Heaven.

John 3:22-35.

I.

            We come now to the final reference to John in this gospel.  John is still baptizing; now he is in a place called Aenon.  And an otherwise un-named, unaffiliated Jew seems to want to spark some dissension between John and Jesus over the Jewish cleansing rituals.  But John doesn’t take the bait.  He just says, “No one can receive anything unless it is given from heaven.”

            Now, that taken literally means that we can’t receive anything unless it comes from the sky.  Which doesn’t make much sense.  So we have to start wondering what John does mean.  What does heaven, the sky, symbolize or represent?  What does it mean to receive something from there?

            Beyond the literal meaning, “heaven” as “sky,” the word has meant several things.  It is the realm of God; it is where good people go when they die; it is the source of all goodness and blessing.  Usually when we talk about heaven we are making a contrast with the world or the earth or the life we know in our daily existence.  Heaven is transcendent and beyond what we are able to experience here on earth, except in rare and special circumstances… like Choc-full-o-nuts, “the heavenly coffee.”

            But I want to suggest that “heaven” has an inner meaning relative to the human soul that makes it a bit more accessible and meaningful.  For the Israelites, heaven was represented on the earth in the Temple or, before that, the Tabernacle: the holy place where God was particularly and uniquely present.  The Holy of Holies symbolized the whole creation, including the sky, or heaven; it was the intersecting point, the interface, between earth and heaven.  There was a direct connection between the Temple on the ground, and the Temple in heaven.

            Jesus, of course, has a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the Temple and its custodians.  One of his first public acts is to cause a disturbance in the Temple, and to predict its destruction. 

And as we saw, he also identifies himself with the Temple.  Now he, the Human One, not the stone and wood building in Jerusalem, will be the connection between earth and heaven.  In chapter 1, John declares Jesus to be the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, thus supplanting the role of the Temple and its sacrifices.  In chapter 4 Jesus will say that we don’t have to go to a particular place to worship; rather, worship happens wherever the Spirit is, and the Spirit is wild and uncontrollable.  The apostle Paul will talk about the body of each disciple, and the body of gathered disciples, as a temple, a place where God dwells.

So the place where heaven and earth meet is being radically de-centralized and de-geographicized.  It is becoming increasingly clear that, if God created the whole place by the Word and Spirit, that the Word and Spirit, and therefore God, is also somehow present in the whole place.  Jesus famously says that “the Kingdom of God is within you,” meaning that we get in touch with heaven when we find within us, in our souls, the presence of the God who is within everything.

II.

            So now when John says, “No one can receive anything unless it is given from heaven,” perhaps we could understand him to mean that we only receive from God what is given within us.  In our souls, that is, in our hearts and minds, in our interior life, that is where we get our authority, our wisdom, our blessings, our very life.  Heaven is within us.  God speaks to us and appears mainly within us.

            Now this is nearly incomprehensible to sophisticated, Modern people like us.  We have been indoctrinated to believe that what is important is what is out there and measurable, repeatable, tangible, and sensible.  Our interior life is dismissed as mere subjectivity; it is not a source of reliable knowledge.

            But in thinking this way we have cut ourselves off from the truth.  In fact, the deeper we go into our own hearts, the more connected we are to everything.  We only appear to be disconnected from each other and from God when we limit our gaze to the surface, the visible, the physical manifestations of things.  But even physicists will now tell us that in reality we are mutually interpenetrating with everything else.  We are constantly sharing and exchanging particles and energy and atoms and molecules with everything else.  Our independence, separation, autonomy, and individuality are only on the very surface of things, if not illusions altogether.

            Which is why when John says we only receive what God gives from heaven, it does not mean each individual thinking and doing whatever they please.  He is emphatically not saying that Jesus dreamed up his own unique approach and he should be allowed to do his own thing.  The key is the word “receive,” which is rather different from the word “invent.”

The spiritual point here is not inventiveness or creativity in the ways we usually use those words.  It is about being inwardly open to and then humbly and self-critically and gratefully receiving, what God gives.  We accept and cherish and implement what is given.  And this means developing disciplines of discernment so we can tell the different between God’s voice in our souls, and the various other voices which mostly express our own fear, desire, anger, shame, greed, and so forth.  We have to be able to tell God’s voice from the voice of our own ego.  (And the quick and easy rule here is that if the voice is telling you what you want to hear, it’s not God’s.)

True faith is never about finding or doing something new.  It is always about receiving something very old and expressing it in a different and changing time.  The Word of God is not essentially new; he was there in the beginning with God at creation.  It only seems new because the institutions that were once inspired by the Word have become corrupted.  In the faith, all revolutions get back to the roots, the original vision, the primal spark of revelation.

III.

            The gospel continues to talk about Jesus as the One who comes from above, from heaven, and is “above all.”  Elsewhere Jesus says the Kingdom of God is “within,” which could also be translated “among;” here it is “above.”  It is the same word used back when Jesus tells Nicodemus he has to be born “anew,” or “again,” or “from above.”  So we might ask, What is it?  Are we supposed to be born again, born anew, born from above, or born from within?  Is the Kingdom within us, among us, or above us?  Is it already here, or still to come? 

