To give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins. By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.

That your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless

Happy St Nicholas Day! S’pradznikom! The joy of the feast to you!

There are many stories of this saint, how he rescued children from prostitution, how he feed the poor, how he guided the lost. Of course his generousity and joy are the pattern from which we draw the charicature that is “Santa Claus”. And even in the cheesiest mall-centre Santa there is a connection with this saint if, as in Miracle on 34th St, there is “kindness and joy and love and all the other intangibles.” But in the midst of all this fluff, there is this curious story:

No less was Nicholas known for his zeal for the truth. He was present at the First Ecumenical Council of the 318 Fathers at Nicaea in 325; upon hearing the blasphemies that Arius brazenly uttered against the Son of God, Saint Nicholas struck him on the face. Since the canons of the Church forbid the clergy to strike any man at all, his fellow bishops were in perplexity what disciplinary action was to be taken against this hierarch whom all revered. In the night our Lord Jesus Christ and our Lady Theotokos appeared to certain of the bishops, informing them that no action was to be taken against him, since he had acted not out of passion, but extreme love and piety.

That story gets a lot of play, today, although it does not come from any sources contemporary with the Saint. It’s comes up rather late in the mythology and is usually discounted. It’s the “gets lot of play today” that troubles me.

Why do I discount that story? Because St Nicholas, the Bishop of Myra, was too deeply engrossed in the teachings of Jesus, the man who went to his death offering no defense, the man who said “turn the other cheek. Only later – when the church got taken over and corrupted by the Byzantine crown (and the Russian crown, and the British crown, and the American presidency – everywhere the Church conforms to secular rulers in order to get more secular power for herself) – only later do we need to imagine a Bishop punching a heretic in the face and Mary and Jesus blessing him for it.

Merry Christmas, Infidel!

And a lot of folks want to imagine our bishops or clergy or laity should be doing this now: punching infidels in the face.

How does this contrast to Jesus?

I learned recently that it takes a LOT of words to be right. It takes no words at all to be in relationship to the Truth. When we are right (and everyone else is wrong) we spend our days making them right, too. But when we are in relationship to truth (that is, Jesus) we want to draw others into that relationship. Truth is: we can’t make that relationship happen by punching others in the face, by beating them up in arguments, by forcing them in to the corner with laws, by hitting them over the head with a Bible or an icon.

“Let your good deeds shine before others,” says Jesus. “That they may praise your Father in heaven.” “They will know you are my disciples,” he says. “By your love.”

We like the story of St Nicholas’ fist fight with Arius because it lets us pull the same tricks on the infidels around us: on the internet, on the street corner.

Today is a day to give gifts in many traditions. This, in America, gets transferred over to December 25th and totally secularised into the day I like to call “Consumptionmass”. How would Jesus react if we told him we celebrate his birthday by spending hundred and sometimes thousands of dollars on junk? That we feel slighted if we do not get enough junk from our friends or, conversely, that we feel slighted if they do not make as big a deal as we would like over the junk we gave them?

In this light, let’s take a look at the “War on Christmas – because quite a few of us Christians are getting freaking uppity and pushy about it. As if it is our right to be comforted whilst shopping by a very thin veneer of cultural religion. This will stand before the throne of God on judgement day and say, “They knew I was your disciple because I made shop girls say ‘Merry Christmas’ to me after I purchased $500 of toys and blue jeans in the Mall”. We are confusing our faith with their shopping. And we want them to comfort us for caving in to the world.

Personally, I’m happier the further “Merry Christmas” gets from Wal*Mart, the Mall and Amazon.com.

I know Jesus is not the reason I’m shopping. I don’t need to pretend otherwise. Where is the “tender mercy” from on high? Where is love that will “over flow”? Not in my wallet. Not in my bank or my credit cards.

Let’s be like Jesus – instead of our mythological boxer. Let’s be like the *real* St Nicholas. Let them have their consumption. Let’s give our stuff away. Let’s let the world kill us over and over. Let’s love them further, stronger, deeper than they’ve ever been loved before.

Then, we’ll be Christians.

• Jeremiah 33:14-16
• Psalm 25
• 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
• Luke 21:25-36

There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves…

As I shared recently, whilst preaching in another parish, these apocalyptic passages used to scare me. For all that – as a good evangelical – I was glued to the news, reading revelation along side of the newspaper, studying Hal Lindsey and other such pre-millenial prophets of doom with a level of intensity most youth and teens reserve for sexual fantasy. And I think the bawdy parallel holds: for such reading generated in me a fear. And such fear was an intense pleasure. Like the risk/pleasure of a glimpse of naked flesh and sexual arousal to a teen, so also was the thought that “oooo it’s happening! Now!” Hal Lindsey (and others) thought that the European Economic Community would, as soon as it reached ten members, suddenly rebirth the old Roman Empire and that would be about 1979 or so, and then the rapture would happen and all hell would break loose…

Every movement towards what looked like prophetic fulfilment would be documented and discussed. Every movement away from such fulfilment would be ignored. Plain and simple.

That such a close reading of the Eschatological prophecies was never done before was explained by Hal and Company not as a breaking with nearly 2000 years of Christian interpretation of Scripture (which it was) but rather as sign – it self – that so many things were now in alignment. We can now see it happening. We can know.

It sent chills up my spine, let me tell you!

Chills of fear, and excitement, and revenge: because everyone who rejected the message was about to get their comeuppance and I could watch from heaven and laugh. Of course, I’d be sorry for ‘em kinda, but everyone was about to see it and know…

In the last couple of years you may have hear that President Obama is the Antichrist or, at least, “Obama is correct in saying that the world is ready for someone like him — a messiah-like figure, charismatic and glib … The Bible calls that leader the Antichrist. And it seems apparent that the world is now ready to make his acquaintance.” and I’m sure that someplace, someone is looking for the number ten to show up again in Europe, now that they have a president and continue to “persecute” Christians (by taking crucifixes out of public class rooms, etc).

So, as we continue in our advent readings (this is the third week of apocalypse in the revised common lectionary) I wonder where the real meaning is. Jesus says it here:

People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken… Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

Hope. Redemption. Lift up your heads.

Other people will be confused and fearful, but you… be not afraid!

