December 23, 2012, The 4th Sunday of Advent

December 23, 2012, Year C, The 4th Sunday of Advent

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          “My soul doth magnify the Lord!”  “My soul magnifies the Lord!”  “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…”

          Christmas is right here, a rising glimmer on the horizon.  Christmas trees stand in most of our homes draped in all forms of family tradition; glowing, beautiful.  Wreathes greet us on doors everywhere we go, what a welcome; rich, living fragrant greens at the precise moment we are furthest from the sun.  We have bushels of greens to deck these halls with after Mass for the big day tomorrow.  I was here late on Thursday night and I paused looking East towards the ridge.  Beautiful. The twinkling lights, wood smoke on the air.  I stood out on the porch, bundled up, warm and cozy on a drizzly Oregon Solstice eve. The words of today’s closing hymn have been bubbling in me this past week. “Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee, God of glory, Lord of love;/Hearts unfold like flowers before Thee, opening to the sun above.”  Beautiful.  It doesn’t get much better than that.  The English language shines this time of year. “My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior…”  “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb.  And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?”  Hail Mary, thou art full of grace without a doubt.  Beautiful. 

          By beautiful I am mean beautiful in the way Plato talks about beauty, the way St. Thomas talks about beauty, a statement of pure perfection that reflects an actuality about the nature of things, or as Thomas would say, God.  We don’t do that much, describe God, because the act of even describing God domesticates, limits, shackles God to humanly graspable proportions.  But beauty, true, graceful, elegant, serendipitous and utter beauty is self-evident.  It, like God, just is, so the great doctors of the church tell us that yes, God is beautiful.  “All thy works with joy surround Thee earth and heaven reflect Thy rays, Stars and angels sing around Thee, center of the Trinity.”  This song carries us God-ward in its sheer joyous beauty.  This season, this annual journey towards the Christ event, our Holy remembrance of the coming of the Lord, the Word made flesh, is all about beauty, all about a beautiful, precious light coming into a darkened world, As St. John reveals to us, “A light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”     

          There is a lot of darkness, though.  This week I found myself vacillating between tears of many colors.  I teared up in joy in the beauty of the words of “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee.” Dave Fenton sent me a viral video of a flash mob in a mall singing this hymn.  I usually hate stuff like that, but this one saved my week.  I shed tears of being overwhelmed by God in the words of the King James Bible placed in the mouth of a child, Linus, who explained the true meaning of Christmas to Charlie Brown, saying, “Fear not: for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.  For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.” At this, Hannah Maeve leaned over and excitedly said, “He got it right!”  And we all shed tears, too many tears, or maybe not enough tears as funerals radiated out from Newtown.  There were five on Friday.  Darkness.  Horror and deep darkness. 

          This is a dark season, winter, truly dark, which is precisely why our European spiritual ancestors celebrated the good news of the Nativity of our Lord at the solstice.  With bright candles and tenacious greens daring to live while everything else is dead or dormant reminds us that a light does shine in the darkness and the darkness, no matter how inky, how vast, how impenetrable it seems will not overcome it.

          While the light shines, it does not make everything OK.  It can not explain tragedy.  God doesn’t offer explanations and nor can we. Nor in and of itself can this Light, God, relieve suffering.  There is no comfort for those who grieve intimately in the community of Newtown, nor us who grieve from afar.  The only consolation in the face of unmitigated horror is that God is with us, everyone, God’s arms are open, God sheds tears with and for the dead, the grieving, the angry, the guilty.  God in Jesus Christ knows fully the suffering of the world, and with us, God’s heart breaks, too. 

          God offers no easy solutions, ours is not a vengeful god.  Our God offers only the hard pills of empathy and forgiveness that are difficult to choke down with a throat so full of grief, but that is the Christian way, or it is supposed to be.  Our God, the mighty counselor, Prince of Peace entered this world in the city of David, not Jerusalem, the city of King David whose line Christ was heralded to restore, but in Bethlehem, the city of an anonymous David, an illiterate shepherd boy turned warlord of dubious character.  Jesus Christ, the beloved of God was not born to a princess which would be befitting the King of Kings, but to a 13 or 14 year old peasant girl who probably could have been stoned to death for adultery, obviously apparent in her pregnancy before her betrothal to a man likely twice her age.  Only the graciousness of Joseph prevented this fate. The paradox of Christianity also leads us to the abomination of the Cross which leads to the glory of the resurrection, though of course Cross-like suffering is not reserved for Christ, as the murders last week makes obvious.

          Abominations, darkness, horrendous evil and tragedy are not preludes to Gods favor.  Someone dies and the comforting words offered are, “Oh, she’s in a better place now.”  That is a load of horsecocky but from a bull.  A clergyman prayed that over my dead grandmother’s body and I almost punched him in the nose, almost as Christian a sentiment as his blasphemous prayer.  Horror is not a fast track to God as evidenced by the volume of meaningless suffering throughout the ages, but… but… the presence of vast suffering, the horrendous evil that shrouds specific times and places does not keep God out.  No matter how dark the night, how deep the suffering, how senseless the slaughter or how innocent the slaughtered, God is always there wading into the darkness, shining a light as bright as the Christ Child into the world, a beacon on dark and stormy seas for the lost of every age, and the broken, suffering, the confused, ambivalent, the mean and the bored.  For everyone.

          From here, from Advent, we ascend to the heights of incarnational joy in Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord, Christmas.  We then move through the Epiphany and the proclamation of God’s arrival, and then are right on to the long march from Galilee to Jerusalem, from Bethlehem to Golgatha, from the manger to the cross and the terror of Good Friday.  We then descend with Christ to the realm of the dead and we rise in the miracle of Resurrection into Easter. From the true beauty of a proper Anglican Advent and Christmas… the Marian blues, the joyful scripture, the glorious music, “Thou art giving and forgiving, ever blessing, ever blessed/Wellspring of the joy of living, ocean depth of happy rest;”  to the abject suffering of parents grieving the murder of young children and to the cold, wet people begging from street corners made quiet because most people are home enjoying the most important feast day in our American culture at home with their families.  And then there is simply the brokenness we each carry in our hearts this time of year, loved ones made distant through death, estrangement or simple geography, memories of Christmas past that haunt us, or the melanchoia of seeing another year slip away, another year closer to the kids leaving home, another year closer to our common destiny in the grave.  From billowing joy to the most mournful suffering, Jesus Christ comes, eternally comes with the one very simple promise: I am with you.  He solves no problems, He answers no questions, He doesn’t explain why things are so bad or are so good, but His presence in our lives, in so much as we will have it, in so much as we make room for Him in our soul, the mystery and presence of Jesus Christ is our salvation.  That is the promise from old, from ancient days.  That is what we wait for in Advent, what we celebrate in our high feast tomorrow.  These are very good tidings of an even greater joy.  This is the heart of Jesus Christ, this is the true meaning of the Christmas we approach on the horizon; and it is beautiful. “Thou our Father, Christ our Brother all who live in love are Thine;/Teach us how to love each other, lift us to the joy divine.”  AMEN