And the answer is yes!  Use whatever metaphor and imagery works for you, the Bible has them all.  We are running up against the inability of human language to completely comprehend God.  The point being that we have to receive from God what we already are because what we think we are isn’t true and is killing us.  Jesus is the One connected to God, who brings us God’s truth, Word, Spirit, life, light; he is the Lamb who takes away sin, that is, he restores us to our created goodness and unites us to God and all things God spoke into being.

This is in contrast with someone who only knows sensory, measurable, temporal experience, which here is expressed as belonging to the earth.  This is the realm of blindness, darkness, and servitude, enslaved to our fears and limited perceptions.  We are caught in the world of measurement, where things are quantified and then inevitably commodified, where truth is thought to be determined by math.

But the Spirit of God is not measurable; God gives the Spirit generously, literally “without measure.”  We can’t measure a dream.  We can’t measure love, or justice, or beauty, or truth.  We can’t measure the Spirit.  We can only receive the Spirit; the Spirit is a gift.  The Spirit comes to us, speaking and communicating in and through Jesus, who is himself the Word of God incarnate.

Jesus Christ comes into the world as the Way of life.  He is the means by which we discern when and how we are experiencing God, and telling the difference between hearing God’s voice, and hearing those other voices in our consciousness that draw us away from God to follow after our own desires or fears.  He is the only measurement; we have to put our own thoughts, words, and actions up next to him and see how they stack up… or not.  “Would Jesus do it?” becomes the main question in terms of our own behavior.

And even that requires interpretation by the Spirit in the gathering of disciples.  Because nothing is more depressing than the kinds of things people convince themselves that Jesus would do… which have no basis in the gospels and which Jesus explicitly rejects.

IV.                  

Finally, we are told that, “the Father loves the Son and gives everything into his hands.”  The Son is Jesus, who is both the Son of God and the Son of Humanity; he is both the divine and holy One, God, and the Human One.  “Fully human, fully God,” is the way we sometimes express it confessionally.  Jesus Christ is the way God gives everything to us.  In him we realize that everything we have is a gift, it is grace, it is undeserved, unwarranted, and unearned.  Where God is concerned, we neither make nor take; we receive from and through him what we have.  The things we make are worthless; and our taking of anything not given is a crime.

Unfortunately, we live in an age of our own making, and we suffer the consequences of our own taking.  Invariably, our making and taking leave a catastrophic mess behind, because we are acting in blindness.  We are acting in fear.  We have separated ourselves from the truth.  And we are doing untold damage, everywhere, from soul to sky.

            That’s why following Jesus is so important.  That’s where our urgency comes from.  I know that for many Christians the impetus for evangelism is saving people from going to hell when they die.  But for me, the urgency of evangelism is keeping us from spawning hell in people’s lives here and now.  For, to use the metaphors from earlier, if we are not opening our hearts to the One who comes from “above,” we are opening them and our world to the one who comes from “below.”  If we are not trusting in the Word, life, light, and Lamb of God, we are enslaved to the darkness, blindness, falsehood, selfishness, violence, and terror of the powers of death.

            I am not talking about “making people Christians,” as in aligning themselves with an institution or doctrine.  I am talking about learning to live together in Christ’s life of generosity, healing, peace, justice, beauty, and love.  Especially love.  That is discpleship, actually following Jesus.

            “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life.”  This is not about having an opinion with our minds; it is about how we live our lives; it’s about what we do in our bodies.  Do we trust in the Lord Jesus?  Do we trust in the wild Holy Spirit?  Do we obey Jesus’ words and follow his example?  Do we strive to imitate in him everything?   

“Whoever doesn't believe in the Son won't see life, but the angry judgment of God remains on them.”  If we don’t trust in him and do as he does, we are out of synch with creation itself.  And that is like driving the wrong way on the Parkway.  It leads only to the wreckage and misery we call the wrath or angry judgment of God.++

            If we don’t receive the gift of heaven, God’s saving presence, within us, I suspect we won’t receive it at all.  But if we do receive it within us, I know we will also start receiving it everywhere.  The whole world will become for us a gift, a present, a manifestation of God’s love.  We will start to see God at work all around us. +++++++

Wake Up!

Luke 5:33-39.  Ash Wednesday.

            Jesus contrasts his new way with the old way the disciples are used to.  He readily admits that people say the old way is better.  This is especially true about wine.  “No one who drinks well-aged wine wants new wine, but says, ‘The well-aged wine is better.’”

            The old way was about fasting, which is something the disciples of both John and the Pharisees did, for spiritual reasons.  Fasting was a sign of penitence.

            But Jesus says his disciples don’t fast, at least not while he is with them.  When he is taken away, then they will fast.

            Just about every great spiritual leader has recommended fasting as a beneficial spiritual discipline.  That includes the Protestant Reformers who founded the traditions we carry today.  They must have understood Jesus to have been “taken away.”  His resurrection and the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost must not have remedied his having been taken away.

