20 April 2008….John 12:1-18

 

How else could she thank him?

How else could she let him know that she understood?

How else could she love him?

With him she knew a silence, a peace, a wholeness she had never known before.

 

She had reasoned that it was necessary for Jesus to be physically in the presence of the person needing to be made whole.  All that she had heard of his miracles seemed to indicate he had always been present.  She knew that he could heal.  It did not occur to her that he could revive the dead.  After all, Jesus was in the same space-time continuum as she.  She confronted him.  “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.”  He had been dead now four days.

 

Then she watched him raise her brother from the dead.

A simple command…”Lazarus come forth.”

There had been no invocation of God.  He had not said, “In the name of God, Lazarus come forth.”

A simple command, “Lazarus come forth.”

 

“And he who had died came out, bound hand and foot with grave clothes.”

 

Jesus said, “Loose him and let him go.”

 

Mary awakened to the divine authority before her. Truly Jesus was one with God.  He was a universal power…The power of Christ was infinite.  Not controlled by time and space.  A power without limit, the sacredness of the Godhead.

She knew too that he was also human.  Jesus had loved Lazarus, he had wept over his dead body.  Reason merged with feeling.  Mary was eminently sane.

 

And now Jesus was to die, and soon…a victim of his own power, of his own deity. 

 

How could she thank him?

How could she love him?

How could she acknowledge that she knew…that she had awakened to his divinity?

 

She took a pound of very costly oil and anointed the feet of Jesus…then wiped his feet with her hair.

 

When chastised by Judas, Jesus defended Mary…”Leave her alone; she has kept this for the day of my burial.”

 

How else could she thank him?

How else could she love him?

How else could she say, Beloved, God?

 

But to give him in life, that which she had saved for his death.

 

Mary had awakened.  She surrendered to this incredible knowing, to this epiphany, to this feeling of love, eternity, and eternal life.

 

Judas Iscariot asked, “Why was this fragrant oil not sold for three hundred denari and given to the poor?”

 

A reasonable question…and even a legitimate one, had Judas not been known for his greed…had not been in charge of the money box and was known to have helped himself to it.  A reasonable question, had he really cared for the poor.  Reason tainted with

greed…with the need to control.    Reason, not used to enhance love, to at least get you to the doors of mystery…some entry to the Godhead.  Not for Judas…reason used to placate fear…to cause dissension.  Reason used to avoid the chaos of feeling…reason used as salve for the ego…to wash one’s own feet. 

In today’s gospel we are introduced to the forever ancient conflict between reason and feeling.  To have one without the other is insanity.  To live in this perceptual world reason and feeling must be in balance.  The pursuit of reason alone has led the human race into some of the most despicable political regimes man has created…Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin….the list is as long as history.

 

Reason does not, cannot control epiphanies…does not control joy…is not the igniter of love.

 

To live in the world of Christ, reason must finally lose its tenacious hold…it must be replaced by compassion, by love.

 

A week before the death of Christ…the two forces which seem to dominate our human existence appear together in an important event in which Jesus endorses the feeling side of our nature.

 

The heart has its reasons which reason cannot know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

13 April 2008

 

Morality play, epic, saga, parable, allegory, metaphor…

Whatever form a myth takes finds its antecedents in human experience. 

 

No matter how distant…or obscured by its own being…its own existence…a myth will continue to insist that it be understood in all its meaning. 

 

A myth is generally so in our face…and has been for so long…

That we accept the edges of its story as the parameters of its meaning.

 

We have heard the story…we are engaged by its surface…we look no deeper.

 

We take what we accept to be its truth as our truth and interpret our experience…our perceived reality…through it…the myth adds credence to our lives…

 

Myths create psychic grids in which we live…grids which measure our lives…myths which exist only in our world of words.

 

Let us look at Genesis.  No…let us first look at the Dali Lama…who is a student of science…and that which he finds contradicts his Buddhist teaching…what does he do…does he create a myth to include both the Buddhist teaching and the science?  No…he changes the teaching.

 

We have not had that honesty...that spiritual honesty…in our Western culture.  There exist today, Flat Earth Societies.  Rather than recognizing the fact that the Earth is billions of years old, scholars, of one bias or another, will stretch and pummel and punch and torture both the science and the myth so that they seem to fit, no matter how awkwardly.  Tthat reminds me of one of Bill Clintons question…”How do you define is?”   or was it “What do you mean by “is?”

 

But I am not concerned with geographic, interplanetary history as it appears in Genesis…what concerns me, what interests me, is the human element…the Adam and Eve element.

 

Being booted from Paradise is in everyone’s experience.  Whether it is having been torn from God, having been pained through a mother’s womb…we were no longer in paradise.  And life became a series of disengagements, a series of multiple becomings.

 

We had been god-like. Without pain. Without death.  There was only one no-no which constrained us.  We were god-like but within us was the deep knowledge of the sacred, of having been part of God…and the yearning to return to that state, that paradise.

 

Not content to be anything less than God…humans tried to control their own destiny…fell from Grace…were reduced, drastically reduced in stature. 

“…Whoever of you desires to be the first, shall be the slave of all.”

 

The desire to be equal to God…came between God’s creation and God…became sin which became death.

 

And there was no hope.  There was no magic solution…there was no miraculous clicking of red shoes, no chaste kiss from a noble prince to awaken one’s soul…no fairy godmother to create coaches from pumpkins…and glass slippers which would eventually help the gallant, heroic, handsome prince to find you and make you his queen…there was no shining armor, no white horses, no real hope.

 

But there were things..And long before Frank Sinatra…there were folks who thought that he who had the most toys was the winner.

