The Single Element

like a fandom meta blog, but for jesus stuff. best wishes to you and yours.

[the-single-element]

Good morning.

Today, Jesus continues the shoreline sermon that began in last week's Good News. He begins speaking about the "Kingdom of God", a subtle concept, difficult for us to grasp directly, as we've recently discussed.

And in doing so, he tells one of my personal favorite parables, as well as a parable that gives us a glimpse of the deeper logic which motivates the warnings, sometimes desperate with which he has warned us away from our former way of life.

He begins, like last week, with a parable about sowers in a field, and about the crops they grow. In this case, the crops are wheat, and darnel. The latter was a well-known poisonous weed of the antique world, which would grow among wheat fields and remain unnoticed until painstakingly sorted out at harvest-time.

That concept – of a Last Judgment, of a harvest time when all will be sorted out – is a concept that the parables which Matthew included in his Good News return to again and again. Matthew was… clearly quite concerned about the world to come, and the "wailing and gnashing of teeth" of those who won't make it there.

But Jesus always casts this as something that will happen… someday. Not today, not tomorrow, and not at a time anyone will expect. Why someday, and not now?

Part of it, certainly, is mercy. Part of it, certainly, is that we don't have a God who wants to condemn, and the longer the wait, the more chances we'll have to enter through the narrow gate.

Part of it is that – as the Wisdom poet reminds us in today's First Reading – justice that is not merciful is not justice in the first place.

But another part of it… Jesus hints at it. If "by their fruits you shall know them", then it's impossible to make those judgments with certainty while the clock's still running and the fruit has not yet grown. Even for God, the outcomes haven't fully unfolded yet while we still have choices left. And perhaps that danger is more grave for us, fully within Time and subjectivity, whose snap condemnation sometimes brings about greater suffering than the crime on which we're passing judgment. Is it strange, then, to suspect that it might make the work of redemption harder too? That it might somehow add to the number of people who, in the final accounting, could not be saved?

That's a dark fear. I fear it too sometimes. I fear that if our modern priests and prelates have indeed inherited, as they claim, the authority to bind and loose, then they are taking just the sort of liberties with it that Jesus lamented when speaking of his own era's moral authorities: binding things out of a sense of tradition when they might instead be loosing whoever they can get their hands on.

But as though hearing that fear of mine across the centuries, Jesus follows up the parable with another one – one of my favorites – reminding us not to underestimate the Kingdom of Heaven, nor its ability to grow. Because from tiny seeds, it grows into a tree for all the birds of the air to nest in. Just a bit of its yeast can leaven a hundred fifty pounds of dough! We're dealing with our God here, after all. Our God won't be satisfied with a partial victory. Jesus wouldn't have taken the pains he did – to come live among us, to come be human with us – if our God was the kind of god who'd settle for that.

And perhaps that's why he exhorts us again, today, to not settle for that either. To remember how big the Kingdom is, and to not foreclose its size while it's still got farther to grow, but rather, to make room in our hearts for all of it.

[the-single-element]

Good morning. Just a short thought for today.

We pick up Matthew's Good News by the Sea of Galilee. We've fast-forwarded a bit in the story of Jesus's public life; the apostles have done their work, and now Jesus is so popular that he has to preach out in deserted places, so that there's enough room around him for everyone who wants to listen.

Most of us would consider this a success state, at least at first glance. Look at all these people who are listening to him! People who'll come out to the middle of nowhere just to hear him talk!

But it seems that Jesus wasn't quite so comfortable with the situation. He had the countryside's attention, yes, but he was already chewing on the much harder task he had to accomplish: getting them to understand the message he was trying to deliver.

It is on this topic that he begins his famous sermon on the shore. And it is for this reason that he has to start habitually using metaphor and implication to explain his message. Despite their eagerness, the people who have followed him here are starting with a fully worldly view of what's reasonable and unreasonable. They're starting with hearts that have been hardened by the world's logic, or else already crowded with "common sense" that will prevent the Kingdom from ever finding a foothold there. If he tries to explain things directly, a lot o his listeners will misunderstand by snapping to whatever "common sense" principle they've already heard… or else deprioritize his message as something esoteric, and thereby lose the chance for what he's saying to change their lives.

But Jesus is the Word of God made flesh. He's not going to be stymied by that; as the second Isaiah insisted, writing from exile, we don't have the kind of God who'll give up on us so easily.

So Jesus deliberately muddles the metaphor here, in this famous Parable of the Sower. Should we identify with the seed, or the soil, or the sprout? In doing so, he makes us think about what exactly he's trying to say. He describes the fruit's ability to grow as being dependent on the properties of the soil… but these are not intrinsic properties, are they? No, on the contrary: the same plot of land can be paved, or rocky, or overgrown, or well-tilled. Everyone has the chance to understand the Kingdom and have it sprout in their hearts, if only they can get into the right mindset to receive it.

For some of that transformation, we will have to rely on God's help. After all, as we've just discussed, Jesus was lending that help even back then! Trying to get around the paving-stones laid by our prior assumptions by speaking in parables and getting us chewing on the meaning behind his words.

But there's another angle here. Unlike the unthinking, unmoving dirt… and even unlike the seed… we, too, can change the conditions of our lives. Less unilaterally than the sower might, and with much more difficulty. But we humans have been making a formal study of human psychology for over a hundred years. There's mountains of research into how we think, and into how that thinking can change. We, too, can weed and till and pick stones in the circumstances of our lives. We, too, can try to set things up so that, when we're faced with adversity or conflicting priorities, we're ready to choose correctly. We, too, can try to approach the Kingdom flexibly, open to making the effort of wrapping our heads around new ideas instead of letting them bounce off of paved hearts.

This may be difficulty, but it's worthwhile difficulty. Paul, of all people, knows – from experience – how hard it is to change. That's why he stands by to encourage us today, in his letter to Rome, reminding us of the joys to come when God at last is able to rescue us.

And the exiled Isaiah reassures us, too. If we have ears to hear, then Jesus is helping us as we go, and he won't give up until he sees us able to reach our full potential, and yield a hundredfold harvest.

[the-single-element]

Good morning. Just a short thought for today.