            Jesus questioners here notice that Jesus’ disciples are “always eating and drinking.”  Life with Jesus appears to have been one long party.  The disciples enjoy life; they do not fall into the morose and self-punishing practices that the establishment and the traditionalists maintain.  It is a common criticism, or at least observation, about Jesus.  His enemies call him a glutton and a drunkard.

            Yet the church has always advised fasting.  Jesus himself fasted, of course, for 40 days in the desert, and presumably at Yom Kippur each year.

            Jesus says that it doesn’t work to take the new wine of his celebratory spirituality and try to make the wineskins of the old institution hold it.  Because the new wine is still fermenting, still changing, still expanding, and will cause the old containers to burst.  He uses the example of new and old cloth to make the same point.  The new cloth is unshrunk, and if you sew it to an old garment it will, when washed, shrink and tear free, making a worse hole than the one you were trying to fix.  New cloth is not done, it is subject to change.

            Jesus’ movement was too full of energy, too transformative, too explosive, too wild to be contained by rigid and limited religious institutions.  It would be like having a dance party in a museum: some ancient artifact will get broken.  The curators and custodians will get angry; the trustees will not be amused.

            Jesus’ movement doesn’t have any curators, custodians, or trustees.  It is undomesticated and uncontrolled.  There is no hierarchy, and it is most assuredly not about maintaining or preserving anything.  It’s not an exhibit in glass cases of dead things.  And it is not contained by any rules or regulations. 

            Jesus’ movement is not artificial but authentic, it is not abstract but direct, it is not theoretical but actual, and it is not about living disconnected in the past or the future but in the present moment.  “Now is the right time; now is the day of salvation,” says Paul.  We live between memory and hope, and both serve to feed our acting in the present as witnesses of God’s untamable love, revealed in Jesus Christ.

            So he says that when we’re with the bridegroom, when we’re present with Christ, when we’re tracking with and in him, then there is no need to fast.  Fasting would be a downer; it would drain the juice from the experience; it would snuff the light and suck the energy out of everything.

            But.  Few if any of us can live like that.  Even the greatest of saints did not always sustain that level of presence with the Lord.  Most of us don’t finally dwell completely and perfectly one with Christ while we’re still in time and space.  No matter how spectacular our experience of the risen Lord may be, all of us fall back to sleep.  We become beclouded with blindness again.  We lose the connection.  The bridegroom is taken away.

            And we fast to reestablish the connection.  Because most of the time when we sense the bridegroom having been taken away it is because we have lost our focus and fallen into distraction.  We inevitably become overwhelmed by the day-to-day blizzard of responsibilities, images, fears, memories, desires, calculations, and other things demanding our full attention.  And we lose our attention on the truth.  We fall back into the sleep-walking existence that characterizes normalcy for us.  We sink back into unconsciousness, non-presence.

            It is then that we fast.  We fast to wake back up.  We fast because it gets our attention again on our bodies, which is the most effective way to become present again. 

            Did you ever have a dream in which you know you are dreaming and you fervently desire to wake up?  If you’re like me you’ve learned that the best way to do this is to do something physical in the dream: pinch yourself, hit yourself, regulate your breathing, run into something.

            Fasting gets you back into your body where you can again experience the presence of the Lord Jesus.  Which is why we do it in Lent.  We have 40 days in which to wake ourselves up by getting back in touch with our bodies so we can more fully experience what we will be commemorating, enacting, and celebrating in Holy Week and Resurrection.

            The idea is that if we have sunk into conventional, domesticated, comfortable, risk-free, boring, predictable, sleepwalking religion, it is because the Bridegroom has been taken away.  We need to shock ourselves into awareness of Christ’s presence with and within us.  We need to get back into our bodies and wake up!

            What does Jesus advise?  Stay awake!  Remain alert!  Keep your lamps full of oil and ready!

            Maybe this Lent we can use this time to exert ourselves into a vibrant, connected, sharp, clear wakefulness, so that when we get to the Day of Resurrection we will see clearer than ever the life of God pored  fr he lfe f he wrld.

+++++++

Rebirth.

John 3:1-21.          (February 15, 2015)

I.

            Being born once is not enough.  It’s enough to get by with a kind of shallow biological existence for a few decades.  It seems to be enough for most people.  But it reminds me of that line from an old song by Bob Dylan, “He not busy being born is busy dying.”  If our only birth is the one where our physical bodies are flushed into the world, then we are spending the rest of our time dying.  We’re just playing out the string and doing a lot of damage along the way.

            We’re born into this life… and we quickly fall asleep.  We descend into a state of semi-consciousness which acts like an artificial womb, keeping us safe but also disconnected from real life.  Each of us re-enacts the fall story from Genesis in a sense, and we end up sleepwalking through life, bound by fear, shame, and anger, spawning in our wake the broken world of grief, pain, confusion, hostility, indifference, and death that we know so well and take to be the only real world.

