Fish Song (Luke 5:1-11)

“I will make you fishers of men, fishers of men, fishers of men. I will make you fishers of men, if you follow me.” A lot of us grew up singing that song, but not any more, at least not in the Presbyterian church USA and other mainline denominations. The problem is one of translation and scope. The rock-bottom, literal translation is “from now on you will be catching men.” That’s because the greek word translated as “men” is anthropous,which traditionally is translated “men.” However, many scholars have come to recognize that it should sometimes be translated as “human beings” or “people.” After all, it isthe word from whence we get “anthropology,” which is the study of all of humanity. So, because Jesus is speaking of all humans here, not just men, our translation has it as “from now on you will be catching people”And as Betty and I were discussing the other day, “I will make you fishers of people” just doesn’t have the same ring.

But there’s another problem with this particular line, and that’s what Jesus actually meantwhen he said this to Simon, whom we all know will eventually be named Peter. When I was little, I was taught that “fishing for people” meant following the great commission, stated over in Matthew as “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” In other words, “bring them to a saving relationship with Christ.” But it seems that Jesus was alluding to a much older, somewhat darkerOld Testament tradition. In Jeremiah, Amos, and Habbakuk, “fishing for people” refers not to God’s salvationbut rather to God’s judgment: the unrighteous and unjust are caught and pulled up by hooks and nets. Listen to this line from Habbakuk: “You have made people like the fish of the sea, like crawling things that have no ruler. The enemy brings all of them up with a hook; he drags them out with his net, he gathers them in his seine; so he rejoices and exults.” And from Amos, speaking to those who oppress the poor and crush the needy, “The time is surely coming upon you, when they shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fishhooks.” Ouch. So, far from telling him he’s going to be winning souls, he’s saying that soon he,Simon Peter, will be the one doing the judging, the one pulling the unrighteous up by hooks and nets. What is going on here?

Fishermen were considered to be unclean because they had to handle fishthat were unclean, and anybody who touched something unclean became unclean themselves. The most prominent such critter was an eel-like species of African catfish called the sfamnun,which had no scales and was thus unclean. The Sea of Galilee—which Luke calls Gennesaret—was lousy with them. Now, even if they didn’t keep the catfish—and there were Gentiles around that atesfamnun—they’d have to disentangle them from their nets, so when Peter whines that he’s a sinful man, he’s not just whistling Dixie—remember that the word we translate as “sinful” was a synonym for “unclean.” Peter wants Jesus to get aways from him because good Jewish people—especially rabbis like Jesus—didn’t associate with unclean folks lest by that associationthey become unclean as well.

So that tells you something about Jesus’ request to sit in Simon’s boat, doesn’t it? By getting into that boat, by associating with someone unclean, he is risking becoming ritually unclean himself.But he doesn’t seem too worried about it; in fact, when he’s done speaking, he prolongs his exposure by asking them to put out into deeper water and let down their nets. Which they do, but only after more griping from Peter: We didn’t catch anything all night, what makes you think we’ll catch some in the daytime, when they can see our nets? But of course they catch a lot,more than anybody’d ever seen,more than one boat can handle, so they had to call in their partners—James and John, the Zebedee boys—so they could fill theirboat as well. And when Simon Peter—at whose house Jesus has already stayed and who already knows Jesus as a wonderful teacher and healer—when Simon Peter sees all the fish, he falls to his knees and calls him Lord.

And that’s when Jesus says he’s soon to be fishing for people: far from being condemned for being sinful, for being unclean, he’s being invited to join the club, to become partof God’s ministry. He’s going to be hooking the unrighteous by the mouth, entangling them in God’s net, and hauling them up. But here’s the kicker: he may be hauling them up, but he’s not condemning them. Simon Peter himself is the proof of that: an admittedly sinful man, Jesus hooks him by the mouth, pulls him up out of sin’s dark waters, and . . . invites him to be part of everything, to be an agent of God.

We can’t divorce this story from the one we read over the past couple of weeks: Jesus announces he has come to usher in the the Year of the Lord’s Favor, the permanent Jubilee, where the lowly are lifted up and all debts are canceled. And it’s that last, that all debts are cancelled thing, that interests us here. And if the Jubilee comes first to outsiders, to the marginalized then, well, within Israel few were more marginalized than the unclean, or as Simon Peter put it, the sinful. The unclean couldn’t participate in synagogue or Temple and were shunned by others lest they become unclean as well. Given that all of Israelite society was structured around synagogue, Temple and table fellowship, that was outcast indeed. And here Jesus is, not only hooking them up out of the muck and mire, but drying them off and taking them in to supper.

And come to think of it, maybe the meaning of fishing for people as soul-winning isn’t so far off. The Old Testament image is one of judgement and doom on the unrighteous, as they are pulled up into . . . wherever . . . for assumed eternal damnation, where there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Jesus usesthis image but flips the script: the unclean are caught, all right, and they’re pulled up, but not into judgement but into communion,into belonging,which must be at the core of longing for the marginalized.

And Jesus, always more interested in his disciples’ figuring things out on their own than telling them outright, tells Peter—and did he have a twinkle in his eye?—soon you’ll be doing the fishing, and will you—who have not been judged by me—will you then condemn those who are caught? And even Peter will get it in the end . . .

Friends, we live in a world that seems to be getting increasingly tribal, with this group with these interests and characteristics over and against thatgroup with thoseinterests and characteristics, and politicians all over the world are trying to capitalize on it. And tribes aren’t inherently bad, there are some things that do better, that are better taken care of at the tribal, or national, level. But for every tribe, for every fenced-in grouping, there are those on the margins, those outside looking in. And Jesus comes to say that the Jubilee Year, aka the kingdom of God, is open for business, and it’s a tribe so big and so inclusive that no oneis excluded . . . not even you or me.  Amen. 

Cliffhanger (Luke 4:21-30)

So. Last week, we read about Jesus’ inaugural address, the first sermon he gave in his hometown of Nazareth. Taking up the scroll of Isaiah, he read “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And after rolling up the scroll and handing it back to the rabbi, he sat down and began to teach: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And all his homies were amazed, just amazed, at all the gracious words that came out of his mouth, even more so because he wasa home-town boy: “Is not this Joseph’s son?” they asked.

