Rising from the Dead 4: Easter spreads its Pentecost wings

 4. Easter Spreads Its Pentecost Wings


This is the day that people, mostly men, have made.

It is a day full of violence and images of violence. Beheadings and suggestions of beheadings. Lynching and dreams of lynching. Murder and threats of murder. War and rumors of war.

It is a day when strangers are presumed to be enemies, a day when those who look, speak, or dress differently from us are presumed to have it in for us. It is a day of mistrust and quarantine, deportation and isolation. It is a day of fear, and scarcity, and hoarding, class war and intellectual snobbery.


This is the day that we have made. Let us feel the oppressive weight of it, rue the energy we've spent demonizing our enemies, believing the lies of scarcity and death. We'd been warned. We know better.

There is another day, the day we've been living for the last fifty days in another reality, when we give our time to it, if we'd let it break out of its Sunday horizon. It is the day God has made, and it is beautiful to see.

Narrative and Counter-narrative. The world has always belonged to the death-dealers, the lynchers, beheaders, the masters of exile and forced labor. And there has always been another story, rising up from that dark narrative like light seeps through a crack in a wall. It is a new narrative of shared plenty, of freedom and equality, of rest and abundance for all. The story takes place in this world, transformed by justice. The forces of the quick fix, of might-makes-right, of manifest destiny have always tried to assimilate this counter-narrative, to marry it to the property of the rulers. But it will not be held captive for long. "There is no imprisoning the word of the Lord." Its story makes fools of its captors and shows them for the duplicity and opportunism of their revisionism.

In the days following the murder-by-capital-punishment of Jesus of Nazareth, there was confusion and fear among his inner circle. But as dark and final as the narrative had turned, the counter-narrative was as sudden and bright as creation, a "big bang" that threw unimagined light in every direction. The tomb of Jesus was found to be empty, and the frightened folk who had been his companions suddenly found voices and power to say something extraordinary, without fear of reprisal: Jesus, whom they had seen die, was alive. Their experience, during the reorientation to the new light of Easter that was the empty tomb, the experiences of Mary, Peter and John, Thomas, Clopas and his companion, and finally the other disciples, was that the divine mission undertaken by Jesus in their lives had been passed on to them, ordinary Jews, to spread to the world.

This couldn't have happened overnight, and might not have happened at all except for the extraordinary change wrought in a fiery Pharisee evangelist named Saul by a vision of the risen Christ. His narrative, too, was overturned, reinterpreted, and given back to him, so that the Law and the prophets meant something utterly new, not to be enforced and defended by threats and violence, but by persuasion and table talk. Even more important, the deep sense of mutual belonging to God that had formerly been a covenant only with the children of Abraham came to be understood by him to be offered in a new way, through Christ, to the whole world. In a similar, more gradual way, the same insight seems to have sunk in with Simon Peter after some interactions with a Roman official and his family. The preaching of the twelve, at least as recorded in Acts half a century later, reveals continued meditation on Jewish scriptures but with a new narrative in mind that slowly begins to include everybody in the parental love of God through adoption in Jesus Christ through the working of God's love in the Holy Spirit.

We who have been part of the Easter liturgy over the last 50 days have heard this story retold over the din of counter narrative being noisily and angrily, violently, mortally preached by ISIS, Donald Trump, Putin, Duterte, and their spokespersons and minions. While the voices of death and isolationism and domination preached their dysangelion, we have heard how a handful of inexperienced fishermen and artisans voyaged around the known world, often reviled and ridiculed, subject to shipwreck, shunning, hunger, threatened with prison, stoning, and exposure to Roman arrest and revenge, took a message not of threat or exceptionalism but of welcome and the all-encompassing love of God to the world.

What kind of fire? What kind of fire would turn these men and women of no particular influence, means, or talent into a peaceful force that called such diverse people to unity in the crucified Jesus and their own transformed Jewish story of a world created by God for freedom and equality?

After fifty days, after ninety days, after two millennia, what kind of fire would convince us to ignore the narrative that says "there's only enough for us," "only our way for the world," "enterprise before the earth," "violence will be met with deadlier, unremitting violence," and "one race above all others"?

Christ still announces his simple message: Turn around. Stop listening to those angry, lost voices. Believe in love because it is the life of God. Follow me. Love your enemies. Call God "our Father," everybody in the family. If you have two, give one away. Lead by serving others. Treat everyone the way you'd want to be treated.

How's the other way working out for you? Happy with the way things are? Jesus says, Turn around. They're lying to you. You're going the wrong way.

I don't know what it means "to rise from the dead." I have no grasp of what resurrection life is. But I see something worth following here because it changed people from being afraid of death to embracing it when it became unavoidable because they were certain from their experience that it was not the end, that something full of life, something greater than life, was coming, and coming in this world, because it was here that they experienced the resurrection. It is for everyone. No one is excluded, no one gets less than everything. No one has to fight, argue, or kill to get it. It's gift. No one offers anything better. So I choose to believe in "Follow me."

Follow me into the fire that is Life. I'll go first.

Summary: Rising from the dead means finally breaking out of the cocoon that is the safe and familiar: family, community, faith, nation, into God's wide universe of the whole human family, the earth. We've been raised in a world that has given us too small an identity and crippling allegiances with no future. The gospel and the resurrection offer abundant life, for everyone, in this world, and more. "Only God could make this day. It is beautiful to see." (Psalm 118:23) "Lord, send out your spirit and renew the face of the earth." (Psalm 104:30)

Rising from the Dead 3: The Emmaus Tapes

3. The Emmaus Tapes 

"Emmaus," by Filipino artist Emanuel Garibay (2000).

My spirit loves that there is a special gospel for Easter when mass is said in the late afternoon or evening, and the gospel for those masses is the story of the road to Emmaus. Even in Year A, however, the narrative makes its way into regular Sunday hearing on the third Sunday of Easter, with the second Sunday always reserved for John "Pentecost" on the third day, and the "eighth day" story of Thomas.

As if there weren't enough to endear me to the story of Emmaus, which, in the day, we so often used for a missioning service for folks who came to our initiation workshops for the North American Forum on the Catechumemate, the wonderful James Alison yokes the Emmaus story with its eucharistic allusion with the opening verses of the Letter to the Hebrews as he begins his "introduction to Christianity for adults" in book and video, entitled Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice. In Alison's hands, what was incomprehensible in the Letter to the Hebrews becomes more inviting, and the story of Emmaus becomes more compelling than ever, a parable of wrenching conversion that turns chaos into a passion for life ("fire burning within us") and a change of direction that helped to birth the church out of the devastation wrought among the disciples of Jesus by his crucifixion.

A brief introduction to Alison's thoughts on the 

"forgiving victim" of Emmaus.

I could not do justice to Alison's exegesis on the Emmaus story here, but do want to remark before proceeding that he helps us to hear, through the Greek in the text, the extent of the roiling doubt and confusion left in the community in the wake of Jesus's execution. (One of my favorites, by way of example, is his pointing out of the verb antiballete in Greek, often translated as "discussing," might be heard differently:)

So, this third person draws up, unrecognized, and says to them: “What is this conversation which you are holding with each other (οὓς ἀντιβάλλετε πρὸς ἀλλήλους) as you walk?” Well, lest you think that this third party has lighted upon a quiet afternoon chat between two English vicars, who are strolling gently along by a river bank and saying things like “Awfully interesting things seem to have happened to Jesus.” “Yes, really, quite fascinating. Wonder what they’ll make of this in Tübingen!”, I’ve included the Greek word antiballete, from which we get our word “antiballistic”, and it means to toss back and forth in a somewhat violent manner. So rather than a quiet discussion, what is going on here is a row: you know the old joke, “two Jews, five opinions” — a considerably charged exchange of multiple viewpoints.
Alison, James (2013-11-11). Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice - An Introduction to Christianity for Adults (p. 54). DOERS Publishing LLC. Kindle Edition. 

