Are you there God? It's me, Jane Margaret.
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Thoughts and reflections of a pastor......
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8/27/2024 Love is Marching On........ 8/25/2024I believe that the whole point of Jesus is that his life and death is meant to become humanity’s filter and lens through which we see everything:
With this in mind, let’s reframe 2 things that we hear in today’s readings—-reframe these passages through the filter of Jesus. First of all, there’s the line in the Gospel reading when Jesus says: “.....no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.” This line has, for too long and too often, been interpreted with exclusion in mind. It has been heard to mean that if one is not Christian, God is off-limits to them. Or if someone doesn’t practice Christianity the way I do, God don’t want them. And, of course, we make ourselves the arbiters of whether someone is Christian enough, good enough, or just enough in general. But let’s remember to use Jesus as the lens through which we understand this statement. Jesus who said, in John chapter 10, verse 10: I came that they may have life and have it abundantly….. Of course we must ask “who is the they?” Again: is it just Israelites or people from that time period or what? Now, Beloved, this is Jesus. Jesus who knows, believes, and trusts his origin story. He knows whereof he came and to where he is going. Jesus knows that our story goes like this: God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good. God—the Creator, the Source of all being, the One whom Jesus calls “Father”: God saw and declared that all of Creation is VERY GOOD. All of Creation. So when Jesus says “....no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father….” We must remember that the Father grants access to all Creation—that all Creation may have life and have it abundantly….All of Creation is very Good; all of Creation is the They. We are the They. All of humanity is the They that Jesus came to make sure has abundant life. We are all invited to come within Love’s embrace, Love’s refuge, Love’s safekeeping. That’s the lens and filter through which Jesus looked and listened. Beloved, Love calls it to be our lens and filter as well. In the 1980s and 90s there was a brouhaha revving up in the Church music world. Who would have known that church music can be cause for a brouhaha? Well, pretty much any of us in the church. Anyhooo…..Different denominations were working on new hymnals. Now, I know the Lutherans among us publish hymnals on a regular basis. The Episcopalians are a bit slower to that work. But both of our denominations, as well as the Methodists and Presbyterians and others, were all involved in the same brouhaha back in the 80s and 90s: What do we do with militaristic Christian music? You know the ones: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword His truth is marching on And then there’s this one: Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war, With the cross of Jesus going on before! And of course let’s not forget that classic one written by a priest: Stand up, Stand up for Jesus ye soldiers of the cross….. Some of us here in this room can sing parts of these hymns by heart; I know that I can. Why are they part of a brouhaha? One remains in the ELW hymnal, 2 of them remain in the Episcopal hymnal…..but I haven’t sung them in a church for years. What’s the issue? Perhaps the “theme” or “subject” under which these hymns are found within some hymnals can give us a clue: Christian warfare. Yep, that’s right where these songs take us. They are battle songs to rev us up so that we can be impassioned to go out there and defeat our enemies…..defeat God’s enemies. Right? And we CAN hear these same echoes when we read this passage from Ephesians today. It can sound to us like Paul is calling us to “gear up” to defeat our enemies, our human enemies who prevent us from being who God wants us to be, who prevent this world from being what God designed it to be. So what’s wrong with that? Well, we have seen what CAN be wrong with that in these past several years. When we think God’s enemies, our enemies, are other people….then we feel just fine dehumanizing other humans whom God has deemed very good. We feel justified and righteous using weapons of all kinds of destruction to take the enemy out. We create borders and boundaries and stop being concerned if those on the other side of the barbed wire have enough to live, much less live abundantly. We create Kings and oligarchs and declare that God sent them to us…….all so we can better defeat our enemies. Oh, yes, Beloved. We have seen this all in a much too close-up view. This way of thinking, this way of weaponizing God and faith, this interpretation of Scripture lives and breathes right in our midst. One of the reasons these songs have been taken out of hymnals and/or folx have stopped singing them is that they are vistages of the Crusades—-history of which we are now ashamed. Where the “they” were simply siblings who understood God differently, but we saw them as the enemy and in the name of God, for the sake of Love, we did our best to obliterate them. But, Beloved, we have our own crusades in our own times. Growing up, I witnessed (and probably unwittingly) participated