a secret global cabal of pedophiles and baby killers!  Be afraid, be very afraid! 

Jesus is healing many of the same people whom the establishment pointed at  as "sinners" and deviates worthy of exclusion or death, whom we're all supposed to hate and fear.  His ministry is with and to the marginalized, the outcast, the excluded, the poor, and the disinherited, that is, the people whom the rulers get a lot of mileage out of blaming for everything.  In another gospel we find a story of Jesus actually stopping the lynching of a woman caught "in the very act" of adultery; such populist murders were unifying events.    

Jesus' work undermines the ruling ideology by weakening this vilification narrative.  The rulers require enemies, but Jesus says to love our enemies.  At the same time, by identifying with these people he is joining them as an object of civil disdain.  All the way to the cross, he will demonstrate solidarity with all who have been unjustly killed for the sake of someone else's power.  

By going to Jerusalem, the site of sacrifice, he demonstrates that he intends his death to be the final offering that ends all sacrificial solutions to the problem of human sinfulness.  His death will reveal what many of the prophets preached, which is that God does not desire literal sacrifice involving deliberate and deadly violence against an innocent victim.  The prophet Isaiah reports God wanting "mercy, not sacrifice."  The sacrifice God accepts "is a humble spirit," says Psalm 51.  A sacrifice is supposed to be about thanksgiving, it's supposed to be an offering, not a cynical transference of our fear and rage on an arbitrary victim for the sake of a counterfeit unity.

If our politics too often degrades into scapegoating and sacrificing someone, Jesus deliberately undermines and cancels it with his example of self-offering love. 

III. 

Thinking about all this leads Jesus to meditate on his destination, the holy city of Jerusalem.  His words are full of sorrow and longing.  "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!  How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" 

The den of foxes who run things have to concoct a false unity by finding a common enemy.  Jesus says to the contrary that God's unity is represented in the feminine image of a mother hen, gently yet firmly gathering all her chicks under her wings, protecting them from their own ignorance, keeping them from wandering away from the nest before they can stumble into the sights of a fox or some other predator.

Jesus says this to Jerusalem, full as it is with "wayward chicks" who know not what they do, whom he knows will kill him.  For the tragedy is that the people of the city do not come to God.  They run away from the loving wings of God the mother hen.  They prefer to be on their own, acting like foxes, making their own decisions, based on their own self-interest… and so they are left vulnerable, exposed, and alone.  And they will eventually be destroyed when the city finally reaps the consequences of its injustice and violence, and the Romans demolish the whole place, which happens about 40 years after Jesus says this.  If we live our lives venerating and celebrating foxes, we will surely die in the jaws of foxes.

It is not something that Jesus is very happy about.  The one who identifies so closely with the victims also feels in advance the pain and horror that the children of the city will suffer, some of the very same people who will scream in a frenzy for his death.  He will even address some of the women, the daughters of Jerusalem, on his way to the cross, "Do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children." 

So he concludes his words to the city by saying, “And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’”  He is quoting from Psalm 118.  It is one of the Psalms traditionally sung at Passover, which is when Jesus plans on arriving in Jerusalem.  People will pointedly sing these words when he enters the city, as they spread palm branches and garments on the street ahead of him in celebration.  Then he and his disciples will sing this Psalm at the Last Supper, the night before he dies.  

The Church has always sung it every time we celebrate the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper as part of an ancient hymn called the Sanctus.  For this is when we see him now, whenever we eat the bread and drink from the cup, proclaiming his saving death and resurrection.  At the end of this gospel two disciples will recognize him there, in the breaking of bread, realizing his abiding presence with them.  Seeing him in the communion we eucharistically share together, we also perceive him in the mission for which we are fed to carry out. 

IV.

This passage leaves us with a choice.  Will we follow our fox inclinations, prowling around looking for someone to devour?   Will we rely on our achievements, successes, and triumphs, all at someone else’s expense?  Will we rely on our privilege, status, entitlements, affluence?  Living by our teeth and cunning, our audacity and hunger, motivated by fear and desire?  Will we therefore bring down the rage and hate of even bigger predators upon us, as the Earth itself reacts to our unsustainable consumer lifestyle? 

Or shall we dance under the broad wings of our Mother who calls us together in love?  Shall we live by God's maternal Wisdom, informed of a unity we already have, and don't need to invent by making up a common enemy?  Shall we live as disciples of Jesus, who embodies a justice which lifts up, gathers in, and includes those on the bottom, and brings down those foxes who prey on them?  Shall we trust in the living God, who created the whole place in love, an amazing, miraculous, and abundant planet with more than enough for all to share?

We are aware, of course, that a fox is going to win any encounter with a hen.  But Jesus is connecting us to something deeper and truer than such temporary but persistent defeats.  For even foxes have mothers; heck, even God requires a mother to be born among us.  When he is killed by the foxes, his tomb becomes a womb from which he emerges in resurrection life.  

For we always get back on ourselves the kind of energy we project into the world.  It could be devouring fox-energy, or it could be energy of the Mother-hen, which gives physical form to God's unconditional, inexhaustible love poured into creation.  She is the living Presence and Wisdom of God, and the heart of Jesus' good news and the soul of discipleship.  She is the very Spirit of the Church.

