God's handiwork

God’s handiwork 100514

Psalm 19, Matthew 21:33-46

Ps 19....the heavens are telling---speech without words in creation, thru God's teaching, warn us...which brings me to the challenging gospel... 

the Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian writing that didn’t make it into the Bible, is primarily a list of Jesus’ sayings, without narrative or editorial additions.   In Thomas’ gospel, this parable about the absentee landlord ends with the tenants’ killing the son, and the words, let those who have ears hear.

Matthew’s version however, speaking to his own late first century situation, adds the bit about Jesus asking the religious leaders what would happen next, and naturally they answer with what in reality would happen.  In Matthew, Jesus then goes on to quote an ancient scripture and condemning the religious leaders for their failure to be good stewards of God’s handiwork and what God had given them.

Unfortunately, this addition has taken a parable and made it an allegory:  God is the landowner, the Jews failed in their job and the Christians got the kingdom….leading to centuries of anti Semitism and an image of a God of retribution. 

Today we might think we’ve softened that interpretation, and perhaps need to say the Church hasn’t taken care of the vineyard, and others outside the church are being given the kin-dom of God.   Or we might say that we as Christians individually have failed to be good stewards, at home, at work, in community, globally.   But its still an allegory.  And it doesn’t fit with the God of Israel then, the early Christian experience, or the God we experience now……this isn’t a God who wreaks divine retribution on those who rejected even the son….this isn’t a God who gives up trying when the world has done its worst.   We know, as the early Christians knew, that God doesn’t wreak retribution, and doesn’t give up.  Indeed God answered the worst we could do with the resurrection, and God continues to speak, as the psalm says.

So lets go back to its being simply a parable in its original form (as best we can guess)….

If the landowner is simply a landowner, we get a whole new perspective, without the lens of thinking it’s about God.

(thanks to a web post for this perspective-I just can't remember whose)

The landowner doesn’t live on the land, doesn’t work the land, but uses, in fact misuses, sharecroppers like migrant workers to do his work – and he doesn’t send his servants out of any love for the people or the land, but simply to get what he needs as a return for his investment so he can continue to live the lifestyle to which he is accustomed.  And according to first century culture, what he takes doesn’t leave much for subsistence for the workers…no living wages here either.

The first and second time, the tenants send them packing; they’ve had enough of slavery to another’s greed, even if it’s the way of the world.  You can almost hear some of Jesus’ listeners cheering at such rebellion against an unjust system.  Then here comes the son; and they get rid of him with equal violence.  More cheers.  Let those who have ears, hear.   Even without Matthew's addition, those who can hear would know what would happen next.

The culture of violence escalates, and simply leads to more violence….the tenants are destroyed and the work is given to other poor suckers so that the landowner can continue to get what he wants.

As a simple parable, this story wreaks havoc on my soul, for it is so relevant to today.

Like the landowner, I depend on the exploitation of others to get what I want to live my life of relative ease.   I too consume and consume with little thought for those on whose backs I get my coffee or my clothes.    Like the tenant farmers, how are we willing to do, or allow, wrong to achieve what we think is ok.  How do we perpetuate violence by violence, and allow conflict to escalate?

Jesus confronts 21^st century Fairport.  

 We all know the alternative, Jesus has preached it for 2000 years to us:  the kin-dom of God, the reign of God in our lives, instead of the reign of greed and injustice. 

Jesus challenges us to co-create a world, or a little part of a world in our homes and businesses and congregations, where the earth is cared for, and not full of our glorious toxic and electronic waste, so it still may speak of God’s handiwork as in the psalm

… where we care for all of God’s children, including the ones who make our clothes and pick our cotton, as well as the ones we buy all that stuff for, for they too are God’s handiwork.

….where we do not answer violence with violence, but work peaceably to end oppression so that all of God’s handiwork is free

…where our security is in God instead of in our wealth or our jobs

…where faithful stewardship is what we do with what God has entrusted to us

This is the kin-dom, the culture, the world, we are baptized into…the world we promise to co-create with Wesley and his family as we make our vows at his baptism today…..

