Sound Bites: Trinity Sunday

Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Psalm 8; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20

The finale to the Easter Season, with the Church established at Pentecost, is Trinity Sunday. Liturgically, the year now looks to beginnings, as we are directed to read the first part of the Genesis story and its confirmation in Psalm 8. “God said, ‘let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’”’ The Psalmist confirms this by asking, “what are human beings that you are mindful of them? . . . Yet you have made them a little lower than God . . . You have given them dominion over the works of your hands.” But Matthew’s Jesus claims, “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.” We, as disciples of the Christ who supersedes all other manifestations of divinity, are to make followers of all people, by baptizing them in the name of the Trinity. On this day we have the ultimate statement of faith in a three-part god: Father (creator), Son (Christ – Anointed One), and Holy Spirit (Holy Ghost), and the Apostle Paul closes his second letter to the Corinthians with a blessing in the name of the three-in-one.

This is cherry-picking par excellence on the part of those politically correct Elves. It is sound-bite theology, worthy of news organizations and partisans of all colors world-wide. In order to get your point across, whether it is marketing widgets or electing a president, concentrate on the shortest message with the greatest impact. Like the front-runner in a 2,000-year long political contest, Jesus and his message have been defined by what has been said about him by the loudest and most well-connected of people in the shortest and most memorable ways. But before we join the vast army of Christian soldiers, carrying the cross of Jesus as though into war, we might wonder if that is who Jesus really was.

From the brief benediction at the end of 2 Corinthians, the eye strays back to the enlarged numerals marking chapter 13, and there in verses 1-2, the Apostle Paul is apoplectic: “This is the third time I am coming to you” Paul roars, “. . . . I warned those who sinned previously and all the others . . . if I come again, I will not be lenient . . . .” Shades of Mom threatening dire consequences once Dad gets home from work. What’s going on here? What happened to baptizing cute babies and blessing everyone in the name of the triune God?

Any seminarian with a decent New Testament professor, or lay-leader with access to a study Bible, has noticed that Paul likely wrote many more than two letters to the community in Corinth, and that the Corinthians were a recalcitrant bunch. What they were recalcitrant about is debatable among some Biblical scholars, but John Dominic Crossan suggests that the problem was that the folks in Corinth were so deeply involved in their own 1st Century version of bumper-sticker living that they could not imagine what Paul was trying to tell them about the Way of Jesus.

Roman life was a highly structured form of patronage in which all classes of society participated, from slaves to the Emperor. Political, social, and commercial life was carried out in a complex hierarchical system that could not be circumvented without causing disturbance. So when Paul came along and reminded Philemon that his slave Onesimus must be welcomed back into the community as an equal brother in Christ, the reverberations were felt for a considerable distance up and down the social strata of 1st Century Corinth. When the good wealthy folk of Corinth came to participate in the Christian common shared meal and ran the risk of eating with people to whom they either owed social/political commerce (banquets and public sacrifices), or who owed to them, it made sense to eat at home first, and simply take a symbolic token of Jesus’s common table.

When Paul baptized the family of Stephanas, and Crispus and Gaius (1st Cor. 1:14-16), the Community Paul had founded thought he was acting as a patron, representing Jesus as a supreme patron, and acting in competition with others who may also have baptized followers of Jesus’s Way. What the Corinthians had so much trouble understanding is that Jesus’s Way lies outside the normalcy of Roman (or any) civilization. Jesus’s Way has nothing to do with normal, accepted social custom: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28. Jesus’s Way leads into the realm of God, where justice has nothing to do with payback, retribution, or what is or is not earned, owed, or deserved because of one’s social, political, or legal circumstances.

Paul taught that participation with Jesus’s program of restoring God’s Kingdom of distributive justice-compassion means living Kenotically. It means a radical abandonment of self-interest; a radical inclusiveness, in communities, business dealings, and political structures, that functions on a very different footing from the normalcy of civilization. So long as nobody asks any questions, civilization rolls nearly effortlessly into the normalcy of empire. But, as John Dominic Crossan has put it, the ancient Hebrew people, who knew that God is just, and the world belongs to God, were in the habit of looking around and saying, “but the world sucks! What’s wrong with this picture?” If God is just, and the world belongs to God, but the world is not just, then God – if God is indeed God – will have to act to do something about it. In Paul’s brilliant realization, God’s infinite grace is available to all who participate with Jesus in restoring that impartial, distributive justice to the world. The question then becomes, what does it mean to participate in that program?