in crusades against: the LGBTQ community, black people, First Nations people, people of color, Muslims, Abortion rights supporters, overweight people, people with addictions, people with mental health concerns, the unhoused and the poor. Whomever we deem immoral Without value Less than….. These songs, these militaristic songs that seem to make God on our side and those “other” people the enemy…..they can con us into thinking we are Just when we take action to put them down, eliminate them, “put them in their place.” But, of course, Beloved Jesus….Jesus, too, wants to “put them in their place…..” At God’s right hand. Within the embrace of Love. At home with the Trinity. For that is where they belong, where we belong, where all belong. Because here’s the truth when you read this passage from Ephesians with the lens and filter of Jesus: our enemies are not “out there”.....in other people. Our enemies are within. Beloved, The only enemies God saves us from are the enemies within us. The only enemies God saves us from, Love saves us from, are the enemies within us. Predominantly fear, for fear is Love’s archenemy. But all the other demons that come from fear: Greed, self-centeredness, apathy, division, injustice, hatred, an unwillingness to forgive, self-doubt, self-hatred, disdain for others…….evil. In all its forms and shapes. Beloved, here’s why it’s hard to completely get rid of at least one of these marching, militaristic songs…..here’s the final verse of one: In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me As He died to make men holy, let us die [to ourselves] to make [humans] free While God [who is Love] is marching on Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! While [Love] is marching on Did any of you, when you were a kid, wonder where the sky started? I was curious about that, and it bothered me. The sky, after all, is usually blue, so the sky must start where the blue begins. Looking up from the ground, that’s more or less at the top of the trees, so the sky must start where the trees stop. Except it doesn’t. When I looked out the window of a tall building, I was at the same height as the top of a tree, but it wasn’t any bluer there - not even with the windows open to let blue come in. No matter how high up I got, the blue continually retreated. If the sky needed to be blue, it seemed, then the sky was always where I wasn’t. The sky was a place it was impossible to be. And that’s the thing that bothered me - until I decided that maybe the sky wasn’t the blueness. And if the sky wasn’t the blueness, then it didn’t start at the tree tops. It didn’t really start anywhere. The sky went all the way down to the ground. “I’m walking around in the sky,” I thought, and it was fun. I still think that sometimes. And it’s still fun. We’re all walking around in the sky.
“Where does the sky start?” is a good question because its answer is illuminating. “Where does God start?” is another good question, and I suspect it’s inescapable, at least for those of us who believe that God exists at all, because everything else that exists starts in one place and stops in another. That’s what make things locatable. The altar, for example, starts over here and stops over there. That’s where the altar is located. So, if God exists, where does God start and where does God stop? Where, in other words, is God situated? Is that a question a child might ask? Of course it is. Is it a good question? Absolutely. And I think people tend to answer it one way or another, even if the answer they believe and act upon isn’t the answer they’d give. There are four main contenders for where God is. The first identifies God with a particular object, person, party, or tradition, and so places God wherever that thing happens to be. I suppose that’s idolatry, though, and however tempting idolatry is, it isn’t especially relevant to our question because we know it’s wrong. The best we can do when talking about idolatry is repent of all the times we accidentally fall into it. It can be useful to identify when, and where, and how we end up thinking about something other than God as God-for-all-practical-purposes, because only then can we reject proxy Gods in favor of the real thing. But our question here is “Where is God?” and the insight that idols aren’t really God, when we know full well they aren’t, doesn’t get us any closer to an answer. So, let’s look at the three remaining options. One way to talk about God that avoids idolatry is called “theism.” Theism says that God transcends the universe and everything in it. There is the creator on the one hand, and creation on the other, and they are essentially different things. Theism has the benefit of escaping idolatry, and (at least for many people) it enjoys the comfort of familiarity. Unfortunately, by so clearly distinguishing God from creation, it makes it difficult to understand how the two could interact. How can a God who transcends both energy and matter accomplish anything in the world? Even more worrisomely, by exalting God above creation we underestimate both God and creation. Nature is forever cut off from the divine. And God, rather weirdly, is found to have physical boundaries. God stops where the tree starts, where the person starts, where the atom starts. God is riddled through with holes. People who find