Let’s do it!

Divine generosity and grace

Matthew 20:1-16

It’s not fair!  A perfectly human reaction.

We’re so reward based as a culture that we have come to believe it’s the right way to be.

But our focus on financial rewards, or any rewards for that matter, changes us.  When we’re counting and comparing, consciously or not, we get angry when someone seems to get more than they “deserve”, and we get less than we “deserve”.  And that leads us into feeling humiliation.

Sure feels unfair to us.

But really it’s not unfair—it’s radically fair, it’s just, it’s generous, it’s grace, it’s God’s way.  And we don’t like it.  It’s such a completely different way of looking at life.

So there’s the first call of this text: to see as God does, which is the reverse of how we see.  We see with what a Sojourners writer, Min-Ah Cho calls “the ethical standards constructed by capitalism”, as people in Jesus’ day saw with the hierarchical system of imperialism.

That’s the first shift: to let go counting and comparing, and admit where it has taken us and what it has made us.

But there’s more.  There is in fact more of a radical call here.  This story seems to suggest God goes even further, that the way of the kin-dom gives priority to the unwanted, and gives challenge to the privileged….comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable….with the purpose that the whole community can grow together through vulnerability – the vulnerability of being unwanted and the vulnerability of losing power – just as we were called to grow 2 weeks ago through the tough love of conflict and last week through the tough work of forgiveness.

This is a radical paradigm shift.  Like the 70 x 7 last week, this is a story about not counting, because counting and comparing are subtle ways of domination of the other—wanting power over others.  God’s paradigm is about empowering.

You see, the unwanted, those ‘standing idle all day’, were probably not the lazy idle, but the unwanted idle, those who weren’t as useful as the others, those at the bottom of the ladder, in fact not even on the ladder: the weak, the sick, the disabled, the outsider.   Today perhaps the list might expand to include the discounted undocumented immigrants, the elderly, children in poverty, the un- and underemployed.

In God’s kin-dom way, in God’s vineyard work force, those were the people last hired and first paid. I wonder why?  Perhaps so they might learn about divine generosity and grace, not just economic justice generosity, but inclusion generosity.   

And the first hired were paid last.  I wonder why?  Perhaps so they might learn humility and learn to BE just and generous.

So what?

The kin-dom of heaven – the community of God - our congregation – is called to be a place where all are welcome, all are valued, all have purpose.   And in this God-paradigm, generosity, grace, vulnerability and humility are the standards.  God is still calling us to join the Jesus workforce—there’s still work to be done……still calling us to shift our counting and comparing thinking……still calling us to see people with God’s eyes, treat people with divine generosity….still calling us to give priority to the unwanted, to keep going out to where people are standing waiting for someone to empower them and off them meaning….still calling us to challenge the privileged, starting with ourselves…..still calling us to rejoice in grace and live in generosity.

forgiveness

Hear me Lord,

Forgive me Lord,

Please those years when I ignored you,

Forgive them Lord

Those that feel they can’t afford you

For those of you that have never heard George Harrison’s 1970 album “All Things Must Pass”, the one with the song “My Sweet Lord”, I highly recommend it. It is a popular album of rare spiritual depth. On it Harrison documents resentment, spiritual conversion, and ultimately, forgiveness. And that is exactly what our scripture deals with today.

So, we just heard Peter come to Jesus and ask Him, “How many times should I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Should I forgive as many as seven times?” Jesus answers, “Not just seven times, but as many as seventy-seven times?” In order to comprehend Jesus’ response we must dig into it a little bit. First, the Greek word we translate as “forgive” literally means “to release, to let go”. Second, when Jesus says we must forgive seventy-seven times he is referring back to Genesis 4:23- 24. (read it).  Jesus is saying that just as Lamech is avenged  seventy-seven times, we must forgive seventy-seven times. The Genesis passage is telling us how violence perpetuates, and Jesus is telling us how peace comes into existence.  The third thing we must know to understand Jesus here is the fact that the number seven suggested completeness to first century Jews. So, if we put all that together, Jesus is saying we must forgive or let go completely. And this is where Jesus’ notion of forgiving differs from ours. What is it to forgive or let go completely? It is to let go of it ALL, the whole thing, the old creation in its totality.