The liturgical year is full of high points and low points, times of great emotion.

Today is not one of those. It's no dramatic moment in the story of the Way. But it is a reminder – especially here in the USA, on the 250th anniversary of its founding, in a time when the cracked foundations of this nation have become increasingly visible – that God's ways are not our ways. That the Kingdom of God works differently from any kingdom we’ve experienced here on Earth.

In the first reading today, we hear from the prophet Zechariah. He preached in a time of rejoicing and return for the Jewish people, who were finally allowed to resettle in their native land, and to rebuild the Temple. But his prophecies go further, and describe a world very different from the one the Jewish people had experienced up until then.

He foresees a different kind of king: one who rules in humility, and not in strength. A king who banishes war and weapons of war, and yet conquers the world nonetheless, "from sea to sea, from the river to the ends of the earth".

As Christians, we interpret his prophecy as referring to Jesus, foretelling his Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem. But he has not yet "banished the chariot [and] the warrior's bow". In his life, he came with the sword of his mouth, a cleaving, divisive sword, not peace. Ephraim, for its part, runs straight through the West Bank, where war wages even now, the chariot and bow exchanged for the bulldozer and the assault rifle.

So the world Zechariah foresees is still the world-to-come.

But today – even if he cannot yet promise us peace as we know it – Jesus preaches peace nonetheless. He preaches peace and rest found by doing ("if you're weary, take up my yoke, and you'll find rest"), not the sort of peace we imagine where nothing more need be done. Peace, but not peace like the world gives.

The world-to-come is still to come. But we can find peace in this troubled world, nonetheless, if we step back a bit from earthly kingdoms, and root ourselves in the Kingdom of God, and in the journey of seeking it.

Best wishes and blessings to you and yours.

[the-single-element]

Good evening. Looks like I accidentally forgot to queue today's post, but better late than never, right? ^_^

Today, as we read Matthew's good news, where Jesus is continuing to instruct his inner circle on how they're meant to spread that good news to the surrounding countryside… we read something that - let's be frank - doesn't sound like good news at all.

Jesus isn't as raw in his language to his disciples as he would be later, when speaking to the crowds on this topic. He says "whoever loves their family more than they love me", not "whoever does not hate their family". But it's still a statement that's hard to digest. It's especially hard to digest in contrast to the story of Elisha blessing the Shunemite woman, where her ties to her family are the medium of that blessing.

How can we reconcile this? How can we make sense of absolute "if X is less than Y" rules in a kingdom whose logic of love normally doesn't truck with that kind of math? How can we celebrate and reject familial bonds - which were of supreme cultural importance in Jesus's society - in the same breath?

Part of it is stuff we've discussed before. Jesus doesn't mention it in today's good news, but in Luke, he pairs this admonition with a parable about being sure you can accomplish your mission before committing to undertaking it. About being ready to buy the pearl of Great Price when it goes on sale - as he will describe in another parable a few weeks from now - rather than miss the opportunity. If we prepare our hearts for that possibility ahead of time, it'll be easier to stick to the mission should we ever be required to choose between it and something else in our hearts. This possibility of controversy is something we heard about just last week, paired with stories of the controversy Jeremiah faced when sent with his own message.

But there's another factor here.

The first words of Jesus's ministry were "the kingdom of heaven is at hand". Jesus is here to establish a different paradigm than the one that came before - one in which, so he says, the things we've given up to reach it will, somehow, be abundantly reimbursed.

How could this be? A reimbursement of material wealth, maybe we can understand at first glance. But what does it even mean for lost family to be reimbursed?

The clue for how this could possibly work, is embedded in today's story of the prophet Elisha.

Consider this: before Elisha blesses the Shunemite woman's family, they invite him into their family. They have him over for family dinners. They give him a little room to stay in, in their home. Their family is no longer a pure matter of blood and marriage, as earthly "common sense" would have it; it's become something slightly different.

And this difference opens the door for more differences. For miracles, yes - both the one we hear about today, and the nearly unprecedented miracle that happens later, where Elisha revives this promised son from death. But the door has also been opened for moments which defy this world's logic in more mundane ways. Moments where the wife takes charge over the husband. Moments where the woman acts almost as Elisha's own mother. The familiar patterns of family, especially family as the domus of a patriarch, have been subverted. Something else has snuck in.

Paul provides an explanation, using some of his favorite images. If baptism is a symbol for death and rebirth, then what is a family but "a group of people I was born into"? If we have a new life in the Kingdom, then why wouldn't there be a family waiting for us there? Perhaps it'll be our old family, and perhaps - if we have to make the sad decision to depart from them in order to live in the Kingdom - it won't be. But Jesus implies, too, that the logic of the Kingdom will conspire to bring such a new life to birth: new family life, and new social life, and new professional life. That relationships within the Kingdom will be intrinsically blessed, even ones as simple as offering someone a cup of water, or a seat at a family dinner.

All throughout his account of the Good News, Matthew attempts to transcribe, from Jesus's life and teachings, glimpses of the otherworldly logic of the Kingdom of Heaven. This is our first such glimpse. When the apostles return from their mission, there will be more - at the Sermon on the Seashore, and then in Caesarea Philippi and Capernaum, and finally in Jerusalem.

But with today's glimpse comes a sense of what we have to gain, and how we will gain it. A sense that will hopefully be provisions for our journey, ready to help us steady ourselves when we face difficult choices along the way.

A sense that we really are living with Jesus, even now, and that there are blessings all around us, waiting to leap into our hands if we take the opportunity to catch them.

[the-single-element]

Good morning.

One of the challenges of Ordinary Time, of returning to the "everyday" with the lessons we've learned during Lent and Easter, is the potential for those lessons to create turmoil.

No, I'm not talking about turmoil around us – the argument and division that Jesus predicted his message would provoke – or at least, I'm not just talking about that. Before the lessons of the Kingdom even have a chance to kick up public controversies, a more personal tempest in a teapot has to finish bubbling away: the turmoil in our hearts, which will inevitably arise as we try to reconcile "everyday life" (that is, as we know it and as this world's logic understands it) with "living in the Kingdom of Heaven" (which we've been told we can do on Earth).