Paul says in another passage that all things work for the good of those who love the Lord. That’s not a magical incantation, but rather an if-then statement. If you love the lord, all things will work for your good, not because God is “doing things” to you but because your faith ill get stronger, your reliance on God will grow, your inner peace will grow. You work out your salvation in fear and trembling and so things – as sucky as they are – are working for your good.

(That is a “you” in the plural sense, by the way. No one of us can do this alone: faith in Jesus is a “y’all” thing, not a “you” thing.)

This text says that even when everything starts to fall apart we should realise that we are still moving towards our redemption. Salvation – wholeness – is coming.

I have written elsewhere that I wish Obama (and others) didn’t so willingly play by the script crafted for them by the Premillenial Dispensationalist crowd. But I think the more-real truth is that the script written by that crowd is constantly changing: Hal Lindsey saw no evidence of the USA in prophecy. That being the case, how could Obama be the Antichrist?

And let’s look at the word, itself: Antichrist. It doesn’t mean what we want it to mean. It doesn’t mean “against” or – as we kind of like to imagine – sort of a black-for-white photographic negative of Christ, all-the-things-Christ-is-not. We don’t use it rightly in our modern English, but more classical tropes have “Antebellum” as in “Before the war”. It means “against” in the classical sense of “instead of” or “compared to”. John uses it in his Gospel when he says “Grace for Grace”. Jesus uses Anti in Matthew to describe the coin with which he is paying taxes.

Anti means “in place of” or “instead of”.

And we who tend to want to read the Bible as a Newspaper filtre, who want to pornographically find evidence that The End Is Near in every event of the world, in every turn of phrase from world leaders, etc, are, I suggest, making an Anti there: instead of Hope we are inculcating fear.

We’ve managed to make an Antichrist out of the Bible.

I’ve managed, since reading more traditional Orthodox understandings of the Apocalypse, to take up hope, sometims. But here’s where I stumble: we are to take hope in these things. When things get messed up, I easily get “weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life”. I am easily bummed into submission. Apocalypse is only more problems in this context. A sign of “The End” is only a further realisation that I’ve not done enough, that I’ve failed to get my act together, that I’ve screwed up.

I don’t see “another sign of the end” as…

What?

What’s good about the end of the world?

We celebrate Advent to prepare. We can view it as a downer time (fasting, self-immolation, avoiding parties, wearing itchy wool sweaters…) or we can see it as a time to prepare for the 12 day party of Nativity and Theophany. We can imagine that we’re supposed to beat ourselves up before the end of the world, or we can imagine that we’re supposed to be amazingly excited.

In his Narnian apocalypse, CS Lewis writes, “The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning!”

But I stay stuck in the term: when the final exam comes, I’m never thinking “only 20 mins more and VACATION!”. I’m usually too set in my fear, focused on the page in front of me.

What would it be like to take the exam as a mark, a milestone on the road to joy?

• Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17
• Psalm 127
• 1 Kings 17:8-16
• Psalm 146
• Hebrews 9:24-28
• Mark 12:38-44

Today’s lesson: there are no verses, chapters, paragraphs or, even, punctuation in the original text.

If you’ve spent any time in Church, you know how this Gospel sermon runs. Here’s a visible parable

See? She puts in more than all these rich people because she has given all she has… then something comes up about tithing or, maybe, about giving all you have. If I, the preacher, am a televangelist, I might add something about God blessing you for giving him your money and then I would post an address on the screen. When I was growing up this seemed a revolutionary development: that a poor person could out-give a Rockefeller or a Roosevelt, a Trump or a Gates. Truly, God must love the poor! Then some pun about “the widow’s mite (coin) becomes the widow’s might”.

Our Revised Common Lectionary spun my sermon on its head, however. Because…

Lookit: verse 38 he says “Beware the religious leaders because they like to wear special clothing and sit at the high table at feasts (vs 39). They do this by stealing widows houses. (vs 40)” Saying so, he watches the rich put money in piles at the temple gate (vrs 41) and along comes this widow who gives everything she has! (Verse 42)

Jesus’ math makes perfect sense: it’s not revolutionary at all. It’s simple percentages. Of course, giving everything she has, she’s given more than all those rich people. But Jesus makes no comments praising her for it. Instead he’s already condemned the rich who made her give all she had.

If you read forward, past our assigned reading, and REMEMBER: there are no paragraph breaks or verses in the original text… Read forward and the next lines are about how worthless the Temple is anyway.

I’m sorry, but this story is NOT about giving all your money to the Church.

Let me move two verses to a different location. See it if reads differently now:

He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on. Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.” As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

I don’t think this is about giving all your money to God. I think this is about being wary of religious leaders who want you to give all your money to God and, instead, end up getting the money themselves.

This is the argument I have whenever someone wants to build a beautiful Temple, use real gold leaf on icons, or spend more money on a set of vestments than a poor family can spend in one year on clothes: “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” We make idols out of our churches when we value the churches more than we value our neighbours; that is, God.

Of course, sometimes = as twice in the last year – the religious leaders are just taking the money to make political hey: to aggrandise themselves at the expense of others. These buildings too, will fall down eventually.

When we take the widow’s mite we don’t bless her: we condemn ourselves. We make an idol of the physical plant, of the stuff we have. God tells us to share our stuff with the poor. Not make the poor pay for more of it!!!!

I’ve been blessed to worship in some beautiful buildings. The best was (a) the Church of St Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco, CA; and (b) St Seraphim Church in Santa Rosa, CA. Things there are VERY beautiful, in different ways and in different styles. But they, too, will one day fall down. And, to be honest, most modern churches are nowhere near as beautiful as St Gregory’s or St Seraphim’s: most are just high-tech entertainment studios with cushy chairs. A church community, the family of communion, is not supposed to have 30,000 members…

The best liturgies I remember are with Fr Joseph, in Hendersonville, served in his house or in the houses of other members of the parish. The dining table was the altar. The choir standing to one side and everyone else gathered around. These liturgies were celebrated in stressful and painful times, but these liturgies were beautiful. Simple. Well done. And later we sat down at the same table and ate our meal or held our parish meeting. That’s the cool thing about Eastern liturgy: as stately and ornate as it becomes, it still boils down to something done around a dining table.

