Welcoming Christ in the Stranger’s Guise - a sermon preached in the Soquel Congregational Church

Today’s scripture reading is from the Gospel According to Matthew, Chapter 10, Verses 40, 41, and 42. I invite you to read them silently along with me as I read them aloud to you.

Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.

Those are the ending verses of Chapter 10 in the Gospel According to Matthew, in which Jesus has been instructing his disciples, exhorting them to take up a new phase of discipleship and encouraging them in preparation for their mission of evangelism. Jesus is sending them out to proclaim the good news that “the rule of heaven’s empire is close at hand.”

You may have heard it said that Matthew is the Jewish Gospel. It’s called that because the author of this version of the Jesus story goes out of his way to emphasize the Jewishness of Jesus and his disciples, and the Jewishness of the ethnic setting in which their story takes place.

There they are, this troop of Jewish disciples who have followed Jesus, a latter-day Jewish prophet, out into the boonies somewhere beyond the Galilee, maybe sitting around a campfire like a band of hobos, getting their missionary orders from the holy man who has been leading them on an enigmatic journey out of their home territory and into an unknown future.

There are twelve of them, according to the scripture: first, Simon, also known as Rock, and Andrew his brother, and James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the toll collector, James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas of Iscariot, the one who, in the end, turned him in. They are all about to become Apostles.

An apostle is a an emissary having a special commission who represents a principal, another person having an important message to convey, in this case Jesus, the central message of whose ministry, in Matthew’s Greek, is best translated, “Heaven’s imperial rule is closing in.” We have more often heard this as, “the kingdom of God is at hand.”

Clearly, it was a declaration with political implications. Jesus proclaimed the ascendancy of the supreme power of God’s love, or Heaven’s rule, over against the brutal and oppressive military rule of the occupying Roman Empire, which claimed the divine sanction of the Roman gods.

And now Jesus was personally commissioning his twelve disciples, and sending them out with authority to proclaim the supremacy of God’s rule of love over the Empire’s rule of violent death and desecration.

We know what that means, to this day. As the ancient Jewish precepts Jesus taught are set elsewhere in Matthew,

You are to love the LORD your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind, and you are to love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depends everything in the Law and the Prophets. 

And as is typical in Matthew, Jesus sent these newly commissioned Apostles of the good news of God on a distinctively Jewish mission. He instructed them, “Don’t travel foreign roads and don’t enter a Samaritan town, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

The setting of this missionary narrative was in the territory north of Jerusalem, and south of Syria, in a region where seven hundred years earlier, the schismatic kingdom of the fabled ten lost tribes of Israel had been reduced to ruin by the conquest of the Assyrian empire. The Samaritans were descendants of the ancient northern Israel sect, with its alternative scriptures, and its separate temple cult, founded under the dissident King Jeroboam in 922 BCE. The Samaritans’ relations with the Jews of Jesus’ time were strained, to say the least.

So the commission Jesus bestowed on the first Apostles was to carry the joyful message of God’s reign not to the immigrant Greek-speaking Gentiles, whose ethnicities were alien to the descendants of the tribes of Israel, and not to the refractory Samaritans, but to their own ethnically Jewish people. They were to go forth, not to evangelize exotic peoples in faraway places, but to minister to the suffering peoples of the surrounding villages and precincts. Their neighbors’ need for liberation and healing was as close at hand as the salvation message Jesus gave them. Jesus sent the twelve out to proclaim the good news of God, to “heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, drive out demons.”

And, according to Matthew, not only was any thought of material extravagance ruled out, but the missionaries would need no money at all. They would be mendicants; they would depend upon the hospitality of the people they would meet to sustain them. They were to trust entirely in God’s care, and to show that God was working not through the rich and powerful, but through the poor and powerless. 

And Jesus promised them that those who have ears to hear, and hearts and souls to be healed, would welcome them as prophets, as righteous messengers of God. In the words of the Scholars’ Translation of today’s verses,

The one who accepts you accepts me, and the one who accepts me accepts the one who sent me. And whoever gives so much as a cup of cool water to one of these little ones, because the little one is a follower of mine, I swear to you, such a person certainly won’t go unrewarded. 

The salvation Jesus promised came about through simply accepting the acceptance that God offers freely, the good news of which was brought by Jesus’ disciples, and realized in Jesus himself, who according to another text elsewhere in the New Testament called himself God’s Apostle. And the humblest gesture of hospitality and welcome to one of the Apostles, these “little ones,” as Jesus spoke of them, would be more pleasing to God than great benefactions by the wealthy.

Whether from the point of view of the Apostles who are accepted, or the accepting ones who receive from them their healing, saving message, the “cup of cool water,” the grace of God, is in the welcoming of the stranger, in hospitality given graciously by loving one’s neighbor as oneself.

This is really the center of the Christian message, isn’t it?

To love God with all one’s being is to love God’s whole Creation, which includes us and all our neighbors, all of us made in God’s image. God’s love sustains us all impartially, and is reflected in our love for one another. As the brilliant Uruguayan poet Eduardo Galeano wrote, “I am another you; you are another me.”

Let me tell you another story, not a Gospel narrative but a very personal story, a memoir I wrote in the 1990’s for a national journal for liberal religious educators. It was published in a collection of contributions from parents and their children under the title, “Images of God.”

I have two daughters, Anna and Maggie, who are now twenty-five and twenty-three years old. For me, the experiencing of their births, and my parenting relationship with them in early childhood opened me wide-awake to the life-changing reality of direct, transformative religious experience. For me, the alpha and omega of religious experience is human-hearted love.

“How big is God, Daddy? Is he bigger than a house?” asked Anna, the firstborn and the more pensive of my two preschool-aged daughters, one afternoon while they sat together, talking with me on the front porch. “God is not a person, or a thing you can see, or touch, or hear,” I answered her, quite as thoughtfully. “God is . . . a feeling inside you. God is how you feel when you know you are alive. God is what you feel when you love someone. When you say, ‘I love you,’ you feel God in you.”

Anna sat quietly for half a minute, enjoying her ice cream cone. “I love you, Daddy”, she said. “I know, sweetie. I love you, too. Listen. Do you remember the day we were at the beach, when you were kneeling in the wet sand, with your back to the waves, and you’d laugh as each wave surprised you, splashing over your shoulders? Maggie was playing by herself, near us on the big rocks, and you and I were there in the surf, and I’d laugh when you laughed, and you looked up at me then and yelled, ‘I’m happy!’ Do you remember how good you felt then? That was God, laughing inside you.”

Soon after I wrote that reflection some twenty years ago, I began seeking to understand and cultivate, and to communicate the meaning of that deeply spiritual experience of infinite, unconditional love, one like other spiritual experiences I’ve had, often, since then.

Now, friends, I can speak to you in more sophisticated terms than one can with a child. To you I can affirm that yes, God is not only not a person and not a thing, God is utterly other – absolutely unlike any object of understanding. Nothing that can be said of anything in being can be said of God, as God. 

And yet, God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. God is not one and the same as everything in being, but God is real and present in every time and place, within us and among us, for we are all of God, children as it were of God and manifestations of God’s eternal, infinite love.

“The glory of God is a human being fully alive,” wrote an early Christian bishop, St. Irenaeus. Our lives are God’s gifts of being, in relatedness with all other beings and being itself. We are given the gift of awareness of our relationship with God in each other, and our accepting response is love. Love is the response of human persons in joyful acceptance of their deep connectedness with one another in the ground of ultimate reality, of being itself, of God’s real presence.

For Christians, together the body of Christ, awareness of God’s love in which we are all connected is what I call Christ-consciousness, because Christ, whom we embody, is the fully human incarnation of God, God with us, God among us, God within us.

Now Jesus Christ’s ministry of salvation is ours, as St. Teresa of Avila wrote in the sixteenth century:

Christ has no body on earth now but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion for the world is to look out; yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good; and yours are the hands with which He is to bless us now. 

And I affirm that, to the extent we can say anything positively true of our relation with God, we can say, with the author of 1 John 4,

Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him [or her]. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and [God’s] love is made complete in us. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 

Love is what made us, and it is what we are here for. Love is the way of life that surpasses death.

Now let’s take the step from our Gospel narrative, and from our God-talk, to our own ordinary daily lives, living out the way of life of Jesus’ followers in Christian discipleship. We were born in this world nineteen and a half centuries on, but our relation to Christ is not much different, really, from that of the generation of disciples for whom the Gospel According to Matthew was written, fifty years or so after Jesus and his first disciples walked upon the dusty pathways of Galilee.

Our Gospel narrative is of course an imaginary one, pieced together in piety by a faithful author looking backward to an earlier time, making meaning for his people of a collection of oral accounts and written sayings attributed to Jesus. That is its beauty and its power.

Here and now, we can make new meaning for our own lives in our hearing of the sacred story. We can imagine ourselves in the roles of Jesus’ disciples, sent forth on missions of apostleship to our neighbors. And perhaps more significantly, we can imagine ourselves as the village neighbors receiving them, accepting them, welcoming them as Christ in the stranger’s guise, and offering the cup of cool water.

In the United Church of Christ, we speak of radical hospitality and extravagant welcome, as descriptions of how we mean to embody the good news of God in our lives as Christ’s disciples for our time.

One way we do this in my congregation is by hosting twenty homeless guests overnight each Sunday. Our church volunteers serve supper and share evening table fellowship with our guests, and we provide them with breakfast foods before they leave Monday morning. Five other congregations in Santa Cruz join us in this, welcoming these guests in church fellowship halls every night of the week. I was the principal organizer of this community mission project, which has been in operation for two years now.

I’ve been consulting with your pastor Mark Fountain, and with clergy and lay leaders of several other churches in the Aptos-Soquel area, to help organize a new faith-based shelter project of the same kind here.

