Making the 60-second Sermon (C26O) (C06O)

First, have you ever thought about how hard it is to say something, just one thing, something you feel strongly about in a persuasive way, in just one minute? When I was asked to contribute to the PrayTell blog's "60-Second Sermon" series, I knew that it felt like a good idea, but I didn't realize how hard it would be to try to say anything meaningful in one minute. The time I spend editing my idea down to a single minute is a much, much longer process than coming up with an idea and writing a draft.

Living at St. John's Abbey (and University) in Collegeville, MN, Benedictine monk, musician, and liturgical scholar Fr. Anthony Ruff began the PrayTell blog in 2010 as a well-informed and "intellectually grounded" forum for "pastors, liturgists, musicians, and scholars," containing "practical wisdom about prayer, sacraments, and the community of the faithful – in short, worship." The blog has certainly evolved into a wonderful meeting place of minds, people of various points of view, engaged in mostly respectful dialogue on every imaginable subject related to the discipline. In the latter part of 2018, Ruff contacted a few dozen people from his address book and asked them to film themselves giving a "60-Second Homily" on a specific Sunday or feast day, and the series has, first under John Kyler and Nic Cortez and now Jason Horstman (SJU grad assistants) been online consistently since the first Sunday of Advent in 2018.

I've seen a lot of the posts, but not all, and know that familiar faces and names like Rita Ferrone and Rita Burns Senseman, Jaime Cortez and Craig Colson, Diana Macalintal and Kate Williams and Michael Silhavy have all contributed.

In October of last year, John Kyler contacted me on behalf of Fr. Anthony, asking if I'd be part of the new project. The concept, he said, was that each "preacher" would give a one-minute message based on the gospel, inspirational and "right-to-the-point." The part that really interested me was that the message be characterized by "compelling imagery, short anecdotes, and wit and humor," all of which appealed to my style. Later, I was assigned the 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time earlier this year, for which I wore a cheap crown and referred to King George III's song in the musical "Hamilton" to talk about the reign of God. So much fun.

I got my friend Mark Karney, a videographer at whose studio we have made several albums and who has made some catechetical videos from my songs for parish events, to help me realize some of my ideas. He made the videos way better than anything I could have done. I mean, it's the gospel, it's a minute-long commentary, not a Spielberg movie, but people are accustomed to a certain level of professionalism in video, and Mark definitely contributes that piece. Using green screen and background graphics and videos made the "sermon" more interesting and engaging, and Mark loves doing this kind of thing as much as I do.

Then, this summer, PrayTell asked me to do a handful more of these during the year, and I was delighted to be able to say "yes." Our second little sermon is on the parable of Lazarus and the rich man.

Here is the new video, if you haven't seen it. Note that the "famous" crown from my first 60-Second Sermon has been placed casually to my right on the bookshelf, in front of the "Atlas of the Bible." This was by popular demand, and I think it is a very great idea that references Alfred Hitchcock's style and will have filmmakers talking for generations. 😅 Click here to see the readings for this Sunday to which the video refers.

Pro tip: when you're green screening in a video, don't wear a shirt with green checks. 😑🙄 How was I to know? Who am I, Bill Maher? I'm not even Matt Maher. Luckily Mark is a genius and you can't tell.

I actually made two "test" videos to share with a small group of friends to get feedback on which idea they liked better, and I think they chose wisely. What I presented to the crew at PrayTell was pretty much the first of the two ideas I'd had, though I changed the ending at lunch on the day we taped it, right before heading over to Mark Karney's house to make the video. The second one did have its advocates, however.

In that second test video, I focused more on the responsorial psalm as a representation of the (fictional) Lazarus's faith, and wondered, "I wonder what the rich man is singing today?" The question is reminiscent of a (possibly apocryphal) Tom Conry story from the 1980s (but if it didn't happen, it should have), when Tom said at a conference that he had a gut sense of what was wrong with the church when he heard a church assembly of well-fed white suburbanites (like me) singing John Foley's "The Cry of the Poor" (like me) and thinking that they were singing about themselves (like...😳) Here's the rough video that I did not send to PrayTell.

And, because there's no end to this once you start, here's a third one that I wrote but didn't video. It was too late and I had already made the one you saw. That doesn't stop Brain from working. This is about 20% too long, so I would have had to do some serious editing to get it down to a minute.

LAZARUS, VERSION 3: 

We have a wealthy man, and outside his doorway, a poor sick man named Lazarus.
The rich fellow doesn’t see Lazarus.
He is selectively blind to Lazarus, to his pain, his need, his hunger.
I’m that rich guy.
No question that through very little fault of my own I have a good income,
Good health, good family, a home,
And once I get over the shock of realizing how that separates me from most of the world,
I have to start asking myself,
Who am I not seeing?
Who am I walking over to get comfortable again?
I hoard my time.
So when Mick corners me on Sunday morning with the list of his woes,
I can’t wait to break out of that conversation.
Lazarus was probably relieved to hear Jesus say that there’s no freaking way the rich can get inside the reign of God. Not even Abraham has strings to pull.
So whatever you’re rich in, start giving it away.
Do everything you can to wake up to people’s need.
Pour yourself into the breach.
That’s how the chasm between the heaven and hell inside us—and between us —starts to disappear. 

That's a little bit about my little contribution to Fr. Anthony Ruff's terrific project out of Collegeville, the 60-Second Sermons that are published on the blog every Monday for the following Sunday. Here is a link to the archive of the series, so you can click around and hear what different people did with different gospels. The wonderful richness of everyone's insight is really edifying in the best possible sense.

That's about it. This is important to me because the process makes me distill my insight, knowledge, and faith experience about a certain group of scriptures down to an essence of one minute, and so I have a responsibility to be both clear and evocative, using images and the resources of my personality to express truths that don't originate with me or belong to me. It's like both poetry and music: at the end, you want the piece to say more than you actually put into it, and you trust that it does because, first of all, you never had it all in the first place. Like the seed scattered in the field, it grows when we're asleep, it does our work in us, and we pass it on as best we can. It's just a story, from a man who told really good stories about a reality for which there really are no words: the reign of God.

I look forward to doing a few more of these. Keep listening, friends, and pass the stories along. If necessary, as St. Francis of Assisi said, use words!

Now, since all free video comes with a commercial (in this case, a PSA!) and these couple of Sundays give us prophet Amos as well as Lazarus and mammon, I wanted to offer you one of many ways that we can actually do something on behalf of the poor: support the Crop Hunger Walk in Barrington on October 13. Here is a link to my walker page: some choir members and other parishioners are walking the 10K in support of fighting hunger, with people from all the churches of Barrington. I will keep you in my prayers that Sunday at my masses, and hope that the word of God will always remind all of us to be doers as well as hearers. Crop Hunger Walk, an activity of Church World Service, does just that. Thanks for reading this far!

The parable of God's Name (C3L)

"Jesus Christ is the face of the Father’s mercy. These words might well sum up the mystery of the Christian faith." Misericordiae Vultus, 4/11/2015, Pope Francis

The Lord is kind and merciful. Full stop.

Is there any word from beyond which we need to hear any more during Lent? In these days when we are more aware than ever of how how impossibly vain we are and how futile our attempts to do good are, how far we are from what the gospel calls us to do and to be, what's more important to hear that those six words from the psalm Sunday? Or these, from the first reading: "I know well what (my people) are suffering. Therefore I have come down to rescue them."

Of course we want God to come down to rescue people from their suffering, and when triaging that, we hope God gets to us first, however self-focused and petty our misery. Meanwhile, we tend to carom between amazement and blame when we witness the suffering of others, still convinced in our heart of hearts that the Deuteronomist was right, that those who suffer are being punished for their sins, or for being infidels, or for being born in the southern hemisphere, and that those who are doing well are the blessed and chosen.

In these readings for the third Sunday of Lent in year C, it seems to me that we have a couple of parables of God's mercy, one from Luke and one from Exodus. We see, as it were, God's Son in one and God's name in the other, and from both of those there radiates the tenderness and compassion we hear proclaimed for our violent, exploitative, and recidivist race, the spark of whose interior life nevertheless shines with the very image and likeness of the creator.

Reports come in to Jesus asking for his judgment on an item heard on Herod-the-Fox News, about an abomination perpetrated by the sadistic Roman governor, apparently murdering some Galileans in the middle of some religious rituals. Quickly losing patience with their bewilderment, Jesus throws in another story making the rounds, about the deaths of eighteen people when a tower collapsed at a site near Jerusalem. His point was not to shock the crowd into silence, but to make them stop wondering whether the victims were somehow at fault for what happened, more worthy of their terrible fate than other Jews including his listeners. The question is, how did he get from their misfortune to "unless you repent, your fate will be the same"? Is he saying that repenting of sin will render the penitent immune from disaster?

