Count Your Lucky Stars (Genesis 15)

In preparing for this sermon, I went to the website of a Lutheran pastor/scholar who is particularly insightful, one I’ve gone to in the past, in order to jump-start my thinking, and I was shocked to read this: “This story of a covenant ritual is about as bloody a sacrificial affair as there is in the Old Testament. Why is it in the lectionary? I don’t get the connection at all.”  And I thought: “thanks for nothing, Paul”—a lot of Lutherans name their children Paul.  That and “Martin” . . . Anyway, I thought “thanks for nothing”: you’ve been a big help.  But it did get me thinking: what did possess the creators of our lectionary to include this passage, and why now, why here, at Lent?

  Well.  To our Jewish brothers and sisters, this is one of the most important passages in the Old Testament, and that’s one reason it’s important to read it, because they are our ancestors in the faith.  But I think it holds something important to Christians on its own terms too, and I’ll give you a hint as to what it is: it’s contained in the name of a lot of congregations, including, you might remember, the previous one I served.  It’s a covenant.  The Abrahamic covenant, to be precise, and it’s the great grand-daddy of ‘em all.  The first in a long line of compacts made between God and the Hebrew people.  But it’s not the first covenant in the Bible: that honor goes to the Noahic covenant, the one God made with Noah, never to drown the whole world like he did in that embarrassing episode with the ark.  But this is the first covenant God makes in relation to the Hebrew people, but it wouldn’t be the last, not by a long shot.

In fact, “covenant” is such a big topic in the Bible that a whole branch of theology sprung up centered around the notion.  In that theology, covenants are in effect over certain time periods within the history of human interactions with God, and which one is operant at any given time is greatly influential in how any biblical event or passage is to be interpreted.  At one time, Covenant Theology was big in mainstream Reformed theology, though it has fallen on hard times, and is not much taught in our denomination’s seminaries, at any rate, though it is still popular in some of the more theologically conservative places.

But the notion of covenant is still important, and so maybe we’d better spend a few minutes figuring out what it means.  First of all, it’s a pact between two parties, in which the covenantor makes a promise to a covenantee to do or not do some action.  In real property law, the term “real covenants” is used for conditions tied to the use of land.  Homeowners' covenants fall into this category.

In the Bible, it is between God and a person, a group of people and/or all of humanity.  In it, God promises to do—or not to do—certain things.  After the flood, we’re told, God promised never to drown everybody on earth again.  In the Davidic covenant, God promises to establish David as a “sure house,” making him and his descendants the rightful kings of Judah until the end of time.  And of course, in the Mosaic covenant, God handed down the ten commandments, and promised to be the Israelite’s God so long as they obeyed them.

One thing that distinguishes some biblical covenants from others is the notion of conditionality, that is who has to do what to fulfill it.  In the covenant after the flood, the one transmitted to Noah, God promises to refrain from drowning humanity, but humanity doesn't have to promise to do anything.  It’s an unconditional or one way covenant. The one received by Moses, on the other hand, is conditional; the Israelites must do certain things to fulfill their side of the bargain.  The entire story of God’s interactions between humans in the Hebrew scriptures, which we call the Old Testament, can be viewed as one of Israel continually breaking one covenant or another, and God time and time again forgiving them.

In the case of the covenant in today’s passage, it’s unconditional: God promises to make Abram’s descendants many.  "Look up and count the stars, if you can count them,” God says. “So shall your descendants be."  And thus begins the great dance of the descendants of Abraham and the Divine.  For the first time, we can see the shape of a people, the Hebrew people, and a bit further along, the Nation of Israel.   This covenant, between God and Abram, calls a people into being.

 But look closer at what does the calling: it’s the same thing that called the world into being, that said “Let there be light.  And there was light.”  It’s the Word of the Lord that literally speaks the Hebrew people into existence, just as it did the world at the beginning of time. And if you’re looking for connection between this dark, primitive passage, with its bloody, carved up cow and its floating lights, here it is: that self same Word that separated the water from the land, that blurted out the Hebrew people in the murky firelight, that same Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

Or so says John, and who am I to doubt him?  There’s continuity between our two faiths, our two people, that runs from their very beginnings: from the violent execution of this first covenant right up through the equally violent birth of our own.  At the institution of the Lord’s Supper, Jesus says “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.”  And Paul said it after him and we say it after Paul every time we take Communion, and what I want to emphasize is that this right here is the Old covenant.  And rather than being the covenant in Christ’s blood, it’s one in bovine blood, and goat’s blood, and the blood of pigeons.

Kind of  bloody, isn’t it?  Kind of dark and violent, and many of us modern Christians—like the author of the website I read—don’t like to dwell on these notions.  But that is part and parcel of the season we’re in, the season of Lent, where such things come to the fore.  And that’s not the only point of continuity between the beginnings of our two faiths.  Look at what happens next: even though everything seems to point against it—he’d just left King Melchizedek with nothing more than the clothes on his back, he’s childless even after all these years, and his wife Sarai barren—even though everything seems to belie the promise of God, Abram believes.  He has faith.  And God counts it as righteousness.

It’s one of the models that Paul would use to describe the Christian faith.  He even quotes our passage: “Just as Abraham ‘believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, so, you see, those who are believing are the descendants of Abraham.”  Here, according to Paul, it was Abraham’s faith in God that made him right with God, just as it is with those who have faith in Christ.  In this passage, we see the root of Paul’s—and our—doctrine of justification, of salvation, by faith alone.  In fact, the word he uses for justification—the Greek word dikiasune—is the equivalent of the Hebrew word zedekah, which the author of Genesis uses here for righteousness.  Abram believed in God, and it was reckoned to him by that God as righteousness.  We who are in a relationship with Christ, who are resting in Christ, and he in us, are in a state of righteous as well.

But there’s one more point of continuity between this passage and our Christian understanding of faith, one more reason we should read it at this time of year.  It goes back to our earlier discussion of covenants.  We saw that covenants come in two basic flavors: conditional, where the people promises to do something in return for the promises of God, and unconditional, where they have no responsibilities.  That’s the kind of covenant the Abrahamic one is:  Abram has to do nothing to maintain it.  God will make the people of Israel out of his ancestors, no matter what Abram does, and in fact he does some fairly rotten things along the way.

And in the same way, the new covenant in Christ, the meaning of which we ponder at this season, is unconditional as well.  Nothing we can do, nothing we have done, or will do, negates it.  Nothing we can do, have done, will do merits it.  God gives us this covenant—sealed in some way we do not understand by Christ—no matter what, and it cannot be rescinded.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.