This is a well-known psychological phenomenon… and so it's no surprise that those who came before us in God's project to renew the face of the Earth – even our famous predecessors, our saints and prophets – struggled with it too.

Our prophetic reading today, for instance, comes from Jeremiah, whose story is almost entirely one of struggle and conflict. The message that he had been given to deliver ("change your ways, or Jerusalem will be destroyed!") wasn't just an unpopular one; it was one that defied the logic of the era in which he lived. Those who described themselves as "prophets" just didn't say things like that… although, honestly, it's because most of them weren't actually prophets in the sense of having been sent by God. At best, they were talk therapists. At worst, they were confidence grifters, who used cold reading to tell their clients what they wanted to hear.

Even as the true situation in Jerusalem got worse and worse, people were accustomed to being told that everything would turn out okay… and so Jeremiah's prophecy, barging into an environment like that, was disruptive. Bizarre. Difficult to accept.

One of the most famous parts of the book of Jeremiah is a prayer he makes about having been put in this situation, one that almost reads more as a lament. "Why did it have to be me, God? Everybody hates me now; even my 'friends' have started looking for me to slip up so they can disown me too. And even so, I can't stop saying these things! Why did it have to be me??"

That's the content of Jeremiah's lament as a whole… but the excerpt we take from it is a moment of strength amid the despair. A moment of… "no, y'know what, if it has to be this way, at least follow through on what you're saying! At least vindicate me in hindsight!" Or, well, he says it with more schadenfreude than that. Just as he spends that lament detesting himself, he does a fair bit of detesting the people who didn't listen, fantasizing about them getting their comeuppance.

Those are, after all, the two easiest ways to resolve a contradiction, right? To throw away one half, or throw away the other. To pick one to love, and the other to hate.

Paul chimes in to remind us, though, that the situation isn't nearly that bleak. He should know; he passed through one of the most whiplash-inducing cases of cognitive dissonance in the whole bible, as he tried to understand what happened to him on the road to Damascus. His letters show that, though he might have been preaching the Good News, he had not entirely discarded the person he used to be, rather adapting himself, and his particular strengths and skills and way of looking at things, to the world to come.

It's in that context that he chimes in to remind us that error need not lead to death. That, on the contrary, the new paradigm Jesus established is designed for a world of imperfect people, alloyed people, to be able to survive.

But there's one more lesson to learn here. Sooner or later, the contradiction in our hearts will be resolved. And at that moment, we can't get away with staying silent about what we've learned. Jeremiah didn't; that truth was like a fire in his belly, which he had to let out lest it consume him. Paul, when his blindness was cured, preached all over the Mediterranean, using his training as a zealous student of the Law to explain the mysteries of the Kingdom which he had come to understand.

Jesus says it himself, today, through Matthew's Good News: "everything that was once unclear will be revealed; proclaim from the housetops what you hear in whispers". Yes, some will hear that testimony and say, like they said about Jeremiah, "she's just overreacting", or "he's just trying to disturb the peace". But it's just as likely that the person who you're discussing this with is going through similar turmoil themselves. We're not the only people trying to figure out how to do what's right in a world like this one. Whatever missing piece has finally become clear to you might be the insight that will save them, too, even if we don't call it prophecy anymore.

And if we fear that it will expose us to danger? Well, that's a natural reaction, too. But we have this reassurance: Paul reminds us that even death has no more dominion. Jeremiah, for all his weeping and terror, had the last word against his enemies, and – when history had vindicated everything he'd said – was carried far away from their retribution, to live out his autumn years in Egypt.

And Jesus assures us as well, that God is watching over us, too, with love and support. That if we're willing to speak out what the Spirit has taught them – for those willing to bring the truth to light – he will be there, holding us in the palm of his hand.

[the-single-element]

Good morning.

Today, we truly and properly drop back into Ordinary Time. Today, the long season of fasts and festivals that we've been traversing since February recedes, and we remember that we are still living in the "long now" of the era between Jesus's ascension and his promised return.

In such a transition period of the liturgical year, it's appropriate that we hear of other transition periods, in the relationship between God and human beings. Paul, for example, recapitulates, in an excerpt from his letter to Rome, the changes – and the actions necessary to accomplish those changes – that brought about the new era we've been celebrating for the last couple months. Meanwhile, our Torah excerpt discusses the moment when the Israelites first arrived at Sinai, and God announced his intention to make that band of fugitives into a kind of culture that the Earth had never seen before.

But this is not the only common factor between those stories.

Consider: what inspired God to make a covenant at Sinai with the house of Jacob? What drove Jesus to die on the cross?

Paul discusses the topic explicitly. He talks about Jesus's love. It's a love that should inspire us, too, by its intensity: a love that has no interest in whether or not it's "deserved".

The books of Moses, on the other hand, are more circumspect about this. They tell the story, without making any suppositions about God's intentions that didn't come from God's own words. And yet, the context of this moment is telling. This is early in the Israelites' journey through the desert. God has seen that they're thirsty, and gave them the rock spring. God saw they were hungry, and gave them manna and quail. God saw they were weak and vulnerable, and gave them the strength to win a skirmish against the Amalekites.

But then, something interesting happens. Just before today's excerpt, Moses is talking with his father-in-law Jethro about how, whenever there's any dispute in the camp, he's always the one who gets called in to resolve it, because he's the one "speaking for God". And Jethro looks at the strain this is putting on Moses, and recognizes that this is unsustainable. Jethro, out of concern for his son-in-law's well-being, advises him to delegate, to find other folks to resolve small squabbles so that his time is saved for more serious matters.

It is at that moment in the story that God steps in. That God says: I'm going to bless this whole community. I'm going to teach the whole camp the right way to resolve their disputes and live in peace. I'm going to give them a way of life that will make all of them holy, all of them authorities.

In a way, the whole Exodus from Egypt has been leading up to that. God, while answering needs in the moment, as the Israelites realized that they needed them, was also executing on the plan he'd had since the beginning, to usher the descendants of his dear friend Abraham into another, better way of life, unique in all the world.