+++++++       

Luke 4:1-13.

March 6, 2022 + Smithtown.

I.

In the gospel for today we meet the devil, Satan, the Adversary.  He is an angel who rebelled against God and gets thrown out of heaven.  Realizing that he cannot defeat God, he sets himself to do the next best thing: destroy what God has made and loves, which is to say, God's beautiful creation.  And he discovers that the best way to achieve this is to enlist and manipulate the creatures God has placed at the center of the garden: humans.  The devil's plan is to play on our innate egocentric fear and desire so that we are driven to destroy creation and ourselves in the process. 

The devil is a mythic personification of the energy at work in the human soul that is always whispering in our ears the kind of words with which he coaxes Jesus here in this story.  We can easily recognize and dismiss as a cartoon villain the figure of a red guy with horns, pitchfork, and a long tail.  But the inclination in our hearts that he represents is in fact much more dangerous and insidious.  For through our fear and desire, we become convinced that we are separate from each other, and inspired to do violence in the world in the form of sins like gluttony, greed, lust, envy, resentment, and so on. 

I might suggest that he has so far been wildly successful. 

The devil’s words to Jesus are very strong because they make perfect sense to us.  That path always seems considerably more appealing and reasonable than the usually pretty counter-intuitive and annoyingly demanding words we get from God.

When we act out of a reflexive impulse to benefit ourselves, when we gratify our own fear and desire, when we act out of a sense of self-righteousness, we are listening and caving in to the temptations of this dissipating, destructive, consuming energy.  As long as we are about only what we perceive as good for us as individuals, or even as families and communities, races, nations, or other exclusive categories, we are not about what God wants.  

God, on the other hand, would have us to do what is good for everybody, for the whole community of creation.  But this is a perspective we have largely lost.

Jesus is truly human.  And it is the chronic and endemic self-centeredness of humans that Jesus has to combat in the wilderness with these temptations.  Here Jesus gives us the pattern for discipleship and for a healthy human life together.  His point is that we have to turn away from these attractive temptations, and turn instead to God the Creator and the vision of God's Kingdom or Commonwealth of peace, justice, compassion, and joy.

These three temptations boil down to the three cravings that dominate our lives when we are under the sway of our ego: they are: first, money or wealth, represented by the temptation about bread; second, the temptation to wield worldly, coercive power; and finally, the temptation to fame, represented by the dare to test God by leaping from the top of the Temple.  

II.

The first temptation is that Jesus turn a rock into a loaf of bread.  It is not unreasonable.  He has just fasted for a month and a half.  A sandwich would have sounded good.  He had reached his forty-day goal.  It wouldn’t make any symbolic sense to fast for forty-one days.  We know the arguments here: Why should he not do something for himself?  He isn’t any good to anyone if he starves to death in the desert.  He needs to keep his strength up for the sake of all who depend on him. 

The devil appeals first to Jesus’ gut, his stomach, his need for nourishment.  It is always weak spot for humans.  Food is a matter of physical survival.  Consuming is a part of life, from microorganisms to whales.  We all eat and process nutrients to live.  Bread is a metaphor for any kind of food.  And over the course of time we have made it stand even more broadly for all kinds of wealth, especially money.  We even talk like this, referring to money as "bread" or "dough."   

The first temptation is really, then, about wealth.  It is the urge to acquire the resources to support and feed ourselves in the manner to which we would like to become accustomed.  Whenever we do something "for the money," we are succumbing to this temptation.  

In the second of the temptations, the devil offers Jesus the might and authority of all the kingdoms of the world: political, military, judiciary, and executive power.  This is the kind of coercive force that is exercised by armies, police, and courts.  It is the kind of power where you can fine, or imprison, or even legally kill someone who transgresses your will.  It is for almost all of humanity the only kind of power that matters.  It is the power to make someone do what we want.

This is the temptation of politics.  And in a democracy we all are concerned with it.  We all want the power to make the world a better place... mainly for us, of course.  We are expected to vote for and enact laws that serve our self-interest.

We cave in to this temptation when we imagine that problems can be solved by laws, violence, or brute force, whether it be with ourselves, our families, our communities, or our world.  It imagines that deterrence and retribution, punishment and reward, will-power and threats will ever somehow succeed in making the world a better place.

For the third temptation, the devil plays on the human desire to be attractive, popular, entertaining, beloved, admired, and even famous.  To get people to like us we will gladly put on a show, whether we are famous rock stars, amazing athletes, brilliant artists or scholars, or just sprucing ourselves up for a date or a party, or even just a trip to the store.  "The things we do for love," as one old pop song put it.  

So the Adversary bids Jesus put on a spectacular show, publicly taking a swan dive off the top of the Temple in Jerusalem.  The idea is that God will be compelled to send angels to keep God's Son from getting smashed on the pavement.  Satan even helpfully quotes the Bible, Psalm 91, in support of this idea, which reminds us that the ego can always have a Scripture verse ready to support its agenda.  