It's hard to think so, looking at the arc of history and the rest of the gospel kerygma. But what if by "repent" he continues to mean "get your meaning and destiny from God," and start believing and living in the kingdom? Stop believing in Rome, and start believing in your own God, in solidarity, community, and social equality. Start believing in a God who doesn't prevent disaster but is present to disaster, and become agents of God's presence with your healing and hospitality.

Jesus turns to a parable, as he always seems to do when discursive language isn't enough. When we hear this parable, we often want to turn it into an allegory. Who does the fig tree represent? Who is the planter? Who is the gardener? The trouble with an allegory is, if you get a character wrong the first time around, it blows the meaning of the whole story. Are we the fig tree and is God the planter? (Psalm 80 and other scriptures could support this reading.) Maybe. That might fit the "angry God" theory, as though Jesus and God disagreed on the fate of the world, and Jesus talks God out of chopping us down. Is that how we want to think of God? Is it possible for the Father and Son to be so out of sync with each other? I can't imagine it.

But maybe the planter is just "the way everything is." The planter is the law of entropy. Everything deteriorates to chaos. The planter is "might makes right" and "survival of the fittest" and the Pax Romana. The planter is the way all of us look at the wreck of our lives, at the destruction wrought by our culture, when we take the time to assess it and admit our complicity. The planter is the voice that says, "It was worthless anyway, throw it out. Let them die. They deserved it. Life is futility, chaos. We bring order. Rip it all out and we'll try something else." And maybe, just maybe, God, and therefore Jesus, is the gardener. When we turn back to the values of our culture for the thousandth time, when we refuse to believe in peace and equality, when we work and vote and support terrible, divisive ideas that take life away from people, that steal from the poor and give to the rich, even after decades of listening the gospel and singing the songs and going through the rituals, and we're right at the place where no one would blame God or Jesus or anyone else from throwing the book at us and letting us experience some of the very suffering we've caused the world, God steps between the victim and the axe, the culture and its victims. Christ the gardener takes the maligned tree tenderly in infinitely merciful fingers and says, "Wait a minute. Here I am. Let me work with it again." Here's someone, finally, who can make something out of nothing, a world out of the dust that we are. Someone believes that we have possibility. Can we remember that touch?

In the Exodus story, God sees the way things are, the "normalcy of civilization" in Crossan's wonderful phrase, and comes to Moses in a sign that breaks open the possibility that "normalcy" isn't the way things are going to be any more. There is a bush. It is on fire. And it is not burning. There's something you don't see every day. God sends Moses, a renegade slave hiding from a murder rap, back to the seat of power, to Pharaoh, to demand the release of the Hebrews. The conversation around the name of God, which Moses thinks would be a good idea to know, since the Egyptians know so many gods that they're bound to ask him which one sent him, is exasperating in how little it reveals. In other words, it tells the truth. "You don't know me. You can't even imagine my name." That's one way of reading the unpronounceable, unknown name Moses receives. Another way, one excellent article suggests, is that the text is in the future tense: "I WILL BE THAT WHICH I WILL BE." The (Jewish) commentator says that the future tense is used in the Hebrew, which the commentator finds interesting because it's the only form of the verb that doesn't specify gender. "The people will come to  know God through their unfolding experiences together...(The name) seems to tease us, saying, 'You want to know my name, just wait and see!' While God is absolute, there are no divine absolutes; each of us, in our own time, will come to know God in our own way." (The article is here.) (And another good one.)

In the gospel, Jesus reminds us that repenting is for everyone. And Jesus doesn't mean beating our breast and being miserable: he means turning in another direction, he means turning toward the Father, and he has already said that he is showing the direction ("follow me"), ditto his honor-bestowing mother ("Do whatever he says") and Father ("Listen to him.") The baptismal message of Lent is: God keeps coming after us. Stick together. Wash off the "way things have to be" and start living in the new world. Stick together. Take care of each other. Make peace through your just living.

See, God is the protagonist in the universe. It is God who is acting from utterly beyond all knowing but more intimately than we can imagine. We are players in God's world. Or would be, if we weren't constantly being distracted by the counterfeits of peace, safety, and power that are being pushed on us by "the way things are," the normalcy of civilization. That is Egypt. That is Rome. That is empire.  Our refusal to turn, or blindness, or fear, whatever it is, is what is making us so unhappy. The "other god" demands unanimity or destruction, cooperation or the cross, submission or slavery, participation or marginalization. The One who reveals self in action, "I AM WHO I SHALL BE," invites us to walk through the cleansing water to the margins of civilization and do something new. Together. With Jesus, the "face of the Father's mercy," we place ourselves between the fig tree and the axe, and ask for a little time to work on things.

Here's what we're singing this weekend at St. Anne:

Entrance song: Lead Me, Guide Me

Kyrie: Daigle-Kendzia "Lead Us to the Water"

Psalm 103: The Lord Is Kind and Merciful (Cotter)

Gospel acclamation and General Intercessions: Mass of Christ the Servant (still in beta)

Preparation Rite: Be Merciful (Haugen)

Mass of Creation

Lamb of God: Mass of St. Aidan

Communion: Christ Be Our Light

Closing: Amazing Grace

Beam and Splinter (C8O)

My first thought while considering the gospel this week was to advise you to take its warning seriously when reading this blog: "Can a blind person guide a blind person? Will not both fall into a pit?" The message isn't "don't read this blog," it's "this blog isn't the gospel, so exercise discretion and use discernment."

As I've grown older, and a little more open to criticism and other points of view, I've more and more come to understand the great wisdom in the "beam in your own eye" gospel adage. Of course, there is a certain irony in it that is inescapable: you always hear it from someone else, and so it's probably generated from inside that person's conscience, that is, the beam in the accuser's eye noticing the beam in yours. The point is that we all have beams. Some of them are light beams, and they actually help us see our own faults in the faults of others. Because of mimetic desire, we jump at the chance to distance ourselves from the wrongdoing we see, while neglecting to accept the truth that what we see in the other is a reflection of something within us.

Relationships with friends and family may provide an example. Let me make one up, this is completely fiction. But let's say your brother and his wife have an argument. I know your brother and his wife. They're both really good people, altruistic, hard-working, fun to be around. But your brother's wife thinks he's too critical of her: she tells him from time to time that he always finds fault

with what she says, is constantly correcting her, and she finds this wearisome and hurtful. Your brother, meanwhile, is thinking to himself, "Luke 6: 41-42," but doesn't dare say it because your sister-in-law will look it up and begin divorce proceedings.

The thing is, they're both right, probably, to some extent. But no matter how big the beam is, the story doesn't end there. Dig deeper and what do we find? All kinds of childhood hurts, lack of affirmation, denial of worth, the imitation of learned behaviors of criticism. We all do this: we try to make ourselves feel better by making someone else feel worse, and often by doing the same things we are accusing the other of doing. We can't help it. We were made to imitate others. When we act in self-defense we tend to use the weapons at hand.

I'm going to let go of this now because I'm not a psychologist and I'm not even that good an observer of human nature, I'm just trying to know myself better and I know that I do criticize in others what I don't like in myself. When I look back even at older posts in this blog at snarky and read the nasty things I've said about this priest or that politician, I'm shocked sometimes to realize that there are traits in me that are exactly what I was criticizing in my splinter-afflicted target.

Maybe those beams are all splinters? Maybe we're all the sum of all the treatment and mistreatment we've received in our lives, and some of us (I include myself in this group) have been unreflective about how that pain has influenced our interaction with the world, with the people we know and the decisions we make in our lives.

I'm guessing that to God, they're pretty much all splinters, and God is like a grandma who loves us so much, sees us with the finger-pointing and name-calling, and can't do much more than shake her head, get us a cold Pepsi and some fried chicken, and change the subject so we learn to see each other again as siblings instead of feral beasts or sworn enemies. And that's why Jesus wants to stop learning from each other, but to learn from and imitate him, because he imitates God who is "kind to the ungrateful and wicked." To learn from Jesus is this regard is its own reward, because as we heard in last Sunday's gospel, "...the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you." Not only will our lives be full of the divine love that gives rather than the mimetic divisiveness that seeks to destroy the other in order to build ourselves up: Jesus promises that "when fully trained, every disciple will be like his teacher."

