That We All May Be One

As this Tuesday of the New York presidential primary dawns, I continue to be conflicted in my support of the Democratic candidates. The fact that “my heart’s with Bernie, but my head’s with Hillary” is demonstrated by the fact that I continue to support him with a monthly donation (more than his average $27 supporters, but fully aligning with them) while not giving her a cent (because she doesn’t need it) even though I was a delegate for her at our Democratic District Convention here in eastern Iowa.

As a catholic Christian (though not a Roman Catholic one) how could I not love a politician who, according to the National Catholic Reporter, has “embraced decades of Catholic social teaching in a brief visit to the Vatican Friday, lambasting some particularly American aspects of the global market system in a bid to match his voice to Pope Francis’ cry against the ‘new idols’ of money and wealth.”

How could one who has preached and taught and tried to live such social teachings for over four decades not agree with Bernie Sanders when he said, “I am told time and time again by the rich and powerful, and the mainstream media that represent them, that we should be ‘practical’, that we should accept the status quo; that a truly moral economy is beyond our reach”

“Yet Pope Francis himself is surely the world’s greatest demonstration against such a surrender to despair and cynicism,” Sanders continued, “He has opened the eyes of the world once again to the claims of mercy, justice and the possibilities of a better world. He is inspiring the world to find a new global consensus for our common home.”

Wow, preach it, Bernie!

While I continue to believe that Hillary Clinton, should she be elected, is more likely to be able to lead in taking incremental steps toward some of these same goals, I am mightily impressed by Senator Sanders’ integrity and decades-long consistency in his advocacy of economic justice and equality for all. I have said before that I will support him enthusiastically should he win the nomination.

But, as the Supreme Court seems poised to overturn Barack Obama’s signature accomplishment on immigration and as the Congress continues to block any and all progressive moves by the Administration, my fear is that four years of Bernie Sanders will, once again, lead to more gridlock and disillusionment as a Republican legislature will unite in trying to sabotage anything such a liberal President will try to accomplish.

Then again, those same “Hillary haters” may well frustrate her attempts to work across the aisle just as they have President Obama’s. The only real hope is for the Democratic nominee to bring along, on his or her coat-tails, more “down the line” candidates for the Senate and House, actually pulling off the “political revolution” Sanders is calling for. I wish Bernie was working as hard at this as Hillary is (the real purpose of those embarrassing George Clooney fund raisers!)

It’s a quandary.

But I am proud to support a political party which has put forth two candidates — a democratic socialist and a woman with a long history of working for women’s rights and children’s issues along with vast experience in international relations. It goes without saying that either one of these dedicated public servants will serve us better than any of the clowns on the GOP side.

It’s hard to overstate the symbolic significance of events surrounding Pope Francis’ recent trip to a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos last week. First of all, the media-savvy pontiff was well aware that his very visit would shed the light of the world’s press on the faces of these victims of the greatest human tragedy in our current time.

Secondly, of course, he not only  visited the refugee community he “walked his talk” by flying twelve Syrian refugees back to Rome. Even he admitted that this was but “a drop of water in the sea” of Europe’s migration crisis, but if every Christian community in the world would follow his model, there would be no refugee crisis anywhere in the world.

Related items got little attention: He made this visit with the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew, representing the Orthodox churches. This great man, often known as the “Green Patriarch” because of his strong environmental stands, was sadly neglected by most press reports and yet is the titular head of the second largest Christian communion in the world just as Francis is the actual leader of the largest. This ecumenical gesture is the latest in a movement toward healing the split between East and West in the Christian world which has existed for more than a thousand years.

Ecumenism extended to inter-religious awareness as the twelve Syrian refugees (members of three families) turned out to be Muslims, not Christians. This sends a clear message to the world about the need better to integrate Muslims into Western society because, Francis said, “Their privilege is that they are children of God.” In other words, human beings.

The Roman Catholic community of Sant’Egidio will actually welcome these refugees into their headquarters in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood. I have worshiped, broken bread, and traveled with this amazing, primarily lay-led charitable community which has quietly led to instances reconciliation around the world and daily feeds and shelters members of the “Roma” (or gypsy) community in the city of Rome. They, like the Bishop of Rome, are examples of Christianity at its finest, putting flesh around the spirit of love demonstrated by the religion’s Founder.