We need liturgy, we need beauty in which to worship, I know that. But for us – as for the earliest disciples – the beauty of a clean home, filled with feasting friends should be enough. Those parishioners and Fr Joseph: giving their all – not to build things that would waste away, but to be the Church in that place. That’s the widow’s might!

• Ruth 1:1-18
• Psalm 146
• Deuteronomy 6:1-9
• Psalm 119:1-8
• Hebrews 9:11-14
• Mark 12:28-34

Love God, Love Neighbour.

This sermon title should drive up the hits a bit!

One point in my personal theological journey, one on which I harp over and over again, is the connection of this word, αγαπε agape – love, with its root verb, αγαπαω apagpao – to welcome or entertain. Although it’s used as a command in our passage today, “Love the Lord your God”, we don’t get αγαπε at all, we go straight for αγαπαω. Jesus tells us straight out to “welcome the Lord God” and to “Welcome our neighbour”.

Ride that train of meaning for a while in your throughts.

This past week one of my housemates met two guys on the street who were asking for money to buy food. Instead she invited them back to the house. They said they would come by later, but they needed the money now, so she said the could come by now and help prepare the food… So they did and, when I came home from errands, I found them in the kitchen, all three working hard to prepare supper for me and for our 13 other housemates. These two guys ended up spending a couple of nights with us, sleeping on the guest bed, and they went their way, hitchhiking to wherever it is they are going. Travellers.

The first night I came to supper at the house that was to become my home… an invited guest of one of the members of the community… there was far far too much food (in the eyes of the person who had cooked) and so she went outside to the bus stop and invited in a bunch of folks who were waiting for the bus. One woman was so hungry, so worried about what would happen when she got home, than she was crying for joy at the invite.

Mindful, also, of the Christian teaching of the incarnation and the implications thereof – that welcoming our neighbour is the same thing as welcoming our God – I want to wrap up this preliminary meditation with some thoughts on this quote from Bishop Kallistos Ware (which I’ve blogged before):

The whole person is not just a self-contained, self-centered unity. The whole person is a person who is on the one side open to God, and on the other side open to other human persons. The human being without God is not truly human. We were created to enter into a relationship with God, to be in dialogue with Him, and if that relationship is not present something essential is lacking from our personhood. Equally, we are created to relate to other human persons. It has been said that there is no true man unless there are two men entering into communication with one another. The isolated individual is not a real person. A real person is one who lives in and for others. And the more personal relationships we form with others, the more truly we realize ourselves as persons. This idea of openness to God, openness to other persons, could be summed up under the word “love.” We become truly personal by loving God and by loving other humans. By love I don’t mean merely an emotional feeling, but a fundamental attitude. In its deepest sense, love is the life, the energy, of God Himself in us.

We are not at all a full person without this hospitality. We are not real. So much of our culture is wrapped up in things that “I do because I enjoy doing them”. I had a conversation recently with a friend about horror movies: exciting our body’s flight-or-fight system just for the sheer rush of doing so. We “Cry wolf” to our body at every turn – roller coasters, scary news stories about H1N1 or AIDS or terrorists or “the other political party”. We hype up our systems every chance we get. I suggest the real problem with our culture is our failure to open up: we have emotions now, and hormones, just exactly for ourselves alone. We are in a closed loop – dealing with only our own feelings instead of others. Our culture – from horror movies to political commentary – one of onanistic enjoyment of our hormones in which all other things (including people treated as things) serve as pornography.

This is the opposite, I would suggest, of our commanded hospitality.

• Job 42:1-6, 10-17
• Psalm 34
• Jeremiah 31:7-9
• Psalm 126
• Hebrews 7:23-28
• Mark 10:46-52

Year B Proper 25 (30), Revised Common Lectionary:

O Lord, Save your people…

HESE ARE, By themselves, more notes for our discussion than a sermon. A couple of things come to mind:

In Jeremiah, we have a brief echo of a line from Psalm, 28:9, “Save your people and bless your inheritance”. This line will be dear to those of the Eastern Rite for the hymn of the Holy Cross, which runs:

Lord, save your people and bless your inheritance;
granting to faithful Christians victories over their enemies,
and protecting your commonwealth by your Cross.

(I got that translation here. In some [Slavic?] texts the second line refers to “Orthodox Christians” rather than “faithful” ones.)

The question arrises as I read this – and as Jeremiah refers to the “Faithful remnant of Israel” – who are the people of God? It’s a hard struggle to answer for Israel says she is, and, in the west, at least, the Church says she is. The Eastern Church goes further than the west (as far as I know) and says, following St Paul, that the Church is “The Israel of God” and that “Israel according to the flesh” is an issue best left to God, himself.

I’m not sure how I feel about that, actually. Since in our Politically Correct world, we are to place no emphasis on race or ethnicity, on the one hand a “spiritual Israel” makes no never mind, but if we insist that Israel is a “race” or “ethnicity”, a specific “tribe” of people, then, in fact, claiming to be “Spiritual Israel” is rather like white, middle class folks claiming to be “spiritual native Americans” or “pagan Celts” or “Mayan Elders”. Those who *are* rightfully those things have a right to cry foul at us.

How do we define “the People of God” or the “Remnant of Israel” today, and that in ways that do not defame, or disinherit others? Or do we try? Does the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus as Messiah of God require that we name the Jewish people to have served their purpose in bringing forth Messiah, but then failed in the follow-through in their failure to recognise him?

Even while we try to answer those questions, we have to look at the Gospel today:

Notice that the blind man is not given a name: his name (in the Greek text) is listed as “Bartimaeus” which is then translated as “Son of Timaeus”. The Hebrew name “Bar-Timaeus” means only “Son of Timaeus” and nothing less. This fact seems lost in the story… where his father’s name (Timaeus) is offered, but not his own. This happens in other places as well: Bar-Abbas is the Son of Abbas who was released instead of Jesus. Bar-Navus is one of the Twelve Apostles. Like Bartimaeus, we may be so used to seeing the names of Barabbas and Barnabas that we might forget the Hebrew meaning of their names.

Following the questions raised by Jeremiah I’m tempted to see Bar-Timaeus as an echo of the Socratic Dialogue, the Timaeus. And the Son of Timaeus (with the implication of a Hellenic scientific philosopher) is really blind and he needs Jesus to see. Hellenic Platonism – like Judaism, in this read – needs Jesus to reach its fullness.