December 9, 2012, 2nd Sunday in Advent

December 9, 2012

Year C, Advent 2

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” 

          Prophecy. We are now right in the middle of Adventide.  This is a season given to us, prepared for us by prophets.  Remember, Advent is Latin for the Greek word Parousia: holy waiting, in this case, the blessed anticipation of the Incarnation of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ promised to us of old.  That is pretty important.  We never would have known to be waiting for a savior had it not been for the prophets.  Isaiah, Zechariah and his son John, even the little known Baruch, the friend and secretary to the venerable Jeremiah: to these servants of God we owe a great spiritual debt.  The thing about prophecy is that it is a debt that demands repayment, and demands it in the very tangible currency of right and immediate action.

          What is a prophet? ______ In the very simple words of the Jesuit master Karl Rahner, the prophet “is the envoy of God… The bearer of revelation.”  The prophet is a person, not a mouthpiece, but a fully alive human being touched by God for a very specific purpose: to reveal the will and nature of God.  How’s that for a job description. 

So then what is prophecy?_____  I think Abraham Heschel, the great 20^th century Rabbi and Hasidic theologian puts it best, writing, “Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profane riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet's words.”  That quotation begins to illuminate the opening line to Heschel’s classic treatment of this subject, The Prophets, which reads, “This book is about some of the most disturbing people who have ever lived.”

On the ground, the prophet does his or her work mostly along two lines, the predictive (this is going to happen), and the accusatory (things are NOT as they are supposed to be, woe, woe, woe).  Both modes of prophecy are holy, divinely sanctioned responses to a world that is not in keeping with the will of God, a world that is not in line with the true nature of things, at least not yet.  Both are equally potent clarion calls to do things differently than we are doing them now because either something big is going to happen and we need to be prepared, OR, somewhere along the way we came to a fork in the woods and we took the wrong road.  In either case, we need to get our acts together, reformulate the very structure of society and/or be prepared for whatever divinely ordained occurrence is to come. 

The Adventide prophets tend towards the former, the revelation that something in particular is coming from God.  Baruch tells us, people look east, like the song, “see your children gathered… at the word of the holy one… God will bring them back to you, carried in glory, as on a royal throne.”  Baruck passes on a promise of salvation. Or Micah’s prophesy to a humble city, “But you, O Bethlehem… from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from old, from ancient days.” Or the more familiar words of Isaiah, “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us… and he is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”  There is something on the horizon, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”

These prophecies can be comforting in their way.  Don’t worry, a savior is coming.  Someday the lion will lay down with the lamb, the child will play over the asp’s den.  The other type of prophecy, well, not so comforting.  They are, as our basic definitions of prophecy point to, disconcerting, threatening, even, dire warnings that things have got to change not because something is immanent, other than perhaps your destruction or the directive to repent and believe because the Savior’s return is nigh, but because the will of God has been opposed.  Thus says Jeremiah, “Shall I not punish them for these things? says the Lord, Shall I not avenge Myself on a nation such as this?”  Thus says Hosea, “So I will be to them like a lion, like a leopard I will lurk beside the way, I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs…” And thus says the rather unsubtle Isaiah, “She despises you, she scorns you – the virgin daughter of Zion; she wags her head behind you – the daughter of Jerusalem.  Whom have you mocked and reviled?  Against whom have you raised your voice and haughtily lifted your eyes?  Against the Holy One of Israel!”  I read plenty of somewhat lefty opinion online and that critique of the current state of the world pales in comparison to what the prophets of old had to say about things, the whore of Babylon, you brood of vipers and the rest of it.  So prophets… they are telling us about things that are to come, and they are describing to us all of the terrible things going on in the world.  In both cases, they are telling us things are not as they are supposed to be, so turn to, do it differently, do it now, be prepared for what is to come.

The thing is, prophecy is not just words.  Prophecy follows the same pattern that preaching does as St. Francis’ legendarily described it, “Preach the Gospel at all times, use words if necessary.”  When I think of the Jesuits of El Salvador, Archbishop Tutu, of course Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X and Bobby Seale, even, I recognize the praxis of prophesies.  Words not made flesh, but alive.  Rosa Parks, a trained activist, trained in non-violent resistance, when she refused to stand up on that bus so many years ago, she prophesied as definitively and clearly as Isaiah or John the Baptist without a word uttered other than, “No sir, I will not give up my seat.”  Actions, prophetic actions, can and often do speak louder than words; which brings me to the meat of things.

Who saw the Register Guard yesterday?  What was on the cover?  “Huts for Homeless” was the headline over a picture of a cute little kiddo just climbing out of the first demonstration model of a hut being proposed for use by homeless folks in Eugene.  This is the work of Opportunity Village Eugene, whose board a sit on.  It is a project of homeless folks, activists, residents and clergy who are at a loss about the state of affairs in our fair city of Eugene.  2000 adults on the streets.  700 kids in 4j without stable housing.  An Hepatitis C epidemic that is fast surpassing HIV/AIDS in the acceleration of rates of infection.  940 breakfasts were served at First Christian in November.  It is terrible.  Nothing new, but terrible, as Amos pointed out so long ago:  “Hear this, you who trample upon the needy, and bring the poor of the land to an end, saying, when will the new moon be over that we may sell grain?  And the Sabbath over that we may offer wheat for sale… that we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals, and sell the refuse of the wheat?”  Some things change, and some things don’t.