A Thorn by Any Other Name (Luke 4:1 - 13)

  I’ve got this cool app on my iPad.  It's a dictionary, encyclopedia and thesaurus, all rolled into one, and I use it a lot.  Now I know what y’all are thinking . . . Rick’s impossibly literate, cultured, learned, knowledgeable, educated and erudite.  What would he need a dictionary and thesaurus for?  Well, believe it or not, I am occasionally at a loss for words, and sometimes I just like to play word games.  Like the time I looked up the word “devil” in the thesaurus, just for grins, and came up with a pretty good list: Lucifer and Satan.  Mephistopheles and Prince of Darkness.    Adversary, Tempter and King of Hell.  The Debbil.  El Diablo, Angel of Darkness and The Nameless One.  And of course, my personal favorite, Ol’ Scratch.

Lots of names for something we're supposed to be scared of.  But Ol’ Scratch is a popular figure in song and story as well.  “That Old Devil Moon.”  “Devil Woman.”  “Devil in Disguise.”  “Devil Dance.”  “Friend of the Devil.”  “The Devil Wears Prada.” “The Devil’s Right Hand.”  And last but not least, Devil With a Blue Dress, blue dress, blue dress, devil with a blue dress on.  (Sorry . . . I got carried away.)

But my favorite of all is a song by the Charlie Daniels band: “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”  It’s about when when the Devil, behind on his quota of souls, desperately offers a fiddler named Johnny a deal for his soul: if Johnny beats him at a fiddling contest, he’ll give him a fiddle made of gold.  But if not, Johnny’ll have to give the Devil . . . his SOUL!!!!

Well.  Johnny’s an even better fiddler than Ol’ Scratch, he gets his golden fiddle, and it’s a twist on the story of blues man Robert Johnson’s selling his soul on a Mississippi-crossroads Midnight, which itself is a riff on a venerable folk tradition.  So venerable, in fact, that it's got a number . . . two, in fact.  "Bargain with the devil" is motif number M210 and "Man sells soul to devil" is motif number M211 in folklorist Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature.  Put that in your fiddle and smoke it.

Of course, the most famous example might be the classical German legend of Faust, immortalized in plays by Christopher Marlow and Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe.  But even that has precedents, dating all the way back to the sixth century and a man named Theophilus (presumably not the same one Luke wrote his gospel to five centuries before).  Theophilus, whose name is Greek for God-lover, was an Archdeacon at Adana, now a part of modern Turkey.  A humble man, Theophilus refuses to be appointed Bishop, but regrets it when the man who does take the job unjustly deprives him of his position as Archdeacon.  So naturally, he seeks out a wizard to help him contact Ol’ Scratch.  I mean, that's what I’d do, wouldn't you?

At any rate, the devil demanded that he renounce Christ and the Virgin Mary, sign the contract in his own blood, and made him Bishop.  Years later, he got worried about his immortal soul, and so he prayed to the Virgin Mary to get him out of it.  Long story short, after several twists and turns, including a grade-A scolding by the virgin, she finally intercedes with God on his behalf and he is absolved.  But the devil doesn't want to give up so easy, but after three days, he gives up, and Theophilus is freed from his contract.  Shades of Jesus’ three days in the grave.

Now.  Even though there really was an archdeacon named Theophilus, the tale of his pact with the devil is considered to be legendary, even by the Catholic Church.  Which, of course, has no problem accepting as, er . . . gospel, that much the same thing happened to Jesus five hundred years earlier.  Oh, it's not spelled out explicitly or anything, but the three temptations of Jesus require as payment the worship of the devil, which to me amounts to the same thing as selling his soul.  And lest we divert into metaphysical territory, I have no idea whether Jesus had a soul or not, but the classical Trinitarian formula has him fully human yet fully divine, and humans have souls . . .

Anyway.  Without opening the can of worms known as biblical inerrancy, one of the reasons I like this story so much is that it’s like a folk-tale.  It’s a real story, with a beginning and an end, and a protagonist—Jesus—and an antagonist, Ol’ Scratch himself.  It’s quite entertaining, perhaps the most entertaining one in the New Testament.  The Old Testament seems to have more than its share: Ruth, Esther, and Job come to mind, as well as Tobit from the Roman Catholic bible.  These stories are told and retold, and they’re a preacher’s dream because it’s easy to retell the story, updating it to appeal to folks in the pews.  Three years ago, in this very pulpit, I pictured the devil as a “successful yuppie with tasseled loafers and an Izod shirt. . . a Starbuck’s in one hand” and a briefcase in the other.  In another sermon, I envisioned him in an Armani suit, big ‘ol cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat, like he’d been watching too much Dallas or something.

Of course, it's not just in sermons . . . Popular culture gives us updated devils  as well.  Besides starring the typical Aryan Jesus, a turn-of-the-century TV miniseries gave us two—count ‘em, two!—Beelzebubs, one male and one female, but both foreign . . . in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Satan is played by a woman, but she is decidedly androgynous.  And, of course, foreign.  Finally, in the latest incarnation—television’s Lucifer—the title character is played as a suave lady-killer who’s on vacation in L.A.  And he’s—you guessed it—foreign.

And I think it's obvious that our imaginings about the Prince of Darkness say more about ourselves than they do about Ol’ Scratch.  In the movies, he seems to reflect whatever the prevailing angst is at the time.   Our rising national xenophobia is shown in the fact that Satan is almost never played by an American actor. Gibson’s androgynous, female demon reflected his homophobic reaction to the rising gay rights movement, as well as his well-known misogyny.  And my Texan devil reflected my distaste for rich oil-men and my six year stay in that great state.  And maybe too much Bobby and J.R. Ewing.

We project our fears and dislikes upon the figure of Satan, and psychologists have shown us that it's often characteristics within ourselves that we don't like, or that we don't want to admit we have.  Thus, my Starbucks-swilling yuppy just might reflect the fact that I do love my Starbuck’s and all the rest of my stuff, and though I don't want to malign Mel Gibson any more than I already have, it's a pretty well-known pathology to project all the things you hate about yourself onto the opposite sex.

Psychologist Carl Jung called this figure, this entity—which contains all the personally or socially unacceptable stuff of our own—the shadow, and he showed that we—both individuals and societies—project this figure onto others.  In the thirties, the German people projected all their fears and anxieties onto the Jewish population of Europe, and ended up killing six million of them.  For a long time, since before the Civil War, white Americans have been projecting all the stuff they hate about their own selves onto African Americans, contributing to the continuing poverty and marginalization of our black population.