He starts up preaching again, and that’s when things start to go South . . . and by the time he’s finished, his hometown buddies, with whom he’d shot hoops in the driveway and horsed around at football games, whom he’d worked side by side in his father’s shop and at whose weddings he was best man, all these so-called “friends and family” are enraged. So much so that they’re not content just to run him out of town, but they grabhim and try to throw him off a cliff.Now that’smad!

And the question is . . . why? Why does the hometown crowd reject him so violently,especiallyafter such an apparently warm reception? To try and understand, let’s burrow down a little bit into the context and what he actually says. First up: he tells them he is the one chosen to proclaim the “Day of the Lord’s Favor.” As we mentioned last week, this was almost certainly the idea that every fiftieth year would be a Jubilee, a kind of “reboot” for society as a whole. Slaves would be freed, debts would be cancelled, and “liberty” would be proclaimed “throughout the land to all its inhabitants,” according to Leviticus. This would have especially benefited many of the most vulnerable in Israel, of course, and accordingly, the Jubilee ideal is often understood to be a time of relief for the poor, a built-in leveler, a bulwark against the development of entrenched inequality. 

Well. You can imagine what this might have sounded like to the beneficiariesof entrenched inequality, the oligarchs and princes of the Middle East . . . even the most pious among them were as adept at ignoring scripture they didn’t like as modern-day Christians can be. But in Jesus’ day, there weren’t likely to be many of those living in the agricultural town of Nazareth, the population of which was scarcely 500. Remember: in those times, there were only rich and poor, those who benefitted from inequality and those to whom the Jubilee would indeed be good news. And archeological evidence shows there were none of the former in Nazareth at the time. Jesus’ friends and neighbors, with whom he’d grown up, were almost certainlyas poor as he and hisfamily were, which could be characterized by comparing them to church mice.

So . . . if the folks packing the synagogue that day aren’t enraged by the prospect of being knocked down a peg or two, if indeed they would come out of the Jubilee smelling like a rose, why are they madder then 300 wet hens, so over-the-top angry as to be moved to murder? Can it have something to do with what he actually preachesafter he reads the Scripture? Let’s see . . . “doubtless you will quote to me this proverb,” he begins: “Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you’ll say ‘Do here—in your own hometown,for goodness sakes—the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’” He’s assuming—and he always couldsee what’s in peoples’ hearts—that they want the same things out of him that he’s done in other places, that surely here in his hometown they’d get some of the good stuff as well . . . and do they assume they’d actually get more, get the best, get the creme de la creme?Did they hear his message—that he’s been anointed,already . . . Christ-ed! Messiah-ed!—to bring in the Jubilee year, when folks like them would get their due? How cool wasit that the guy slated to bring on the goodies was a home-town boy?

So when Jesus began by quoting that proverb and telling them what’s in their hearts, they all thought “durn tootin” we want to get the same treatment they got in Capernaum. But the next thing he says starts to belie this hope: “Truly I tell you”—and when he says that, we know he’s serious “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.” And before they even have time to protest—not us, your messiah-ship, not your home-town buddies—he tells them the unvarnished, harsher-than-harsh truth, and in a way, this is the center-piece of the whole shebang, the truth, the Alethia,as it is in Greek. And this alethiasets the tone for all of Luke’s writing: here in his Gospel, then in Acts, the second volume. And the truth is that although there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s day, Elijah was sent to none of them except the one at Zarephath in Sidon. What’s more, there were many lepers—and that word was used for a number of diseases in the day—there were many lepers in Israel, but Elijah’s successor Elisha only came to one: Naaman, who was a Syrian.

And have you figured out what enraged Jesus’ hometown peeps yet? All those people in trouble in Israel—lepers and poor widows, no less—and God sent the prophets not to them,not to God’s supposedly-chosen people, but to foreigners, to outsiders, to those their religion had marginalized. And this, friends, is a defining theme of Luke’s gospel, a theme we’ll return to again and again as we dip into it over the coming year. The divine seems to have a preferential option not only for the poor, as Catholic doctrine would have it, but for the marginalized, for the outsider as well. But, as we’ll see over the next months, the concept of outsider-ness is a slippery, relativeterm. On the outside of what?On the margins of what?And what about when the situation is reversed, when marginalized suddenly become the insiders, what about then? Often, when that happens, when through some divine or worldly intervention the marginalized come in out of the cold, eventually theybecome the oppressors. It’s happened time and again over the ages, and become almost a cliché when one thinks of South American politics, with the revolutionaries becoming just as bad as those they overthrow.

And the amazing thing about this episode—taking last and this week’s readings to be one, as was Luke’s intention—is that this one story encapsulates all that complexity, the slippery-ness of the notion of insiders versus outsiders. First, Jesus uses that particular passage from Isaiah—one well-associated with Israel’s identity as an underdog community—and encourages them to see themselves as the “lowly,” then pulls the rug out from under them, saying “not so fast . . . are you sureyou’re the ones for whom the prophecy was written?After all, Elijah—arguably Israel’s greatest prophet—came to the foreigner, the outsider. And his successor Elisha: he did the same. And by the way . . . how doyou treat the wandering Samaritan amongst you, or the Syrian or Syrophoenician?

And today, as nationalism is on the rise around the globe, we might well ask a similar question . . . what about the Muslims amongst us, what about immigrants—undocumented or otherwise? Heck, given the precipitous rise of anti-semitism over the past few years—hello Pittsburg!—what about Jews?The fact is, God favors the marginalized, which kind of kicks nationalism right in the pants, doesn’t it?

And is it any wonder his listeners got all ticked off? He comes into their synagogue preaching good news for . . . somebody. . . they’d thought it was them—they were amazed, just amazedby his gracious words—and they reveled in being in the inner circle, the ultimate insiders, because who was more inside, more ground floorthan the anointed-one’s own friends and family? This Day of the Lord’s Favor would certainly favor them.But then came . . . the rest of the story, and as they begin to realize that it ain’t necessarily so, and that realization spread through the congregation—What’d he say? What does he meanGod sends prophets to the unclean first?Take care of your own first,that’s what Isay—as people start to figure out what it means, whispered incredulity becomes downright hostility, and the crowd in the synagogue becomes a mob—a lynchmob, to be precise—and the very one they’d cheered just minutes before becomes its scapegoat.