            When Nicodemus comes to Jesus, we are carefully told that it was “night”.  Night, a time of darkness when we cannot see – and remember that before about a century ago nighttime was really dark – symbolizes this state of living death, sleep, unconsciousness, and blindness in which we find ourselves after our first birth.

            Just like the stone water jars in the story of the wedding, and the Temple in last week’s story, Nicodemus, a Pharisee, also represents the failed, inadequate, stop-gap, provisional religious institutions of the time.  At best he was one of the blind leaders of the blind, managing a system in which the people try to grope their way through the darkness by following the written directions of the Law. 

            But at least he does show up, recognizing that Jesus is “a teacher who has come from God.”  He senses in the strange things Jesus is doing the presence and activity of God; maybe he wonders if Jesus’ actions which don’t seem to make much sense, actually reflect a different dimension of reality.

            To which Jesus responds, “I assure you, unless someone is born anew, it’s not possible to see God's kingdom.”  In other words, you won’t be able to see much of anything I am doing unless and until you have experienced a rebirth, a birth from above.  Being born once is not enough to see the Kingdom of God, the saving Presence of the living God all around us in the world.  If you’re only born once you are still in the darkness, still bound to the night, still basically blind to what God is doing.  You’re still busy dying. 

            As an indication of how blind Nicodemus really is, he takes Jesus literally, assuming that “rebirth” is a grotesque and ridiculous biological and physical impossibility.  He thinks it means somehow entering and emerging a second time from his mother’s womb.  Which of course is nonsense.  To take Jesus literally is often to reduce his words to gibberish.  He only makes sense if we are able to listen to him with ears to hear and new minds.  That’s what “repentance” actually means: thinking differently.  And repentance is a condition for seeing the truth that Jesus talks about.

II.

            “I assure you,” Jesus continues, “unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, it’s not possible to enter God’s kingdom.”  Jesus is referring to his own experience at his baptism, when he descends into the water of the Jordan, and a bird, representing the Spirit, lands on him when he comes back up.  It is this event that causes John to recognize him as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

            We start off mired in our once-born existence.  But we have this encounter with water and Spirit.  Remember that the Greek word for Spirit, pneuma, is the same word for breath and wind; so Jesus is also talking about being born of “water and wind” or “water and breath.”  Jesus says we emerge from this encounter in a twice-born life able to see and enter God’s Kingdom.

            It is not that we are able to rise above God’s creation; what we rise above is our fallen existence beneath God’s creation, unable to perceive the goodness and blessing of God’s creation.  We come out of our unconsciousness, we wake from our sleep, we rise from submersion, we move from the darkness of our own delusion up into the light.  We rise up into God’s creation, as symbolized here by the water and the wind, or breath or Spirit, or the wild bird.

            Until this rising up happens, we remain lost in an imploded and collapsed darkness that we imagine is the only world.  Jesus says that, “Whatever is born of the flesh is flesh, and whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit.”  In other words, our first birth was a result of personality-driven, ego-centric impulses, and flushed us into a personality-driven, ego-centric world. 

            Our first birth began in unconsciousness and unconsciousness is what we inherited.  “Flesh” in the New Testament does not mean our physical nature; it is a selfish, self-centered, self-righteous impulse far below our physical nature.  “Flesh” is the power that actually separates us from our God-breathed nature.  Jesus is saying that whatever is born separated from God stays separated from God, until something else happens.

            The only way to be restored to connection with and in God, is to be born anew, into that true, good, blessed, and holy nature.  It is to be “born” a second time of water and wind.  It is to be born into God’s creation, God’s wild, uncontrolled, unpredictable, undomesticated nature.  “God’s Spirit blows wherever it wishes,” says Jesus.  “You hear its sound, but you don't know where it comes from or where it is going.  It’s the same with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

            We have to trust the Spirit’s wildness.  We have to surrender to not-knowing.  Remember which tree in the garden got the people into trouble: it was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 

III.

            At this point, Nicodemus is as confused as we might be.  This is not what he is expecting.  This is not what he has always been taught or has been teaching.  He doesn’t find any of this “born of the Spirit” stuff in his Bible.  So he says, What?  “How are these things possible?”

            To which Jesus replies that his teaching comes from a place of which Nicodemus has no knowledge: heaven.  Now, in one sense heaven literally means “sky,” and refers to some realm above this one.  But in another sense heaven also refers to the inner life of the human soul, as when Jesus says in Luke that the Kingdom of God, synonymous with the Kingdom of Heaven, is “within you.”  

            So “heaven” is not just another place where the good people go when they die; it is also within and among us, here and now, in our hearts and in our relationships.  Heaven pervades everything, like the way physicists tell us most of our world is actually empty space.  Heaven is this other dimension from which we are separated by our own self-centered blindness.  It is what we enter when we are born anew, or born “from above,” which is another way to translate the word used there.

            We have to be born from above, born from heaven, in order to understand what Jesus is talking about. 

            Jesus then brings up a story from the Torah where the Israelites, due to their chronic grumbling, are attacked by snakes, and, at God’s instruction, Moses fashions a snake made out of bronze.  When he lifts it up and the people look at it, they are healed of their snakebites. 