Such a public miracle would get a great deal of attention.  He would win the imaginations and hearts of the people.  More importantly, Jesus would demonstrate that God is at his disposal like a really powerful genie.  Jesus would be saying, “Stick with me because God is obviously on my side!" 

 

III.

In all three of these, Jesus of all people could easily have reasoned that he is being given a chance to do immense good.  For if he does nourish himself, grab ultimate political power, and win people over, he would be in a position to make so many lives better and the whole world a more just and equitable place.  He could feed the world, end injustice and poverty, and be the most admired and respected person of all time.  Isn't that what the Messiah is supposed to do, anyway?  He just needs to accept it from the one offering it to him.  How many of us would turn down a deal like this?

It is easy to dismiss these temptations as being specific to Jesus and his own  personal mission as Messiah, but not really applicable to us.  After all, we are hardly going to literally turn stone into bread, or be offered the job of planetary monarch, or be asked to perform a spectacular public miracle.

At the same time, Jesus models a response to three things we all crave, that factor in the life of each of us, and that serve to divide us and destroy creation.  Not only do we personally crave money, power, and fame, our whole society is set up to encourage us to crave them.  Our whole economy is based on our seeking these things.  Acquiring them is the very definition and measure of success!

Bob Dylan once sang about how we all have to "serve somebody.  It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody."  It makes a huge difference whom we serve.  

We convince ourselves that freedom means not serving anybody, that we are independent and autonomous, with unalienable rights.  But the fact is that what we have been trained to call "freedom," is in reality an enslavement to the demands of our own ego, and that is the Adversary's grip on our souls.  The Apostle Paul says we are thus enslaved, to "the flesh," which is our false self, our egocentric self, in which we are dominated by our fear and our desire for self-preservation and self-gratification.  It denies our interconnectedness and interdependence. 

To counter these cravings, Jesus does not command us simply to abstain from these things, cold-turkey, as we say.  He doesn't say to avoid these things.  For that is often still a self-righteous violence which draws attention to ourselves.  Masochistic self-destruction also plays into the ego's game.  Rather, Jesus says we should lose them; we should obey God and give them up, which is different.  Because we can only give up what we first acknowledge to have received.  

Realizing that all we have is a gift from God, and appropriately giving thanks, we then obey God by sharing, giving away, and contributing what we have to the common good.  We participate in and even facilitate the flow of God's goodness and benefits into the world.  Jesus does not want us to have these things, but he does want us to receive them... so we can give them away.

Later in his career, Jesus will make bread to feed five-thousand people apparently from nothing; he's not against providing bread.  Neither is he against wealth per se.  He tells the rich people he meets to give their wealth away to those who need it, then come and follow him.  We respond to God's Word by sharing.  Instead of gaining and hoarding what we want, we offer it up and give it away.

It is the same with power.  We receive it in order to relinquish it and spread it around, not to wield it against others.  We intentionally cultivate equity by identifying with, empowering, and serving the powerless, which is what Jesus exemplifies in his ministry, especially in healing.    

And finally, in terms of the kind of admiration and approval we crave, Jesus would have us reflect that to others by treating everyone, even our enemies, with love, forgiveness, affirmation, blessing, and by doing for them the good things we want for ourselves.

IV.

Jesus models a change in the orientation of our lives so that we are not about what comes to us that we keep, store, save, hoard, own, control, or benefit from.  He responds to each temptation by referring back to God, the only One we should serve.  Human life is about shining the light of God into the world.  It is not about serving ourselves, but serving God, which means serving others, beginning with those most in need.  

Only this attitude and approach is sustainable.  Only caring for and serving each other, fostering equality and equity, only compassion and non-violence, only forgiveness, service, and sacrifice will save us.

There is an existential urgency here that we cannot ignore.  Right now in history we are at a tipping point along so many scales, from the deepening climate crisis that we are completely unable to address by normal ways of thinking, to a deteriorating geo-political order, to a republic edging from polarization towards disintegration.  The pandemic has shaken our trust in a lot of authorities, traditions, and assumptions.

The greatest urgency is that humans must reverse the direction of our consciousness itself, away from the toxic attitude that life is about what we get for ourselves.  That voice wants to kill us and this planet.  We need instead to move according to the affirmation that we are put here to do good with and for each other.  We are not individuals so much as participants in networks of intertwined, interactive, interdependent, mutually supportive communities, and the more we take just for ourselves the more surely we doom ourselves, and the world.  In Jesus Christ the "us" we care about gets expanded universally to include all creation and all people.

These temptations are the summary of Jesus' whole teaching.  He will enact and embody this teaching in the rest of his ministry, culminating in the giving of his own life for the life of the world on the cross, and pouring that life into our own lives in his resurrection.  The Church is supposed to be that place where this life is blowing, and shining, and blasting, and spraying into the world, it is supposed to be a womb from which grace emerges, a place where we witness by our actions to the truth that to follow and serve God is life, joy, peace, and love.  

The truth is that our lives are knitted and woven together with everyone and everything God has made.  We are all parts of each other to build each other up.  In Christ, God sends us into the world as his witnesses, his emissaries, his agents of blessing, shining God's goodness into the world, for all.    