In alcoholics anonymous, they know how self-enclosing and therefore deadly it is to live in the past by holding on, by not letting go. These are people who have learned the hard way the following fact: the core reason we end up needing to forgive is because, mentally, psychologically, we live in the past. What neuroscience calls the “autobiographical self” is of the past. For example, everything I know of Chris Jewell is from memory. Every person recognizes his or her self simply and solely as their past. Our “I”, our continuity and our identity, is nothing but an abstraction from our memory, since what I know of myself is always what I was. (A. Watts) This living in the past is condemned by Jesus in the gospels. Consider Matthew 8:19, where someone approaches Jesus and says, “Lord I will follow you, but first let me go and bury my father, and Jesus said to him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead”. If Jesus worked in our churches he would get fired quick—he would not be tolerated. That’s why we worship him, so we don’t have to tolerate him, we toss him up on a pedestal and say “I can never be like that” and that allows us to effectively ignore him. We like that because it keeps us secure, it keeps us from having to change. If we really followed him we would have to put up with him—he would ask us to let go of that which we hold on to so desperately. But, anyway, what Jesus is really saying with His “let the dead bury their dead” statement is that we live in the past, and that causes us to miss living fully in the present. It causes us to interpret the new in terms of the old, and so we miss the new reality. In Christian theological terms, living in the old creation causes us to miss living in Christ, in the new creation, in the eternal now.

Members of AA know they might pay a heavy price by living in the old creation, especially since that old self or creation is alcoholic. So they have a saying, Let Go and Let God”. But alcoholics aren’t the only ones hurt by living in the past, or living in a resentful mind. The whole world is hurt by this—wars, divorces, these and many other things result from minds that hold on to resentments and judge others. And both our readings today all about that—how we pay the ultimate price when we judge, when we don’t forgive or let go of the past.

 In romans 14 Paul is warning his listeners not to judge, and Jesus as I said is telling us we should forgive completely. The fact is, we judge others, and we end up with resentments. Maybe if we look and understand what it is that judges, what it is that needs to be let go, maybe this whole process of forgiving doesn’t need to occur in the first place. Judgments, resentments occur because we grasp, acquire, hold on to experiences. I mean the mind, the self does this with both positive and negative experiences. Grasping or holding onto positive or pleasant experiences is how many of us get addicted to something, I take a drink, a smoke, a bite of cake, sex, whatever, and I hold onto, remember, that experience. And now, I want to repeat it, I want MORE. This becomes part of the architecture of the self. After all the self is born of an acquisitive process right? What is the self? The ideas, the memories, the conclusions, the experiences, both good and bad, the habits, etc.. as I said before all this is acquired, accumulates, builds up, hardens into a center and then we know it through memory and reflection.  So this acquisitive process or self holds onto positive experiences but the self also, and even more effectively, keenly, holds onto negative experiences. Contemporary neuroscience points out that the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and like Teflon for positive ones. This is a little trick from evolution—for survival’s sake we encode negative information so we can protect ourselves from it in the future. Have you ever looked closely at this in yourself? I mean, I can have a great day—and then one bad thing happens, one person gets on my nerves, and then bam, that is what I remember of that day. Neuroscience acknowledges that this process of retaining experiences gets out of control and begins harming us. They acknowledge that we need a release—we need to let go. That is why so many of them are involved in the exciting new field of contemplative neuroscience—where they study the effects of meditation on the brain. Jesus was a few thousand years ahead of them.   This process of holding onto, clinging to, or grasping experiences is marked as a fundamental problem by the world’s religions. All of the world’s spiritual geniuses said that living in the past, in the old acquisitive self, which is the old creation, causes us great stress, great problems. Buddhism called it the clinging mind—in Christian terms it is the clinging mind that causes us to cling to the old creation, to the old self. Jesus knew we needed to be saved from this old creation, that living in the center of this old self causes us to have resentments, to judge, and then we are estranged from neighbor, and most importantly from God—living in the past causes us to consciously miss God—who is always New, always Now. God, the Spirit, can never be relegated to the past, turned into something static or dead, something known. God can never be anywhere but NOW, in each new unfolding moment, in each new turn of creation. God of course is even in what we call death, for that too is a new turning of creation.