And individual projection can be just as detrimental.  We’ve all heard it said that “oh, they don't get along because they’re too much alike,” and probably experienced it as well.  The truth of it is explained in the phenomenon of projection: we don't like the other person because we see ourselves there and have projected—all unconsciously, of course—all the stuff we dislike about ourselves, or are socially unacceptable, onto them.

You know, Luke never describes the devil, he never tells us what he looks like.  There's no Germanic accent or misogynistic blue dress or midnight fiddler.  He just says that he tempts Jesus, and leaves it up to us to imagine what he might be.

And maybe that's the point.  Maybe I’m not supposed to personalize Satan, because if I  do, if I imagine the enemy as a person running around out there, it's too easy to dismiss it as outside of myself.  It's too easy to project all my very human faults and foibles tidily onto another and imagine that they aren't mine to work on, mine to fix.  And when that happens, when I imagine that everybody but myself is problem, well, there can be literally Hell to pay.

And so, on this first Sunday of Lent, when we begin our exploration of what it means to be human in God’s calculus of salvation, let’s consider this: maybe the devil isn’t some demon flapping around, whispering in our ears, some guy in red long-johns sitting on one shoulder, while an equally insipid angel sits on the others.  Perhaps the devil is our own shadow, our own stuff we project outside of ourselves, onto the world and those who are in it.  And maybe, just maybe, the kingdom that Jesus says is within begins when we accept that shadow, when we become conscious of it so we can stop the cycle of violence and recrimination and bring the kingdom of God to fruition both without and within.  Amen.

Don't Shine Me On (Luke 9:28 - 36)

      This is a transitional passage, at least the way the Church treats it: we put it on the last Sunday of the first period of Ordinary Time, a time that’s ordinary only in the sense that it’s not a festival season like Christmas or Easter or Lent.  Of course, I’m talking about the Church Calendar, for you folks new to this whole Presbyterian thing.  That’s the calendar that doesn’t follow the Gregorian one that the Western world observes . . . the church doesn’t begin its year with hangovers and party-burn out on the first day of the coldest month of the year . . . it begins it with Advent, the first Sunday in December, or the last in November, like it was this year.  And it’s good to think about why it does that . . . it does it to reenact the life of Christ, in its worship and liturgy, every year.  Thus, because we celebrate the birth of Jesus—away in a manger, no crib for a bed—a week before January One, we begin our new year earlier as well.

Aha! You say.  Gotcha!  Why don’t we begin the new church calendar on December 25 then, why do we begin it four weeks before the blessed event?  Is it so we can throw Mary a baby shower, or maybe help her decorate the nursery before the big day?  Well, it’s preparation, all right, but not for Mary: it’s for us. To prepare us for the cataclysmic event that changed the world.  It’s so we can stop and take a breath, stop and wait upon the Lord as we are commanded to do, and while we wait, to ponder it in our hearts, just as Mary pondered it all in hers. 

 And this Sunday, here we’re on the cusp of another of those church periods of contemplation and prayer:  Wednesday night we’ll have the traditional service, seven o’clock, right after supper, we’ll do a service of readings, hymns and the imposition of ashes, then we’ll continue our Lenten journey in the Fellowship Hall by experiencing the labyrinth, an ancient devotional practice.  Then we’ll have forty days of it, forty days of thinking about how maybe we were there when they crucified our Lord, and I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag or anything—because we’ll talk about it next week—but it’s 40 days because of the 40 wilderness days, when the devil tested Jesus with three temptations.

But the church puts Transfiguration Sunday right before Ash Wednesday, and the question is why?  Why would we put it right before his 40 days in the wilderness, when chronologically, it happens well into his ministry, well after the temptations that begin it?  Well, let’s take a look: the first thing to notice is that it’s almost like a tableau, like one of those bathrobe pageants a lot of churches—including this one—put on around Christmas time, with Jesus and Mary and the wise men all standing around for a half hour or so, only here the tableau is Jesus standing beside Moses and Elijah in the heavenly spotlight.

Jesus leads Peter and James and John up on the mountain—and it isn’t an accident that it’s the same three that are in the garden—he leads them up onto the mountain-top and suddenly, his face and clothing start to glowing, and all of a sudden there he is, flanked by maybe the two greatest prophets in the Hebrew canon.  And they’re hob-nobbing away, talking about his departure from this mortal coil, which is about to happen at Jerusalem, and that’s one reason the church puts this event right before Lent.  It’s right as he sets face toward Jerusalem, as Luke puts it, and even though it takes nine more chapters to get him there, we know what’s gonna happen when he arrives.

But there’s another reason, a perhaps more compelling reason we celebrate transfiguration three days before Lent, and it can be seen in the reaction of the disciples, summed up by the actions of Peter, who is, as usual, a stand-in for what the rest of the disciples are thinking.  Here they are, all standing up on the mountaintop, shining to beat the band, and the message is clear to them.  They are, after all, good Jews, and they get that Jesus is one with Elijah and Moses, that he is of the same stuff of Elijah and Moses, that he is, as we often put it, a continuation of the prophetic line.

And unlike in the Garden of Gethsemane, when the same disciples doze off three times, this time they stay awake, even though they’re weighed down with sleep.  And because this time they stay awake, they get to see the whole thing, and what is the first thing out of Peter’s mouth?  Master it’s good for us to be here, it’s good for us to be here on the mountain-top.  Let’s make some rooms, one for each of you, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.  Just as the two were fixing to leave, Peter tries to get them to stay up there, at least temporarily, by building them places to stay, like tabernacles or motels or something.

Peter wants them to stay on the mountain-top, to be enthroned up there like three peas in a pod, three earthly rulers, and why shouldn’t he think that?  He was, as I said before, a good Jew, and good Jews at the time were expecting a Messiah—in fact (and this is important) in the passage right before ours, that’s what Peter calls him, Messiah.  Jesus asks “Who do people say I am,” they say “some say Moses and some say Elijah”— and if you think that it’s a coincidence that those two are the ones standing with him right now, I have a bridge to sell you.  And when Jesus asks “but who do you say I am?”  Peter pipes up with “The Messiah of God,” which means the anointed of God.

And so it’s understandable that Peter wants to enthrone Jesus along with the two prophets up on the mountain-top.  And was it the same mountain-top where Satan tempted Jesus to rule the whole world?  You got me, but it does give you pause . . . mountain-tops are perfect places for palaces, and for fortresses like earthly kings had to defend all their stuff, before they had intercontinental ballistic missiles, at any rate, so it’s understandable that Peter, who thought Jesus was the king who’ll take back Palestine from the Romans, would want him up on one.