+++++++

 

 

Matthew 6:1-8, 16-21.

March 1, 2022 + Ash Wednesday + Smithtown.

In Matthew 6, Jesus talks about the three pillars of spiritual practice.  They are prayer, giving alms, and fasting.  Jesus doesn't say "if" you do these things, he says "when."  He assumes anyone seriously involved in the spiritual life would already be engaged in these activities. 

We know that prayer is kind of basic.  And most of us understand that giving of the resources we have to others in need is also important.  All of us do both of these things, I hope.  Certainly we can do them better and with more consciousness, knowledge, and faithfulness.  But we at least know they are essential to do.  

The one we have a problem with, generally, is fasting.  There are historical reasons for this, rooted in the Reformation.  All the Reformers understood fasting to be beneficial.  What they objected to were the oppressive and silly Medieval Roman Catholic rules about it.  But unfortunately, people took the removal of those rules as permission to abandon the practice altogether.  Our egocentric inclinations took over, which were then greatly buttressed by our consumer-driven economy and society.  Which meant that many Presbyterians do not fast.  Ever.  I have known Presbyterians who were convinced that if they were to go without food for a whole day they would literally die.  We frame fasting as an example of mindless religious legalism at best, or at worst, a self-hating form of asceticism on a par with the bloody, masochistic, self-flagellation done by monks in the Dark Ages.  As if it were a form of self-punishment.  

Of course, were fasting really either of those things Jesus would not recommend the practice to us.  Clearly something else is going on. 

The purpose of all spiritual practices is self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-discovery.  They help us discover the truth, which is that we are not who we think we are, and that who we truly are is unknown to us.  Spiritual practices are technologies by which we become aware of this.  They help us move from our old, false self to our new, original, true Self.  The apostle Paul framed it as a shift from being influenced by the "flesh" to being under the Spirit.  We may follow our ego, which separates us from the world, or by God's grace we may follow our Essence, which is Christ-in-us, through whom we are connected to all people, all of life, all creation, and the Creator.  

Fasting is in some ways the epitome of a spiritual practice because it reveals the fundamental direction of our interaction with everything, from God to the world.  Is our existence about what we gain, or what we give?  Is it about what we take, or what we share?  Is it about what we kill and devour, or how we give life to each other?

By intentional and prayerful fasting we move from unconscious consumption to conscious connection.  We come to realize that if and what and how we eat are choices.  What we choose reveals our spiritual condition. 

Fasting shows, on the one hand, that we are slaves to our egos, and we approach the world with the mentality of a vacuum cleaner, with the point of life being to get, to take, to acquire, to gain, to receive, to devour, and to absorb, with the direction being exclusively one-way, towards me, for my benefit, feeding me, sustaining me.  It is all about me.  

This is in fact the ideology of the Modern world: to consume with abandon and reduce the Earth to "resources" for extraction and commodities for sale.  It is all about consumption.  We even define humans as "consumers."  We have been trained to do this almost unconsciously; certainly we do it mostly uncritically, assuming it is necessary and inevitable.  It is a message we get from every side.  Our economy and culture demands consumption, which means there is nothing more antithetical to our Modern way of life than fasting.  A deliberate choice not to consume is the most subversive thing a person can do.  

On the other hand, fasting can shake us awake to see our dependence on others, and therefore our connection to everything.  We literally are what we eat.  Our bodies are physically constructed out of nutrients we acquire in eating and drinking.  By eating we are connected in remarkably intimate ways with people and life-forms, soil and water.  

Fasting may also encourage us to consider deeper questions of where our food comes from?  Who grew it and harvested it?  How was it processed?  How did it get here?  Who transported it, and sold it?  What effect does all of this have on the larger systems upon which we depend for life?  My blueberries come from Chile.  My tea comes from Sri Lanka.  We get rice from Vietnam, and cheese from Wisconsin.  My honey comes from an apiary in Southampton.  Was all this food production and delivery done with justice and fairness and equity?  Was it done sustainably and responsibly? 

More to the point, am I benefitting from evil?  Am I underwriting slavery and pollution and deforestation and the unspeakable horrors of the way we mass produce meat?  

Fasting as a spiritual discipline makes us realize that we are the Earth and that we all depend on each other to live, and that what we do to one part of the system necessarily effects all the other parts.

When we combine fasting with prayer, we give thanks to God our Creator for all we receive, and at the same time confess our complicity in systems of destruction.  And when we combine fasting with giving alms, we make material amends to those who suffer from our irresponsible consumption.  Thereby we witness to God's new world of justice and shalom in which everyone has enough, which is the original intent of creation. 

In the end, living as a disciples of Jesus Christ means seeing ourselves not as consumers, but as mutual participants in a miraculous system of mutual nourishment and blessing.  This season of Lent is intended to wake us up to the fact that we are existing most of the time according to other values and life-styles.  The heart of Lent is fasting.  In some Christian traditions Lent is called just that, "The Fast."