And it’s not the lasttime Jesus would be a scapegoat, but his time has not been fulfilled, and so he passes, ghost-like, through the midst of them and goes on his way. And of course, this foreshadows the final lynching of Jesus, up on a Jerusalem cross, but it also states anothermajor theme of Luke’s highlighted in this passage: preaching the alethiatruth, is dangerousin a lot of ways. It can be dangerous to one’s bank account, one’s social standing and even one’s bodily integrity, even one’s life.

Preaching truth to power—and in that moment, the good people of Nazareth had the power of a mob—is dangerous, but that’s what we are called to do, brothers and sisters, preach the unvarnished truthof the Day of the Lord’s favor—aka the Kingdom of God—which comes first to the marginalized and powerless, but, of course, also to us. Amen.

Trickle Up Economics (Luke 4:14-21)

So, here we are: Luke’s version of Jesus’ initial voyage into the waters of ministry. Actually, this week is the first half of that story, next week we’ll read the second, but here at the outset it’s good to remember that beginnings are important in a piece of literature. What an author—in this case, Luke—chooses to open with tells us a lot about the concerns of that author. Take Mark, for instance: the first episode he describes—after the baptism, wilderness and calling of disciples—is an act of healing. On the other hand, the first instance of ministry Matthew describes—again after baptism, wilderness and disciple-calling— is the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

By contrast, Luke defers his telling of disciple-calling and chooses to begin with this episode of Jesus in his home-town synagogue. He’d been led into the wilderness and tested by that wily old Devil, and emerged unscathed, “filled with the power of the Holy Spirit.” And it’s important to remember the sequence: the Spirit had descended upon Jesus at his baptism, led him into the wilderness—Mark says drove him in, as if he’d had no choice—and now he’s filled with the power of that same Spirit. And what did that Spirit enable—compel him, maybe?—to do? Teach. He began to teach in synagogues all around Galilee, and was a huge success right off the bat. Word got out and, his fame preceded him all around, into the surrounding country-side. People were just waiting to hear from him, lining the tracks into dusty little sheep-smelling towns and packing out the synagogues where he preached. He was a rock star! Or as Luke more prosaically put it, he “was praised by everyone.”

And now he comes to Nazareth, where, Luke reminds us, he was brought up. And it’s just as crazy—on his way into town, at least. It was like one of those carefully-staged American Idol episodes . . . you know, where they bring the contestants back to their home towns? There’s this big ol’ parade into town, Jesus riding in an open limo like a homecoming queen, smiling and waving to the crowds . . . there’s Joseph with his little brother James on his shoulders and Mary, with her secret smile, and look! Over there’s Barnabas, his best friend, with his high school sweet-heart Hannah, who is displaying a prominent baby bump. Jesus is a home-town boy made good, and they’re all out to meet him, whooping and hollering, trailing him all the way to the synagogue, where they pack the place out, discomfiting the elderly rabbi, who twitters and fusses around, and finally—with great ceremony—hands Jesus the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.

Now. Isaiah is a big book, and he could have read any part of it, like “Comfort, comfort O my people” which would have been a comfort in those dark days of Roman occupation, or “Truly, O people in Zion . . . you shall weep no more.” But instead, he opens the scroll to the part that begins “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” and so, stressing that Spirit thing again, we’re going to hear what it’s all about. And what it’s about amounts to his mission statement, what he’s come to do. But it isn’t just any coming, he didn’t just decide to show up one day; he has been anointed—by God’s Spirit, no less—to do it. And anointed is a freighted verb, the Greek for it is chriso, which of course is the root word for “Christ.” And what is the Hebrew for Christ? Messach, from whence we get the word “Messiah.”

So Jesus has been Christ-ed or Messiah-ed by God’s Spirit to do some stuff, to perform some deeds, and what he doesn’t say is as interesting to me what he does. He doesn’t say he’s come to boot the Romans out and bring back the glorious reign of a Davidic king, which were the expectations swirling around about the word “anointed” at the time. But neither is it to save us from sin and prevent us from going to Hell, as many Christians assume. What this statement is about is what we today would call social justice: he’s been anointed, messiah-ed, even, to bring good news to the poor. To proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind; to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

So. A lot of folks concentrate on the five things in that list— the good news for the poor . . . what could that news be but not-being poor? The release of the captives . . . probably spoils or prisoners of war, not having a particularly good time. Giving sight to the blind and freedom to the oppressed, lot of both of those going around in the day; and in short, the Day of the Lord’s Favor. All are wonderful things, and we should view them not as a definitive list but a representative one. We should view them in the same light as those more famous Old Testament passages: a time when the lion shall lay down with the lamb, spears shall be turned into pruning hooks, and we shall practice war no more. More specifically, “the day of the Lord’s favor” is reminiscent of the Jubilee Year, that legendary commandment of God wherein every fifty years, all debts are forgiven, all property is returned to its original owners, and everyone is set free.

But here’s the thing: the Jubilee Year, as far as we know, was never actually implemented, and so is what Jesus is promises a final coming of that time? Is he saying “this thing is finally coming, this long-awaited promise of re-ordering, redistribution of the gains—even lawful ones—this day that has been prevented human greed?” What we have here is a first cut at what Jesus’ ministry is all about, and it’s clear that for Luke, at least, it’s all about proclaiming the dawn of the Great Jubilee, a new era of liberation, restoration, and return. Because of that, this good news comes first of all not to the rich but to the poor, to the disadvantaged and downtrodden. In this “inaugural address” of his ministry, Jesus is crystal clear that the Gospel is above all about God “lifting up the lowly”—words that should sound just a little familiar . . . they were sung by his mother when she visited her cousin Elizabeth. Remember? “My soul magnifies the Lord,” she sang, ‘and my sprit rejoices in God my Savior, who has . . . brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; who has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

And did he learn this almost radical concern for the lowly, the marginalized and outsiders at his mother’s knee? It’s possible . . . certainly he came by it honestly. His father Joseph was by no means rich—in those days, there was no middle class, just rich and poor, and carpenters were clearly among the latter. And though this theme is present in the other gospels, it’s given especial prominence in the writing of Luke, who describes the apostles continuing this work of proclamation of the Jubilee—in thought and deed—all the way through the second volume of his writing, which today we call the Acts of the Apostles.