As I said earlier about the Sermon on the Plain, after his Nazareth sermon about his vision of his ministry and vision of the arrival of the jubilee, Jesus gathered disciples, embarked on a campaign of miracles and exorcism (healing and liberation) and now takes the time to do some mystagogy with them on what all that means. They, and we, need new hearts to understand what we are seeing and hearing in Jesus. We have no other experience of someone who acts not to be admired or to divide and conquer enemies. We've lived by the rules of "how things have to be," of the normalcy of civilization for so long, that this surprising announcement of a new, peaceful kingdom is befuddling because we want it to become like all the kingdoms we've known: one that defeats enemies and makes us rich and powerful. It is not, and will never be like this, not in our world, not even in our homes. It is a place and time and method of invitation, collaboration, and self-gift. It is a reign of love by a Father-God or, if it works better for you overall (it does for me), a Grandma-God, who gathers rather than rules, who feeds rather than conquers, wait us out rather than gets angry.

I want to get inside of being my grandma. I'm the right age, anyway. I want to listen to the gospel, and finally act my age. I hope you don't have to wait this long!

Here's what we're singing at St. Anne this weekend:

Entrance Song: We Are Called (Haas)
Penitential Rite: (Kendzia/Daigle) "Lead Us to the Water"
Psalm 1: Roots in the Earth (Cooney) not the psalm of the day, but a wisdom psalm that summons us to delight in good and grow where the nutrients of the soul are most abundant
Celtic Alleluia (O'Carroll/Walker)
Preparation of Gifts: Were I the Perfect Child of God (John Bell) This charming text and accompanying Scottish melody seem wonderfully suited to today's liturgy, tacitly acknowledging both the faults have and the grace that helps us correct them. 
Eucharistic Acclamations: Mass of Joy and Peace (Alonso)
Lamb of God and Communion: May We Be One (Daigle/Cooney)
Recessional: Halle, Halle, Halle (Bell, arr. Haugen) To bury the Alleluia until Easter!

My enemy: God's beloved (C7O)

The readings this weekend are amazing, particularly the graphic scene in the first reading from 1 Samuel in which David refuses to kill his enemy Saul when it would have been both easy and expedient, and the gospel that continued Luke’s Sermon on the Plain with its discomfiting if familiar urging that we love our enemies, stop judging, and do to others as we would have them do for us.


The last time we had these readings was in 2007, and my friend Rev. Cyprian Consiglio OSB Cam. was visiting us and giving a little concert in the church. He said mass a couple times that Sunday. He began the homily with a story that gave us an immediate glimpse into where he might be headed, a story about a prior at the abbey where he attended seminary admonishing the body of seminarians never to use the words, “What Jesus really meant was...” Obviously, none of us really knows “what Jesus meant to say.” What we know is what is in the gospel, which is what Luke meant to say, and even that is under considerable scrutiny from divergent sources and innumerable cultural and linguistic variants through the years. Last week, for instance, there was an entire meme on Facebook and Twitter on the difference between what the Gospel said ("Woe to the rich") and what homilists said in their homilies ("Jesus didn't really mean 'Woe to the rich.')

But in the context of this gospel, Cyprian was clearly headed in a specific direction. Rather than try to pasteurize (and thus bowdlerize) the gospel command to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us, he told us to take it for what it is: the heart of the gospel, the Spirit-empowered nurturing of divine identity. To love our enemies is to be like God, who loves the good and bad alike. Cyprian went on to mention not only René Girard, but also the wonderful theologian James Allison in his homily, so I was completely in heaven, and thrilled that at least one other person in the room was resonating with what I was hearing. What a feeling of solidarity!

That same evening at St. Anne, a visiting Congolese priest, Father Mokucha, began his homily with Mahatma Gandhi and ended with Martin Luther King, and even asked for personal witness from anyone in the assembly who had experience “loving those who hate” us. A lovely woman, who looked like she might be a mother of middle-school-age children (read, younger than I) talked about knowing that a friend of hers gossiped about her behind her back, and she wept when she talked about how much that hurt her, because she wanted this person so badly as a friend. She said that the way she tried to love this woman was to be extra kind to her children when they came over to play, which was remarkably touching and perfect for all of us to hear. All in all, that day, twelve years ago, was a good day for preaching. You might say, “perfect.”

I think we just try to keep what's happening in Jesus's Galilean ministry in front of us as we hear these gospels. He is baptized by John, undergoes some kind of validating transformation in which he understands the depth of God's love for him and, one must conclude, everyone. He is the "beloved son," in whom God is well pleased. John's baptism was exactly about washing off the contamination of empire and returning to the Promised Land, the "kingdom of heaven", by passing through the waters of Jordan. It was a rejection of the values of the conqueror, and being washed in the values of the Torah and the prophets. Then Jesus is driven "by the spirit" into the desert for his retreat, the testing and sussing out of his mission, at the climax of which he gives "messiah lessons" to the Tempter, describing the difference between human ways, the ways of empire, and the ways of God. He returns to Nazareth and gives that startling homily in the synagogue, opening the word of the prophet Isaiah, declaring it fulfilled "here, on this day," and then explicating it in such a way as to offer the freedom and healing of God's intervention to the whole world, not only to the "chosen." Avoiding an assassination attempt, he moves to Capernaum, calls followers, and begins a campaign of healing and exorcism in Galilee. Finally, here, where we are these Sundays, he takes to openly teaching about the reign of God, how it is not what anyone expects, how it begins and ends with love freely exchanged among all as unlimited currency, available to all who seek it from the infinite source that is Abba. When even this does not shake off the habits of empire for want of power and status, Jesus resorts to parables, and finally a march to Jerusalem, where the Luke's story really begins, and then begins again, in Acts of the Apostles.

More on "Even sinners do the same" (Don't the pagans do as much?) Part 1     Part 2
More on "Enemy love"

About a year ago, I wrote the following about my song “Be Perfect,” based on the Matthaean version of the same Jesus sayings. I’ll just quote it here as I close, because it contains both my thoughts on this text and my own inspiration for writing the song. Maybe you’ll find some hope or inspiration in it as well. "Be merciful" is the way Luke puts the same thought: mercy is the defining quality of God, which of course doesn't define at all. As we reflected recently for an entire year, Jesus is the "face of God's mercy," the icon of the invisible God. "Perfect" refers to the mercy of God which treats everyone equally, no outsiders. Jesus keeps coming back to this: love of God and love of neighbor are the same thing. As we hear later in Luke in the parable of the Good Samaritan, mercy is as mercy does. We become neighbor when we "do" neighbor.

“Be Perfect” is a song I wrote from the intersection of the parish travails of a good friend and colleague of mine and my reading of the French-American anthropologist Réné Girard. Part of Girard’s thesis about the origin of societies and religion in violence, a thesis generally termed “mimetic desire,” is that we don’t want things in themselves, but we want them because others have them. We learn to desire from others, and want what others have simply because they have things. 

Girard’s theory, while complex and necessarily oversimplified here, is that this desire escalates into violence unless a “scapegoating mechanism” is triggered, and the violence within society can be focused on a single person or group and thus released. Girard, a Catholic, saw the Paschal Mystery as the way out of the cycle of escalating violence and scapegoating by revealing our violence for what it is, an assault upon an innocent victim. Scapegoating only works by associating God with the accusers, by making a demon of the one cast away. But in the Christian story, Jesus is revealed in the resurrection to be both innocent and the Son of God. The false religion of sacrifice is revealed for the murderous thing it is. 

By refocusing our desire after the desire of Jesus, to be like the Father who loves unconditionally and “makes the rain fall and sun shine upon the just and the unjust,” we can be part of the emergence of the reign of God. The passage upon which the refrain is based, taken from the Sermon on the Mount, is almost invariably watered down by homilists afraid to imagine that it might be possible to act as Jesus does, and imitate the perfect love of God. There is a certain sense in which the admonition to “be perfect” has been understood in a semi-Pelagian way, that is, that we need to keep practicing our spiritual exercises until we get them right, and arrive at some state of sinlessness reserved for the true spiritual Olympian athlete. This sort of thinking denies both the perfection of divine love, which loves us right in the midst of our sinfulness, and the divine initiative, by which we mean that grace precedes and enables the response of repentance. 

But there’s something even more important here: to be perfect means to be like God, to make being-like-God the object of our desire of our loving imitation. And this is not being like just any God, but being like the God of Jesus, who “makes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike.” To keep Jesus’s admonition before us to “be perfect” is to resolve not to forget the admonition to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us. It keeps the church honest, and helps us to recall that it’s not enough to “be nice” and to love each other in our families and communities of intention. The gospel call is to love everyone with the divine love, the love that puts the good of the other first, even if, especially if, the other is our enemy. ...

