textweek

Christ the King - Luke 23:33-43

Some thoughts about Christ the King and Luke 23:33-43:

I guess that when I read this Luke passage, I hear it with a bit different emphasis. Rather than primarily hearing, "Jesus is KING," I hear, "JESUS is King." It keeps occuring to me that at this time, there WAS a King of the Jews - Herod Antipas - who may have been unpopular among Galileans and some others, but had done some pretty good business on behalf of Rome and Jerusalem, was properly ruthless/self-protective in his political dealings, etc. He was the "rightful" king. I hear, maybe, Pilate asking, "You think that YOU are the king of the Jews? I KNOW the King of the Jews, and he's nothing like you!" as a reversal-thang - a deconstruction of kingship and power as understood in any then-contemporary terms. To me, Jesus, by saying, "You say so," is saying something profound, not about himself, but about Kingship and Power.

I hear the same thing in the conversation between Jesus and the thieves. Someone in my lectionary group yesterday said that she heard the "first" thief's statements and questions as sincere, and not mocking. "If you're a savior, then save us!" "If you're a King, then BE one!" But the second thief looks at Jesus hanging on the cross beside him and understands something much deeper about kingship, power and salvation - something I think that I, anyway, forget from time to time - that somehow, Jesus on that cross IS real power, real Kingship, real salvation.

For me, the scriptures chosen for these Christ the King / Reign of Christ Sundays really deconstructs the whole "King"/imperial domination thing, perhaps even among those whose celebration are done in all sincerity. When we call JESUS king, are we saying that Jesus has the "properties" of a King, or that JESUS as king points toward a whole different understanding of reality. What choice HAS that second thief made - what reality has he participated in - that the first thief does not understand? What reality is it - what Truth - that Pilate will never get? And us? Will we ever REALLY want relationship with THAT king in our own lives, our churches, our nations?

Thanksgiving (U.S.) - John 6:25-35

Some interesting thoughts about the Thanksgiving holiday, in light of the John 6 text:

"The Multiplication of Thankful Hearts," Paul Nuechterline, Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary. Paul states that the miracle could well have been an act of Jesus which physically multiplied the amount of food, and then goes on to say,

"Here's what I think Jesus means, if we begin by seeing this miracle a bit differently. Let's say that the folks on the hillside that day did leave their homes and villages prepared. Most of them had satchels of food and water. So why only five loaves and two fishes when the disciples went out asking? Simple. Because of fearful, untrusting, ungrateful hearts. It's easy to imagine, isn't it? The disciples come asking for offerings of food, and you think, 'Gee, I have enough for myself and my family here, but what if I get it out in front of this big crowd? It'll be gone in no time flat, that's what! I'd better keep it hidden, and get it our later, after we leave and are alone.' Isn't that easy to imagine happening all over that hillside? So the disciples only come up with five loaves and two fish. In John's Gospel, he even tells us that it was a boy who offered it. That makes sense: a boy wouldn't know better. A boy wouldn't have learned the hard facts of survival yet, where everyone needs to watch out for themselves.

And there was another factor going on, too. Good Jewish people, like most of the people there that day, were kosher. They were careful not to break bread with other people in unclean situations. Eating was a religious activity. You need to be careful not to contaminate yourself by eating with the wrong people, in the wrong situations. It's a bit like all those years in which Christians of different denominations wouldn't share Communion with one another. You have to be careful not to get contaminated. Even now we worry about young children. We don't want their shaky table manners to desecrate our Holy Communion.

So with all these factors of fearful, untrusting, ungrateful hearts, can you see how amazing this miracle really was? Despite what seemed like a gross scarcity, Jesus looked to heaven, gave thanks, and began to give out the meager loaves and fish. Do you see? Jesus' own thankful heart was able to stir up the hearts of those who were there that day, to also open their hearts in thanksgiving. Jesus taught them to have thankful and generous hearts, at least for a few moments. As they opened their own hearts and began to break out their food and share it, too, lo and behold, there was an abundance.

A multiplication of bread and fish is impressive, but isn't a multiplication of thankful hearts an even greater, more far reaching miracle? Do you see? It's one thing to physically multiply bread and fish one or twice two thousand years ago. It's on a wholly different order of things to be able to open stingy human hearts, and not just that day, but today and every day, too. This means something not only to us here this evening, as we open our hearts to this miracle, but it potentially affects those children in Afghanistan, too. Because if the hearts of the American people are opened once again on this Thanksgiving, to be thankful and generous hearts, the abundance of sharing can make a difference across this globe."