But the Jubilee ideal isn’t only for the benefit of the marginalized—it contributes to the health and wellbeing of society as a whole. Everyone benefits when liberty and vision extend across the neighborhood—that’s what “Jubilee” was all about. We’ve heard a lot about supply-side economics, where supposedly if you take care of the upper class it’ll somehow “trickle down” to the poor and marginalized. Jesus is having none of that: what he is preaching is pure-D “trickle up” economics, and as we know, he follows it up by practicing what he preaches. He knows that a healthy society takes cares of its most vulnerable members first, and that’s what makes for a solid, moral foundation.

Well. He rolls up the scroll, hands it back to the rabbi, and sits down. Unlike these days, when teachers—and preachers—generally stand, his sitting was the signal that the teaching—or preaching—was about to begin. And as kind of an aside, this is the model for our own, Reformed preaching, minus the sitting of course. Like Jesus, first we read from the scripture, then we expound on it, drawing what lessons we can.

Anyway. All eyes are riveted upon Jesus, there is a drop-dead silence, which for a bunch of Israelites is amazing, even in synagogue. And he looks intently at each of them in turn, and all swear he is looking straight into their souls, and he begins his teaching with “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And this idea of scripture being “fulfilled” in and through contemporary events was a powerful, widespread notion in Jesus’ day. It wasn’t just that ancient scriptures were understood to foreshadow the future, but that the meaning of present events was illuminated by how they embodied key events in scripture. Thus, the present and the past elucidated each other—God typically works through signature, even poetic patterns. Those motifs will resonate in current events, and current events will “fulfill” or “fill out” ancient motifs. The prophets of old - such as Isaiah, who we hear from in this week’s passage - thought and spoke and acted in terms of these signature forms, and likewise, so did Jesus.

More importantly, in this situation, so do his home-town friends and relatives, his homies. They stare at him in awe, gob-smacked by what he was telling them. And if we read just a verse beyond our passage we see that at first, they were appreciative: “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth,” Luke tells him. That this is doomed to change is the subject of next weeks lection, but for now, I just want to leave you with a thought about our own place in all this. If it’s Jesus’ mission to proclaim good news to the poor, release of the captives, and etc., then it is ours as well. Further, as Saint Francis supposedly said, and Jesus embodied, we’re to do it in words, if necessary.

And you know what? We do a pretty good job of that around here, I have to say, especially for a congregation our size. Our mission programs are varied and important to our community. Soul, Winton House, Centro de Vida. The music school, Greenhills Strings and the Jean Wiggins Choral Scholars. Our activities—our coffee houses and recitals, our high-quality music program—help bring culture and hope to the Greenhills community. This congregation was historically and continues to be vital to the health of Greenhills and its surrounds.

If Jesus was a fulfillment of the Jubilee spirit of the Lord, we—by way of being his body on earth—are part of that. And to that I can gratefully say “Thanks be to God.” Amen.

It Takes All Kinds (1 Corinthians 12:1-12)

In Paul’s time, they were just learning how to be Christians.  It’s true: nobody had ever been one of those before, nobody had ever lived as a follower of Christ, and they had no idea how to go about doing it.  Paul had established communities in his travels, most probably meeting in houses—thus the term “house church”—many in secret, and it was a new thing for them.  Compounding it all was the fact that this Jesus fellow wasn’t like anybody else: he wasn’t an aesthete like those guys over in Qumran nor was he a military leader—no matter how wishful their thinking he was called the Prince of Peace. He wasn’t a moral leader, he didn’t seem to be much interested in who was sleeping with whom . . . in fact, he didn’t preach about sex once, although he did talk about divorce, about protecting the woman in an unequal relationship.  Most of his preaching was about money, about its use and abuse, and not unrelated, how to treat your neighbor.

This last prompted some, at least, to live in communes, or so Luke says in Acts, and it seemed to have prompted a lotof them to re-think leadership of their communities.  That was important, because communities were where it’s at in first-century Christianity, you couldn’t be a Christian on your own, Christianity was practiced in community with others.  That’s as true today as it was back then, I think: as Christians we’re called to do the difficult work of living in community.  Every time somebody says to me “I can be Christian on a mountaintop, I don’t have to be in a church, I want to tell them—and sometimes I do—that they are full of it, because Christian spirituality isspirituality in community.  If you are not in community, you may be spiritual, but it’s not a Christianspirituality.” John Calvin put it even more strongly when he said “unless we are united with all the other members under Christ our head, no hope of the future inheritance awaits us” and “beyond the pale of the Church no forgiveness of sins, no salvation can be hoped for.”

Of course, there’s one caveat here: Calvin’s not speaking of a building or even a denomination, but the greater church, what he called the invisible church, which includes and subsumes the Presbyterian church that he helped found.  And he based his ecclesiology, his theology of church, largely on these passages from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians . . .  it’s here that Paul talks about the church as a body and Christ as the head . . . Note that we close our passage with his famous “for just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.”  And from this metaphor flows all of Calvin’s—and Paul’s—ecclesiology, his theology of church, if you will.  Note the “for:” it’s forjust as the body is one, as in becausethe body is one we can effectively govern the church, that is, we can govern the church in a Christ-like manner.

I’ve always said, whenever I’m asked—and sometimes when I’m not—that one reason I’m a Presbyterian is that we do representative government right.  For those of you who don’t know what I mean, we are governed by elected officials, elected to represent us just as our congress-persons are, and . . . and when I went with my pastor to Presbytery meetings, where representatives elected from each church Session get together with pastors to help govern, I saw a system that, by and large, worked.  Not that it didn’t have its little squabbles, its little ups and downs, but hey … look at the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives—you knowhow well they’ve been working, lately.  And one reason—perhaps the mainreason—it works is this little thing: all the members of the body, though many, are one, and they are one in Christ.