Was Paul suggesting some kind of trinity with his blessing at the end of 2 Corinthians? Or was the Trinity somehow “anticipated” in the beginning of 2 Corinthians (21-22)? No. The number 3 is a prime number, and has had mystical connotations for thousands of years before Christianity appeared on the Planet. The aspects of Goddess form a Trinity (maiden, mother crone); the Moon has three phases: New, Full, Dark; ancient Celts turned around three times to raise protection of the elements around them; Brigid – a Celtic Goddess who made the transition into acceptance as a Christian saint is a triple Goddess governing poetry, healing, and the art of metal working. Paul certainly spoke in threes – any good preacher does the same. He says in 2 Corinthians 21-22, “But it is GOD who establishes us with you in CHRIST and . . . giving us his SPIRIT in our hearts as a first installment.” It is God’s action, through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus (another triad), that conveys the Spirit – that numinous, mysterious aspect of human consciousness that inspires and directs life outside the realm of ordinary human understanding.

At the end of his letter Paul invokes the GRACE of the Lord Jesus Christ, the LOVE of God, and the COMMUNION of the Holy Spirit upon the community at Corinth. This is not a God divided into three equal parts. This is a three-part blessing with Grace, Love, and Communion. When all three are present, God’s Kingdom is found in the midst of that community, whether among the followers of Jesus’s Way or not. In that elusive realm of distributive justice-compassion, where Grace, Love, and Communion are found there is no room for injustice.

The Elves selection of the readings from Genesis and Psalm 8 is not so irrelevant as it may seem at first. While the sound-bites are distracting (Dominion! Trinity!), a deeper reading suggests that one way to step into God’s Kingdom is to act with sustainable justice in our relationship to Planet Earth and the creatures that dwell there – including ourselves.

Psalm 8 (NRSV) says, “Yet you have made [humans] a little lower than God.” The Hebrew word is elohim, meaning divine beings or angels, which is the term used in the KJV. Angelic dominion is not about the physical space they control, but the human quality they have mastered and have become associated with. For example, The Arch Angel Michael is a warrior; other angels are known as “Hope” or “Peace” or “Love,” and may be called upon to act within their particular expertise. Guardian Angels are frequently credited with intervening to save lives or property. So rather than taking God’s granting to humans dominion over the earth as meaning domination, oppression, or subjection, the angelic meaning is closer to management, or “stewardship” – as the greener Christian denominations have long suggested. God’s Earth has been placed in our hands as a trust. To accept the responsibility for its sustenance means acting for eco-justice in sustainable kenosis – the radical abandonment of self-interest. What would impact would kenotic environmental attitudes have on oil, mountain-top removal, development of alternative energy resources, and the survival of endangered species – including those portions of humanity threatened with extinction by natural disaster?

The Priests for Equality of Brentwood, Maryland have the last word from The Inclusive Psalms: “From the lips of infants and children you bring forth words of power and praise, to answer your adversaries and to silence the hostile and vengeful . . . . You have made us responsible for the works of your hands, putting all things at our feet . . . Adonai, Our God, how majestic is your Name in all the earth!”

Community: 4th Sunday in Eastertide

Acts 2:42-47; Psalm 23; 1 Peter 2:19-25; John 10:1-10

Oh the Mountain sheep are sweeter

But the Valley sheep are fatter.

Therefore we deemed it meeter

To carry off the latter.

Part 3 of Eastertide 2008

This week we have sheep and shepherds: Our favorite image of Jesus and his disciples in the 1st Century, and the church and its bishops ever after, presiding over their “flocks” with their ceremonial shepherd’s crooks. First we have the 23rd Psalm, read at times of personal or community crisis. Then we find in 1st Peter, reference to Isaiah 53 and the words used by G.F. Handel in one of the choruses from the Easter portion of the Messiah. (At least one choir director of my experience thought the musical emphasis produced on the English phrasing to be particularly amusing: “All WEE like sheep . . . have gone astray.”) Finally, we have John 10:1-10, in which the sheep/shepherd metaphor is explored, ending with John’s Jesus declaring that “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

Emphasizing the comfort of the sheep/shepherd motif is certainly far less confrontational than considering the possibility that some 1st Century Christian communities actually practiced communism and increased their numbers thereby. Nevertheless, this 4th Sunday of Easter mandates a look at the nature of community and leadership.