In that Register Guard article, it was briefly mentioned that some churches might possibly hosting some of these little huts called Conestoga huts for their resemblance of the prairie schooners that carried some of your ancestors to Oregon 150 years ago.  Yep.  That is us.  There might be some others, I’m working on that.  But there is a good chance that we will, in conjunction with St. Vinnie’s parking lot program that we already participate in, that we will expand it and allow three of these little huts to be erected on these 2 ½ acres we have been entrusted with to do God’s work.  We’ll give up our car camper to another church that will take on a family, and we’ll get three adults or possibly some couples, the same port-a-potties, the same vetting and screening in conjunction with St. Vinnie’s.  Besides the loss of a couple of parking spaces, I imagine that it will largely be transparent to us, much like the program we are with right now.  

          I brought this to the vestry on Thursday and they unanimously voted to invite this program here to Hilyard Street.  I cannot tell you how proud I am of our vestry.  They are the first to commit to this in the entire city.  This is prophetic action happening.  I do not know how controversial this will be here in the congregation, in the neighborhood, in the city; it could be significant.  This too is prophetic action happening.  I don’t know how this pilot program here, if it happens, will work; it will be messy at times, inconvenient for sure.  And I am not sure if a self governing homeless village that we are working on for the longer term will work, but like the prophets of old, I, we know that things are not as they are supposed to be.  God’s will in the world is not being heeded, this fact is heralded in the countenance of each person behind a cardboard sign at a street corner, in each person suffering from trenchfoot, each man, woman and child who fears being robbed, beaten, raped, harassed by landowners or police for the terrible crime of not having a place to park their car or unroll their sleeping bag.  And I haven’t even mentioned the rain and mud and cold and wind, and the fact that this time of year many of the public bathrooms start closing, and the Mission is full and we are all expecting the Eagan warming center to overflow, too…

          This is not a Rosa Parks or Salvadoran Jesuit level of prophetic action.  Not by a long shot.  Really we are giving up 3 – 6 parking spaces, might get some flack from our neighbors and will probably cause some stress in out city government.  (I’ll work diligently on the neighbors).  But this is prophetic action.  The world is not as it ought to be and this action points that out in Technicolor.  When I brought this to your vestry, there was not even a hesitation.  Some prudent questions, some quite assurances were needed, but the moral uprightness, the prophetic character of the action was in a word, Christian.  If you have questions, comments, or complaints, I’ll be having a Q&A session after cookies.  

          This church is doing it right, paying off our prophetic debt with right and immediate action.  On behalf of Jesus Christ, thank you.  AMEN

November 18, 2012, 25th Sunday after Pentecost

25^th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, Proper 28

November 18, 2012

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          “Beware that no one leads you astray.”

          I do not think that the precipitous fall from grace of CIA director David Petreaus is one of the signs that Jesus was talking about in this, St. Mark’s Little Apocalypse, but it is worth making comment on.  It amazes me that so many are shocked that the moral character of the director of the CIA has come into question.  He was the director of the CIA; his job was to skirt the outer limits of morality under the cover of darkness in the violent defense of a specific group of people: us.  He ran the drone war.  He ran the secret prisons across the globe.  He declined to take responsibility when 27 CIA operatives were convicted in abstentia in the courts of our ally Italy for kidnapping a man and shipping him to Egypt where he was brutally tortured.  And before this, as a soldier, his vocation was to kill people, or more accurately as an officer, to get 19 year olds to kill people.  I had that same job once.  And yet what outrages us, what forces his resignation is that he had sex with someone other than his wife?  If we were to put this on a hierarchy of sin, I’d rather that he had a lot more sex with a lot more biographers and killed a lot fewer people.  I suppose if you are going to betray an oath before God to a spouse you are probably more likely to betray an oath to a nation, so this revelation of impropriety is operationally relevant, but still.  We should have been outraged by this man’s conduct in the world way before he betrayed his wife.  Truly, if this by all accounts great man had dedicated his talents to alleviating poverty, eradicating malaria or to some other common good, he would have gotten much further in his mission to make this world safer, freer and more secure for Americans as well as for everyone else.  His fall is no great loss for our nation, I do grieve, though for him and his family, Ms. Broadwell and her young children and husband.  Terrible all around.

          I don’t think this is one of the signs Jesus was talking about.  I don’t think the General was one of those leading us astray, not intentionally, at least.  He was pretty central in the rumors and conduct of wars, of kingdoms rising against kingdoms, nations against nations.  I don’t think the CIA can cause earthquakes (that is the natural gas company’s fracking operations.)  I am not all conspiracy crazy.  All of this stuff is and true.  True like Marcus Borg says when he uses the term post-critical naïveté, which means, “I don’t know if it happened this way, but I know this story is true.”  Just like today’s gospel, St. Mark’s Little Apocalypse. 

I just want to be clear why I bring up such a thing as this, something so current-eventy, so newsworthy at church.  My understanding of the mission and purpose of Christ’s church is all wrapped up in why I think speaking about a disgraced public figure on Sunday morning is not only appropriate, but is important if not necessary.  We gather here week in, week out, to pray together.  That is what this is, the Mass, a form of common prayer.  Prayer is a practice, a practice, as our Catechism teaches us, that is all about responding to God.  This practice of responding to God together deepens, complexifies, enriches, makes stronger our relationship not only with God, but with each other and the world we live in.  One of the primary fruits of a life of prayer together is learning to make meaning of the world and our relationships with the world.  Being here together in a Holy community, saying, singing, proclaiming Holy words, orienting our beings on the Holy Sacrament… these are beautiful things, but in and of themselves are valueless, if not dangerously and narcissistically distracting, if they do not help us live in the world in a way more in line with God’s will, more in line with the true nature of things.  Making meaning, discerning the will of God, discerning our part in the vast interdependent web of existence… if being here does not help you, motivate you, enable you to bring all of your faculties to bear on how you live in the world, how you conduct your business, your classroom, your family, your political life, your money, if being here doesn’t inform that, if not define that, your kind of missing the point of the religious life.  Certainly the religious life Jesus Christ leads us on is one straddling eternity and the present moment, the finite and the infinite, the now and the forever.  Our public and private lives, our religious life, our professional life, our family life… there is no delineation of these spheres, no separation, no boundaries.  Our whole lives are a seamless continuum in the eyes of God, therefore our religious life, the meaning we make through our religious life has to inform how we live in the world. It has to inform the choices we make, the leaders we select, the society we aspire to.  So following the advice of Karl Barth, perhaps the greatest theologian of the 20^th century, I preach with the Gospel in one hand and the newspaper in the other.  The always and everywhere illuminating the here and now.  