He gets around to trying help us understand, both in this chapter and later when he's talking about the disorientation and reorientation of our lives (like the early witnesses) when we realize that God is the protagonist of our story, not us, that this turmoil is completely natural, as deep as our bones and our dreams, because we're literally pulled out of the orbit of our consciousness and drawn into the gravity of  I AM. What we thought was reality, our interacting with the world, our receiving our identity from people who may not know who they are, learning the patterns of desire and behavior of a world that has only subscribed to and learned from "civilizing" violence, turns out to be a lie, a poisonous vapor, and that all the while the Forgiving Victim has come back from the gallows and the grave with another path, another civilization formed by love, patterned after the love of God that "makes the sun shine and rain fall on good and bad alike," and who is made visible once and for all in Jesus.

What struck me about this this year, as I listened to the readings week after week from Acts of the Apostles and then from First Peter, and harkened back to the Matthew and John passion narratives, was the number of references through the season to "Moses and the prophets" in the kerygmatic speeches of Peter and others. It brought me back time after time to that line in the Emmaus story, when Jesus says to his companions, “'O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?' And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them (διερμἠνευσεν αὐτοι̑ς) in all the scriptures the things concerning himself." Jesus, on the road to Emmaus, became their hermeneutic principle. He retold to them their chaotic story, the same story that made no sense to them, with a new thread that they had been unaware of, however steeped in the scripture, history, faith, and ethos of the Jewish people they may have been. And, Alison is quick to add, this was not merely a religion class: he was interpreting their understanding of their existence to them. There was no Jewish faith without a Jewish nation, every meal, every relationship, history, festival, and crime was related to the story. He told them, in their own vocabulary and through stories they knew and their experience of the life and death of Jesus, what their own lives meant.


In Acts 10, the section read on Easter, Peter talks about what he and the other disciples have witnessed in Jesus, in front of a mixed group of Gentiles (God-fearers) converts and Jews, about the meaning of the death of Jesus and his need to witness to the meaning of that death as it unfolded in the (unhappily, untold) story of the centurion Cornelius and his family. Like the mission to Samaria and the council of Jerusalem, this is a foundational moment in the self-awareness of Christianity, or "universal Judaism." 1 Peter 2 -3 has references in the Sundays after Easter to Psalm 16, Isaiah 28, Psalm 118, Isaiah 8, Exodus 19, and that's just the times Peter/Luke directly quote those scriptures. I've been attending daily mass through Easter (I'll give you a little time to get up off the floor and let that sink in) and the pattern continues throughout Acts. In Acts 7, alluded to during the 3rd week of Easter only with the end of Stephen's discourse and his death, Stephen tells his Jewish accusers their own story leading to Jesus by quoting from or referencing parts of Exodus, Deuteronomy, Numbers, Amos, Jeremiah, Josue, Isaiah, 1 Kings, 1 Chronicles, and Psalms, and that's just what I can remember from the footnotes! Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 discuss Isaiah 53 in interpreting the meaning of Jesus. Paul's address in Pisidian Antioch to the gathered Jews and God-fearers refers to Exodus, Deuteronomy, Josue, Judges, 1 Samuel, Isaiah, and Psalms.

OK, I think you're getting the idea. So why did I call this blog post, and this wash of insight over these Easter weeks, "The Emmaus Tapes"?

It seems to me that there are a lot of "lost years" between the death of Jesus and the arrival of Paul on the scene as the apostle to the Gentiles. One possible dating of the Council of Jerusalem, recounted in Acts 15, puts it around 50 CE, so maybe a period of twenty years after the events surrounding the death of Jesus. During that time, in addition to continuing to pray in the "synagogues" and temple and thus hearing again and again their own scripture read to them and discussed and prayed over with Jesus in their hearts, they also met at table, went about doing good works, and told their own stories and developed their own traditions about what Jesus said and did.

"Emmaus," by Janet Brooks Gerloff

This was all "post-Easter catechesis," wasn't it? It dawned on me that one way of seeing the Emmaus narrative is as a parable of that process. Or, conversely, we might see the apostolic narrative, the speeches of Peter, and especially the first letter of Peter, as an "unveiling" of the Emmaus tapes. If you have wondered, with me, what Jesus said on the road the made the hearts of Clopas and his unnamed companion (me? you?), maybe these stories in Acts and 1 Peter, the apostolic kerygma, is the answer, or was the answer for the Jewish hearers and their gentile God-fearer peers of the day.

For us, see, the interpretative key for our story, which includes the stories of the Jewish scriptures, the Christian scriptures, the songs and stories we learned in school and from our mothers and grandmothers, sisters and priests, along with the sturm und drang, the clang and chaos of political doublespeak, broken promises, class war, the ephemeral comforts of retail therapy, overeating, obsessing over health and beauty, worship of youth and success, all of that, everything which has us hurling antiballistic epithets at each other and crawling to church, booze, entertainment, and drugs in order to make the pain go away: the interpretative key for our story is Jesus Christ, dead and risen. He is the image of the invisible God, power that serves, utterly alive, who offers unconditional love and forgiveness that precedes our asking for it, like Grandma's, only better. Jesus taught Grandma. All the grandmas. Or the God of whom Jesus is the image did.

This is how Easter is ever new. It's the annual, eternal "Follow me" from Jesus that assures us that it will be OK to go to the place of the victim, to stand with the rejected, to risk forgiving and reconciliation, because God has already gone into that place and remains there, hallowing it. The tornadic clatter and roar of modern life is stilled by the voice of the Messiah, whose word approaches with a thread that binds all of life into a song for the pilgrim's road. The Emmaus tapes, playing still in the words of the apostles, ring down the ages to our grumpy, mistrusting, suspicious, fearful hearts, offering yet a walk into a new world, this world, transformed by a different gravity, known by the fire in our hearts, bellies, and laughter when we remember the music of his voice.

Summary: Rising from the dead drops us into the unknown, and for a while it's like waking up in a different house when its still dark. But the new house has been prepared with loving hands, and we discover that it is a commune. A new narrative replaces what we had thought was our story. We are finally ourselves, finally home.

Rising from the Dead 1: Why Have You Abandoned Me?

(T)hey did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead. (Jn. 20:9)

Well, they're not the only ones, are they? 

These are a few of things that were swirling around my head this year through Holy Week and the beginning of the Easter season. As usual, they're not necessarily original thoughts with me at all, just things that struck me with renewed vigor from previous years, or new ways of seeing old things. Some of them come from articles, or conversations, or even homilies. Because we spent eight weeks this year studying the problem of God's (apparent) violence in the Bible with Dominic Crossan in a video series made available through Living the Questions, some of the issues that Crossan perennially surfaces in his work were especially vivid for me. And of course, the importance of the Emmaus story and other stories of the passion and resurrection of Christ have renewed spiritual power for me because of James Alison's course Jesus, The Forgiving Victim, which we also completed recently with a couple of dozen people in the parish after engaging with it for two years.

