Twelve Quotes for Christmas (9-10)

 

 

 

Dayton Art Institute Creches

“Herod, you are troubled with idle fear.  Your kingdom would not contain Christ; nor is the Lord of the world to be confined within the narrow limits of the power of your scepter.  He whom you wish not to reign in Judah, already reigns everywhere.”    (Pope Leo the Great)

 

“What shall the tribunal of the Judge be like, when the Nativity of an Infant, makes proud kings tremble?  Let kings fear Him, now sitting at the Right Hand of the Father, Whom the impious king feared, while yet at His Mother’s breast.”  (St. Augustine)

See Quote 8

Next Quote 11

The American Myth and Its God

Stanley Fish, university professor and NY TIMES editorial columnist in his 3 May 2009 piece, Think Again, offers comment on British critic Terry Eagleton’s new book, “Reason, Faith and Revolution.”    While Fish and Eagleton offer much food for thought, I want to draw attention to and comment on one of Fish’s paragraphs:

…  “The coming kingdom of God, a condition of justice, fellowship, and self-fulfillment far beyond anything that might normally be considered possible or even desirable in the more well-heeled quarters of Oxford and Washington.” Such a condition would not be desirable in Oxford and Washington because, according to Eagleton, the inhabitants of those places are complacently in bondage to the false idols of wealth, power and progress. That is, they feel little of the tragedy and pain of the human condition, but instead “adopt some bright-eyed superstition such as the dream of untrammeled human progress” and put their baseless “trust in the efficacy of a spot of social engineering here and a dose of liberal enlightenment there.”

Oxford and Washington are metaphors for academia (the infallible brainchild and savior of the Enlightenment ideology) and modern political power (for Washington and the U.S. are the progeny of  Enlightenment values).  Eagleton has Oxford and Washington both thralls of “the false idols of wealth, power and progress.”  

That is worth pausing to think about.   For we might ask what is wrong with wealth, power and progress?  Aren’t these in fact the greatest, most virtuous goods which modern Western and particularly American society have spawned?

Eagleton sees them as being false idols and superstitions.  

Just think about the recent world wide economic collapse.    The world’s economy was growing at this unprecedented pace, and the world’s financiers and American politicians were so awed by the growth that they could see it as nothing but human  progress and the triumph of American values.  It was our god/idol which was worshipped by all the powers that be, but who were blind to the fact that it all was a bubble, not founded upon anything solid or real but based in the economics of capitalist psychology.   It felt so good, who cared if it was a delusion?  

It was indeed an intoxicating vision which caused many to become drunk on its seemingly endless powers.  It did turn out to be a false god who could not deliver on its promises.  Read Revelations 18 about Babylon where merchants grew rich on the wealth of her wantonness but whose wealth was lost in one hour as no one buys her cargo anymore.  How quickly we forget when we ignore the Scriptures.  We have been warned but just can’t believe it  would be us and our generation who would be decieved by wealth!   Shouldn’t our much vaunted human progress have saved us from self deception?

It could not resist false Idol of  limitless and infinite wealth expanding and growing throughout the universe.  It was unbridled human progress – trickle down economic wealth was finally dripping down to the lowest levels of society from the ever expanding but vacuous balloon.   Wealth. Power. Progress.  The Trinitarian gods of American idealism and ideologues.

But it was a false god, an idol which had forgotten the Genesis mythology of the Fall of humanity, Eden’s clever but deceiving serpent, and the existence of evil in the world.  It was an American paradise, retelling the Genesis story by exorising any mention of a serpent and totally trusting in American ingenuity to complete what Adam and Eve failed to do:  fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over it.

Genesis – that great myth telling us about why life on earth is not paradise – turns out to be a truth about America and Americans as well.   Who’d have guessed?

(In the Lucas Cranach painting that is not John Chapman offering us a tempting but delicious apple!  America’s mythology about itself as paradise excludes the serpent, but in so doing proves the truthfulness of Genesis 3).   America very much belongs to the same earth as the rest of the nations of the world.