We are one in Christ, and in Christ, as Paul says over in Colossians, all things hold together.  He is the center which keeps us from flying apart; if we separate, if we split up, as this denomination has before, as individual congregations have been known to do, one thing I can say: Christ is not in it.  Christ holds all things together . . . and you can spin it around, too, you can come at it from the opposite direction: without Christ, true unity is impossible.  And more to today’spoint, true sharing of power and leadership is not possible. For if church splits have nothing of Christ in them, neither do jealousies or anger or the protection of power and turf.

There are varieties of gifts, Paul says, but the same Spirit.  It’s the same Spirit, whether you be pastor or janitor or choir director or plumber, and if it’s the same Spirit, how can anyone claim superiority or turf?  It’s through the same Spirit that we are all chosen, that we are all called, no matter what our gifts.  There are varieties of services, but the same Lord. How against the ways of the powers that be thisis, where we value some jobs—no matter how vital—over others, and justify paying some people much less than a living wage based on our—not God’s but our—notions of how much a job is worth.  If our societies were truly Christian societies, it would not matter the nature of the job, all would be paid enough, all would have enough.

This doesn’t mean everybody is identical: there arevarieties of services, says Paul, and to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good, not for their own personal good, or even for their family’s good, but for the commongood . . . to one is given the utterance of wisdom, another the utterance of knowledge, to another the gifts of healing . . . to one the gifts of music, to another the gifts of teaching, to still another the gifts of preparing a mean casserole or repairing the locks on the sanctuary doors.  All are given specific gifts, all are given tasks to do by the same Spirit, and for the glory of the same God.

This notion is at the heart of the Protestant doctrine of call, of the priesthood of all believers: God calls each of us to specific tasks—note the plural—and we are gifted through the Holy Spirit to perform them.  In the Presbyterian Church, we follow Paul in this: our offices, our positions are supposed to be gifts-based, we are to hold church position based on the gifts the Spirit has given us.  By this theory, I have some gifts in the realms of preaching and pastoral care—no smart remarks from out there—but thank God there are others with financial heads on their shoulders to appoint as treasurers and heads of finance committees, because if I did it, we’d be in altogether worse shape than we are now.  And likewise, thank God there are people who can play the organ or piano or lead a choir, because if it were left up to me to do it, well . . . have you ever heard a bag of cats sing?

Notice where all this puts the emphasis: it puts it on the person, and their abilities, not the office and any intrinsic worth.  If a person is appointed or elected or hired for a job, they are done so by dint of their suitability for it.  If they are not suitable, then they should perhaps not be in it.  As Paul points out here—and our theology of call affirms—there is nothing special about a particular office, about a particular position or job.  There are all kinds of jobs . . . the only thing special is the person filling it.  That’s why—and this is controversial, I know—I find it hard to respect a position.  As Paul says, there are varietiesof position, all are of value to God.  It’s not that I have no respect, but I reserve thatfor people, and that after they have shown they should be respected.

Well.  Tomorrow’s Martin Luther King’s birthday celebration.  In a few minutes we’re going to sing an iconic civil rights hymn. And reading today’s passage, it’s striking how egalitarian Paul was, not just for the times, but human beings, period. In this passage—and the remainder of chapter 12—Paul lays out his criteria for church leadership—and thus, of course, membership—and not oncedoes he say anything about race or gender or sexual orientation, for that matter.  He doesn’t say “There are different gifts, but the same Spirit, unless you’re black.” He doesn’t say “All those gifts are activated by the same Spirit, unless you are a woman, and then it must be the devil . . .”  No. All gifts of the Spirit are givenby the Spirit.  End of story.

And of course, this is hardly the strongest case for inclusion Paul made . . . he is, after all, the one who wrote “There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”  It makes centuries of exclusion and bigotry in the church all the more unexplainable, because make no mistake—Paul is the founding theologian of the church. That’s why I thank God for prophets like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, who through their lives and—yes, death—consistently call the church to live up to its promise of inclusion for all. Amen.

It's Not Easy Being King (Matthew 2:1 - 12)

     It wasn’t easy being Herod. Consider: Herod the Great—aka Herod the First, the Herod of our story—was appointed ruler of Judea by his father Antipater the Idumaean, who was from what the Hebrew Bible calls “Edom.” After Herod helped overthrow the last of the Jewish Kings, thus handing Palestine to the Romans, he was awarded the title “King of Judea” by the Roman Senate, and set about alternating between oppressing his Jewish subjects and trying—with little success—to be a good Jew himself. He had a pretty long rule, by the standards of the day, some thirty years or so, and perhaps it was because of his extreme paranoia, which led him to be rather, how shall we say it, brutal toward members of his own family, murdering for example, his second wife Miriamne and her relatives when he thought them a threat.

Be that as it may, as Herod approached his dotage, he began looking towards his sons as heirs. His first choices were two of his sons by Miriamne: fine, ruddy youths who’d been raised in Rome, at the Imperial Court no less, and who offended Herod with their Imperial manner upon their return home to Jerusalem. Nevertheless, they were his choices for heirs until another of his sons—first-born Antipater II—turned the King against them, and Herod had them strangled for treason. Which put Antipater II in the cat-bird seat as Herod’s heir . . . for a year, anyway, until he got convicted of trying to poison the old man and executed, at which point Caesar Augustus was said to have remarked that “It is better to be Herod's pig than his son."

Well. Herod was on his last legs in 4 BCE, the year Jesus was born, when three Magi—aka wise men—showed up, looking for “the child who has been born king of the Jews.” And when they came before the King, they emanated . . . what? An aura, I guess, a touch of the divine, doubtless because they had been following a star, a spark of that Presence, and it had filled them with wonder and hope that shone out of every pore.

But Herod hadn’t gotten any less paranoid since he killed his last son, and he was completely absorbed by dynastic worries, and so missed the aura entirely. And he was in a panic when he heard what they had to say, and all Jerusalem with him, which seems strange, because Herod wasn’t a beloved figure by any means. Nevertheless, he called for the chief priests and rabbis, the Sanhedrin, and various assorted sooth-sayers, and asked them where this young king was supposed to have been born, and by way of answer, they quoted the prophets: “‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.’”