That, at last, gives us the key to understanding what we read today in Matthew's good news, and what it means for us, as this year's gateway into Ordinary Time… because the pattern repeats there, as well, doesn't it?

This is a turning point in Jesus's ministry. This is the moment when he, like Moses, starts to delegate. Starts to get his inner circle involved in that work, makes them co-conspirators in his same labor of love, deputizing them as citizens of the Kingdom so that many more may enter into it than he could have ushered in alone.

What's it in response to? Seeing how many people he had yet to reach. Seeing that need, and acting out of loving care to fill it.

This was a reflexive action for Jesus… but the action he took was also always part of the roadmap. "Taking spontaneous action motivated by loving-kindness" has a habit, you see, of playing directly into God's agenda in the big picture, whether or not we can see or comprehend the cause-and-effect linking the one to the other.

Just like the covenant at Sinai which turned the house of Jacob into a uniquely holy culture and society - the same people who Jesus chose to focus on first, as one more reaffirmation of that commitment.

Just like the crucifixion itself, which was an act of love but also the whole reason Jesus came to Earth in the first place.

That deputization, as much as anything else, is what we've been celebrating since Easter. Didn't he repeatedly say to his inner circle, after his resurrection, that it was their turn now? Didn't the Holy Spirit come to loosen their tongues, and send them out into the world?

This era - the era between Jesus's first departure and second coming - is the era where the Kingdom of God can exist within the mortal world, but only and precisely to the extent that we make it manifest by our own actions. And like Sinai's newborn nation of kings and priests, and like the Apostles, we've been given the power to succeed at it beyond our wildest imaginations, if we try.

So let's go forth in joy, returning to our everyday lives from this festival season, because we're bringing something back with us. God, in his loving care, recognizing our need, has deputized us, too.

[the-single-element]

Corpus Christi

In 1978, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick wrote a… “galaxy brain” essay about what it means for something to be “real”. I don’t mention that essay to endorse its philosophical and theological arguments (like I said, they’re pretty out there), but because of a powerful image he uses in the course of that argument: “what if, one night, someone snuck into Disneyland and replaced all the fake things with real things?” It would be apocalyptic, of course. They wouldn’t be safe, anymore. They couldn’t be controlled. The park would have to close down.

In 2010, historians did a DNA study and concluded that about 1 in 200 men have Ghengis Khan as a direct ancestor. But even if you aren’t Genghis Khan, every dug grave returns a body to the earth, returns carbon to the ecosystem - the substance of the dead lives on in the living. We don’t need to imagine the gasoline in our cars as the fats of long-dead dinosaurs; our connection to ancient life is much more visceral than that.

…sometimes we need a hug. To hold, or to be held. And sometimes we need to shake something, to punch something. To physically, viscerally express the strong emotions in our hearts. Sometimes verbal expression, intellectual expression, things like that aren’t enough to work through our feelings.

Keep reading

[the-single-element]

Trinity Sunday

Over the Easter season, we've heard the good news of Jesus's death and resurrection, and then, of his return to his "father", and then, of the coming of the Holy Spirit.

If a twenty-first century Christian finds something strange about this, I suspect it'll usually be the miracles themselves, not the cast of characters involved.

But in Jesus's time and place, in the Judah and Galilee of 2000 years ago, to describe how he talked about himself and the Father and the Spirit as "strange" would've been an understatement.

Consider this: what was the most often repeated, most stressed, most belabored point in the Sinai covenant? "No other gods but God."

What is the "greatest commandment", confirmed by Jesus in his final debate in Jerusalem? "Hear, o Israel, the Lᴏʀᴅ is God, the Lᴏʀᴅ is one."

Surrounded by polytheistic cultures, Jewish culture – shaped as it was to be different, set apart from everyone else – was uncompromising on this point.

And yet Jesus claims, on the one hand, equality with God the Father (“before Abraham came to be”, “the Father and I are one”…), and on the other hand, converses with God the Father (”I know you always listen to me”, “into your hands I commend my spirit”…) and talks of the Spirit as something that can only arrive if he's steps back to make room for it.

How can we resolve this apparent contradiction? How can Jesus be divine, and distinguishable from the Father… and how can the Holy Spirit be divine, and distinguishable from both of them… and have them all still count as being "one", a monotheistic God?

We can start by digging into the notes and conclusions of the early Christian communities, who had to solve this riddle first.

Three hundred years after Jesus's human life, Christian leaders from across the whole "known world" met twice to debate certain points of doctrine: once in Nicaea in 325, then again in Constantinople in 381.

One of the products of their debate was a document we now call the "Nicean Creed", a summary of what everyone (other than a few Arian holdouts) had been willing to agree about, with regard to the contentious doctrinal issues of the time. And on the topic of the mysterious, seemingly impossible relationship we now call the "Trinity", it had this to say":

Jesus was “begotten, not made” – not a creation of God the Father, but rather, naturally following from his existence. This happened before anything else was created – “before all ages“.

Jesus and the Father are “consubstantial” – sharing one substance.

The Holy Spirit “proceeds” (with connotations of origination) from the Father – again, logically following from his existence.

So the Son and Spirit’s existence, in some way, is a natural consequence of the Father’s existence.

This… doesn't do much to clarify things, does it?

But it becomes more enlightening when we make use of another mysterious fact we know about God, which we discussed at Easter: God is love. "Love" in the peculiar sense that we use the word when talking about the Kingdom, yes. But love.

And that kind of love – the loving care for another which drives a person to action – can't exist alone. It doesn't make sense unless someone else exists to care about. Every example we're given in the Good News of the kind of love which defines God and God's Kingdom is a relationship with the other.

So the Trinity – the idea that God can be Father, Son, and Spirit while still being "one" – far from being a paradox, a doctrine invented to patch up a logical contradiction in the Good News… is, instead, almost a logical necessity if God is who we believe him to be.

What else could God be, to know love before Heaven and Earth were made? What else could God be, than either intrinsically in a relationship, or (if you parse it differently) intrinsically a relationship himself?

We can take this line of reasoning further. Consider what it means that the Father and the Son are not just distinguishable, but different. Different enough to have different preferences, different perspectives (as we saw, painfully, in Gethsemane). God’s love, the relationship of love that God embodies, is not the mere love of one's own reflection, or of a friend so joined-at-the-hip that you already agree with her about everything, but the love for someone that has distinctions from you.