And I know, fasting can just be an ego-centric feat of physical achievement or done with some selfish ulterior motive, like fitting into my old jeans.  But the real heart of it is connection.  It is realizing our dependence one each other and the Earth, and reshaping our lives to live more justly, humbly, gratefully, joyfully, and reciprocally.

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Luke 9:28-36.

February 20, 2022 + Transfiguration + Smithtown.

I.

Just before this story, we hear about how Peter affirms that Jesus is indeed the Messiah, the One anointed by God to be the King of Israel.  It is the culmination of all that has gone before in Jesus' ministry.  Their movement is growing!  Jesus is a popular teacher and healer, with the power to feed five-thousand hungry people from practically nothing.  Things are going really well.  On to Jerusalem! 

But just then, Jesus starts to get very dark.  A cloud seems to come over him.  All of a sudden he begins to talk about how, when he gets to Jerusalem, he will die.  He will undergo great suffering, and the elders, chief priests, and scribes will kill him, he says.  Not only that, but the disciples too will have to participate in this defeat with him, in some sense.  To follow him, Jesus says, they have to "deny themselves."  Every day, they will have to "take up their cross," which was a gruesome instrument the Romans used to torture seditious troublemakers to death.  In order to save their lives, they will have to lose their lives, he says.  It seems like a dramatic and not very helpful change in tone.

I imagine the disciples are somewhat perplexed.  What happened to nice Jesus, giving away free health care and food, fixing the weather, conjuring huge catches of fish, and walking on water?  What happened to that attractive, entertaining, popular Jesus?  What happened to Jesus the winner?  After eight and a half chapters, you think you know somebody....

Maybe we find ourselves in a place somewhat similar to Jesus' disciples.  I think the church has been in a kind of trauma for half a century and now it is getting even worse, especially over the last two years of Covid.  

We don't like change.  Some folks want the church to be a refuge from all the crazy stuff going on out there in the world.  At least when we come in here we can depend on things being reliably more or less the same.  I mean, the interior of this room probably hasn't changed in centuries; we still worship in box-pews and I'm up here in this pulpit in the sky, just like our Puritan forebears.  We have a beautiful pipe organ and a bell choir, and we have old-fashioned group singing, and we read from this book from two-thousand years ago.  It's all very traditional, reassuring, stable, and comforting.  Most of what we do would be completely recognizable to our grandparents or even great-grandparents, as Presbyterian worship.    

One of the reasons Covid has traumatized us is that it has forced us to change.  We're "meeting" now on screens instead of in-person; we wear masks all the time, we can't touch each other.  Ministers are resigning, churches are splitting over vaccines and mask mandates; people who got used to "going to church" in their pajamas, or streaming it whenever they like, or even surfing around to check out other churches?  They are not necessarily coming back, if we are even safe, which nobody knows for sure.  Receipts are way down.  Churches that used to be ready for change, are suddenly retrenching into survival mode, frantic about getting new members and keeping old ones, which turns out to be mostly an impossible contradiction.  Worse, a lot of Christians are finding themselves in shock over the astonishing spread of the just plain nastiness of other Christians, over everything.  

We hate this!  Things are getting farther and farther from the nice, comfortable, secure, successful way they used to be.  Fewer and fewer of us even remember that.    

II. 

And if we can't have Jesus and the Church as a place of stability and comfort, if we're going to have change preached at us even here?  Jesus going off with this alarming talk about death and crosses?  What good is it?  Who wants to be part of a movement that is going to fail?  

So, perhaps sensing a need to address confusion and frustration in the ranks, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John, the inner trio of his disciples, up onto Mount Tabor for a retreat.  They are to pray and meditate, probably to help them process this new approach, this change in the plan and message, that he is going to Jerusalem to die and be raised.  But when they get to the top, apparently Peter, James, and John are exhausted; they fall asleep.  They lose consciousness of what is going on.

Mountains are very important in the Bible.  Mountains offer us the sort of all-inclusive, God's-eye-view of things that gives us some perspective.  They also offer opportunities for solitude and reflection.  At the same time, mountains remind us of our vulnerability.  In the Hebrew tradition, the two people most closely associated with mountains are Moses, who receives the Law on Mount Sinai, and Elijah, who defeats the prophets of the god Baal on Mount Carmel.

Maybe to find our bearings in a time of confusion and conflict, we too need to spend some time on a "mountain."  Now, we don't really have mountains on Long Island.  The closest things we have to mountains are big landfills.  I don't know if we can go up there or if we would even want to.  So fortunately it doesn't have to be a literal mountain.  It doesn't even have to be an actual geographical place.  

Mountains in Scripture are metaphors; the spiritual meaning of "higher" is within.  "Going up the mountain" means entering our deepest inner place of prayer, contemplation, vision, and union.  It means getting a wider perspective and refocusing our thinking.  The "mountain" is where we experience our connection with our own bodies and breath, where we go to touch the basic elements of life we share with others.  It is where we get away from distraction and demands, and take time to focus on core values and identity, where we have come from and where we are going?      