So, in this stumbling read of the two texts, we left (along with the Church) in the unenviable position of being right whilst everyone else is either wrong or, simply, not right enough.

And I’m left remembering an interesting cartoon that occasionally makes its way around the net: a person says they can not go to bed because “someone is wrong on the internet!” How often do theological discussions boil down to that – someone is “wrong” and needs to be “fixed”. An earlier post of mine… posted after these notes but posted before… needs to be highlighted here: wherein I make fun of unitarians. On the other hand, the preceding post is where I make fun of very conservative sorts.

Someone is theologically wrong and needs to be fixed…

I can even justify it in all the cited cases: All heresy is, essentially, Christological. The Jewish, Platonic, Unitarian and Conservative heresies all seem to miss a point in the doctrine of the Incarnation and, thus, fail to grasp something about the human person.

It’s fun to run around a fix people!

If, however, we want to fix people, we miss the Gospel.

In Mark 10:47, we have the seed of one of the most important Mantras in all the Christian tradition: ‘Ιησου ελεησον με. Isou, eleison me. Jesus, have mercy on me. It’s the root of the Jesus prayer, the central mantra of Eastern Monasticism, and the central point of all Christian theology, really.

We are so used to hearing “Mercy” as a cry of the tortured to the torturer. In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Dr Frank N. Furter uses a bullwhip on his servant, Riff-Raff, who cries out “Master, Mercy!!!!” The implication being, usually, that we cry out for mercy to someone doing something bad to us. “Say ‘Uncle’” becomes the bully’s mirrored version of this cry for “Mercy”. God has us pinned down, one arm twisted behind our back, and he says, “Say Uncle!” and we say “Mercy!”

Bartimaeus doesn’t imagine that Jesus has any connection to the source of his Blindness…

Rather the blind man is saying something else. The Greek word ελεησον eleison, “have mercy” is linked to the word for olive oil. Far from meaning “Stop Beating Me Up”, eleison means “poor oil on my wounds, help me heal”. Since we no longer pour oil on our wounds, a more-modern reading of eleison will be “give me a massage.”

The Gospel tells us the world hurts. But God is there to “have mercy”. Not because he’s beating us up and we cry uncle, but rather because it sucks that things are like this, and here, let me give you a massage.

It may seem I’m being flip, but I’m not.

Eleison becomes the primary prayer of the church. I tried, once, to count the number of times the Church says “Lord, Have Mercy” or Kyrie Eleison or Gospodi Podmilui. In any given liturgy, well before the Gospel is read, the cry of “Mercy” has gone up nearly two dozen times. If the third and sixth hours were read first (as in the Slavic tradition), “Lord have mercy” has been prayed already over 100 times before the beginning of the liturgy itself! To every mention of trouble, from sickness and suffering, from mourning and death, from war and famine to unemployment and “evil imaginations”, the prayer is “Lord, pour oil on our wounds!”

The issue, over and over again, is “Lord, the world sucks. Give us a massage.”

It may seem I’m being flip, but I’m not.

The Gospel is not about fixing people. It is about pouring oil on their wounds: it’s about giving out massages. It’s about helping folks heal.

Lord, save your people! Save is also a word associated with healing. It’s the name of Jesus, as well: “Save” being “Yash” and giving us “Yeshua”. We cry out to God for saving, for healing. We cry out to God for oil to dress our wounds, for this massage.

Philo of Alexandria said, “Be Kind. Everyone you meet today is struggling.” If we ask God for mercy, for a massage… won’t it be better if we pass that along? Better than correcting everyone we see as “wrong” on the internet (or elsewhere), mightn’t a bit of Eleison be more in keeping with the Gospel?

• Job 38:1-7, (34-41)
• Psalm 104
• Isaiah 53:4-12
• Psalm 91
• Hebrews 5:1-10
• Mark 10:35-45

Year B Proper 24 (29) RCL

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth…
Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him with pain…
To sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared…

I lost my day job this week. It’s been kind of disorienting, really… not for all the usual reasons, though. It was, for a number of reasons, time to move on, I think. And I wrestled, for a few hours, with what to do and what to think and what to feel. But when I got in touch with Brodie, upon arriving home, his first words to me were, “You don’t sound as upset as I imagined.”

So many doors had opened up for me in the earliest moments…

Reverend Mother always says when the Lord closes a door, somewhere he opens a window… so says Maria in The Sound of Music. Does God get that involved?

There’s a video out there, showing the number of galaxies in deep space, a small arc of sky “no bigger than a grain of sand held at arm’s length”. As the video unfolds, there are billions of stars, galaxies… events of light never seen by any man. And one becomes painfully aware of how lowly we are as humans, not on the “food chain” but on any chain: whole portions of the universe live lives without any concern for us, our jobs, our religious debates, our theologies or our eucharists.

It’s easy to see that in such a universe, there might be a lot of things going on that are way more important than one more unemployed human being on planet earth…

Yet, we don’t need to go far in our tradition to hear that item such and so was planned by God, or that it will be as “God wills it”. We pray for new jobs, we find God closing doors and opening windows…

The scripture is filled with such images. OUr Iconography often includes an image of the hand of God (Or sometimes a tiny image of Jesus, himself) coming in from the upper corner of an image indicating divine blessing on an action or scene.

Job’s argument with God brings us to three chapters of God’s claims to have to do everything. The Prophecy and the Gospel present us with images of God doing specific things, preparing specific places for specific people… The Hindus have Ganesha – that often appears as an elephant-headed image – referred to as the remover of obstacles. The Celts have Ogma, the Opener of Every Gate.

Is God that involved? Does God open doors and close windows?

This is not the same thing, to be sure, as knowing why something happened. These are three different sets of questions:

1) Does God do everything? (EG: Did God make me loose my job?)
2) Why does God do something in particular? (EG: Why did God cause me to loose my job?)
3) Is a given event part of the plan for salvation? (I believe the answer here is always yes.)