From "Eat the Right Food," 21 November 2004, Thanksgiving Day (U.S.), Walter W. Harms, Göttinger Predigten im Internet: Every Sunday Sermons based on the RCL by a team of Lutheran theologians/ pastors:

"Yes, I know we are in this place of worship today to give thanks to God for being so good to us, but that does not mean that we have not been working for that which perishes. Today is inventory day, before we begin the new church year this Sunday. Now is the time to work for and eat that which Jesus recommends to us...

What does this thing about Jesus being bread mean? It has been spoken of many times. Sometimes we hear, that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, of getting our heads and our "stuff" together. Doing God's work of trusting God, that he is on our side because of Jesus is radical stuff.

You either believe it or you don't. You can't hedge your bets with"Well, if God doesn't come through, I will have my investments." You can't believe that you'll be satisfied, if you have a later model car and, at the same time, trust that Jesus is the beginning and the end of all that is important. You can't go home today and eat until you are stuffed, like the turkey was, and not have given part of what you are to those who are literally starving in our world today, either physically or spiritually or both.

I wonder if I even can be thankful today when I think about the outcome of wars, the economic situation, gas prices and heating oil prices which are making many people live closer to the edge. Will we be thankful in all circumstances because we know God is in charge? Will we believe that "God who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, will freely give us all things"?"

This is not in the context of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, but there's a similar theme at "First Thoughts on Year B Gospel Passages in the Lectionary: Pentecost 8," William Loader, Murdoch University, Uniting Church in Australia:

"As often in John, we find the passage serves a single purpose: to point to Jesus as the way to God. That can lead to a myopic view which is rather sectarian: loyalty to the leader is what matters; his is the only way, independent of issues of substance. Everyone else must be wrong - or damned. It need not do so. It can lead to a rich and open spirituality in which the ultimate focus falls on finding the light and life, the water and bread, in God and recognising it wherever we find it and then understanding that life as something to be shared, something to be lived out in love for the world which ‘God so loved’ (3:16) and loves. Then the christ-centredness is released from a narrow exclusive focus, from the cult of the leader, to become the focus of something much more dynamic.

While the repeated melody throughout John sings of the relationship with God and says little of what that means in practice, the music can inspire such involvement, especially within the total setting of the orchestra, as it were, that is, the canon. John is a healthy antidote to activism which, without being rooted in a deep spiritual relationship, has difficulty sustaining itself and becomes in danger of a return to rules and obligations. John refreshingly calls us back to the spirituality of relationship in which love is celebrated and generated. That is profound nourishment."

Again, thinking of the multiplication of bread as "eucharist", Sermon Preparation Thoughts and Questions by Wesley White, 2004:

"This is more than getting our hungers met, this is going beyond hunger to meaning. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, but the work of Viktor Frankl keeps coming back to mind as a source of thanksgiving. It is this gift of meaning that we yearn for, search for, jump at."

Can we use this "feast" for an opportunity to take stock, to multiply ministry in senses other than imperialistic ones, to understand what it means to be fed by Christ alone, to turn ourselves outward toward others in new and vital ways?

Faith and Depression

"The Soul in Depression," Speaking of Faith, American Public Media:

"Nearly ten million Americans are diagnosed with clinical depression. As a society, we're increasingly aware of the many faces of depression, and we've become conversant in the language of psychological analysis of depression and medical treatment for it. But there is a growing body of literature by people who have struggled with depression and found it to be a lesson in the nature of the human soul. In this episode, Krista engages some of these voices experiencing a range of varieties of depression and religious perspective."

Sojourners: The Power of the Word

Commentary at Sojourner's: "The Power of the Word," by Julie Polter: "Reading passionately isn't about escaping reality, but about plunging further into it."

Religion in American Life

At NPR's Weekend Edition, November 13, 2004, "Conversations on Religion in American Life"

"What role is religion playing in American politics? What can we learn from Western philosophy about the role of religion in public life? NPR's Scott Simon speaks with Morris Fiorina, Stanford professor and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and with author Alain De Boton."

On Kierkegaard

At "Face to Faith," Guardian Unlimited, "Both a Grain of Sand and Eternity," by Chris Hardwick:

"Towards the end of his life, Kierkegaard emerged as an uncompromising Christian disciple and an implacable critic of the Christian church of his day, which he dismissed as 'the firm Jesus Christ'."

Solzhenitsyn

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, at Bruderhof Communities:

What I Learned in the Gulag

"I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: they struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person."

Solzhenitsyn in His Own Words

"Difficult trials and sufferings can facilitate the growth of the soul. In the West there is a feeling that this is masochism. I feel it is a significant bravery when we respect suffering and understand what burdens it places on our soul."