I mean, many of us have been locked down for the better part of two years; how have we been using that time?  Have we found some solitude, or even communion with a few trusted companions, to reflect on what is going on with us and where we might be going?  Have we engaged in some spiritual practices -- like meditation, journaling, lectio divina, yoga, fasting or even just taking long walks -- to reground ourselves in what is really important?

Remember that our "mountain" is not supposed to be a comfort zone.  It's not a vacation resort.  That's why we're generally so lax about these practices.  Mountains are dangerous and exposed places.  We don't know what wild animals we might encounter.  They take strenuous effort to climb.  We are liable to fall, or give up.  We're at the mercy of the elements.  And climbing a mountain has no redeeming social or economic value. 

 

III.

Up on that mountain with Jesus, the disciples wake up and have this mysterious, mystical, supernatural, unexplainable experience where they see Jesus changed and shining with a dazzling light, and the prophets Elijah and Moses appear with him and they have a conversation with him about what is going to happen when he gets to Jerusalem, which they pointedly call his "exodus," his departure or liberation.  

Peter of course rather infamously responds to this by not wanting to leave.  He is infatuated with the amazing experience itself.  If Jesus is turning his attention to Jerusalem, Peter is still focused on the mountain.  “It is good for us to be here,” he says, as if to say, “and it is not a good idea to go anywhere else, like Jerusalem, for instance,” where Jesus has already predicted that they will face death and shame.

This is what happens when the mountain becomes merely a great experience and personal achievement.  We all want to remain in our glory days, whenever they were.  We don’t want to go back down to the lowlands, where there is pain and need.  Wouldn’t it be better to stay on the mountain and let needy, possessed, and sick people come up to them?  Wouldn’t it be better to build a shrine… no, three shrines! up here?  Then they could tell people all about their experience and they could go down and spread the word.  Wouldn’t that be better?

We tend to get all excited about the experience and ignore what the experience is really about.  We make sure we buy the t-shirt and the coffee-mug, and take lots of pictures with our phones... we focus on remembering something, but we miss the actual thing that is happening now.

Peter is still speaking when this mysterious, terrifying cloud comes over them,   “overshadowing” them like a dense fog.  The last time the gospel uses this word, “overshadow,” is back when the angel Gabriel tells Mary that the Holy Spirit would envelop her and the power of the Most High would overshadow her, and she would be filled with the very life of God; she would be pregnant with God's Son, growing within her, to emerge from her to save the world.

Here, the disciples are also overshadowed by God’s bright Presence, where they too receive God’s Word, though in a rather different way.  With them it is a Voice they hear, saying "This is my Son, my Chosen: listen to him!"  Just as Mary was charged with giving birth to God, they will be sent to bear God's message of reconciliation and peace to everyone.   

IV.

What we see in this passage is change, more change, change upon change, change squared!  The word "transfiguration" is a translation of the Greek word metamorphao.  Luke uses for what happens to Jesus the same word we use for when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly: metamorphosis.

The thing about metamorphosis is that for the caterpillar to change it must almost totally disintegrate.  Were we to open a chrysalis in the middle of its process we would find, not a caterpillar growing wings, but just an indistinct goo.  From this goo a butterfly is made.  The caterpillar deconstructs and then is reconstructed as a butterfly.  

So our choice is basically either to stay on the mountain as a caterpillar with Peter, still practically asleep and unaware, barely conscious of what he is saying, building and maintaining monuments, museums, and memorials.  Or we may see in Jesus Christ a foretaste and anticipation of our own bright destiny.  

The mountain is important.  But following Jesus means getting off the mountain and going down to the crucible of human confusion, pain, disease, and bondage.  It means making our way with him to Jerusalem, where the Temple is, which after all is basically a place of sacrifice.  It means disintegration and deconstruction.  It means letting go of our ego-centric impulses and projects, our fears and dreams, our nostalgia and our desire.  It means relinquishing what we used to be, and who we think we are, and emerging into who God calls us to be, who God made us to be, who we essentially at our deepest place already are: Christ-in-the-world.  

That is the journey, the process, of the season of Lent, which begins this week.  Forty days of following Jesus into the lowlands, through the valley of the shadow of death, a time of disintegration and deconstruction, failure, loss, and release.  Forty days to come to grips with the darkness, where things seem to be falling apart and the center not holding.  Forty days to arrive at something that looks like a tomb, but because of the insight we receive on the mountaintop, we know is really a chrysalis, an incubator, the site of resurrection, from which new life emerges.

So I hope we can reframe this whole time we are in right now, both in the world and in the Church.  Instead of looking back at what we've lost and longing for the glory days of 2019, or 1955, or 1975, or whenever, let's open our eyes and our ears and see the Light of God shining in Jesus Christ, hearing the Voice that tells us to "listen to him!"  By listening to and following him, we become what he is: beings of light spreading God's Presence, Wisdom, and love, God's compassion, forgiveness, and grace, into the world.

The Transfiguration means that this time of disintegration is the way God is making of us something new.  The new thing we are becoming will have continuity with what God has done, that's why Moses and Elijah show up.  The new thing will also be completely, wildly different.  We need to do what the Voice says: "Listen to him!"

