Refractions

There’s a radical edge to Jesus that familiarity can obscure. We love to hear him say, “Consider the lilies”.  It’s good advice against fretting and worrying – a comforting insight.  We might easily miss what comes before and after it. What comes before is the kind of stern clarity that Jesus expresses from time to time. You can’t he says, have it both ways. What follows is his insistence the his followers distinguish ourselves from the worried Gentile preoccupation with food and clothing and entrust ourselves to the care of God.  So we can’t just treat this “lilies” passage simply as advice for coping in lives that are otherwise committed to business as usual. What is at stake, Jesus insists, is the fundamental orientation of our lives. Will we live our lives and direct our energy towards God, or towards wealth? That is, will we seek first the kingdom of God, or will we serve the other kingdom – the kingdom governed by greed, governed by fear? It’s not a choice that chu...

Many of us, I think, have an idea about holiness that associates it with a disembodied spirituality that denies the gift of the body and the holiness of the physical world. When we think “holy” we think “heaven”, not “earth”. The heavy influence of Greek thought on Christian understanding has often invited us to think of history as a shadowy stand-in for more “spiritual” realities. But in today’s Hebrew Scripture, holiness is clearly associated with the actions of bodies in history.  God speaks: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” What follows is not a strategy to skirt history, to escape the world, or how to transcend our bodies. Instead, we learn a way of engaging the world – of acting in our bodies, of participating in history – that is holy.  Don’t reap to the edges of your field or go through the field again to pick up what you missed the first time. Don’t strip all the grapes from the vines or pick up the ones that have fallen. Leave some for the poor...

In the prophet Micah, it finally all comes down to three things – justice, kindness and humble companionship with God. And in Matthew’s rendition of the teaching of Jesus, we learn how deeply God is committed to those three things.   To hunger and thirst for righteousness, to practice mercy, and to foster a personal habit of meekness is so profoundly at the heart of God’s desire for us that Jesus proclaims that such actions are “blessed”.   Already blessed. It isn’t that they will be blessed – “pie in the sky, bye and bye.” Nope. Pie now , pie here for the meek, the merciful and those who hunger for God’s righteousness, for those who “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.” Justice, kindness and humble companionship are, however, demanding practices. The demand of justice requires of us that we not see ourselves as more entitled to the abundance of the earth than the other, even the Other whom we find different or frightening, or whose customs and habits we...

Simon and Andrew are seekers, followers of John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin and mentor. They are part of a reform movement within Jewish national life, a movement that seeks to restore the faithfulness of Israel to the mission of God. In the synoptic gospels, the movement’s direction and the heart of the matter is described as “the kingdom of heaven” or “the kingdom of God”, and Jesus is the focal figure who proclaims and enacts that kingdom and its ethic of love and justice. In the synoptic gospels, Jesus inaugurates something; his death and resurrection come to be understood as the embodiment of the sacrificial love in which the kingdom is founded, and the vindication of that love in the resurrection. In this fourth gospel, the focus shifts from “the Kingdom” to “the Lamb”. Much of what formed us as disciples in the church of the last several centuries has taken its cue from this shift, interpreting Jesus almost exclusively in terms of the atoning sacrifice (the lamb) of God – God...

Sometimes it feels as if all the lectionary gives us is sound-bites from the gospels. Because of that, it’s easy to see them as a collection of pixels instead of as a coherent picture of the ministry, death, and resurrection of the one we identify as the governing authority (“lord”) in our lives and in our life together. And sometimes we interpret Jesus so as to align with our preconceptions, rather than allowing his story to challenge them, break them open, and bring something new to light.   I wonder if that’s why, for example, we ask why Jesus had to be baptized if he was without sin. That is, I wonder if, having decided that baptism is all about washing sin away, we are confused by Jesus’ own baptism by John. I wonder if we might be willing to grant some authority to scripture and allow its account of Jesus’ life and ministry to change our minds about baptism. At the beginning of the events that bracket Jesus’ baptism are two identical proclamations:   “Repent, for the ...

They said, “You have a blue guitar. You do not play things as they are.” The man replied, “Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.” Wallace Stevens’ “Man with the Blue Guitar” insists that reality bends in unexpected ways for unexpected reasons. There are two worlds to be played – one on the blue guitar, and one not. Today’s readings “play” the world in a blue guitar sort of a way. “Things as they are… are changed.”   At her installation as Bishop of the Diocese of Cuba two Sundays ago, Bishop Griselda Delgado told of her arrival in the town of Itabo, as rector of the Parish of St. Mary the Virgin.   The roof of the church was collapsing, and the walls seemed about to fall outward. There was no seating – most of the church was littered with rubble. There had been no priest there for many years.   There were, however, some women who kept the linens washed and the candles lit. And there was a man, a gardener, who tended a small flower garden. Those women a...