To forgive is to let go of all of the old creation, of the old self—it is to be reborn. It is to see beyond the old acquisitive, accumulating self. Jesus, as a first century Jewish mystic knew about letting go—of going beyond self. He meditated, he practiced His spirituality. Modern neuroscience is confirming that meditation is one way, and the most effective way, of letting go of the past, of transcending the self. So many of Jesus’ teachings are concerned with this. Consider the story of the rich young man—Jesus tells him to, in a sense, get rid of, let go of his possessions. We tend to go with a literal interpretation and think he is speaking of material possessions. But there is another level to this--Jesus is saying let go of all you have acquired, accumulated,  he is saying we should let go of the process that is the acquisitive mind, let go of the old creation and come join the Christ, the New Creation.  Human societies have always been acquisitive, built out of the acquisitive process of each of us. Our culture takes it to a whole new level. That is why Jesus is so counter-cultural, more now than ever before, he is saying let go of that. Let go of the very process that your society, the old creation is built out of. Wow. No wonder we couldn’t let him stick around too long—He wanted to change us from the foundation up.  Consider the statement in Revelation-21, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and first earth had passed away. Let go and see the New heaven and the new earth! I will close this morning with some more George Harrison, this time from Sgt. Pepper: “when you’ve seen beyond yourself, then you may find peace of mind is waiting there”. When you forgive, when you let go of the old creation, you let go of what you know, the old consciousness, and that is bound to feel scary, it might feel like a part of you is dying, but by dying to the old you have peace of mind, you allow a new creation, a new consciousness to come into being. Let It Be So.

Tough Love

Tough love 090714                                                                                                                                                        Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20

When I was visiting Kay in the hospital the other day, we got talking about her puppy, Edmund.  She said he needs some ‘tough love’  to get him out of bad habits and into good ones.  Like his namesake in the Chronicles of Narnia, he needs to experience some transformation through pain!

But the tough love I want to talk about isn’t just about redemption.   It’s the very nature of the life of Jesus followers.  Love is tough, in the sense of strong AND love is tough in the sense of difficult.

Both of our texts today speak to those people who were trying to figure out how to live together in community as Jesus people…..both are about relationships, being part of something bigger that themselves.  St Paul sums up all the relationship stuff in the ancient, and modern, Jewish commandment, love your neighbor as yourself.  This church stuff is all about that, love your neighbor as you love yourself.   Last week Ken shared with us a bit about who IS our neighbor, and then this week I read that while that one Jewish commandment occurs once, ‘love the stranger’ occurs much more often…..love people we don’t know, who may be culturally, religiously, racially, obviously different from us…..it’s tough to love THAT neighbor.

But here in this place we get to practice that love, week by week, day by day, together on this journey.  Look around.   Lots of familiar faces, lots of ‘strangers’…..here we begin tough love.  And here we get some guidelines from Paul and from Jesus…..

Paul says to pick up the weapons of light, we might say tools, spiritual practices, and he has several:

Do no harm

Wake up—be attentive, intentional about your spiritual life—get practical, get real

Live in light—keep an eye on what could be, not wallow in what is—be transparent and have integrity

Put on Jesus—if you’re wearing a cardigan or a jacket, take it off.   Now put it back on and imagine it’s the example of Jesus and the love of God embracing you….what difference will that make as you look and act Love?

And Jesus has another one of his own in today’s gospel.