And so what does this mean for us? If God has always known what it is like to love and be loved, if the particular love between all three distinct divine persons is part of who God is… what lesson can we draw from it?

If that’s part of who he is…

…and if we’re made in his image…

…then he wants us to know that kind of love too.

Love for each other. Love for those different from ourselves, which nonetheless unites us. Love like the Spirit enabled at Pentecost, when everyone heard the good news in their own native tongue. Love like Jesus had for the Caananite woman. Distinction without disunity.

Best wishes to you and yours.

[the-single-element]

Pentecost

Throughout the world, and throughout history, people tell stories of a time when the human race was a single tribe or family.

The Torah goes a step further: once upon a time, it says, God made us, as creatures like him; our family resemblance is because we have a common ancestor in our Creator.

Throughout the world, and throughout history, we also tell stories of a time when the human race grew from that single family, and in doing so, grew apart. Where those different parts, separated, became, in time, incomprehensible and alien to each other. Became set against each other – seeing each other as “barbarians” – as gibberish-speakers.

The story passed down to us in the Torah is one of God “confusing their languages”, splitting them each from each.

But if this is not the caprice of an insecure and neurotic God – if God is who we believe he is – then what would be the purpose of him doing something like that?

What was the danger, of a humanity united like Babel was united?

Keep reading

[the-single-element]

[the-single-element]

Good morning.

It's been six weeks since we began our celebration of the Resurrection, of this new paradigm in which death is not the end.

Today, many Catholics celebrate the feast of the Ascension: the next part of that story, where we celebrate when Jesus, in his resurrected but human body, left our world and returned to heaven without having to die.

It's an interesting moment, an interesting miracle. Jesus hardly shied away from breaking new ground with his miracles. Indeed, even before the Resurrection, many of his miracles were called out by the evangelists as literally unprecedented. But "a holy person is brought into heaven alive" isn't one of these. Enoch walked with God. Elijah got a ride from "Israel's horses and chariots". And we have centuries of Jewish commentaries which argue there were others who got the same treatment.

In that light, Jesus being allowed to do the same is almost expected, right? Now that he's resurrected, it would be strange for him to die again.

But it's still worth celebrating… and I think there's still something to learn from the stories we hear as we celebrate it.

All of those stories, today, circle around the topic of Jesus's "authority". This is one of those subtle topics, when talking about the Kingdom of God - one of those words that we use as a best-fit, but that could get us confused if we keep assuming that the Kingdom works like our world does. Authority, in the Kingdom, is a property of service, and cannot exist without it.

So we read, in Luke's good news, Jesus talking about God's authority. And Matthew writes about how this authority has been handed over to Jesus. And Paul writes to the community in Ephesus that this is the authority Jesus reclaimed when he reentered heaven - the authority he had set aside in order to have a human life.

But if he's "reclaiming" that authority in his ascension, then he is also, in a way, (because Heaven is outside of Earthly time and history), claiming it "for the first time" - proving that the authority of God is not, and never was, the Earthly authority of "might makes right", but rather, a river whose origin is Jesus's service in ministry and his sacrifice on the Cross.

So if Jesus has this authority, how did he use it, in that moment when he returned to his "seat at the right hand of God"?

The first way, was to pass it on.

Matthew and Luke frame the "great commission" - Jesus's urging that we tell people the good news he's been telling us - as an extension of Jesus's authority. And that has implications for how we do it! If we want to "tell the Good News" in that context, it means that the authority to do it must also be found in service. By being willing to serve, we also become able to speak what we've heard as eyewitnesses and specimens, in a more convincing way than could be accomplished by simply quoting scripture.

That's… not an easy job, admittedly. Which is why the second part of how Jesus exercises his authority in today's readings is so important: the promise of the Holy Spirit. This was a mysterious promise, for his inner circle at the time. Jesus had alluded to something called "the Holy Spirit", or to "an advocate", a defense attorney. He had described it as being how they would learn the things he couldn't teach them himself. But they wouldn't have to wait long to find out what it was. Luke tells us that Jesus waited until 40 days after the Resurrection to depart, and that he told them to stay in Jerusalem until the Spirit would come. That was Shavuot, 50 days after Passover - only a week or two, give or take, from the time that Jesus departed.

…we are lucky, in comparison. We know what's coming. We have all sorts of established doctrine on the nature of the Holy Spirit, of its power to drive us to action - to the kind of service that aerates the soil for miracles to sprout. That's why we're still celebrating, right? Why today's commemoration of Jesus's departure hasn't quite ended this season of celebrations and wonders.

So let's take this story of the Ascension in that light. Jesus left the rest to us - delegated to us, so that living the kind of lives that earn authority in the logic of the Kingdom might also benefit from the power that was handed over to Jesus in his own life. Today is the beginning of the rest of the story of this world - the story of how the Kingdom shall come. We've been made a part of it.

As we celebrate the remaining feasts before dropping back into Ordinary Time - the feasts that shed light on how the Kingdom exists in the here and now - let's remember that, and choose to live in the same homeland to which Jesus returned, on that hill, all those years ago.

[the-single-element]

Good morning. Just a short thought for today.

At last, with Pentecost only two weeks away, our readings this morning begin to turn to discussions of the Holy Spirit.

I intend to talk more about the Holy Spirit – who I think is the most often forgotten person of the Trinity – more in the coming weeks. But for now, our focus is on the first we hear of such a being: people in the early Church, “filled with the Spirit”, acting on the message they had received.

And then, as they acted, wonders taking place, because the Spirit was present within those actions.

Our first report on this topic is, once again, from Paul's testimony about how the Way was walked in its early years. We visit Samaria again – where they also clung to the God of Abraham, but in a way that set them at odds with the Jews. And in that visit, we see echoes of Jesus’s own ministry there – the message intertwined with works, and with wonders, and framed by the shocking acceptance he receives from these people who, half a decade earlier, his disciples might have seen as enemies.