• Job 23:1-9, 16-17
• Psalm 22:1-15
• Amos 5:6-7, 10-15
• Psalm 90:12-17
• Hebrews 4:12-16
• Mark 10:17-31

Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword…

What is the Bible? What is the Word of God? Usually, the only time I hear this verse quoted in sermons is in as scary context: something about using the Bible as a weapon against our enemies. Do a Google on the phrase “the word of God is living” and see what sort of things you come up with. I found this page that talks about fuzzy theology being based on pulling together only a few verses… and then promptly pulls together only a few verses without understanding a single one…

I have friends – conservative, “fundamentalist” or “evangelical” friends of either the Christian or Atheist sort – who will tell me that if I fail to do Christianity their way, then I’m doing it wrong. But when they want me to be a literalist… and then use a bad understanding of the Bible, I can’t do that.

What is the Bible? What is the Word of God? are those two questions even the same question? The Bible doesn’t say so. The Bible doesn’t use the phrase “Word of God” to refer to itself even though some of its texts (mostly all prophecy) make the claim to be sourced in the Word of the Lord. (Isaiah says “the word of the Lord came to me…”)

To some religions, the text is all there is: the Sikhs, for example, believe their sacred text is their Guru. Muslims and Jews alike are taught that before the creation of the world their sacred text was, as a whole, present in the mind of God. Mormons, too, are taught their text exists, engraved on Golden Plates, in Heaven.

The text becomes all, there is nothing along side of it in that context. You are, seemingly, expected to adhere to the text. Truth be told, however, the texts in all those religions is subject to interpretation and application. That’s expected. But the Christian texts are treated differently, at least in some traditions: the text is not seen as if it fell, whole cloth, from the sky. Admittedly, some Protestants act as if it did fall so, leather cover, King James translation and Scofield reference notes and all. Some seem to imagine that the “Authorised Edition” is authorised not for the Church of England, but rather by God. (For this they conveniently forget that the original 1611 Authorised Edition contained the “other books” of the Bible like the Papists use.)

Nothing could be further from the Truth, for the Word of God in the Christian understanding, is not the Bible but Jesus, himself. If you read the text of the Bible trying to understand the book to be talking about itself, it becomes very difficult. Phrases like “the word of God came…” and “the word of God increased…” and even “the word of God is a sword…” all make no sense if the are discussing a book; a book which did not even exist yet! But these phrases make sense if “word of God” is seen as some sort of mystical idea, especially when the Greek tends to use in most (not all) cases, the Logos of God, implying not a written text, but rather a Greco-Roman philosophical concept. The Logos being the concept, the idea, the content of God, rather than the Form. It might be present in a written text, or a prophetic utterance. But ultimately, in the Christian Context, the Logos of God becomes flesh in Jesus.

Look at this passage today, in Hebrews. Between verse 12 and verse 13, there is only one sort of pronoun used. In Greek it can mean she, he or it. If you read v12 to mean the text of a book called the Bible it has to be “it” but v13 brings us to “him to whom we must render an account” which is certainly not the Bible, but, rather, God. The entire book of the Hebrews is an argument about Jesus’ place in the plan of salvation. To read v12 (and really, only v12) to be about the book of text rather than the Messiah is a huge mistake. It is reading into the text what is not there… and reading out what is. If we replace the bad pronouns with direct readings this is what we get:

Indeed, the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until he divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; he is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of him to whom we must render an account.

Let’s replace the pronouns with proper nouns and see what we get, in the fundamentalist language, first:

Indeed, the Bible is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until the Bible divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; the Bible is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before Jesus no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of Jesus to whom we must render an account.

And then in the way I’m suggesting:

Indeed, Jesus is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until Jesus divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; Jesus is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before Jesus no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of Jesus, to whom we must render an account.

Makes a lot more sense, I think. It is also the way that Church has traditionally understood the Bible, as a conveyor of the teachings of God, an Icon, if you will, of God. Perhaps even the most privileged conveyor of those teachings short of Jesus himself. But not the word of God in the sense contained in today’s reading (active, sharp, etc).

St John Chrysostom, in his commentary on Hebrews, says as much:

“For the Word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and pierceth even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” In these words he shows that He, the Word of God, wrought the former things also, and lives, and has not been quenched.

But the footnote to the translation I linked to says:

St. Chrys. here understands the λογος of the Second Person of the Trinity. It is now generally interpreted as a personification of the spoken or written word sent forth by Him.

The translator gets away by saying “now generally understood” without adding, “by Protestants”.

It is important to note that exception – short of Jesus, himself. The Bible’s teaching (see?) that the Church is the Body of Christ, filled with Christ’s spirit, makes the church the thing that, in this world, is the “Ground and pillar” of the Truth; the Church is the thing that, in this world, “able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart”, the λογος of the Trinity. She is not, however, any more perfect than the book that she wrote: an ongoing and historic record of the way God uses fallible humans to do his work in the world. She includes all the understanding of all the humans she always was. We are limited by culture, by our current science, by our own biases: but we are called to be the word of God, the “λογος of the Trinity.”

Today’s Gospel speaks of Rich People and how hard it is for them to enter the kingdom of heaven. It would be easy to turn that to a sermon about wealth, and – in today’s climate – healthcare. I’ve blogged as much recently. But we need to recognise that, in America, even the poorest of our poor has far far more stuff than, in some cases, the wealthy of Jesus time. Wealth is not a statement of the number of things one has: if it were, we’d all be doomed. Wealth is a statement of relationship. That man valued his stuff more than the people around him. He had a “personal relationship” with his money instead of a relationship with the people God had placed in his lives.

But with God, all things are possible.

How do we move (we the Church and we the Rich People of the Gospel) into a deeper co-operation with the Word of God, present, living, sharp and active? How do we become that sword?

• Job 1:1, 2:1-10
• Psalm 26
• Genesis 2:18-24
• Psalm 8
• Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12
• Mark 10:2-16

It is not good that the man should be alone

When I left ECUSA for Eastern Orthodoxy, I was continuing a journey I’ve always been on. I was looking for the One Right Answer, good for All Time™. The modern sellers of Orthodoxy in America (equally ™) seem to push this. I’m not sure if this is the right way to use the term, but some friends of mine have been known to use the term “Byzantine Rite Baptists” – and I think it aptly describes these sellers. My experience was that they are as Literalist as the late Jerry Falwell. Their Orthodoxy is as coloured by their cultural assumptions and prejudices as my liberalism is. Their Christianity is as removed from that practiced in “The Mother Country” as mine is from 2nd Century Palestine.