            Jesus says he will also be lifted up; he will be like the snake.  He will be lifted up when he is crucified.  And just as the bronze snake becomes, when the people see it, the antidote to what it depicts, so Jesus being lifted up on the cross becomes, when people see what is really happening, the antidote to death itself.  Therefore, when people see him and trust in him and follow and obey him rather than the demands of their selfishness, they are restored to the original life and blessing they were created with.  They are free of the infection of separation and so free of death.

            Back in the prologue we heard that “the Word became flesh.”  Paul also says that Christ “became sin.”  Here Jesus takes on the role of the snake in the story from the Old Testament.  I do not have to remind you of the snake’s other role, in Genesis, as the tempter who coaxed the people into disobedience.

            All of which means that God’s salvation in Jesus entails this dive into the very depths of our twisted, crippled, darkness, and then lifting it up, revealing its full horror.  “This is the basis for judgment,” Jesus says.  “The light came into the world, and people loved darkness more than the light, for their actions are evil.  All who do wicked things hate the light and don't come to the light for fear that their actions will be exposed to the light.”

            When Jesus is lifted up bleeding and broken it shows how people love the darkness more than the light.  We see the regime of violence, fear, hatred, and inequality in which we are all imprisoned.  We see how we treat each other.  We see how we treat the God of love who made us.  We see the snake that is killing us.  And the snake is us.

IV.           

            For those born of water and Spirit, born from above, who trust and follow and obey Jesus and his way of radical love, his lifting up on the cross is not a sign of despair and just another bitter victory for the powers of evil.  The cross does not instill the fear and terror it is intended by the powerful to instill.  Whoever has been reborn sees that all the violence and hatred aimed at Jesus, and at all suffering people, is absorbed by God and pours into the infinite depths of God’s love, where it is neutralized and channeled away, the way a lightning rod takes all that powerful, unstable voltage from the sky and conducts it harmlessly into the earth.

            To trust in him is to live without the judgment and condemnation that are the main tools used by the powerful to keep people blind and bound.  It is to live without hierarchies and regulations, without threats and scarcity, without chains of command.  It is to live in community, connected to God, creation, others, and even your own soul.

            And following him is to place ourselves in the same position.  It is to find ourselves reborn, born from above, and therefore located above our debased condition, elevated into harmony with the blessed and good creation, taking our place as the Creator’s stewards, managing all these marvelous resources for the good of all. ++

            For this is the way God loves the world: by sending the only Son, the Word, the light and life of the world, by whom the world was created, into that world, becoming our lost and broken condition.  So that whoever sees him, the living God, lifted up in suffering, taking the full brunt of the consequences of our blindness and our addiction to evil, and giving his life, God’s life, the life of the Creator, to all, will be immune to the power of death, and live forever. +++++++

Jesus Against the Market.

John 2:13-25.          (February 8, 2015)

I.

            Jesus and his disciples go to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover.  When he gets to the Temple he finds that it has been turned into a noisy marketplace.  There are bankers who have installed themselves in the precinct for the purpose of exchanging idolatrous Roman coins for Jewish coins which were suitable for people to use at other booths to buy birds and animals for sacrifice. 

            This enrages Jesus so much that it inspires his one act of semi-violence in his whole life.  Making a whip, he drives the animals out, and then he overturns the tables of the bankers.  He makes quite a commotion.  And he says, “Get these things out of here!  Don’t make my Father’s house a place of business!”  He does not want his Father’s house made into a marketplace.

            What is his problem?  Sacrifices are mandated in the Bible, and they had to take place in Jerusalem, which means that people had to travel.  Since, it was inconvenient to haul birds and animals on long trips; it made more sense to buy an animal when they got to Jerusalem.  But the Roman coins that everybody had couldn’t be used in the Temple because Caesar’s face was on them and the Bible rejected such graven images.  So people had to change it for Jewish money.  And it was only reasonable that this happen in the Temple complex, rather than in the city where it was harder to control things.  And people cannot be expected to provide these services for free, they have to make a living.  Therefore, profits should be made on these enterprises.  Right? 

            I mean, what does Jesus want to do?  Get rid of animal sacrifices altogether?  Is anything more solidly biblical than animal sacrifices?  Then, frankly, there is the practical matter of the whole economy of Jerusalem and Judea to consider, which was built on the spending of pilgrims who came to worship at the magnificent Temple.

            Jesus’ problem is that the point of the Temple and its ceremonial complex was to take away sin.  It was to restore humanity to its original, blessed, good, whole condition, united to God, to creation, and to each other.  It is a free gift of grace to which humans respond in gratitude and joyful obedience.  But can sin be taken away this way?  Faith in God had been twisted into a racket designed to fill the pockets and maintain the power of the elite. 

            The Temple was not doing what it was supposed to do.  In fact, it was doing the opposite.  Instead of taking away sin, it was compounding sin.  Instead of reconciling people to God and each other, it was driving them further apart.  It had been turned from a place of prayer to a place of business.