I hope that some of you will be inspired to works of extravagant welcome and radical hospitality in your church for other wayfaring strangers, people who have next to nothing in the way of material resources, and who lack any housing at all.

I hope you’ll be encouraged and inspired by what is plainly possible to join in the organizing process with your neighboring congregations. It would be my joy and my honor to guide you, and to share with you the benefit of my experience. I’m sure there will be a time soon for us to work together to bring a new mission project into being here where you live and worship.

Now as you go forth in discipleship, be mindful that you don’t need to go very far. There are lost souls just beyond your doorstep, and multitudes of displaced, dispossessed, and suffering children of God right here in your own neighborhood. There, but for fortune, go you and I. Let us be good news to them. Let us offer them the cup of cool water.

God’s blessings be with you. Go in love, go in peace, and remember – you are not alone.

Walking song composed by Daddy and his daughters in 1993-1994.

Sing a song of silverfish, a thimble full of sky.

When Maggie caught the mockingbird, it called her, "Maggie Pie."

When Anna, in her dancing gown, asked all the stones to spin,

The silverfish danced to the gate, and Maggie let them in!

Dandelions, daffodils, and buttercups are we.

We sing our yellow flower songs to butterflies and bees.

The bees buzz in the clover patch, MacKenzie's in the tree.

The butterfly plays in the sun and tickles MacKenzie's knee!

Christina was a ladybug, and Angela was too.

They lived inside a teacup Anna painted all in blue.

They rested on their leaves of grass for half a dreamy day,

Then Anna tossed the teacup up and told them, "Fly away!"

Sermon Preached Sunday August 14, 2011 at First Congregational Church of Santa Cruz

Isaiah 56:1, 6-8

Thus said the LORD:
“Observe what is right and do what is just;
For soon my salvation shall come,
And my deliverance be revealed.

And the foreigners
Who join themselves to the LORD,
To minister to God,
And to love the name of the LORD,
To be his servants -
All who keep the Sabbath and do not profane it,
And who hold fast to My covenant -
I will bring them to My sacred mount
And let them rejoice in My house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices
Shall be welcome on My altar;
For my house shall be called
A house of prayer for all peoples.

Thus says the LORD God,
Who gathers the dispersed of Israel:
“I will gather still more to those already
gathered.”

Reflection: On the Hope of Israel

Those are the words of the ancient Jewish author known to Bible scholars as Deutero-Isaiah, or Second Isaiah. He is thought to have been among the second generation of Judeans exiled in Babylon in the sixth century BC. Fifty years before then, the Babylonian empire had sacked Jerusalem and destroyed Solomon’s temple. The Babylonian armies decimated the Jewish population, and took captive large numbers of the Jewish elites. The captives became a dislocated community living in a foreign land, until Babylon finally was conquered by the rising Persian Empire. Then the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great restored the exiles to Jerusalem.

Deutero-Isaiah wrote in the tradition of the prophet Isaiah, who lived earlier in the sixth century, in the final period of First Temple Jerusalem. Like the original Isaiah, Deutero-Isaiah looked forward to the dawn of a new era, but apparently he no longer held any expectation that a descendant of King David (or any other human being, for that matter) would reign as king in a restored Jerusalem. Rather, God alone would rule over all Creation in that day. Thus, Deutero-Isaiah foretells of a messianic era, but not of a personal Messiah.

At first, like Isaiah before him, Second Isaiah predicted a return to Zion that would usher in a renaissance of the Judean commonwealth, a reunification of the Northern and Southern kingdoms of Israel, disjoined since 922 BC, bringing restoration of the wholeness, sovereignty, and peace of King David’s once expansive realm. This would be an era of amity among all nations throughout the world, the end of Gentile ignorance in disregard of the true God of Israel.

Unfortunately, though the reconstructed Second Temple in Jerusalem was dedicated near the end of the century, the Judaic restoration did not have such far-reaching effects. Judah became no more than a poor, insignificant province of Persia – not an exalted, independent Jewish state directly ruled by God.

Relatively few of the exiles availed themselves of the opportunity to return to Zion, and the world remained largely unchanged. Still, Second Isaiah continued to predict that a greater ingathering of exiles would occur, and that a new and holy world order would eventually appear.

We don’t know how significant these hopeful prophesies were in Jerusalem over the following five hundred years, but after the end of the Second Temple period they were appropriated with great significance by the early Christian author of the Gospel According to Mark, and by the authors of Matthew and Luke, following Mark.

That’s why we’re reading from Isaiah in today’s lectionary. The Gospels anticipated the realization of Second Isaiah’s prophecy in a hoped-for new world they said was proclaimed by Jesus as the coming kingdom of God.

So let’s fast-forward six hundred fifty years or so from the advent of the Second Temple era to a reading from Mark and Matthew about Jesus in his time.

Matthew 15:10-20, 21-28

Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, “Listen and understand:

it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.”

Then the disciples approached and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?”

He answered, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted.

Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.”

But Peter said to him, “Explain this parable to us.”

Then he said, “Are you also still without understanding?

Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?

But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.

For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.

These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.”

Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon.

Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.”

But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.”

He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.”

He answered, “It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.”

She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.

Reflection: He Who Was Called Christ

Today’s Gospel reading pretty obviously is a pair of unrelated pericopes, as set in the Gospel According to Matthew. Pericope. Isn’t that a great word? Pericope is derived from the Greek, by way of Late Latin, meaning, literally, a “clipping” or a “cutting” – a “piece cut out.” A pericope is a selection of text, an extract from a book, usually the Bible.

It’s easy to see that our reading involves two selections, cut and pasted together. This cutting and pasting is typical of the way the authors of the Gospels assembled their materials. In both of these, Matthew used Mark as a source for the narratives, incorporating the received text more or less intact, with some variations and elaboration.

Mark was the earliest written of the New Testament Gospels, put together about fifty years after Jesus died from a collection of oral and written traditions about Jesus, with a liberal dose of invention and imagination. Matthew and Luke both were published some twenty years later. Each of them incorporated most of the Mark material, with additions from other sources.

Our first pericope is about what defiles a person spiritually. This theme may have reflected an authentic teaching of Jesus, though it is not found in the more recently discovered collection of Jesus’ sayings known as the Gospel of Thomas, nor in any of the other ancient documents known as the Nag Hammadi Library – both of which are thought to have existed prior to the composition of Mark. On the other hand, the teaching concerning what defiles a person may have been a Markan invention attributed to Jesus.

There are two particular sentences in this reading not directly related to the theme of defilement, though, which belong to the hypothetical collection of Jesus’ sayings known as Q. Those are the warnings that the plant not planted by the heavenly father shall be uprooted, and the one about the blind leading the blind.

All put together, we have a composite discourse against the piety of the Pharisees who required ritual purity for Jews, and who demanded strict conformity with the letter of the law of the Torah – in this instance, a critique of the Pharisees’ application of kosher rules regulating ritual purification of foods.

There are two streams of Jesus tradition combined here.

The first is typical of the authentic Jesus teachings, emphasizing the importance of moral discernment as a matter of religious character, the saying that “what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart,” insisting that uncleanness and depravity of this kind – not merely ritual impurity – is what defiles a person morally and spiritually.

In perhaps the most memorable of the Gospel scenarios, Jesus quotes the Hebrew Scriptures, saying,

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might and . . . you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

On these greatest commandments, Jesus said, “depend all the Torah and all the Prophets.” To love God is to love God’s Creation as well. To love one’s neighbor as oneself is corollary, because we all are aspects of God’s Creation. Love in action, Jesus taught, is the moral test for every practical application of the Torah’s standards for religious purity.

The other theme, more polemically against the Pharisees, is related to an issue especially significant in the time of the latter-day followers of the Jesus traditions, when Mark and Matthew were composed.

By then, the general project of differentiating the religious commitments of emerging Judeo-Christian communities from the conventional observance of Jewish Torah rituals had become important for congregations comprised mostly of Greek-speaking Gentiles. For them, Jewish standards of ritual purity were burdensome and unacceptable. Mark composed for Jesus a discourse to support this view, one that arose from certain religious circumstances of his own time, which had not yet emerged as current concerns in Jesus’ lifetime.

The bottom-line faith commitment of the New Testament Gospels is that in the church of Jesus Christ faithful Gentiles are members of the people of God just as authentically as faithful Jews are – and without regard to whether or not they observe the ritual purity requirements of Torah with the same alacrity as their Jewish brethren.

Jesus though, like any of us, was presumably a man of his own time; and he was one hundred percent Jewish – as we see in our second pericope.

Here we find him and his disciples in foreign territory, having wandered out of their home region of Jewish villages in the hill country of ancient Israel, into a coastal district now part of southern Lebanon. Matthew called the people of that place Canaanites; Mark called them Syro-Phoenecian. To Jesus and his disciples, they were aliens, people of non-Jewish ethnicity. They were Gentiles.

There is no gospel narrative in which Jesus teaches a Gentile, and only one other Gentile-healing episode. Nor do Jesus and his disciples stray outside Jewish precincts, except in two instances, of which this is one. It does seem that Jesus’ message, in his own time, was exclusively for God’s chosen people. Those were the people of Moses’ covenant, descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – the Jewish people.

To the contrary of the post-resurrection gloss in the New Testament, it appears that the good news of God that Jesus proclaimed during his lifetime was only for the descendants of the sons of Jacob – not for the whole world.

I’m not sure what to think about this vignette, one featuring a hostile Jesus with a chauvinistic, in-your-face attitude. I’m sure the evangelistic author of this narrative invented its setting and composed the dialogue – with a distinctive message in mind. But still, we might have a glimpse of the real Jesus here.

This aspect of Jesus’ Jewish persona could have been preserved authentically in an oral tradition received by the author of the first Gospel. It would not really have been out of character to find an observant Jew of Jesus’ time insulting and humiliating a Gentile woman – despite Jesus’ moral critiques of false piety found in other contexts.

