Jesus – Page 3

1 Christmas 2017: Straddling the In-Between

December 31, 2017 by Cam Miller

Text (sort of): Luke 2:22-40

We are straddling the in-between.
Christmas has not ended
but only the liturgical churches are still observing it.
It is not the new year yet,
but everyone is about to celebrate it.
Trinity is moving its offices and program space,
but the Sunday morning worship will stay here.

Straddling the in-between
is awkward and can also be stressful.

In such moments,
going back to the fundamentals
and remembering the rock upon which we landed,
is an important practice for wellness.

So, I am going back to Jesus,
who is the rock upon which our foundation is hewn.
I am going back to a sermon I preach regularly
in one way or another,
maybe even weekly to some extent.
But today I will be explicit.

Jesus bar Joseph
is the name of the historical figure
gleaming at the core of our religion,
as does the sun from the center of our solar system.

Jesus is Latin for the Greek, Iesous
(pronounced “Yay-soos”).
“Jesus” instead of Iesous,
became the norm of Christianity
because Christianity became Romanized, and Latin,
was the language of the empire.
But the Greek, Iesous, nor the Latin, Jesus,
was his name.
Jesus had a Hebrew name,
not a Greek or Latin name.
That name was Joshua.

But since there was no “J” sound
in ancient Hebrew,
it was Yeshua (Y’shua).

Like all names, and especially all ancient names,
Yeshua had a meaning.
It meant, “God saves,”
or more precisely: “Jehovah is salvation.”

But we probably know all of that
and do not give it much thought, because,
well because that is what is normative for us.

It is impossible for us to know what the name
Yeshua meant to Jesus.
A lot of people in his generation
had that name.
A lot of people,
before and alongside him, were named, “God saves.”
A lot of people before, with, and after him,
believed that, in fact, God does saves.

So we do not know
what his name meant to him,
but we do know that the meaning of his name
came to define how people would remember him.

Now, because we are a highly secular culture,
there are a lot of people who think
that Jesus’ last name was, “Christ.”

But Jesus did not have a last name,
any more than millions of people
in some cultures around the world today
have last names.
Yeshua bar Joseph, was his name.
Or more accurately, Yeshua bar Yosef;
that is, Yeshua “son of” Yosef.
But Yeshua, long after his death on the cross,
began to receive a title alongside his actual name:
Yeshua Messias,
or Hebrew for Messiah.

But we also know that the title, Messias,
got changed like the name Yeshua did.
It became the Greek form, Christos or Christ.

Messias means, in Hebrew, literally,
“anointed one.”
When we say Yeshua Messias,
or Jesus Christ,
we mean them as synonymous.
In our world,
To say Jesus is to say Christ
and to say Christ is to mean Jesus.

That is because the Roman Empire
spread, inspired, converted or coerced that version
of Christianity across the globe
until you and I,
and most of the modern world,
took it for granted
that Jesus means Christ
and vis versa.
Even those who do not believe
Jesus means Christ,
know that those two words
are synonymous to Christians.

Those words, Jesus and Christ,
are laden with heavy baggage.
But that is why it can be refreshing
to go back, way back,
before the words carried all that baggage.

It is good to go way, way back,
when the words, Yeshua and Messias,
were just a name and a title
that more than one person bore
at more than one time.

You see, all the kings of Israel were
“anointed” – that is, messias.
Approximately forty-three kings,
over something like four-hundred
and thirty-three years,
were anointed when assuming power.
As I am fond of telling children and families
at baptisms, Messiah means “Oily Head.”
All those ancient kings were anointed with oil
as the symbol of sacred selection –
or divine favor.

But they are not the only ones.

In fact, six months before I was born,
Queen Elizabeth II of England,
was anointed with oil in a private ceremony
by none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The reason she was?
Because the British monarch is believed
to have divine favor also.

I know, it sounds absolutely primitive in our world,
but there it is – a very long tradition
of anointing royalty with oil.

So Yeshua Messias means, literally,
“Jehovah saves, anointed one.”

Which begs the question, I’m sure you’re asking,
why should we care about any of these
peculiar and arcane names and notions?

Why not just go on with the old familiar names,
without knowing any of this messy,
possibly confusing, and somewhat troubling
dissertation on names?

This is where we are getting down to the rock.

When we say Jesus and Christ;
we are talking about two different historical figures:
one is a clear theological construction
and the other is an historical figure
obscured by the dust of time.
We need to understand the difference.

Marcus Borg liked to distinguish them
as the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith,
or the pre-resurrection and post-resurrection Jesus.

Yeshua bar Yosef
is the man who was born, named,
circumcised, and consecrated at the temple,
and who grew up to form the sacred spiritual wisdom
that has been filtered through the Gospels.
That is Jesus.

Jesus Christ
is the god formed from creedal belief,
doctrines, and the politics of the historic Church,
and which evolved centuries
after Yeshua bar Yosef
was dead and buried.

One offers us wisdom about God
and about God’s best dream for us;
and the other IS God,
and the object of faith.

Here is the bedrock.
It is possible to be a Christian
and acknowledge the difference
and believe in both;
and it is also possible to be a Christian
and believe in one but not the other.

For the sake of intellectual honesty
and spiritual integrity, if nothing else,
we need to acknowledge the difference
between Jesus and Jesus Christ,
and not pretend that they are the same.

But I think it is also important
because in the twenty-first century,
our culture unbraids these two from each other
even if we do not.

Jesus-the-man, and Jesus-Christ-the-theology,
are fairly easily untangled, and
we do it without stress all the time.
For example, Yeshua bar Joseph,
the historical human being we call “Jesus,”
took a saying made famous by Rabbi Hillel,
and turned it into his core principle:
Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.
And then he connected it to a teaching
on non-violence:

If someone strikes you on one cheek, offer him the other.

But we know without any stress or shock,
that these two connected and primary principles
of the man Jesus,
were not preached or practiced
by the Christ that the Church emphasized
when it went on Crusades
to enforce belief at the end of a sword,
or later, to replace culture by force of empire.