We hear also, from the correspondent Peter (who may or may not have been Simon Peter, but seemed comfortable writing in his name), writing to small Christian communities fearful of local persecution. And he also reminds them that the good news must be paired with goodness and gentleness, to avoid bringing shame upon the message they preach.

And finally, we hear from Jesus – in another deeply layered excerpt from John – where he promises the Spirit to those who maintain their love for God and their adherence to the commandments.

…if the logic of the Kingdom of God is something alive, then like any living thing (as Paul observed in his lengthy meditation on Aesop's fable of the belly) you can't divide it up and have just one part of it without the other parts. Underneath what we can see, the Holy Spirit's presence is a great unifying factor, which means that the loving care with which we minister to our neighbors, and the good news we've been sent to share, and the miracles that God works through us, are all components of a greater, living whole.

On some level, this should be obvious, right? They’re all part of the faith as we understand and have been taught it, and yet “nobody can serve two masters at once”, so for these seemingly competing priorities to not actually be in competition, well, there needs to be some explanation as to why they're not really as separate as they seem.

But I think it bears repeating, and remembering, both as a source of hope - if it’s all one thing, then there are many ways to get onto the Way – and as a cautionary tale not to end up in blind men and the elephant territory, touching its leg and saying “oh, an elephant is a kind of tree”, or touching its trunk and saying “oh, an elephant is a kind of snake”. If it’s all one thing, then the truth of what Jesus has passed on to us, and what the Holy Spirit is keeping burning in us even now, is something deeper than any single facet we can see. And to truly understand it, we need a hollistic approach – to see and know it as a whole, just like Jesus promises us today that we will one day see God as a whole, who is as intertwined with us as with himself.

Best wishes to you and yours.

[the-single-element]

Good morning, and happy Easter.

Today, the story of the early Church community – or “the Way”, as it was called back then – continues. And like last week, it’s paired with one of Jesus’s more symbolically dense sermons, as recounted to us by John.

Appropriately, the sermon this week is the one where Jesus calls himself “the Way”. He does this in response to Thomas’s now-familiar pessimism: in this case, lamenting that he and his fellow apostles don’t even understand Jesus’s final destination, much less how to get there with him. And his response, his reassurance, is this: you know me, so walk with me, and you’ll get there.

It's natural, I think, for many of us to balk at an instruction like that – to say, "well, easier said than done". But consider this, exemplified by today's excerpt from the Acts of the Apostles: much of what the folks walking the Way did back then was, essentially, played by ear. They didn't really have a plan; they were more often reacting to circumstances as they arose, and letting the Holy Spirit guide those reactions.

Indeed, the fact that "ordination" – the deputization of people as priests and nuns and friars – exists at all in the institutions we now call Christianity, is shown today as a nearly accidental innovation, invented to deal with the narrow issue of a procedural dispute. The Apostles, faced with this dispute, realized that they didn’t have time anymore to properly oversee both praxis and preaching, so they instead called the Holy Spirit down upon people from the community who could be trusted to take care of the former, so that they could focus on the latter.

And once again, we're told this furthered the cause. Even though the point was never to "attract followers", but merely to do right by their community as Jesus taught them… somehow – just as Jesus hinted last week – that action built up the Kingdom nonetheless.

Jesus speaks of the Way, which we can walk even if we can’t see it, and the dwelling that will be prepared for us the end of that journey.

Peter the correspondent writes about the structure that we are building ourselves into, even if we’re still so in the dark that the brickwork of this structure will be tripped over from time to time by those who can’t accept it.

In our Easter joy, we are traveling somewhere that “eye has not seen, and ear has not heard”. We don’t start out knowing it. Or, if we do, we – like Thomas – don’t realize that we know it, don’t recognize it for what it is. Rather, it seems that it’s in the walking itself – in the living out of it day by day – that we discover the true nature of the Way, and where it’s leading us.

Today, too, is a moment when we don’t understand where we’re going. The world is confusing. It’s hard to get any kind of clear picture.

But if we walk the Way, day by day, then we’ve been promised, reassured: sooner or later, one way or another, we’ll make it where that road is going.

[the-single-element]

Good morning, and happy Easter.

This week, we're still hearing about the first acts of the Apostles, as reported by Luke. We're hearing about those early days when the message of Jesus was spreading, explosively, miraculously.

And what a miracle! Somehow, the people listening to Peter that day understood him at a level of fidelity that even Jesus only rarely managed. Somehow, the preaching of Peter on Shavuot was accompanied by a miracle of understanding, of overcoming the curse of Babel which separated us.

I wrote, last week, about why this is so frustrating, here in our era. "Why can't we hear such words? Why can't we be trusted with the clarity that Cleopas received on the afternoon of Easter Sunday?" And the answer I came to, was that we, too, have the Spirit within us - and thus, we have our own "exclusive content" to discover, if we listen.

But… listen to who? Jesus is a household name worldwide, these days. We have practically reinvented the "prophet problem" of the old Kingdoms of Israel and Judah: its infestation of everyone with an opinion running around saying "thus says the LORD" to give it more credibility… or even people with no opinion of their own at all, piling up clout and money by cold reading what their listeners wanted to hear.

This is in many ways the same situation we have today, when trying to figure out which of our "priests" or "pastors" or "preachers" are speaking God's word, and not just their own.

That's why today's excerpt from John's Good News is so important. That's why, hot on the heels of healing the blind beggar - an episode, as we heard in Lent, redolent with examples of self-deception by the supposed theological experts - Jesus gave us a roadmap for finding our way through the problem of discerning true prophets from false.

And the trick is surprisingly simple: try to figure out, from the way they act, why they're in the "shepherd" business in the first place.

Jesus proposes three tests:

“Is this person behaving well themself?” Are they doing things honorably, or dishonorably? Do they approach their ministry by being careful to keep their own behavior morally sound (thus entering through the “gate” proposed by Jesus’s own teachings), or are they willing to cut ethical corners on the way to winning you over? Paul wrote about this at length; when discussing his own evangelical activities, he emphasized the lengths he went to (typical of Paul and his lifelong struggle to escale the paradigm of Rules) to not do anything that might bring dishonor to the message he was trying to share. The easiest test of whether someone really believes what they're saying is whether they practice what they preach.