Think of another Matthew passage, the one in which Jesus compares his followers’ discipleship to the light of the world, and to a city set on a hill. We read that people do not “light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all the house.” The phrase, “all the house” is of course an exclusive reference to the House of Israel.

On the other hand, in the Luke version, the lamp is put up on a stand, “that all those who enter may see the light.” Here we have the Gospels’ inclusive, universalizing, ecumenical message to “the whole inhabited world.”

Though some of the intended audience for Mark’s and Matthew’s Gospels were Jewish, they were living in reformed modes – in full fellowship with Gentiles. They were no longer practicing the religion of Jesus of Nazareth and his contemporaries. They were developing a revisionist religion concerned with Jesus the Christ – not as he was in life, but as he was mythologized, in the changing post-Judaic tradition.

And that tradition, expressed in the New Testament Gospels, is the tradition we have received. We can’t reach back to a time decades before the first Gospel, to discover who Jesus actually was. There aren’t any contemporary accounts. We simply cannot know historically very much about Jesus, who lived and died two millennia ago – he who was called Christ.

So we interpret the scriptures we have as best we can, using the tools of critical scholarship and the insights of tradition. We construct meaning for ourselves on the basis of tradition and scripture, but more importantly, by application of our own experience and reason.

The thrust of the Christian gospel, extending to everyone everywhere Jesus’ perhaps parochial message, is that God’s Presence, God’s redeeming grace, and God’s covenanted relationship with all humankind, indeed with all Creation, is universal.

As Saint Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

So when Mark and Matthew conclude their narrative with the Gentile woman asserting her own inherent worth and dignity, and with Jesus in response casting this as a powerful confession of faith, the same message of universal salvation is prefigured.

In our own time, we carry that faithful principle forward, seeking to embrace all differences among us in the circle of our beloved community.

The author of Mark, writing for the faithful of his time, also revived the six centuries old prophecies of Second Isaiah, to which Jesus himself apparently never referred in his authentic sayings. But these fit the anticipation of a Messianic glory to come that was so characteristic of the Gospels.

We know now how the nineteen centuries between their time and ours have instead been a history of pretty much one damned thing after another. Yet even today Christians everywhere hope and pray for a new dawn of the kind hailed by Deutero-Isaiah, for the coming of an era when peace and loving-kindness will prevail on earth, when the nations will be ruled in justice and mercy, when people everywhere will live together in faith and forgiveness.

We’re not naïve. We know how improbable it is that such a world transformation will become reality. And yet, somehow, we continue to hope in the power of love and faith, knowing that a more excellent way is possible, and that the way begins with each of us, following the moral example of Jesus, and extending his world-redeeming message of grace and salvation by our example to each person with whom we share our lives.

We try to live in the present as though our hope were already being fulfilled.

The earliest Christians – some of them anyway – actually imagined the second coming of Christ and the advent of the kingdom of God would happen to them in their lifetimes. Now I would guess that no one here actually anticipates that one day Jesus Christ will come roaring down from the sky in a blaze of glory, with angel trumpets blaring, to plant his banner triumphantly on the Mount of Olives.

And while we know that a mother’s faith and love, like that of the Canaanite woman, may banish something like a demon from her child’s soul, in our day we wouldn’t understand that as a supernatural miracle.

What is the good news of God for us, today?

I think of Jesus as the archetypal human person – the "Son of Man," a child of humankind, one who sought the Presence of God at the very center of his own being, and called on his people to join him in that quest. The good news of God today for us, I believe, is that God’s transforming Presence is with us here and now, as it was with Jesus, and has been always.

This ultimate and eternal reality is the unfathomable source of a love supreme, a transforming power that works in us, and among us, by the saving miracle of the spirit we call grace, through our acts of faith.

For God is with us so intimately that we are truly of God, and God is love, so that to love God is to love one another as oneself. This is the good news of God, and the ever-fulfilled promise of the holy covenant, ancient and new.

If we can no longer believe in the creeds and confessions of a past orthodoxy, we can take hold of the ancient vision of justice and redemption for all humankind, and we can become that vision by the very manner in which we live our lives.

The times change, and with them our lives and we must change. The signs of the changing times are all around us. Yet as it was written in the first century, so it is now that faith, hope, and love abide. And love is still the greatest of these. Let love light our way, for we know God is with us – as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.

Amen.

Free Julian Assange!

And now this:

Our State Department’s house elf, Mr. P. J. Crowley, a slinking toady who speaks publicly for Secretary of State Ms. Clinton, says,

“Obviously, the fact that Julian Assange has been arrested in Britain is a matter between Britain and Sweden; the United States does not take a position on the merits of that particular warrant from Interpol for his arrest. We have, and continue to condemn what Julian Assange and WikiLeaks has done; in our view, he has done substantial damage to the interests of the United States, and the interests of other countries.”

Quite to the contrary, obviously, the people of the other countries, like the people of the United States, view the matter rather differently.

Virtually all of us understand perfectly well that the interests of the United States’ government have been, and continue to be in direct opposition to the interests of the people.

The fact that Julian Assange has been arrested in Britain is emphatically not simply a matter between the governments of Sweden and the U. K.

The long arm of the ruling regime in the U. S. A. is reaching out over the seas to strong-arm its vassals, in plain view to all, in a desperate attempt to silence the estimable Mr. Assange, the world’s present epitome of courage, in his truth-telling heroism.

The government of the United States is not on the side of justice, truth and liberty, as you may have guessed.

Just yesterday, one of Fox News’ nominal Democrat commentators, a Mr. Bob Beckel, said he wanted Julian Assange illegally killed; he said that American Special Forces should do that.

He said, “a dead man can’t leak stuff; this guy’s a traitor, he’s treasonous, he’s broken every law of the United States. I’m not for the death penalty, so there’s only one way to do it – illegally shoot the son-of-a-bitch . . . ,” and so on.

(The intrepid Mr. Beckel is also a columnist for USA Today. In 1984, he was Walter Mondale’s campaign manager. Early in his career, Mr. Beckel joined the Department of State, and became the youngest Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Carter administration. He was a co-host of “Crossfire Sunday” on CNN, alongside Tony Snow, and later, Lynne Cheney; he has moved on to Fox News Channel as a political analyst and commentator, regularly appearing on such shows as “Hannity and Colmes,” “Hannity,” and “America’s Newsroom.”)

Will Barack Obama’s Attorney General now respond, and move swiftly to arrest the makers of such public death threats – of which Mr. Beckel’s is indeed in prominent company?

That will happen just as soon, I imagine, as the White House criminals of the former Bush-Cheney junta will be collared and shackled.

Are you beginning to see now, dear Virginia, how the interests of your present government are not at all in your own best interests?

For my part, I’ll say this: If Julian Assange, who is an Australian national, is a traitor to the United States, then so am I. I am a U.S. citizen by birth. And, like all people of political discernment and good will, I am a natural enemy of the United States’ government.

I support whole-heartedly, and applaud all that WikiLeaks has done to make public the multitudinous and global evildoings of the United States.

Open Letter to President Obama

Dear President Obama:

As you know better than I do, the apparatus of government in these United States is held now, as it has been for at least sixty-five years, in the ineluctable grip of an iron triangle of socioeconomic forces – the true axis of evil that former President Eisenhower identified in saying prophetically that, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

Since January 17, 1961 when General Eisenhower gave his farewell address as President to the people of this country, that appellation has become standard terminology − as the pervasive power of the cancerous concatenation of forces represented by the Pentagon, the so-called national defense industry, their corporate mercenary armies, and their allied financial and political organizations, have grown toward metastasis.

Old Uncle Ike should better have referred to the military, industrial, and congressional complex in his final speech. The majority of our members of Congress, including the Senate, have become tragically complicit in that insidious and malicious combination of forces. There can be no doubt that Ike meant to point out the truly malignant nature of the combination of private sector and public sector establishments in continual military preparedness and elective wars. He himself included in his rhetoric the urgent warning that,

“The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

In beginning his speech, Ike couched his remarks with a summation of his working relationship with the Congress, and the looming threat to our freedom and peace posed by the military-industrial complex. He noted that,

“We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence − economic, political, even spiritual − is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.”

In words that echo down the many years since his time, Ike warned us that, “Any failure of our [government’s] basic purposes . . . to keep the peace, to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among peoples and among nations, traceable to arrogance or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt, both at home and abroad.”

At the time, he spoke of the military threat posed by the former Soviet Union and its supposedly inimical ideology, and he paired with it the threat of a galloping tendency toward fascism – let us call it what it is − in our social, economic, and governmental order.

According to Wikipedia [on the topic of the military-industrial complex], in the prescient book Fascism and Big Business, “by the French historian and anarchist Daniel Guerin, which was written before the Second World War broke out, [Guerin] examines the development of Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy, and [the] relationships [of the Fascist political leaders] with the capitalist families there. Its main thesis is that fascism supported the heavy industrial sector to the detriment of lighter industrial sectors, dedicated to building consumer goods. It points out the failure of ‘corporatism,’ which in effect meant the dismantling of trade unions and workers’ inability to elect their own representatives, who were nominated instead by the fascists.”

Nowadays we devote even more, much more, of our economic productivity to weapons and war than we did in 1961. We have recently wrought havoc in the Middle East, and elsewhere, with our criminal wars and covert misadventures. And we have created widespread economic disadvantage, and enforced repression of dissent at home, in our headlong rush to hugely advantage the interests of the ruling elites in the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill, in so-called defense industries, and on Wall Street.

It has been more than thirty years now, since the late enemy of Eisenhower and his contemporaries, the U.S.S.R., imploded and ceased to exist. Yet, instead of making a return to building plowshares, we have continued to build ever more terrible swords. Now we tilt at windmills against a false enemy, created out of whole cloth by our shadow government: the supposed terrorist alliance of Al Qaida, and the imaginary enemy Osama bin Laden, who in fact is almost certainly deceased, and storied beyond all true fact.