The same is true with the doctrines
surrounding Jesus Christ,
who the Church defined as a man without sin,
who then died to save us from our sins.
The historical man, Yeshua,
sought out baptism by John the Baptist,
which was a baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
Plus, the man Jesus never
actually talked about himself
the way the Church has described
Jesus-Christ-the-theology.
Even so, the two became woven together
into one monolithic tapestry.

Now, I am not advocating for one or the other,
or for one over the other;
and in truth,
anyone who cares about Jesus
can’t help but blend the two together.
All of us are the products of a greater history
and the culture we were raised in.

But whichever one you believe in,
or even if you are a full-blown advocate of both,
I am pleading for us to acknowledge
and make the distinction
between the man of history
and the Christ of faith.

Most people in Geneva, New York
and the United States of America,
do not know either one very well,
and when they are wrapped up together,
do not think Jesus is credible –
merely a myth or legend.
Yeshua bar Joseph,
Wisdom teacher and prophet
who dared to speak truth to power,
is someone that needs to be heard today.

That Jesus does not require belief,
only sharing what he taught.

We are in an even bigger in-between time
than any of the little ones
I mentioned at the beginning.
We are in-between the time
when Christianity was the dominant
non-governmental cultural institution of our lives,
and the future Christianity
that is now in flux.

Our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry,
likes to talk about the “Jesus Movement.”
I do not have any personal knowledge about
what he means by that phrase,
but here is what I think.

The big monolithic institutions of Christianity
are dying.

Macro-religion,
the big, conglomerates
we have imagined were universal,
are giving way to micro-religion:
more localized,
smaller units that must be entrepreneurial
and much more authentic to their core
in order to flourish.

Whether a congregation numbers in the thousands,
or is a house church made up of a dozen members,
Christianity will find its vibrancy
in this century,
as a movement rather than an institution.
Denominational identity like Episcopalian,
Roman Catholic, and Lutheran
may survive, but
they will become looser affiliations
than what has been known in the past.

It is all about Jesus, the man.
It is all about the spiritual wisdom
of a first century teacher, prophet, and sage
whose abiding wisdom
bubbles up through the ocean of time
and still offers us air to breathe.
Our mission is to share that wisdom,
to fathom it and practice it,
and offer it as the life-giving force that it is.

Whatever else we do,
if we do that with energy and passion,
we will find ourselves smack dab in the middle
of a reformation and movement toward the future.

We are in the in-between,
but the future is calling to us now.

Proper 29A, 2017: A chance to clothe the naked

November 26, 2017 by Cam Miller

Link to Liturgical Poem – The Star Market, by Marie Howe:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/01/14/the-star-market

Link to Matthew 25:31-46: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25:31-46

SERMON

Picture if you will, a magnificent autumn day.

The sky is a deep blue,
the sun unusually intense, even hot
for that time of year.
The leaves were still turning
and so the world was cast in the golden and red glory of fall.
Summer warmth, pleasing colors,
the hum of pleasantness all around.

The church I served was on a Big Ten university campus –
fifty-thousand students, and
twenty-five thousand faculty and staff.
The university was surrounded by dense urban neighborhoods
but still leafy under the canopy of streets lined with
sycamore, maple, beech, and oak.

It was mid-afternoon on a Sunday
and the bishop had visited that morning
for a full complement of youth and adult confirmations,
the pews brimming with people and vitality.
It was just the kind of experience a thirty-six year old priest
wants to show off to his bishop,
especially when only a few years before
the church had been a bit threadbare and dog-eared.

After services, we had taken the bishop and his wife to lunch,
and the conversation was unusually interesting and pleasant.
All felt right with the world, at least my world.
After taking a few minutes to reflect on the morning
in my office, all alone, the voices
and events echoing in my thoughts, I left for home.
Stopped at a red light on the main street,
a north-south urban corridor that ran like a carpet
through the university district,
I did a double-take.
Through the open passenger window
I starred at a twenty-something young man
striding up the street buck-naked.
He walked with purpose,
his strides focused on going somewhere
but in no particular hurry.
Naked as a jaybird,
his partially bald head a tangled mess
of hair exploding akimbo in all directions.

I was speechless – not just because I was alone,
since that never stops me from talking.
But because there was a naked guy
walking up the busy street
as if it was an everyday kind of thing.
The car behind me honked
as the light had turned green.
I felt as though there was something I should do
but I didn’t know what.
The only thing I could think to do at that moment,
was to honk and wave.
So I did.
He did not acknowledge me.

Three blocks later,
stopped at another red light,
looking down at my trench coat
folded over the passenger seat, I suddenly remembered:
“When was I naked and you clothed me?
When you did it for the least of these, you did it for me.”
It had been the gospel reading that day!
And the bishop had preached on it!
No joke.
I kid you not.

How many times in my life
will I have the opportunity to offer my coat
to someone naked in public?
Surely, I had blown my one and only chance,
and clearly, I was a goat.

Caught up in my own urgent business,
I have missed the opportunity
and failed miserably, more than once,
to embody this gospel in real-time when given the chance.
Like you, I have also been able to meet the challenge
many times in my life, but
there are a number of spectacular failures
that haunt me.

Fortunately, such failure is not the last word. Ever.

The contrast between sheep and goats
in this once parable,
now allegoric saying from Matthew,
is not a coincidence.
Granted, it is a contrast lost
on most of us 21^st century urbanites,
but for Matthew’s audience,
it would have been a vivid metaphor.
You see, while it is true
that during the day the sheep and goats were mixed together,
at night the shepherd had to separate them.
It turns out, goats need better shelter than sheep –
sheep are hardier than goats,
so they need less protection at night.

That is an interesting twist
if the goats are supposed to represent the bad guys
and the sheep the good guys.
But that is just an interesting side point.
The real kicker in this story is its focus.
Remember, an ancient parable has only a single focus –
a contrast between two elements.
It is easy to take our eyes off the simple contrast
and wander into the cattails of characters
inhabiting the sidelines.
But the contrast in this story,
the one holding the original parable,
is probably between the kingdom of God
and the act of separation.