          Today’s passage, St. Mark’s Little Apocalypse is a case in point of the always and everywhere illuminating the here and now.  What does the word apocalypse mean?  ______   Revelation. And what does that mean? ____  Right, making known that which was unknown, particularly in the case of a divine disclosure of knowledge or wisdom.  Apocalypse has popularly come to mean the revelation of something to do with the end times, but more accurately, what is revealed are mysteries of the future or mysteries of the heavenly realm. In this passage, the 13^th Chapter of St. Mark’s good news to us, what mysteries are being revealed?

          Remember where St. Mark and his community were in history.  They were in the time of a major insurrection against Roman imperial hegemony that would end in 70 with desolating sacrilege descending upon the Temple.  What a time.  How terrifying.  What Jesus is saying is that, yes, terrible things are happening, but this is not the end, not yet, it is just the very beginning and you have to be prepared for the long haul.   Then the rest of Chapter 13 goes into pretty close detail about the terrible trails and tribulations that the faithful will suffer in these times, but Jesus’ primary warning is “Beware that no one lead you astray.”  So what is he talking about?

          Wars, famines, earthquakes… these are generic embodiments of all Jewish apocalyptic literature, so they could be just that, poetic references to the future state of things heavenly and otherwise.  There is also the real possibility that what was being discussed here were contemporaneous events.  Wars, rumors of wars… Roman legions, 5,000 man fighting units moved around Palestine then.  Would there be a siege?  Are they leaving?  A terrible famine blanketed the eastern Mediterranean in the 50s, certainly leaving a deep impression on St. Mark and his community, that famine would have been an abiding memory.  And earthquakes?  In 60, an earthquake devastated Laodicia, a city in Asia Minor mentioned by Paul.  Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 62.  

          50s.  60.  62.  The war of 66 – 70.  These dates are all well after the death of Jesus Christ…  So either He was speaking purely metaphorically, His prophecy was dead on accurate, or, and what most scholars more or less agree on, these words, the Little Apocalypse of St. Mark are not the actual words of Jesus Christ but were crafted by St. Mark in the spirit of the teaching of Jesus Christ. The words “do not be alarmed,” is a translation of a Greek word meaning literally “to avoid precipitous action.”  In this time, yes, there were many messianic, apocalyptic figures running around Israel, our own Lord and Savior and his herald St. John the Baptist among them.  There were also insurrectionists, rebel leaders recruiting heavily for those rumored wars to end all wars with the imperial forces.  Barrabas, the man freed in Jesus’ stead by Pilate; he may have been one of these.  Judas Iscariot, our unfortunate anti-hero, he is associated with the Zealots, a violent movement of extreme religiously motivated rebels; I have an image of 1^st century jihadists in my mind.  

          So St. Mark, with all of this swirling about, rebellion, famine, darkened skies from a distant volcano in his not so distant past, with Jesus Christ on his mind, in his heart and through his pen, he begins to make meaning of the world.   He expresses his understanding of Jesus Christ’s message to not be a call to armed insurrection against Empire and her collaborationist allies, but of non-violent resistance to those same dark forces.  In the words of Mark scholar Ched Meyers, “Mark prepares the reader for a discourse not of revolutionary triumphalism, but of suffering and tribulation.  Against rebel eschatology, Mark pits the death/life paradox of his own narrative symbols and the politics of non-violence.”

          Be it the authentic words of Our Lord and Savior, or the spirit of that Savior inhabiting the words of St. Mark, what is clear is that meaning of the movements of the world, the actual day to day movements of the world, making meaning of those, that is a religious imperative.  Poverty, disease, violence, corruption, disingenuous religious leadership, injustice of all forms and offering models of life as corrections to life in a broken world; this is what Jesus preached.  He did not preach in abstracts but in the concrete realities that he experienced as a landless peasant in the occupied territories of 1^st century Palestine.  (Israel.  Rome.  Some things don’t change.  God bless the people of Gaza and forgive the people of Israel in this, yet another terrible hour).  This is the body and blood of our shared existence that Jesus Christ demands we take deeply into ourselves; demands that we make meaning of; demands we do something about; demands we be something different.  “This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.”  AMEN

November 11, 2012, 24th Sunday after Pentecost

Year B, Proper 27 

November 11, 2012

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

“For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all that she had to live on.”

Giving everything that we have.  Now there is a theme of a stewardship sermon!  No? 

This story begins with a broad condemnation of temple leadership.  There are Jesus and his friends, sitting in some busy city square, looking at the comings and goings of Jerusalem.  Jesus, in the verses just before this, had been confronted by one of the scribes.  It worked out in the Messiah’s favor, but things must have been tense.

This little band of men and women from Galilee were simple country folk sitting in one of the busiest quarters of the busiest city in all of the Levant.  The variety of people they must have seen, of all colors in all sorts of dress from across over the Empire.  The smells of foreign foods and spices, the presence of all that wealth.  All the fancy people.  I imagine that they felt a bit like I feel when I am in New York, not quite a bumpkin, but certainly not at home.  Sit on a bench in Union Square and watch the world go by.  It is dazzling.  I can imagine them sitting there with their rabbi, dazzled by the grandeur of Jerusalem.  

Jesus starts by talking about the scribes.  The scribes were just that, writers, public officials associated with the Temple who could write.  They carried the responsibility for recording political, financial, legal and religious proceedings.  They were highly educated in theology and the law and held an esteemed place in society, thought to be smart, wise and just.    Jesus pointed out their long robes, the sign, like Joseph’s Technicolor dream coat, that they did not do physical labor. Unlike what Rabbi Jesus had taught, being the servant of all, the scribes expected respectful greetings in the market and expected the best pew in the synagogue and a seat of honor at the parties.  

Then he says, “they devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers.”  This takes some explaining… throughout the Law, the care of widows and orphans was given high religious merit.  Over time, the temple, or temple officials (such as scribes) became involved in the care for widows.  If a widow lacked a replacement husband of suitable kinship, her wealth might have been entrusted to a scribe who would administer her affairs on her behalf (heavens, women could not be trusted to handle their own affairs)!  Invariably, this became a center of sin and corruption, as widows, being at the very bottom of the social ladder, had no recourse against their scribal protectors with rank, prestige and those long sleeves.  So as Jesus commended to the tax collectors to collect no more than they were supposed to, he condemns the corruption unleashed on the least of these by trusted officers of the Temple.  Fair enough.