In the end we will see and hear.  We will be beautiful.  We will be awake.  We will be wise.  We will be alive.  We will shine like the sun.  And we will fly.

+++++++   

 

Luke 6:17-26.

February 13, 2022 + Smithtown.

I.

Jesus is up on a mountain.  After a night in prayer, he chooses twelve of his disciples to be apostles.  A disciple is called to be a follower, while an apostle is also sent out to spread the word.  The Lord and his new apostles come down off the mountain to a level place where there are many other disciples and even more just regular people from all over, who have come to Jesus "to hear him and to be healed of their diseases."  One of the main things for which Jesus was best known in his own time by his own people was his healing.  He was considered a health care provider.

What he does here is an extension of the calling and ordination, as it were, of the apostles.  It is the setting for what he is about to do and say.  Luke takes this as an opportunity to give us what amounts to Jesus' "stump speech," the summary of the kind of thing he says all the time.  Here it functions as the basic message the apostles need to have down when they undertake their own ministries in his name.  They are to understand that his mission is not just words, as important as those words are, but he frames his words in the context of healing.  He heals in verse 19, then in verse 20 he starts to talk. 

I think we like to imagine that the provision of health care is more or less apolitical.  When I go to the cardiologist or the dentist, I don't expect a sermon about politics.  Even these days, when it is becoming more difficult to maintain that separation, it would still be somewhat unusual for my doctor to tell me whom to vote for or which government policies to advocate.  I mean, she might advise me on what to eat.  And I might decide to take that politically.  I might wonder if she is getting paid off by big fruit and vegetable companies, or if she has something against the salt industry.  I once went to a chiropractor who, I could tell from the posters in the waiting room, had political views diametrically opposed to mine.  I had to wonder during the rather vigorous treatment whether he was trying to paralyze me so I couldn't vote....

We try to keep these areas separate, but I suspect that this is another of those luxuries from yesteryear that has evaporated.  I mean, vaccines used to be non-political too.  I remember, when I was about seven, everyone in town dutifully and without question, even enthusiastically, going to the school gym on a Saturday, lining up to get a shot.  But those days are over.

Health care is actually very political, like it or not.  And for much of history, it has been.  It was certainly political in Jesus' day.

Jesus was going around Galilee and Judea healing people.  For free.  It was making him very popular.  And I imagine it might have been making him increasingly unpopular with the national and religious leaders.  Aside from the fact that people who make money off health care might not appreciate someone undercutting their profits by giving it away, in Jesus' day health care was political in another way.  The prophets predicted that the Messiah, when he comes, would be a healer.  And Messiah is a political title; it basically means king.  So, if the country already has a king, that's a problem.  So there was a built-in tension surrounding anyone going around healing people like Jesus is doing.  And he knows this because he mentions having to deal with persecution.  He knows that his actions are offensive to the people in charge.

II.

When Jesus is finished healing people, he sits down and starts interpreting for his disciples what he has just done.  This is instruction for the disciples, including the twelve newly minted apostles.  The rest of the people can overhear what he is saying, and from that they may glean some idea of what his movement is about.  His teaching is not a secret.  At the same time, he is mainly addressing his followers.  Which is to say, us.

When he begins, "Blessed are you who are poor..." the "you" is the disciples.  He says they are blessed when they share in the low economic status of the people.  Then he goes on and repeats the same thing about other difficult and painful situations.  "Blessed are you who are hungry," "blessed are you who weep," "blessed are you when people hate you...." 

In other words, he declares that the disciples are blessed by God when they are needy, broken, and marginalized... when they take on the material conditions of the people to whom he has just spent the better part of a day ministering.  

Indeed, theologically, in the Incarnation, God self-empties, taking on the liabilities, pain, fear, sadness, and dependent relationships of us humans.  It's as if Jesus says to his disciples: "I came down from heaven to serve needy people by becoming one of them.  To illustrate this, we have just come down from the mountain to the level of the common people in order for you to do the same thing: to heal people by sharing their lives, their poverty, their hunger, their sorrow, and their rejection by others.  This is to be the shape of your ministry in my name going forward.  Like me, you will also heal from within and among the people; you will heal and save what you take on yourselves and share."

God does not use a paternalistic, condescending approach to us.  Neither are his disciples and apostles to employ this superior attitude in healing others.  The mission of the church has always been most fruitful when identifying with, living with, standing with, crying and hurting with people in their pain and losses.  

At first glance, this doesn't make any sense.  It can be hard to see how simply being poor and hungry with someone changes anything.  But what it does is create community.  It creates relationship, and because it is done intentionally it automatically conveys value, welcome, acceptance, and love to people.  It eliminates injustice and inequality by refusing to participate in judgment and subordination.  

This is itself empowering and enlightening.  We witness to the truth that, before God, there are no differences between us in status or privilege.  As Paul says, there is no slave or free, Jew or Greek, male and female.  There is nothing that makes anyone higher or better than anyone else in God's sight.  When we create a community of equity, healing can happen because so much of what is impoverishing and starving us and causing us grief are these distorted, stratified, adversarial, exploitative relationships.