The focus is not on the shepherd (Jesus).
The focus is not on the sheep (the least of these).
The focus is not on the goats (those who neglect the least of these).
Sad to say, but this teaching
is not really about that good old liberal social action agenda
to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Sorry.
Rather, it is about separating,
and whether or not to separate,
sheep and goats.

Matthew has likely taken a parable spoken by Jesus,
that was a simple contrast between the kingdom of God
and the act of separation,
and written it into a complex metaphor
about the end of time
and the last judgment.

Matthew wants us to see our situation in life
as a single, either-or decision –
a zero-sum game in which a success for the good guys
is a loss for the bad guys,
and vice versa.
Matthew, in an urgent plea to his generation,
a full fifty years after Jesus had been executed,
paints the existential question as one about
whether we follow Jesus or not:
The sheep are in, they follow Jesus;
the goats are out, they do not.

I do not think that such bifurcated alienation
is what Jesus had in mind, rather,
I think it is a product of Matthew’s moment in time…
and ours.
You and I are in an alienated kind of moment –
sheep or goat,
right or wrong,
in or out;

Trump or not-Trump;

Republican or Democrat;
white or black;
English or bi-lingual;
born here or immigrated;
gun control or none;
choice or never;
fluid gender or as-assigned;
Christian or not,
even Trinity or St. Peter’s…

The molten issues between hardened lines
leaves little room for relationship.

We are separated.
It is enough to make a person sick, literally.

We can see with our own eyes,
it is enough to make a society diseased and ill.

It eats away at our humanity,
dissolving the veneer of grace and hospitality
that protects us from tribal warfare.

I do not believe Jesus was a champion
of vivisecting humanity
with a sword of judgment, dividing people
between those loved by God
and those unloved and abandoned by God.

It is true that the later followers of Jesus,
Paul and the gospel editors,
did see the world in such terms,
and that later the institution of the church
practiced a scorched-earth policy
of us verses them.
But if we pull the blanket back
on the teachings of Jesus,
I think we hear something else.

Jesus did not speak in one-size-fits-all terms,
that is a piece of his genius.
If we listen carefully to the parables and stories
handed down to us, even
through the distortion of later editor’s filters,
we can still hear the graduated tones of nuance.

When Jesus speaks, there is a message
for those who follow him closely,
but also a word to those who are in the crowd listening;
and there is a little something for the hostile too;
and even a message for those who are indifferent.

There is no way to know this for certain,
but it seems to me, Jesus spoke to each audience differently
and with different expectations – or perhaps
different invitations.
In other words, following Jesus is not for everyone.
In fact, I doubt that Jesus invited everyone to follow him,
or would even have recommended it to everyone.
And it is for certain, that the love of God
does not hang upon a condition
that we follow Jesus or be severed, then cast
into the outer darkness where the pitiful unloved shrivel.

Even the decision to follow Jesus
is not an all-at-once, or once-and-for-all, kind of action.
It is a decision, once made,
that we come to again and again and again,
as we fail to clothe the naked in front of us
and then remember or realize how to do it another time.

Instead of a straight line from us to Jesus,
as if a dart on its way to a bullseye,
following Jesus looks much more like a meandering river
snaking its way through mountains.
There are, and will be,
times when we are more like the experience
Marie Howe describes at the Star Market –
when we are freaked out or repulsed
by the needs of those around us.
Other times, compassion will well up within us
and empower our action, as if on a massive dose of steroids.
Each time is a new time,
and each time a discrete opportunity
to move from hostile voice in the crowd
to loyal follower,
or from a voyeur watching Jesus from a distance
to someone a little further up in the crowd,
nearly able to touch him.

But either way, sheep or goat,
close or distant,
disciple or agnostic,
God holds us in the arms of love
and we are inseparably connected to the Holy One
who created us from dust,
and imbued us with life – the actual breath of God within us.
We are not standing on the precipice
of light and outer darkness,
rather, we are held within the light at all times
whether or not we feel lost in the dark.
The ones we consider the enemy
have no true separation from us;
they are not either, nor are they or.

The enemy, those who are utterly wrong,
them that oppose us
and those that reject us,
are only goats because we see ourselves as sheep.
The truth is, we are both one and the same.

Following Jesus, it seems to me, looks a lot more like
knitting together alienated sides
and stitching up the open wounds of rancor,
than it does choosing sides
between them and us
or sheep and goats.
And we get to do it over and over and over again
instead of once and for all.

I hope that naked fella found his clothes
or got somewhere he didn’t need any.
But I am also grateful to him,
because of him, I became a bit less alienated that day.

Thanks be to God.

Proper 25A 2017: A Non-random Act of Kindness – Lower the Toilet Seat

October 29, 2017 by Cam Miller

Link to Matthew:https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2022:34-46

The Liturgical Poem for This Week:

From “The Forms of Knowledge”
by Kenneth Patchen

Calling to each other across the graves,
the beautiful and strong whom
horror eats, whose bones are already
bleached in city deserts, whose stars
and moons bestride another world –
these, these few, these holy –
they are not drowned by the great white rains
of this winter; they are not trampled
by the horses of murder and death;
instead, they try to live above life,
as the birds above their flying,
as the dead beyond their dying.

Leviathan’s scales sparkle in the heavens
and the whole fist of the universe
turns on the enraptured spit of God.
Through the flames I can see the lowered faces
of creatures that watch us in amused love.
We live on only one side of the world.

Sermon

There are hints today –
whispers up the sleeve if you can hear them,
of saints and stewardship to come.
We’ll just let those things roll in slowly and
mosey in with the tide of November.

As today’s poem by Kenneth Patchen concludes,
“we live on only one side of the world.”

We imagine,
or think unconsciously if we don’t imagine,
that everything we see and do
is all there is.
We imagine,
but not very imaginatively,
that what we are aware of
and what we can smell and taste,
and what we can think about and know,
is all there is.