“Holy Moly,” Herod thought “I’m the Shepherd of Judah!” And he called for the wise men—in secret, of course, wouldn’t do to have people know there’s a rival, might send shock waves through the market—and sent them to Bethlehem to look really hard for the child and let him know where he was so he could, ah, worship him, yes, that’s the ticket . . . worship him. But the magi weren’t called wise for nothing—they were court astrologers from the Far East, and where they came from it was no different than in the here in theMiddle East. The powerful didn’t give up that power lightly, especially when they’d had it for as long as Herod had. And it was in that moment that the magi—no slouches at divination—first felt that the King’s motives were not what you would call pure.

And it’s not so different these days, is it? It’s hard to pry the powerful away from their power. I saw it in the federal government, the Agricultural Research Service, where I once worked. We were organized into research units, with a Research Leader (or RL) over a group of scientists, kind of like in a university department. The RL was a scientist as well, promoted from within the ranks of us run-of-the-mill types, and the minute that happened, they often began to change. They had control of all the money, and because they still had to do research, the temptation was strong to use it to help maintain their position. And that went all the way up the hierarchy, from area leader to regional leader all the way up to the top.

Administrative hierarchies are like that . . . the one thing you can count on is that the individuals in them will try to hold on to what power they possess, and that gives the hierarchy a kind of unholy stability. You can see it everywhere, even in churches. Look at the Catholic abuse scandal: it wouldn’t have become entrenched if everybody—priest, bishop, archbishop—weren’t trying to hold onto power, or—and this is even more dangerous—making sure the hierarchy itself, which in this case was the Church, persists. Which, of course, preserves their own personal power, so it’s a nasty feed-back mechanism, it goes round and round and round.

Paul called these hierarchies “powers and principalities,” and recognized that they took on a life of their own. He often short-handed it with the word “flesh” and ended several of his letters with lists of bad things associated with it. Biblical scholar Walter Wink has fleshed this notion out, and showed that if anything can be called demonic it’s these entrenched, intertwined structures of administrative power—whether governmental or corporate—in which we are all embedded.

And perhaps that’s what Matthew means when he says Herod was afraid and “all Jerusalem with him.” After thirty-some-odd years of rule, there were so many toadies, so many functionaries in the multi-storied hierarchy—really a web—of which he was the head, that if you cut that head off, and relocate it somewhere else—Bethlehem? Really? —everyone would lose.

Whatever the case, the wise men departed in secret, and Herod’s own private guard watched their backs, making sure they weren’t followed, and lo! before them went the star, in defiance of all physics, and they were returned to that state of timeless wonder that had accompanied them to Jerusalem, before their encounter with Herod brought them . . . where? Certainly not reality, for this had more the feel of realism than all the petty squabbles at court . . . the star went before them, even in bright daylight, and settled over a Bethlehem house. It wasn’t the fanciest, nor was it the meanest, it was just a house, with a small adobe wall around a courtyard ringed by a kitchen and sleeping rooms, and there, in the center of the courtyard was Mary and the child, and their hearts were filled with an unaccountable joy, and once again they felt the heightened . . . something that surrounded the child, indeed that poured off him, wave after wave, like a warm tide. And they fell to their knees before the boy—they couldn’t help it, really—and they cried out their delight and homage.

Friends, at the touch of the star, at the sight of the child, the magi experienced another reality. Call it the Kingdom of God, as does our scripture, or the imaginal realm, as do Sufi mystics, or the ground of all being, but it is there. And though it is intertwined with all matter—and in a sense, underpins all matter—it is insensible, that is, invisible to our ordinary senses, most of the time, at any rate. But occasionally, the kingdom slips through the veil that normally hides it, and it did so that night. The wise men saw it, heard it, touched it, and even those veterans of the strange—they were magi, after all—were overwhelmed.

And that reality—which in the end we simply call God—that reality was incarnated that night, distilled and instilled by some means impossible to describe into that babe in that courtyard in that luminous night. The light of the world, pouring from that child . . . the light of the world who somehow was that child and—somehow again—is still with us, still underlying and supporting everything, and will be with us until, like the wise men, we go home by another road. Amen.

Word on the Street (John 1:1 - 14)

     The Word, the logos, became flesh—was enfleshed, as we sometimes say—and came to live around here. Right here, among us, the denizens of Greenhills, Ohio, USA, the World, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the universe. But it wasn’t new to the universe, to the cosmos, not by a long shot. It was there all along, in the beginning, we just couldn’t see it. In fact, it was there in the beginning with God, and we all know that was a long, long time ago. What if our spirits were to take wing like time-traveling doves, and fly back through time to substantiate this claim, that the Logos was there in the beginning, maybe we stop at the rise of us, of Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago, we stop and look around with our spirit-sense, and yup! There it is, right there where John claims it is . . . and once again we take flight, slipping through the air, passing through time like smoke through leaves, and around us we catch fleeting glimpses, and everything of course is running backwards, a great cloud coalesces around a fiery point and a while-hot ball emerges out of the sea, and we come to realize we are looking at the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, and sure enough, there they are, thundering around the plains and through the jungles and seas . . . we alight for a moment, and dodging a Stegosaur, we determine the presence of the Word; and how are we doing that, you might ask, how are we so sure the Word is present wherever we alight? Well, I can only say that like pertains to like, that our spirits are of the same stuff—not matter, you understand, but the same . . . essence—as the Word, we vibrate on the same frequency, a frequency far too subtle to detect with any detector we’ve ever invented, and just as birds recognize other birds, trees detect other trees and rocks other rocks, our spirits, our divine sparks register the spark, in fact our spirits just barely resist dancing a little jig in its presence, like the one John the Baptist does in Elizabeth’ womb, when his spirit recognizes the incarnate Word.

