Pentecost 6

Pentecost 6 (Mark 6:1-13)

“He was amazed at their unbelief.”

It takes a lot of effort to resist the obvious. It takes a strong will. It takes an all pervasive pride.

When Jesus returned to his home town he encountered opposition and contempt. It was an illustration of the principle that for many people familiarity breeds contempt.

The people had known Jesus since he was seven years old. They identified him as the carpenter. They referred to him as the son of Mary. We miss the insult in this description. In that time and culture a man is always referred to as the son of his father. So, properly speaking the people should have referred to Jesus as the son of Joseph. They didn’t. They had heard the stories that Joseph was not the biological father of Jesus. They concluded that Jesus was illegitimate.

Of course, they had no way of verifying this. That didn’t stop them from believing it. They used this belief to avoid the obvious about Jesus. He was indeed not the biological son of Joseph. He was the legal son of Joseph and as such heir to the throne of David. He was also the Son of God.

In the gospel readings this summer the universal church invites us to consider how belief distorts fact and blocks faith.

According to the customs and beliefs of the time an illegitimate son is by definition unrighteous. He is under the condemnation of God and the judgment of God. It doesn’t matter who he is or what he does. He is condemned, excluded and unworthy of attention. His very presence in society is an affront to the righteous and a threat to their righteousness.

According to the law he has no inheritance in the nation or family. According to custom he is disqualified from marriage. He lives on the very fringe of society. His sole function in society is to serve as an example of God’s judgment. He is tolerated only to allow the righteous to shine brightly against his darkness.

Sadly, this attitude is not unique to first century Judean religious culture. It stems from a misunderstanding of who God is and what righteousness means. The great tragedy of this misunderstanding is that it subverts our Heavenly Father’s Plan of Salvation.

The co-eternal Son of God united his divinity with our humanity in Jesus the Christ. He came to seek the lost who do not want to be found. He came to proclaim the Good News that God is universal unconditional love. This Good News is completely consistent with the teaching of Moses and the prophets. It was completely contradictory to all forms of religion of the time.

The Law based religion of first century Judea manifested in condemnation and exclusion. It drew on the power of original separation from God to define God as an impersonal judge of an eternal law. It cultivated the pride of righteousness based on a rigid inflexible uncompromising set of beliefs and behaviors. It asserted the will to impose this form of righteousness on every one in society through a system of religious law, religious police and religious courts. It longed for the day when God’s righteous Messiah would empower them to conquer the world and impose this form of law based righteousness on everyone.

Tragically, the law based righteousness of judgment and condemnation could not agree which form of the Law was the true righteousness. They argued incessantly amongst themselves even as they condemned the vast majority of people who did not embrace their beliefs. Even more tragically, when the righteous Messiah of God appeared in their midst they were incapable of accepting him. They refused to listen to him even though he spoke the language of Moses and the prophets.

Jesus gives us an insight into their resistance when he comments that the judgment we use to condemn others is the judgment we will use to condemn ourselves. Jesus brought Good News. The righteous people preferred judgment. Jesus brought universal unconditional love. The righteous people reserved their right to condemn.

Jesus forgave sin. The righteous people were invested in a system of rewards and punishments that defined a person by his sin. Jesus brought liberation from separation and stagnation. The righteous people drew back in fear that Jesus was somehow changing the rules and overturning the religious values of their ancestors. Jesus embodies the reality Moses and the prophets observed over the course of centuries. People, even religious people who invoke God, resist, reject and repudiate God when he makes himself known.

God offers his blessings to everyone. God does not impose himself on any one. Mark comments on this principle when he records that Jesus could do no deed of power in Nazareth. The people held him in contempt.  He was not the Messiah they wanted. They defined him by the rumors they had heard about his birth. They defined him out of their lives. And, Jesus was amazed at their unbelief.

They had heard his teaching drawn from Moses and the prophets but they rejected it. They had heard of his miracles but they refused to accept the eyewitness accounts. They had experienced his integrity and compassion but were unmoved.

They, and so many others in their time and in our time, rejected the personal transforming relationship with God that Jesus offered. They defined God, their society and themselves in the categories of pride and self-will manifesting in the attitudes and actions of judgment and condemnation. They insisted on their rights as the righteous. Their demands deafened their ears to the Good News of divine love. They were lost. They were lost in belief. And Jesus marveled at how insistent they were in refusing to hear and receive the Good News he proclaimed and embodied.