Meanwhile,
“…Leviathan’s scales sparkle in the heavens
and the whole fist of the universe
turns on the enraptured spit of God.
Through the flames I can see the lowered faces
of creatures that watch us in amused love…”

Still, the distance between knowing and unknowing,
between the lustrous and luscious
heaven on earth, and the earth of daily bread,
is love.

Even a small love, as poet Ann Sexton mused.
According to her, a thin vein
is all God needs to cover that distance,
a thin vein with even a small amount of love in it.

That is the distance
between those creatures who watch us
with loving eyes and kindly smiles,
their faces smashed against of the glass of heaven.
Only a thin veil away;
only a thin vein with a small love in it.

As a preacher in a techno-world,
where religion is irrelevant at best,
and in which preachers are pie-in-the-sky schemers,
it is difficult for me to stand up here
and preach about “love” without feelig self-conscious.

From Billy Sunday to Elmer Gantry
every Christian bible-thumping crook
has tried to cash in on love.
Yet underneath
the muck of self-interested misuse and abuse of love;
and underneath
the fluffy clouds of yellow smiley-faces that trivialize love;
and underneath
the blackwater of despair and cynicism from those who have
given up on love;
underneath all of that detritus,
there is powerful and practical wisdom
in those two little sentences from Jesus.

While on this side of the glass,
in the cottoncandy Valentine’s Day world
of Disney and Wal-mart,
love is a noun.
But in that teaching of Jesus,
rooted in the rich moist soil of Moses,
love is a verb.

While we write, sing, and speak of love as a feeling,
an emotion to be consumed,
Jesus speaks of love as an action that embodies
one’s total posture toward another person.
Love is concrete
and muscular –
and as such,
sums up Torah from Jesus’ point of view.

To get persoal, even homely,
my mom taught me about love as a verb.
It caused me no small amount of consternation at the time,
but through the wisdom of years
I have found myself grateful more times than I can count.

My mom’s first commandment was be considerate.
She was fanatical about it.
She convinced me, slowly and over time,
that being considerate is a core requirement of being loving.
I will offer one, very humble and earthy example
I often inject into pre-marital conversations
with those who are about to be married.
To the husband-to-be I say,
if you leave the toilet seat up and don’t flush,
the message is clear:
You are not thinking of the person who comes after you,
and if you are, you expect them to clean up after you.
That is not loving.

It is only a small pithy example,
but it points to love as a verb –
love embodied in actions more than words.
Even small actions, even a thin vein.

In this sense, love is sacramental:
and outward and visible sign
of an inward and invisible reality.

In the end,
and from the beginning,
all we ever have is the opportunity to love.

We begin life as mostly hairless,
drueling, and utterly dependent.
All we have throughout those months and years
of infancy and beyond, is the opportunity to love
and to receive love.

In the end, as we drift toward death,
we are once again mostly hairless,
drueling, and utterly dependent.
And still, all we have is the opportunity to love
and receive love.

In betweeen, love is the best of what we have:
the opportunity to love
and accept the love that is offered us.

It is easy to conceptualize:
Let us imagine that the stock market crashes –
it is not so hard to imagine, is it?
The banks close – all of them.
ATM machines flash, “System Shut Down.”
There is no money, other than what is in your pocket
or squirreled away under your mattress.
When the money is gone,
your job, if you have one, is not far behind.
Or your pension,
or your social security, or your IRA.

When our job, the work or profession
through which our identity was nurutred;
and our money, the means
by which we purchase safety and security
and everything else big and little;
are gone, what we have left
is the opportunity to love and be loved.
It is so simple and true
that it seems ridiculous to say out loud.

Let’s take it an uncomfortable step closer
to that glass veil of heaven.

Imagine being in bed
during the last days of life.
Our muscles shriven,
unable to walk or even void by ourselves.
It is not a very pleasant thought, I realize,
because such dependency is the worst of all indignities.
And yet, as life fades from our body
like the thickening gray of the evening sky,
here come our family and friends.
Gathered around the bed,
they smile and make small jokes from time to time,
an effort to clear away the pain.

They fight back tears
and their eyes grow more swollen by the hour.

What is left then, at the end of our life?
The very same thing that was present at the beginning
when our eyes first opened
or we learned to walk and fall down again:
the opportunity to love and be loved.

To love God
withour whole life, and to love ourselves
and one another,
with the service of our body,
is not just the greatest thing, it is the only thing.

To love God with our life,
is measured by what we do with our relationships,
and by what we do with our money,
and by what we do with our labor,
and by what we do with the talent we have been given.
All of it reflects our love of God…or not.

To love God with our lives
and to love ourselves and one another,
is to be guided by the knowledge that our choices
are never just about us.

It should give us pause, as a church and religion,
that when Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment,
he did not answer:
To believe in God,
or believe in the Trinity,
or believe Jesus was the son of God,
or believe in any doctrine or creed.

Rather, Jesus said to love God
with our whole being, that is,
body, mind, and spirit.

We are to love our neighbor,
not for what he or she can do for us,
but as ourselves –
as if our neighbor is us.

Jesus said loving God is physical,
and that God loving us is mystical.

I am not saying anything new here.
We all know,
deep in the pit of our stomach,
that this religion of ours is about action –
about doing love, not believing in love;
about doing love, not defining love;
about doing love, not feeling love.

And right here, on this doorstep,
is where I am going to leave the baby today.

If you were to ask me
why I am a Christian, instead of one of the other
religions I studied, explored, and found compelling,
it would come down to this:
We are incarnational.

We know,
and we experience,
and we act out – with ritual and in our lives –
the improbable love of God
that requires only a thin vein,
and a small love
to bridge the distance
or lift the veil between us.

In the world of religious ideas,
the notion that God is embodied –
is present in human flesh,
probably seems nutty and ridiculous.
And I am not talking about Jesus,
I am talking about God embodied
in your flesh
and mine.

That our flesh and blood is good and wonderful,
precisely because we embody God,
is a unique idea.

That the earth and stars and oceans
are filled with gooness
rather than the source of suffering,
is a strange idea to millions of other people.