Then they got up and moved, sitting down across from the Temple.  The place was huge, certainly the biggest building complex they had ever seen by an order of magnitude.  Ever been to Rome? Their new seats gave them a view of the Temple treasury, a little bit bigger an operation than Gay’s office after Mass.  It was found in a part of the Temple called the Court of Women.  Around the walls of this court were thirteen massive, trumpet shaped chests invested out of bronze, probably.  As the money went in, they probably rang out so all could hear how much (or little) you were putting into the coffers.  All taxes not bound for Rome would have been collected there, in addition to the regular giving and payment for sacrificial animals.  It was big business.  And there are Jesus and his friends, heckling to themselves about the vast wealth being dumped into the treasury of a corrupt institution led by corrupt people, and with an expiration date.  In the very next paragraph Jesus tells his friends that the Temple will be destroyed, “not one stone will be left here upon another.”       

     

Then there is the poor widow.  What does she do?  She gives two small coins.  “For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”  That is something else, everything she had to live on.  So is she a model for us, or a warning?

Think about it.  Jesus has just given a damming critique of the scribes in their arrogance, their privilege and their status in society.  They “devour widows’ houses.”  The machinery of the Temple society is corrupt, not praying for the least of these but preying upon them.

Maybe the woman giving all that she has to live on is a tragic figure in a cautionary tale.  What warning might her example offer?_______

Don’t be duped by bad religion.  And there is a lot of that.  It used to be pretty common on television, the preacher claiming that for every $100 you send him, God will return with $1000.  God doesn’t.  Or the prosperity Gospel; God wants people to be rich, or that riches are a sign of God’s favor.  Again, God doesn’t and they are not.

Maybe the warning is that the days are numbered for religious institutions that exist for their own good, and not for God and the world.  Remember, the next paragraph talks about not one stone left atop another. And also remember, St. Mark’s gospel was recorded just as the temple actually was destroyed in the desolating sacrilege that only an empire can dish out.  So maybe Jesus is showing the disciples the tragedy of poor widows being had by the powers that be.

So then, how might she be modeling positive giving for us?

That is harder, no? With all the facts in hand, it is harder to see the positive in the poor widow’s selflessness.  We have to be careful, for far too often we put on a pedestal those who make great sacrifice and we don’t consider all the facts.  Deep giving, real sacrifice is too often a non-voluntary action. Too often those with little are forced to give more than they should, more than they can. Since knights started falling to longbows, it is the poor, the immigrants, the disenfranchised who fight wars.  How much of the brunt of domestic spending cuts are borne on the backs of the homeless, on the unemployed, on women, infants and children?  Prisoners?  How many of Eugene’s budget woes are solved at 4J’s expense? At the expense of the 2500 people living on the streets?   And don’t forget, Warren Buffet’s secretary pays a higher marginal tax rate than he does.  That issue came up a little bit with this most recent election cycle. This woman is giving all she has, all that she has to live on.  This is a poetic way of saying that she was giving her whole life to something, but to what?  What is Jesus teaching about the temple?  Right, it is broken.  It is perverted from its true vocation.  She is giving her life to something that is corrupt and condemned and will be destroyed, St. Mark knows this as he writes.  It has happened, and she is still giving.  Giving to the Temple, it is a return ticket on the Titanic.  She is giving a foolish gift to an undeserving recipient.

So here is the religious twist, the surprise, the unexpected truth that the Gospel so often plops on our laps.  This kind of foolish gift to an undeserving recipient is exactly the kind of gift that Jesus Christ Himself was about to make.  This scene here, these teaching around the Temple, this is the end of his conventional ministry.  From here, “He stretched out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself, in obedience to your will, a perfect sacrifice to the whole world.”  Look around:  ours is a corrupt and condemned world, every created thing will witness its eventual destruction, from the tree that falls and rots into the mould of the forest floor, to the mighty mountain that will eventually end up as sand grains on some beach, to each of us, for dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.  And the church?  We’re doing OK.  We give a lot, but we are sitting on a bunch of wealth, just this land, I mean, how many people could live safely here, if just overnight?  What more do we have to give that we don’t?  How tightly do we grasp to OUR treasure, how little do we pass through to do God’s larger work in the world?  What do we, here, deserve?  And yet… and yet… Jesus Christ gave all that he had, His body and His Blood, the perfect sacrifice of suffering and death, and of praise and thanksgiving to a dying, a failing, a wholly undeserving world. He gave His life that our feeble, dying, broken bodies and souls might have a taste, or even a chance for a taste of the Living God.  Is that a wise use of what one has to give?  Is that a way to live, to give up a life for something that is worthy only of being condemned?  AMEN

November 4, 2012, All Saints Sunday

All Saints, Year B, November 4, 2012

The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

          The Feast of All Saints.  This is one of the major feasts of our church, a feast of memory, remembering the lives and work of those who have gone before us.  We remember the triumph of light over darkness, right over wrong, good over evil.  That is what saints do, and that is what we are supposed to do for this feast; remember them.  This is part of our birthright as Anglicans, the Communion of Saints, that cloud of witnesses, named and anonymous, that have served God and humanity in our past, and we are to remember them and their stories.  But that is not the whole story.  All Saints does not stand alone.  This week we also celebrated All Hallows’ Eve, Halloween on the 31^st, and on the 2^nd, All Souls, or officially, the Feast of All Faithful departed.  These three days come together in a complex of feasts that should probably have a name, but doesn’t.

          All Hallows’ Eve...  Not that I don’t love all the witches and superheros and kitty cats and mermaids running around the neighborhood, and the cheap candy and spider webs hung from trees, but Halloween has lost its traditional power.  What is being taunted on All Hallows’ Eve?  Death.  Death itself.  It is a carnival, in its most ancient sense, which means it is an occasion for humans to bring our wit and sense of humor to bear on serious, terrifying, and solemn subjects. All Hallows’ Eve is a lot like Mardi Gras, but instead of mocking the fast leading up to remembering Christ’s death as in Mardi Gras, in All Hallows’ Eve we are mocking our own death.  Wearing a fanciful, outrageous or even obscene costume and eating too much candy or drinking too much whatever, I am saying, “Death – I mock you.  You have no power over me because I can chose to not take you seriously.  And I so choose.  (Tonight).”  That is where it comes from, Halloween.  It is not where we are today.