But those are just lenses through with these stories are filtered again, new ways of seeing old truths, and my sharing my own insights will necessarily be affected by them like they are about everything else I've learned through the years. So here we go:

1. Why have you abandoned me? In an internet essay for HuffPost called "The Communal Crucifixion of Jesus," John Dominic Crossan explores the connections between the gospel accounts' use of Jewish psalm and prophetic texts and the way they were heard and preached in the early church. What he has done is turned the jewel of hermeneutics on the passion narrative a little bit, and rather than seeing the sayings as fulfillment of prophecies about the specific death of Jesus of Nazareth, he posits that the use of the quotations was to clarify and expand the meaning of the death of Jesus by associating it with the fate of the people of Israel. From their earliest communal memories of slavery in Egypt and Babylonian captivity through their more recent experience of the violence and cruelties suffered under the Greek, Hasmonean, and Roman occupations, the authors of the gospels united their narratives by reference to texts like the servant canticles of Isaiah and the psalms of lament, especially Psalm 22 and Psalm 31. More about this later, when I discuss some thoughts about the Emmaus narrative and the "law and the prophets" role in the apostolic kerygma before and after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE.

Crucifixion, condemnation of the innocent, torture, and random violence were the daily bread of the Jews, especially in the years from 4 BCE (around the time Jesus was born) until the destruction of Jerusalem in 70. Given the thousands of crucifixions of "enemies of Caesar" who were part of various uprisings during that period, I imagine most Jews of Judea and Galilee must have had first hand experience of the brutality of Rome. Their situation was desperate. And yet, the "good news" that the apostles and evangelists were risking their own lives to preach was that Jesus, victim of Rome's iron-fisted "justice" system and the collaboration of conflicting interests within Judaism, was not dead but alive, rescued from death by God as some had begun to believe since the time of the Wisdom literature, a couple of centuries. Out of an unswerving faith in God's justice, a new strand of hope for a resurrection of the dead, in this world, arose. If God is just, how could the young martyrs who had stood against Antiochus Epiphanes and other tyrants who desecrated the temple be lost forever in their youth? Surely a just God would not abandon them to death! From such faith rose the apocalypse of Daniel, in which God would clean up the violent mess of the world. Such passages like this in chapter 12, for instance:

Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake;
Some to everlasting life, others to reproach and everlasting disgrace.
But those with insight shall shine brightly like the splendor of the firmament,
And those who lead the many to justice shall be like the stars forever...

...as well as passages like the familiar text from Wisdom (chapter 3), read so often at funerals, 

The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,
and no torment shall touch them.
They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead;
and their passing away was thought an affliction
and their going forth from us, utter destruction.
But they are in peace.
For if to others, indeed, they seem punished,
yet is their hope full of immortality;
Chastised a little, they shall be greatly blessed,
because God tried them and found them worthy of himself.
As gold in the furnace, he proved them,
and as sacrificial offerings he took them to himself.
In the time of their judgment they shall shine
and dart about as sparks through stubble;
They shall judge nations and rule over peoples,
and the LORD shall be their King forever.

We rarely, I think, appreciate what a break this kind of tradition was from other strains of Judaism, which continued in the tradition of the Sadducees who "did not believe in the resurrection." But the pharisaic tradition continued to explore resurrection as a necessary correlation to God's justice, and Jesus was part of the tradition. After his death and resurrection, the church struggled with what the resurrection means for those "left behind," what its meaning is for the earth and its people. Is resurrection about another world, an afterlife? Not in this view, at least, not entirely. It certainly appears that the emphasis both in the preaching of Jesus and that of the church is that it is this world that is created and loved by God, and this world which is to be transformed into God's new heavens and new earth. Those who have suffered the fate of Jesus at the hands of powers that rely on cruelty and violence to gather their way, those who are abandoned, humiliated, tortured, whose flesh is pierced, who are spat upon, degraded, and buried among the forgotten, like Jesus, they will rise again, borne up by the power of a God who is full of life and who has nothing to do with death. The gospel message, then, is "Change the world with love. There is nothing to fear."

We goyim—gentiles— cannot fully comprehend the tribal unity of Judaism in the time around the life of Jesus. Connections between family, extended family, and nation were tight; people were able to survive because they were not alone. And there was no distinction between tribe, nation, and faith. Jewish self-identity was rooted not in political history but in their sacred stories and scriptures. The authors of the gospels, some possibly Jewish themselves, converts to Judaism, or "God-fearers," Jewish sympathizers who took to preaching of the apostles about Jesus, knew this, and experienced in the betrayal, torture, and death of Jesus the brutality suffered by their nation at the hands of invading powers forever. They reverenced these connections, the suffering of innocent people beloved by God, by framing the passion narratives in with words and phrases borrowed from scripture and loaded with resonance from their own story. They would do the same with the resurrection narrative. The same psalm (118) that is quoted for the entry into Jerusalem ("Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!") is quoted for the betrayal and death of Jesus (the "stone that the builders rejected") and for his resurrection ("has become the cornerstone. This is God's doing! This is the day the Lord has made!")

Thus for the kerygma of the Apostles and the evangelists, the death and resurrection of Jesus spells the end of a world ruled by violence and despair. God had personally entered into the place of death and shame, and returned a verdict of "Innocent" with the resurrection of Jesus. But the Victim of the crime is the same in life and resurrection: no retribution, no more victimization. The preaching and life of Jesus suggests a new world order of mutual care, healing, and loving resolution of communal problems. The old order would crumble around the tables of Christians who would refuse to participate in the business-as-usual of Caesar's world. God asserts "peace through justice," the world counter-asserts "peace through victory by violence." Now as then, the transformation of earth depends upon the resolve of Christians to believe in life and sharing goods in an economy of divine abundance, or accommodation of an economy of scarcity and fear, driven by an ethic of "might makes right" and survival of the fittest.

The passion narratives, rich with allusions to the suffering of Israel throughout its history, and considered against the rich backdrop of the preaching of the early apostolic community in Acts and the letters of St. Paul, give us a way of hearing this story in our own day. Sanitized from the suffering of most of the world, in many ways ignorant of the depth of human suffering, we may not be able to fathom the humiliation of public execution, the sadistic tearing of flesh, torture devised to prolong the sufferer's agony. But we can still hear the message of the "forgiving victim" who offered a path for transformation of the world in the Sermon on the Mount, in his life of healing and breaking down barriers between people, and in his faith in a God who is head of the household of the world, who wants a loving family, and who desires "mercy and not sacrifice." With his disciples, we can still wonder through this Easter season at the empty tomb, and listen for stories of peoples' encounter with him, risen, conversing about how it might be better to surrender to death than to kill, because "the souls of the just are in the hands of God," and even this:

Because of his affliction
he shall see the light in fullness of days;
through his suffering, my servant shall justify many,
and their guilt he shall bear.

Who'd have thought that even possible?

Summary: Somehow, resurrection is for everyone, it happens in this world, and it happens because God is life and God is just.

Taste and See the Goodness of the Lord (reflection on B20O)

“[I]f you believe in God omnipresent, then you must believe everything that comes into your life, person or event, must have something of God in it to be experienced and loved; not hated.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

Yesterday, August 16, it was my privilege to give the reflection on the readings at my parish, St. Anne in Barrington. This is, more or less, what I had to say to my friends and neighbors at church.

As I was reflecting on the readings for this weekend, I thought it would be interesting to look at the "bread of life" discourse, and what Jesus says about the himself in John 6, through the lens of the psalm we have been singing for four weeks now. Just in those very short verses of Psalm 34, there is a lot to ponder as we "address one another in psalms and hymns and inspired songs, singing and playing to the Lord" in our hearts, as Ephesians said. But before I do that, I'd like to briefly look at some repeated words in those first two readings, and how they suggest a way to think about the word of God today.