That food and sex and emotional intimacy,
and the sensual beauty of art and music
are meant for our joy –
and not simply as a lesser reflection
of the joys of heaven,
would seem a peculiar idea to millions of other people.

But that is what we claim.

God is incarnate in human life, we say,
and not our life only,
but animate and inanimate substance,
seen and unseen,
throughout the entire Cosmos –
all of it infused with God.

We claim that and more
when we embrace the love of God with our whole selves,
including our woeful, imperfect
yet fantastic bodies.
We claim that and more
when we embrace the possibility and desireabilty
of loving our neighbor as if loving ourselves.

God’s love
and our love of God
are incarnational: in the body,
our body.

The Creation is an act of God’s love.
The presence of God among us,
even here and even now,
is an act of God’s love.

Likewise, how we spend and share our money;
and how we use and share our resources;
and how we live out our relationships;
and how we act toward others, even those we do not know;
and how we care for others, even those we do not see; and, how we care for the earth, even the air we do not breathe;
all of that is the measure of how we love…or not.

You see, our religion is mystical at its core.
But it is both mystical AND phsyical.
To love God with our whole self
is a mystical experience.
To pop open and suddenly know
that we are less than a sub-atomic particle of God,
and still feel loved sweetly and serenely by that same God,
is a mystical experience.

It can happen when we stand in the presence
of the awesome natural wonders around us,
and it can happen all of a sudden in the heart of worship,
and it can happen when least expected
in the darkness of despair,
or in the silence of prayer,
or at any time or place.

When suddenly we know,

know it in our bones
or in the soft tissue holding our heart,
that God loves us,
it is a mystical experience.
It need not be big and flashy.
Even a small love coursing through a thin vein
is enough to deliver such a mystical moment.

And that is the astounding physicality of our religion:
that the mystical presence of God,
everything bugeoning on the other side of that veil
between us and God,
is made known in our bodies.

And we embody it, make it known,
with our bodies
when we commit small acts of love.

It is astounding; it is
fantastical; it is an
amazing and a speechless
wonder.

Proper 21A: Forgiveness Without Repentence

October 1, 2017 by Cam Miller

“Is God among us or not?”

This screeching lament
from the freshly escaped slaves
encountering the down-side of freedom,
is not to be confused with the opening refrain
of our Eucharistic Prayer from Kenya:
“Is God present? God is here;
Is Christ among us? God is here;
Is the Spirit moving? God is here.”

But honestly, there is not much distance
between proclamation and lament.
Take an acclamation of faith
or declaration of hope, like, “God is here,”
and add a pinch of severe thirst
or extreme discomfort,
or any kind of fearful deprivation,
and the declaration becomes a curse.
The distance from light to darkness,
hope to fear,
satiation to deprivation
is measured in seconds and even nanoseconds,
because that is how fast our situation can change.

Our attitudes toward God are likewise as vulnerable –
that is just who we are.

There is almost no point in apologizing for it
or pretending to repent,
because our attitude can turn on a dime
and even if we aren’t acting surly and hostile now,
we will, or would,
should circumstances become altered.

In all fairness to the people in the Exodus story,
if you have ever been in the desert with limited water,
then you know the panic of thirst.
Ironically, thirst is akin to running out of air under water.
Thirst in the desert
causes the walls of your mouth
to become like dust,
and you become desperate to gulp,
and all you want is to drown your tongue and throat.

“What the heck am I supposed to do with these people?”
Moses grimaces to God, and
it is more of a statement than a question.

To Moses’ people, it is a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately
kind of story.

I knew a guy who owned an international business,
a high-end, boutique kind of manufacturing enterprise
that was recognized as the best of its kind around the world.
Still, the competition was fierce.

Business being business,
his customers were driven by their bottom line,
and it mattered little that he had filled their need last year.
The question was always what he would do this year,
and for how much?
It was a one-way relationship
in the sense that he was always catering to their needs
and never the other way around.

So in the Exodus story,
when the people are thirsty,
it is of little consequence to them
that God has just performed panoramic miracles
that totally altered the face of the geopolitical landscape.
Even though God literally picked up thousands of slaves
as a lioness carries her cubs by the scruff of the neck,
to those thirsty people it was: “what have you done for me lately?”

I mean, really, who has ever done enough for you?

We are voracious,
and we are made that way.
If we eat too much, our stomach stretches outward
and the next time we’re hungry
we’ll want even more than before.

That story from Exodus is as much about us
as it was about those thirsty dust bunnies in the Bible.
It never ceases to amaze me,
that a three-thousand-year-old story
can deliver a crystal clear snapshot
of our own human character,
that has finally brought us global climate change
and a toxic environment.
We are “never enough” kind of creatures,
and on top of it, “never good enough” people;
and apparently it has always been that way.

As that delicious Paula Gunn Allen reading says about stories,
Biblical narratives tell us who we are,
where we came from,
and occasionally, how we got to be this way.
Of course, in our materially-driven,
science-only,
twenty-first century mindset,
those stories get dismissed as fairy tales
while stories from Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky
are allowed to retain truth.

But I digress, sort of.

What has authority to speak truth
pops up in the gospel story too –
yet another narrative that offers us a mirror.

The religious authorities in Matthew’s story,
know who and what their authority comes from
and they quiz Jesus about his authority.

The religious authorities operated on coercive power,
as presidents, and generals, and
CEOs do in our world.
Coercive power was and is,
the ability to force people to act a certain way,
or manipulate, move, and
restrict certain resources
as deemed appropriate.

The religious authorities in Jesus’ day
were granted authority by birthright –
being born into one of the reigning priestly families.

By birth they were given the resources and responsibility
to operate the Temple,
which was considered to be the one and only place
from which the power of God was exercised.

Today we would call that a monopoly.

As the story goes, the religious authorities
test Jesus with a question.
It is actually not a real question,
because by asking it, their intention is to belittle Jesus.
They know how much authority they have
and in comparison, anything Jesus tries to say,
will seem anemic.
“So little man, what’s your authority?”

