"Naughty or Nice"

                              Dualism requires us to think: "We or Them"  "Bad or Good"

                              Unconditional love requires us to think "Everything & Everyone Belongs"  

Dec 18 2016     Matthew 1: 18 -25

One of the great theologians and renowned author of our time, Karl Barth, was asked to be a guest lecturer at the University of Chicago Divinity School.   Dr. Barth being quite elderly, not well and quite tired, sat quietly after his arrival.  The organizers for the lecture thought after speaking Dr. Barth shouldn't be expected to handle the strain of the many question that were expected from students.  It was decided that the Presider would ask one general question for all.  He turned to the renowned theologian and asked, "Of all the theological insights you have ever had, what would you consider to be the greatest of them all?    It seemed the perfect question for a man who had written literally tens of thousands of pages of some of the most sophisticated theology ever put into print.  The students held pencils right up against their writing pads, ready to note down the great insights of one of the greatest theologian of their time.  Dr. Barth closed his tired eyes, and he thought for a minute, and then he half smiled, opened his eyes, and said to those young theology students, "The greatest theological insight that I have ever had is this: "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so”

Karl is right folks, for the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the greatest love story ever written!  If it weren't for Christmas we might never have known the intensity of the love that God has for each and every one of us.

Mary and Joseph, far from home because of imperial rule, a peasant mother giving birth in unsanitary substandard conditions... There was no fanfare, no religious delegation and no royalty in attendance only a few shepherds who were apparently attending their flock that night, but some might say what about the wise men Sim, they were there weren’t they?   Well the truth be known, and I hope I don’t shock to many of you but there is no gospel account of the wise men from the east showing up at the manger screen.  Here is some homework for you: There is only one gospel account of wise men visiting Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem and it can be found in the gospel of Matthew 2:   1-12.  The account speaks of wise men from the east showing up much later when Jesus was a child not an infant.  Check it out folks.  If you attend our worship service on Christmas day I will explain this in more detail when we talk about the season of “Epiphany” or the 12 days of Christmas. 

So, in the original telling of the story, we have only the Shepherds vising Mary, Joseph and their newborn in the manger. They, amazed at the miracle of new birth, gauze in joyful celebration as they looked upon the face of their newborn, just like every new parent would do.   But this child would be different for He was to be the sign of God’s true unconditional love for the world to see and to know personally. 

Unconditional love accepts us for who we really are; God chooses to love us precisely because we are all His and because we are all subjected to the human condition... Let us set aside the myth that we are loved only if we are good, for if that were true, none would be loved.  Let us also set aside the myth that if we are bad we are not loved, for if that were true none would be loved.  How come the same? Bad or Good we are loved folks.  We all know that good stuff and the bad stuff make their home within all of humanity no one escapes these two natures.    Mary and Joseph had nothing to offer but their obedience to a calling beyond themselves and that is precisely all we have to offer, a calling beyond ourselves.  It is an invitation to trust and surrender our lives over to the care and control of something greater than ourselves. 

Jesus was to be the Son, the true Son of God so patiently waited for, and now to be born into our world.  This child would be the ONE, the one who was willing to finally embody God’s unconditional love for all to see and experience.  Not just some of the time, not when it was convenient, but in every waking, breathing minute of every single day... It is the birth of that love into our world that we celebrate at Christmas.    It’s not about making list and checking it twice, and it’s not about being naughty or nice folks.  It’s about a love so great and unconditional that its power transcends naughty and nice, good and bad.   Who would have ever guessed that this crossing of paths, this intersection of the divine and the human, would take place in a remote village in the Middle East?  That a child would be born into our world, who would fill His life so much with the love of God, that in Him , thousands upon thousands would be moved to make the incredible claim that they had actually met their God in person.   On Christmas night God would sent out a love letter of cosmic proportions as Jesus was to embody the incarnate Christ.  You can read about the Christ being there in the beginning, Genesis 1: 26.  This birth was the moment that all were waiting for, when God and humanity were offically joined as a bride and groom on their wedding day.  As Jesus grew and went out into the world, so our understanding of just how much God loves us also grew.   We find in Jesus that God's love doesn't demand perfection - that forgiveness isn't given away sparingly but recklessly and indiscriminately - that unconditional really means unconditional, and that God's love is completely and thoroughly inclusive no label, sign or promoting necessary. My hope is that our UCC can take that in.    In and through this love there is no them and us folks, all are accepted.   We find that even the likes of us gathered here today including me, fall within the embrace of that love, and that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God found in Christ Jesus.   But I also know this folks; that without this trans-formative Christmas birth my life would be positively unbearable!  ---  that for me the baby in the manger is the light of my world, even when my world is in shambles...For in that baby the Divine and the human miraculously cross paths.   The infant Jesus is our living, breathing sign of the immeasurable love that God has had for all of us from the very beginning and gives us reassurance that we too contain within our genetic makeup that divine love.  For it is within the ingenious gen of the true “Atom”, from which we all were created, which some might believe is the true image of God.  

Christmas is the living promise that we are never ever alone.  No matter where we are in life, no matter in what condition we find ourselves, no matter how far we might stray or how unfaithful we are, God, the supreme lover, will pursue us in love for eternity!    It's a love that never stops shining.