that hard to swallow sometimes look to pantheism. Pantheism (which means “all (pan) God (theism)”) says that God is the same as the cosmos itself, identical to the universe and everything in it. There is no distinction between the creator and the creation. Pantheism, like theism, avoids idolatry by refusing to identify God with any particular thing. And pantheism, unlike the theism, doesn’t force us to separate God from the world in troubling ways. Unfortunately, pantheism doesn’t present us with a personal God, a being with whom we can enter into relationship. Prayer, for instance, makes little sense on this model, so some people turn to panentheism. Panentheism (which means “all (pan) in (en) God (theism)”) maintains that God transcends the universe while also manifesting as the universe. There is nothing that is not God, but God is also more than everything. God and creation are related to each other in somewhat the same way that the ocean is related to the waves. The ocean is certainly more than the waves, even as the waves are nothing but the ocean. Similarly, according to panentheism, God is more than the things around us, even as the things around us are nothing other than God. I suspect that panentheism is less familiar than traditional theism in most Chrisitan circles, but it’s not unheard of. The Christian Congregational minister and mentor to Lewis Carrol, George MacDonald, wrote, “I repent me of the ignorance wherein I ever said that God made man out of nothing: there is no nothing out of which to make anything; God is all in all.” The Catholic priest and author of The Universal Christ, Richard Rohr, explicitly identifies as a panentheist and writes, “Everything visible, without exception, is the outpouring of God. What else could it really be?” Rohr calls panentheism the "incarnational worldview,” and traces it to scriptural sources, the Eastern Fathers, Celtic spirituality, and many mystics, so if you find panentheism attractive, you’ll be in good company. Now, I’m not here to say that panentheism solves all theological puzzles, but I think it solves some without introducing many new ones. And one of the puzzles that I think it solves, or at least clarifies, is what we do each Sunday when we identify the bread as the body of Christ and the wine or juice as his blood. Because, if panentheism is right, of course it is. To quote Richard Rohr, “What else could it really be?” I don’t deny that something supernatural occurs at the altar. That’s beyond my pay grade. But it seems to me that when Jesus says, “I’m right here, in this bread,” he’s got to be right. Where else could he be? And when Jesus says that we abide in him, and he in us, he’s got to be right. How else could it be? When Jesus says that believing all this will give us eternal life, I suspect he’s right about that as well. We will, after all, be identifying ourselves and everything else with the eternal and undying substance of God. What that eternal life amounts to after the death of our physical bodies is certainly the topic of a whole other discussion. I suspect it’s pretty good. But what that eternal life amounts to right now is pretty good as well because the implications of panentheism are really quite astounding. It’s not just good news. It’s the best of all possible news. Everything is God. Right now. Of course, the idea that everything is God right now can be hard to grasp and even harder to practice. It means acknowledging that there's an essential unity among all things, taking Paul seriously when he writes to the Ephesians that “There is one body and one Spirit… one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” It means treating nature as sacred. It means seeing yourself as nothing less than an expression of God. It means refusing to demonize anyone. Not anyone. Ever. It means doing all things as God to God, listening to God when a friend needs to talk, enjoying God in a loving animal, stretching ourselves to love God more unconditionally when we engage God in someone who disagrees with us, or confuses us, or frightens us. That’s a tall order, and I like to think God knows that. I like to think that God says to us, “If you can’t, right now, see me in the people who support what you oppose - if you can’t, just yet, see me in yourselves – start by seeing me in the bread.” God’s a good teacher, and that’s easier, isn’t it? We can taste God in the bread and the wine or juice that we’re offered each Sunday, and we can know that it is really God after all. Because, like the sky, God doesn’t start at the tree tops. God, like the sky, goes all the way down to the ground, but God, unlike the sky, becomes the ground, too, becomes wheat, becomes bread, becomes flesh. “I am walking around in God,” I sometimes think. It’s fun. And it’s helpful. You can think that too, if you want. We’re all walking around in God. 8/12/2024 August 11: Another Dimension....The Rt. Rev. Steven Charleston wrote: “Worship is our acknowledgment of the transcendent. It is how we seek to express our awe, our curiosity, our wonder. We believe there is something — a presence, a mind, a consciousness — far beyond the reach of our control, but still accessible to us, aware of us, engaged with us. Worship is standing at night on a high hill beneath the sky, feeling like you could cry from happiness.”