But just as he says it, they are enveloped in a gray cloud, and I imagine Peter is thinking “Holy guacamole, what’d I say?  What’d I say?” and they’re all terrified as the sun is blotted out and a chill strikes to their bones, and suddenly, a voice comes out of the cloud—and was it the same voice that came out of the clouds at Jesus’ baptism?  You got me, but it starts out saying the same thing as at the baptism, “This is my Son,” but instead of calling him “my Beloved,” it calls him “my Chosen.”  And afterward, after they’re down from the mountain, Peter asks himself “chosen for what?” but at the time, all he can do is shake in his boots, thinking now I’ve done it.  And when the voice stops, the cloud lifts and there in the ordinary Palestinian sunlight, Jesus is alone.  Quite alone.

And just like to Peter and the others, he is revealed to us in that moment as well, as singular, a man apart, a man who even though in the same line as Moses and Elijah is different from them, greater than them, perhaps.  And we can see the sequence, can’t we?  (1) Jesus and the other prophets are talking about his departure, (2) they’re about to go their separate ways and (3) Peter says something stupid, something that causes God to make a point: and that is that Jesus isn’t just like the prophets, that he is not an earthly ruler who might rule from the heights, as earthly ones were wont to do.  The voice from the cloud was correcting Peter when it said: “This is my Son, the Chosen” and if Peter didn’t know it, we certainly do, we know what he was chosen for, and it wasn’t any mountain-top experience … It wasn’t any serene hill-top life-style, the life-styles of the rich and Palestinian, the life of a ruler of humans, of a warrior holed up in his mountain like some latter-day David, descending in the Spring, when kings go out to battle.

No.  Jesus was chosen for something altogether different, and that’s why the church puts the Transfiguration right before Lent: to remind us of what he was chosen for, and to foreshadow what is to come in just 40 short days.  Jesus the Christ is chosen all right, he’s hand-picked by God, but not for any earthly power and might, not to stay up on that mountain top eating sweet-meats with his fellow prophets.  Jesus the Christ, the anointed one, is chosen to be the embodiment of cosmic incarnation, emptied of any God-hood, and become fully human, even to death upon a cross.

We know all that, because, well . . . hindsight is 20-20, after all, and we’re aware of the rest of the story.  But it seems to me that we need to be reminded, on a regular basis, to listen to him, because just like Peter, who didn’t hear when they were talking about Jesus’ death, we need to listen to who he really is as well.  We’re admonished to listen to him, just like Peter, as he tells us what he tells the disciples, not ten verses after today’s passage: “Let these words sink into your ears,” he says, get this through your thick skull:  “The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into human hands.”  Far from ruling gloriously over the rest of the world, far from lording it over his countrymen like they expected him to, he would be betrayed into human hands and die.

And I think that like Peter, many of us project our own desires and longings onto Jesus.  We develop prosperity doctrines, to justify our over-the-top consumerism.  We picture Jesus as some personal, magic genie, there to grant our every wish, to help us win football games and avoid the consequences of our actions, to reward us here on earth for being Christians.  Many of us, whether we say it out loud or not, imagine ourselves privileged through our relationship to Jesus, and we just know it's our destiny to end up in that mountaintop right along side.

But in the Transfiguration, we are reminded about who Jesus really is, what he really signifies: he is one who stands alone, apart, who comes down from the mountain instead of staying up there, eating bon-bons and commanding armies.  Who comes down to serve the people, to heal them and feed them and free them from oppression.  Why does the church insist we hear this right before Lent?  To remind us of what Lent is all about: a time to do that thing the voice of God commands us to do.  And that’s to listen.

 

I say these things in the name of God the one who creates us, God the one who redeems us, and God the one who empowers and comforts us, amen.

Crazy Little Thing Called Love (1st Corinthians 13:1 - 13)

A lot of people think that Paul’s writing is convoluted and hard to understand.  That it’s kind of baroque, and when it’s not baroque, it’s cranky.  I’ve even heard some folks say he’s not very pastoral, and apparently they mean by that that he isn’t always sugary or even particularly sympathetic.  And at times, all of that is true: his writing can be hard to understand, and he certainly seems to get a little bit cranky at times, although what seems that way to us is usually just a rhetorical device.  But he also wrote some of the most beautiful prose in the New Testament . . . “I consider,” he wrote “that the sufferings of this present time not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us,” and he pictured the “whole creation, waiting with eager longing for the revealing of God’s children.”  And don’t forget it was Paul who assured us that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,  nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

But arguably, the most popular of his writings is today’s passage, especially at weddings, where it’s doubtless being recited somewhere at any given hour of the day.  Here he describes one of the core marks or attributes of the Christian life, or one of the supposed attributes, at any rate.   He argues that not one other of our other traits is as important, that this one mark overshadows them all: if we have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and knowledge, and all if we have faith enough to move mountains, but have no love, we are empty, we are nothing, we are pure noise.  Bonging gongs and clanging symbols. Ringo Starr on drums.  Love washes everything else away, it drowns them right out, it overshadows them in it’s importance.  All those other characteristics—prophecy, faith, knowledge and all that jazz—don’t amount to a hill of beans without love.

But just what is this love stuff? Paul talks about it as if it is a thing, something you can have, he says: “if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.” And if it is a thing that one can have—and presumably not have—what’s it made of?  Of what does it consist?  And more to the point, how do we get some?  Are we born with it, or do we acquire it somehow, does someone come along and give it to us?

Well.  When we were children, our parents loved us—another way to put it is gave us their love—and we loved them back.  And we hear all the time of people incapable of love, and the story-line is it's because their mama or daddy didn't love them, so is that where we get love?  From parents, or others who love us?  Is there some kind of age limit, some kind of developmental stage, beyond which us getting love from somebody else doesn't work?  We’ve all heard stories about sociopaths who are incapable of returning love . . .

And that returning business  brings up another thing: love requires two parties, an “I” and a “thou,” as Martin Buber puts it.  It takes two to tango, a love-er and a lov-ee, but only the lov-er has to actually have love.  A staple of television drama is unrequited love, and we’ve all loved an inanimate object—I just love my iPad—which more than likely can't love us back.

All in all, this love is a very complicated business, but culturally, we tend to dumb it down to an emotion, as something that makes our hearts go pity-pat.  Although we say love is a many-splendored thing, when we say the word, what we’re really talking about is feelings, nothing more than feelings.