But I tried, really… to live in the world they offered me: a God who never changes and who wrote the little spiral bound song book we used at every liturgy. It only works, really, if you don’t notice that “Those Orthodox over there” do it differently than we do. (Of course they do! We’re humans…) The Byzantine Baptists go rushing out to fix those folks over there. I’ve even heard one guy wanting to send American Orthodox evangelists to the Middle East to make our Elder Brothers and Sisters “do it right”! But my reaction was to see if there was a place where this might make sense.

It’s not good to be alone, though… so I do this with others – with you, today.

Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” So out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man…but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner.

Does this passage startle you? Does it trip you up at all?

Pretend for a moment you are a biblical Literalist (buy into the whole Six-Day Creation and Young-Earth movement for a while). This passage – like everything in the Bible – is God’s story about himself to us. He is using Moses to write specific words on the paper. These are God’s words, through Moses, to us. Read these verses and what do you see?

Pretend you are a “Higher Criticism” sort, or a cultural critic of the text. Hold the text at arms length as far as revelation about/by deity is concerned. But the Bible tells us a lot about the people and cultures in which it was written. (Or, at least, a lot about what they wanted to say about themselves.) What do these verses seem to say about what these people thought about the God they followed?

God wants to make man a partner…
So God tries all the animals out…
They don’t work…

Hold these verses in your imaginary Literalist mindset. Did God make a mistake? Get suddenly distracted?

Hold these verses in your imaginary Higher Criticism mindset. Did the ancient writers imagine that God made a mistake? Did they imagine that God got distracted? Where they just weaving a story and used the pretty animals as a plot device?

Look in the Gospel…

[The Pharisees] said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you.”

Jesus is engaged in a debate here within the Jewish community regarding the content and application of the Mosiac law. Of two great schools (or houses) of thought present in the Jewish Community, the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel, Jesus seems to be siding with Shammai here and in other places on Divorce: either no divorce at all, or else only for extreme issues. Paul seems to take this line as well. But notice what Jesus says… “Because of your hardness of heart [Moses] wrote this commandment for you.” Not because God commanded it thus but rather as a concession.

Use your Literalist mindset and tell me what that means? That God’s law was, from the very beginning, not a “Perfect Law for all time” but rather a process? If Jesus is, himself, God, what does that say about Moses making up laws that are concessions rather than God’s real commandment?

Use your Higher Critical mind and tell me what this might mean about the people or cultures that wrote the law? Rather than divine inspiration does it seem the law is a process? Is it possible that Jesus feels this way?

I’m not asking new questions really. The rabbinic sages taught that the New Creature of Earth (the Hebrew adama meaning, literally, “Earthling” rather than a name) was at first androgynous. The failure to find a friend from the Earthling among the other creatures led to God’s division of the Earthling into two beings, Man and Woman. But first God tried the Animals…

Is God testing things? Trying things out? Did God fail to understand that the Earthling, with reason, understanding and skill, might not be interested at all in the creatures who don’t have that? I mean a dog is incredible comfort… “Man’s best friend”, even… but not much comfort when mourning or when feeling randy, or even when looking for a night out on the town.

Really? Try all the animals first?

And while Jesus seems to take God’s omnipotence and omniscience as a given, even whilst siding with Shammai, Jesus seems to deny the text of the Scriptures. He indicates here (and elsewhere) that the law is a process, a dialectic, a give and take in to which we (humans) are constantly maturing. Paul seems to take this line as well. It’s not a once-for-all-time standard, a thing that leaves us stuck in the past. It is a law that evolves and moves with us through time and culture.

And the God who is described as a Jealous God is later called “Love”.

So for me, standing here in time and space, 2000 years and several cultures away from these texts, I’m left to wonder what God is saying to us or what God as learned in that time about humans. What does it mean to hold in tension these ideas about a God who changes and evolves (or, about an evolving and changing understanding of that God) with the ideas we like: permanence, unchanging, foreverness?

One of the things that amuses me constantly about modern atheists of the strident sort is that they want us religionists to all be of a stripe. They often create – and try to force all of us believers into – a straw man and then set it on fire. When we try to point out subtle differences in meaning and readings and understandings… they (the Strident Atheists) often turn into more literalist fundamentalists than Jerry Falwell ever wanted to be. And they presume to tell us, the believers, that we’re doing it wrong.

But we’ve not changed, I think.

It seems within our tradition that there has been, for some time, since the beginning of our tradition, really, some 3,000 years ago – and really, since Abraham (some 4,000 years ago) – a dialogue with this God we follow. It started with Abraham bargaining for Sodom: we are getting to know him and he is getting to know us. Judaism and Christianity seem to agree thus. The latter even going so far to say that God became one of us to experience this world, to do it, and live it.

The point of this meditation here, on St Francis Day, is not to cast doubts on the text or on the Literalist or Higher Critical readings of the text. Rather I want to open our eyes to the spectrum, to the depth and width of this religion we try to follow. It’s not textual: it’s contextual. We’re not in a place to pull out a text and say “this says X”. Rather we can pull out a text and say “This seems to mean this…” and then we must decide how to live that meaning.

Judaism has, within it, a community known as the Jewish Reconstructionist Movement.

Reconstructionist Judaism is a modern American-based Jewish movement based on the ideas of Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983). The movement views Judaism as a progressively evolving civilization.It originated as the radical left branch of Conservative Judaism before it splintered. The movement developed from the late 1920s to 1940s, and it established a rabbinical college in 1968.

There is substantial theological diversity within the movement. Halakha (Jewish law) is not considered binding, but is treated as a valuable cultural remnant that should be upheld unless there is reason for the contrary. The movement emphasizes positive views towards modernism, and has an approach to Jewish custom which aims toward communal decision making through a process of education and distillation of values from traditional Jewish sources.

Although the word “reconstruction” can mean something rather different in conservative Christian thought (which meaning I reject), I think of this community as – roughly – Eastern Christian Reconstructionim. What we say about the God we worship says a lot more about us than about Him. And we wrestle with that. As we seek to know and be known by that God, things with evolve and change – as they always have! But we do it together.