Through the Cross Joy Comes into All the World

Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright frequently writes about the nature of the Kingdom of God which Christ is ushering into our world.  What has God got to say about evil in our world?  How does God respond to the evil violence in our world?   Wright says God’s answer to evil is the crucifixion – taking on Himself the evil violence of this world.  This seems to many not the response they hope from God.  They would prefer the God of Vengeance to show Himself and to violently destroy evil, the evil one and all evil ones and inflict tortuous suffering and damnation on them for all eternity. 

God inaugurates His Kingdom by dying on the cross and descending to the place of the dead, and by resurrecting His Son.  No violence, but the goal and plan of evil is totally defeated and show to be powerless.  “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.”  God has the last word and God is victorious.

In the final chapter of his book SIMPLY CHRISTIAN: WHY CHRISTIANITY MAKES SENSE, Wright offers a vision of justice for the world as mediated through Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection.  I will quote extensively from one section in this chapter:

It is a response to the longing, and the demand, of the living God that his world should be a place not of moral anarchy, where the bullies always win in the end, but of fair and straight dealings, of honesty, truthfulness and uprightness.

But to get from the longing and demand to anything that approaches God’s intended justice, we must go by a route very different from the one which the world normally expects and even demands.  The majority language of the world in this respect is violence.  When people with power see things happen of which they disapprove, they drop bombs and send in tanks.  When people without power see things happen of which they disapprove, they smash store windows, blow themselves up in crowded places, and fly planes into buildings.  The fact that both methods have proved remarkably unsuccessful at changing things doesn’t stop people from going on in the same way.

On the cross the living God took the fury and violence of the world onto himself, suffering massive injustice …  in some sense or other Jesus exhausted the underlying power of evil when he died under its weight, refusing to pass it on or keep it in circulation.  Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of a world in which a new type of justice is possible.  Through the hard work of prayer, persuasion, and political action, it is possible to make governments on the one hand and revolutionary groups on the other to see that there is a different approach than unremitting violence, than fighting force with force.   … 

Violence and personal vengeance are ruled out, as the New Testament makes abundantly clear.  Every Christian is called to work, at every level of life, for a world in which reconciliation and restoration are put into practice, and so to anticipate that day when God will indeed put everything to rights.  …

God, as the wise creator, uses authorities, even where they do not acknowledge him and even when they make many mistakes, to bring at least a measure of order into his world.  The alternative is the breakdown of social and cultural order, a situation in which the powerful and wealthy always win.  Precisely because God cares passionately about the weak and the poor, he intends that there should be government and authorities who can keep in check those who through greed and force would otherwise exploit them. …

Not does working for reconciliation and restorative justice mean ignoring the fact that there is such a thing as evil.  Indeed, it demands that we take evil actions very seriously indeed.  Only when they have been named, acknowledged, and dealt with can reconciliation take place.  Otherwise all we have is a parody of the gospel, a kind of cheap grace in which everybody pretends that everything is all right while knowing perfectly well that it isn’t. 

In the Orthodox world, there is the Orthodox Peace Fellowship which is endeavoring to remind all of us as members of the Church to keep the issues of peace, reconciliation and restoration in the forefront of our thinking about how to live the Gospel.  “Through the Cross joy has come into all the world….”

The Kingdom of God Begins by Transfiguring our Hearts

Great and Holy Tuesday

Jesus told numerous Parables about the Kingdom of God.  In each one He gave us a glimpse into that Kingdom – a kingdom whose values are quite different than our own – where the first are last and the last first, where due to the master’s generosity all workers get the same pay no matter how long they worked, where judgment is not based upon sin but upon goodness, where human power and authority are excluded as belonging to the pagan and fallen world.

Jesus spoke to us about the Kingdom of Heaven while ministering on earth, and He used earthly images to help us get a sense of what God’s Kingdom is.  As Russian Orthodox Theologian Paul Evdokimov wrote:

In the  domain of Caesar, we are ordered to seek and therefore to find what is not found there – the Kingdom of God. This command signifies that we must transform the world, change it into the icon of the Kingdom. To change the world means to pass from what the world does not yet possess – for this reason it is still this world – to that in which it is transfigured, thus becoming something else-the Kingdom.