Did you notice that both Proverbs and Ephesians start off with exhortations to "forsake foolishness"? What do they mean by that? I suspect we'd have a wide range of meanings for "foolishness." If there were a political debate, say, between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and each used the word "foolishness," they would probably mean almost universally different things, probably pointing to the other as they said it. But what is foolishness to the writers of today's readings?

It would help if we looked at all of Proverbs 9 today, because there are two women inviting people into their houses. Lady Wisdom's invitation is here, but Lady Folly's invitation doesn't begin for a few more verses. The whole of chapters 1-9 in Wisdom speak of the tug-of-war between wisdom and foolishness. The call to the simple and uncomplicated in today's first reading is an open invitation to experience the bounty of Lady Wisdom's house by obedience to the Torah, acting with justice toward the neighbor. Folly, on the other hand, does what it wants to do, without regard to the law and prophets. The path to each house and the outcomes of living in them are clear. They are the result of choices that we make in life. They are not rewards and punishments. They are consequences of our choices. Good choices, symbolized by the covenant or Torah, are made possible by God's invitation.

The teaching of Jesus is much the same, though Jesus also reveals for us the love behind the law. Jesus preached in Galilee, a Jew in a nation under the rule of the Roman empire. Rome, like every empire before and since, embraced a view of civilization that used military violence and threats to keep a version of peace. As long as people accepted Rome as their master and paid their taxes, they would have a measure of peace and security. And Rome had a god—Caesar—Octavian, later called "Augustus," the "majestic," who also had titles like "son of God," "God" "savior of the world”, LORD, and "prince of peace." Octavian, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, passed these titles on to his adopted son, Tiberius, and so on while the Caesars lasted. (Footnote: the word evangelion, the word we translate as "gospel," was a word used by the regional governors of the empire to commemorate the victorious Octavian's military victories which brought "peace" to the world. They used the word in the plural; the Paul and the NT writers use it in the singular to refer to the gospel of Jesus Christ: that is, his death and resurrection which are the peaceful "victory" over Caesar.)



That was the "gospel" of Rome; but Jesus, and later the church, preached a different way. He knew people knew that things weren't working, that people weren't happy, that they were suspicious and often jealous of each other, that they worked too hard, and were afraid of what terrors the next day might hold for them and their families. Of course, that was then, and this is now, right? Jesus wanted people to remember who they really were: God's chosen people. So we might hear his message as, "How's that Roman empire working out for you? How is that god 'Caesar' working out for you?" And he reminded them, and he reminds us, about who we were before Caesar and the rest of the civilizers showed up: Jew or non-Jew, we are the sons and daughters of a God who wants us to act like a family that takes care of each other. To make this as obvious as possible, he called this God "father, abba"—the head of the household of creation. He called for a world organized not by violence and threats but by justice, equality, and love.

Rome disagreed, and executed him as a disturber of the Pax Romana. But we know the rest of the story. Abba raised him up, the beloved son, the servant, on the third day. And his disciples continued to preach the message of the empire of the Father, a world organized by love and justice. So when the Church called Jesus “Lord,” or "Son of God" or "Prince of Peace," it was as a clear alternative to the "Lord" of Rome. At the heart of this new movement of healing, love, and reconciliation was a meal shared in equality in memory of Jesus. As Jesus had shared his table with everyone, the infant church gathered around a meal to remember Jesus and spread the word of the empire, the kingdom of God.

I want to say that this is what Jesus means by the "bread of life." Do you remember that these gospels began four weeks ago with the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, and that the whole event took place "near the time of passover"? The "bread that came down from heaven" is part of the passover story. Manna, the bread of exodus, the bread of freedom, is the bread that came down from God. Now Jesus says, "I am the bread that came down from heaven. I am the bread of life." We're meant to hear "I AM" as the name of the God of the Exodus, the god of freedom. Wisdom, freedom, joy, equality, and God are life. Whatever is not like this God, whatever belongs to the other god, Caesar, the one who civilizes by threats, violence, and force, that god is death. To choose that god is to choose death, to taste and see death. Just like the two women in Proverbs, there are two calls into two houses. Each comes with consequences. But only one call comes from God.

So when our psalm sings, "Taste and see the goodness of the Lord," we should try to keep in mind which Lord the psalmist is so enthusiastic about. It is the paschal God, the God of passover. We can taste and see that God because God created everything out of God's own goodness, so that everything created shines with the freedom and love that made the universe. This is the God who doesn't even cling to divinity, but pours self out to come among us when we lose our way to show us, in an utterly human body and soul in Jesus of Nazareth, what the real God is like. In Jesus, I AM shows us how to live with compassion and healing, and how the walls we put up between each other with money, power, property and greed are nothing but illusions that will dissipate when we just turn around from one god to the other, when we turn from death to life. So, in the words of our psalm,

When we bless this Lord at all times, the "lowly will hear and be glad."
When we seek this Lord, the paschal God, the god of freedom and love, then this Lord will answer, and deliver us from all our distress.
When we look to this God, the paschal God, our faces will not be ashamed.
When we cry out to this God, the paschal God, then the poor are rescued from distress.

It is this God whom we taste and see in the Eucharist. It is this God who says, in Jesus Christ, I AM. I AM the bread of life. I AM the living manna. And it is into this God, in Jesus Christ, that we are baptized, and whose life we share not through any good we do or any merit of our own, but because of the loving kindness and the call of God. It is this God whose spirit, in baptism, makes us into the body of Christ, to keep proclaiming by our lives the gospel of compassion and service. It is now our vocation to ask one another, to ask the fearful, jealous, unhappy, overworked world, "How's that other empire working out for you?" It's for us show by our lives a different way, not reinforcing "civilized" threats of force and violence, but demonstrating a way of living together based on service, compassion, freedom, invitation. That is the goodness that we can "taste and see" when we encounter this Lord in the body that is this church and in the body that is the eucharist. That is the goodness that we are, that enables us, that inspires, in-spirits us to sing,

I myself am the bread of life.
You and I are the bread of life,
Taken and blessed, broken and shared by Christ
That the world may live.

We begin to taste and see the goodness of the paschal God, of one another, of a world that God is bringing to be, when we live as the daughters and sons of Abba, and come together around the supper table of the Passover lamb.

So at communion today, let us say "amen" to who we are, the beloved children of God, committed to God's empire of peace, justice, and freedom, and "taste and see the goodness of the Lord," both at the table of the Eucharist, and at the table of the world.

Mystagogy for Dummies (like me) - Easter 6B - God Is Love - so what?

God is love. So what?



No one is born loving in agape. Most of us learn the hard way, the long way. We journey through the ages of humanity, the stages of development, the path toward “self-actualization” and ultimately transcendence. We learn to love from eros and philia, from the thrill and pleasure of loving, from the security and acceptance and transparency of presence to one another, from the fierceness of a mother’s defensive love, a father’s laughter, the often indefatigable and unalienable devotion of brothers and sisters, or grandparents. 



Somewhere along the line, if we’re lucky, it strikes us that we’re not the center of any universe but our own, and that to become part of the truth of the universe we have to turn outward toward others. We hear the obvious truth of the life of the grain of wheat. It’s not at all that there’s anything wrong with eros and philia. It’s just that they are there to lead us to the Source, the love that is pure life-giving, that is independent of feeling, reciprocation, or even belonging, because it participates in life itself, and finds the source of its joy from its dissipation on behalf of the Other.