“What personal risks are they willing to take, for the benefit of their 'flock'”? To be clear, this has nothing at all to do with "what risks are they taking to convince people". Rather, it's about risks that have nothing to do, in and of themselves, with their doctrinal agenda. Jesus spoke about this at length, in John's account of the Last Supper, as one of the foundational pillers of the Kingdom of Heaven: the true meaning of authority, which exists only within service.

"Are they saying something we can believe in?” This is the most tricky, most subtle part. As the blind beggar’s story reminds us, there’s a tendency for people to reject anything unfamiliar, anything too different from what they’ve heard before. As in the era of the prophets, grifters like to tell us what they think we want to hear. People trying to cheat their marks of their minds, not just their wallets do it, too: simplistic, pre-digested messages of "you are good, and they are evil", or perhaps "you are evil, and I will make you good", which are both the type of snake oil that gets its potency from echoing the original venom of the Garden of Eden. And yet… there's something. Something that transcends those easy paths and yet speaks to us anyway. Something that made Cleopas exclaim "didn't his words set our hearts on fire?" Something that Jesus alludes to, when he talks about his sheep knowing his voice. Something achingly familiar. Something we can keep our ears pricked for, in exactly those places where we wouldn't expect them.

In the twenty-first century, the era in which we live, the "Good News" has (by all appearances) spread across the whole world. But the greatest danger of grand projects to change minds and hearts, grand visions of metanoia, is that they create a landscape which is terribly effective camouflage for pied piers and wolves. Couching a message in our religious vocabulary, or our deeply-held-moral vocabulary even if it’s not “religious” per se, can hit us in the heart. Leap straight over our normal walls of skepticism and common sense and get us following without really stopping to think.

It’s happened a lot, over the years. It also happens today.

We’re still in Easter, a joyous time.

But let’s still walk with care - trusting but verifying - acting in hope but guarding ourselves against disaster if we stumble.

And today, there's a special, extra message for those of us with moral authority. For those of us who are looked up to as shepherds. Because every question Jesus gives us to recognize true shepherds is also a question we can ask ourselves, to check whether we're doing the job right, or whether we've lost our way.

May that help and advice keep us all faced the right direction in our Easter joy: still walking with the Holy Spirit, towards the world to come.

[the-single-element]

Good morning, and happy Easter.

Yes, it's still Easter. Not with the same intensity as last Sunday (the last day of the Easter "Octave"), and certainly not with the intensity of Easter Sunday itself. But the season of Easter lasts about as long as the season of Lent. It stands to reason; we have a lot of rejoicing to do! And so, we continue to hear stories about Jesus as he was after his resurrection, when the disciples - trying to understand what had happened - are repeatedly met by Jesus at the moments they least expect him.

This week, in particular, the readings focus on that attempt to make sense of the miracle that we remembered and celebrated two weeks ago. They show Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit at Shavuot and speaking in words that defy the normal limitations of human communication, preaching in the streets of Jerusalem about what Jesus's resurrection accomplished, using the words of the Psalmists and the prophet Joel to explain what had occurred, and how it relates to the covenant his listeners and their ancestors have been keeping since Sinai.

But something about how he said it is lost in translation now. We don't get the benefit of the original miracle; Luke's account of this moment amid the birth pangs of the Church is written his usual literary Greek, not words that cut through to the soul through language barriers, so sharp that they convince three thousand people to be baptised on the spot. We, like the Apostles were in the early days after the Resurrection but before Pentecost, are left with a frustratingly partial picture.

And nowhere is that partial picture more frustrating than in today's excerpt from Luke's good news.

It feels like it shouldn't be frustrating, y'know? It's a beautiful scene, a beautiful story of Jesus's reunion and reconnection with his disciples, of him restoring their hope.

But if some of Peter's Spirit-inspired preaching is lost in translation… that's still nothing compared to what Jesus said, there, on the road to Emmaus. Those disciples got the whole package, the comprehensive explanation: how it all fits together, the Jewish prophets right alongside Christ’s new paradigm.

As for us? We have to somehow content ourselves with what Luke actually wrote down about the conversation. Which is… almost nothing. Somehow, by the time reports of that meeting made their way to him, the actual content had vanished, and all he could report was the metadata: the topics discussed, the effect after Jesus vanishes again. It feels like reading a mystery novel, and getting to the end, and reading “and Picklock Holes explained to them all how Snidely Whiplash had committed the crime, and the clues that undoubtably proved his guilt.” That’s all well and good, but couldn’t you tell us that reasoning too?!

…there’s so much of what happened, back then, that we don’t know about here and now.

Stories lost to time. Details John’s account alludes to, when it ends with “there wouldn’t be enough books in the whole world to tell the whole story”.

Maybe that’s why this week’s story and its lacuna is paired with Peter’s later letter: a reminder that, as precious as the Resurection was, it’s not like God isn’t telling us things today, too. The revelation continues. Just as the past has much it didn’t have time or bandwidth to pass on to us, God has much to tell us, now, that Jesus didn’t have time or bandwidth to explain to his own disciples.

In some sense, isn't that the whole point of Penecost - the next great feast of this season?

So maybe that’s the theme of this week’s Easter celebration: to rejoice that we, too, as those ransomed by Christ, have a God who still draws near to us, who still speaks to us. Perhaps we don't always recognize, at first, what he's saying, or that he's the one saying it. Perhaps it's only after the fact that we realize what we've heard. But once we realize… what a blessing! What new and wonderful things we'll discover, if only we open our ears to listen.

[the-single-element]

Good morning, and happy Easter.

A week into our celebration of Jesus's resurrection, we have a Sunday whose readings pack in a lot of themes at once.

We hear about St. Thomas's initial doubt of that miracle, until he saw Jesus for himself: the resurrected Jesus, bearing the same wounds of his slain body, yet healed of pain and returned to the living.

We read Peter the Correspondent (who might have been Saint Peter or might have just been one of his posse) extolling the mercy Jesus showed us by his death and rebirth, echoing St. Faustina's later visions of Jesus which have led to today's special commemoration as "Divine Mercy Sunday".