Anyway. Our spirits flutter back through time, dodging flying reptiles, batting away giant mosquitos—wouldn’t you just know that they’d be able to see us?—and dive into a sea teeming with fish and then—as the age gets younger—no longer fish but arthropods, trilobites, then progressively simpler life forms, swimming in that primordial soup, until zap! a blinding light that would sear retinas, if our spirits had retinas, and behold! The first living thing, and our spirits immediately feel the Word, coiling around and within the organism like an all-pervading serpent, and once again our spirits are off, back through the eons, and though we are at a frequency much more subtle than the material world coming into being around us, we still dodge and metaphysically wince when volcanoes belch up underneath, or when continents crunch together like ponderous bumper cars. Our spirits know they cannot be harmed, but old habits die hard. And through it all, like a background weave, like a pulsing electric ligament, winds the Word.

We suppose, though our spirits’ adventures, that Paul was correct when he wrote that in Christ all things are held together, because our spirits—reporting back to our hearts—tell us that the Word, the one that was enfleshed, pervades everything, and as they keep voyaging back though time, things get more and more dodgy—thank God our flesh is not there—and they sense that the Word is in everything and everything is in the Word . . . and now the Earth is a fiery ball, we’ve seen it go from cool and green and ocean-covered to molten red, as if heated in a cosmic forge, and now it’s hurtling through space, racing around a sullen sun, and it comes apart before our spiritual eyes, back into its constituent pieces, the loose rock and space dust it was before centripetal force coalesced it, and still the Word is there, and it is becoming apparent that John was just a bit conservative, a bit off in his metaphor-shifting. He likened the Word to light, the light of the world, as a matter of fact, and it’s a metaphor that certainly had legs, it’s lasted to this day . . . light, that allows us to see, that illuminates dark corners, that becomes associated with truth, and those dark corners? Why they’re always associated with false, and everybody knows that false is wrong, it’s bad, and so things that are dark must be that way, no? The night—the life-giving darkness, when plants respire, when people are refreshed by sleep—the night must be bad . . . at night, with the glittery stars and garish, silver moon . . . the twinkling stars that were to the ancients holes in the firmament, or to the Aztecs, demons held back only by sacrifice . . . the poetry of John’s prolog didn’t create this false dualism, but it certainly helped it perpetuate . . .

But what if we think of this light as what physics has revealed it to be? What if we think of it as energy, as streams of photons . . . the light of the Word, the light that is the Word, powers the world, some—like theologian Father Bruno Barnhart—say it has powered the whole enterprise in the West, in Europe and the Americas, first the flowering of society and educational institutions under the church, and then as science and secular rationality, all powered by what Father Bruno calls the Christ Quantum, that bursting of energy and creativity release when the Word became flesh. And what do we know now about light? Is it not both wave and particle? Is not the metaphor John wrote even sharper, even more apt today? If light is both-and, so is the Word, who was both with God, separate from God, and at the same time, identical with God, the same as God . . . light from light, light as light: two natures, God and not-God, all at once.

But our wandering spirits are further back than that, by some 5 billion years or so, and the weight of the intervening millennia grows heavy, and now there is only our sun, which grows smaller and smaller even as we watch, until it is no more, and we are suspended in the void, and here’s the thing: it is a void, it is empty of matter, but not of the Word, not of the Christ . . . what? Christ Quantum as Father Bruno would say? Christ Omega, as Teilhard de Chardin would put it? Perhaps Word is the best we can do . . . but it’s not Word as we conceive of it today, not a static thing that lies there on the page, nor is it an assembly of characters that points to an object—or objects—in the so-called “real” world . . . it is a dynamic presence, always has been, always will be, always changing, always vital, always new.

Problem is, we often do not conceive of it that way, everybody kmows what the word of God is, it’s this book right here, written down anywhere from two to three thousand years ago, argued about by Roman Catholics and then Protestants and Catholics, finally settled as to its contents by 70 CE in the former case and 1500 CE in the latter, and here it is, you can hold it in your hand, see? Certainly not a part of us, certainly not dynamic in any way, and if it was made flesh, as our passage would have it, it certainly isn’t that way now . . .

And our spirits have accelerated in their flight . . . ten billion years ago, twelve . . . we see the accretion and scattering of whole constellations under gravity’s inexorable weight, and still there is the Word, wound through and around everything, all the nascent stars and wobbly solar systems . . . and are there other life-systems to which this Christ-Principle, this powering and empowering evolutionary engine is central? It is not for us to know at this time, but someday perhaps we will . . .

Fifteen billion years ago, sixteen . . . things are getting packed, now, much more compact, and we are swept along toward a discernible center, and galaxies and interstellar dust are zooming at super-hyper-dooper-sonic speeds towards that center, and right before the crash we close our metaphysical eyes, and . . . we are back in the present: I suppose there are some places—or rather, some times—even our spirit selves cannot penetrate, and if ever there was such a space-time, the Big Bang would be it. But John assures us—and I have to take his Word for it—that the Word was there in the beginning, and that implies even before the Bang, and that everything was created through the Word, everything was created in the Word, and that Word was there when it all happened, in the beginning, and that means before the Big Bang when literally God only knows what was there, or even if there was a there.

The Cosmos burst into being with a Bang . . . all of a sudden there was space, all of a sudden there was time, and seventeen-odd-billion years later, here we are, like all created matter, trapped in space, bound up in time. Except . . . except that part of us that is divine, the divine spark, as I call it. In our journey through time, we discovered that John wasn’t exaggerating when he says things are created in and through the Word. Paul wasn’t whistling Dixie when he says in this Word all things—all things!—hold together. And today, do you want to see this Word? Do you want to feel it? Hold out your hand and touch the back of the pew in front of you. Run up to a tree, rub your hands over the bark. Heck, plant your feet in the Greenhills streets, ‘cause the Word isn’t just on the street, it’s in it as well.

And one more thing: if you want to experience the dynamic Word, the ever-changing, ever lively Word, you don’t have to sit with 2000-year-old writings and wait for the Spirit to make them come to life—although that’s not a bad thing to do, everything has its place. But all you have to do is look at your neighbors and family and friends, and really be present, really listen to them, and you’ll see the Word shine through in everything they do. Amen.