Honestly, I’ve been so selfish for so long that I don’t even know how little I do for other people. It’s just in the last ten years, really, that I’ve consciously stopped ignoring the things that I don’t do because I don’t feel like it. It’s like it dawned on me, in my mid-fifties, that to love other people isn’t about feeling anything, it’s about doing. It doesn’t matter what I feel, only what I do. Eventually, with some reflected living, some feelings might catch up, but if they don’t then somehow the actions themselves, if they are for another, and selfless, are part of the paschal mystery, and are life-giving in and of themselves to me as well as to whomever I might have served. It’s hard to imagine it’s taken me so long to even begin to grasp this. And don’t misunderstand me — it’s not like I’ve suddenly become Mother Teresa or Mia Farrow. Just a little bit less Falstaff, or Oscar Wilde.



It’s so obvious, but sometimes it’s just words. Like, I remember Tom Conry once laying one of his famous dictums on me, “Liturgy isn’t about making people feel good; it’s about making people feel like doing something good.” And on the level of drama alone, that’s a world of difference. It’s a movement from the self and eros toward the other, and agape. When that other stands outside the circle of friend and family, that’s the purest form of agape. It’s certainly true that real love is like the river; it doesn’t matter where you drink from, the river is the same. One can be truly, completely selfless with a lover, or with a son, or daughter, or parent, or friend. But Jesus, it seems to me, wants to make a point about this in his culture, which is already loyal to a fault to its own. In the Sermon on the Mount, making a point about loving those who love us, he tells us, “Don’t even the pagans do that?” So the real test is loving our enemies, doing good to those who hate us. As any of my friends in liturgy preparation would tell you, be specific about enemy-love in the general intercessions some time, and see how fast the good Christians shoosh you out the door. “For the safety and well-being of al-Qaeda, let us pray to the Lord.” “For ISIS, the Taliban, the Sendero Luminoso, the Crips, the Bloods, the 18th Street Gang, let us pray to the Lord.” And praying for them is hardly dying, or living, for their good.



For the believer, this relentless divine love is at work even in those who have not heard the Name of God, or who have heard it and rejected it. Every moment of longing and alienation is a doorway to the infinite. God’s life is invitation, the available experience of accepting, unconditional love. The question becomes, who will discover the path of the love that “lets the rain fall and the sun shine on good and bad alike” in the search for meaning in life? Whose Church will be a safe harbor like that, whose preaching of the gospel will be the way it lives and worships and serves the neighborhood? 



Maybe that’s the “so what” question that follows the proclamation that “God is love,” the one that Paul asked just a few decades after the death of Jesus (Romans 10).


But how can they call on him in whom they have not believed?

And how can they believe in him of whom they have not heard?

And how can they hear without someone to preach?

And how can people preach unless they are sent?



Belonging, in Christ, ultimately means being sent. Love, like God, is not satisfied with itself, it is by its nature outward bound. If this “here comes everybody” party is ever going to get underway, we’re going to have to get the word out. Into every cozy upper room, into every lakeside breakfast, into every comfortable Christian’s life, a little fire must fall. Love is mission. Easter, the paschal mystery of God, is Pentecost.

This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends.

Mystagogy for dummies (like me) - B5E - Bold enough to be changed

After Sunday's liturgy, I ask these questions of myself: What did I hear about the paschal mystery of God in today's celebration? What did I hear about what it means to "rise from the dead"?

It may seem obvious, but I keep going back to the question of what life and death mean in the gospels. For my Catholic-school-through-seminary thoughts, the first level of response to these texts with which I've lived my whole life, I default to a personal eschatology—I'm alive, I'm going to die, and life and death are as simple as that. But as I've learned through my life about how we are all connected to one another, how our living now affects the living and dying of others now, I'm no longer satisfied with my original answers, and see that the gospel is calling me to a different way of seeing life and death.

The very heart of the gospel image today, of a vine and branches, is a corporal image, that is, it's an image of a living organism, a body. Jesus suggests that life is interdependent, that we are bound together with him by a single life, and that it is precisely in our being bound together that more life is possible, "bearing fruit," which suggests both nourishment and continuity in the vine. St. Paul's word, in fact, the gospel of St. John's word, for the way that the vine is kept alive with the life of Christ in God is "Spirit." The Holy Spirit of Jesus, the breath of God, the wind of Pentecost, respirated into the Church from the cross and in the revelation of the resurrection, unites us with the life of God and the mission of Christ.

But God is not just another agent in the multiplicity of forces that run the universe. God is not like "one of the gods" to whom we have traditionally ascribed that kind of role, a benevolent or malevolent or insouciant or random force competing with others forces for our allegiance or worship. No, as James Alison says, God is much more "like no god at all" than like that. Infinitely patient, kind, and without any malice or envy, God is the agent in the universe, the I AM whose life is so wildly generous and so utterly shared that, like it or not, there is no other life to be had. Like with the other I AM sayings in the gospel of John, we are to hear the echo of the voice from the burning bush when Jesus speaks, whether of the life of the vine, the flock, living water, living bread, or anything else. The life is the life of God, the life shared in God's given Spirit, deathless, liberating, freedom-for-others, companioned in covenant. It is life that invites participation, and participation which awakens new identity and solidarity among those who relax into it, and that very participation leads us into the life-for-others which is the kenosis and agape of the paschal mystery of God.

St. Paul, whose conversion to Christ was the focus of more than a little skepticism in Luke's Acts narrative Sunday, is a good example to me of someone moving from death to life, all while worshipping, in his own heart, the very same God. Did God change, or did Saul/Paul? After his "conversion" (turning toward) Jesus he did not serve a different God, but he perhaps he saw that he he had projected his own anger, prejudice, and constricted sense of grace and belonging onto God because of a particular way of worship, behavior, and orthodoxy. His catechetical style certainly changed. He left his fire-breathing, sword-wielding, warrant-serving, death-penalty-enforcing self on the desert road, and became a bold persuader, a poet of the body, one who invited participation in Christ and with Christ in the grace made universally available by the Holy Spirit for the equalizing, loving-kindness of every person: man, woman, slave, free, Jew, Greek. No more threats and violence, just the bold invitation to be a part of the body dwells richly in the unifying, liberating grace of the Spirit of God.

"I will praise you, Lord, in the assembly of your people," was the psalm refrain in the liturgy today, and it reasserts the very same principle—whatever the novelty theology might be that infers that we can experience God on our own, the authentic experience of the God revealed in scripture is that God is experienced and worshiped by participation in community life. But God is not in rivalry with individualistic models of belief! With infinite patience, by the gentle, persuasive participation of those who submit to the experience of the vine and branches, all shall be one, because at a depth perceptible only to the Creator and only barely imaginable by the rest of us, we are already one.

What does it mean to "rise from the dead" then? For today, for me, it means to stop projecting my restrictive brand of grace onto God and to accept that God loves everyone equally. St. Paul said that in Christ there is neither "Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, woman nor man." We might today say there is neither "Anglo nor Arab, poor nor rich, liberal nor conservative, straight nor gay," or any of many false dichotomies around which we rally like idol-worshipers. To "rise from the dead" means to try to shed the envy and rivalry in me against perceived enemies, perceived competitors, and to try to encourage others to reject rivalry as well, and to try to let our "sun shine and rain fall on good and bad alike," the way that God does.

To "rise from the dead" is to remain in Christ, and to "love one another" as Christ loved us, ready to occupy the place of the enemy and the victim, full of faith and hope in the I AM whose life is so abundant and without rivalry that death does not even exist. It is participation in that life, the life of God's Spirit, that is the beginning of God's gentle reign, right here, right now.

And his commandment is this:
we should believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ,
and love one another just as he commanded us.
Those who keep his commandments remain in him,
and he in them,
and the way we know that he remains in us
is from the Spirit he gave us.