But Jesus is smarter than to simply answer tit for tat.
When you are smaller and weaker than the bullies,
you have to get fast and agile, and sneaky.
You see, John the Baptist
was far more popular than Jesus,
and the person-on-the-street
believed John the Baptist had been a messenger from God –
a prophet.

In short, John had the authority of God
while the religious authorities only had coercion.
That is why King Herod had John beheaded,
because the authority of God was too powerful
and threatened the King’s power.

So, if the Temple priests diminished John’s authority
they would have less credibility and therefore less authority,
in the eyes of the people.
If they confirmed John as a prophet,
then they would have the wrath of King Herod
down upon themselves.
Oops.

So Jesus won’t answer their question
but he will tell them a story.
There it is again – the power of story.

So the point of Jesus’ story is a hot poker for us too.
As I have said before, the religion of Jesus’ day
was all about purity.
Even John the Baptist was all about purity,
he just challenged the Temple priesthood’s monopoly
on the ability to forgive and heal violations of purity.

The religion of Jesus’ day orbited around the question
of how to remain pure
when the slightest violation of purity rules
made one unclean.
To be clean was the moral and religious task at hand,
and was enormously important.

If you were not clean,
and if you did not do anything to purify yourself,
then you could not remain in association
with those who were righteous.
And remember, the covenant with God
was communal not individualistic.
Individualism had not appeared
on any scene in human history yet,
and the idea of personal salvation would not show up
for another thousand years or so.

So an individual needed to remain in communion
with the community of faith.

But eat the wrong food,
or eat the right food at the wrong time,
or eat the right food with the wrong person,
or any combination of the above,
and you became unclean.

But purity and impurity
were scrupulously delineated by more than consumption.
Touch, ever so slightly,
a woman while she was on her menstrual cycle,
and you became unclean.
Touch a dead body, and you became unclean.
Enter the house of a gentile, or any unclean person,
and you became unclean.
Have a blemish on your skin – even a simple zit –
and you were unclean.
Touch someone who was considered diseased,
and you were unclean.

And the size or degree of your violation
did not really matter –
impurity was impurity regardless of degree.
The nature of rehabilitation and recovery
varied by the degree of violation,
but not the requirement to get treated
before being allowed to return to communion
with the religious community.

There was nobody more unclean in Jesus’ day
than tax collectors and prostitutes.
Matthew uses them as a metaphor for the worst of the worst.
Both tax collectors and prostitutes
worked with Gentiles –
they were collaborators with the Roman oppressors
and to do so, they had to violate the rules of separation
from Gentiles.

Tax collector did not refer to the big money guys
who owned and operated the structures of taxation.
It referred to the middle men,
the agents of the big money guys.
They were the people hired to collect the taxes
and they were commissioned with whatever they could gouge
from the people they collected taxes from.

In other words,
if someone owed a 2% tax on their flock of sheep,
the standard rate by the way,

then the tax collector might charge them 4%.
They were racketeers and extortionists,
the bagmen for the taxing authority.

So tax collectors were considered extremely unclean
and morally diseased.

Prostitutes, besides engaging in sexual activity
that was expressly forbidden,
did so with Gentiles – who were likely their primary customers.

Roman soldiers and civil servants
were the principle people with money
and so they were the target market of prostitutes.

Tax collectors and prostitutes were considered, ‘as Gentiles.’
They were permanently stained
by their despicable service
to the Romans and other unclean populations.

So, the idea of eating with tax collectors and prostitutes,
not to mention a wide variety of lesser
but still obvious violators of purity laws,
was an interesting one-upmanship on John the Baptist.

You see, John had subverted the Temple monopoly
by using baptism to cleanse people of their impurities.
Instead of depending upon the Temple,
with its expensive means of reconciliation –
requiring as it did the purchase of sacrificial animals
or payment to the clergy –
John offered baptism that cost nothing
in terms of money and time.
It was a brilliant sabotage of Temple authority.

But Jesus went a step further.
By hosting an open table
to which all manner of people were invited,
tax collectors and prostitutes included,
he seemed to be saying that people were forgiven
even before they asked for it.

Jesus offered acceptance and community to the unclean
even before they acknowledged their guilt.

The festivities to which Jesus invited the unclean,
or in which he participated as a guest,
were not dour, begrudging, dinners with relatives.
They were parties.
They were feasts.
They were festive celebrations.
Unclean, toxic people yucking it up with Jesus –
that is what it would have looked like
to those watching from the outside.

So we have these stories
that hold a mirror up, and
in which we can see ourselves more clearly.
Old stories, smudged by time
and discredited by our twenty-first century,
one-dimensional thinking, as Marcus Borg says it.

They remind us of our propensity to judge God and
the goodness of the world around us,
by the current state of our own comfort and satiation.
In other words, we evaluate good and bad
on the basis of extreme self-interest.
And these stories also push us to see God,
not as the source and means of meeting our needs
and insuring our self-interest,
but rather, as a lover of souls with an open embrace,
one who invites us to do likewise.

So we can put up barriers and restrict access
to people from other parts of the world;
and we can insulate ourselves by class, ethnicity, and race;
but we cannot do those things
and still claim to be faithful followers of Jesus,
or that we are upholding the spiritual practice
he commended to us.

Stories tell us who we are,
where we came from, and
how we got to be this way.
That is the power of story.

And biblical stories, perhaps even especially
the Jesus stories,
remind us who we are
and whose we are;
and they also show us
when we have strayed far away
from the truth and love we claim.

Proper 15 2017: Learning From A Perfectly Human and Imperfect Jesus

August 20, 2017 by Cam Miller

Link to text for preaching (Gospel of Matthew): http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=155

This sermon, like the story in Matthew that we heard,
is bound to challenge an assumption or two
and make some, if not all of us, uncomfortable…
maybe even angry.
You can let me know.

You and I are sealed in an invisible,
tamper-resistant chrysalis
enveloping us as a second skin.
Most of the time we don’t even know it.

We get out of bed,
shower and dress,
eat a bowl of gruel
or feast on a sumptuous breakfast,
and all the time we are surrounded
by this soft, pliable membrane
so strong it protects us
from innumerable injuries
and incalculable harm.