What Is Happiness?

At Bruderhof Communities: What Is Happiness? Quotations by, "Beckett, Thoreau, Merton, de Mello, Eckhart, Kingsolver, Shaw, Bonhoeffer, Buber, and others."

Luke 21:5-19

We're getting close to advent, and beginning to see apocalyptic texts. A number of resources this week remind us that apocalyptic texts were written about the present in the person of a person from the past who is predicting the future. As Reginald H. Fuller says at the Saint Louis University Center for Liturgy,

"The authors do not conceive themselves to be predicting, in an abstract, uninvolved way, the "last things" that are to happen centuries hence; rather, they are interpreting the present crisis in which they are involved as the last crisis of human history, to be followed very soon by its consummation."

I'm reminded of the way that the writer of the gospel of John uses "signs" in the book of John. These are not abstract "miracles" told to prove something that everyone would see. Instead, these are a way of looking at the world through eyes of faith and faithfulness - seeing things that others probably would not see, in the same events. In the same way, these apocalyptic events are not predictions like we read about in tabloid newspapers. Instead they are interpretations of faith and faithfulness, seeing God's hand at work in even the most nasty of circumstances.

At Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, Paul Neuchterlein quotes James Allison (Raising Abel):

"The question then, is this: when Jesus talked of his coming and of the end, was he simply enclosed within the apocalyptic imagination? That is, did he accept the dualities proper to the apocalyptic imagination as part of what he was preaching and announcing? It will come as no surprise to you if I say that, as I see it, he was not. It seems to me that what we have with Jesus is precisely and deliberately the subversion from within of the apocalyptic imagination. What I have called the eschatological imagination is nothing other than the subversion from within of the apocalyptic imagination. That is, Jesus used the language and the imagery which he found around him to say something rather different. (p. 125)"

Again, the point here is not the "fact" of apocalypse, but rather the interpretation of it. Michael Hardin and Jeff Krantz have helpful words at Preaching Peace (click on the links at the left of the site page):

"Let’s talk terror today. There was a time when the United States knew about terrorism as a non-domestic phenomenon. There was a time we were afraid of nuclear missiles screaming down upon our heads but bombings and attempts to stop economies happened elsewhere. But not here.

Until 9/11.

Since then, we too have been caught in the fear that now grips the entire planet, there is not a country that is not exposed to terror. We hear that it is not a matter of “if” but “when.” And we spend incredible sums of money to try and figure out when. We call that intelligence. The disciples were no different, they wanted to know when too. They knew about the birth pangs of the Messiah, it was a stock piece of the program of apocalyptic. They wanted to know when so they could have a chance to escape. Jesus gives them a ‘talk.’"

Their Girardian perspective continues:

">Jesus does not deny the reality of the dissolution of human culture that apocalyptic predicts. He does, however, separate it from God as a source, or a violent solution. He offers himself as sacrifice to the victimage mechanisms that will also produce the violent climax, thereby stripping them of their hiddenness and showing us how to avoid becoming entangled in them.

We preach a Gospel that offers a better hope than the one where God saves us from our violence by becoming violent for us. We preach a Gospel wherein God defeats violence by suffering our violence, defeats death by suffering our death, defeats Sin by becoming Sin for us. There is no longer any need to respond to terror with terror, because there is nothing of which to be terrified. We no longer need to return violence for violence, because violence no longer has the power to bring its faux peace."

At Process and Faith Lectionary Commentary, Paul Nancarrow writes:

"Luke’s picture of Jesus’ picture of the beginning of the End is enough to make us understand why some, like the Thessalonians, might prefer to withdraw from the world and avoid the destructive conflict. But Jesus calls his followers to a different quality of response: “this will give you an opportunity to testify... for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.” Even in the midst of betrayal and hatred, the faithful are called to keep on working, in synergy with Christ’s word and wisdom, to witness to the promise of justice and peace."

At Exegetical Notes, Brian Stoffregen asks:

"

Persecutions and hatred or even possible death shouldn't stifle our witness. Ultimately we know that we have no need to preserve our lives. We are confident in the resurrection. Luke shows us in Acts how such witnessing took place.

I think that we need to ask ourselves: "How do we use times of conflict or turmoil as opportunities to witness?" How do we let Jesus' words flow through us in such difficult situations? For most of us, the conflicts we face will not be as severe as Jesus' mentions, but we face them.

A few years ago, a pastor in town died at age 52 of a brain tumor. It was frequently said that the way he approached his death over the months of his terminal illness was a witness to his faith.

When a congregation is in the midst of conflict and turmoil, can their approach to the difficulties be a witness to their faith?"