While Jesus spoke to us about the Kingdom of Heaven – and in His teachings as well as His life revealed the Kingdom to us – one temptation we have is to project onto the Kingdom of Heaven what we think it will be like.  We project onto the Kingdom all that we want in this world, and imagine that everything we dislike in this world will be absent in the Kingdom.  The disciples James and John clearly did this when asking Jesus if they could sit next to Him at his right and left sides (see also my Kingdom People) – and Jesus rejects their thinking entirely.

Instead of us shaping the Kingdom of Heaven into our ideas of what it will be like, we are to allow the images of the Kingdom of God to shape our thinking, our imagination, but more importantly how we live day by day.   It is not what we imagine the Kingdom of Heaven to be like which is important, but how we allow it to shape our daily lives – our taking up the cross daily to follow Christ.  Our vocation as Christians is not to form and shape what the Kingdom of Heaven will be like, but rather to allow the images of the Kingdom and the thinking of the Kingdom to shape and form our hearts and lives.   The Kingdom of God is not a mere abstraction, pie in the sky, future place to which we will go. 

In the Incarnation, Christ made the Kingdom of God present on earth and in our lives.  We are to bring that Kingdom into our hearts – for that is where the transfiguration of the world begins.   The Kingdom of God takes root in our lives today, this side of the grave, not just in the life after death.

Jesus said, “for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” (Luke 17:21)

 See also my The Non-Hierarchical Power of the Church

Palm Sunday: Victory yet Disappointment

A LESSON from PALM SUNDAY    

In order to appreciate the full depth of this text, in order to feel the joy of the annual feast, the feast of Palms, it is important for us to remember, first of all, that this victorious entry into Jerusalem was the only evident victory in the course of Christ’s earthly life. Nowhere and at no time did he ever seek fame, or power, or glory, he never even asked for the most basic comforts of life. “Foxes have holes”-he would say-”and the birds of the air have their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay down his head” (Mt 8:20). He rebuffed all attempts to glorify him, and his whole teaching was about humility and meekness: “Learn from me for I am meek and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Mt 11:29). From our earthly human point of view his whole life, from the moment of his birth in a cave to his shameful death on a cross beside condemned criminals, was a complete and tragic failure. And by the end even those crowds that followed him, expecting miracles and healings, abandoned him, and all finally ran away. It is important to understand that at the heart and very core of the Christian faith there really is earthly disappointment, tragedy, and failure. And it is this fact that evoked the scorn of the opponents of Christianity, beginning with those who stood by the cross and derided the suffering Man: “Save yourself! If you are indeed the Son of God, come down from the cross” (Mt 27:40).     (Alexander Schmemann)

Until the day when Revelation 11:15  comes true – “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever” – Christians will continue to experience disappointment in this world.   The disciples hoped that Jesus was the Messiah, only to experience the disappointment of the crucifixion.  Then their hope revived with the resurrection, only to experience the disappointment of the delayed Second Coming.  In Christ we experience the most hopeful foretaste of the Kingdom, and yet we are disappointed to be denied the fulfillment of the promised Kingdom of God.  The current world is not the Kingdom of God, and yet we hope for the transfiguration and transformation of the world into the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.   Come, Lord Jesus!

Kingdom People

Sermon Notes for  5^th Sunday of Lent  2009        Mark 10:32-45

 The Disciples James and John in today’s Gospel lesson seek from Jesus the unique privilege of sitting at his right and left hands when He comes in the glory.  They want positions of power and authority in the Kingdom of God.  

There request carries the implication that no one else could then be in the positions of most favor and  honor – so they are asking to rule over even their fellow disciples.