It is not good for the Earthling to be alone.

Indeed everyone is going to be salted with fire.
Mark 9:49

I like this passage, which in some translations talks rather overmuch about the “worm that shall not die and the flame that shall not be quenched.” Jesus is calling to mind the closing words of Isaiah, which do, in fact, talk about punishments for those who rebel against God, but it is verse 49 that attracts my attention just now. This passage – my understanding of it – is one of the central points of the Gospel. Everyone will be salted with fire.

Please note that Jesus promises everyone fire – not just the evil ones – but everyone will be “salted” with fire. Obviously, I think, there must be some meaning here that I’m missing. Who wants to be salted in Hell?

Jewish tradition has no concept of “original sin” as western (mostly Protestant) Christians tend to understand it. The Jews speake rather of a good inclination and a bad inclination that are given to everyone. The two inclinations (“Yetzer” or plural “Yetzerim”) are in everyone. In the most basic understanding we have:

Yetzer HaRa

(m.); “evil” inclination, the desire to commit sin; as in “Yoseph HaTzaddik cavash et ha-yetzer ha-ra shelo,” (“‘Joseph the Righteous’ conquered his ‘evil’ inclination.”)

Yetzer HaTov

(m.); “good” inclination, the desire not to commit sin; as in “Lekol echad yesh Yetzer HaTov,” (“Everyone has a ‘good’ inclination.”)

Source

But there is more: they are not only good and evil, like a devil and an angel sitting on my shoulders: Yetzer HaRa is the selfish nature that urges one to procreate – to have children, who are, in part, “little copies of me” – the drive to seek pleasure, to succeed and excel. But when it gets out of balance, it becomes hoarding wealth, having sex in ways that harm others, and drinking too much. Yetzer HaTov is the nature that urges one to give – the drive to share with others and to love. When it gets out of balance, it becomes having no healthy boundaries and not respecting the boundaries of others.

Traditional Jewish prayer asks God to make Yetzer HaRa subservient to His will and asks that the one praying not become subservient to her own Yetzter HaRa – the seeker requests to use Yetzer HaRa in the service of Yetzer HaTov, and to use both in the service of God. Jewish prayer asks for all of the person to be used in the service of God – the Yetzer HaTov and the Yetzer HaRa both come from God and can be used by God to further God’s plan.

These notions match up well with the Eastern Orthodox idea of “passions”. Of course, Eastern Orthodoxy is only Judaism under different rabbis. The Orthodox would ask for the passions themselves to be taken away then purified, returned to ther natural state. For the passions to be returned to ballance and subservience to God’s will. And the Holy Apostle Hermas says, that we are “to know that with every man, there is a good and an evil spirit.” Hermas, too, was trained in Jewish thinking!

The Hebrew word for life, Chai’im, has in it two of the letter yod (Chet, Yod, Yod, Mem). Yod is also the first letter of Yetzer. The Rabbis teach that those two yods symbolize the two yetzerim. When the Creation story says that God blew into Adam the Breath of Life (Genesis 2:7) – it comes with both of the Yods, with both of these inclinations. All life (Kol Chai’im) has both sides.

i bake bread a lot. Sometimes for my housemates, and often for communion.

Bread is the most amazing thing: flour – most often wheat – and water, really, along with yeast. That’s all it is. Through the process of stirring and kneading, flour and water together have an unusual property: the flour’s natural gluten protein separates from the starch and develops a structure – threads. But it’s flat and lifeless. Then yeast is introduced. Yeast survives by reproducing maddeningly fast, but it requires three things: warmth, food and water. The yeast that makes my bread rise today eats the flour and drinks the water and makes babies. The babies eat the flour and drink the water. Then there are babies having babies. Then babies having babies having babies having babies. And while this is all happening, everyone burps. The belching releases gases, and the gases make the bread rise: the selfish desires, the Yetzer HaRa, of the yeast raise my bread.

The Church Fathers and Mothers speak of each of us having evil and good within us. They preach about the Parable of the Wheat and Tares as referring to the good and bad within each of us and say that at our deaths, the demons will come and claim the tares and chaff from our souls. This also sounds like the words John the Baptist spoke – (Luke 3:16-17) “He will immerse you in the Ruach HaKodesh [the Holy Spirit] and in fire, He has with him his winnowing fork to clear out his threshing floor and father his wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the straw with unquenchable fire!” Remember that no kernel of grain is without its chaff – we each have parts of us that will be burned away in God the Consuming Fire.

My bread rises the most when I first put it my oven. The warmth of the fire speeds up the yeast’s reproduction. Babies having babies having babies having babies having babies-until the heat is too much and everything dies. The bread is not bread until the fire comes.

We will all be salted with fire – the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit will burn to purity all whom it fills, all who are immersed in it. It all makes an odd bit of sense if we consider the wheat=us equation. Leviticus 2:13 says, “You are to season every grain offering of yours with salt – do not omit from your grain offering the salt of the covenant with your God, but offer salt with all your offerings.”

My bread of flour and water and dead yeast, also contains a surprise ingredient: me. No matter how I wash and scrub my hands, parts of me enter the bread. My skin cells come off, moisture from my breath stirs the air. Small drops of perspiration add water. My bread is me; I flavor the bread.

It is hard for me to share my bread alone. My room holds six or eight guests maybe, so even if I bake all day, I’m limited in the scope, the reach of my giving. When I put my bread on the altar, it is so small, alone. But it is no longer me – but becomes Christ – as I am no longer me. As the bread is made Christ so am I. The bread on the altar is an icon of our salvation. The bread sacrificed to God, salted with the Spirit, feeds the multitudes. So are we, Little Christs salted with Fire, are sent as Bread and Life to the world.

The Bread and I are salted with the fire that descends in prayer, the answer to the upraised hands of the Church and the downward-bending hands of God.