Mystagogy for dummies (like me) (B4E)

Once again, the question:


How did Sunday’s liturgy speak to me about the meaning of life in the light of the paschal mystery? What did the readings teach me about what it means to “rise from the dead”?



It was a line from the responsorial psalm that caught my ear yesterday. It was quoted by Peter, somewhat polemically in the context of a quasi-legal hearing, in the speech from Acts in the first reading.

“The stone which the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone.”


What got my heart working during the hearing of these scriptures was trying to associate that phrase with the overarching metaphor from today’s gospel of the Good Shepherd. Of course, there’s the obvious connection with “laying down my life for my sheep.” But how to take this out of the purely theological context, and apply it to my faith in daily life? That is the mystagogy question.


Another question that arose as I listened to the gospel comes up for me every time I hear this scripture and similar ones. There is the condemnation, or at least repudiation, of the “hired man”:


A hired man, who is not a shepherd

and whose sheep are not his own,

sees a wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away,

and the wolf catches and scatters them.

This is because he works for pay and has no concern for the sheep.



How do I know, as a paid minister of the church, that I’m being a “good shepherd” and not a “hired man”? In context, I can see the parallel between the “hired man” in this passage, with its dominant metaphor of the people of God as sheep, as the equivalent of the tenant farmers in the parable of the vineyard, or even the builders’ unrevealed plans that are replaced when the rejected stone becomes the keystone of the structure. One one level, these are the equivalent of the “false shepherds” exposed by the prophets, who lead people away from Torah. For instance, there is Ezekiel’s stunning philippic that pervades chapter 34:


Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel,
in these words prophesy to them (to the shepherds):
Thus says the Lord GOD:
Woe to the shepherds of Israel who have been pasturing themselves!
Should not shepherds, rather, pasture sheep?
You have fed off their milk, worn their wool, and slaughtered the fatlings,
but the sheep you have not pastured.
You did not strengthen the weak nor heal the sick nor bind up the injured.
You did not bring back the strayed nor seek the lost,
but you lorded it over them harshly and brutally.



I didn’t want to get sidetracked by this, but it does appear that the charge against the religious leadership of Israel during the time of the prophets and again at the time of Jesus was that it was self-serving, concerned about its self-preservation, enrichment, and legacy to the detriment of the people from whom they were chosen. By the time of Jesus, the ruling class including the temple priesthood of Jerusalem were often collaborating with the occupying power of Rome to hold back the tide of potential violence if the nation appeared to be restlessly moving toward revolt, as they might while observing the memory of Passover each year and their deliverance from Egypt. The swollen ranks of the temple aristocracy skimmed enough money from the overtaxed peasantry to arouse general resentment. Thus, Jesus could make a priest and a Levite the object of (mild?) ridicule in the parable of the good Samaritan, as well as win points with the populace in his game of status-and-shame with his inquisitors on many occasions. 


What does that have to do with me? Well, ultimately, the choice is the same on any minister of the church. Which god do I serve? Of which empire am I a citizen? Are my efforts in my work toward building the empire of God, this God, this shepherd, or the empire of “the world,” and its strategy of self-preservation, acquisitiveness, survival-of-the-fittest, and might-makes-right? That’s a tough question. Like everyone else, I’m culturally entangled in the web of civilization that makes me complicit in the domination of others in ways of which I’m not even aware. But the possibility of action is there for me to the extent that I'm aware of my complicity, and so am able to make decisions about how to act. 


But it is the metaphor of the rejected stone that I think most helps me relate to the paschal mystery this week. The cornerstone of the temple of the Holy Spirit, the building of living stones that is the church, is the rejected stone that is Christ. It is the stone that did not appear to be worthwhile because it was too weak, not worthy, not suited for such a task. And yet it is this very stone that becomes the cornerstone. What this made me remember is Paul’s observation in the second letter to the Corinthians about his “thorn in the flesh,” and the answer he received from God when he asked that the weakness be removed:


But (God) said to me: “My grace is sufficient for you,
for power is made perfect in weakness."
I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses,
in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me.
Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints,
for the sake of Christ;
for when I am weak, then I am strong.  



It is here that I encountered the Easter presence of Christ in the scriptures Sunday, the way that Christ revealed the paschal mystery to me a little more fully in the scripture from Sunday. This weakness-is-strength is a scandalous idea in a universe that appears to run by strictly Darwinian natural selection. And yet it pervades the revelation of scripture, from the moment that a slave nation is chosen to be the people of God and wrested from the hand of Pharaoh. The sin of the first parents initiates a new strategy of divine participation in the human enterprise. The deceit of a son secures a birthright from Isaac, the favored runt of Jacob’s litter is sold into slavery and emerges as the savior of both Egypt and his murderous siblings.The youngest of eight sons, a shepherd, is anointed as the king of Israel. A stuttering murderer is God’s advocate before a Pharaoh, children and tree nurses are selected to prophesy to kings. The choice of the apostles themselves, and their characterization in the gospels as clueless, ambitious fair-weather friends of Jesus belies their emergence as the foundation upon which the temple will be laid, with Christ as the cornerstone.


This God, the God of the paschal mystery, is the rejected stone. This God, who did not believe status of “godhead” was something to be grasped, is the one revealed in Jesus Christ.
 

I guess, then, no more thinking that the job is too big for me, or that I don’t have the talent or the means to accomplish the task. I don’t. But it’s not what I can do, or what kind of ability I have. It’s not even about succeeding, if success is defined by civilization and the culture of domination and strength.

Like the Good Shepherd, my task is to serve, to lay down my life for others. God’s grace, my baptism into the mystery of this God who pours Self out for the good of all, has to be enough for me. As the first letter of St. John reminded us yesterday,

See what love the Father has bestowed on us
that we may be called the children of God.
Yet so we are.

The DNA of the paschal mystery is imprinted on us. I’m a child of the God who is not ashamed to be revealed as weak, as slave, even as an enemy of the state. But it is this love that created and sustains the universe, and which calls me to unity and peace with every other person on the planet, every other child of God. Nothing else will give me life. There’s no way to build any other temple to God than upon the rejected stone that is Christ, and him crucified.

The stone which the builders rejected

has become the cornerstone.

By the LORD has this been done;

it is wonderful in our eyes.

(Psalm 118)

Mystagogy for Dummies (like me) (B3E)

I’d like to briefly visit yesterdays’s readings, because it’s a good exercise for us to do. The way I phrased the question that mystagogy asks in my blog a year ago was this, and for better or worse, that’s how I am going to follow through:


How did Sunday’s liturgy speak to me about the meaning of life in the light of the paschal mystery? What did the readings teach me about what it means to “rise from the dead”?



As I reflect on the scriptures and how I heard them last week, it’s the words “repent, and be converted” that struck me. I think it’s because of the reading I’ve been doing, because the question that really pops for me is, repent of what? Be converted to what? We tend to spiritualize those words, much in the way we have spiritualized the cross, but more and more I wonder whether the gospel offers an explicitly “spiritual” message any more than a socio-political one. Certainly for Jesus's contemporaries, the Jewish culture was not a way of imagining a better afterlife, but was how people lived in this world. Wouldn’t opting out of this world, in favor of one to come (after death), actually be a victory for "the other gods," the forces of death? Whose world is this, anyway? In the clash of ideologies and gods, it’s the way of the god Tiberius (following after Augustus) versus the God of Israel, the abba of Jesus. If the clash is between this life and the next, what does Tiberius have to lose? Or any other despot or boss or husband or warlord or president or ayatollah who controls the destiny of others by violence or intimidation? 