            Worse still, it was compounding sin while making people think it was taking sin away.  It’s like taking medicine that you think will make you better, but is really making you worse.

II.

            So the Temple authorities ask Jesus, “What is your authority for doing this?  What miraculous sign will you show us” to prove that you have the right to make this disturbance?  The only thing that might possibly overrule the entrenched Temple system would be some incontrovertible miracle from God.  And the Temple leaders knew this was not going to happen.

            But that is in the end what happens.  For now, though, Jesus says, Here’s my miraculous sign for you: “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”

            Of course, the Temple executives take him literally.  They think he’s talking about the actual, physical Temple, which has taken forty-six years to build.  They hear him saying they should somehow allow the gleaming, stone edifice to be dismantled and demolished, and that he will then personally and miraculously reassemble every block, brick, and rafter, neatly in place.  Using the Force, like Yoda, I guess.

             Last week Jesus transformed the exhausted faith of the people  into powerful new wine.  Now he goes to the heart of the religious institution of his people.  And he sees that it is corrupt, ineffectual, and dead.  All that’s left are the commercial vultures picking at its carcass.  Unless they are open, light, and flexible enough to keep receiving the refreshing breath of the Spirit, religious institutions tend to become just dead weight.  They spawn leaders and hierarchies and rules and budgets and bureaucracies and procedures.  And then they seek mainly to preserve themselves at all costs. 

            Institutions seem inevitably to morph into markets, places of commerce, areas in which money comes into power.  Because all those leaders and hierarchies and rules and budgets and bureaucracies and procedures don’t come cheap.  They have to be paid for.  And the money has to come from the people who are actually producing something, generally.  So the leaders of institutions have to develop some tactics for convincing or compelling people to give their money to support them.  Hence the whole rigamaroll of buying and exchanging that people had to pass through before they could worship in the Temple.

            And a market, a place of business, is the polar opposite of the zone of grace, forgiveness, redemption, equality, freedom, and liberation that the Temple was originally supposed to be.  The Temple that Jesus found was upside-down.  It had become a gauntlet of haggling, interest, accounting, scarcity, lies, and swindling.  It had taken what God gives freely to all, and put price tags on it.   

III.

            When Jesus tells the officials that he will raise up “this temple” after its destruction, in effect he is saying, “I am the true Temple.  My body is the real Temple.  And after you destroy this temple, that is, after you kill me, I will rise up after three days.” 

            Now the new Temple, the real Temple, is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”  In place of these living sheep that Jesus stampeded out the door, the shedding of whose blood was not working anymore, he puts himself.  The people’s relationship with God, creation, and others, was not being healed.  Their alienation and sin was not being repaired.  That is something a market, as a battlefield of competing self-interest, cannot ever do.

            But this reconciliation will happen in the ultimate sign that Jesus predicts, which is his own death and resurrection.  He takes away the sin of the world, not by buying and selling, but by dying and rising up again.  He carries our sin, our brokenness, our hatreds and fears and selfishness, our shame and anger, in his body, which is the same body we have, made of the same stuff.  And he immolates all that on the cross, vaporizing it, and revealing it to be the nothing that it is.  And he gives us God’s own new, eternal life of love, and pours that into our hearts in his resurrection. 

            It is his death and resurrection that reveal that he is the new, true, final Temple.  Unlike the Temple that failed to do its job, Jesus will himself lead his people through death to new life.  That is the only way to new life.

            Not through propping up an institution that was actually dead but didn’t know it, and was now nothing more than a cynical cash-cow for the elites.  But through the transformation which requires that we die to our old fearful selves caught in addiction to violence, selfishness, and suspicion, so we can be reborn on the other side, a place of light and life, joy and grace, healing and liberation.

            The true test of anything is whether it actually accomplishes its purpose.  In terms of the Temple: does it heal people?  Does what goes on there take away sin?  Do people find reconnection and wholeness?  Do they emerge from the place reconciled to God, creation, and their neighbors?  Are their broken souls restored to integrity and unity?  Or do they come away from the place with little more than souvenirs?  Trinkets and a t-shirt?  Some pictures?

            That is a tough standard but it has to be applied to churches as well.  Are we better people, are we more grounded and together, are we more healthy and strong, are we more peaceful, forgiving, compassionate, open, joyful, and loving because we came to church this morning?  How can we continue to improve our gathering so that it is more apparent and more likely that we will be made better by coming here?

IV.

            Jesus’ ministry is not a Temple-reform movement.  He is not trying to apply principles of adaptive change to the religious institutions of his day.  He comes not to reform but to replace the Temple with himself… and by so doing reveal that the true Temple, the true place where we meet, worship, hear from, and respond to God is… everywhere.  He is the Word through whom everything was made.  In him the whole creation is his Father’s house.

            His body is not just his historical, mortal flesh but now given to us sacramentally, so that we literally become him.  The gathering of his disciples, the church, is now his body.  Paul says that therefore now each of our bodies is a temple, a holy space where we encounter God.  The Lamb is the Temple who gives himself to us making us the Temple.  And the blood of the Lamb of God, his divine life, becomes the life of the whole world.