Full disclosure: let me be the first to admit that this "love your enemies" stuff, hard as it is to even say the words, it's WAY harder to actually practice. We live in such a fractious culture. If the world scene weren't dangerous enough, even within the American sphere, even within the church sphere, it is hard to love one's enemies. In church, we shouldn't even have any! But it goes back to the mimetic rivalry process: we define ourselves and who we are against other people: I'm not a Mormon; I'm not Muslim, I'm not a Leninist. But it gets even crazier, right? I'm not a Trumpster, I'm not a socialist, I'm not an EWTN Catholic, I'm not a liberal, I'm not 1%, and so on. Turns out we're enemies in some way with people within our own families, and every conversation is either walking on eggs or full of vitriol and expletives. How do we stop that? How can I even say I follow the gospel if my heart is riddled with the cancer of violence, even if it's just violent or abusive speech?

One thing I think we can do is "first do no harm." "Love your enemies" might start with "don't kill anybody." Full stop. Most of us think that's something we do already, but we might take a second and look at the politicians and policies we support and see whether even there we fail against this precept of the kingdom of God. Avoiding "near occasions of sin" is an old expression we used to describe a therapy of repentance. If you're an ax murderer, for instance, avoid hardware stores. But it might mean avoiding Facebook, or Twitter, or "comments" after online news stories. I've taken to just deleting people from my "friends" list who are recidivist haters, whose only method of discourse is ad hominem attack. I can understand how this might make me vulnerable to confirmation bias with the people I have left, but in all honesty, I've unfriended fewer than 1% of my contacts, so there's that. I still have to try to stop wigging out at every (perceived) insane thing that our current President, beloved child of God that he is, blasts out on social media. Unfortunately, it's not quite as easy to filter out news from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, or Mar-a-Lago. But I can refrain from commenting, especially when using certain emoji to help make my point.

Anyway, friends, let’s get out there and “be perfect." Or merciful, if that suits you better! Every journey starts with a single step. One less cyber-finger, maybe.

Here's what we're singing this weekend:

Entrance: The Call Is Clear and Simple (text: Ruth Duck, PASSION CHORALE) This text by the late  Ruth Duck made me do a double take the first time I read through it, and it continues to both challenge and attract me, so I'm unleashing it on the congregation to sit with it as they hear the readings. Love, however "clear and simple" the gospel call, isn't easy, and there's not really a clear map about how we do it right. After our Liturgical Composers Forum sessions with Bernadette Farrell and Kate Williams' recent article in GIA Quarterly about the women's perspective in songwriting, I realized (rightly or wrongly) that maybe a man could not have written this song. I couldn't have, anyway. So maybe this is a good thing.
Psalm 103: The Lord Is Kind (Cooney, OCP) My setting uses the 19th century James Montgomery text that Stephen Schwartz appropriated for Godspell.



Presentation of Gifts: Be Perfect (more on this blog page)
Communion: Be Merciful (Haugen) (YouTube audio above)
Recessional: Let There Be Peace on Earth (Jackson/Miller) This camp song from the 1940s by the once-married couple moves the talk of love and mercy to the global view. I attended a Unity church in St. Louis with Terry a few times, and the service would invariably end with this song and with the minister and his wife walking down the aisle to the doors smiling and reaching out to the people who had attended. My only wish is that someone would make a definitive text so that there aren't so many different versions of the "with God as our Father/Brothers all are we" in the books. People have a hard enough time reading a hymnal. Why make it harder with alternative texts printed in the book?

The world turned upside down (C6O)

I've been writing this blog since 2016, though some of the content was borrowed and expanded from older versions of my writing online back in the days of Apple's "iWeb" pages. Some of my oldest blog pages date to 2006! But it still occurs occasionally that I come up against a Sunday or, in this case, as series of Sundays which I have not written about before. In 2019, we have the 6th, 7th, and 8th Sundays in Ordinary Time, Year C. The first two haven't been in the liturgical calendar since 2007, and the last one not since 2001. That wasn't before I was using the internet with a noisy modem, but it was before I had even heard the word "blog." Thus in the hope of trying to write something on each Sunday of the church year in order to maybe someday write a book, here we go with some thoughts on the 6th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C, or in my personal shorthand (which I recommend to you), C06O.

Since the beginning of Luke's narrative of the Galilean ministry of Jesus in chapter 3 of his gospel, beginning with his baptism in the Jordan and his desert retreat, but for our purposes from the sermon in the synagogue in Nazareth (Lk. 4:16-13), the author of the third gospel is spelling out in story after story exactly what Jesus believes the mission of God to be. In the simplest terms, the care of God is showered upon all, every person is beloved, the blessings of jubilee are meant for the whole world. But this is an "opt in" jubilee, and those who have experienced bounty in their lives, or some other manifestation of jubilee economics, are bound by gratitude and family-love to share that with others. We are not to see this jubilee as meant for ourselves, or our family, or our nation alone, but for the whole human family. Jesus, soon along with the disciples, moves about the region, preaching the "good news to the poor," exorcising demons (a liberating practice which we would come to spiritualize as "redemption"), and healing (which we would come to term "salvation"). The fragment of Isaiah 61 upon which his sermon was based was meant to call to mind the whole sweep of sabbath and jubilee economics (Lev. 25: 8-24) as the intent of the "kingdom of heaven," which we, again, came to think of as a place other than where-we-are, a place where God lives. It took a while for us to start to understand that things are just fine in heaven: it's here, on earth, now, where we need to do the work of Christ. Earth too is the realm, or kingdom, or empire of God as well, only God is less like an emperor or king than the head of a family, Jesus tells us. Jesus will show the way. "Follow me," he says, to get inside this new thing God is doing. We'll bring the others along too.

Unlike Matthew who, for his more Jewish audience, edited his narrative to show Jesus as a new Moses and his followers as a new Israel (and think of "new" here as "new creation," rather than as a retread of the old), Luke wants to show Jesus as a new (different, not rivalrous or a retread) Caesar, using the infancy narrative to situate him in the Roman empire, using vocabulary ("gospel" and "peace") that was the provenance of Caesar Augustus to describe the birth of Christ, along with the ancestry of David to place him within the mythology of Israel's "once and future king." (Crossan & Borg, The First Christmas.) Luke, whose gospel continues into the second book that we know as Acts, has already seen the outcome of story of Jesus, the crucifixion and resurrection, Pentecost, the conversion of Saul, and the spread of the Way from Damascus to Rome and beyond. Among those claiming the name Christ, the titles of the emperor have been turned over to Jesus: Lord, Son of God, Prince of Peace, Light of the World. But Luke also knows that Jesus is a radically different "emperor" and radically different "God" from the emperor in Rome. Luke in his lifetime has already seen the world turned upside down, or as he puts it in the "Magnificat" overture to his gospel, "(God) has torn the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty."

Our gospel this Sunday begins the "sermon on the plain." Where Matthew has Jesus do this earliest bit of teaching in an extended "sermon on the mount," pointing to the story of Moses giving to Israel the book of the law from God, Luke has the sermon take place on "level ground," a different way of seeing God and people together more in line with Jesus's egalitarian proclamation of the jubilee. These first few verses of the sermon on the plain are made up of Luke's four beatitudes, followed by four woes.

When John Kyler called me late last year to take part in the PrayTell blog's new series, "60 Second Sermons" for C year that began this past Advent, he asked me to do the sermon for this Sunday, and when I saw the gospel, I thought it was worth spending the minute tying in Luke's beatitudes with the "reversal of worlds" theme of the gospel, and also saying a word about the influence of the Deuteronomist on much of the Septuagint and therefore on the evangelists. I think we need to be careful reading these texts that we read them with the heart of Jesus, who had no problem casting aside texts and traditions that he felt did not adequately or fully represent the God whom he represented. Soon after today's gospel pericope in Luke comes the parable of the new wine and old wineskins: Jesus knows that a new proclamation of God's favor will require a new attitude about old presumptions garnered from the law and the prophets. This is not to say that it all has to be cast aside. Rather, we need to acknowledge that the counteroffensive mounted by human culture against the ideas of mutual love, hospitality to all, share resources, not to mention enemy love, will make its appearance in the Bible, right in the very place where the countercultural jubilee is announced. We want walls. We want a god who hates the same people we do. The violent god of the Caesars makes his appearance in the Bible, all the way to the book of Revelation, where he is made up to look like Jesus. But we need to keep in mind as we read that that Jesus was clear that violence is not the answer, that the sword must be put away, that service is the mark of leadership, not coercion.