          For All Faithful Departed, All Souls, we remember our own common of saints, those that we as individuals and communities have lost to death’s inevitable embrace.  Remembering our dead in hope; that is part of the light perpetual shining on those who have passed into the sweet by and by.  All Faithful Departed is celebrated in the full knowledge of our collective mortality, mitigated by a hope for a common eternity, or at least by the hope that even in death, I think Bob Marley says it best, even in death, “…every little thing’s gonna be alright.”  Even in death, it is going to be fine, there is nothing to fear.

          This autumnal triduum, anchored by All Saints, is among the most powerful complexes of Holy Days that we have.  The dark and chaotic mockery of Halloween, the commemoration of powerful servants throughout history for All Saints and the solemn remembrance of our own dead on All Faithful Departed… there is powerful medicine in there.  But this feast complex is, barely observed religiously by anything besides reading the names of the dead and singing “For All the Saints.”  Why?  

          Earlier this week, someone described to me a cartoon they saw.  It may have been in the Guard. It had two panels, the first a man in a suit just standing there, the second, the same man in a suit, this time standing in rather deep water in what was obviously New York City, and each panel had the same caption: “This is no time to talk about climate change.”  On the eve of a complicated election, in the wake of a devastating and unprecedented storm, or in the words of our resident expert on such matters, John Orbell, an “ ‘anomalous’ and extreme weather event,” it is what, disappointing, dismaying, disgusting that neither major party candidate has even uttered the words climate change.  It is beyond negligent.  This fact is an abomination of Biblical proportions.  We are experiencing the overwhelming and willful disregard of our and our planet’s future by our so-called leaders.  And not the distant future.  My sister’s sculpture studio under the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges was under 6 feet of water on Wednesday (they still don’t have power).  And she was blocks from the river, the studio is in a good neighborhood, but not that good.  First Bangkok was under water this year, now New York.  Millennial droughts occurred across the central US this summer, they are still ongoing.  And in the artic, we experienced the smallest summer ice pack ever.  This is it happening; climate change.  Wet places getting wetter, dry places getting drier, storms getting bigger.  And no one is talking about it, not without being couched by politicized and partisan deniers of what are accepted and now, in the wake of Sandy, widely experienced facts about the reality of climate change. How can they get away without ever talking about climate change in this whole campaign (or poverty or homelessness or barley even the wars we are involved in)?  How do we let them get away with it? Why does this happen?  Why?  

          Well, why?__________

          What I think, is that they, you know, They think, that we can’t handle the truth.  Remember that line from Rob Reiner’s film A Few Good Men?  “We can’t handle the truth,” that truth being that the world is a brutal place that needs brutal people to protect us by brutal means.  That is in fact not true, but They operate under that premise, andby extrapolation, so do we.  If we, the people, knew how bad it was, is, knew how precarious our atmosphere has become, knew how much the ocean has warmed and knew, truly knew what we were facing, sure, we’d be angry, we’d certainly not reelect some, and would certainly not elect others, we’d change consumption habits, change a lot about how we live and then get on with it.  That’s what New Orleans is doing.  It is what we did during World War I, the Depression, and World War II.  We can handle the truth.  We have, and we can again.

          And the same thing goes for death. Ours is a death denying culture.  Over the generations, they, and by that I certainly include we, the clergy we, as part of the problem, we have come up with all kinds of death denying jargon, theologies, distractions, taking us away from the heart of the matter.  And the heart of the matter is that, yes, we will all die.  You heard it here.  It is true.  Death is in all of our futures.

          The thing is that that, death, is not the end of the story.  Here is where the liberals among us start to get uncomfortable.  And hey, I get confused too.  But the words of Sam Portaro, an Episcopal priest and writer, bring us to the heart of the matter is that, “We Christians dare to hope beyond the constraints of mortality.”  That is what this whole All Hallow/All Saints/All Souls feast complex is about.  Christian hope is all bound up with the departed in the face of death: saints, souls and otherwise, a vast collection of those gone before us living life everlasting, beyond time, beyond mortality, now and forever.  And every little thing’s gonna be alright. 

          There is no evidence for this, of course, evidence for eternal life, not immortality, that is heresy if not sacrilegious, but eternal life.  The testimonials on the hereafter are spotty and are generally unreliable.  But Christianity is THE hopeful religion.  It is the religion of eternal life.  Our culture lives as if there is no tomorrow.  It, we spend our natural resources, our real wealth, our people as if there is no future to expect.  That is the ethic of clear-cutting, strip-mining, tar sands, and fission reactors. If there is no hope for tomorrow, there need be no worries for today.  That is the guiding theology of late stage free-market capitalism of the West; no hope, so… (Lots of words flow through my mind that are not appropriate for Sunday mornings, so I’ll settle with a locally grown slogan) just do it. That is not a Christian way to live.

          Hope is the guiding force in the life of the Christian.  Not hope for some forseen or wished for future, not some grasping image of how things might be, or how you want things to be, not some vision of a world unstained by death, a world that miraculously turns the corner on global warming, but an eschatological hope, a hope unconcerned with the mechanics of it all but with the blessed assurance we can do it.  By do it I don’t mean that you are going to live.  None of us are, not that much longer, but by “do it”, I mean that you can go through all that you have to go through.  You can handle the truth of what it means to be alive, alive, formed in the imago dei, the image of God.  We, Christians, live in the hope of the Resurrection; of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, yes of course, and of the perpetual nature of life, eternity, time outside of time, and the very real, cold fact of death, and its inevitablility.  Christian hope is the balance of inevitable death and equally inevitable eternity.  Christian hope is bound up with the indelible mark of life, the unstoppable will to live, and the intense fragility of the living.  We can handle the truth.  About our own future and about the future of our planet.  And the complex of All Hallow’s Eve, All Saints and All Faithful Departed, we can handle that, too, and in handling those observances, we might even be able to handle the rest of it even better.  So until next year, give to the departed eternal rest: may light perpetual shine upon them, because every little thing’s gonna be alright.  AMEN

October 28, 2012, The 22nd Sunday after Pentecost

Year B, Proper 25
October 28, 2012
The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

 “Immediately he regained his sight and followed Jesus on his way.”

What does it mean to follow Jesus?

Let’s review the scene here in St. Mark’s Gospel. Jesus and his friends have spent the past five weeks or so traveling from the northern most tip of Galilee, Caesarea Phillipi, all the way down to Jericho, where we meet Bartimeaus this morning.  Jericho is, was basically a suburb of Jerusalem.  So getting to Jericho, they were almost there.  And all along the way, Jesus had been telling his friends bit by bit more about what is in store for him, for all of them, when they get to Jerusalem.  “Are you able to drink the cup that I will drink, or be baptized with the baptism that am baptized with?”  Remember that last week?