Finally, just before his departure, the Pope met briefly with U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Some have decried this as an openly political move by Sanders even while Pope Francis described it as “good manners and nothing more.” Actually, it was both. Sanders genuinely admires Francis’ “democratic socialism” (otherwise known as Catholic social teaching) and is married to a Roman Catholic.

But he could not have been unaware how this would have played with desired Catholic voters in New York who will be voting in the primary this Tuesday. Nor could Francis — again, extremely politically and socially aware — have failed to know what kind of signal he was sending about his admiration for (and support of?) Senator Sanders.

I just think this brief trip was an amazing and extremely effective gesture which reveals with startling clarity how the twin poles of “the Jesus Movement” (evangelism and reconciliation) so often spoken of by our own Presiding Bishop Michael Curry can come together seamlessly.

In the words of one young Facebook commentator on Pope Francis’ recent trip: “This guy is the real deal!”

Part of the significance of the Feast of the Annunciation is lost this year as it is celebrated today. The usual date of commemoration is, of course, March 25 but that was Good Friday this year. Hardly an appropriate day to remember Luke’s account of the announcement to Mary by the angel Gabriel that she would “conceive and bear a son and call his name Jesus.” (Luke 1:31)!

The March 25 date was originally chosen, of course, because it is exactly nine months before the church’s celebration of Jesus’ birth on December 25 and, even though this feast often falls in the Lenten or Easter Seasons, it begins once again the annual cycle of Jesus’ conception, birth, life and death which will lead to his eventual resurrection.

This year the feast of the Annunciation was delayed even longer than usual because of the early date of Easter and the need to “transfer” the feast not only until after Holy Week, but until after the days of Easter Week which also take precedence.

Be all that as it may, this is an important feast day to remember. It sets Mary on her path toward being the mother of the Messiah. It symbolizes the cosmic nature of this birth and the fact that humanity and divinity would meet in a special way in the womb of this Jewish teenager. It even provides the first line of famous mantra-prayer, “Hail Mary,full of grace, the Lord is with you….” (Luke 1:28)

Whenever I keep this feast, I am reminded of words from one of my mentors, Dean Alan Jones, sometime Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. He highlighted three dominant images of our Christian faith — a woman (and her baby); a ruined man (on a cross); and a community of persons (the Holy Trinity). And then he said something like,

“Confronted with these images — a woman and her baby; a ruined man; and a community of persons — how then shall we live?” 

How then shall we live? How indeed! We must surely work to protect all women and their children. We must stand with the last and the least, the broken and the ruined of this world. And we must be part of that community of love which is an earthly expression of that community of love found in the Godhead itself, that community which Christians call Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That is how we at least begin to live.

And it all started with a woman and her baby…

Continuing our daily lectionary readings for Easter Week, we reach today the resurrection story according to Luke’s Gospel. (Luke 24:1-12) In it, we have one of the most powerful lines delivered in all the accounts. Coming to the tomb at dawn to anoint Jesus’ body properly for burial “the women” encounter two men (not simply the one man, as in Mark, or the angel, as in Matthew, but two men “in dazzling clothes!”). Their question to the women is profound, “Why seek the living among the dead?”

Far from being appreciated for the noble “act of corporal mercy” they were about to perform out of love for Jesus and grief at his loss, the women are gently upbraided for not remembering Jesus’ constant teaching that not even death would remove him, or his influence, from among them.

So, Mary Magdalene, Joanna (not Salome, as in Mark, and Mary the mother of James, perhaps “the other Mary” in Matthew) rush to tell the apostles who refuse to believe it until Peter ran to the tomb, found only the linen cloths, and returned to “mansplain” things to his buddies.

The point is, all of them…and all of us…need to stop seeking the living among the dead. That’s what participants in the “emergent church” movement and perhaps even the new Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, mean by “the Jesus Movement.” It means that we Christians need to stop defining ourselves primarily by our membership in one of the tens of thousands of denominations which make up the church today, and start defining ourselves as “followers of Jesus” and actually begin doing what he commanded us to do — love God, love our neighbors as ourselves; and actually begin putting that love into action. We will never find the living among the dead!

It means that literalistic readings of the Bible which try to have us wrap our 21st century minds around pre-Copernican, pre-Newtonian, pre-Darwinian, pre-Freudian concepts are doomed to failure. As John Dominic Crossan has said, “The problem is not that the biblical writers wrote literally and we are now smart enough to understand them symbolically, but that they wrote symbolically and we are now stupid enough to try and understand them literally.” We will never find the living among the dead!