Modern science, of course, views this kind of love as nothing but chemical reactions, and they’ve shown that a class of opioids called endorphins, produced by the central nervous system, produces these feelings of euphoria, and that in a romantic relationship, they tend to not be produced after a certain number of years. leading to the infamous seven-year itch of Hollywood fame and Marilyn Monroe’s dress.

The Greeks, of course, were well aware of this all of this, much more so than we seem to be, and had three words for that little thing we just call love.  Eros is the word they used for erotic love, or what we might call romantic love, whispered by two people one to another for thousands of years.  Philos is their word for familial, sisterly or brotherly love, that between members of a family, mother to son, father to daughter.  Agape is what they called a “higher” form of love, an appreciation that arises based on conscious evaluation and choice.  Agape love is not something one “falls into,” it's something one chooses and, contrary to what you may have been taught in Sunday school, it’s applied to humans as well as the divine.  And that’s the kind of love Paul is talking about here.  Agape.

So.  Let’s recap.  Paul is talking about love as a thing here, as something we can have, if not hold.  Further, he’s using the word agape here, which the ancient Greeks considered the “highest” species of love, note the quotes around “highest.”  Finally, we’ve seen that agape is an appreciation that results from conscious evaluation and choice.  Thus, in a way, we’ve answered the question of how do we get some love: by evaluating the person or object and choosing to love him, her or it.

And it makes a certain amount of sense, doesn't it?  This is how we just might be able to live out Jesus’ commandment to love our enemies: we evaluate, we gain knowledge about a person or a peoples and thereby gain an appreciation, a love of them through understanding  and perhaps even empathy.  Jesus doesn't say we have to feel an emotion for them, we don't have to go all mushy inside of us at the thought of them, but that we should open ourselves up to them through knowledge, and learning and understanding.  In other words, we are to appreciate them, how they came to be who they are, or—as euphemism would have it—where they’re coming from.

That's the point Paul is making here, and he puts it very graphically: “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”  If I do not have love, I may speak with the most silver tongue, sing the most beautiful tune, but what comes out will just be noise, nothing to it but sound.  If I know everything, if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and knowledge, but have no love, well . . . I am nothing.  Without a relationship with my fellow human beings, entered into with empathy and compassion, without an appreciation of the other, without being able to put ourselves in their place, walk a mile in their shoes, then it is all worthless.  Our beautiful speech, our tremendous knowledge, all our fine deeds of charity will come to naught.

In the last line of our passage, Paul speaks of three attributes: faith, hope and love; says that they “abide.”  And it's important to note that Paul uses the Greek word we translate as “abide” in a permanent sense, in an indwelling sense.  They are virtues in the ancient Greco-Roman sense: eternal, changeless and true.  “Faith, hope, and love abide, these three,,” he says, “and the greatest of these is love,” and it's not hard to see why.  Faith and hope are qualities of individuals, but love is relational, it involves two parties, it involves Buber’s I and Thou.  It has the potential to glue societies together, to bring peace between peoples.

The love Paul speaks of is a conscious love, brought about by studying and learning about the “other.”  And this appreciation breeds compassion and understanding, it engenders a desire to help, to work together, instead of simply condemning them when we get crosswise.

There’s a saying “hate the sin and love the sinner” that is too often used in a trite, almost smug way by people who, if they don't hate the sinner as well as the sin, do a pretty good imitation of it.  But if we think about agape,  the love Paul writes about, you can almost see how that might be.  Paul isn't asking that we condone what others do, that we love what we consider “sin.”  Neither Paul—or Christ—expect us to condone or accept the beheading of journalists, to feel all warm and fuzzy about murders or rapists or jihadi terrorists.  But we are expected to love them.  We're expected to acknowledge their humanity, that they are created by the same loving, forgiving God as we. Before we condemn them, we are asked to understand them, because that’s our vocation: to be the active presence of God’s love in the World.  After all, as the song goes, they will know that we are Christians by our love.   Amen.

 

Campaign Stop (Luke 4:14 - 21)

You ever notice how politicians return to their home towns to announce their candidacies?  It makes for great photo-ops, there against the backdrop of their childhood … with spouse and kiddies and mama and daddy there, smiling adoringly up at their loved one, little suspecting what a chore it’s going to be in just a few short months: smiling adoringly, smiling adoringly, smiling adoringly . . .  and they never quite see it coming, when the unending pressure of press scrutiny scrapes up something embarrassing from the past.  We’ve got a very bad habit of lynching our politicians and other luminaries for having feet of clay, for being human beings which, last time I checked, most of them are.

But at the start of their campaigns, there on their own home turf, where the press will throw them softballs, where there are loving crowds of friends and family looking on, wanting a President or a Senator or Congressman from their own town, maybe thinking of all the pork that’s gonna come their way, all the public works projects or no-bid contracts at the local defense plant . . . I remember Bill and Hillary and Chelsea, beaming for the cameras in Hope, Arkansas—he was the man from Hope!  But that was before Monica and Gennifer and the disillusion of millions . . . I remember W and Laura and the girls there in Crawford, all optimism and confidence, looking young and fresh and ready.  Of course, that was before the press savaged the girls for sowing some wild oats, and before some airplanes hit some towers in New York.

But there on that day, in that place, it was a sweetheart deal for each of the future first families, and it must have felt good to them . . . That’s not exactly how it was for Jesus . . .though it’s outside our reading, it’s important to remember that not too long after his reading in the synagogue, they run him out of town on a rail, or more accurately, try to throw him off a cliff.  So much for the hometown crowd.

He quotes from Isaiah, from one of the “messianic passages,” then very deliberately rolls up the scroll, hands it to the attendant, and sits down.  And Luke says all eyes were upon him, and then he begins to say to them “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  And most of the time, we read that and say: “There.  He’s announced who he is, revealed his messianic-ness,” and maybe—though he says some other things too—maybe that has something to do with why they get mad. I know I’ve preached something like that in the past.  But scholar Gil Bailie points out that a careful reading shows differently:  Luke tells us he begins to say “Today this scripture has been fulfilled . . .” not that he says it.   He sees that all eyes are upon him, all are attentive—after all, he is well-spoken and gracious, and a local boy to boot—and he starts to tell them who he is, but he doesn’t.