In your administration, Mr. Obama, you have demonstrated a deeply worrisome unwillingness to break with the continuity of former administrations in furtherance of the United States’ unending warfare, military expansion, and export of militarism globally.

I, for one among many, had dared hope you would lead the rulers of the nation toward peace and disarmament, toward withdrawal from our global conflicts, toward demilitarization, and the cessation of international weapons distribution – as I believe President Eisenhower would have done if he could have − and that you would instead lead us toward a retooling of our industrial capacities for clean energy sufficiency, and critical reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

But you have so far failed us in our hopes.

And during your watch, the ruling elites have by now arrogated to themselves trillions of dollars of the public weal, crippling our national economy and consigning the poorer 99% of our people to decades of continual economic decline, while you have stood by impotently, complicitously making the former administration’s disastrous foreign wars yours, and the universally hated far-flung military empire of the United States has become your own legacy.

Unless this country’s misbegotten foreign military and insane so-called national security expenditures can be reduced by huge proportions – soon – the domestic order of the United States will certainly collapse into chaos, anarchy, and violent popular uprisings against our failed national institutions.

Is this the nightmare you will preside over before your term in office is finished, or will you find the personal courage to commit your administration to the radical change that is absolutely necessary to avoid this country’s impending descent into fascist tyranny?

Which do you choose?

Sincerely,

Jim Weller

Sermon preached to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Santa Cruz County on July 5, 2009

Good morning, friends! God be with you. It is a special blessing to revisit a place one once called home, and I’m feeling especially blessed to be here, to revisit, if just for a short time, the area where my daughters were born, and where their childhoods were spent, and where we had so many memorable times together, on weekend visits after their mother and I split up.

Santa Cruz was where I eventually returned to live, to be closer to my girls, and where I found my way to this Fellowship, where I found a spiritual home, a community of like-minded and like-hearted people where I could belong, where I found friendship, and fellowship, and love, and ways to participate meaningfully in worthy service to the congregation, and the larger community.

The people I came to know here helped me to heal, and grow, in many ways. I remember all this with gratitude to you who are still here, and honor to those who have passed on since I’ve been away. It was here that I first began to feel my calling to ministry, and where I began to discern the shape of my potentiality as a minister of the word and the sacrament, whatever those might turn out to be – because I hardly knew then, not that I know so much more now!

The bonds of affection are still strong for me here; this is a place where I felt very much at home, in community, in ways I have felt nowhere since I left.

As I contemplated setting to the task of telling my story, I realized it is not all, or even mostly, mine. Our lives, and those of all creatures, are profoundly connected with – and considerably determined by – those of others among them. And so it is with me. I believe that we engage with God most immediately and effectively in our relationships with other persons.

“I tell you the truth,” Jesus said to his disciples, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”

Each one of you is here today, I know, because you share an understanding that the world we live in is connected profoundly, and mysteriously. You gather to lift up your mutual care for and celebration of the interdependent web of existence, of which we all are a part. Your communal worship has sacred meaning for each and all of you.

The English word “worship” is derived from a combination of old roots meaning, “worth-ship,” or “worthiness.” We gather together to honor the worthiness, the moral value and sacredness of the life we share, and the love that gives us birth, that binds us together in a kind of holy communion.

I am here to share with you the meanings that I have come to recognize in my own spiritual practices. And I want to acknowledge that there are some here whose own spiritual meanings, and the words they use to express them, differ from mine. Let me honor those differences, as I try to express mine to you.

You are going to hear a lot of religious language coming out of my mouth this morning. If you’re having skeptical difficulties, I implore you to suspend disbelief, just for now. One hundred percent of the language and imagery of religion – every religion – consists in metaphor, myth, and symbol. Profound truths and ultimate realities are “pointed toward” by these verbal signs and imagery. Humanity employs such methods because the ineffable, ultimate concerns of our religious traditions cannot be adequately described, nor their meanings conveyed, by ordinary descriptive language.

We progressive theologians like to say, “To each its own meaning.” I even remember a textbook on critical interpretation having that title. So, if a word or idea sticks in our ears at first, we try to deconstruct it, and reinterpret it in a way that better suits our understanding and experience.

I have read the Bible, and studied its original languages, as well as the scriptures of Buddhism and Hinduism, and this has been my method for approximating an understanding of these books’ meanings for me, for accommodating them to my own system of belief and appreciation. So, come along with me now, and try beginning to unpack whatever words you may wince to hear!

When we set out on a journey of exploration, it never leads where we expected it to lead us.

I set out to prepare myself for religious ministry some seven years ago, and I thought I would go straight to Starr King School for the Ministry – a primarily Unitarian Universalist seminary in Berkeley. I’d considered nothing else, since I’d identified as Unitarian Universalist since I was a youth. But my application for admission to the Master of Divinity degree program there was denied, and I was unable to find out why. I was told only that a second application for admission was strongly discouraged.

So, I decided to complete an undergraduate degree in religious studies first, and before long I was enrolled in a bachelors degree program at Holy Names University – a small Catholic liberal arts college in Oakland. When I was finished, after two years, I applied for admission to Starr King School again, and lo and behold, this time I was accepted!

But I had also applied for graduate studies at Pacific School of Religion – a progressive multi-denominational Christian seminary in Berkeley, which is part of the Graduate Theological Union, as is Starr King. I was offered admission there as well, and for reasons mostly intuitive, and non-rational, I accepted that offer instead of Starr King’s.

In care of the dedicated and radical Sisters of the Holy Names, I had studied the Bible critically, the history, theology, and ethics of Christianity and Judaism, philosophy of religion, and so forth, and I had begun to adopt a new identity as an appreciative heir to the long Judeo-Christian monotheist tradition.

The Unitarians and Universalists, after all, had first defined themselves as Enlightenment Christians, the intellectual liberals and radicals of Protestant Congregationalism. I had begun to feel I was recovering, and reconstructing, my Reformation religious heritage.

If the depth and breadth of my inherited religious traditions were new to me, God was not. I had formed the conviction long before, based in experience, that God is real, ultimately real, and of ultimate significance to the human condition.

A power higher than my own reason, a saving grace I had prayed for, had enabled me to recover from alcoholism in an earlier phase of my life. I came to find consolation and strength in prayer, from a source deep within me, and I knew that, whatever God is, God is present, always and everywhere with me. The feeling of God’s presence is love. God is love, and I know always, as the Gospels say that the Holy Spirit assured Jesus, that I am a beloved child of God, in whom my Creator delights. For me, religious experience is love, and in unconditional love, there is salvation.

Let me tell you a story, a bit of memoir I wrote in reflection on a very special experience I had, quite some years ago now:

“How big is God, Daddy? Is he bigger than a house?” asked Anna, my firstborn and the more pensive of my two little girls, one afternoon while we sat together on the front porch railing after their preschool day.

“God is not a person, or a thing you can see, or touch, or hear,” I answered her, quite as thoughtfully. “God is . . . a feeling inside you. God is how you feel when you know you are alive. God is what you feel when you love someone. When you say, ‘I love you,’ you feel God in you.”

Anna sat quietly for half a minute, enjoying her ice cream cone. “I love you, Daddy”, she said.

“I know, sweetie. I love you, too. Listen. Do you remember the day we were at the beach, when you were kneeling in the wet sand, with your back to the waves, and you’d laugh as each wave surprised you, splashing over your shoulders? Maggie was playing by herself, near us on the big rocks, and you and I were there in the surf, and I’d laugh when you laughed, and you looked up at me then and yelled, ‘I’m haaaap-py!’ Do you remember how good you felt then? That was God, laughing inside you.”

Soon after I wrote that reflection, I began seeking to understand and cultivate, and to try to communicate the meaning of that deeply spiritual experience of God’s love I shared with Anna.

In graduate studies, at Pacific School of Religion, I went on to study the Hebrew and Christian scriptures more thoroughly, seeking the central significance of the biblical religion that pivoted on the teachings of Jesus.

I also spent a good deal of time in study of the sacred texts Buddhism, and those of the Indian wisdom traditions, the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad-Gita. Certain elements of those teachings have contributed importantly to my spirituality, and shaped my views of the teachings of Jesus.

In a postmodern, post-structuralist intellectual environment, my position may be an unpopular one, but nonetheless, I believe that the central personal experience in every religious tradition, despite all their diversity, is the selfsame relation between the human person and God.

And I have, step by step, come along the trajectory of the Christian tradition, for though there are many ways of ascending the spiritual mountain; I think it is better to follow a wide, well-marked way, than to wander through the underbrush unguided, or to skip from one trodden path to another.

I have learned that before the doctrine and dogma of the Latin fathers, and the Greek patriarchs, were erected into an institutional church, before the texts of the New Testament were composed, there was a very human revelation, a transforming message, that emerged in Jerusalem, and challenged the established religious authorities to a spiritual turnabout, to re-pent (which means, “think again”) and to embrace whole-heartedly and whole-mindedly, as whole human persons, the ultimate, incomprehensible reality of God, to which we can only respond with love.

Just what, exactly, was the “good news,” the Evangelien, the gospel, or God-spell that Jesus taught? One preaching professor of mine stressed that a sermon has to have some good news in it, somewhere. So, I took my search for the good news of God to heart.

Some of the work I found I needed to accomplish, after poring over Biblical translations, alternate versions, and commentaries, was to paraphrase the texts of the Gospels, and the most significant parts of them, in ways coherent with my own developing faith, and my theological understandings. Thus, according to the first-written Gospel,

Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

In my paraphrase,

Jesus came along, so it is said, and he preached a great blessing, saying, “The time for enlightenment and liberation of the spirit is now! God’s real presence is with us, among us, within us, now and forever. Let your hearts and minds be changed; believe in this very good news!