To get those toys…to stave off fear…the fear of death…they needed rules, power, control…they wouldn’t be able to put off

                                           

death, but they made the waiting for it easier…more fun…hey, let’s at least play that we are God.  Let us play with power, ordering lesser mortals about…let us make believe that we are immortal…

 

Then born into this world, this world of so much loneliness, for without love there is loneliness, came this unique being who spoke of a love which united all creation…a love which transcended human love and that was the love for God…and therefore love for God’s creation.  And the death of this Jesus freed man from the fear of death…and making possible a more “complete communion between man and God.”

 

But by this time so ingrained was man’s fear of the law that few of them recognized their new freedom.  Throughout history the majority of humans had been beaten, tortured, or starved into submission.  The teachings of Jesus, that we should love one another, were ignored if they should contradict a law.  The world of my way, or no way, was the rule, not the exception.  In our not too distant history we had the specter of Joe McCarthy screaming, in so many ways, “I am the boss, I am the boss.”

 

“And whoever of you desires to be first, shall be the slave of all.”

Here, among the select of Jesus’ followers…power play, favoritism, one upmanship…was no stranger.  “May we sit on your right hand and left hand in your glory?”

 

Why should we be surprised by the hypocrisy, the abuse, the extortion, the fraud…all committed under the shield of Christian Love…by those who sell themselves as the ministers of Christ…who tell others to live by the teachings of Jesus…but plot and contrive for bigger and better riches for themselves. 

There seems to be no end to the number of toys one needs.

 

What about ourselves?  What has happened to the Samaritan fund we once had, but no longer do…what has happened to the idea that as we age and have completed the raising of family, we take only a pound of salt, a cask of water and a bible and wander until we find an empty house, a sojourners cottage, on the outskirts of a town or village, and move in…offering our care and concern, our knowledge, our understanding and our love to those who are in need.  This was a once viable Russian practice, one which our paternal founder, Bishop John Adair, greatly admired.  Which was a model for our retreat cabins…asking a donation for those who could give but understanding those who couldn’t.  Our current donation “asking” price…is more expensive than motel six. 

 

The Wall Street Journal is the new bible.

Murdoch, etal are the new heroes…the new supermen…the new men in shining armor…

 

In a world, whose starving numbers are increasing daily, whose greedy wars for the control of resources…and for delusional egos…are escalating…where men whose conflicting needs to be the boss are igniting genocide…where are we?

 

Can’t we do better than reflect the rest of the world?

 

‘FOR EVEN THE SON OF MAN DID NOT COME TO BE SERVED, BUT TO SERVE AND TO GIVE HIS LIFE A RANSOM FOR MANY’

 

The only “boss” which should live among us

The only power we should love and worship and obey is that of

FATHER, SON AND HOLY SPIRIT

 

 

And that must be lived…not mouthed…we are the instruments of God’s love…where is Jesus in our lives?

 

23 March 2008…Western Easter

Mark 2:1-12

 

 

Faith…the collecting the mind within the heart.

Faith…the basis for all relationship.

Faith…the DNA of friendship.

Faith…the necessity for healing…for both the one to be healed and the healer.

Faith…the quantum leap beyond trust.

Faith… yields, without changing.

Faith…is flexible without changing.

 

It was faith in Jesus and in their friend which propelled the four men to do an end run around the crowd

To shred the roof so they could lower their paralytic friend into the room in which Jesus was speaking the word.

 

When Jesus saw their faith, their love for their ill friend he turned to the paralytic and said “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

 

Faith…the essential component in all the healings Jesus did.

 

Faith, a knowing beyond doubt…the keystone of the architecture of the heart and mind.

 

the other day I picked up a little pamphlet of sayings while I was having coffee at the Sandstone…the one and only coffee shop in Perkins…and read the following…author ANON…

 

“It is in the shelter of each other that people live.”

 

We cannot exist without each other…perhaps we do not exist without each other…

 

Faith and love are the necessary ingredients for happy and joy filled relationships…and absolute must for the depth of relationships we all crave…

 

The Lord your God is with you…he will quiet you with his love.

Zephaniah 3.

 

He will quiet you with his love.

With his love…not man formulated dogma…and this major issue is another one which Jesus addresses in today’s good news.

 

BLASPHEMY…scream the scribes…but Jesus teaches us from the beginning of his ministry, that it is God to whom our primary interest and attention belong.  It is God who moves in us, not the law.  We create meaning for ourselves because of our fear of chaos, rather than because of our love of God.  It was this fear the Jews must have experienced during the Babylonian captivity, the fear that their existential, 24-hour a day working God, had deserted them and left them with nothing but the law to remind them of Yahweh.  When you no longer feel God moving in you it must be pretty frightening…and to cling to the law, a poor substitute, they must have felt to be better than no God at all.  As the law gradually filled the center, where God had once been enshrined, they and we began creating absolutes from that which had been used to describe the absolute ONE.  And as that absolute created out of the fear of nothing as a substitute for everything, becomes enshrined in us we discover that it has no power to move of itself…it does not move inside us as God does…as the Spirit moved Friday night.

 

 

The belief was that if dogma and ritual and law was to have a life of its own, it must be enforced.  Need I recount the horrors.

 

The teachings of Jesus cry out against this foolishness.  Laws were created as guidelines not absolutes.  They are not to become absolutes in themselves.  There is only one absolute…God eternal…and it is from God, the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit that we must create meaning…not from our need for God.

 

Certainly Jesus teaches us that we must not accept the past as a viable, living template of the now or of the future.  Why is it that we accept the decisions of councils of men who met in the fourth-century, C.E. as valid today?  We do not do it in science or the arts of medicine or space…

 

Why is it that with religion we assume the past and not the present to be valid?

 

Why do we allow the most important thing in our live’s, the fundament of our existence, our perception and experience of God, to be dictated by vested interest groups from the past.

 

I recognize that this is an intensely loaded question, but one with which each of must be concerned, and must answer.