And it begs the question: why?  Why didn’t he tell them he was the fulfillment of the scripture he’d just read from Isaiah?  All eyes were upon him, it was the perfect time, there couldn’t have been any better to announce his ministry . . . it would have been as if Clinton or Bush had gotten this big ol’ crowd together, talked about their presidential heritage, maybe evoking the ghost of Lincoln like they all do, but instead of going ahead and announcing their candidacies, they wave at the crowd, get into their limos and drive off.  All eyes are on Jesus, and he starts to take advantage of it, starts to announce his candidacy for Messiah, but he doesn’t.

 And to understand why not, we need to invoke the “C-word.”  That’s the context-word, in case you were wondering.. Stories like this were never meant to be read in isolation, by themselves.  On the contrary, they always relate to what comes before and after.  And in this case, the relevant passage is the one right before, when the Holy Spirit drives him into the wilderness, and Ol’ Scratch presents him with three temptations.  And without going into detail—we’ll likely do that in a few weeks—all three in some way tempt him to grasp for power, to take authority over the world and all that’s in it, to exercise his power as Son of God to become rich and famous and drink Latte’s all the time.  And here, in the very next passage, is yet another temptation: messianic fever is vibrating throughout the land, he’s just read from one of passages responsible, and all eyes are glued on him.  There will never be a better time to tell them who he is, to declare his Messiah-hood, but he doesn’t.

At the end of the wilderness story, Luke says that the devil left him until an opportune moment, and I always assumed it’s meant to be at the end, when they crucify him, but maybe not.  Maybe the reason Luke puts this story where he does, right after the wilderness episode, is that he wants to subtly remind us that temptation lurks everywhere.  In the synagogue that day, all eyes were upon him, they were his homies, his people, and they would have followed him anywhere.  He could have led them off, to a glorious revolution or the beginning of a new movement, but no.  He begins to tell them who he is, that he has come to do all of that, but he doesn’t.

And at first, he gets away with it, at first his fellow Nazarenes say “Wow, he speaks very well for a carpenter’s son,” but as he continues to teach—and it’s only after pointing out that God sent two of their most famous prophets, Elijah and Elisha, to their enemies from Sidon and Syria, do they get mad and try to throw him off a cliff.

But if they had listened carefully—and maybe it sat there in the back of their minds and they didn’t notice until he got more specific—they could have inferred it from what he read in Isaiah.  Or rather: what he didn’t read.   Here’s the passage that he was reading, from Isaiah’s 61^st chapter:

The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor,

And what I just read was Isaiah chapter 61, the entirety of verse 1 and the first part of verse 2, verse 2a as we would list it in a bible lesson.  What Jesus didn’t read was 2b, the part that comes right after.  If he’d continued, he’d have read “the Spirit has anointed me . . . to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God.”

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he leaves that off, do you?  Isaiah—like many other ancient prophets and theologians—thought that right along with doing good for God’s people, God would wreak vengeance upon their enemies.  Revenge.   Retaliation.  But Jesus—whom we believe is the incarnation of the divine—spent his entire life embodying just the opposite.  His whole life as the Son of Man was spent forgiving and even healing those who were the enemies of his people.  He spent his whole time on earth demonstrating—through his example as Son of the most high—that there was nothing of vengeance in God.

And so in a sense, the Good News that he talks about is not just freeing the oppressed, not just recovery of sight to the blind—though it surely includes all these things—but what he leaves unsaid as well, and what he demonstrates just a few lines later by refusing to give in to the temptation of declaring his Messiah-hood and becoming a tool of human vengeance.  God, whom Jesus called his Abba, is not a God of vengeance, not a deity of retaliation, not a God of revenge.  The year of God’s favor is a year of favor to everyone, Jews and gentiles alike, friends of Israel and those who oppose it as well.

When Katrina hit New Orleans, some of our more, how shall we say it,  fundamental  brothers and sisters said that God was punishing the city for its tolerance of gays.  Overlooking, apparently, the fact that God must’ve had a bad aim, because God spared the French Quarter where they all hang out. Three years and change after that, an earthquake that killed upwards of 100,000 people in Haiti brought ‘em all back out of the woodwork, the most famous being Pat Robertson, God bless him, who opined that the earthquake was, and I quote, “God’s vengeance upon the Haitians for making a deal with the devil to rid themselves of the French.”  He was apparently referring to a folk tale—that even most of Haiti’s Christians considered mythological—that the country’s founders did a deal with the Devil, Robert-Johnson style, to get the French off their backs.  And although I think it’s an insult to Isaiah to compare him to Robertson, there is definitely some of the old vengeance-thinking to these remarks by founder of The 700 Club.  Rather than their poverty being due to a sinful and corrupt government, and the ‘quake to shifting tectonic plates, God is actually bringing God’s vengeful wrath upon those poor people.

But here’s the problem: we’re on the other side of the Old Testament.  The whole point of the incarnation is that God becomes one of us, and showed us what it means to live as the perfect human, as one perfectly in tune with the spirit of God who dwells within.  Jesus is like a filter: he filters out all the human-borne ideas of the divine, all the historically-conditioned notions that God is like us in desiring vengeance, in wreaking bloody retribution.   Jesus showed—in this passage and in his whole life—that God is not a God of vengeance, not  a God of revenge.  The Lord God Almighty is a God of forgiveness, of compassion.

And it’s a good thing for Robertson, saying that crazy stuff that God can’t have been too fond, of and it’s a good thing for us.  The God of forgiveness, the God who is love, forgives Robertson for saying those stupid things, just as he forgives us for all the dumb things we do, for all those times when through our acts of rebellion and contrariness we have impeded the work of God.  God forgives us for all the hateful things we might have said, all the things that hurt our fellow Christians, all the times we have not treated our neighbor as ourselves.  The God we worship, the one true God, does not seek vengeance, does not seek retribution, but forgives us just as we are.  Hallelujah!  Amen. 

Ritual Matters (Luke 3:15 - 22; Baptism of the Lord)

Anybody know the difference between a ceremony and a ritual?  Neither did I, until one of the faculty at the Living School explained it to me.  He said that ceremony is when you do stuff and say stuff that are entirely predictable, entirely choreographed, it's like Kabuki theater.  In a ceremony, you always know what's coming next, what's going to happen on the stage.  A lot of civic functions are ceremonies, like presenting the key to a city to a visiting dignitary, maybe a famous hometown actor or something.  You know exactly what’s going to happen, almost down to the second: the mayor will introduce the dignitary, she’ll say what a wonderful person they are, how honored the city to have this person be a part of it. Then the visitor will say a few words, saying how honored he is to have grown up there, how it instilled in him a strong work ethic, the drive to succeed, et cetera, et cetera. Then the mayor hands this big giant key to the actor, they pause with it in between so a photographer can get a picture, and after the ceremony, the actor gives the big giant key back to await the next honored visitor, ‘cause it doesn't really open anything, anyway.