            Now the words, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace,” mean that in God’s eyes nothing is for sale; nothing is reduced to a dead commodity; nothing is considered only for its exchange value.  The whole place has already been bought with a price.  Jesus, the Lamb of God, reveals the truth of Psalm 24: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and all those who dwell therein.”  And it is all free.  Unencumbered.  Priceless.  +++++++

                         

             

            

The Good Wine of Now.

John 2:1-11.         (February 1, 2015)

I.

            Jesus and his disciples make their way up to a town in Galilee called Cana, which happens to be the hometown of Nathanael, Jesus latest disciple.  They are invited to a wedding. 

            When the text says “on the third day,” it may literally mean it took three days to walk there; or it may also mean they arrived on a Tuesday. But whenever we hear the expression, “on the third day,” it should remind us of Jesus’ resurrection.  It means that this story is happening in the fullness of time, in resurrection time.

            By starting this part of the gospel with “on the third day” we are invited to look on this story, and perhaps everything Jesus does throughout his ministry, as anticipating, foreshadowing, previewing, and revealing his resurrection life.  His ministry is the breaking-in of the future.  Jesus’ whole life and ministry reveals in advance the nature of the eternal life we see in his resurrection.   

            John calls Jesus “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”  Now in Jesus’ ministry we will see how he takes away the sin of the world.  Sin means separation and alienation, adversariality and enmity, brokenness and hostility, resulting in fear and violence.  When sin is “taken away” from something it is restored to unity, peace, and wholeness.  What gets taken away are the divisions and oppositions.  The role of the Lamb of God in the world, then, is to bring back into unity, to reconcile, that which had been separated, divided, ripped asunder, and put at war with itself.  It is to heal our hatreds by the power of his love. 

            Jesus is fulfilling in himself the atonement and forgiveness ritual from the ancient liturgy of the Day of Atonement.  There, the blood of the goat representing the Lord was spread all over the Temple to signify the interface or membrane that reconnects the people to God.  Blood was life, and the blood of this goat represented the life of God.  They would take some of the life that God placed inside a living thing and offer it to God as an outer sign of the life shared with God. 

            What happens symbolically and ritually in Leviticus, Jesus will do permanently, once and for all, in his death and resurrection.  His blood, the blood of God – the Word, the Life, the Light, the Lamb, the Messiah – not just of a goat representing God, will become the glue that reunites humans to God, to each other, and to their own true selves.  That blood will knit us all together from within.

            The first manifestation of sin, that is, of disunity, separation, and hostility that he chooses to break down is the division between male and female, the fundamental split that runs through all of life and even through the human soul.  In a traditional wedding, this is what is happening.  Two people, male and female, are being united into “one flesh.”  This is one of the unities listed by the apostle Paul in Galatians 3:28, of course.  “As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.  There is no longer… male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” 

II.

            But, like the ritual in Leviticus, an actual human marriage falls somewhat short of realizing the full truth it points to.  A wedding, God knows, does not take away sin.  It does not in actual fact reconcile two people and join them in a mystical union in which they are restored to created goodness.  It kind of points to this, but in the end we are left with two individuals trying together to work through the promise of a more perfect union.

            At this particular wedding, Jesus’ mother is present.  And she is the one who notices that the wine has run out.  Certainly, panic must have already set in among the planners of this banquet.  Running out of wine would have been a profoundly embarrassing and shameful thing to happen to the host.

            The running out of wine is a symbol for the energy being depleted from the established traditions.  The gospel is saying that there wasn’t enough juice in the current practices and rituals to actually accomplish what they were supposed to be about.  They ran out of gas, they were exhausted, before they could finish or complete their full meaning and importance.

            So, recognizing this, Mary just makes to Jesus this statement of the facts of the case: “They don’t have any wine.”  There is no Spirit here, there is nothing happening, no life.

            To which Jesus replies, “Woman, what does that have to do with me?  My time hasn't come yet.”  People were still caught in their own time; they had not yet entered into his time.  His time had not yet occurred to them.

            Undeterred, Mary goes – not to the headwaiter, or the bridegroom, or anyone else in charge – but to the kitchen staff.  She goes to the busboys and the servers and the cooks and the dishwashers, the anonymous, invisible minimum-wage workers who actually make a banquet happen.  And she tells them to do whatever Jesus tells them.  She is going to make his time come here and now.

            As far as we know, Mary is just an invited guest at this wedding reception.  Nevertheless, she gives orders to the staff, who have to make a choice whether to listen to her or to wait for orders from their actual boss, the one who is paying them, the headwaiter, the steward.

            So in a sense it is left up to these workers to decide whether Jesus’ time has come or not to this wedding.  Whom do they decide to obey?  Do they proceed to fill up these 6 large, stone jars with about 160 gallons of water, on the word of a guest and her son?  Or do they say, “Sorry, but we have to wait for our orders from the headwaiter”?  We work for the caterer, ma’am; you’ll have to talk to him if you want us to do anything.