This invisible substance
is a synthetic weave of
thousands and thousands and thousands
of ordinary assumptions.

Many of the assumption we wear were inherited,
given by others who feathered our nest with them.
Some of the assumptions were given to us
by contemporaries, and some
garnered from our own personal experience.

Let me throw out a few easy examples.
A bank is a safe place to keep money.
A gray sky means rain.
Certain kinds of people should be avoided.
Kale is good for you but tastes terrible.

Our assumptions may or may not be true
but we act as if they are.
They often form the lines of the coloring book
we live within, or try to anyway.
We make thousands of assumptions every day
without even thinking about it –
we have to in order to get by.

Some people navigate their entire lives
by the assumption that people are out to get them.
Other people assume everyone deserves
the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise.

The fact is, neither assumption is factual;
neither one universally true or false.

Some assumptions are stronger
or more elastic than others,
while some are more dominant
even than our own experience.

For example, there is an age-old,
Christian theological assumption that God is perfect,
and divine perfection means
God is unchanged and unchanging.
But stack that up against our scientific
and flesh and blood experience of Life:
Every thread of knowledge we have
about the Creation,
is that everything changes.
We know, in fact,
that life is evolving,
forever adapting,
and even mutating.
So, if the very nature of the Cosmos
to which God gave birth,
is change,
then the assumption that God is unchanging
seems odd.

An unchanging, unchangeable God
would defy our experience.
But still, it is a pernicious assumption
to which popular Christianity clings to,
as if someone flailing overboard with a lifebuoy.

That is how powerful assumptions work.

The story in Matthew’s Gospel is a wonderful example
of just how blinding our assumptions can be.
You see, for nineteen centuries
the common read on this story
was as an example of how benevolent Jesus was.
“SEE!” the previous preaching narrative went,
“Jesus even lowered himself to address the needs
of a common Canaanite woman.”

This story we heard today,
was lumped in with all those stories about Jesus touching lepers,
and engaging in risky behavior
in order to befriend or advocate for poor,
marginalized people.
In short, they were hero stories
that marked Jesus as the best of the best.

But something doesn’t add up
between the traditional interpretation of this
Matthew story, and the story itself.

It begins with Jesus ignoring the woman.
But that is not all.
His bigotry toward her is pretty obvious.
He as much as calls her a dog –
in fact, he does call her a dog.

Christian tradition ignored this obvious
and dark side of the story
because of an assumption:
that Jesus was perfect after all.

Jesus would not be so mean, it was reckoned,
but also, changing his mind mid-story
would suggest he had been wrong in the first place.
Our assumptions about Jesus
prevented us from embracing the story
as it was being told to us by Matthew.
The traditional interpretation was
that Jesus condescended
to meet the woman’s need,
and so it was an example of him humbling himself
because of his profound compassion.

But for the past fifteen years or so,
I have heard a new narrative about this story,
one that is not limited
by more traditional assumptions.
The new interpretation is based upon the assumption
of Jesus’ humanity instead of his perfection.
If Jesus was fully human,
as we have said in mainstream Christianity,
then he was also subject to human brokenness.

So if we presume that Jesus was truly human,
it means of course, he was imperfect.

Once we recognize his humanity,
we can read this story
in a way that makes more sense.
Here is an interpretation
that assumes Jesus was fully human.

A mother, desperate to save her child, accosts Jesus.
Now consider what we know
about the plight of peasants in those days.
There was no social safety net.
No medicine;
and without the do-re-mi,
not even access to spiritual healers.
It was a social caste system
that left poor women utterly powerless.

It was a society that placed children
on the absolute bottom rung of the ladder
where their value was measured
by their potential for labor,
and if a female child, for her marriageability.
As a matter of fact, a poor female child
possessed by a demon –
or with mental illness if you prefer –
was truly a life without value or worth.
She would have been completely vulnerable
to all forms of human cruelty.

The mother must have been beside herself;
woeful in her fear about what would happen
to the daughter she loved.

Most such mothers
would chase down any and all options.
So despite the social and ethnic wedge between them,
she goes after Jesus.
Clearly, she had already learned not to be too polite –
that would get her nowhere in the first century.
So she charges toward the crowd of men
and shouts.

That’s important: she shouts.
She yells at Jesus
to stop and have mercy.

I like the image here
of Jesus as a deer in the headlights.
He is accosted by a strange woman demanding mercy.

We should remember too,
that mercy was a special feature of his stump speech.
So, just to fix the scene in our imagination,
a yucky-poo woman begs Jesus for mercy
and the first thing Jesus does, is ignore her.
How human.

Ignore it and hope it goes away.
Haven’t we all done that before?

But his disciples did not allow Jesus
to follow an avoidance strategy.
Instead, they begged Jesus, and I quote,
‘get rid of her.’
“Uh, um, I’m not here to help Canaanites, lady.”
Jesus says, motioning her to move on.
“I was sent to help the lost sheep
among my fellow Galileans and Judeans.”

Again, let us remember
what Jesus has said just prior to this event,
at least in Matthew’s version of the story:
“…What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions…”

Something dark has just slipped from Jesus’ heart.

In fact, he pretty much contradicted with actions,
everything he had just preached with his words
only a little bit before.
Hypocrisy is pretty human too.
All of us have violated our own values,
and veered far off the walk of our talk.

But the question for Jesus –
and for us – is what will we do about it?

Now in the more traditional interpretation of this story,
the one that assumes Jesus was perfect,
this bit of nastiness
is regarded as a “test” of the mothers’ faith.
Of course it is – blame the victim.
Jesus was just testing her
(he didn’t really mean it).

But if instead, we assume Jesus was human,
in the same way that you and I are human,
we begin to realize he was subject
to the bigotry and prejudices of his own day,
just as we are to ours.

So instead of testing her,
the story reads more like a test of Jesus, that he fails:
“Go away lady, you are not my concern.”