Growing up. I thought worship was about me. Going to church on a Sunday morning—maybe you called it “church” or “communion” or “mass” or “worship”---whatever you called it, I thought Sunday morning was about MY report card with God. And so was attending Sunday School, being Confirmed, joining committees and ministries, knowing my catechism and the Bible. I understood it all as being about me. What I had to do to be good enough to make it into heaven. What I had to do to be good enough for God to love me. Beloved, I stand here before you today and call: B.S. I had it all wrong. It isn’t first and foremost about me, or about you, or about our neighbor and their goodness/worthiness/value. Well, it is and it isn’t. But what both Jesus and Paul are trying to convince us today is that it is, and always has been, all about Love. That we are all already loved. And worthy. And enough. Our purpose isn’t heaven. Our purpose is Love. And when Love is what we live, when Love is what we know–about ourselves AND our neighbors—then heaven is laid bare for all to see and taste and touch. Because heaven is simply where God dwells, where Love lives and has her being. Let us remember, Jesus never asked us to build church buildings and create institutions. Nor did Jesus tell us to craft creeds, catechisms and dogma. Those are all things humanity has created—--I would even say with good and faithful intention—to help us do what Jesus actually calls us to do: LIVE LOVE. BE LOVE. I mean, that’s it. Jesus says follow me; I am the Way, the Truth, the life. Jesus’ only catechism is to live as Jesus lived: the Way of Love, with the Truth of Love which then begets a Life of Love. In essence, today’s reading from the letter to the Ephesians, Paul writes this letter to tell us that if we know and believe the gospel story (the story of Jesus’ life and death) then our lives should mirror the Gospel. That’s it. Its all that easy and all that hard. But, you and I, we have been sidetracked by good intentions. Humans, when asked to do challenging things, often get mucked up in the instructions or the doing of something rather than the being. And with good intentions, so has the church. Some of the Christian church even believes that our work is to “save others.” But Jesus has already saved all of Creation. Yep. We are all already saved. Because we have all already been shown how to live out Love in the flesh. That’s our salvation–living into the truth of Love. Because it’s the living Love out loud that restores creation, that heals Creation, that causes Creation to flourish and thrive–and every creature in it. And Beloved, death is a part of that. Death is not failure nor a sign of things gone wrong or a punishment. Death is a part of Creation’s ongoing life-cycle. God’s promise, Love’s promise, has never been: If you believe in me and live righteously you will not suffer and die. Jesus suffered and died. Love’s promise is: This life has suffering and death, but Love will accompany you through it all: the good, the bad, and the ugly—and Love will sustain you in it, pull you through it, and walk with you on the other side. BECAUSE there is another side. There is more beyond death. Beloved, I believe there are two dimensions in which we live, or at least two in which we can live. We all live in the historical dimension—this dimension of our daily lives that is bordered by time and space. This dimension between our birth and our death—this dimension of here and now. But concurrently, there is another dimension—an eternal dimension. It is the stream of Love, sometimes called “Kairos”--God’s time, Love’s time. It is this dimension that always has been and always will be that even death cannot diminish. And, when we are rooted and grounded in love, we have the capacity to have our feet in both dimensions. And the eternal dimension–this stream and current of Love—it intensifies the good and joyful and gives us eyes and ears to see Love all around us, even in our most challenging moments and our darkest places. And this current of Love also is what carries us through those challenging and dark times and places. Love is what sits with us in the pain and suffering, the loneliness and discomfort. Love sits with us so we can take a breath and then the next one until we have the strength to rise up and move forward—beyond the pain and discomfort, beyond the suffering and despair. But it doesn’t always release us from the pain or the discomfort. Sometimes what Love does is give us the capacity to still know joy and peace and strength—even while the pain still exists. But, if we stop trusting that the Love stream is there or we do not know how to access it, then at times, it may seem as if this Love dimension is a fairy tale. I mean, this is the purpose of church (which is simply a gathering of folx who believe in and claim this Love dimension to be in their lives). Here, as Church, we practice reaching into the eternal dimension of Love; here we tell stories so we can keep believing; here we live out examples of it happening in our daily lives; here we encourage one another, build up one another so that we can shine the truth of this Love dimension out into the world as a beacon for others to follow, to reach for, to join in. This is who we are, Beloved, this is our purpose. Bridgers of dimensions. Believers of eternity. Beings of Love. It’s all that simple. And all that hard. ***************************************** So, today, I am wondering: what have you believed or have been taught that would have to be reconsidered for this view of being Church to be true in our life? What are the obstacles? Or —what clicked for you today? What makes sense? What questions arise? Daily Practice: Start of the Day: What can I do/am I doing today to prepare myself to be Love in the Flesh? End of Day? Where did I miss the mark of Love? What can I do to turn that around? |
AuthorJane Johnson is the pastor and priest of the Beloved Community of Intercession Episcopal and Redeemer Lutheran. Archives
January 2025
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