One more example: for all you constitutional “originalists” who want to maintain that the Constitution is best understood as a “dead” document the words of which can only be interpreted as the founders would have understood them in their day, rather than seeing it as a living, breathing document which must constantly be interpreted for new challenges, some advice from Luke: Trust me, you will never find the living among the dead!

The point of Easter is that it is much more exciting and challenging it is to serve a risen Lord than a dead hero. Much more exciting and challenging to follow Jesus to Galilee and meet him there than continue to spend all our time taking care of his dead body.

Why seek the living among the dead?

“A suicide bomber killed at least 65 people, mostly women and children, at a park in Lahore on Sunday in an attack claimed by a Pakistani Taliban faction which said it had targeted Christians. More than 300 other people were wounded, officials said. The explosion occurred in the parking area of Gulshan-e-lqbal Park close to children’s swings.” (Reuters)

Close to children’s swings…

If ever we needed verification that there is sheer, naked, unimaginable evil in this world, perhaps that phrase will do it. Close to children’s swings. Some hate-filled, misguided murderer strapped explosives to his body and decided to move close to children playing on the quintessential child’s toy — a swing — before he blew himself…and their little bodies…to pieces.

Much has been made of the fact that this was Easter Sunday, and that the vast majority of people in the park were of the 2% minority population (Christians) in the park. But Muslims died too. People of no particular faith died too. Hatred and barbarism know no political, ethnic, or religious bounds. We see that in the senseless acts of random violence (multiplied many times by the plethora of guns in our society) right here in the United States.

Yet, this was not a random act of a madman. This was a coordinated, planned attack on a particular group of people held on a particular day, holy to them, and to much of the world. And so 65 more souls (and probably many more in the next days and weeks as more of the injured lose their battle for life) join the “great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands…” (Revelation 7:9)

For “the white robed army of martyrs” of the Te Deum continue to “praise you, O God.

Because, in the midst of it all, Christ is Risen, He is Risen indeed. Alleluia!

It must have been so frustrating for them, his friends and followers. Why don’t they get it? Why don’t they understand? Why don’t they realize that they have, right here in their midst, the Anointed One we have all been waiting for? Could it be possible that the opposition is so widespread that he might actually be assassinated, right here in the Holy City?

But, gradually, they remembered his teaching. They remembered the times he, like the prophet Isaiah of old, had told stories of vineyards and owners of vineyards and tenant farmers who worked in those vineyards. One in particular stood out: the one about an absentee owner sending slave after slave to these sharecroppers to collect the lion’s share of the produce; and how they were beaten and some even killed; and about his finally sending his son, who was also killed.

They knew that the image of the vineyard had often been used by the prophets to symbolize Israel itself. And so it was no great leap to interpret Jesus’ coded message that he would have to suffer, and even die, as some of the prophets had done, as Israel itself had done. But, would that be the end of it all? Would his life end up as counting for nothing? Would his mission be a failure?

But then, they also remembered a line from Psalm 118, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing to our eyes.” And they recalled the rabbis interpreting this as the essence of Israel’s mission — they would always be despised and rejected as a people, but somehow in God’s own way, they would be instrumental in repairing the world!

Israel would become the cornerstone.

Perhaps — even if the worst should happen — Jesus would too.

Today we continue the account of Jesus’ conflict with the religious establishment after the dramatic “moneychangers in the temple” event of yesterday. Today, the chief priests, scribes and elders ask the obvious question, “By what authority are you doing these things? Who gave you the authority to do them?” (Mark 11:28)

That is to say: Yesterday, you stood in the midst of the temple, questioned the entire sacrificial system, and accused our leaders of robbing the poor to advance their own ends! How dare you? “Who made you the boss of us,” as our kids might put it today.

Jesus responds by setting them up with a brilliant conundrum, a “Catch 22” if there ever was one. Basically, he asked them who gave his predecessor, John the Baptist, his authority. John was a prophet in the long line of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and others, at least according to his followers — who were many. The religious leaders had tried to “stay neutral” on the Baptizer as he came into conflict with their Roman overlords.

Now they were being called out. If they denied that he was a prophet, the people might rise up in revolt. If they said that he was a prophet, that his authority came from God, the obvious question would be, “Then why didn’t you acknowledge him. And come to his assistance when he was arrested and murdered by Herod?”

They took the Fifth –“I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me.”

In a court of law, such a statement usually means the defendant is guilty.

Same here.

Jesus – 1; Chief priests, scribes and elders – 0