May God bless each of you and those you love this Christmas

"Everything Belongs"

Everything Belongs:
All things work together for good. —Romans 8:28

                                           The Weeds and the Wheat

Can true humility and compassion exist in our words and in our eyes
unless we know we too are capable of any act?—St. Francis of Assisi

Jesus uses a number of images that illustrate the tension between good and evil. They seem to say this world is a mixture of different things, and unless you learn how to see deeply, you don’t know which is which, and you don’t notice that God allows both good and bad to grow in the same field (Matthew 13:24-30). When a student asks Jesus if he should pull out the weeds, Jesus says to “let them both grow together until the harvest” (13:30). Then, at the end of time, God will decide what is wheat and what is a weed. In a certain way, he is saying it is none of our business to fully figure it out. This is really quite risky of God—and it takes tremendous courage on our part to trust God and ourselves here.

We are all a mixture of weeds and wheat and we always will be. As Martin Luther put it, we are simul justus et peccator. We are simultaneously saint and sinner. That’s the mystery of holding weeds and wheat together in our one field of life. It takes a lot more patience, compassion, forgiveness, and love than aiming for some illusory perfection that is usually blind to its own faults. Acknowledging both the wheat and weeds in us keeps us from thinking too highly of ourselves and also from dismissing ourselves as terrible.

To avoid cynicism and negativity, you have to learn to accept and forgive this mixed bag of reality that you are—and everyone else is, too. If you don’t, you’ll likely become a very angry person. To accept the weeds doesn’t mean that you say, “It’s okay to be ignorant and evil.” It means you have some real wisdom about yourself. You can see your weeds and acknowledge when you are not compassionate or caring. You have to name the weed as a weed. I’m not perfect; you’re not perfect; the church is not perfect; America is not perfect.

If we must have perfection to be happy with ourselves, we have only two choices: We can blind ourselves to our own evil (and deny the weeds), or we can give up in discouragement (and deny the wheat). It takes uncommon humility to carry both the dark and the light side of things. The only true perfection available to humans is the honest acceptance of our imperfection. This is precisely what Divine Perfection can help us do; only God in us can love imperfect and broken things. By ourselves, we largely fail.

Learning how to love—which is our life’s project—is quite simply learning to accept our messy reality. If you love anyone, then you have learned to accept them despite their faults. You see a few things you’d like to change in your partner, your children, yourself. By the Largeness of God within you, you are able to trust that the good is deeper than the bad, and usually well hidden. This is probably why so many of Jesus’ parables are about hiddenness, seeking, and finding.

 Adapted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003)

"Doesn't Everything Belong"

Order, Disorder, Reorder  

 Whenever we’re led out of our comfort zones into sacred, open space, we often experience the fear factor, because it is letting go of what we’re used to. This is always painful at some level. But part of us has to die if we are ever to grow spiritually (John 12:24). If we’re not willing to let go and die to our small, false self, or our eogic controlled self, we won’t enter into any new or sacred space.

The role of the prophet is to lead us into a sacred space by deconstructing the old familiar one; the role of the priest is to teach us how to live fruitfully in a new sacred space. The prophet disconnects us from the false, and the priest reconnects us to the real at ever larger levels. If  Clergy have been largely unsuccessful, it is most likely that the Clergy has confuse the maintaining of order with re-order! This is a huge issue. Such Clergy might talk of new realms but never lead us out of the old realm where we are still largely trapped and addicted to doctrine or tradition, having little personal knowledge of the further journey. Thus our Western spirituality is so lopsided.  

Let’s think in terms of what I call “the three boxes”:  order > disorder > reorder.

The first order, where we all begin, is a necessary first “containment.” But this structure is dangerous if we stay there too long. It is too small and self-serving, and it must be deconstructed by the trials and vagaries of life (“the cross” or disorder). Initial “order” doesn’t really know the full picture, but it thinks it does.

Only in the final “reorder” stage can darkness and light coexist, can paradox be okay. We are finally at home in the only world that ever existed. This is true and contemplative knowing. Here death is a part of life, failure is a part of victory, and imperfection is included in perfection. Opposites collide and unite; everything belongs.

We dare not get rid of our pain before we have learned what it has to teach us. Most of religion gives answers too quickly, dismisses pain too easily, and seeks to be distracted—to maintain some ideal order. So we must resist the instant fix and acknowledge ourselves as beginners to be open to true transformation. In the great spiritual traditions, the wounds to our ego are our teachers to be welcomed. They should be paid attention to, not litigated or even perfectly resolved. How can a Christian look at the Crucified One and not get this essential point?  The Resurrected Christ is the icon of the third box or reorder

Once we can learn to live in this third spacious place, neither fighting nor fleeing reality but holding the creative tension itself, we are in the spacious place of grace out of which all newness comes.

There is no direct flight from order to reorder, you must go through disorder, which is surely why Jesus dramatically and shockingly endured it on the cross.  He knew we would all want to deny disorder unless he made it clear. But we denied it anyway.

All things work together for good. —Romans 8:28

This article is from:    the writings of Rev. Richard Rohr
 Adapted from Richard Rohr, How Do We Get Everything to Belong?  and
Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003)