It is hard to imagine what must have been going through their minds.  Walking day after day, knowing, or at least having some inkling that something big, something life altering, even life taking kind of big is in store for you at the end of the journey. That was where the disciples were, not having many details, just Jesus’ vague and not so vague references, and yet they kept following, kept walking, one foot in front of the other, each step truly taking them one step closer to that murky inevitable.

What does it mean to follow Jesus?

And on that road leading out of Jericho, a blind man, Bartimeaus, sat along the side of the road begging.  The road from Galilee to Jerusalem leads through Jericho, so all of the Galileans on pilgrimage to the Temple would pass through Jericho’s gates.  This was a perfect place for beggars to get alms from open-hearted pilgrims starting the last stretch of their journey.  Well, Bartimeaus hears that it is Jesus passing by and he calls out to him, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”  But the crowd, the disciples, shushed him.  So he called out louder, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus stopped, called him over.  The blind beggar leapt up, leaving his precious cloak behind as he rushed to Jesus.  Jesus asked him the same question he asked the disciples last week, “What do you want from me?” Bartimeaus’ request was pretty simple compared the James and John’s request to sit on the right and left hand of Jesus; Bartimeaus just wanted to see again.  Jesus said, “Go, your faith has made you well.”  Then, “immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.”

What does it mean to follow Jesus?

For Bartimeaus, it wasn’t easy, but it was clear.  He was blind.  He heard about Jesus, then asked him to help him to see again, it worked, so he followed him.  For Bartimeaus, he physically followed him, in his case, it meant following him right into the lion’s den of Jerusalem.  For Bartimeaus following Jesus meant a complete and profound change in his entire life.

What does it mean to follow Jesus?

How about the disciples?  That might be a better place to learn about what it means to follow Jesus.  Their call was personal, like in person kind of personal, but none of their call stories were as miraculous as Bartimeaus’.  Initially at least, their experience is closer to ours, but they still each had a complete and profound change of life.  Their following was far from perfect.  The disciples never seemed to get it right, did they, particularly in St. Mark’s gospel?  Constantly misunderstanding things.  Shushing the wrong people.  Cutting off ears.  Denying Jesus before He was even dead, but they kept trying.  That’s what is important.  It was not so much what they did, or how they did it or what they believed, it was that they changed everything in their lives, they left their nets where they lay, and they did not turn back.  Jesus said again and again, “Leave the dead to bury their own.”  “Who is my family?  This is my family.”  “One who puts their hand on the plow and looks back is not fit for the kingdom of heaven.”  They were serious.  And for as many mistakes as they made, they kept trying and trying and trying again.  Now granted, they had the distinct benefit of having their Lord and Savior telling what to do for most of this story.  Really telling them what to do, where to go, what to do and how and with whom.  That would make this all much simpler, wouldn’t it, if Jesus Christ were here telling you what to do, and how and with whom?

I am sorry to say, that we do not, actually, have that excuse; the excuse that Jesus Christ is dead, risen and gone.  That is just not true.  Look to the person next to you.  Everyone look left, everyone is less self-conscious than if everyone was looking at each other.  Seriously, though.  Look at that person.  Realizing what that person needs, what that person needs from you, you are hearing the voice of Jesus Christ.     And when you do it, when you deliver the goods, when you give what the other needs from you, you are following Jesus Christ.  You are making real the kingdom of God.

What does it mean to follow Jesus?  It means doing what you need to do.  Giving what you have to satisfy the needs of others.  It is that simple and yes, it will take your entire life trying to live up to it.

Following Jesus means satisfying the needs of others to the best of our abilities, and when we fail, to get up and try again.  It means standing up for those who can’t stand on their own, and it means standing aside so that those who have not had a chance to stand up on their own, can.   It means looking into the faces we pass on the street, from the gun carrying police officer on patrol, to the transgendered street kid hanging out in Kesey Square, to the guy we find sleeping on the back porch some mornings, it means looking into their face and knowing that Jesus Christ is speaking to you, directly to you in their countenance in a very particular and mysterious way.  And the more uncomfortable that person makes you, the more likely it is that it really is Jesus staring at us through those yellowed, blood shot eyes attached to a body that has drank too much and bathed too little these past few years.

What does it mean to follow Jesus?  The same as it did for Bartimeaus and the disciples: a complete and profound change of life.  I can’t sugar coat it.  There is nothing easy or pleasant about following Jesus Christ.  Look where he leads us: prisons, brothels, tax offices, torture chambers, court rooms, crosses. As our Sarah Miles, our speaker at Convention this week might say, following Jesus leads us to all the wrong people in all the wrong places.

We don’t, most of us, just drop everything like the sons of Zebedee and take off following Jesus Christ that we find in the Body of Christ, the Ecclesia, the people.  To make our following stick, to built habits of discipleship, we need to start with baby steps to the kingdom.  It is like tithing.  If you jump right to that, unless you are very wealthy, it is going to be hard, unpleasant, and unlikely that you’ll complete your pledge or make one again next year.  You start by maybe looking at the percentages, what does three percent look like, the proportional giving idea, then looking at what you gave last year and maybe closing the gap some.  Then next year, maybe that 3% is looking more doable.  And then four or six percent the year after, and then maybe the rest goes to other important institutions.  Win and I gave 2% last year.  It was a tough year financially, a layoff, one income and not full time at that.  But now things are more settled, so we went up to 4%, $2400.  That is what we can do this year.  Next year, we might have more courage, more faith, and we can probably give more.  Baby steps.

Following Jesus looks and probably feels a lot the same.  It is hard, it feels risky, scary.  But the needs of the world, the needs of the people we share this world with are so blindingly apparent.  Overwhelmingly so. So start with that one thing.  That one thing more…  a stretch.  Sign up to serve breakfast with Christine and the crew at First Christian or come play with the kids during shelter week.  Those are pre-packaged introductions to Jesus, but it is following Jesus just the same.  You might strike up a conversation with someone you wouldn’t usually speak with.  That is a first step in following Jesus.  Listen to or learn something new, something that you had possibly even dismissed at one point.  Open yourself and engage, pre-requisites for following Jesus.  Or follow someone that you see following Jesus. For when you can’t see Jesus enough on your own, you can follow someone you trust that does.  There are people in this church you can follow.  One person came to church a couple of weeks go without socks because she gave them to someone who needed them more than she did. And that was just that Sunday, it is always something, something more than she can ask or imagine giving, but there is always enough to give more. And giving things, money, that is the least of it.  Give of yourself; that is what the other really needs. Following Jesus means complete and profound changes in the way things are.  But look around… we need some complete and profound change to the way things are. Start with yourself.  Start with Jesus.  AMEN.