The shepherd metaphor is not particularly flattering, nor encouraging to 21st Century hopes for global democracy. The people are sheep, who listen only to the known voices of their leaders. The people will not listen to anyone who comes in over the fence instead of through the gate. They will run away from that one, but will follow the true shepherd. Then John’s Jesus tries to explain what he means and says he is the gate. Presumably God is the gate-keeper who opens the gate so that Jesus the Shepherd can call the names of each one in his flock, and they will hear and follow.

Because of the infamous cherry-picking by the Elves that put together the Lectionary for this Sunday, half of John’s argument about the nature of the good shepherd is left out (John 10:11-18). In that section, the pivotal phrase, “lay down his/my life for the sheep” is repeated four times. Jesus claims the power to lay down his life and to take it up again as “received from the Father.” By the end of the discourse, Jesus the good shepherd is seen to be in partnership with God the gatekeeper, even on behalf of “other sheep that do not belong to this fold.” Here the metaphor breaks down. Unlike those other strangers, from whose voices the sheep will run, Jesus can jump the fence. “[T]hey will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.” The question arises, just who are the thieves and bandits here?

It is absolutely essential that these passages not be read as anti-Jewish. They are certainly anti-something. Whether the creator of John’s gospel was writing from within a Jewish context or from a non-Jewish pagan or Greek context is under current investigation by biblical scholars. For the purpose of this discussion, which it was doesn’t matter. John was probably railing against “thieves and bandits” in rival fledgling Christian communities who were siphoning off members using various interpretations of a developing Christianity. Perhaps John was referring to the likes of the leaders of 1st Peter’s community. The sheep may run away from the thieves and bandits who jump the fence, but they cannot escape if the thieves grab them and carry them off.

The secret for a successful community that relies on commonality such as described in Acts lies in the certainty and trust that individual members have in the kind of realm described in Psalm 23. Even though the majority of 21st Century, largely urban Christians have no clue what sheep are like, the 23rd Psalm attributed to the Great King David resonates with other pastoral imagery of God’s peaceable kingdom of distributive justice-compassion. Such trust allows the individual to walk through the valley of the shadow of death itself because evil is held in check by one’s own integrity, partnership with the Creator, and trust that distributive justice can and does work.

With mutual trust, there is no need for authority. Or, as Paul puts it in 1st Corinthians 15:56, “the power of sin is the law.” Extrapolating 1st Century Paul to the 21st Century is always a tricky exercise. Paul may have been talking about Jewish law that insists on physical signs to prove membership in a community; he may have been talking about Roman law, which solidifies retributive imperial power. But the relevance that remains in Paul’s suggestion is that law expressed as power-over others prevents individuals from full participation in establishing just systems in a community, or participating with God in restoring distributive justice-compassion on earth, as in God’s realm.

Interpreting Isaiah’s servant song (Isaiah 53) as ransom or substitutionary atonement theories, as 1st Peter does, has been accepted theology for nearly 2,000 years. But being a servant-leader does not mean piously and passively accepting abuse from the powers and principalities that impact the wider society, as 1st Peter implies. Without the second half of John’s parable of the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep, Jesus’s leadership falls far short of his dramatic demonstration of kenotic service found in Chapter 13. Jesus’s leadership model is the servant-leader who transforms societies because the servant-leader empowers others. 1st Peter’s theology amounts to heresy because leadership vested in the authority of human institutions acting with power-over others can never lead to distributive justice.

The Elves also conveniently skip 1st Peter 2:18, which advises slaves to “accept the authority of your masters with all deference,” whether they are kind or “harsh.” This is unacceptable on several levels whether in a 1st or a 21st Century context. Slavery is outlawed world-wide in the 21st Century, although of course it is practiced in all kinds of ways, ranging from sub-standard wages to human trafficking. Shall Christian communities indeed decline to work to eliminate this injustice? Following the slavery example, pious 1st Peter implies that if we allow injustice to not only exist, but to proliferate, “if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God’s approval.”