God was right there with them and they refused to believe the evidence. And so, “He was amazed at their unbelief.”

Pentecost 5

Pentecost 5 (Mark 5:21-43)  “Your faith has made you well.”

God does not want us to hold an unexamined belief. Faith is not a blind leap in the dark.

In Jesus God invites us to examine the facts of our lives based on observation and experience. People came to believe Jesus could heal because they witnessed him healing. People saw Jesus restore lepers to perfect health. They saw how the blind came to see, the paralyzed walked, and all manner of illness and injury healed. Their belief was grounded in observation and formed by their experience.

Faith is a different matter altogether. Faith is trust and commitment. Not all who witnessed the healing miracles and believed Jesus had the power to heal came to faith. Some people came to Jesus for the healing then walked away. Some stood to one side and claimed Jesus healed by the power of Satan. Others largely ignored Jesus through indifference.

Jesus recognized the difference between belief and faith. Belief is largely a matter of will. It is a will resistant to change, to growth, to transformation. More often than not religious belief selectively chooses bits and pieces of scripture and the words of Jesus while ignoring the person of Jesus. More often than not belief rejects fact and subverts faith.

Jesus used the occasion of the woman who sought his healing to teach about faith. In his humanity he did not know who had touched him. He only knew someone had indeed called forth the power of his divine nature. That power is the power of love. Jesus did not heal through the power of command and control. He healed by the real presence of infinite and eternal love. It is the love that creates the universe. It is the love that eternally manifests as one God in three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The woman touched Jesus out of belief based in fact. The fact is grounded in her observation of how Jesus healed others. She was hesitant due to the nature of her affliction. Under the Law of Moses any discharge of blood rendered a person unclean. Had the woman approached Jesus publically she would be violating the law of isolation. By approaching Jesus she would be threatening to render him unclean. He would have had to withdraw from society and offered the appointed sacrifices in the Temple before he resumed his public ministry.

When Jesus asked who had touched him she probably feared that he would denounce her to the religious police and punish her. He didn’t. Jesus wanted to complete her healing. She had been cured but she needed more. She needed both wholeness and holiness restored to her. Wholeness meant the healing of every aspect of her being not just her ailment. She had endured much pain and economic distress over the years. Such distress and pain had taken its toll on her mind and heart and soul. She needed more than a cure. She needed wholeness.

Due to the nature of her ailment she also needed ritual holiness. She could not return to society unless she performed certain religious acts defined in the Law of Moses. Jesus understood this aspect of her disease. He publically declared she was fully healed. What God calls clean no one can call unclean.

Jesus does not want secret disciples. If you follow Jesus you need to follow from the place of informed belief and committed faith. There is no half way faith in Jesus. You are either loyal to him and growing in grace; or, you are standing on the fringes of faith lost in a twilight belief that lacks the power of salvation and sanctification.

The woman claimed the full healing when she came forward and admitted she had reached out to Jesus. This was not a blind leap of faith. This was a public acknowledgement of her trust in Jesus. It is as she steps forward in faith that Jesus says: your faith has made you well. Go in peace. Be healed.

Passive belief is not the same thing as active faith. The woman was hesitant. She had some fear. She wasn’t the classic model of a courageous saint. She didn’t need to be. All she needed was that mustard seed sized faith to come to Jesus. All she needed was the seed of faith to believe the truth, receive the truth and acknowledge the truth. She told him the full truth in the presence of his disciples and the crowds. She told him of her illness, her pain, her suffering and her fears.

Sadly, belief has a tendency to shroud itself in deceit. It is largely a self-deceit that defends its position from change. It is a defense of pride and self-will that will not and cannot admit where it is in distortion. It is much better at judging and condemning others for their sins than in acknowledging its own sin of pride.

The fullness of healing the woman received is the fullness of truth. In truth the woman experience the real presence of love in Jesus Christ. At that moment she was completely undefended and humble. At that moment Jesus not only completed her physical healing he gave her the spiritual healing of peace. It was a peace she had never experienced. It not only restored to her all that she had lost over the years but opened to her a new life and a new way of living.

The peace of God transforms. It transforms past suffering in the reality of present grace. It changes anxiety about the future by a present trust in the real presence of the eternal. Separation from God keeps us trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of judgment, conflict, fear and anxiety. It formulates systems of belief that keep our perception of God and God’s creation so narrow that we miss the blessing God has designed into the world and our own souls.