And we're reminded of the practices of our earliest siblings in Christianity (or "the Way", as Luke calls it in his account of those early days).

These themes come together in a special message of hope and a special challenge to us, which builds on the message of Easter and roots it to the world we live in today.

What we believe in this Easter season – the central point by which we can even call Christianity "good news" – is that death is not the end. That the Resurrection is real, or else nothing else we believe makes sense.

Thomas was slow to believe that. He was slow to understand the Resurrection, to accept the good news he was hearing; it seemed too good to be true. He was too early for the Letter of Peter – too early to see the otherworldly wonders waiting in the wings that were even greater than what Jesus was working during his earthly ministry. Yet, even without believing in the Resurrection, Thomas has this to his credit: he was willing to walk the Way anyway, even though he thought he wouldn't survive it, right up until that last-moment flinch in Gethsemane.

Riddle me this: what else do we hear today, that seems too good to be true? Let's take a look back at what Luke reports about the first community to gather around Easter's good news…

All the believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, and to fellowship, and to sharing in meals (including the Lord’s Supper), and to prayer. A deep sense of awe came over them all, and the apostles performed many miraculous signs and wonders. And all the believers met together in one place and shared everything they had. They sold their property and possessions and shared the money with those in need. They worshiped together at the Temple each day, met in homes for the Lord’s Supper, and shared their meals with great joy and generosity— all the while praising God and enjoying the goodwill of all the people. And each day the Lord added to their fellowship those who were being saved.

This is a consistent description throughout Luke's account; in other years, we hear another excerpt from his Acts of the Apostles describing much the same thing.

And the good news we're being asked to believe today, above and beyond the Resurrection itself, is the good news of that vision. That such a world – a world operating on the logic of the Kingdom of Heaven – is not too good to be true, no matter how strange it may seem now, or might have seemed then. On the contrary, if Jesus has already conquered the logic of this world, then it's something we can have here and now, if we want it. Which is more unbelievable: that a person can survive that way of life, or that Jesus has risen from the dead?

Like all of this difficult-to-believe news, we are called, like Thomas, to believe without seeing. To believe the good news that Luke's testimony spent so many pages building up, that this kind of life is possible even if it doesn't exist in the world today. That if we focus on living in the Kingdom, the rest will fall into place and we don't need to worry so much. That the proper use for the light we received at Easter, and the best way to pass it on, is to build the city on the hill. That if neighborhood-scope "baseline communism" (as David Graeber once called it, and may he rest in peace) has worked for cultures across the world and throughout history, as well as for our own Apostolic founders, then it can work for us as well, and that incomprehensible blessings await those who can trust in it.

But even if we can't believe, we can still follow in Thomas's footsteps: Thomas, who was willing to walk the Way even when he couldn't believe, and who was eventually blessed to see the proof with his own eyes.

Best wishes and blessings to you and yours.

Happy Easter.

[the-single-element]

Gospel means “good news”.

And there’s all sorts of good news packed into it.

But if there’s “the” good news, it's the good news of this morning:

That as painful as death is, as sorrowful as death is... ...death is not the end.

Not as a special one-off favor of a faraway God.

Death is never the end. Death is never the last word. Not anymore.

How do we know?

John’s telling of the Good News talks over and over about testimony.

The reason we know that death is not the end is not just that we heard it from someone - it’s that, when Jesus came back, he went and visited dozens of people.

It’s the testimony of that crowd of people - their testimony that, “no, really, I saw him, we talked, we ate lunch together, no it was definitely him, he still had the wounds, just somehow with all the pain and danger gone...” that allowed the good news to spread in the first place.

But Jesus is divine. Death obviously wouldn’t have been the end for a god. How do we know the logic that raised him from the dead applies to us? How do we know that death is never the end?

Well... what did Jesus teach us were the most important commandments?

Love God.

Love each other.

What did he urge us most frequently?

Share with the needy.

Welcome the outcasts.

What did he warn us against most urgently?

Hoarding.

Judgment.

Love is the core of his message.

Paul goes further, and says: love is eternal; love remains even when everything else has passed away.

John (the one who wrote letters) goes further still, and says this: God is love.

But “love” is such a broad word in English that it's hard for us to understand what this means just from the face value of an axiom like that. And even if we look into the original Greek or Aramaic – even if we start talking about “חֶסֶד” or “ἀγάπη” instead – it still doesn't become entirely clear. When we say all these things about “love”, what are we really referring to?

...instead of using single words for such a subtle matter – instead of trying to sum everything up by finding a word in our language to fit this concept from another dimension – perhaps we should use parables, like Jesus did.

We could say that we're talking about what that Samaritan felt when he passed a Jewish mugging victim lying half-dead on the side of the road.

Or that we mean what Jesus felt when, hot on the heels of his cousin John's death, he nonetheless fed the five thousand instead of hiding up a mountain.

Or his defeated laugh in Tyre, when a Caananite woman reminded him why he had come to Earth at all.

This is the mysterious motive impulse of the heart that lies at exactly the foundation of the Kingdom of God.

And it's also why Jesus's resurrection serves as both evidence for us that death is not the end, and a direct argument as to how and why.

Because if God is “love”,

and if God is forever,

then the part of us that loves like God – not conditionally or transactionally, as this world would have it, but as an intrinsic outpouring of action for others' intrinsic worthiness of love – that part of us is also forever. The part of us that can love like they love in the Kingdom of God, is already living in that kingdom, where the power of death has been broken forever, and the wedding feast does not end.

Jesus came to Earth to prove it, and to set it as a precedent that cannot be overturned.

Out of that kind of love for us, he gave up his life. And so the seed which fell to earth sprouted. And so he is alive, and will never die again.

And we all have the capacity for that love, no matter how inexperienced at it we might be.

So let’s train it. Let’s increase it. Let’s practice it, in every sense of “practice”.

Let’s love more and more, so that more and more people can come to understand how precious they are to us! So that, filled with that love, they may have the freedom to love too!

(“I have come to light a fire on the Earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!”)

Today, my dear friends, I hope you can know how beloved you are.

Best wishes and blessings to you and yours.

Happy Easter.