October 21, 2012, 21st Sunday after Pentecost

October 21, 2012, Proper 24, The 21st Sunday after Pentecost

Job 38:1-7

The Rev. Jo Miller

The Patience of Job, Really?

Those who have the written copy of the homily can see my title. So for those of you who are listening I titled my homily “The Patience of Job, Really?” A brief break down of this wonderful folk tale turned into a play is needed here: Two weeks ago the scenes from Chapters 1-2 were set to tell of God’s testing of Job. Chapters 3-31 grows into a dialogue between Job and three of his “friends”. Modern counselors may call them toxic friends. The debate is over the meaning of divine justice, Job’s suffering, ending with Job

demanding that God appear and defend himself if he is a just God.

Then there is a sudden appearance of a fourth adversary, Elihu, who challenges both the friends and Job demanding they submit to divine control of human events. The penultimate act in Chapters 38 -41 has God himself appear and recite the powers and marvels beyond human understanding which show Job’s demands for justice to be arrogant. Job summits twice and then the final act of the old folk tale has God restoring Job to his past greatness.

Like I said Job is a great play written in stages around 600 to 500 BCE.  Suffering is primal. Suffering has been with human kind for as long as our kind has walked the surface of this beautiful earth. There are many forms of suffering and for the most part we want or demand that someone or something be responsible. In the book of Job we have Job’s wife and friends throwing salvos of blame on Job. It’s Job’s fault. Job knows himself to be righteous and above reproach and cannot fathom why God has harmed him. Is it God’s fault?  In America we take care of much of our suffering by suing someone in hopes that their pain will relieve our own or bring us closure.

The book of Job has become an indictment on God at times. Carl Jung wrote such a book called “God’s Answer to Job.” He understood ultimately that he was writing more about the inner dark qualities of the Self because talking about God is nearly impossible. As Jung wrote, “The tendency is to anthropomorphize and give the Deity a quasi-human personality.” In my opinion this is what most if not all of our theologies do. In the earlier years of

Christianity people were brought under many forms of suffering by the powers that be if they did not agree with the authorities who had a firm handle on God.

When we talk about God, we are creating God, psychologically speaking, and we are, in essence, talking about ourselves which is limiting. In Jung’s terms we can only apprehend or try to comprehend God through our own, limited psyches. And, oh the suffering this has caused not only to ourselves but to others as we impose our own small finite understandings of God and the Universe on others.

Job was hurting and his friends did not bring a salve to soften the pain but barbs. They played the judgment game. Throughout this play one hears false judgments and false expectations which inflict mental suffering upon the already physically and emotionally suffering Job.

Job kept asking the unanswerable question why?? Why is the question that falls out of our mouths when pain and suffering hit us. Why did I get sick?  Why did my son get washed off the rocks by the ocean? Why did my husband have to die at that random shooting? No answer. When we hear the troubled cry we give feeble answers. We try to find someone or something to blame when the best thing we can do is to sit and cry with them. There are no answers. And, it is hard to find God in the pain. We struggle to grasp how God works in this universe of ours. Instead of us realizing we are in God's universe.  Has God preprogrammed my life and there is no choice? Is this universe just a random experiment of chaos versus order?

There is nothing wrong in wanting life to be pleasant and free of pain and suffering. We all want that. However, every pleasant experience must inevitable change or end. Even the best ones of all. We are routinely separated from things we enjoy. And someday that separation will be permanent. Friends drift away, children leave home, careers end, families disappoint, and eventually our own final breath comes and goes. Everything that begins must also cease. Everything that comes together must also disperse. Experiences are incapable of being completely satisfying. That is a downer if I ever heard one.

The biggest downer however is the doctrine of retributive justice which is the overall theme in the book of Job. Retributive justice is the doctrine found especially in Proverbs and all too often today. It is the doctrine that God so ordered the world that everyone receives reward or punishment commensurate with his or her behavior. Jesus worked against this doctrine throughout his short ministry and yet it hangs tough today. We forget that the rain falls on the just and unjust alike. Jesus gives us a glimpse of God. Jesus touched the untouchables, loved the unloved, healed the sick, gave hope to the hopeless.  Jesus confronted those who cast judgments and who looked for power.  Ultimately, in Jung’s book he writes that God’s answer to Job was Jesus. Jesus understood and knew the meaning of suffering. There is a salve in that. There are many healing depths in the living Spirit of the Christ.

But, what do we hear in God’s answer out of the whirlwind? Last week we heard Job demand an audience with God. This week he gets that audience, but it wasn’t what he was expecting or wanted perhaps. God pours out on the poor man sixty rhetorical questions that cascade out of the whirlwind like stinging pellets of ice that render Job speechless.  Centuries of reflections on this rather cryptic answer have failed to produce a generally agreed-upon answer. So I’m not going to give you one. I may suggest that it all depends on how we have decided to view and have a relationship with this whirlwind. One early 20th century mystic and healer

simple referred to the IS-NESS of God. The IS-NESS of God works for me.  God is. I am also rather fond of the Celtic view of God. It is the wildness of God they comprehend.

From “The Book of Creation” J Philip Newell writes, and this is long:”  Into this essentially unknowable and infinite realm of God a dome of space and time is created. It is like a womb or matrix of life. In it will appear all that is to be created. St. Paul speaks of the One ‘in whom we live and move and have our being.’ Creation is planted, as it were, in the waters of God’s life. It is rooted in the Unseen. All that is born in this matrix of life has its inception in the Infinite. Creation’s life partakes of the essence of God’s life, and to that extent is a theophany or manifestation of the mystery of God. 

A mighty wind sweeps over the face of the waters. Earth, air, fire and water, the constituents of everything that will be, are in a whirlwind of motion.  It is a wild wind carrying the incipient life of the universe in its wings.”

We are carried at all times in the wings of the creative divine. It is not always an easy ride.

J