The first step to healing and wholeness is the first step of faith. That first step of faith means that we are willing to walk a new path of discovery. In that path we discover who God really is. He is Jesus. In that path we discover who we really are. We are each the forever friend of the co-eternal Son of God. In that path we discover the truth of humanity. We as a species are a collective whole designed to help each other and to complete each other. The Holy Spirit, the divine Helper, asks us to ask ourselves today. What is my next step forward in faith? How is Jesus inviting me to experience wholeness, holiness and peace?

Pentecost 4

Pentecost 4 (Mark 4:35-41) “Why are you afraid?”

It was a dark and stormy night.

In the midst of a violent storm, in the middle of an inland sea, with the boat filling with water the disciples faced certain death.  Many of them were fishermen. They knew the sea. They knew the danger. They understood the impossible position they were in.

Jesus was sleeping through the whole thing. For one thing, he must have been really tired. Remember, he was fully human. He had no special knowledge or power. He also was the co-eternal Beloved of God. He had come from the eternal realm into the realm of time. He had left the infinite expanse of the Divine Domain in order to enter into the natural universe of matter, energy, time and space.

Jesus slept from exhaustion. And, he slept in the fullness of the Beloved who never ceases to trust His Heavenly Father.

The disciples do not have this trust. They had a belief in God. It is a belief formed from the place of separation and molded by the pride of self-will. The God the disciples believe in is a God of rewards and punishments. It is a God of rigid inflexible uncompromising demands on human thought, word and deed. It is also a God of detached impersonal perfection.

Jesus had come to offer people a very different experience of God. That experience was planned in the eternal realm to help human beings catch a glimpse of the original blessing God had infused into our souls. That experience had been crafted to offer people a new and more complete way of living.

As a particular human being, Jesus could not be present to everyone at once. He did the next best thing. He selected twelve men of the dozens perhaps hundreds who offered to study with him. He selected the twelve to train. He selected them to train in the Way of Blessing.

Of the twelve, Jesus selected three for special training in leadership. Those three were Peter, James and John. They were each unique and had different qualities that would enable them to share different aspects of the divine revelation embodied in Jesus.

Of the three Jesus chose one. He chose the one who chose him to be his closest and best friend. He chose John to become the  beloved of the co-eternal Beloved so John could weave the strand personal relationship into the Sacred Tradition of Faith and Hope and Charity,

As the disciples experienced throughout the three years of their association with Jesus as their teacher, this moment was a unique moment. It was also a teachable moment.

Under ordinary circumstances this storm would have been a moment of fear. Jesus offered to transform this experience into a moment of faith.

Faith is not belief. Faith is not rules and restrictions. Faith is trust in a person. Jesus is the unique personal presence of God on earth. He and he alone unifies divinity with humanity in a single individual at a particular place and time.

His presence in the boat and the storm transforms an occasion of fear into an invitation to faith in the living God. Faith. Not belief. The great obstacle to faith is belief. More often than not, belief is impersonal, detached from fact, and expressive of the individual will to power.

Faith is personal. It is fully engaged in and defined by our relationships. It is teachable.  It is willing to walk side by side with others in mutual cooperation and support.

Belief defines human behavior. Faith does not come easy to us. The power of original separation reinforces belief even as it subverts faith. The power of the original blessing emerges in moments of crises, in moments of quiet and in moments of doubt. These are the moments of grace God the Holy Spirit uses to invite us to receive the gift of faith.

The gift of faith is not doctrine or discipline. Those things have their place once faith emerges, strengthens and evolves. The gift of faith is a personal relationship with the infinite and eternal love of God through a personal relationship with the co-eternal Beloved incarnate in Jesus Christ.

What do you fear?

Most of what we fear has some basis in fact. But, it is fact distorted by belief about how the universe works and how life should  be. Our belief creates a dark and stormy universe filled with the certainty that we are alone and  surrounded by threats.

Jesus invites us into the moment of fear the disciples experienced that day. He invites us to ponder how that fear was perfectly natural, based in the struggle for survival. And, he invites us to hear his word of command. Peace be still.

It is a word of command only Jesus as the co-eternal word of God can speak in union with the Father by the real presence of the Holy Spirit. Jesus speaks the word and the world responds. The world changes.