We can read too much, or too little, into Jesus' saying that time is fulfilled. From a God’s eye point of view, time is always fulfilled in the Eternal Now, and that is the point here. Not that the time of God, at long last, is finally upon us, finally full, finally filled – it always has been! Is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.

God’s reign (or, perhaps better, the community of God) is not just near, almost here, about to happen. What Jesus meant is that God is not merely close by – God is present among us, and within us, and each other, here, now, and forever.

Now when He was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, He answered them and said, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation; nor will they say, ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.”

God’s presence is real and immediate, at all times, for everyone who is ever disposed to apprehend it. But we are made in God’s image; therefore, God’s presence is visible and most palpable in community, where we recognize, and speak with, and sing with one another.

Because we are God’s creatures, and God’s conscious embodiments, when we gather together to worship, we witness the presence of God in one another. All of creation is God’s embodiment, but we disclose God’s presence most immediately to one another in our loving, affirming, and forgiving presence for each other.

For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.

Our lives are God’s gifts of being, in relatedness with all other beings and being itself. We are given the gift of awareness of our relationship with God in each other, and our accepting response is love.

While I can assure you with the greatest of faith in my meaning, that you are a beloved child of God, in whom your Creator delights, I must in all honesty admit that I myself often cannot feel beloved, and I spend much of my time feeling lonely. This is not hypocrisy, it is hope; and it is human. True, an assuredness of God’s embracing love can be faint substitute for a warm human embrace when a person is without loved ones. But it can still be a saving grace, when nothing else avails.

I believe this: Love is our response in joyful recognition of our deep connectedness with one another in the ground of ultimate reality, of being itself. The ground in which we are all connected, and interdependent, and the fully human self-consciousness of that reality, is what I call God. Love made us, and it is what we are here for. Love is the way.

“The glory of God is a human being fully alive,” wrote Irenaeus, an early Christian theologian.

For me, Jesus is a centrally significant religious symbol. He represents the potentiality of the fully human person, awakened to the ultimate reality of his fully human divinity. He has come to know himself as a beloved child of God, in whom his Creator delights, and he has come to understand his purpose on earth – to proclaim the good news of God’s loving, redeeming, and saving presence.

What does this tell us about how we can live our lives best, and most blessedly?

A pagan is said once to have approached the Rabbi Hillel, an older contemporary of Jesus, and promised to convert to Judaism if Hillel could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while standing on one leg. The Rabbi then stood on one leg and said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study it.” He said that every single verse of the Torah is a commentary, a gloss, upon the Golden Rule.

Confucius first enunciated the Golden Rule in the fifth century BCE. “Do not do unto others what you would not like them to do unto you.” That, he said, was the central thread that ran through all his teaching, and that his disciples should put into practice all day, and every day.

The great Rabbi Meir, of the second century CE, said that any interpretation of Scripture that leads to hatred and disdain of other people is illegitimate. Saint Augustin made the same point. He said that the Holy Scripture teaches nothing but charity (meaning loving-kindness), and we must not leave off interpretation of Scripture until we have found a compassionate interpretation.

Religion is as religion does. A prophet called Micah, who lived long before Jesus, summed up the Torah this way: What does Adonai require of you, but to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?

A first-century Jewish prophet, Jesus located the central tenet of the manifold Law of Moses in the single “greatest commandment,” the law of love that stood as Judaism’s holy imperative:

Shema Yisraeil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” And there is another like it: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On this, he said, “depends all the Torah and all the Prophets.”

An honored contemporary rabbi is asked by a lawyer, “What must I do to be righteous and merit God’s mercy?” The rabbi replied, “What is written in the Torah?” The questioner answered, “You shall love Adonai your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself.” The rabbi replied, “You have gotten the right answer; do this, and you will live.” But the questioner continued, asking, “And who is my neighbor?” The rabbi replied with this story:

“One day recently, at about dawn in an alley in Downtown L.A., a teenaged boy from Pasadena was mugged, beaten badly, and left for dead, lying just by the sidewalk. The first pedestrian to pass by that morning was a middle-aged woman, a wealthy physician on the way to work at her sports medicine clinic.”

“Noticing the motionless body, she hesitated a little, then hurried to cross the street, and continued on her way, thinking anxiously of her legal liability. Next, a young corporation executive carrying a hot cup of Starbucks coffee, while speaking into a cell phone, frowned at the unsightly mess, and sidestepping it, he strode on by, dismissing from mind what he’d just seen.”

“At last, a raggedy brown-skinned man, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, came upon the scene. When he saw the injured body, he was moved with compassion. Remembering his catechism, he stopped to see about the boy. Using his bandana and his undershirt, a plastic bottle of water, and some cheap vodka in a hip flask, he cleaned up and bandaged the boy’s wounds, flagged a taxi, and took the stranger to a skid row hotel room where this man and three other so-called “illegal aliens” were living. The man attended the beaten boy and cared for him all that day and night, even arranging for an unlicensed day nurse from the barrio to come in and treat his injuries.”

“The following morning, the rescuer left to seek a day’s labor, first paying the curandera fifty dollars to stay and nurse the boy; and he promised her when he would return he’d pay her as much as she needed to take good care of her hapless young patient.”

“Now, which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the robbed and beaten boy?” asked the rabbi. The lawyer answered, “The one who showed him mercy,” The rabbi said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

You’ve just tasted old wine poured from a new wineskin. You may recognize the parable I’ve just told as a revision and paraphrase of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan.

Religion is as religion does. The religion that teaches me to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with my God is the religion I practice.

Now, I’d like to invite you all to take a few moments to turn, and look at the person beside you; look a while, with loving kindness, for you are looking at a beloved child of God, in whom the Creator delights! Let us bless one another with a sign of God’s love and peace; shake a hand, embrace, give a holy kiss, as may be appropriate, to signify God’s loving presence, and reenact the ancient ritual of the passing of God’s peace!

Go now in peace. May the spirit of love surround you everywhere you may go!

How I'm Feeling Just Now

My heart feels as though it were a Leyden jar.
Not the cardiac muscle with its autonomic contractions -
I mean mi corazón, that center of psyche-spirit where bonds
of affection are meant to be formed with other persons;
where all those affect receptors ought to be aquiver,
awaiting a new acquaintance’s touch,
waiting to try for a fit, as a key fits its keyhole.

But no one has been able to reach inside the glass jar
since you sent me away into exile
to search in the taiga for my destiny.
And the battery wire is disconnected.
And the foil sheets lining the jar
make it impossible for anyone to peer inside
for a glimpse of what’s there.

I go about the tundra, and up and down in it like a ghost,
whose availability no one notices, even when I smile.
I imagine my smile is like the Cheshire cat’s grin
– a disembodied thing.

A Fable, After Aesop

Once upon a time a terrible forest fire drove all the animals in the woods down to the inside of a bend in the river. The birds took to the air and flew to the opposite bank. Some of the legged ones dove in and swam across to safety, but the others who crept or crawled, or slithered couldn’t swim or paddle. These gathered together, in great fear, with no means of escape.

One little snake, of a venomous kind, begged a large frog to carry him across the river on his back. “Please, please, kind Ranadaean Sir, Best of Batrachians, won’t you save my life, since you swim so well and easily?” wheedled the juvenile adder.

“But I fear you will bite me if I come close; you’ll kill me with your poison. No, no, I’m afraid to help you,” replied the old frog.

The snakelet answered, “Heaven forfend, dear Anuran Lord; I swear by all that’s holy, I won’t harm a wart of your handsome head. I’ll name my first hatched offspring after you. I promise the tale of your goodness and trust will be told for generations in Viperdom. There’s no time to lose; hurry! Come here and let me coil upon your back.”

Well, that big old frog repented of his mistrust; he beheld before him the spectacle of masses of creepers and crawlers beginning to charbroil, he felt a tide of mercy lift his warming heart, and he consented to remove the garrulous serpent from harm’s way, saying urgently, “Hold on as best you can; I’ll try to keep you above water.” And off they went, the frog stroking strongly, his bow wave streaming back from his nose as he surged ahead, the puff adder pup balancing on the frog’s broad green back.

When the odd couple of refugees, reptile and amphibian, arrived on the other shore, in the snake’s promised land of salvation, as it were, the good frog exclaimed enthusiastically, “Hallelujah, Brother Serpent, we made it!” And the snake struck, sinking his deadly fangs into the frog’s cervical spine just below his skull, where the back of his neck would have been, if frogs had necks.

The frog cried, “You bit me! You’re killing me! Why did you bite me, when I had just saved you from certain death? You made a holy oath! Why did you betray your word?” And the rescued puff adder, slithering away, replied simply, “Hey, I’m a snake. I bite. That’s what I do!”

The moral of the story is: Never turn your back on a snake. Not even a well-spoken one.

Bad Obama, Bad!

The Pentagon Plutocrats have no idea how to bring their Godforsaken debacle in Afghanistan to an end, no more than for their continual splattering of young people's blood and bone all over the map of Iraq - whilst a widening pall of depleted uranium dust and futility settles over all.

Into the City of War strides the new President Barack Obama, proclaiming a compromise deployment - or sacrifice - of seventeen thousand more troops into the quagmire of Afghanistan, who are now supposed to "stabilize" the situation.

I'm having deja vu, big time, Barack. Maybe you're too young to remember, but we've been here before, not so very long ago. Stabilize, you say? Are you playing Big Brother, Barack, or what? Let's lose the Newspeak, shall we? Tell us now, just what is the big idea, Mr. Commander in Chief?

Campaigning for election last fall, you blustered about, threatening to send - yes - no fewer than thirty thousand more hapless hod carriers for the Kabul regime construction project. What's up with your new number? Are you opting for the Golden Mean? Are you striking a virtuous pose, replete with classical virtues of temperance, prudence, fortitude, and justice?