Christ rebukes them for seeking such power saying that the desire to rule over others is how non-believers understand authority and rule.  In Christ’s Kingdom however, greatness is found in the servant – the one who serves, for the servant is the one who imitates and exemplifies Christ, not the ruler.   St. John Chrysostom wrote:  “So what does Paul mean, ‘Authority comes only from God?’ (Romans 13:1)  He established it for our benefit: while sin created the need for it, God used it to our advantage.  Just as the need for medicine comes from ailments, and the administering of the medicine depends on the physicians’ skill, so too the need for servitude came from sin, and its proper control depends on God’s wisdom.”   Authority and rule are only needed among humans where sin reigns in our hearts.  In God’s Kingdom, sin is completely cast out, and so there will be no more need for authority or rule – humans will be guided completely by love for one another.   Thus it is in the Kingdom where the first are last and last are first (Matthew 20:16).  The request of James and John shows they still do not comprehend the Kingdom of Heaven: existence in which power and authority have no place as sin has been dealt away with.

In this world we may be concerned with getting ahead, with climbing the ladder of success, with outdoing the Joneses, with maintaining the lifestyle to which we have grown accustomed.  None of these are the values of the Kingdom of God – they all belong to this fallen world. If we are to be people of the Kingdom, we also have to embrace and incarnate the values of the Kingdom of Heaven.   The primary Kingdom value is love – to love God and to love neighbor, and to love the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters as if they are the Lord Jesus Himself.

2nd Sunday of Great Lent 2009

Sermon Notes 2^nd Sunday of Lent 2009         (Mark 2:1-12)

 And when he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. And many were    gathered together, so that there was no longer room for them, not even about the door; and he was preaching the word to them. And they came, bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men. And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him; and when they had made an opening, they let down the pallet on which the paralytic lay. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “My son, your sins are forgiven.” Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, “Why does this man speak thus? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they thus questioned within themselves, said to them, “Why do you  question thus in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your pallet and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins” -he said to the paralytic-”I say to you, rise, take up your pallet and go home.” And he rose, and immediately took up the pallet and went out  before them all; so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We never saw anything like this!”  

This is an interesting lesson about the Kingdom of God.  Jesus is “preaching the word” to the crowd which I take to mean he is proclaiming to them the Good News of the Kingdom of God.  He is talking to them about God’s Kingdom, power and glory breaking into the world.  I assume this because so often His preaching consisted of telling parables of the Kingdom.

 Suddenly breaking into his talk are four men who make a hole in the roof to lower their friend into the presence of Christ.   They are seeking this Kingdom which Jesus is talking about, but they don’t want just words they want power.  As St. Paul wrote, “For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power“  (1 Cor 4:20).  

Jesus sees the faith of these four men.  He sees they want something from that Kingdom of God, and He offers it to them – the forgiveness of the paralyzed man’s sins.   Now we might assume the men were hoping Jesus would heal their friend, but what Jesus “sees” in their faith is the desire to have the paralyzed man’s sins removed. 

Now the scribes apparently are sitting right up front and listening to the preaching about the Kingdom of God immediately take offense at Jesus forgiving the paralyzed man.  The scribes seem interested only in words about the kingdom and not its power (which maybe why they are scribes and not prophets or healers).  They are willing to listen about the Kingdom, but when confronted by the Kingdom of God in its power, they are visible upset.  They deny the very thing Christ was preaching about.  It is possible that what they hoped for was God’s Kingdom making Israel a world class power and when they realized Jesus was saying the power of the Kingdom was to forgive sins not destroy sinners, they are no longer interested. 

Jesus goes on to show them that indeed the Kingdom of God consists of power and not just words, for not only does he proclaim the paralyzed man to be forgiven (words) He heals the man and raises him from his illness restored to health (power). 

The people are amazed for suddenly the Kingdom of God is not simply promise and words and future and hope, but it is imminent life changing power.   They actually see what it means that the Kingdom of God is coming.  They see that in Christ the entire universe is being changed and the meaning of the Kingdom of God is taking shape on earth. 

We too are given opportunity not just to hear about the Kingdom, but to actually taste it – for today we will received the break and wine of this world transformed into the heavenly Body and Blood of Christ.  And our congregation – a mere assembly of people – is transfigured by the Holy Spirit into the very Body of Christ.  The Kingdom of God is in our midst, and we participate in it and experience it, and receive it and become it.