And that’s the thing about a ceremony: it doesn't really open anything, there’s very little real meaning or feeling to it.  But what if the mayor had followed up her glowing comments with a recollection about how the last time the actor was in town, he got drunk, took off all his clothes and swam with a model half his age in the fountain at the downtown Hyatt?  And what if the visitor followed up his remarks by saying that he hopes he doesn’t get shot, crime having gotten so bad downtown since he was a boy? At the very least, it would provide some amusing news coverage, and maybe, just maybe, some thought as well about the price of fame and what to do about downtown crime.

And that's the difference between ceremony and ritual: ceremony is always pro-forma, always positive; ritual includes the dark side.  It's like the Fourth of July, where we shoot off a lot of fireworks, listen to a lot of patriotic speeches, but not once do we ever mention that our country was founded by killing many  of its former owners and putting the rest on land we didn’t want.  What we do on the fourth is by and large ceremony: it doesn't acknowledge the dark side, and is empty of anything but the most banal, self-congratulatory meaning.

Now, you’re probably asking: what put a bee up your bonnet all of a sudden?  What does this have to do with the Baptism of Our Lord, who surely didn't even have a dark side?  Well, I’m glad you asked: what prompted me was noticing that the Lectionary, that three-year cycle of readings that many of us preacher-types follow, leaves out the dark side of Luke’s version of the baptism story.  So, as a public service, I have put it back in, but it's not what you might expect, it's not the winnowing and burning part—that was just pro-forma messiah talk in those days.  If you think carefully about the metaphor, you'll notice that it isn't Jesus who does the separation of wheat from chaff: it's the wind, aka the spirit . . .  but that’s another sermon.

No, the part the Lectionary leaves out is the bit about John the Baptist getting beheaded because he gets crossways with the Herods.  They cut out the middle of the passage, and when that happens, it always makes me suspicious.  Check it out: the lectionary moves from winnowing the chaff and burning it, thus perpetuating the notion of the fires of hell, moves straight into Jesus getting baptized, and then ends when God tells him he’s beloved. And though the implication may be true—you’re gonna get winnowed unless you're baptized and called beloved—it leaves out the dark side: you can get beheaded, or at least persecuted, as well.

There's a reason Luke puts that little aside in there; it's not because like me he follows rabbit runs.  We’re being warned that things won’t be all sweetness and light, all milk and honey if you just join the church.  Following Jesus comes at a cost, in the New Testament it always does that—just ask Paul—and it makes you wonder why it doesn't seem to be that way these days.   Maybe it's because Christians, at least in this country and the rest of the West, are so assimilated, so tamed that they’re no longer a threat to the powers that be . . .

Well.  Back to baptism . . . I told you I like rabbit runs . . . Luke tells us about Jesus’ baptism in one line: “when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying” and it's interesting to note that he doesn't even show it to us, he just indicates that it was done to him along with everyone else, like it’s no big deal, like it’s to be expected . . . when Jesus was baptized like everybody else . . . There’s none of this agonized complaining from John, no “I need to be baptized by you, and you come to me?” like over in Matthew.  Nor is there a cryptic answer from Jesus “it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness,” whatever that means.  For Luke, baptism is just expected: everybody gets baptized . . .

And then there’s the little matter of the coming of the Holy Spirit . . . Matthew follows the source—we think both he and Luke used Mark’s text—saying “just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending on him like a dove” but Luke modifies it so that the Spirit comes when he is praying: “when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.”  The Spirit comes upon Jesus when he is praying to God, when he is in relationship with the ground of all being, AKA the one who birthed him (remember the Word was begotten, not made).

Perhaps this is why Luke and the other gospel writers emphasize that Jesus prayed to God, whom the ancients called “Father.”  And note that he’s not praying to himself, he’s praying to that person of the Trinity we call “creator,” but my point is that it’s the relationship between father and son, between creator and redeemer, between eternal Ground and eternal Word, it's in that relationship that the Spirit gushes forth.

Remember in our discussion of the Trinity that the relationship between its members can be seen as perichoresis, that is, an eternal emptying of the being of one member into the next and into to the next, and so on . . . Thus, the relationship is one of a continual flow around and around and around . . . Fourteenth century theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart describes it this way: the Ultimate source, who the ancients called “Father” but could just as easily be called “Morher,” is eternally giving birth of the Word, who we call “Son.” And in this eternal birthing, the Father empties himself into the Son, and the Son, in turn, contemplates, or “prays to” the Father, and out of that mutual relationship, the Holy Spirit flows into the world; among the many names for this Spirit is love.

So I think that’s what's pictured here, the Son praying to the Creator, and the Spirit flowing out of the relationship, and in that moment, the Creator defines the relationship and declares that it is good: “you are my son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  Or as Clarence Jordan put it in The Cotton Patch Gospels, “I’m proud of you!”

And for us, Baptism is a sacrament, it’s a means of grace, to put it in theological terms.  In plain old English, it's something God does for us, rather than vice versa.  We believe that God the Creator establishes a relationship with us at Baptism, a relationship as of a mother to a son, a father to a daughter, a parent to a child. We believe that the Ground of all being tells each of us “You are my child, my beloved; I’m proud of you!  No matter what you’ve done, no matter how you fumble around in your human fragility, in you I am well pleased!”

And in that relationship, the Holy Spirit dwells within us, and it is through prayer and—especially—contemplation that we can become aware of it and increasingly able to access that indwelling.  Not in a childish, trivial way, as in we get the Spirit to give us whatever we want, to provide special dispensation against the vicissitudes of life.  Bad stuff is still going to happen to us, some of it because we follow Christ, there will always be a dark side to corporate existence.

That is why, in our baptismal litanies, we speak of that dark side, which in Scripture is sometimes called “sin.” Without it, baptism is just an empty, meaningless ceremony that, like candy, is sweet at the time, but provides no lasting value.  But by acknowledging that dark side, and by deepening our relationship with the divine through contemplation and prayer, the Spirit “teaches us to pray,” as Paul put it.  And increasingly, we see through Spirit eyes, and learn to embrace and accept our own stumbling path toward the divine.  In other words we begin to know—as has the one who Creates, Redeems and Comforts since before the beginning of time—we begin to know that we are beloved, and that in us, God is indeed well pleased.  Amen.