If so, I beg to differ.

This is not prudent, not just. True temperance, and due fortitude would rule out warfare in the first place, deploying diplomats, not destroyers to engage the world in peaceful solutions to whatever real threats might subsist. And I challenge the idea that any regional political movements, from the Mideast through Central Asia, are our enemies. We, not the alienated victims of our world-girdling military empire, are our own worst enemies.

It's not just the economy, stupid.

Start the task of reconstructing the political economy by decimating the American military-industrial complex. Slash away the brass hats at the Pentagon; burn out the institutional thickets of waste and larceny thriving there behind corridors of closed doors. Put the multitudes of undereducated American youths who have been, and otherwise will be suckered into Devil's work in the military class, into re-education and vocational rehabilitation programs oriented toward waging peace, not war.

Let's just stop manufacturing mountains of weapons to arm the whole world. A single executive initiative on the part of our new President could put an historic end to that evil enterprise. Instead, let's make enough silicon photovoltaic solar cells to roof the planet, to power pumps to raise deep groundwater to subsistence farm families all over the Two-Thirds World, to do every piece of life-sustaining work electricity without emissions could to to bring about the transformation of our whole world into a new world of peace and justice!

Make love, not war!

I, for one, am not too young to remember the powerful impact those words had on the imaginations of a generation too much reviled now, but still capable - if we all have the will - of saving the world. I still believe, and I'm not the only one. I hope one day you'll join us, Barack; let the Devils of War and Mammon take the hindmost!

 

Let's hear the truth, for a change, Mr. Obama

In his inaugural address, President Obama declared, “Our nation is at war, with a far-reaching network of hatred and violence . . .” Probably, his speechwriter did not include the significant comma I do in that declarative sentence. But, with that critical punctuation, the statement is definitively true. Without the comma, it is merely a turn of deceitful polemic.

The truth the entire world knows is that our nation is indeed at war, with its far-reaching network of hatred and violence, that is, with the demonic power of its world-girdling military complex, headquartered in the Pentagon, and standing ever ready to dispatch cruel death, destruction, and despoliation, anywhere resistance to American hegemony arises.

I have yet to see a clear sign that this status quo will be altered, now that Barack Obama sits in the Oval Office.

How now, Mr. President?

Indulge me, my friends, will you please, on this Inauguration Day 2009, so full of bombast, hoopla, and dewy eyes, in an uncommon exercise of common sense.

We hold, I trust you’ll agree, these truths to be self-evident: That common men and women, of every land, in every age, are mostly people of good will; that is, they demonstrate in their lives and works, most of the time, the virtues of faith, and hope, and charity. And this, as well: That the predominant forces in all societies’ institutions, that rule the lives of the common people, are those of bad faith, mistrust, diffidence, and ill will.

You know there’s something going on here that is not good, but you don’t know what it is, do you?

Even the former President of the United States, George W. Bush, in his farewell address to the nation, reminded us that, “I've often spoken to you about good and evil, and this has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two of them there can be no compromise.”

Right. So you may say.

I ask then, why is the common good so patently compromised by evil?
Something wicked this way comes, eh? That phrase is to be found in Shakespeare's play “Macbeth.” The speaker is the second witch, who prophesies, "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes." The wicked thing is Macbeth himself, by this point in the play a traitor and murderer.

What do I make of this? Well, first of all, the common people are not in charge of society. And those who are in charge obviously do not have the common good in mind. Why? Well, ipso facto, they are not common people.

Those who are in charge are rich and powerful people, a perennial ruling class, and they are enemies of the common good. Thus, Mr. Bush, a scion of ruling class patriarchs, were he at all a reflective man, would do well to consider the tragedy of Macbeth. Even more so, I think, should President Obama, a man surely better equipped for self-reflection, as he assumes authority himself, going henceforth ever amidst a congeries of ruling class plenipotentiaries.

We will all do well to keep in mind that what is going on, in the final analysis, is not a struggle between good and evil; it is everywhere and always an economic class struggle, and we must choose which side we are on. Let us remember the still-relevant words of Frederick Douglass, penned in 1857:

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

You are now between a rock and a hard place, Mr. Obama, God help you. I wish I knew which side you are on.

Now, Mr. Obama, change U.S.-Israel policy

When you step into the Oval Office, Mr. Obama, will you be leaving a trail of bloody footprints? Are you already so obliged to the Israel Lobby that you’re constrained to say nothing, and do nothing, about the ongoing massacre of Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli war machine, its veritable Wehrmacht, its “mighty defense,” wielding horrible weapons supplied by the U.S.A.?

The Godforsaken rogue terrorist state of Israel is, and has been since its strategic, founding war of conquest in 1948, a lawless, merciless criminal aggressor in the region of Syria-Palestine – the enablement of the U.N. under the control of the U.S. and the U.K. notwithstanding.

Israel’s so-called “Defense Forces” have unceasingly engaged in cruel, unjust, unmerciful acts of forced relocation, and confiscation of Palestinian lands and buildings, mass displacement and imprisonment, “ethnic cleansing,” and virtual genocide against the indigenous Palestinian people. They are the native Muslim and Christian farmers and villagers whom the Zionist Movement, and its synthetic Zionist State, have resolutely sought to decimate and destroy, as individuals, families, communities, and even as a would-be Palestinian nation.

The criminal Zionist Israeli military regime has made for itself a history of decades of evil-doing, having waged war endlessly against its Syro-Palestinian and farther away neighbor states, and having become loathed and reviled uniformly throughout the world – except for the political and military-industrial elites who control the policies of the United States government – the corporate godfather and super warlord that supplies its Eastern Mediterranean vassal Israel with all the weapons and finances, and military support it ever needs, to continue and enhance its ongoing criminal aggression and war crimes.

The Palestinians of Gaza are trapped within armed perimeters, like fenced-in cattle, awaiting slaughter. They are living and dying – by thirst and starvation, untreated disease, and Israeli military murders – in a scenario reminiscent of nothing so much as the Warsaw Ghetto, where German Nazis imprisoned and massacred European Jews seventy years ago.

This cruel irony of history seems peculiarly unnoticed by the bloodthirsty leaders of the three Israeli war parties competing for election to its Prime Ministry. Zionist Israel has become the Doppelgänger of the Nazi's Third Reich. Its pursuit of military solutions to the problem of Palestinian resistance is like the Nazis’ pursuit of successive solutions to the “Jewish Problem.” Will Israel’s “Final Solution” be anything like Die Endlösung der Judenfrage?

The United States of America has played the single most dynamic role in the international pro-Zionist cartel to establish, arm, and enrich Israel through a process of violent dispossession, impoverishment, and dislocation of the native Palestinian people, since Israel’s inception in 1948. At present, the government of the U.S.A. virtually controls the military, economic, and political prerogatives of the state of Israel.

To be sure, the persistence of Palestinian liberation fighters in resisting Israeli oppression by firing homemade rockets toward the towns of the Israeli Negev is misguided and counterproductive, and deserves to be reproved. Nevertheless, this is no justification for Israel’s abominable airborne terrorism and ground assault on the helpless captive people of Gaza.

I say, Mr. Obama, I beseech you, to end U.S. government complicity in the war crimes of Israel, to withdraw immediately all U.S. military aid to and financial support of the state of Israel, to demand the removal of Israeli blockades on the borders of Gaza, to further demand Israel’s withdrawal from the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies, and to insist on the abandonment of all Israeli-occupied settlements in the Palestinian territories. The United States has also provided small arms and military support to the Palestine Liberation Organization for use against Hamas, and those policies must be ended as well.

Our near-term goal should be a cessation of hostilities, followed by substantial disarmament and demilitarization of all warring factions in the Syria-Palestine region, including Israel, Hamas, and Hizbollah. No renegade state intransigence should be tolerated – such as Israel has demonstrated in the past, with the collusion of the United States.

This process should be enforced with all the diplomatic and economic powers at the disposal of the United States, the United Nations, and the European Union. Every attempt should be made to engage Russia, Iran, and China in the peace process as well. May it be so.

No, Mr. Obama, there is no "right war."

Mr. Obama, I supported you and voted for you – being for me, as Ralph Nader said, “the best of the worse” – but this time, my friend, you are wrong, dead wrong.

The United States military misdeeds in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, are not “the right war.” There is no “right war.” As a self-identified Christian, you should know that, better than most folks do. And you know as well as I do, although perhaps you would not admit it publicly, that the so-called “just war” rationales of modern and pre-modern Christian ethics are obsolete and impossible to justify in our post-modern world.

A genuine follower of the way of Jesus Christ would prefer (as Platonic ethics required too) to suffer injustice than to do unjustly unto others, would try to never do violence to anyone for any reason, and would rather choose the way of peace, as with St. Paul and St. Peter, “not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing: but contrariwise blessing; knowing that ye are thereunto called, that ye should inherit a blessing.”


Furthermore, and again you know as well as I do, although perhaps you would not admit it publicly, that the supposed threat to U.S. national security posed by “Islamic terrorists” – whether located in Afghanistan or Pakistan, or Iraq or Iran, or Palestine or Somalia, or anywhere else in the world – is a convenient political fiction, a nightmare, a bete noir, a bugbear, used on behalf of this country’s plutocratic elites to falsely justify their imperialist crimes of transnational conquest.

I do not fear harm by “Islamo-fascist extremists,” but I do fear for the future if we do not begin to dismantle the military-industrial shadow government that rules the United States.

I believe I stand with a broad and diverse majority of the people of this country in an unequivocal demand to you as President-elect to withdraw U.S. military forces immediately, not only from Iraq, but from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and everywhere else in the world where they don’t belong, and aren’t required to protect our lives and properties – and I’m speaking for we, the people, not the military industrialists and plutocratic elites who have usurped our government!