But wait.
Give Jesus a break.
There are good reasons for Jesus to ignore her
and to want some immediate distance between them.

Judeans and Galileans
saw Canaanites as morally unclean,
socially despicable,
and ritually filthy.
Keeping a distance from such low-life
was integral to the practice of good faith.
For Jesus, social distance and bigotry,
in this case, was “good faith.”

Plus, she is an unattended woman
and so Jesus had plenty of reasons not to get close.
Social and religious policy dictated that men
not enter into conversation or deal with in any way,
an unrelated woman –
especially one that was not with a man.

Jesus just wants her to go away.

He does not want to help her.
He may even have been disgusted by her.
His compassion was not aroused, nor his mercy.
He was likely repulsed instead, and closed off.
And on top of all that,
everything in the culture justified and reinforced
his rejection of her.

That is the reasonable interpretation of this story
if we do not begin with the assumption
Jesus was perfect.

Now allow me to hit the pause button on this story,
and briefly take a peek into our story today.
(I did not pick this reading from Matthew by the way,
even though it could not be more apt
for this week of horrendous discourse
over the pro-white supremacy rally in Virginia).

I am not going to preach at Donald Trump.
Clearly nothing I could say will reach him
so it is pointless for me to subject you to that.

Nor are there any Confederate War hero statues
in Geneva, at least that I know of,
so some Northern know-it-all preacher
squawking about something going on elsewhere
is not our issue today either.

But for those of us here today who are white,
we do have a renewed opportunity
to reckon with ourselves
and one another –
and I do want to take that opportunity.

We have the opportunity to curl our fingers back
from pointing at anyone else;
and to stifle our criticism of any other
group, class, or race of people,
and look solely into our own prejudices,
and take stock of our own privilege,
and how our prejudices
and our privilege
have been used, by us and by others,
to marginalize people.

We have a renewed opportunity,
right now,
to once again recognize
that God created us as inter-dependent creatures
that need and require us to be in relationship
with one another for wellness.

We have a renewed opportunity,
right now,
to recognize that race is a social construct,
an erroneous assumption
that European and North American Caucasians
have used for several centuries
in order to justify our colonialist foreign policies;
and we have used race
to establish so-called social sciences
that elevate people with our skin tone
and ethnic background over others;
and in ways we haven’t even recognized yet,
we have used race to marginalize people.

We have a renewed opportunity
right now,
to dismiss the wasteful emotional ballast we call guilt,
about those things done and left undone
by previous generations,
and dig into our own current moment in history:
and look at ourselves,
at our own speech,
and at our own behavior,
and then make changes.

We have a renewed opportunity
right now,
to look at ourselves and talk about our prejudices
and our privilege,
and how we can walk into the future
with better behavior.

Jesus faced this same choice,
the same opportunity for renewal
as we have right now.
Let me end this sermon by observing what he did
and then maybe we can take our cue from Jesus.

For nineteen centuries,
in spite of our own experience that tells us
we all are all bigoted in some way,
and that we all carry with us prejudices of some kind,
the assumption of Jesus’ perfection
would not allow us to see and hear
what is actually happening in this story from Matthew.

We know darn well that our bigotry
and our prejudices
block mercy and cloud any impulse
toward compassion.
That is our experience…over and over and over again.
If we begin from that assumption
then this story takes a different turn.

It is a measure of the mother’s desperation
that she responded as she did:
“But Jesus, even the dogs
get to lick up crumbs
under the master’s table.”
Imagine the pride she had to swallow.
Imagine the anger and resentment
she had to manage
at the very moment she needed this man the most.

She did not believe she was a dog,
and certainly not her daughter.
Canaanites did not view Jews as their superiors
any more than modern day Palestinians do.
But she was desperate.

How many people and places
had she already tried
and yet her daughter still lived at the edge of survival?

It is her willingness
to subject herself to degradation
that finally pierces Jesus’ bigotry.

The woman’s fierce love and devotion
has revealed something to Jesus
that he did not want to see in himself.
Jesus knows in his bones,
that there are no dogs
when it comes to the love of God.
Jesus knew above all else
that God is compassionate and merciful
and that therefore,
his spiritual task
was to be compassionate and merciful also.

The woman held up a mirror of sorts
and in it, Jesus could see and hear
his own moral failure.

We all have a moment like that, don’t we?
Don’t we have a little hidden box of horror moments
when our own prejudice and bigotry,
or lack of compassion and mercy,
have been revealed – even if only to ourselves?
Isn’t it powerful to see Jesus
with such a moment?
Even Jesus?

Pick a prejudice, any prejudice.
Rich
poor
black
white
w.a.s.p.
Hispanic
Chinese
Muslim
Roman Catholic
Fundamentalist Christian
male
female
homosexual
heterosexual
transsexual
Iraqi
Israeli
Republican
Democrat…

If it is a prejudice, a bigotry,
then it dilutes our compassion
and tarnishes our sense of mercy.

That is the implication of this story from Matthew.
If we delete our assumption that Jesus was perfect,
and come to this story with eyes wide open,
then this story makes a lot more sense.

Opening our eyes
to our assumptions and prejudices
is a core spiritual task for any Christian.
Our assumptions usually close our eyes
and keep us from looking
for what we have not yet seen.

Opening our eyes
is a natural consequence
of removing assumptions
and the filmy cataracts coating our vision.

Not all of our assumptions are wrong,
and many of them protect and defend us
in ways we cannot even fathom,
but all assumptions are worth visiting,
and all assumptions can be examined for the impact
they have on our compassion and mercy.

Opening our eyes
means inspecting our assumptions
and reviewing their influence upon us.

Opening our eyes
in such a way that it frees our compassion and mercy
to encompass more and more people,
is a core spiritual task for every one of us.

1 Christmas 2017: Straddling the In-Between

Proper 29A, 2017: A chance to clothe the naked

Proper 25A 2017: A Non-random Act of Kindness – Lower the Toilet Seat

Proper 21A: Forgiveness Without Repentence

Proper 15 2017: Learning From A Perfectly Human and Imperfect Jesus

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