Creation is Incarnation (John 1:1 - 14)

It's kind of unusual for me to preach on the same passage two weeks in a row, but then again, John's first chapter is not just any passage.  It spans the whole of creation, up until the time of its writing, at least, and really: you could argue that it does the whole thing, cause what has changed since Jesus’ day?  Just more wars and rumors of wars, conducted with ever-increasing sophistication and whole-sale slaughter . . . More peoples oppressing other peoples, not so different from the Romans of the day . . . this passage covers it all, not explicitly, of course, but it begins with the beginning, in the beginning, quoting Genesis quite handily, and letting us know what that pesky first-person plural might have been . . . Remember?  When it comes to making human beings, God says “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness . . .”  And though killjoy biblical scholars have proposed that this “our” is a remnant of the more “primitive,” multi-god origins of the tale, but I like to think that John gives us one answer, at least, as to  who “they” might be “in the beginning.”

Anyway.  John’s first chapter covers that beginning, telling us that the Word both was God and was with God, and that all of creation—everything: rocks and trees and flowers and bees—came into being both in and through him, and it was nothing short of life, that was the light of the people, that provided for them and illuminated the way.  And thus, the first part of John's prose poem operates on a cosmic scale, and indeed, this Word is what theologians have called the cosmic Christ, or less personally, the Christ mystery, the eternal Word that became incarnate in an unique way as Jesus of Nazareth.

If the first part of this passage is on a cosmic scale, it quickly moves to the human as it describes a forerunner: “There was a man sent from God,” we are told, “whose name was John.”  He wasn't the light that was life, but came as a witness—and in Greek, that’s martyr, and we know that he would be both: witness and martyr, perhaps the first to give his life in service to the incarnate one.  And the true light—which, remember, was the light of the people—was coming into the world.  It was, as Paul would say, emptying itself of its godhood, its eternity, and taking human form

What must it have been like to be John the witness?  To know, from before birth, your role as the one who foretold?  After that one leap in the womb, that first awakening of the heart in Elizabeth's womb?  Did he but count the days until that fateful wilderness meeting?  Did that prenatal encounter cock his eye, did it throw him off, just a little, so that his friends growing up would point and say “here comes crazy John, talking about the chosen one again?”

From the cosmic notion of the pre-existent Word, who was with God and who was God, to a very human, hair-shirted wilderness-hopper seems a long ways, but was it really?  After all, in the very first words of the gospel John we’re told that all things came into being through him, and at the same time in him, and what more intimate relationship can there be than that?  I mean, my liver is in me, and my eye, and they are part of me . . . And they are of me as well, they are made of human cells containing 23 pairs of human chromosomes each, and in this way a human heart is human and not porcine or avian. And by the same token, something in a dog is canine, something in a cat is feline . . .

And John the gospel-writer tells us that all things are in this Word, all things share in this Word-ness, mountains and lilies and cattle and telephone poles, right on down to one John the locust-eating Baptist, right on down to you and me.  We are all in the Word, so we are all of the world.  We share in the divine nature by way of being part of the divine Word of God..

So, in a real sense, incarnation occurred 14 billion years ago, as Richard Rohr puts it. when creation was brought into being through and in the Word, through and in the Christ mystery.  If we are part of the divine, then the divine spirit is part of us.  Created matter is not separate from divine spirit, but intertwined with it.

Some seven centuries and change ago, an Italian philosopher and theologian named Giovanni di Fidanza (later canonized as St Bonaventure) rediscovered this and wove it into his theology of incarnation.  According to Bonaventure, everything emanates from God, everything is an example of God, and everything returns to God in the end.  Emanence, exemplar, consumation—those are his words for it.  We, and everything else, are created in and through the Word; in us, and in everything else, we can see the Word; and we, and everything else, return to the Word in the end.  That was one theologian’s conception of what all this means, anyway . . . And emanation is a pretty fair description of what John is talking about here in his first chapter—we are created in and through the eternal Word—and exemplar seems to line up with the incarnate one’s own description—whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me—and “returning to God?”  Well, just as matter and energy are conserved, wouldn’t divinity, wouldn’t divine spark be as well?

Well.  Seven and a half centuries after Bonaventure, science is coming around to describe the same thing, from a different angle, and thinkers like the late Teilhard de Chardin and Walter Wink are speaking of a re-enchanted universe, and it's important to understand that the universe isn't being re-enchanted, it's always been enchanted, we’re just coming to realize it again.  After centuries of a disastrous, dualistic view, where spirit was considered separate and superior to matter, to flesh, we are re-imaging the universe as being full of spirit, full of divinity, and there are ramifications of this at all levels.

On a policy level, if everything is enchanted, if everything contains a spark of the divine,  how can creation continue to be exploited, with whole species being driven to extinction at an ever-accelerating rate, species created through and in the Word, and thus incarnate spirit us?  How can we mow down the God-haunted mountains, just take their tops right off, to line coal-company pockets, or poison our divine rivers and streams with pesticides and fertilizers, so they are at once depopulated and choked with over-bearing single-celled life?

For that matter, how can we keep whole populations impoverished, whole nations enslaved to the false Gods of consumerism and greed, when whatever we do to them we do to the Christ within them?

And on a personal level, what would happen if each one of us recognized the divine in every other human being?  The God-spark in the woman sitting next to you in the pews, the guy in the pickup truck cutting you off, the Muslim praying to Allah?  How could we treat one another—our spouses, our children, our friends and neighbors—as we sometimes do if we recognized and acknowledged the Christ in every one?  We are all incarnations of the divine Word, the mystery that is Christ.   As Richard Rohr puts it, there is incarnation at every level of our enchanted universe.

Well. Our passage ends the with the classic line: “The Word became flesh and lived among us”—I prefer the King James’ more poetic “dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”  And I think this verse answers the question some of you all might be asking: if incarnation happened with the creation of the universe, if creation is indeed incarnation, why did the eternal Word empty itself of godhood and become human.  It is so we can say we have seen it, so we have experienced it, so we can point to it and say: this is how it is.  This is how it looks when divinity and corporeality, divinity and humanity, are in perfect balance, in perfect harmony one with another.  This is how it can be for you and me who are, after all, siblings of the incarnate Word through Christ.

Poet, theologian and novelist G.K. Chesterton commented that this truth can only be understood on small stages, and this is my New Years wish for us all: that we begin to (or continue to) look for and recognize the incarnate Word in everybody and everything we meet on the small stages that are our lives.  Amen.