The consecration of the Holy Gifts in the Liturgy is like the men disrupting all the proceedings in Christ’s home, disrupting the mere proclamation of the word by making present to us the power of the Kingdom of God. 

The forgiveness of sins is a transforming power of the Kingdom as is the consecration of the Holy Gifts.  That same power to forgive sins which Christ exhibited before all the assembled people in today’s Gospel event, He gave to His disciples and to His church.   We can receive from Christ this same forgiveness of sins in and through confession.  There is no crowd to keep us away from this healing for Confession of sins is available to all throughout the year in the Church.

Pascha as our Judgment Day

Meatfare Sunday 2009

The Gospel Lesson of the Last Judgment (Matthew 25:31-46) offers us some thoughts about how to end up on God’s good side on the Day of Judgment.  

Take note in this parable of Jesus that the Kingdom of God was prepared “from the foundation of the world” for those who show mercy, kindness and charity.  In other words before any human had done anything, God had prepared a Kingdom for all humans.  To get to that Kingdom required only that you be merciful and charitable. 

Note also in the parable that the eternal fire was prepared for the devil and his angels, not for humans.  God did not intend humans to end up in the eternal fire, but humans could through their own choices and behavior end up there.  The Last Judgment in Christ’s parable is God allowing humans to choose their final destination based on their own choices and actions.

The Great Lenten Journey we are about to embark on is the road to the Kingdom of God.   Great Lent is the road map to help us arrive at the good destination – Pascha and the Kingdom of God.   So how do we use Great Lent to get to the Kingdom?

Christ taught us to care for Him.  How do we do this?  By taking care of whom He called the least among the members of His family;  whenever we do these acts of charity to one of the least members of the Christian family we do it for Christ.

 We should take today’s Gospel Lesson and figure out how to live it each week of Great Lent.   Even if we did but one of the acts of mercy that Christ speaks about per week, there are plenty of weeks in Great Lent to accomplish them all.  So here is a check list for Great Lent:

____ Fed the hungry Christ     When & how accomplished?

____ Gave drink to the thirsty Christ    When & how accomplished?

____ Welcomed the stranger Christ     When & how accomplished?

____ Clothed the naked Christ     When & how accomplished?

____ Cared for the sick Christ     When & how accomplished?

____ Visited the prisoner Christ     When & how accomplished?

 

Pascha, the day without end, is also our Judgment Day – the day on which we enter into God’s Kingdom.  On that Day the Lord is not going to ask about what we ate during Lent, nor how many services we attended.   He is going to sort us out by whether we did the deeds of mercy to the least of His family members which he enumerated in today’s Gospel Lesson.  Fasting is a good discipline as it teaches us to stop paying attention to our wants, desires and passions and start paying attention to the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters.  The arrival at Pascha and the Kingdom will be a joyous celebration, not so much because we have avoided certain foods for 7 weeks, but because we indeed followed the discipline in order to figure out how to minister to Christ.

Giving A Glass of Water – Receiving the Kingdom of God

St. Peter of Damaskos (12th Century) asks,

“What can be simpler than giving a glass of cold water or a piece of bread, or than refraining from one’s own desires and petty thoughts.  Yet through such things the kingdom of heaven is offered to us, by the grace of Him who said, ‘Behold, the kingdom of heaven is within you.’  For, as St. John of Damaskos says, the kingdom of heaven is not far away, not outside us, but within us.  Simply choose to overcome the passions, and you will possess it within you because you live in accordance with the will of God.”

In the Icon:  The acts of mercy from Matthew 25 – note each act is being done to Christ for when you do it to the least of His brothers and sisters  you do it to Him.

Top Tier:      feeding the hungry, giving a drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked

Lower Tier: Welcoming the stranger, visiting the sick, visiting someone in prison.

The Kingdom of Heaven is found in acts such as these.  Doing these things will bring you close to God’s Kingdom and mercy.