            But no.  They obey Jesus when he, a guest, instructs them to fill the water jars.  They go out on a limb.  They take the risks.  They trust him that something is going to happen.  They obey Jesus’ commandment.

III.

            There is a sense here in which Jesus’ time comes for us when we trust him, when we obey him, when we put his teachings to work in our own lives.  Instead of waiting for instructions to come down the chain of command from the wealthy and/or powerful people in charge, instead of waiting until it is the safe, accepted, approved, and authorized thing to do, these kitchen servants follow Jesus’ instructions.  They apparently have no idea who he is except that he is a guest at the wedding and that he arrived with at least four other men.  Yet they do what he says.  Jesus only talks; these workers are the ones who make the sign happen, and they are the only ones who know it.

            The six stone water jars were there for ritual ablutions, washing.  They represent the whole scaffold of legal prophylactic measures that the leaders had carefully assembled around the Torah.  These were largely extra laws designed to prevent people from even coming close to breaking the actual laws by accident.  They stand for the principle that if law isn’t working the answer is to have more laws.  If the law isn’t taking away sin, then maybe we don’t have enough laws.  Instead of realizing that the present strategy isn’t working, they double-down on it even more.

            The stone water jars represent the failure of the legalistic approach of the establishment of the day to actually take away sin and restore people to wholeness and unity.  In Psalm 104, wine makes for gladness.  Jesus sees no joy in the people he meets whose lives have been made more difficult and repressed by these layers of legal restrictions imposed by the powerful. 

            So the point here is that following Jesus works, and following the letter of the law, or even the letter of these complicated extra-added laws, doesn’t work.  If you rely on the law, your wine, your juice and energy and spirit, runs out.  Law is draining and depleting.  It is soul-crushing and oppressive.  It only reinforces the power and authority of the establishment, who are the ones who let the wine run out in the first place.  You cannot keep the wine flowing, your lamp lit and your light shining, by rigorously and literally keeping to the regulations of a written code.

            Obeying Jesus, however, has the opposite result.  By keeping his word, we see the ordinary transformed into something bright, good, lively, and miraculous! 

            The servants do as Jesus says and fill the jars with water.  They take some of this to the headwaiter, who, surprised that there is a newly discovered supply of wine, tastes it.  He calls the groom, who is apparently responsible for the wine supply, and he says: “Everyone serves the good wine first.  They bring out the second-rate wine only when the guests are drinking freely.  You kept the good wine until now.”

IV.

            What takes away sin, then, is this good wine of now.  That is to say, when we obey the Lord Jesus instead of the chain-of-command of human hierarchies, principalities, and powers, when we reject our given place as underlings, lower class, mere servants, and instead turn and follow God’s Word… then we see miracles happen.  What is ordinary drudgery, what is common, what is empty and ineffectual, what is lifeless and rote… becomes alive and powerful, filled with the Spirit, inspiring joy.  Jesus’ time, Jesus’ presence, comes.

            That’s what makes this wedding real.  The wine of God’s Presence is what takes away sin in that it heals what was divided, and adheres what was broken, and unifies what was separated, and reconciles what had been at enmity and in mortal competition.  The divisions are erased when the good wine finally starts to flow at this wedding reception.

            In this gospel there is no story of the Last Supper.  Instead, the truth and power of the Eucharist pervades the whole story.  And that starts here, where Jesus provides the wine for the wedding banquet in anticipation of his blood being offered for the life of the world.  Here is the new covenant in his blood prefigured.  Later, in chapter six, on the hillside, he will provide the bread and speak at length about the importance of eating his body and drinking his blood, that this is the way we receive his eternal life and become one with him.  This is the way we live in his time. 

            This starts here, right at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry.  The first of his signs revealing who he is happens in this provision of wine.  If the taking away of sin and the reconciliation of the people to God was accomplished in the Torah by the spreading around of the blood of the sacrificed victim, here it is finally and forever fulfilled in the sharing and drinking of the wine together in the gathering of God’s people.  Instead of sprinkling and painting the blood on the surfaces of the Temple, we are taking the wine within us.  Our bodies are temples now, says the apostle Paul.  Our bodies are now where the saving sacrament of Jesus’ body and blood, the bread and wine, happens... and this is what makes us one Body together and individually members of Jesus Christ.

V.

            Jesus’ ministry is always about the transformation that happens when we trust in him and obey his word, rather than the regulations of human institutions and leaders.  Jesus’ ministry is always about revealing the truth hidden beneath and within the ordinary and often oppressive facts of our existence.  Jesus’ ministry discloses our own destiny, and the nature of the whole creation, as united in love with God. 

            For as the water became wine that day, so here, today, the fruit of the vine becomes for us, in our trust and obedience of him, in remembering his promises and his giving of his life for us and to us, a communion in his blood, his life, the very life of God, with and within us.  In this sacrament, we witness to our own transformation and renewal, and we see our sin, our misconceptions, divisions, illusions, hostilities, and fears and all their lethal consequences, get taken away, changed into the new wine of his life in us.

+++++++