Maybe the events are not the unusual thing here. These events - persecution, turmoil, terrorism, wars, disasters, etc are part of life. The issue is our response. Do we respond with faith and faithfulness? Do we indulge ourselves by basking in imagined persecution - interpreting every difficulty as some lack of faith on the part of others or some attack by evil itself upon us? Is our response to actual or imagined difficulty self-serving and self-preserving? What does our actual response to actual difficulty say about us, our faith, our communities, our understanding of God's will in our lives - not just what we WISH it would say, but, looking back at our actual responses as individuals, communities, nations, what does our response say about our actual faith in God's presence in our lives and in the history of the world? We may not work that out exactly as Luke's community did - in fact, we probably will not - but perhaps Luke's response is one example of something we each do, in our own lives, as our own communities, and in our own difficult circumstances. What would it mean to respond to our life and our world - no matter the circumstances - with faith and faithfulness? How can we be less bound to reacting to each "thing" by being thrown off course, and more able to respond, centered within our faith in God through Christ?

Luke 20:27-38

At Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, Paul Nuechterlein has posted an interesting chapter from James Alison's Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination, which focuses on this week's gospel passage:

"If your mind is absolutely quickened by the effervescent vivacity of God, then you can speak the sort of truth and reveal the sort of injustice which may well provoke people into killing you, since for you, unlike for them, truth is not decided by the survivors, or the victors, but could well be what it was claimed to be by the one who was killed. This, of course, can simply not be understood at all by those who do not share your perception of God. Their angle onto God still perceives him as in some way involved in death, for example by punishing or rewarding people with misfortune or success. So, if you are killed by a group of people, then it must have been God's will, and what you did and who you were has to be defined from your final failure: if Jesus died as a transgressor, then it must be because a transgressor he was. That means that what God thinks of you is a function of what the humans who have brought you to your end think of you. God is completely involved in violence: it is human hands which carry out God's murders.

If, on the other hand, God has nothing to do with death, then death is only a purely human cultural reality, and no reflection of what you did and who you were. This means that what is good is in no way defined by death, and you are free to act in a way which doesn't respect the limits of good and evil which are imposed by living in the shadow of death. Now, try to imagine the kind of shock which befalls those who are entirely bound in by death, and whose vision of God has not been freed from shading into death, when someone who was killed under the system of death, apparently punished by God, and certainly considered to have been the purveyor of a falsified vision of God, suddenly appears again, beyond death.

If we begin to imagine this shock, then we'll have done almost all the work which is proper to Christians who do theology or who try to understand God to some degree. For this is exactly what happened to the disciples at the resurrection of Jesus. God's whole project, including the deliberate mime and mise-en-scène of the undoing of death, was possible because Jesus was working out of an imagination which was simply not tinged by death, so that he could work beyond it. The first thing, then, which happened to the disciples as they began to understand, was the complete shake-up of their vision of God. They began to be possessed by a totally different perception of God, the perception which Jesus had had during his life.

In the first place this change of perception meant that God was indeed as Jesus had claimed: brilliantly alive, and completely without reference to death. It also meant that all other human attempts to describe or define God are wrong, and that every form of moral life is inadequate, because it doesn't go beyond death."

Nuechterlein comments,

"I wonder about a so-called "natural" view of death. We are mortal creatures who die, after all, right? But I think that Alison is trying to get us to see that our experience of death is completely cultural, so that there is no such thing as a "natural" experience of death. And at the heart of human culture is murder -- violent, 'unnatural' death carried out by human beings. The Resurrection starts us on the road of being able to finally catch a glimpse of these truths. At the same time as it shows us our cultural experience of death, it shows us that there is also a birth to New Life through the forgiveness of Jesus Christ. We could never admit our enslavement to death if we were not already forgiven it."

At Michael Hardin and Jeff Krantz' Preaching Peace:

"When you have everything you want, like the Sadducees did, it is easier not to believe in an afterlife. And if you are strict constructionists, like the Sadducees were, you can point out that the notion of resurrection had an origin, a time it arose on the scene, and that it was much later than when Moses received Torah. It was the Pharisees who held to the notion of an ongoing revelation of Torah, represented especially in the Prophets, but also in a further oral tradition (which later becomes The Mishnah). The Sadducees presumed that when you died it was game over. No worries about what is on the other side because there is nothing. The reason they thought they had it good? Their bounty was a sign of God’s blessing, proof that they had been deemed worthy...

We need to be careful when we preach the resurrection. We musn’t be caught preaching a resurrection that is nothing more than God’s opportunity to make up for the fact that the righteous might have had a lousy life in this world.