The language of relationship between the god-emperors of Mesopotamia, the Assyrians, Babylonians, possibly the Sumerians before them, and kings and peoples they conquered, is found in covenants that still exist and can be read in various references. As we read them, we see how they are imitated by the covenant language of Deuteronomy. "If you do as I command," the Assyrian god-king will proclaim, that is, pay the tributes, work the land, obey the occupying forces, then your harvests will be plenty, your children happy, your barns full, your wives and daughters your joy. But if you do not do as I command, then fire will rain down on your fields, the armies of Assyria will devour you like locusts, your children split open on the rocks, your wives and daughters will be our slaves. You get the idea. Compare this to, for instance, the language in Deuteronomy 28 and 29 (and other places.) Dead ringer.

The thing is, the Bible, with the influence of the Deuteronomist front and center, is how we learned what God is like. Do good, God loves you. Do bad, you go to hell. Simple as that. Blessings for those who love God, curses for those who don't. We then started looking at the world as it is, and started making judgments on ourselves and others about who was blessed. That person has money, status, good trajectory. That person must be blessed by God. That person is sick, lost a family, had her house burned down, had a child run away. That person must have done something to deserve it. Even though that kind of judgement doesn't jibe with the teachings of Jesus about who God is, we clung to it. It works for us: we're blessed for doing good, cursed for doing evil.

There's a huge hole in the logic, though, the more we look at the world. The author of the book of Job points it out clearly. As one theologian put it, after Job, the Deuteronomist should have been erased once and for all, but it didn't happen. In fact, not even Jesus could put the Deuteronomist to bed, because the Deuteronomist is what we want to believe. But God is not like that. "Blessed are the poor," Jesus says. "Blessed are those who mourn." Jesus turns our idea of who's blessed upside down. In Luke he even makes sure we get the point by stating the other side of the coin: "Woe to the rich!" They're not blessed after all, it appears. "Woe to those who have enough to eat." However it appears, God is not on the side of those with more than their share, as long as there are those who are underserved, hungry, unhappy. God is with those people. That is what "blessed" means. (Woody Allen, I think, also struggled with this reality in his brilliant and underrated movie Crimes and Misdemeanors, which asks the question "Why do good things happen to bad people, and vice versa, and is there any punishment in this life for the most heinous of crimes (murder)?"

Jesus turns our view of who is blessed (to whom God is near and present) upside down. It has nothing to do with status, well-being, or the luck of the draw. Our psalm and first reading today, like the gospel, present what seems to be a dualistic view of life: good people prosper, bad people are ruined. But maybe it's possible to see the dualism not as a reflection of God, but as a reflection of bad choices we make. It's not God who does the cursing, who makes life woe for those who choose wealth, power, comfort, and influence, but rather it is a result of the choices they make. The thing is, this seems to go against our experience as well, if we are looking through the lens of the reign of the world (as Ezekiel puts it, the one "whose heart turns away from the Lord,"), and not of the reign of God,  (the one who "who trusts in the Lord.") We don't see, in the first case, the influence we have upon the whole human family, the damage we cause by our self-interest. In the reign of God, it is always the other upon whom the gaze of our concern lies because we imitate God in loving all people, in wanting the good of all people, not just of ourselves, our family, our country.

This was the lesson of the Nazareth sermon, when Jesus's explication Isaiah savaged the expectations of his listeners, people who up to that moment had been enthralled with his preaching. They wanted confirmation bias, what they got was the gospel: the announcement of a new empire, a new king in town, who not only wasn't going to do what was expected, he wasn't even going to be a king in any recognizable way. These good citizens of Judea (and Rome) wanted nothing to do with Jesus's global view of God. They showed him to the door and then to a precipice in what seems to be a literary rehearsal of a scapegoat ritual (from the rite of atonement). Literary, because we know that there weren't any cliffs in Nazareth. Rehearsal, because we know, with Luke, that even though Jesus "passed through their midst" unharmed, there was going to come a day when he would not, and for the same reasons.

What's the lesson for us? Well, we could start by not thinking of people who are rich, well fed, happy, and unharmed as "blessed." People like most of us. We might be lucky, but blessed has nothing to do with it. "Blessed" has a different role call. The rich, well fed, and happy might be blessed when they learn to share their bounty in significant ways with those who are poor, hungry, and sorrowful. Otherwise, they're not blessed at all, at least not in those qualities. Jesus has introduced us to a world turned upside-down, where the greatest among us serve the rest, where power serves, where God, who is holy, goes to dine with sinners. We need to stop thinking like they want us to think, that we are nothing more than what we can produce and purchase, that we need to buy more things and better things to have self-esteem, that our value resides in where we were born, the color of our skin, the things we own, who our friends are. We need to stop thinking that might makes right, that "he who has the gold makes the rules," that "God is on our side," and not on the other side.

Jesus says that God is for everybody. God is like a Father, and we are all related and need to take care of each other. Jesus shows up our gods for what they are: images of ourselves, the petty despots and vengeful judges that we want to be, vested with the guns-blazing, golden-armored authority of the divine. "Blessed are the poor" means, "Think different, my friends. Follow me. We're going in the other direction. Don't be afraid, I'll go first. It's going to be better than you can imagine."

I'll leave you with the video clip of my "Sixty-second sermon." I would have started with it, but then why would you take six thousand seconds to read the rest of this stuff?

Here's what we're singing at St. Anne this week, if, for the first time in a month, crappy weather doesn't 86 rehearsal for the choir:

Entrance: How Can I Keep from Singing Part of the struggle is just to keep remembering who we are, the children of God, all of us beloved together. What makes it good news is hearing in some broken part of our lives that the doctor is in the house. We're all broken, and God is faithful, and in Christ, God in present to us in each other.

Psalm 1: Roots in the Earth more on the psalm paraphrase here, in another blog post. 

Celtic Alleluia

Preparation of Gifts: There Is a River (Manion) Tim's great gospel song of divine solidarity with human beings turns Psalm 46 is a musical post-it note that reminds us that we have nothing to fear when we stick together in our quest for peace and the promise of new world right here, on this planet.

Eucharistic Acclamations: Mass of Joy and Peace (Alonso)

Communion: Do Not Fear to Hope more here in another blog post

Recessional: Canticle of the Turning ...because the Magnificat is part of the Lucan overture to the whole gospel, and nothing says "the emperor is a liar and a phony" like the song of an unmarried, pregnant teenage girl who teaches her son what power and glory really look like at the hearth of a little house in a backwater town in a third-rate province of the Roman Empire. More here in another blog post.

Not far (B31O)

Back in January, when we first met Jesus at the beginning of Mark after his baptism, desert retreat, and the arrest of John, his first words declared the heart of his mission: "Time’s up! God’s kingdom is here. Change your life and believe the Message." (1:15, The Message) The "kingdom," the reign of God, is the first thing on his mind. In those three terse sentences, the urgency of his mission and the sea change of loyalties that it represents pops out at us. In Sunday's gospel (31st Sunday in Ordinary Time) Jesus tells a scribe, a member of a class or guild with which he is often at odds, that he is "not far from the reign of God." What did he mean? I think, to begin with, we need to revisit the motto of that first campaign and consider what Jesus is doing, and maybe discover what it has to do with us.

Jesus knew John had been onto something, and he had undergone the baptism of John in solidarity with John's insight. It seems to me that John and Jesus were in touch with a feeling in the populace, now under Roman rule after laboring under a succession of conquerors over the last three centuries or so, that things shouldn't be like this. Something's wrong. People had an instinct that what God had promised them as a people had to be more than being another revenue source for another conquering emperor. Their story was a story of freedom. The Jordan River was a symbol of the boundary between slavery, nationlessness, and freedom. God had brought them here. What was this new hell?

John had felt it strongly, and preached the arrival of "another" who would put things right on God's behalf. "His winnowing fan is in his hand," John preached, "and his ax is at the root of the tree." John’s cry of “Repent” was picked up by Jesus with perhaps a playfully seditious hashtag: “Believe the gospel,” that is, the good news of the god-emperor’s victory—only Jesus meant an emperor quite different from Tiberius. Their riverside exhortation to “repent” was a shout almost of imminent danger: you’re going the wrong way! No wonder you’re confused and unhappy. Turn around! Follow me! We’re going to the reign of (a different) God...and it’s where you belong.