The Forerunner (Luke 3:1 - 18, Advent 2C)

When I was an undergraduate, there was a campus preacher named Hubert Lindsey, but everybody called him “Holy Hubert.” He got his start at Berkley in the 60s, and got beat up over 150 times, most notably by the leadership of the Black Panthers. Nevertheless, he was responsible for bringing a lot of young people, a lot of “hippies,” as denizens of the counterculture were called in those days, to Christianity. He had a knack of showing up at protests and turning the talk toward Christ; then-governor Ronald Reagan quipped that the State of California owed him millions in crowd control and, of course, he was darkly accused of being a tool of the State because of it. And though he was seen by students as something of a joke, he nevertheless is considered to be one of the fathers of the West Coast Jesus movement.

I saw him on the campus of the University of Washington in the early 70s. He’d stand in front of the Husky Union Building—the HUB—and draw big crowds of students, who would joyfully heckle him as he preached. I say “joyfully” because there was no malice in it, from either side, really. He would say outrageous things—“bless your dirty little hearts!” and “everything about you is evil, everything about you is defiled”—and the students would eat it up, they’d laugh and throw verbal jabs back at him, attempting to best him in debate, which, of course, they never could. But there was no animosity in it, and if you go back and look at some of the videos—YouTube has some, just search under “Holy Hubert”—you can see the compassion underneath all the fire.

I think of Holy Hubert every time I read about John the Baptist—it’s almost like, in my mind, he’s a spiritual descendent. Every time I read John’s taunt—you brood of vipers!—I think back to Hubert calling the students “You little devils!” And predicting hellfire for each and every one. The difference is, of course, that John was the forerunner, he was heralding the coming of Jesus into the world, and Hubert was an evangelist, trying to save souls after the fact, more akin to John the Gospel-writer than John the Baptist.

But stylistically, at least, they have something in common. Like Hubert, who preached up and down the West Coast, John preached up and down the Jordan. Like Hubert, John minced no words: “You brood of vipers!” he’d spit, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?“ Like Hubert, he preached of repentance, urging his listeners to turn away from their sins. And I wonder—if you were to get into a time machine—maybe H.G. Wells’, I hear it’s not being used at the moment—if you were to get into a time machine and go back to watch John the Baptist there on the rocky Jordan banks, what would you see? Did the locals taunt the hair-shirted prophet? Did they fling jibes and insults at him like the modern kids did Hubert? Did the Jordan prophet fling ‘em right back, did he seem to enjoy the game as much as 70s preacher?

One thing I’m sure of is that underneath any playfulness he might have had, underneath any compassion he might have shown, there was the same resolve, the same overwhelming sense of mission. Just as Hubert was deadly serious in his desire to see students brought to Christ, John the Baptist was serious about his calling as the forerunner, the messenger, the harbinger of Christ. “I baptize you with water,” he’d say, “but one who is more powerful than I am is coming, and I’m not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals.” In other words, he’s saying, he’s not worthy to be Jesus’ slave.

If it was important to John that he not be mistaken for the one whose coming he foreshadowed, it was equally important to the early Gospel writers. Disciples of Jesus that they were, they wanted to make sure their readers knew that Jesus was the one, not John, the followers of whom may have been still around. In fact, some Biblical scholars think there may have been a rivalry between the followers of John—beheaded by Herod for speaking truth to power—and those of Jesus, crucified for doing the same.

Well. Be that as it may, it’s important to note the content of John’s message. “You brood of vipers!” he’d say. “Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Don’t tellnme you have Abraham as an ancestor. God can make children of Abraham out of those rocks over there. That’s not gonna cut it any more. It’s not about ancestry it’s about the fruit you bear. In fact, even now the ax is on the tree, it’s on the tree of Israel, the leafy ancestors of Abraham, ready to cut it down if it doesn’t bear fruit, ready to cut it down and feed it to the fire! As we’ve seen, John could be a just a bit over the top . . .

 And his followers would say “If it’s not about our ancestry, if it’s not enough to be sons and daughters of Abraham, then what shall we do?” And it’s as important to notice what John doesn’t say as much what he does. He doesn’t say “just believe in the one to come,” he doesn’t say “you must follow the one named Jesus.” He tells them that they have to reform their behavior. Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none, and whoever has food must do the same. It’s not enough to mouth platitudes, it’s not enough to just believe, you’ve gotta change your behavior, you’ve gotta put some money where your mouth is.

It’s a theme that runs throughout the whole New Testament, from the Gospels to the Epistles. Over in Matthew, Jesus tells a parable of a king (clearly meant to represent himself) who separates the sheep from the goats according to how they take care of the poor—whatsoever you’ve done to the least of these, the king says, you’ve done to me. In John, Jesus says that he has come so that we might believe, Paul is the avatar of salvation through faith, but the author of James insists that faith without works is dead. There is a tension in the New Testament between being and doing, belief and action, faith and works.

Here, John comes down squarely on the action side. How do the Israelites avoid the ax and the fire? Give clothes to the naked and food to the hungry. Don’t take more than is your due, especially if you’re a tax-collector. Don’t use your power to extort money from folks by threats or false accusation, and don’t be greedy, be happy you have a job, for Pete’s sake.

Traditionally, John is seen as an avatar of the old, the last of the hair-shirted prophets, preaching hell-fire one last time before the coming of grace, and there’s certainly something like that going on. But I think he represents something else as well: an acknowledgment that the Gospel is to be practiced, not just believed. John was the forerunner of Christ, all right, but he was also the forerunner of a new social order, which combines prophetic action—you will be known by your fruits—with forgiveness by the grace of God.

And there’s one other thing John was a forerunner of, and that’s Christianity as a whole. He prepared the way for the entire Christian enterprise, that begun with the coming of the one whose sandals he was not fit to untie. He prepared the way for the apostles and St. Paul. For Benedict and Augustine, St. Francis and St. Teresa. He prepared the way for John Calvin and John of the Cross, for Martin Luther and Billy Graham, for all the evangelical preachers right down to good old Holy Hubert. And last, but certainly not least, he prepared the way for the denizens of Greenhills Community Church, Presbyterian—he prepared the way for us.

But not only did he he showed us how to prepare as well. Advent is a season of preparation, and not only did John the Baptist prepare the way for Christ and every Christian to come, he showed us how to do it as well. We’re to examine our lives, how we relate to each other, how we conduct the business of living, how we relate to God. The meaning of repentance is turning ones life around—each Advent we’re invited to examine ours and see what needs turning. Amen.