We elected you to begin to undo the manifest evil visited on this country and the world by previous administrations, not to advance it and expand it.

To the barricades! Let the Revolution begin!

As our old tophatted comrade Pogo declared decades ago, "We have met the enemy, and it is us!" Let those with ears to hear listen!

The United States government and the elite ruling class minority it represents have, together, become a formidable enemy of the People. Our national government and its allied military-industrial complex have, together, become the greatest threat to peace and security the world has ever known. Today, under the mendacious, maleficent usurpation of Richard B. Cheney and George W. Bush, we have finally realized a dire state that the founders of our nation, in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, foresaw with stern resolve.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that [all persons] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . . That to secure these rights . . . Governments are instituted . . . deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . . whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government . . . Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes . . . But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

The time has come for the Cheney/Bush regime to be decisively, forcibly, forever removed from power. The United States Congress has the Constitutional authority, and now the political wherewithal, to impeach the pretenders to the Presidency and the Vice-Presidency, for the commission of many high crimes and misdemeanors against the people of our country.

Furthermore, these outlaw executives have engaged our armed forces, and clandestine operatives, and armies of sociopath mercenaries in continual criminal wars of international aggression, in defiance of all applicable norms of international relations. Many more than one million human beings have been murdered, maimed, and tortured, in direct consequence of the Cheney/Bush junta’s policies and directives, for no other purpose than the corporate greed and sheer power lust of ruling class elites.

Though more than two thirds of our citizens, and majorities in Congress oppose them, the bloodthirsty White House dictators now demand the lives of tens of thousands more of our sons and daughters, to follow the hundreds of thousands who have gone before them, to be sacrificed for the idols of Mammon, on the bloody altars of this regime’s unholy wars.

The plurality of the governed no longer consents to the powers so unjustly wielded by the representatives of the miscreant junta who have seized control of our nation’s executive offices and the Pentagon. It is high time to alter the present state of executive power, to abolish the rule of the Cheney/Bush regime, to dispatch all their co-conspirators and accomplices, to rid the precincts of our Capitol of their evil and corruption.

It is our right; it is our duty, to overthrow that unjust and illegitimate government that now defies even the will of the United States Congress, in its hell-bent determination to escalate its wars in the Middle East.

The New American Revolution has begun; it is even now under way. The first sign of the confrontation between the People and the Presidency was the 2006 midterm election, in which Republican Party representatives were turned out of office in droves, and new majorities of opposition Democrats were elected, in both houses of Congress. The People’s Mandate was and is unmistakable: No more war! The People demand a complete, permanent withdrawal of U.S. forces, and their bases, from Iraq – and by logical extension, from the entire Middle East, East Africa, and Central and South Asia.

Yet Cheney and Bush scorn and despise the expressed will of the People. “I fully understand they could try to stop me,” Bush said of the new Democrat-run Congress. “But I've made my decision. And we're going forward.”

Now, Congress must make its decision, to go forward with equal resolve, to impeach Cheney and Bush, to deny the Pentagon any further funding to escalate, or even to continue to wage this war, and to expeditiously reverse the criminal regime’s military deployments, returning what remains of our occupation forces to the places they belong – at home with their families and loved ones.

The warlords of the Cheney/Bush regime have made the United States of America public enemy number one throughout the world. The time has come for the American people to declare them public enemies at home, and to decisively drive them out of the seats of executive power.

Love Is The Way

A homily preached on Sunday May 28, 2006 at New Spirit Community Church, in Berkeley, California.

Good morning! My name is Jim Weller. I’m your student intern pastor, and this is the last day of my official internship. I’ll bet you thought you were going to get away without having to hear me preach to you!

Perhaps I should explain the schema for our chapel arrangements this morning. White and red are the prescribed liturgical colors for the six Sundays after Easter, of which today is the last. I thought we would hang our United Church of Christ “God Is Still Speaking” identity banner, since we are now a full-fledged UCC church, and it matches the color scheme. And I just got back last Sunday from the UCC Northern California Nevada Conference Annual Meeting weekend at Asilomar, full of denominational identity!

I am, after all, a theological student, as I will continue to be until I become august and venerable, so I thought it good today to give you a brief survey of the key meanings of Christian theology, as I understand them. The core message is that love is what redeems us, but a few other theology words will make appearances, too. Don’t let them distract you!

Anyhow, I have my white and red on; my head is polished, so let’s go!

Let those with ears to hear listen:

“How big is God, Daddy? Is he bigger than a house?” asked Anna, the firstborn and the more pensive of my two preschool-aged daughters, one afternoon while they sat together, talking with me on the front porch.

“God is not a person, or a thing you can see, or touch, or hear,” I answered her, quite as thoughtfully. “God is . . . a feeling inside you. God is how you feel when you know you are alive. God is what you feel when you love someone. When you say, ‘I love you,’ you feel God in you.”

Anna sat quietly for half a minute, enjoying her ice cream cone. “I love you, Daddy”, she said.

“I know, sweetie. I love you, too. Listen. Do you remember the day we were at the beach, when you were kneeling in the wet sand, with your back to the waves, and you’d laugh as each wave surprised you, splashing over your shoulders? Maggie was playing by herself, near us on the big rocks, and you and I were there in the surf, and I’d laugh when you laughed, and you looked up at me then and yelled, ‘I’m happy!’ Do you remember how good you felt then? That was God, laughing inside you.”

Now, friends, I can speak to you in more sophisticated terms than one can with a child. To you I can affirm that yes, God is not only not a person and not a thing, God is utterly other – absolutely unlike any object of understanding. Nothing that can be said of anything in being can be said of God, as Godself.

And yet, God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. God is not one and the same as everything in being, but God is real and present in every time and place, with every thing and every person, for God is being itself, ground of being, first and final cause of being. Creator and creation completely interpenetrated.

Our lives are God’s gifts of being, in relatedness with all other beings and being itself. We are given the gift of awareness of our relationship with God in each other, and our accepting response is love. There is no way by works of penitence to attain to the love of God. Love is the way.

Let me tell another story here. A Unitarian Universalist minister I know was preaching the good news of God’s love one day, and afterward an older man approached her with a question. Now this man, Bill, like most Unitarians, had an advanced education, and he was a perfectly rational thinker. He really was a rocket scientist. He and his colleagues knew how to put a man on the moon, and bring him back to tell about it – and they actually had.

So Bill asked, “Pastor, I know you believe in your experience of God’s presence, but how do you know that’s what you’re experiencing? How do you know it’s not just your imagination? Rachel could have launched into an intricate philosophical proof of the existence of God, and Bill could have followed it.

But instead, she asked him another question. “Bill,” she asked, “Have you ever been in love? I mean, really in love, so that everything was brighter, and more beautiful than before?” Bill smiled, remembering. “Oh yes,” he replied. “Well, how do you know?” she rejoined. “How do you know you didn’t just imagine it?

There you go.

Though any meaning we may attribute to God is but a metaphor, a symbol, or a sign pointing to the incomprehensible reality of God, one glorious affirmation is indubitably ours to make – God is! Ancient Hebrew Scripture tells us that that is how God, in the burning bush, told Moses God’s name – “I am!”

Centuries later, because he knew he was of God too, that is the way Jesus answered his accusers – “Before Abraham was, I am!”

“The glory of God is a human being fully alive,” wrote an early Christian, Irenaeus.

As it is said, we are children of God, beings made in God’s image. And by God’s holy grace, the same affirmation is ours to make in every season of our lives, in sorrow and in gladness, with our first breaths and our last, “Yes God – I am! I am of you and I am yours, God. Your will be done, not mine!”

Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echod! "Hear, O Israel, Adonai your God is One!"

"You shall love Adonai your God with all your heart, all your mind, and all your strength, as you are beloved of God. You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself."

We are here to love one another, for that is the way to love God as we are beloved. These are the greatest commandments.

The relationship between God and human persons really is one of unending, unconditional love and acceptance. You are a beloved child of God in whom God delights. You are accepted in the kingdom of God, now and forever. God’s acceptance does not end.

That is the good news of God. Your part of the relationship is very simple: Accept your acceptance!

The way Jesus put the saving message was this: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the good news."

What this meant was that God's time is always fulfilled. The love and acceptance of God are immediately available for you, right here, right now.

To re-pent is to turn the soul round right. It means, "Think again!" It is to respond rightly to the good news of God. We take our turned-inward spirits and turn them inside out, turning the light of love toward God and other people.

Jesus taught us to believe that in this way only, we will be redeemed from sin.

Sin is not a popular topic in churches like ours, where the gospel of love is emphasized. We all know that mistaken ideas about sin have been used, or misused, in church as weapons to shame us in our expressions of love and the joy of living, and to separate us from the love of God.

No one is untouched by sin. William Sloane Coffin said that sin is the abuse of our God-given free will. I say that it almost always involves pridefulness and abuses of power. In any case, it erects barricades that keep love out.

Sin forms in the shadow of the isolated self that stands between the human soul and the light of God’s love.

To sin is to do the opposite of the Great Commandment to love God, and love others as oneself. It is to be alienated by self will from God's will to love unconditionally. It is to will harm, and to act harmfully, instead of for good. It is to abide in diffidence, ignoring and disguising the harm others and we do in our alienation. And, it builds up permanency in our social structures and inherited cultural traditions.

Sin and salvation could be explored at length in many other sermons. Understanding them is at the core of understanding the meaning of the gospel. But today’s topic is simply about love and acceptance.

The glad tiding of God is the good news that you are accepted! Sinners and saints alike. You have been beloved of God and accepted into God’s realm since the day you were born, and before then, and nothing you can do or believe, or not do or not believe, will cause God’s love and acceptance of you to be withdrawn.

All that is required of you for salvation is to accept your acceptance. Repentance of sin demands no more of you than this: "Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly in the presence of God."