Neither is it a reward for “good living.”

It is a declaration, a declaration that God’s love will not be thwarted, not even by death."

At The Center for Liturgy, Saint Louis University, John J. Kavanaugh SJ's http://liturgy.slu.edu/32OrdC110704/theword_engaged.html :

"Some people (we may call them "supernatural dualists") seem to think there is a profound discontinuity between this life and the afterlife. We must choose between being happy in this world or in the next. It is hell, one might ironically think, all the way to heaven: misery, unhappiness, and unfulfihiment now, but big rewards later. This life is the pilgrimage, the vale of tears, the test. The next life brings the reversal of roles.

Others (we might call natural humanists) seem to agree that there is a radical difference between earth and heaven. But they say we should choose the earth. As the "Humanist Manifesto" proposed, we ought to live this life without heavenly crutches or the promise of reward. In its stronger formulations, the naturalist approach looks upon heaven as "pie in the sky," or, as one well-known troublemaker put it, "the opiate of the people."

There is, however, a third option. What if there is no discontinuity between this life and the afterlife? What if there is just life, some of it eternal, some of it temporal? If that is the case, then the way we live now is the way we will always live. How we live is the promise of our destiny.

In this option, God does not threaten us with hell. We fashion it for ourselves by the choices we make: enclosed, egocentric, untrue, uncaring, unloving, That's a hellishly mean existence, whether in this life or the next.

Thus, as we live and die, so we become eternally, outside the limits of space and time. There may not be marriage in the afterlife, but there is the fulfillment of what we have been becoming. All of us, from the moment we begin, are endowed with an openness to God. But those of us who live long enough to exercise our freedom actually take part in determining our fate."

At The Center of Concern Sunday Reflections, Fr. John Bucki, SJ, writes:

"In the gospel today, Jesus seems to be saying that it is to be found in more than just the immediate things around us, more than what we consume or in the wealth or status that we accumulate. Jesus seems to be saying that it is to be found in more than just the afterlife, more than in some other world that is still to come. Jesus seems to say that what is important is to be found in the here and now as well as in the past and the future."

At Process and Faith Lectionary Commentary, Paul Nancarrow writes:

"Resurrection life is life in God; as Jesus says, to God “all of them are alive”; or, as process theology has it, all the moments of our lives enter into God and are held everlastingly in God, so that the pattern of moments that makes us who we are does not perish but is alive in God. Resurrection life is a life of intimacy with God. Further, since all are alive in God, in equal intimacy with God, we can know each other in and through God with an intimacy that goes deeper and broader and higher than intimacies we can achieve as “belonging to this age.” Read in this light, the story is more than just a contentious bickering over a fine point of first century theological speculation; it is more than a questionable account of the value of marriage; it is an invitation to look forward to a quality of life in God filled with an intensity and harmony of love we can now only barely begin to imagine."

At Kairos CoMotion Lectionary Discussion, Wesley White reminds us,

"We get ourselves in all sorts of difficulties by positing one position on a continuum and investing it with so much truth that everything has to emanate from it. Political parties are like that. The wedge issues of war, marriage, the parentheses of life (birth & death), what is good for an idolatrous economy is good for a faithful individual, clear skies, and welfare as a common right all come to ignoble ends when asked to bear more than their frameworks can stand."

A bit of background from William Loader's First Thoughts:

"Levirate marriage was a way of ensuring the family line continued. It could also protect women. We are entering the ancient culture of male and female and the values which determined their relationships. The values reflect a male dominated society. Marriage was a crucial element in maintaining stability. That stability was related to the family and extended family. You married someone in the extended family, not an outsider. Bearing children was important to sustain the family. Families were their own welfare system, their own economies. Sexuality was a key component. Marrying outsiders or having children by outsiders produced unstable offspring. Sexual behaviour must be closely monitored. Women must be guarded. They bore the children, which was blessing if they belonged and a curse if they came from outside. This is the background of the Sadducees’ ‘case’."

And don't miss Loader's The Sadducees' Question: A Sequel !

How do we keep this week's passage from being just more technique in just another theological ping-pong match - "for" or "against" whatever we think it/God should be "for" or "against"? Again, I'm reading this week's passage as a reminder that however I've lined up my life - with God, with others, in myself - those things WILL become unsettled. It's inevitable, no matter how I've built up things to protect myself and others, and no matter how "correct" I am about any of it. Where do we put our trust within that reality? Exactly what IS the God in which we put our trust within that reality? What does that sort of trust mean? Is our "faith" a belief (even in terms of trust!) in a certain outcome or a certain reality? What does it mean to trust God alone?