Live at peace with one another—deal promptly and properly with conflict.   My, that’s love that’s tough. But TL takes its time, isn’t hasty.   TL allows space for all to share their point of view.  TL encourages us to grow together through tough times.  Imagine a world that practiced that kind of love!   Then, as Jesus says, that really would reverberate through the universe.

THIS can be a place of Love that is tough strong so we can learn how to love tough difficult.   We know life is tough, especially for you young parents and families.  But here we can build a place where Love Wins when we share together, worship together, be together, love together.

Let’s make it happen, tough as it may be…make this a place of learning to love, so that beyond this place we can live out love supported by one another.

Do no harm; in fact work on reconciliation                                                                                                                          Do good; love, even when it’s tough                                                                                                                                       and wear Jesus; wrap yourself in the example of Jesus and the toughest of all loves, the love of God. 

Communion:  “It’s interesting that Jesus chose bread and wine.  They’re two things that once changed can’t revert to their original form.  You can remove lettuce from a salad, and it’s still lettuce, but bread can’t go back to being grain, and juice can’t return to the grapes.  It’s a total transformation. And in each case, there’s an agent.  Yeast in the case of bread, sugar in the case of wine.  In the eucharist, I think the agent is the Spirit” (Sister Judith in Atchison Blue by Judith Valente)

 the table where we meet for our family meals, and this table, can be holy places, where we gather not just to take in food, but to know others more intimately, to share an experience that God has in mind for the whole world.  All are invited, neighbors and strangers; come today to be refreshed by God’s grace, feasting together so we know we are not alone, that the agent of the Spirit might transform us into more of what God dreams for us to be.

Signs of Jesus people: humility and giftedness

Romans 12:1-8
(used Message version)

Signs of Jesus People: humility and giftedness

We’ve spent the summer looking at what are signs of our being Jesus people—and in today’s reading there are two, humility and giftedness, but before we get there I was struck by two images of ‘body’ that show up that Paul uses to make us sit up and pay attention—present your bodies as a living sacrifice to God, as the NRSV says, or as the Msg says Take your everyday, ordinary life – your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life - and place it before God as an offering.

And the second is that we are part of Christ’s body—the only body Christ has now.

And much as I’d like to go with the simple spiritual message of how important we are to one another and to God, there’s a more pressing cultural message in here that I need to start with….

“present your bodies as a living sacrifice”…. Offer all of yourself, all of yourself, to God.

Paul is writing in the first half of the first century to new Christians at Rome….a particular historical and cultural situation….the hub of the imperial cult, the empire that thought it was the centre of the universe.  Doesn’t seem to have that much to do with us in 21^st century America, does it?  And yet….here we too worship at different temples and are devoted to other Gods….one God is our stomach, and we worship at Wegmans or Mcdonalds or Krispy Kreme.  Another God is our technology, worshiped on our couches in front of our tvs or computers or smart phones.

Present your bodies as a living offering to God?   I don’t think so.

Complicating this is that we have an incredibly ambivalent attitude towards our bodies…we dis=ease and demean them, complain about them and spent thousands on making them better…..at the same time we use them, especially women’s bodies, to sell stuff, including happiness.

Present your bodies as a living offering to God?

Think about your day to day life for a minute….what part of your life isn’t offered to God:  working, eating, sleeping, playing, exercising?   Is God assigned only to Sunday morning, or occasional scripture reading, or prayer when you’re looking for a parking place?...........

Present your body as a living offering to God?

It’s yours….it’s the only one you’ve got - it’s precious and made by love and by God.  So, we must tend it and nurture it so we can offer ALL of it to God….eating, sleeping, working, playing ….

And as if that’s not enough of a word from God for this morning, there’s the second body image…..

This body is yours, and its yours for a reason…..you are meant to be part of something bigger, the body of Christ.

So….here comes the bit where you do the spiritual work…...   If you were to think of yourself as a body part, given your personality, what would it be?