Remission of sin is a process engaged in on the part of the human person who has accepted God’s unconditional acceptance – one who has been redeemed by simple surrender to divine love. It is a movement of the human spirit in love toward God, the divinity of being itself that is reflected in the human spirit.

One morning last weekend during the UCC Conference Annual Meeting, I took a walk by myself among the flowering dunes, back of Pebble Beach on Monterey Bay. The sky was full of sailing clouds and sunlight, and the wind tore wildly at my shirt. It would have whipped the hat off my head if it hadn’t been tied on. For weeks, I had been full of self-doubt, and despaired of the authenticity of my vocation, feeling alone and ill equipped to accept God’s calling – if it even was that, and not just my wishful imagination.

Then I rounded a bend in the path, coming into the lee of a sand dune under a sheltering growth of cypresses. And the wind ceased its howling. The hollow where I stood was bright and quiet. I reflected that this walk was a metaphor for these days of my arrival in the company of saints, so to speak. For I was a part of a gathering of members of the body of Christ, young and old, clergy and laity, ordinary human persons who were accepting their acceptance – and I was accepted among them, imperfect as I am.

[solo singing accompanied by choir, humming the melody] “Sometimes I feel discouraged, and think my work’s in vain, but then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again. There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole; there is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.”

Salvation is never done once and for all. We need periodic renewal treatments, makeovers, or tune-ups. We salve each other. That’s why we pray and worship together. Salvation is the balm of God’s grace given freely and received by faith, and it is the way of life for God’s people. All people are chosen to be redeemed by God’s grace, if only we will accept God’s choice.

The Deuteronomist of ancient Israel discerned God’s message of salvation this way: “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life – so that you and your children may live" – by loving your God, heeding God’s commands, and holding fast to God.

Love made us, and it is what we are here for. Love is the way.

Let us choose accordingly, and love one another as God loves us.

May it be so. Amen.

Anselm said it way back

More than a thousand years ago, way back in the early eleventh century, the Christian philosopher and logician Anselm of Canterbury used words to the following effect to express the meaning of the word, God:

“God is that reality than which nothing greater can be imagined.” This has stood as the generally accepted meaning of God among people of discernment and wisdom ever since. Than which nothing greater can be imagined.

Apparently alone among earthly beings, we humans are creatures of awesome imaginative powers. We are, beyond doubt, perfectly real ourselves, and we can imagine, as though real, things and configurations far beyond our personal realities, some of them so fantastic they could never be made real – but some can be, and sometimes actually are.

You are real. Your personal reality is indubitable. It is deeply rooted in the ground of being itself. But you are a finite reality. Your physical being is contained within the boundaries of a relatively small envelope of space and time. You were born a few years ago, and before then, you were not. You will die some time hence, and again you will be not.

While you live, you have mental capacities that enable you to perceive, in limited ways, areas of reality beyond your personal envelope. And you have high-order mental capacities by virtue of which you may imagine incomprehensibly vast, but still finite, extensions of space-time. Of the unknowably great, but not infinite, number of intelligible realities that can, in principle, be imagined, you can even imagine the totality of reality – sort of.

But there, you reach your personal limit. You cannot imagine that ultimate reality than which nothing greater can be imagined. That would be God. In contemporary theology, God is ultimate reality, being itself, the ground of being. Or, in ancient Greek thought, the unmoved mover, first cause and final cause, the uncreated creator.

Any word-concepts that may be attributed to God as God are ones that may not be said of anything in being, or even all of everything ever in being. God is infinite. God is eternal. God is absolute, unchanging, indivisible, and ever present. To some minds, God is omniscient, omnipotent, and all good.

None of these terms can be truthfully said of a person, any person. Therefore, obviously, God as God is not a person. God as God is not even a being, the popular term Supreme Being notwithstanding. Because God as a Supreme Being, exalted above and all-powerful over all other beings, can be imagined, just barely.

That cannot be a description of God. God is that than which nothing greater can be imagined. The only reality, the only being greater than which nothing can be imagined is ultimate reality, reality itself, being itself.

And, since you are a temporal, finite but fully real being, embedded, as it were, in the infinite eternal reality of being itself, and since you are (by now) conscious of your curious position (this should blow your mind), you are a personal being in conscious relationship with being itself, that ultimate reality in which you exist, out of which you came, and into which you will return. You are in direct and intimate relationship with God. You are of God. Your very being is a manifestation of God. God is closer to you than you are to yourself.

And since you are a being who, finite and temporal creature though you are, is capable of reflecting consciously on all the multifarious aspects of reality of which you are a part, and even on reality itself, it can be well said that you are the consciousness of being itself.

Now if you speak of God using the language proper to persons, which God is not, but most people routinely do anyway, you could say that yours are the eyes through which God looks upon God’s Creation. Yours is the mind by which God perceives, and feels, and knows, and apprehends those proximate aspects of reality that are accessible to you, including the reality and presence of Godself.

This amazing way of understanding the basics of theology is not new, as I have mentioned. I believe it was the core insight of ancient Israelite monotheism, and hence, of all religious traditions which followed after it. Only the most elite priests, monks, and scholars understood it, of course. Listen to what Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth century Spanish saint, said about all this:

“Christ has no body on earth but ours, no hands but ours, no feet but ours. Ours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ looks out upon the world, ours are the feet with which he goes about doing good, ours are the hands with which he blesses his people.”

Now, by the time Teresa wrote that, the Christian church had developed an elaborate Christology, a subdivision of theology, in which Jesus Christ was understood to have been fully human – meaning finite, temporal, and historically contingent, in his lifetime, and that he was nonetheless fully God, and merged with God, especially after his crucifixion and resurrection, being or becoming one of three divine persons, or substances, which together comprise God. Christ was the aspect of God with whom human persons could most easily and directly relate.

Because of the way most people think – other than erudite theologians and philosophers –people’s ways of relating to God, and having discourse about God, are personalized. This is to be expected, since we are persons, and those other beings with whom we are most significantly related are persons. (In my person-ology, higher vertebrates are kinds of persons, too, since human persons have psychologically significant affective and cognitive relationships with them, and we have the same lower brain architecture.)

Each one of us, whether we recognize it or not, is in profound relationship with God, a relationship more ultimate, and ultimately more meaningful, than any other human relationship can be. God is not a person, but, given the ultimate concern (to use Paul Tillich’s term) of human persons in their relationship with God, and their need to express themselves about that relation to others, God is necessarily spoken of, depicted, and thought of as a personified being.

Thus, God is given names, and prayers are directed to God as though God were a person capable of receiving them and answering. All of this kind of God-talk is metaphoric, because it has to be. Nothing pertinent to persons, or beings of any sort whatsoever can be said of, or thought of, or attributed to God as God.

However, I am a man of charity and mercy, and I understand that, even though metaphoric, we tend to relate to God by names and social identities which are proper to the most significant other persons with whom we are related. Thus we have LORD God the Father, God the Son, Lord Jesus Christ, Mary Virgin Mother of God, and so forth.

If this is the way that most folks put their spirituality into words, who am I to disabuse them? It takes little or no effort for me to convert such metaphoric terms to simple signs pointing, for me, to the reality they signify, as I understand it. Anyway, I sort of enjoy the sweet quaintness of these artifacts of folk religion.

When I am in the company of cognoscenti who insist on political correctness achieved through use of inclusive language for talking about God, I usually go along with their shortcomings of tolerance, and avoid pronouncing any God names or pronouns smacking of patriarchy, racism, or androcentrism. Even though the Bible is, in fact, shot through with all of those unwelcome characters, there are always ways the text can be revised to clean it up.

The most important thing to remember about God and your relationship with God is that God is love; you are a beloved child of God, created by God in God’s own image. Metaphorically speaking, of course. God’s love – a metaphoric construction signifying an ineffable reality – is not the same as human persons’ love, though it is fair to say that our love for each other and God is inspired by and responds to God’s love for us.

The nature and meaning of the relationship between God and human persons really is unending, unconditional love and acceptance. Though it is a metaphor, it is an accessible one. You are a beloved child of God in whom God delights. You are accepted in the kingdom of God. No matter who you are, what you have done, or intended, or said, or thought, or believed.

That is the good news of God. Your part of the relationship is very simple: Accept your acceptance. The way Jesus put it was this:

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the good news.”

What this meant was that God’s time is always fulfilled; the power, love, and acceptance of God is always immediately available – here and now, for you; take your gnarly turned-inward spirit-mind and turn it inside out, toward God and other people; and believe that in this way, you will be redeemed from sin.

When you have made that spiritual conversion, that repentance, that metanoia, you will be able to live in the way recommended by Jesus and stated in the Torah centuries earlier:

“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and all your mind, and all your spirit; and you shall love your neighbors as you love yourself.”

And the prophet Micah, also long before Jesus’ time, summed up the Torah this way:

“What does the LORD your God require of you, but to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?”

So there you have it. It’s not rocket science, is it? All you have to do to get right with God is to love with all your heart, all your soul, and your entire mind. Love God, as you are beloved of God. Love your neighbors as yourself. Love your enemies. (That pretty much covers everyone.)

Do justly. (That means avoid doing harm, and do good whenever possible.) Love mercy. (That implies loving kindness, care for the sick and suffering, nonviolence in action and intention.) Walk humbly with God. (God is always with you; stay in right relationship with God.)

Of course, there is no guarantee you won’t get into trouble in the world, especially if you go around doing evil – but then you might get away with it after all, particularly if you’re very powerful. In the end, of course, you will die and be not, just as all creatures do.

Remember that you are just one finite, temporal human soul in exquisitely interconnected interdependence with all other people, and all life on Earth. Take from the abundance of the world only what you need to live simply, that others may simply live. (If you wind up with a little more than you need, don’t worry – you can give some away!)