The storm ends. The wind and waves transform instantly from a life threatening tempest to an almost supernatural calm.  The disciples move from the place of fear to the place of awe. In that place of awe they ask a question. Who is he?

That question is the portal of grace. That question sets aside belief, at least for that moment, and opens the minds, hearts and wills of the disciples to move from belief into faith. This is a universal pattern of transformation emerging in a very specific experience in a singular moment of time.

What makes the difference for this moment of fear and all future moments of faith is Jesus.

Pentecost 3

Pentecost 3 (Mark 4:26-34) “The Kingdom of Heaven is like….”

One of the great misunderstandings human beings have about God is that we are all experts on the subject of God.

 Each person on this planet reserves the right to define God however we choose. We all tend to define God within the categories of our own personal experience. Some of us develop rationalizations to support our conclusions. A few of us over the centuries have developed systems of beliefs to hold our experiences and transmit our conclusions to subsequent generations.

God is not a subject we can analyze and codify. God is person we can experience in an ongoing relationship.

Jesus also draws on his personal experience of God to express his teaching about God. What is unique about Jesus is that he has a direct experience of the infinite and eternal reality of God. No other human being has that experience.

We did once. God the Father created us to have a direct experience of the divine through the pre incarnate Son in the presence of the Holy Spirit. As a species we rejected the personal relationship with the divine. We made that choice in order to acquire the attributes and aspects of God apart from the personal presence of God.

Our experience of God and therefor our knowledge of God is now indirect, inferential and distorted. It is indirect because we think about God from the place of pride. Pride reserves the right to analyze, define and delineate.

This should be no surprise. Moses and the Prophets record how people stubbornly resist the reality of God in word or deed. Had people been willing to hear God’s word, believe God’s word and then act on God’s word we never would have needed prophets to call us to repentance. And, we never would have needed Jesus to die on the cross for the forgiveness of sin.

This should be no surprise to us here in the United States where people cannot agree on the basic facts of science. Indeed. There are large numbers of people who hold the belief: my mind is made up don’t confuse me with the facts.

Jesus understands this about our species in general and indeed about our particular pride filled culture. He does no issue decrees and commands as much as he offers us a way. It is a new way of life, a new way of being human. It is a way formed by metaphor and simile. It is a way informed by the forever friendship he offers us.

Jesus uses the language of nature. The language of nature is grounded in the patterns God the Father designed into the world. Those patterns derive from the Son, incarnate in Jesus Christ. In an ongoing personal relationship with the Son we can begin to discern those patterns, learn from those patterns and transform according to those patterns.

Jesus describes the Kingdom of God in terms of the inter relatedness of natural patterns. So, he speaks of the kingdom as seed. The pattern of the kingdom emerges in the pattern of the seed.

The first pattern is action and potential. The sower makes a choice to actively sow the seed. This is an image of the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit works within the context of natural law to fulfill a supernatural purpose. The supernatural purpose is the  reunification of lost souls with Christ.

The seed contains the full potential for growth and development. As it sprouts it seems to do so of its own accord. Of course, we all know it is responding to the soil, the sunlight, the rain and the mix of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide in the air.  It is part of a web of natural relationships of earth, air, fire and water that enables the genetic potential to activate, grow and mature.

The pattern of the seed is that life starts small… imperceptivity small, almost inconsequentially small. The patter is that life emerges within the context of a set of conditions and relationships.

Notice the language Jesus chooses to use to describe the Kingdom of God. It is participatory. It invites us to observe the world around us. It encourages us to think and reflect. It is not an absolute rigid uncompromising ideological (or theological) demand Jesus places before us. It is a process that invites us into a  partnership with God in Christ. The partnership is our response to enter into the pattern and purpose of the Plan of Creation.

Jesus does not use the language of politics or power to describe the Kingdom of God. He uses the language of creation and he uses the language of personal relationships. That language is for us an invitation to participate in a divinely ordered set of personal relationships. Those relationships start small and develop slowly. But, as they derive from the divine pattern of the Word of God so they facilitate a never ending process of growth and development. That is the Plan of Salvation. That is the kingdom of God.

In this passage, Jesus invites us to ponder the wonder of creation and the pattern of salvation as he teaches: the kingdom of heaven is like seed scattered on the earth.