…..think, share, then consider how that plays out as your part in the body of Christ, not just in this church but in the wider world?  How are you eyes, ears etc (depending on responses) in all your offering of your body to God?

Now think what that role that body part plays in the body….it means that you are GIFTED (sign of J people) to play that role in the larger community…..it means you are HUMBLE enough to know your own importance, but also that you need others to make your part work right….(that’s humility, sign of J people)

We are called to be there for one another, says Paul….we are all one together – so if someone is struggling with something, someone else is there to help.  God has given each of us gifts that make life full and abundant for others.

If your gift is teaching, then do it well; if your gift is encouragement, then do it well, if your gift is nutrition and education, then do it well for those who need help with their bodies.

Some of you have been anxious about imagined upcoming changes at church, changes in the body of Christ……. understand that as with the body, change happens, not always predictable, not always understandable, but if we understand and use our own giftedness, and remain humble enough to trust God, God will bring good out of our frail human efforts, and we will be able to offer loving transformation for the world; just as Jesus did so is his body to do.

Teresa of Avila wrote:

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

         What are WE going to do about it?

---

   

signs of Jesus people: transformed for service

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing

There is a field, I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

The world is too full to talk about.

Those are an English translation of words written by the 13^th century poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, better known as simply Rumi. They came to mind when I began looking at our scripture reading for today, because this morning, Christ takes us to a field out beyond ideas of right and wrong.

The beginning of our text has Jesus being told about the murder of John the Baptist and then going off by himself to a deserted place”. This is language pointing to the spiritual practice of Jesus the Jewish mystic. In Hebrew there is a word that is very important for understanding what is going on when Jesus is said to be going off alone—and all four gospels mention him going off to be by himself. The Hebrew word I am speaking of is hit-bo-dedut—it is derived from a word that means “to be alone”—and it points to much more than physical isolation—although the mystics would go off to be physically alone to meditate. This word, hit-bo-dedut, also refers to the mystics internally separating their inner essence from their thoughts—or, in modern spiritual language, their True self from their false or conditioned self. In other words, spirit-filled ancient Jews like Jesus knew the value of solitude—of internal solitude—and this is key to understanding Jesus’ spiritual genius. Why? Well, many of us, generally speaking, have very little solitude. Even if we are physically alone, our minds, as I said a few weeks ago, are crowded by so much cultural conditioning, by so many influences, by all the knowledge we have accumulated, by so many memories of so many experiences, by so many fears, so much anxiety, so many ideas, so much conflict. Are any of us ever truly alone? We are not alone today if we are weighed down by thousands of yesterdays—if we are burdened with all we have collected during those thousands of yesterdays—all the ideas of right and wrong we so often mistake for Truth, all the pleasures, all the treasures, all the pains. Remember, Jesus told us very clearly that if we wanted to follow Him, we must deny or disown the self—the self that is always of the past.  This can be very difficult in a culture that has turned the love of self into the idolatry of self. When Jesus says we must deny or disown the self—he is saying we must die to the past—and to do that we must know this internal solitude—we must “go off by ourselves”. We must die to that past, to those thoughts that literally preoccupy our minds. To let go of all that is to be alone.  And, this is a beautiful thing, for as our scripture tells us, the result of this aloneness, of this solitude, is a kind of compassion that is truly un-selfish and that is truly miraculous.