God’s Judgment Does Not End Free Will

“God is love” (1 John 4:8).   This theological statement is at the heart the Christian understanding of God.  It has led some to believe in the idea of apokatastasis, the idea that ultimately God will restore all thing to union with him and will destroy hell.  It is the notion that a loving God in the end will save everyone and all things.

Dr. Alexander Kalomiros explained in his talk “River of Fire” that the idea of apokatastasis becomes popular and perhaps even necessary among Christians because of a mistaken idea of God’s judgment.   His basic notion is that God created humans with free will, and God in His love for His creation, limits His own power in order to fully respect the free will of humans.  Thus God will never force humans to love Him, believe in Him or obey Him.  Kalomiros argues apokatastasis is in fact incompatible with God’s own choice to respect human freedom.  God will not in the end save those who do not wish to be saved.    However, he says for those who believe God is good, any sense of His judgment seems incompatible with His love, and they find apokatastasis a way to hold to an idea of God’s goodness. 

Kalomiros, on the other hand, argues that what happens to each of us in the end is exactly what we choose to happen to us – this is what God allows and respects.  God’s judgment in the end is not God weighing every sin and punishing sinners, but rather God respecting the wish of each human being and allowing each human to experience God’s eternity as they chose by their way of life and relationship to God.   In the end, those humans who do not wish to abide in God’s presence, will by their own choice be banished from God’s presence for all eternity – they will fully experience their choice in the afterlife, totally separated from God or any hope in God.  Those who hate God and see God’s commands as oppressive will find God’s presence unbearable for all eternity.  Those who love God will rejoice in the eternal presence of their Creator.   God will in His love respect the choices we make and made.    What will be different for each of us is not how God treats us, but how we experience God’s presence and love because of our beliefs and choices, not because of what God is doing.  In this sense our final judgment is our own choice, not God’s wish for us on sentence on us.   “Say to them, As I live, declares the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?” (Ezekiel 33:11; see 1 Timothy 2:3-4)

In this thinking, when Adam and Eve sinned and chose to live lives separated from God, God did not punish them with eternal hell.  Rather he let them experience their choice – separation from God.    Eternal punishment is not mentioned in the Genesis story.  Rather death, something which exists in time and whose effect is limited by time, is introduced into the human story.  In this sense, seeing death around us and experiencing the pain it causes us are things which gives us a chance to consider what separation from God really means.  Death can thus serve as a corrective to our thinking – separation from God is painful.

Death is not something which existed from all eternity, and neither is hell – that place of punishment.  Death and hell cannot be eternal because they are the antithesis of God, not godliness.    Thus death and hell are limited to the existence of time and space – to this world.  They have no existence in the eternity of God.  Death’s purpose – to allow us to experience our choice and the pain of separation from God – holds no meaning in eternity and will in fact be brought to an end by Christ destroying death (1 Corinthians 15:26).

The Kingdom of God is eternal and all things will become part of God’s holy Kingdom.  The only difference for sinners and saints will be how they experience this Kingdom and God’s eternal presence.  They will rejoice in it if that is what they sought in this lifetime.  They will suffer in it if they found God and His way oppressive to their self will in this lifetime.  God will not impose judgment on anyone; rather, He will make this world to be His Kingdom, and He will limit His power and allow His eternal presence be experienced by what we humans chose  for all eternity.   He won’t save us from our choice but will respect our free will.  Thus God does not condemn people to hell for eternity, rather He accepts our choice for how we want to relate to Him.   We get a glimpse of this in the parable of the laborers and the vineyard in Matthew 20:1-16.   Jesus is telling us what the Kingdom of Heaven is like.  The Master in the parable at the time of reckoning is incredibly generous to the people who came last to His field and who labored the least.  Those who worked the longest grumbled and experienced the Master’s generosity in a very negative way and as totally unfair.  They could not rejoice in the Master’s goodness.  Such it will be for all of us in the final judgment of God – we will each experience God’s presence as we choose to judge God!