1st Peter repudiates Isaiah’s suffering servant, negates the meaning of Jesus’s own death, and cheapens the courage of self-less martyrs to justice in all times and circumstances. Being an empowered partner in a community dedicated to the great work of distributive justice-compassion is not a passive role, subject to blindly following the leader. Kenotic servant leadership arises from and creates kenotic communities that bring about God’s Realm of distributive justice-compassion through radical abandonment of self-interest. But such radical abandonment is far from passive, and cannot happen without profound trust in the presence of justice and life. Participation then means active non-violent resistance to the normalcy of unjust human institutional systems. But beware of mixing the metaphor, as John risked doing with his parable, and the Elves have done with the choice of readings for this week. It is far more difficult to follow the true shepherd through the gate than it is to be kidnaped over the fence.

What Does It All Mean? Easter 2008

Acts 10:34-43; Jeremiah 31:1-6; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24;
Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-18; Matthew 28:1-10

Peter’s Sermon in Caesarea (Acts 10:34-43); Psalm 118; and the story of Mary Magdalene being first on the scene (John 20:1-18) are always offered as traditional readings for Easter Sunday morning. These are the pillars of Christian faith: Peter’s sermon tells the story of Jesus in about 200 words, much as the story of the Hebrew people is told and retold at Passover and throughout the Jewish liturgical year. Psalm 118 becomes a song of vindication for Jesus as Lord instead of a song of praise at being able to once more enter the Temple in a condition of reconciliation with God. “[T]he stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone,” appropriated from the original meaning, refers to the risen Christ as the foundation of the church. Finally, our favorite Mary, the forgiven sinner, walks in the garden alone and encounters the personal savior.

Easter Sunday is easy. The scent of forced-bloom lilies in the sanctuary is overwhelming; the local symphony orchestra’s entire brass section has a paying gig – even the trombonists have been dispersed throughout the City. The choir turns its stoles to the gold side and screams Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. People show up who haven’t been seen since Christmas Eve. The plate collection is the most lucrative of the year. The thunderstorms of Good Friday and Saturday are over and done, and the sun is shining. The Easter ham is slow-cooking in the oven, and the kids are stuffed with multi-colored Easter “peeps” and chocolate bunnies.

Who needs a sermon?

– Everyone who slides over the uncomfortable story about “resurrection” and talks about spring: New life from death – as though Jesus were planted like winter wheat and appeared along with the crocus and the daffodils to prove that nobody really dies, that “love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.” These are perfectly usable and valid metaphors for the cycles of birth, life, death, rebirth – the archetype of the dying rising god, who brings renewal, fertility, hope. But if that is all Jesus’s resurrection means, he is no different from the Celtic gods like Herne, or Lugh, or the Greek goddesses Persephone and Demeter.

Peter’s sermon in Acts is no help. He reiterates the story, but already Jesus’s Way has been watered down to forgiveness of petty personal sins. But then, Peter never did quite get what Jesus was all about, and very nearly joined Judas in opting for collaboration with the normalcy of Roman rule. The Colossians passage is just as bad: We are piously advised to “seek the things that are above, where Christ is.” Authentic Paul’s commitment to distributive justice-compassion has been eliminated by the usurper writer, along with Paul’s passion about life transformed by participation with the risen Christ in God’s kingdom, not the Emperor’s. The Elves have eliminated this part (Matthew 28:11-15), but after the women have left to tell the men that Jesus will meet them in Galilee, Matthew suggests the distinct possibility of a hoax. The tomb guards have run in a panic to the chief priests. Once the priests met with the elders, it was clear that a cover-up was necessary. The guards were paid “a large sum of money” to forget about angels and earthquakes, and to claim a “Passover Plot” perpetrated by Jesus’s followers, “still told among the Jews to this day.” To claim that Jesus’s disciples stole his body and made up a story about a resuscitated corpse is no worse than dumbing down the message.

Throughout these meditations on the Revised Common Lectionary has run a thread called “Piety vs. Covenant,” or the theology of Empire (piety, war, victory, peace) versus the theology of Covenant (non-violence, distributive justice-compassion, peace). The only opportunity offered in the Year A Easter readings to claim something different from the imperial paradigm that still prevails in 21st Century conventional Christianity is the Old Testament prophet of the Covenant, Jeremiah. So long as the people honor God’s mandate for distributive justice-compassion, God will provide protection and prosperity. In the reading picked for this Easter Sunday, Jeremiah assures the “remnant” of the people left in Jerusalem that as a result of keeping the Covenant, they will be reunited with those returning from exile in Babylon.