Because of the way we experience the gospel liturgically, we might not be aware of where this story fits into the overall narrative of Mark. Like the gospel of the first Sunday of Advent last year, which we experienced before Christmas, the gospels from now through the end of the year happen near the end of Mark, between what we call Palm Sunday and Holy Thursday. After the entry into Jerusalem "cleansing of the Temple" in chapter 11, a series of confrontations happens as events during the lead up to Passover tumble toward the arrest and crucifixion. A delegation of party leaders question Jesus's authority to undertake these deeply symbolic political gestures and continue teaching. He silences them, and follows up with a thinly veiled allegory about their collusion in the conspiracy to kill him, at the same time putting to the lie their imagining that they, and not God, are in control of his life and death. Some Pharisees and representatives of the puppet king confront him about a legal matter, the payment of taxes, that could put him at odds with the agents of the empire, and again, he silences them with a reminder of their amnesia over their actual "lord/Lord." Sadduccees try to sink him with what they think is an hilarious rebuke of the idea of resurrection, and he reminds them that God has nothing to do with death, is not in rivalry with death at all, that God is the God of life and the living. Into this matrix of conflict and duplicity, a scribe enters the story with a question about the Torah: "What is the greatest commandment of the law?"

Unlike Luke's version of the story (chapter 10), the scribe is apparently not trying to outwit Jesus, but to engage him, as scholars do, on an important question of the law. What teachers (rabbis) do is interpret the law. They debate interpretations, size them up, weigh them against each other. From the conversation that ensues, it appears that in Mark's story, the scribe really wants to know, and has no agenda other than a rabbi-to-rabbi conversation.

When Jesus tells the scribe that he is "not far from the reign of God," the story harkens back to the choice between emperors, between Caesar and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. "You're seeing the choice clearly," Jesus seems to be saying. "You're not framing it, like some of the rest of the leaders of the people, in terms of law, or ritual, or birth, or status in the world. You understand that love of God and love of people are divine attributes, aspects of Godself, inseparable. The proof of the one is the authenticity of the other.


In Luke 10, where the third evangelist tells the version of the story he knows and wants to record, the scribe is trying to justify himself after Jesus’s response, so he goes on with a follow up question: “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus’ response is the parable of the Good Samaritan. Refusing to quantify what constitutes a neighbor in legalistic terms (how many people can I get away with excluding?), Jesus leaves the scribe and his other listeners with the familiar parable, and says, “So, which of these was neighbor to the man?” Unable to even spit out the word “Samaritan,” the unlucky scribe says, “I suppose it was the one who stopped and took care of him.”

Jesus’s response, “Go and do likewise,” rings down the ages to say that we become neighbors by acting like neighbors, and nothing else: citizenship, ethnic group, kinship, no other criterion other than compassionate action on behalf of the other makes a neighbor. Jesus’s reimagining of the Law as a binary “Love God entirely, and love your neighbor like you love yourself,” infuses the whole of Christian scripture with its vitality. Matthew recasts the second part as part of the Sermon on the Mount when he states in an axiom as old already as Hammurabi that one should “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This ethic’s universality among world religions and even secular ethics is remarkable, and even so is not without its critics. (“You should do unto others the way that they would like to be done to,” or “It would be better cast in the negative, ‘Do to no one what you would not want done to yourself.’” Taking issue is clearly easier than taking a chance and opting in.)

“Love God, love your neighbor” also echoes the double chiasmus of the familiar song of the angels at the birth of the Messiah, remembered each time we sing the “Glory to God” on Sunday, that is, that

GLORIA —> IN EXCELSIS —> DEO
PAX —> IN TERRA —> HOMINIBUS (BONAE VOLUNTATIS)

or, GLORY —> IN THE HIGHEST —> TO GOD
(is) PEACE —> ON EARTH —> AMONG PEOPLE OF GOD’S FAVOR

which means everybody. The incarnation means that God’s boundless love for people has overflowed into the human flesh and blood of the Messiah, and the mission of making a world of people aware of their interrelatedness and belovedness to God is everyone’s task. In the song over Bethlehem, the angels tell the good news that the glory of God is made manifest by the mutual shalom of the human family.

In those tension filled and conflict-fraught days between the entry into Jerusalem and the cleansing of the temple, two rabbis confer over an opinion of interpretation of the Torah. In the scribe’s response to Jesus’s formulation of the greatest commandment of the law, by looking past cultural, ethnic, dietary, and even moral imperatives, we find Jesus relax for a moment, and put the war of words on hold. From within, Jesus reaches out with words of fraternity and affirmation: “You are not far from the reign of God.”
___________________

This Sunday also accomplished the extraordinary feat of getting me out of my musical inertia and writing a new song, an arranged ostinato that I have I in originally titled “The Greatest Commandment.”  I just thought, after a long period of gestation, that there should be a simple musical setting of this important text like we have with other important texts: the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, and so many others. I have sent the music to over two dozen “beta-testers” around the country. Maybe during the week we’ll see how it played in Peoria, as they say.

Just past the silence (Second Thoughts on "Ephphatha" - B23O)

Open up.

Break out.

Snap out of it.

Fly.

We’re here to help:

Ephphatha.

Say something.

Don't just sit there.

No one's stopping you now.

Take a stand, say it.

I'm listening. We're listening.

Don't be afraid.

Listen to me.

Listen to the earth.

Listen for the birdsong, the breeze.

Hear the beggar’s plea,

The baby’s cry,

The choir, the traffic.

Let it all in.

Don't cover your ears,

Snap out of it.

We’re with you.

Listen.

Unfold. Bend. Reach up.

Open up.

Break out.

Open a window, open a door.

Scale a wall,

Break down a wall.

Prophesy to the wall.

Connect.

Touch me, take the outstretched hands,

Hold on.

Ephphatha.

Stretch. Walk. Run. Reach.

Listen to the word,

then speak it.

We’re with you. Be the echo.

Don't be afraid.

Ephphatha.

Hear me. Say after me,

Open up.

Break out.

Come along, call the rest.

It's gonna be OK.

We're going somewhere new

Just

past

the silence. Let's go. Open up,

Listen. Say it.

Ephphatha. 

(Allelu

"What will this child be?" [Nativity of John the Baptist (June 24)]

I confess that I don't know whether I can separate my head* and heart enough to write a coherent post, one that does what I insist we have to do, which is evaluate what we hear in the scriptures on a weekend and act on it. I'm really tired. The weight of the terrible news, the story of what citizens and leaders of this country are actually doing in the name of national security in a nation founded on the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. We have families being split up at our borders, children separated from parents and placed in pens; we have removed ourselves from international agreements on human rights, after already denying climate change; we have congressional representatives moving to take away safety net programs and social security to pay for border walls and space warriors; we have leaders turning away from longtime allies and cozying up to tyrants with their own bloody histories of human rights violations. To top it all off, we have a government official quoting the bible to say that disagreeing with them or disobeying their orders goes against God's will, because God ordains the government.

In my own church, not a homiletic word about any of this. Not one. It's as though parish life is unaffected by the world we live in. The priests of the archdiocese are in a weeklong retreat together with Cardinal Cupich, a man whom I greatly admire. I wonder whether, John-like, they'll come roaring out of their desert "retreat experience" with something new to say. If not, I think retreats have lost their purpose and meaning.

As for me, like Paul Simon in his "American Tune" that pulled together his experience of political life and the aspirations of many of us in the 1960s and early 70s,

And I don't know a soul who's not been battered
I don't have a friend who feels at ease
I don't know a dream that's not been shattered
or driven to its knees
But it's all right, it's all right
We've lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road
we're traveling on
I wonder what went wrong

I was briefly disappointed that we would not be celebrating the 12th Sunday of Ordinary Time, with its gospel about Christ calming the sea. It seemed to me that we need to be reminded that even though the waves are crashing over the side of the boat, and we're sinking, Christ is in the boat too. Even if it sinks, I guess, though sometimes he calms the seas. Then I remember that I'm supposed to be Christ in that story. I'm the person who's supposed to say to you, "Don't be afraid," and then to the sea, "STFU so we can get some sleep." I'm supposed to believe I can do that, and do it. But we don't get those readings this year.