How much of what is harming people's health today is a result of systemic poverty and bias?  If I can't afford health care, or decent food, or if I'm under constant stress because I'm liable to lose my job, or get arrested, or evicted, I'm more likely to be sick.  It's going to affect me physically.  If we intentionally share people's lives as equals, creating communities of love, compassion, and care, we go a long way to healing or preventing even things like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, depression, addiction, suicide, maternal and infant mortality, poverty, and hunger.

III.

  Maybe the disease beneath a lot of other diseases is injustice: maybe bigotry, exclusion, rejection, and condemnation of others are what is killing people.  Maybe that is the unclean spirit that is troubling us all.  And maybe the response to which the Lord calls his church is to come down off our comfortable, affluent mountains and empty ourselves of a lot of what we are hoarding out of our egocentric greed and fear.  Maybe we need to find ways to share the lives of needy people, creating communities of acceptance and love, forgiveness and peace, hope and joy.  How many times does Jesus make a condition of discipleship the selling of everything one has and giving the proceeds to those in need?  "Then come and follow me," he says.  We can't follow Jesus weighted down with all that expensive baggage; unload that, and then we can walk freely together with him and with others.  

Jesus chooses to join people in their poverty and hunger, and therefore he can say with integrity, listen, because I am with you, your poverty is actually a blessing, your hunger is really a benefit, your sadness is in fact good, because through those experiences and through me, and through my disciples and apostles, you are in touch with God.  You have a future.  Together there is room in your life for God to act.  In me you have everything to gain.  You may look forward.  In this connection, we can connect with and feed and enrich and empower and and enjoy each other.

Because the folks who allowed that disease of injustice and inequity to fester in them and dominate their thinking and their whole lives?  Those are the people who sadly have no future.  Their lives are shrinking and collapsing.  They see connecting to others as a threat.  They think they have nothing to gain and everything to lose by following Jesus, if it means having to be involved as equals with those other losers.

So Jesus continues and states who is, well, not blessed.  "Woe to you," he says to them, and then gives a list of exactly the things we all have been trained by society and even our families to strive for!  The things we are taught we are supposed to achieve: wealth, popularity, safety, happiness, security.  Jesus means that if we strive for these things we lose them, because in the process of getting them for ourselves we have created a society of inequality and injustice, where our life is evaluated on the basis of how much stuff we have.  No matter how we got it.  Or who is left behind with too little.

If being blessed is about solidarity with others and community formation and living in relationships of sharing, acceptance, forgiveness, and listening, then being cursed has to do with the opposite.  It is individual autonomy, relationships of superiority and subordination, inequality, judgment, condemnation, blame, cheapness, separation, competition, and animosity.  It is get whatever you can for yourself.  It is suspicion and fear of the others, especially those poor and hungry people Jesus blesses.  It is about walls and exclusion.  It is about segregation, caste, and class.  It is about repression and suppression.  It is about canceling books, because they threaten us.  It is about how everything threatens us!  I know people who are threatened by Starbucks' coffee cups!  I know people who are threatened if they see the wrong two people holding hands!  How is that not some kind of curse? 

These are precisely the characteristics of a sick soul and a sick society that literally makes people physically and mentally ill.  That drives people to addiction, that destroys souls, families, communities, nations, and the planet itself.  That's why Jesus says they are cursed.  They invite hostility and catastrophe on themselves and on everyone.  In God's economy, to curse is to be cursed, to exclude is to be excluded, to condemn is to be condemned.

IV.

I don't hear Jesus yelling here.  I think he is very sad.  He is profoundly heartbroken that people in their deluded egocentricity, choose to curse others by enforcing a toxic inequality, and so bring a worse curse on themselves.  By grabbing more and more for themselves, and carelessly leaving their neighbors in need, they generate generation after generation of woe, misery, illness, resentment, violence, paranoia, and death.

Jesus gives us a way out of woe.  He offers a path out of this curse that afflicts people and societies, and now the whole planet.  Stop cursing and start blessing!  Put yourself in a position to receive the blessing of Jesus by identifying with and taking on the condition of others, especially those in need, and creating together a beloved community of sharing and acceptance.  

The Lord indicates that his Church is supposed to be a healing ministry.  It is supposed to be a place where people can find integrity and wholeness together.  That is what he shows the apostles when they come down from the mountain.  

The Church is supposed to make people whole.  And it makes people whole by connecting them together in networks of solidarity and equality, beginning at the most basic, common, sensory places of loss, hunger, abandonment, poverty, grief, and extremity.  We see this in Matthew 25 as well.  The Lord builds this community up from the very bottom of our creatureliness, our humanness, our physicality, our liability to loss and hunger and pain and death.  Then together, in him, we spin and knit, and weave together the antidote to woe, which is blessing.  We become people of blessing.  We finally inhabit God's call to Abraham and Sarah where this whole thing began: we become a blessing to all people and the whole creation.

The fruit of such blessing Jesus says is the emergence and realization of the Kingdom of God.  It is a dawning of prosperity and nourishment and satisfaction for all.  It is an awakening to laughter and joy.

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