Since I'm Not Preaching This Sunday...

... I thought I would give some random thoughts on the Gospel reading for Sunday (Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23).

The Parable of the Sower is a parable about parables and their effect on the people of Jesus' day. Some would hear and hear and hear and just won't buy it. And of course, Jesus' preaching had that effect upon the religious elite and their minions, who sought ways to have Jesus taken out. Some people just don't appreciate getting rained and snowed upon, not knowing that precipitation is necessary for growth and renewal.

We can be like little children who sing, "Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day." The Word of God is showered upon us "as the rain and the snow come down from heaven" to make our hearts fertile so that we become fruitful and multiply in works that "give seed to the sower and bread to the eater."

But instead, we come in out of the rain for one reason or another. It could be fear that God sends acid rain instead of pure water. It could be fear of becoming wet with the image of Christ. Or maybe we don't want to go through the troublesome task of drying off.

But what if we're never supposed to get dry in the first place? Baptism drenches us with water (the basis of all life) and Word (the sustenance of all life).

Jesus accomplished what God sent His Word to do. Parables were just the start of how he did it. Some people wouldn't have any of the freedom that Jesus was offering them. They were so used to their own ways and ideas of what freedom should look like that they were blinded to what God was revealing in Christ.

The tour de force was the cross. If people refused to see what was happening there-- the destructiveness of their own hatreds and biases and the identity of who they were to be-- then they would suffer the same fate, and suffer dearly. But if their eyes were opened to what God was doing-- showing the door to freedom from a destructive and self-defeating system--they would be transformed and become people with a mission.

Freedom never comes "as you want it". This is not bad news. The futility of thinking that we are the masters of our own destinies comes at great cost. Self-interest at the expense of the whole destroys the self. We are not the islands we believe ourselves to be. But by grace we are knitted together as self-interested individuals into a body that benefits from the body and blood of Christ, given and shed for us in the Eucharistic Feast, so that we reach and benefit those outside of the faith.

Moonwalkin'

A thought just occured to me and I wanted to get it out before I forgot.

What would the Bible say if humanity had its origins on the Moon and not on the Earth? How would it read? I suspect it would be quite different because the Biblical authors would have had the moonscape as their point of reference. How would Genesis 1 read then?

Just wondering.

Letters to Libraries (and beyond)

A letter.

Then alphabetized letters.

Letters combine to form words.

Words combine to form sentences.

Sentences combine to form paragraphs.

Paragraphs combine to form pages.

Pages combine to form stories.

Stories combine to form books.

Books combine to form libraries.

There would be no libraries, books, stories, pages, paragraphs, sentences, words, or alphabets if it weren't for letters.

Reality is series of nested whole/parts (holons). Each holon represents something that is whole but is part of a bigger whole. Every stage of development is dependent on the previous stage. Books can exist without libraries; libraries cannot exist without books.

These are not my ideas, but they make perfect sense to me.

God can exist without the universe; the universe cannot exist without God. God is the only "holon" (for lack of a better term) who is the "Whole", but yet is not a "part", and yet is immanent with every part "wholistically".

Make sense? Think about it!

Foxhole Faith

As the saying goes, "There are no atheists in foxholes."

In response to this, an atheist once said, "If I'm being bombarded in a foxhole, I'm going to do whatever I can to get out of there. I'm not going to sit around and wait for some God-guy to come and rescue me."

Exactly. This is what I call "foxhole faith". It's a faith that's just as valid a belief as any that I've ever heard. Perhaps even more so.

The late George Carlin once quipped, "Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible old man in the sky." And yes, that is the trajectory of most religious discourse. Unfortunately, it has led us to where we are today-- a world full of deists, atheists, and agnostics. This is why most churches are empty on Sunday mornings. An invisible old man who doesn't seem to know what he's doing is hardly worth getting up out of bed for.

To me it's quite simple: we're going to have to give up the interventionist and invisible God-guy if we're going to speak intelligently about our faith. We're going to have to stop speaking of God as an interplanetary cop watching and waiting to catch bad guys. In fact, we may even have to stop speaking of God in ways which imply that God is a sort of superhuman being who reminds us of how much we screw up. But what do we put in his place?

I propose we start speaking in terms of Ultimate Reality out of which all reality we experience with our senses arises, and that this God is constantly being revealed to us through ongoing discoveries in nature--medicine, physics, sociology, astronomy, archaeology, geology, anthropology-- as well as discoveries in Biblical and theological scholarship, linguistics, history, etc. Aren't discoveries made in these fields "revelations"? Aren't things being constantly revealed to us?

Of course, as Christians we believe that God was ultimately revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. That is something that cannot even be questioned. But I wonder if Jesus can be looked at from different angles. I believe that he can; it's why there are four Gospels and not just one. The first Christians saw in Jesus the fulfillment and the goal to which their collective stories pointed.

Today, our stories are huge by comparison and getting bigger by the day with the exponential explosion of our knowledge base. Wouldn't it be right to say that God is the Ultimate Reality out of which all of our discoveries and revelations, even our stories, emerge? We could even call this (to use a bit of Christianese) Divine Service. To use my own sophomoric term: Foxhole Faith.

No Scripture

What would the Christian faith look like if the Spirit hadn't inspired the Biblical authors to write? Almost all scholars agree that almost everything we have in the Bible started out as oral traditions, including the Gospels. According to Dr. Ken Bailey, the Gospels were written primarily out of necessity. The oral traditions and stories about Jesus were kept guarded in the various faith communities by the eyewitnesses of the events of Jesus' life. In the earliest Christian communities in Palestine, reducing oral traditions to writing was the same as burning them, which is why they waited until the last possible moment to write them down. The eyewitnesses (guardians) of the traditions were dying as the years passed, and writing would have been the only means of preservation. So...

What would the Christian faith look like if all of the original eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus died before their stories were written down? Remember, at the time of the apostles there was no such thing as a written New Testament, and the faith caught on like wildfire throughout the Mediterranean world.

Just wondering. Thoughts?