Instead, we get to celebrate the birthday of John the Baptist. In the summertime. This is all pretty much because of some early (to us, late, to church historians) documents that  posited the annunciation to Zechariah to have taken place while he was serving in the Temple during the festivals of Tishri, at the autumnal equinox, the same documents (De solstitiis et aequinoxiis, the argument summarized in Origins of the Liturgical Year, by Thomas Talley, pp. 93-99) that go on to surmise based on the scriptural witness that the annunciation to Mary happened when Elizabeth (John's mother... are you getting this?) was in her sixth month. I could go on, but you're getting the picture. The birth of the Messiah and his herald thus fit with cosmic precision into the scriptural witness that John said, "He must increase, and I must decrease," with even their birthdays cooperating as the (northern hemisphere) days increase in length after the winter solstice, and decrease after the summer solstice.

And it dawned on me that John the Baptist, the baby whose birthday we celebrate, is a good place look for light today. "What will this child be?" was the question the people of the hill country started asking when the boy's mother and deaf-mute father somehow decided in the same instant that his name should be John. What will this child be in our occupied nation of pop-up messiahs and bloody suppression with ruthless capital punishment by crucifixion? What will this child be in our nation where our occupiers insist that there is no separation of religion and government, where the emperor is god, and there are real limits to the worship we can offer to our own God?  What will this child be as he grows in a world where violence is all around him, and the mighty lord it over the weak, and yet  his father serves, quietly, faithfully, a God with an unfinished story of deliverance and liberation?

John's baptism announced the arrival of the reign of God. It was a call to metanoia, a change of life that amounted to a turning around from one field of vision to another, from a worldview that put the pretenders to God's place (I'm using "pretenders" rather than "enemies of God," because to be consistent, I have to believe that God has no enemies) behind the believer, and field of vision of God's reign, a world of liberation, opportunity, and enough for everyone, in the foreground. He invited people to the Jordan to come through and be washed of the old way of being and, by symbolically passing through the border river of the Promised Land, passing into the new world, which was, in fact, where they belonged. Away from the legions and spies and intrigues at the political centers of Judea, John's preaching and cleansing ritual offered people the chance to express what they all knew to be true, that something serious was wrong with the world, that power was turned upside down, that justice had disappeared from their experience, and it was time to reject, at least in a symbolic way that could offer an inner hope and memory, the status quo offered by the empire and its Herodian and temple collaborators.

Anybody seeing any parallels here?

John's demise came about when he spoke the truth to religious and civil power. Herod Antipas, the Jewish puppet king, had divorced his wife in order to marry his brother Philip's wife. Being a Jew, Herod was breaking the Torah. As king, he was occupying a place in the social order in which he stood as a localization of God's presence, much like the high priest did, though with more power due to his relationship with the Romans. For John, then, this was an abomination, a blasphemy, not just a little domestic drama. When Herod had enough of John's diatribes, he took him out. Maybe he got wasted first, maybe besotted with lust. Or maybe he just had had enough of the outsider, and separated his mouth (and the rest of his head) from his neck, where it belonged.

John's driving energy seemed to come from his conviction that God was about to show up and set things right in the world, and that it was going to happen with violence and retribution. "You poisonous snakes! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Show me evidence of your changed hearts, and don't tell me about how you're the chosen people. God can turn these stones into Jews. (my paraphrase, Lk 3:7-8)" He goes on to warn that the ax of God is already in the orchard, and if there's no proof of change (fruit on the tree), the ax will fall, and there's going to be a burning. The "one who is coming" will bring this about, and soon: "He's going to sweep the threshing floor, and the broom is already in his hands. He'll gather up the wheat, and the rest he'll throw into the fire. (3:17)"

But the thing is, John got it wrong. John's vision was obscured by a malformed sense of justice, one that depended on force and violence to punish, destroy, and impose its will. The one-who-is-coming, the Messiah, surprised everyone, including John, by not being that kind of God. He was "like no God we had imagined," and even imposed upon John to baptize him, not taking the spotlight, but joining up with the rest of us. Redactors may have later attributed to Jesus rhetoric that was insulting and derisive in response to events in their lifetimes, but the teacher of the Sermon on the Mount already had made non-abusive speech a sign of the fulfillment of Torah. The one who was silent in his trial and died with words of comfort, compassion, and forgiveness on his lips would not, I think, have been one to demonize his enemies. For Jesus, God's arrival would be made visible by the overflow of life, the bounty and abundance of the world when people turn toward one another in love, and begin to live by the simple discipline of doing unto others only what we would want others to do to us. This loving of neighbor as self is a visible sign of loving God. In fact, loving neighbor seems to be identity with loving God.

So I came to see, despite my wish for Christ in the boat and the boat in the storm, that John the Baptist, the baby, the promise, the world within, the child with a future, the baby born into a temple family in the regional capital who came to live in the wilderness and who came to rage against the machinations of the temple and the palace, is a good fit for the problems I'm having with the world I live in, with my perceived powerlessness, with my barely-cloaked desire for a political fix by someone with whom I agree on more issues, with my shameful demonization of my "enemies." I'm (badly) acting like John, and John was wrong. But he kept pointing to the Messiah he did not yet know: "I am not (the one). Behold, one is coming after me; I am not worthy to unfasten his sandals." Later, from prison, he sent a message to his cousin to ask him: Are you the one? And Jesus told them to report what they saw and heard, he told them to report on the "fruit": the healings, the new vision, the word of liberation to the poor. John, so close to the reign of God that he couldn't bear the trappings of the pretenders, surely got the news and knew the answer.

Question of the weekend:

What will this child be?

I'm going to try to find my inner "baby John," the one I didn't have any part in creating, the one of whom Psalm 139 says, "Truly you have formed my inmost being; you knit me in my mother's womb." In my infantile Christianity, still immature and afraid after six and half decades of life, I want to wonder, "What will this child be?" Find something to do, and do it, without being an asshole and tearing down my perceived enemies and making all kinds of people I don't know even more upset and afraid and stressed out than they already are.

This fellow who takes up so much room with his needs and words and music, What will this child be?

Music for this weekend at St. Anne:

Entrance: For All the Saints Who've Shown Your Love (John Bell, THE WATER IS WIDE)
Kyrie: Kendzia (Lead Us to the Water)
Glory to God: Mass of St. Ann
Psalm 139: "O God, You Search Me" (Farrell, sung responsorially with cantor)
Alleluia and Intercessions: Mass of St. Aidan
Preparation of Gifts: Blessed Be the Lord (Canticle of Zachary) (Darryl Ducote & Gary Daigle)
Mass of Joy and Peace (Alonso)
Communion: Christ Be Our Light (Bernadette Farrell)
Sending Forth: Canticle of the Turning 

* no pun intended. really.

Binding the Strong Man (B10O)

I think most of us who are in the church music biz keep records going back several lectionary cycles so that, for instance, each time the 4th Sunday of Easter, Year A, comes up, we can see what music we've done in the past to get our creative juices flowing and to cut down on "reinventing the wheel." For me at least, liturgical music is kind of a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" thing. You've worked hard over many years to choose the best songs in the repertoire for your community for this particular Sunday, so if there's not some better ones (or a better one) that have come along since last time, I at least tend to go with some of those songs I used last time, or use the best of what I've done for over the last nine years, with an addition or two of something maybe new, or an older song I've discovered, that might fit the Sunday better than things I've used before.

I bring this up today because, as you'll notice from my doing a new "Sundays" post for the 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, that I realized a few weeks ago that I don't have any records of music or liturgy texts that I've used before for this Sunday. That's because we haven't had a 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, in this century! The last one was in 1997, before our church was built. The year I started keeping all my files on my computer for each year was, you guessed it, 1998. Ergo, all the usual prayers and notes I keep for the parish will have to be written anew from scratch this weekend. This is why many people are atheists.

What I do have from The Last Year B archive is an article I wrote from a series of articles I was writing at that time for Today's Parish magazine, which I think was published by Twenty-third Publications. (If so, it goes into a long line of institutions for which association with me has brought ignominy and/or extinction. That list includes the high school seminary, novitiate, and college which I attended, the original Composers Forum for Catholic Worship, the Corpus Christi Center for Advanced Liturgical Study, Modern Liturgy magazine, the North American Forum on the Catechumenate, and possibly the United States of America, though the jury is still out on that one. And that list is by no means exhaustive.) This little article had a one paragraph reflection on the day, my usual dose, with a few music selections, but it pointed me again to Ched Meyers’ tome Binding the Strong Man, reminding me of how influential that book has been on my thinking about the first gospel. For Meyers, the passage we hear this Sunday is a central text for the whole gospel, hence his title. In it, he says, Jesus “declares ideological war” on the temple establishment, and I made the point in my notes that in the Genesis reading, God declares ideological war on Satan. Of course, it turns out to be the same war, but we need to be careful about underestimating and localizing “Satan,” lest we think this cosmic battle has little to do with us. More below on this.