On the contrary, it seems to me, it is complete turning away (repentance) from the strategy of empire (the violence and threats which Crossan and Borg call “peace through victory”) and a turning toward (conversion to) the strategy of God (what Crossan and Borg call “peace through justice.”) That may or may not have something to do with the world to come: no one knows about that. But it does have an effect upon the followers of either “way” in this life, on this planet. 
"Rising from the dead" is repentance (i.e., metanoia, changing our inner direction) when we understand the competition between gods for our allegiance while the one God, the one whose "name" is "I AM" waits all around us, perfectly full of life, inviting us to turn together in a new direction.


So how did Sunday’s liturgy speak to me about the meaning of life in the light of the paschal mystery? Well, first, God is a God of freedom, life, peace. Living for God is to be a stranger in a strange land, or in Stanley Hauerwas’s happy phrase, “Resident Aliens” in whatever civilization or culture we find ourselves now. We live and work and love here, in this world, the world that God made good, and claim it for the good God by our way of life here, in this world. It means sharing and not hoarding, dialogue and not coercion, and every possible alternative to violence in every situation. The words of the Messiah to the “army” of his empire is, “Put away your sword. Enough!” (Mt. 26:52 and equiv.) We’re not incarnate spirits, or souls trapped in bodies: we’re divinely created beings that are all at once body and soul, substance and meaning, inseparable. To live in the paschal mystery is to learn that it’s not enough to be right; it’s fairly easy to kill for what you think is right, but it’s often difficult to live and die for it without killing or threats of violence or coercion. The paschal mystery of God, that great kenotic arc of creation and salvation by which God creates and saves the world through the presence of the Spirit and the incarnation of the logos, is the eternal example lived out by Christ, who washed his disciples’ feet like a slave. God “bent down” in Christ, Christ “bent down” to serve his world, and now, we ourselves are called to do the same. Not to fight for what we believe, but to live for it to the death.




And so in the gospel, Jesus speaks the words that we heard Peter echo in Acts in the first reading:


"Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer 

and rise from the dead on the third day 

and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins,

would be preached in his name
 to all the nations,
beginning from Jerusalem.

You are witnesses of these things."



God achieves victory not through the violent intervention of angels or armies, but through the surrender, in life and death, of those who love. It is our witness, we who have not seen him but have believed in him through the Holy Spirit’s indwelling gift of faith, our witness that will save the world. Our witness is the lives we live as a community that follow the example of the master, who bent to wash our feet. Our witness is our participation in the saving actions of life, justice, peace-making, and healing taught by Jesus and the saints who have followed him. If we were buried with Christ in baptism, we’re risen with him now. Nothing else can bring us to any harm.


God has thus brought to fulfillment

what he had announced beforehand

through the mouth of all the prophets,

that his Christ would suffer.

Repent, therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be wiped away.

Mystagogy for dummies (like me) - Pentecost edition

As a body is one though it has many parts,
and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body,
so also Christ. (1 Cor 10, second reading for Pentecost)

As the Father has sent me, so I send you. (Gospel for Pentecost)

Almost no one is born loving in agape. Most of us learn the hard way, the long way. We journey through the ages of humanity, the stages of development, the path of “self-actualization.” We learn to love from eros and philia, from the thrill and pleasure of loving, from the security and acceptance and transparency of presence to one another, from the fierceness of a mother’s defensive love, a father’s laughter, the often indefatigable and unalienable devotion of brothers and sisters, or grandparents.

Somewhere along the line, if we’re lucky, it strikes us that we’re not the center of any universe but our own, and that to become part of the truth of the universe we have to turn outward toward others. We hear the obvious truth of the life of the grain of wheat. It’s not at all that there’s anything wrong with eros and philia. It’s just that they are there to lead us to the Source, the love that is pure life-giving, that is independent of feeling, reciprocation, or even belonging, because it participates in life itself, and finds the source of its joy from its dissipation on behalf of the Other.

Honestly, I’ve been so selfish for so long that I don’t even know how little I do for other people. It’s just in the last couple of years, really, that I’ve consciously stopped ignoring things I don’t do because I don’t feel like it. It’s like it dawned on me, in my late fifties, that to love other people isn’t about feeling anything, it’s about doing. It doesn’t matter what I feel, only what I do. Eventually, with some reflected living, some feelings might catch up, but if they don’t then somehow the actions themselves, if they are selfless, are part of the paschal mystery, and are life-giving in and of themselves to me as well as to whomever I might have served. It’s hard to imagine it’s taken me so long to even begin to grasp this. And don’t misunderstand me — it’s not like I’ve suddenly become Mother Teresa or Mia Farrow. Just a little bit less Falstaff, or Oscar Wilde.

It’s so obvious, but sometimes it’s just words. Like, I remember Tom Conry once laying one of his famous dictums on me, “Liturgy isn’t about making people feel good; it’s about making people feel like doing something good.” And on the level of drama alone, that’s a world of difference. It’s a movement from the self and eros toward the other, and agape. When that other moves outside the circle of friend and family, that’s the purest form of agape. It’s certainly true that true love is like the river; it doesn’t matter where you drink from, the river is the same. One can be truly, completely selfless with a lover, or with a son, or daughter, or parent, or friend. But Jesus, it seems to me, wants to make a point about this in his culture, which is already loyal to a fault to its own. In the Sermon on the Mount, making a point about loving those who love us, he tells us, “Don’t even the pagans do that?” So the real test is loving our enemies, doing good to those who hate us. But try that in the "universal prayer" (the general intercessions or prayer of the faithful) some time, and see how fast the good Christians shoosh you out the door. “For the safety and well-being of al-Qaeda, let us pray to the Lord.” “For the Taliban, the Sendero Luminoso, the Crips, the Bloods, the 18th Street Gang, let us pray to the Lord.” And praying for them is hardly dying, or living, for their good.

For the believer, this relentless divine love is at work even in those who have not heard the Name of God, or who have heard it and rejected it. Every moment of longing and alienation is a doorway to the infinite. God’s life is invitation, the available experience of accepting, unconditional love. The question becomes, who will echo the path of the love which “lets the rain fall and the sun shine on good and bad alike” in the life looking for that kind of a God to believe in? Whose Church will be a safe harbor like that, whose preaching of the gospel will be the way it lives and worships and serves the neighborhood?

Maybe that’s the “so what” question that follows the proclamation that we are one body, sent by Christ on the Father's mission of reconciliation and unity. St. Paul was asking it already just twenty years or so after Jesus's death, and long before John's gospel was finally written:

...How can they call on him in whom they have not believed?
And how can they believe in him of whom they have not heard?
And how can they hear without someone to preach?
And how can people preach unless they are sent? (Rom 10: 14-15)

Belonging, in Christ, ultimately means being sent. Love, like God, is not satisfied with itself, it is by its nature outward bound. If this “here comes everybody” party is ever going to get underway, we’re going to have to get the word out. Into every cozy upper room, into every lakeside breakfast, into every comfortable Christian’s life from Vatican City to Lake Zurich, a little fire must fall. Love is mission. Belonging is being sent. Easter, the paschal mystery of God, is Pentecost.

Mystagogy for Dummies (like me) 6 - rising from the death that is violence (C6E)

Busy day. Busy week (aren't they all?). But I want to keep to my discipline, even briefly, of trying to listen for hints of an answer to the question, "What does it mean to rise from the dead?" This is just many ways of thinking and talking about the paschal mystery, and how we are soaked by creation and baptism in the life of God. And let me tell you, this would have been a couple of paragraphs shorter, because I wrote it this morning after reflecting on the liturgy last night. Then, just as I was closing it, I made some kind of HTML error and it disapparated. I had a "preview" window up, which I printed, and am now retyping it. Unfortunately, I went to mass two more times since this morning, and had a few "addenda" to my original thoughts. Sorry!