In verse 14 we see Jesus coming ashore and encountering a great crowd, and we are told he has compassion for them. The compassion Jesus shows is not just that of a nice guy—if Jesus was just a nice guy, just gave poor folks a dollar, he wouldn’t have become synonymous with Love, with freedom—in short, he wouldn’t have been the Christ. Jesus has died to or denied the self that is the result of thousands of yesterdays—he has let go of or transcended the old creation—and it is for this reason that he is called the Christ—the one who brings the New Creation. In His solitude he has let go of self. And this allows for compassion. Compassion is a truly un-selfish response. True compassion is without motive. Solitude allows for this because there is no self to have a motive—there is no self that filters and judges, there is no self that wants the social capital or improved self-image that comes from being a nice guy. There is no self that is estranged from others. Jesus is Love because he is not estranged—Jesus Christ is Love, the power that overcomes estrangement—now, obviously so-called religious people have used the idea of Jesus to separate themselves from others so I’m not necessarily speaking of the Jesus of the church, I’m talking about the Christ as the New Reality or Love that is when the self is not. Solitude or dying to the conditioned self allows us to Love and serve our neighbors in a truly Christ-like or Christian fashion—whether those neighbors are across the street or across the sea. Whether those neighbors are like us or not, whether or not those neighbors hold political views or lifestyles we approve of. Whether or not those neighbors have oppressed or harmed us.  Jesus was the Christ because he brought the New Reality—he transcended the old reality. He transcended the self--the self that is the result of the old reality; the self that is the old reality; the self that is the result of the continuity and the accumulation of a thousand yesterdays.

We next hear that the disciples come to the deserted place where Jesus is and ask him to send the crowds away so all those people can go buy some food for themselves. Jesus’ response is a big lesson for all of us…he says the people need not go away, he says to the disciples, you— the church—you give them something to eat. In other words—YOU DO IT. Jesus had compassion for and served all—he said we should even love our enemies—he loved and served a Roman centurion, he loved Samaritans, he even had compassion for those who killed him. It is the church’s responsibility—it is our responsibility to love and serve ALL—INCLUDING ALL THOSE WHO MAY BE THREATENING OR EVEN POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS—THOSE WHO ARE EASILY OR WILLFULLY FORGOTTEN, LIKE THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN IN OUR PASSAGE TODAY—WE MUST LOVE AND SERVE THOSE WE HAVE BEEN TAUGHT ARE EVIL OR THE WORST OF THE WORST. Earlier in Matthew’s gospel he says, “IF YOU LOVE THOSE WHO LOVE YOU WHAT REWARD DO YOU HAVE—DON’T EVEN THE TAX COLLECTORS DO THE SAME?” SO HOW ARE WE TO SERVE THEM? Well, just as this story is not ultimately about serving people food, we, the church, are to serve, to transmit, Christ’s Love and compassion—we are to serve, to transmit the un—selfish mind that was in Christ Jesus. But first we must receive that Love, that unselfish mind, from the Christ. First we must go off alone like he did. I am reminded of people I have known in ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS. When one alcoholic really gets sober—not just quits drinking—but really transcends their old self-centered ways—they truly begin living in a New Reality, a New Creation—and those around them witness a new consciousness as it emerges.  That  person then transmits His or Her new reality to ALL they encounter—like a pebble dropped in a pond—the reality of everyone in their world begins to transform, in fact the reality of people they don’t even know is transformed—for that person is no longer drunk behind the wheel, no longer drunk around their kids, and so those kids and then their-- yet to be born--kids will have a different story—a radical transformation of consciousness reaches worlds not yet formed, people not yet born, as it radiates outward.

A A’ers know it is their responsibility to feed or transmit the gift of their new consciousness to the next person that comes into the program. Jesus tells us it is our responsibility to love and serve the crowds, it is our responsibility to feed ALL of them. Sure, we are fortunate; we can share material goods, food and money. But the church is not merely a goodwill society—it is the church of Jesus Christ—me and you—all of us together and as individuals—we must un-selfishly or without self, love and serve them all—we must offer and transmit a new consciousness—a new reality, a new creation—that is what a deep encounter with the Christ gives us—a new consciousness, the bread that endures to eternal Life, the bread or transformed consciousness that will reach into and shape worlds yet to be born. Love transcends all barriers, Love multiplies and radiates in a miraculous way.

I will close with this--Like Jesus we must go off alone—we must know the internal solitude that comes when the self is not, when the self has been denied. Then we, the church of Jesus Christ, will be able to say to the whole world—out beyond ideas of right and wrong, there is a field, we’ll meet you there. AMEN.