For Girardian exegetes, the "Satan versus Satan" narrative is a core scripture. Satan in the earliest narratives is the Accuser, and only later becomes the Evil One. As Satan assumes both roles in the mythology, we begin to see how the Accuser is the one who accuses the Evil One, creating the Satan versus Satan scenario. This is a central theme of Rene Girard's The Scapegoat and certainly of his work, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. As one author puts it, "when Jesus asks, seemingly rhetorically, 'How can Satan cast out Satan?', Girard essentially answers, 'It happens all the time. In fact, that’s what human culture is founded on. Our anthropology can be summarized by the phrase Satan casting out Satan.'" The murderous blood sacrifice of the scapegoat is used to appease the desire of the murderous crowd. The only way out of this spiral of temporarily sating violence is the act of Christ, the Forgiving Victim, innocent, who comes back from death to rewrite the myth from the perspective of the victim. When God finally speaks definitively about sacrifice, the answer is, "Are you kidding? No thank you. Let's get on with building life."

It's good to get back to St. Mark's gospel, and dig into the great story that the author says is just "the beginning of the evangelion of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." We're getting more accustomed to the vocabulary of Roman civil religion being used in the story of Jesus, starting with that word evangelion which has a specific meaning related to news of an imperial victory. We hear the stories of  the entry into Jerusalem in that light, the name "Legion" given to the demons that are cast out and into a herd of swine that jump off a cliff into the sea, we might even hear an echo of a Roman imperial procession in the language of the story of Bartimaeus, and his "eleison" shouted from the roadside to the approaching king, here, however, a "son of David." And just this past Sunday, in the narrative of the Last Supper, we get reminders of the subterfuge and hints about the extent to which Jesus and the disciples have to go to keep under the radar, resorting to passwords and secret arrangements for the last supper. Sometimes, to be subversive and stay alive, you need to go underground. Or at least under whatever passed for the radar in the first century CE.

The message of Jesus has enemies in the imperial cult, but it also is at odds with the temple cult, both because of his message itself and because both depend on the maintenance of a status quo to keep the peace among the people. Have-nots mustn't try to become haves, people outside of the power circle mustn't try to usurp the power structure, and generally speaking, outsiders shouldn't try to become insiders. The story in Sunday's gospel is sandwiched between two mentions of one kind of insider-outsider groups: Jesus's family, who are outside his house and think he's crazy and want to stop him, and Jesus's discipleship group, his family of choice, who are "outside" the status quo group in his society of actual family, but are nevertheless inside his house, and are the ones to whom he offers his attention and allegiance. Between these two slices of narrative "bread," a meaty battle of wits goes on between Jesus and the scribes. While the inside-outside dialectic plays out in the "family-house" event, a more cosmic one is being addressed between Jesus and the scribes, and at stake is the honor of Jesus, the source of his authority and power, and the balance of authority between the status quo symbolized by the scribes and temple cult and the subversion of that status quo by the preaching and ministry of Jesus. Placed between the two pieces of the "in-out-family" narrative, the battle with the scribes become the core of the lesson, an inclusio, so we need to pay attention.

This is just chapter three of Mark. We've just heard of Jesus forming a band of disciples, a resistance group against the prevailing theologies of temple and state. The scribes in this story, agents of the temple rulers, do what ruling hegemonies always do to those who challenge their authority: they demonize him. Here, they do so literally, saying "it is by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that he casts out demons." He is possessed, they allege. Jesus's response will echo his (and even more certainly Mark's) audience's experience in watching the collapse of Herod's kingdom, first that of Herod the Great's being divided into a tetrarchy, then the complete collapse in the 60s with the war against Herod Antipas when he divorced the daughter of Nabatean king Aretas, who then defeated Antipas in war. "A house divided against itself will not stand." (3:25)

Jesus's parable about the strongman is another tactic of subversion, hiding truths in plain sight so that his followers might understand, but not the attackers. The "master of the house," the strong man, is Satan. In fact, the Aramaic name Beelzebul means "master of the house." Jesus has come, he says, to "bind the strong man," and take back what belongs to the reign of God, that is, the human race, starting with the Jewish race. His discipleship community, ministry of healing and exorcism, parables, and teaching are all oriented toward that: releasing those bound by the power of fear and murder, and sapping the strength of the myths that keep them bound. By myths here, I mean the structures of behavior and ways of thinking that keep oppressed people oppressed, the shrinking options that seem to be available to those under domination by others. Jesus is pretty clear in Mark that what he is about to do is "plunder the strong man's house," put an end to the rule of Satan by unleashing the reign of God upon the world. The scribes cannot see it, and yet they are God's agents, the ones whose role is supposed to be keeping the Torah alive in the community. As Ched Meyers puts it in Binding the Strong Man (page 167):

Imperial hermeneutics, ever on the side of law and order, will of course find this interpretation (i.e., the liberation and rescue of the captives of tyrants) strained, offensive, shocking. Yet Mark drew the image of breaking and entering from the most enduring of the primitive Christian eschatological traditions: the Lord's advent as a thief in the night.

Then Jesus announces that all kinds of sin will be forgiven except that of the ones who accused him of being empowered by Satan: blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, that is to say, calling the actual work of liberation and wakening the children of God to who they are "demonic possession." If you can't see the work of God right before your eyes, he is saying, you've missed the bus to the reign of God. You're going nowhere, and you're already in hell.

Which leaves us with the inside family and the outside family in the gospel. We should be grateful that the lectionary compilers left this whole pericope intact when including it in the reading for Sunday, so that we get everything that's going on here. All the labels: family, believer, baptized, circumcised, Jew, white, straight, American, Christian—all the labels have to go. Being "inside" the reign of God isn't a matter of claiming to be there by some birthright or self-oriented entitlement. Being inside the reign of God is participating in Jesus's project of liberation with him, doing what he does, giving everything for the sake of others. The goal of the insider is to tell the outsiders that everyone is actually inside already, and there aren't any outsiders, unless one chooses to be out there.

Gee. Are you having as hard a time as I am trying to figure out what this has to do with us?

Maybe it's the damage we do by identifying law with actual morality, by not repenting nationalist euphemisms like "manifest destiny" and working to first acknowledge and then undo the horrific legacy of the Indian wars and treaties. Or maybe repenting the sin of slavery and its enabling mother-sin of racism, and working together to undo the systems of injustice and prejudice that flourish in our time, not to mention the enabling of racist and white supremacist rhetoric under the guise of "freedom of speech."

It's important to keep remembering that the tactics and strategy of the reign of God are peaceful and non-violent, but they are urgent. They require non-cooperation with evil, putting all of the danger and risk on us who believe with Jesus that death is meaningless to God, but that we are God's children, and he counts each of us, and all of us together, with unimaginable love that risks everything even before we do. We, disciples, are part of the confederacy of subversives for the new order, the reign of God. Let's be careful not to let ourselves be aligned with or sucked into the strategies of the status quo, blaming the victims of injustice rather than calling out the perpetrators. As in Mark's day, as in Jesus's day, there are two religions with competing altar calls. One is the voice of imperial religion, promising peace through force, naming insiders and outsiders, saying that it's always expedient that a few (or a lot of) others die so that we can keep things the way we want. The other is the voice of the reign of God, promising peace through justice, naming everyone as inside the circle of divine love, with a strategy of healing, equal protection, and table fellowship. The altars are on different horizons. To choose one, we need to turn our backs on the other.

What we're singing Sunday at St. Anne's:

Entrance: In Christ There Is No East or West (John Oxenham)
Kyrie: Kendzia ("Lead Us to the Water")
Psalm 130: With the Lord there is Mercy (Modlin)
Presentation of Gifts: Turn Around (GIA, Cooney) I chose this song because of one of the later stanzas, stanza 6, which uses the "break-in" imagery of the gospel:

Good news for he comes like a thief in the night
To take back his own from the enemy's might.
And like a small seed, or the yeast in the dough,
God's justice in silence will grow.

Eucharistic Acclamations: Mass of Joy and Peace (Alonso) I'm trying this again after introducing it in winter OT. I'm trying it in the key of C for a while. When I switched it at daily mass, the singing improved by (literally) 100%. I think the tesitura is a little high on the "Hosanna" passage and the "Amen," and this seems to fix the issue. It's not that the mass isn't singable. And one size doesn't fit all. Just giving it a shot.
Communion: Faithful Family (Cooney) (link is to yesterday's blog post on this song)
Sending Forth: Lover of Us All (Schutte)