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.

Not as the world gives do I give it to you.

When I heard those words at mass last night, I felt a resonance with the first reading, psalm, and second reading that I hadn't expected. And I heard some of what I've learned from Dominic Crossan about the gospels and other writings of the Christian scriptures, too. "Not as the world gives." My mind now does not go, as it has been led by homilies in the past, to the world of the spiritual, the afterlife, the alternative world of heaven. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but people don't get crucified for "spiritual" messages. Spiritual messages are not a threat to people with legions, guns, and drones.

What I did hear was an echo of that choice that Mark made clear in the first verses of that first gospel, and which the later gospels reiterated in their own language: everyone has a choice to make. "Turn away from sin, and believe the good news." There are two ways of doing things. The world's way, Romes way, the way of the powerful and elite is one. And God's way is the other. Two emperors. Two gods. They can't both be god, and we can't follow both of them. One is "off the mark," one is sin. We have to turn away from one, so that we can see and love (believe) the other.

Jesus's implied message to his peasant audience was, "How is that Roman version of 'peace' working out for ya?"

Crossan makes this point over and over again, pointing to the titles given to Jesus in the New Testament as titles already given to and claimed by the Caesars starting with Augustus: God, son of God, savior of the world, light from lights, prince of peace. The preaching of Jesus, the "good news" or gospel (the word is from the military vocabulary for 'victory proclamation'), was that there was indeed an alternative to this "god" who ruled by violence and threats of violence, who perpetuated a system where a few had nearly everything and most barely eked out a subsistence living. There is, Jesus says, an alternative to "peace through violence." What Jesus offered in the "reign (or empire) of God" was "peace through justice," peace through right relationship, peace through agape. Jesus offered a God who is Abba, and not a general, a judge, or brutal imperator. 

Peace I leave with you; my peace i give to you.

Not as the world gives do I give it to you.

When I heard those words, I heard "I don't give you 'peace' like the Romans give you peace, or like your priests give you peace, by cooperating with their brutal system. I've lived and shown you a way to live differently. Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Follow me. Expect nothing more than what happened to me. Take up your cross. But things are changing. We have sown weeds in their field that can't be uprooted. The victory is already won, wait for it. Believe in it. Live together for one another. There is immense joy in that, in this world, here and now. Whatever happens, I will be with you, God will be with you, in the Holy Spirit, living wherever you live."

The "new Jerusalem" is that transformed world, not brought from earth to heaven, but come to earth from heaven. It's already here. It begins when we talk with each other, work difficult things out, let go of old habits of hate and prejudice that keep other people out of our lives. It begins in communities like the Acts communities, which, instead of fighting or seceding or starting over or ignoring the gospel, plead the case of the Word, passionately and even with disagreement, but come to a new place of acceptance and radical change. (Editorial remark: this is radical change, organic change that seems revolutionary, but is in fact radical, sprung from the root of the word planted in us. Let those hear who have ears.) The psalm today, "let all the nations praise you," or the seasonal Easter psalm 66 which we sang, "Let all the earth cry out to God with joy," reverberates with a vision of a new world, not just one nation and one people with an insular or particular claim on the divine, but all the earth crying out to the one God who makes all things new.


What does it mean to "rise from the dead?" Today, to me, the gospel reassures me that I must continue to hope and believe when the voices of power, voices with guns, unlimited wealth, even voices with crosses, crescents, crosiers, or six-pointed star, all the trappings of faith-that-separates, voices that claim that power is majority rule, or divine ordination, or is anything other than the one God's power of coming down, the power of washing feet, of service, of kenosis, try to threaten or frighten us into compromising the gospel. They have lost the fight. We cannot build up any empire that lasts. We can only bend down to enter one, carrying a bowl of water and a towel. Dialogue, not force, builds the world. The Word builds the world. We cannot build a world that reaches to heaven, like the fabled artisans of Babel. Heaven comes here, as a gift.

It is so hard to accept this. I don't know about you, but I'm so enmeshed and tangled in the world of reciprocity, of buying and selling, of owning, of the wrong kind of compromise, of selective ignorance and complicity in the poverty and death of others, that I see no clear way of extricating myself. Love my enemies? I can't even love some of the people I work with, and we're supposedly on the same side. And yet, as I played through the last two of our six first communion masses, I kept asking myself, Isn't the gospel, the real gospel, the gospel of equality, of children of one Abba, of power being service, the only story worth telling, handing on, living and dying for?

To rise from the dead is to stop cooperating with death, and to live for God who is life, abundant life for all. First communion or three thousand and first communion, that's the meaning of the table. "When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim the death of the Lord." It doesn't get much plainer than that. There's no way to resurrection except through the cross. That's why grappling with that question, "what does it mean to rise from the dead," is so blessedly important.

Mystagogy for dummies (like me) - Easter 5 - That's the story of, that's the glory of love

The wonderful Father Michael Sparough, S.J., lives and works right down the street from St. Anne's at the Bellarmine Retreat Center in Barrington, and occasionally helps out at my parish. We had him last evening for mass, and were treated to a lovely homily on love, embracing all kinds of stuff from C. S. Lewis to Mother Teresa, a real breath of fresh air. This has nothing to do with my post for today, except that it got me listening to the gospel more intensely, just because of the way he proclaimed it. As always, it's something in the moment, in the lived experience of the liturgy, that makes a day different, and gives us a new window of insight into scripture and the Christian life. And,

in this case, into "what it means to rise from the dead."

One thing Michael brought out in the gospel that really did speak to me was that first phrase: Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. The "now" in that sentence is the moment that Judas leaves the room where the "last supper" has taken place. John has only mentioned the supper obliquely, opting instead to call attention to what Jesus did after the supper, that is, he got up from table, and washed the feet of his disciples. It seems to me that "now" harkens back to this action and to the musical overture to John's gospel, the hymn of the Logos, describing the descent of the Word from heaven to "pitch his tent among us." "Now" is the moment of kenosis, when the events of the death of the Lord are set into motion by the departure of Judas. This the moment when both Christ and God are glorified.

Why? Because glory is how scripture describes the visible or sensible manifestation of God's presence. And God, as the New Testament makes clear, is agape, is love. The glory of God is kenosis, is the emptying out of the divine self in love for the other. It becomes clear in the hour of betrayal. And it will be clear to the world, Jesus says, if the disciples will do as he has done, and wash each others' feet. Or, as he puts it more clearly in the gospel today, if they love one another. 

Self-emptying love among human beings is the glory of God. It's as impossibly simple as that. As Luke put it in his "overture" to the gospel story, the glory of God in high heaven is peace among people on earth. This shalom is not achievable except as a manifestation of who God is, that is, as self-emptying love that does not assert its rights, even to life, but surrenders everything for the good of the other.

So, for today at least, in my hearing of the gospel, the glory of God is our love for one another. Glory is agape, and that love is kenosis, the way we serve one another, "pour ourselves out" as God does in Christ and Christ does for us. That is no more achievable for us than not dying is achievable for us. How is it possible to love with agape? How is it possible to rise from the dead? It is only possible through surrender to God's love in us. 

Put as directly as I can say it, to rise from the dead is to have love for one another, to imitate Christ by washing each others' feet, to live and die for the life of the world. I don't know what it means for the future, but I know that that love creates, sustains, and saves the world. My world.