(This meditation is based on an essay I wrote nearly 10 years ago…)

My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is poor you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

When I was in my early twenties I discovered the works of Mary Renault. Through her writing – especially The Last of the Wine (1956) and The Charioteer (1953) – I came to read the books of Plato. I most enjoyed Phædrus and the Symposium because both of these speak of love, specifically love between men. The Socratic Dialogues still sit on the shelf of my “personal scriptures”, books that changed my life. But I never took a class in Plato: they were reading “for fun” of the sort in which one has the luxury to indulge when commuting to or from work via mass transit: having 30-45 mins every morning and evening to read… sheer joy! Anyway, I met a platonic scholar one afternoon at the bookstore where I worked. I was reading Phædrus and he asked me how it was I came to be reading that. And I shared my story about Renault and gay love and he blushed and said that was not at all what the dialogue was about. Rather it was using such love to expose a rhetorical fallacy. If you look at the wiki article, you’ll not see any of that listed among the themes of madness and divine inspiration, or rhetoric, philosophy, and art. I thought certainly the scholar was just dodging the clear and specific meaning of the text – perhaps he was gay, himself, and closeted. Such topics must have embarrassed him, I thought. Except, like I’ve since found out, scholarship agrees with the guy I met in the store: the content is different from the form, the story is different from the meaning…

On my blog recently, too, theres been a bit of a blow up about a post I made about a group of folks called “The Outlaw Preachers”. To frame the discussion I noted the way the Outlaws welcome LGTBq folks. This, naturally, resulted in a pro-gay/anti-gay discussion that had nothing to do with my original post.

It would be real easy to turn this into a sermon on Social Justice and, even, perhaps socialism. But that is not, I think, where James is going – even though it it a valid conclusion to draw from these texts.

James is making an example of the issue of poverty.

But he is not talking about poverty.

So I want to play with the story a bit – and lets see if we can hear in the story what James is talking about.

First, the most obvious:

If a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one who is poor and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one wearing the fine clothes you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

If a person of your own race – whatever it is – comes into your assembly, and if a person of another race also comes in, and if you take notice of your people and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is different you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

Politics?

If a person with a Obama buttons and a tie-dyed shirt comes into your assembly, and if a Birther in a button down shirt also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the tie-dye and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is a Birther you say, “Stand over there there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

If, on Gay Pride Sunday, a person with many buttons and in a rainbow t-shirt comes into your assembly, and if a person in in a shirt and tie with a very large Bible also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the rainbow shirt and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who looks really conservative you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

Liturgy and community norms?

If a person with the 1928 prayerbook and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a woman in a clerical collar also comes in, and if you take notice of the one with the right BCP and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is in clericals you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

If a person with a gold cross and in a black cassock comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in shorts and whose wife is not wearing a schmatta also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the cassock and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is in shorts you say, “Stand WAY back there,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

Can we carry this further?

If a literal 6-day young earth creationist comes into your assembly, and if a well known and respected scientist also comes in, and if you take notice of the creationist and say, “Have a seat here, please – and would you mind sharing something during coffee hour?” while to the one who is a scientist you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?

Or maybe the reverse? Which is more likely in my social circles: the Scientist would get asked to speak and the mere presence of the Creationist would drive most people bonkers.

James is very focused here on poverty, on social justice issues within the community he is addressing. It is Saint Paul who pulls out all the stops: Neither Jew nor Greek, Neither Slave nor Free, Neither Male and Female. James says, “Neither poor nor rich” but both he and Paul are talking about the same things:

Making distinctions among yourselves, and becomeing judges with evil thoughts.

It’s the “Judges with Evil Thoughts” that is the problem, really, for both Paul and James.

I went to confession once with Fr Victor – Memory Eternal! – and I confessed to often making assumptions about people and then judging them on those assumptions! In other words I was making up reasons in my own mind to judge these persons long before they ever gave me a reason on their own! (This, too, would be another issue to confess.) I can – often – look at someone and assume their friendship or the reverse. I can be preparing for a fight long before they even get introduced to me…

I remember once being in an Episcopal Church and some visitors came. I heard that the visitors had come from a certain parish that had, once, been pastored by a man who had been involved in the theft of rather a lot of money (it’s a long story) but merely hearing of the parish caused a lot of anger – rightly or wrongly founded on that long-ago ex-pastor – to flair up and be directed at the guests. I never actually got to talk to them, mind you. It was their presence that did it. And… get this… it was the youth group of that parish that was visiting.

I have to confess things like that rather a lot.

Fr Victor said there was a word for it in the Russian Tradition – Evil Imaginations. I don’t have a slavonic Bible present but here’s the Greek, right here in James: διαλογισμων πονηρων – dialogismon poneron. Evil Thoughts. But that word, “thoughts” is important because it’s not just an “idea”, but rather a “dialogismon”. It’s a Dialogue! A whole series of ideas, a back-and-forth in your own head – it is “Imaginations”. “Poneron” implies that the dialogue is, in fact, with Satan. It’s a pulling down of the mind.

And of course you start to judge the person.

That’s what Satan wants: he is, after all, the Adversary. He wants to tear people down and if he can use my own mind (or yours) to do it, that’s more power for him.

In the Gospel today, Jesus breaks one of the Taboos of his people, associating with a Gentile. He does this rather a lot in the NT. First he tests her faith a little, but finding it strong – bold even – he does for her what he does for everyone and makes her whole. James, Jesus’ Brother, tells us not to make distinctions based on the things of this world, the things that we see. How hard must their parents have worked to instill such an idea in the midst of a world (and several cultures) beset with xenophoiba? How hard must we work to instill it within ourselves?

I work in an employment agency. In a worsening economy we are increasingly beset with people seeking work. My own job as gatekeeper at the front desk is to sort out people who are qualified from people who are not qualified: to divide the people who can make money for our company from the people who are, essentially, a waste of our time.

I wrestle with this all time, most recently coming to a decision that if I get all caught up in not-judging these people, I will fail to be of service to anyone we can actually help. I’m being a better steward of limited resources by judging than by not. But where does that leave my soul?

How do we avoid not only judging but also dropping people into boxes where we leave them to rot?

James draws the conversation from his specific example to a discussion of Faith and Works, keeping to his example. But we need to hold not just his example in place but all the implications as well: slave and free, insider and outsider, male and female, gay and straight, republican and democrat, Arab and Jew, Muslim and Christian, American and whoever out enemy is in this “war” we’re in now. Any freaking “Us and Them” you’ve got. James says it had better all be “us” when you come to the table of God.

Of course, he’s talking about this in the Church. But you can’t practice one thing at Church and another thing at work, can you?