What does it mean to keep the Covenant in a post-modern, post-Enlightenment, pluralistic, global, 21st Century? Clearly the Way to keeping the Covenant is not to look “up” to God.

In Mark’s original version of Easter morning, the women who found the tomb empty were so terrified they simply ran away without telling anyone. But the story could not have ended there, or I would not be writing this meditation, and nearly 2,000 years of Christian history would never have transpired. Somebody added a codicil in which the women did as the young man sitting in the tomb suggested, and they “briefly” told “those around Peter” what they had seen. In Matthew and Luke, angels explain what has happened. By the time John creates his version, there is only one witness – Mary Magdalene – who carries the story to the rest of the scattered followers. Regardless of how it is told, the story is the same: Jesus is not here. He is risen. That is a terrifying realization. If Jesus is not here, what happens to the message? What happens to distributive justice-compassion? What happens to those who had the courage to oppose the Empire? The visitors who find the tomb empty are confronted with a choice: If God’s realm of justice-compassion is to be restored – as the Biblical record presents the argument – it will either be by the direct intervention of God alone (apocalyptic eschatology), or by the collaborative action of God in partnership with humanity (participatory eschatology).

For 21st Century Christians, with Jesus seriously dead, and contemporary cosmology rendering theistic, personalized gods beyond belief, the only way to renew the Covenant is a participatory eschatology, through equal partnership with a kenotic God “whose gracious presence as free gift (Paul’s charis) is the beating heart of the universe and does not need to threaten, to intervene, to punish, or to control A God whose presence is justice and life and whose absence is injustice and death." John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, In Search of Paul (Harper SanFrancisco 2004, p. 291.

Despite all the temptations that the Empire offers, the renewing of the Covenant is up to us. On Planet Earth, we can only look “out” (not “up”) to find other planets and galaxies, and perhaps to discover something about the nature of the universe, the character of the spirit/creator we call “God,” and the conditions in which humanity finds itself; but then we can only look “in” to ourselves to create the response that will result in the partnership.

He had stood his ground honorably to the very end; he had kept his word. The moment he cried out “Eli Eli” and fainted, Temptation had captured him for a split second and led him astray. The joys, marriages and children were lies; the decrepit, degraded old men who shouted coward, deserter, traitor at him were lies. All – all were illusions sent by the Devil. His disciples were alive and thriving. They had gone over sea and land and were proclaiming the Good News. Everything had turned out as it should, glory be to God!

He uttered a triumphant cry: “It is accomplished!”

And it was as though he had said: “Everything has begun.”

Nikos Kazantzaki, The Last Temptation of Christ ( Simon and Shuster, New York, 1960), p. 496.

Second Sunday in Epiphany: The Priesthood of All

Isaiah 49:1-7; Psalm 40:1-11; 1 Corinthians 1:1-9; John 1:29-42

This week we abandon Matthew’s midrash to consider John’s declaration that Jesus is “ the lamb of God that does away with the sins of the world.” We also get started on 1st Corinthians, which is the orthodox template for church organization from Paul, but we don’t get past the first chapter. This Second Sunday in the season of Epiphany is the prologue to a fore-shortened liturgical year because in 2008, there are only three Sundays before we get to the Transfiguration and Ash Wednesday. This Year A concentrates on orthodox mysticism and belief in the early church by studying the gospel of John throughout Lent, Holy Week, and Easter. We will therefore miss Matthew 5, 6, and most of 7. We do not get back to Matthew until the Season after Pentecost, when we take up chapter 7 and continue in “ordinary time,” in May.

Perhaps it is good to have a long dose of orthodox mysticism. It gives believers a break from all that guilt about distributive justice-compassion ...

The subject matter is the establishment of the early church. In John’s version of the Jesus story, the brothers Simon and Andrew are disciples of John the Baptist. When Jesus comes to be baptized, and John declares that Jesus is the lamb of God that does away with the sins of the world, Andrew takes note, and tells his brother Simon that Jesus is the Messiah, and they had better leave the Baptist and join him. Jesus declares Simon to be “the rock.” Psalm 40 is a hymn of thanksgiving to God, who “drew me up . . . out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock . . .” It is only in Matthew 16:18 that Jesus is made to say “upon this Rock I will build my church.” The Elves don’t mention that at this time, but we all know it already anyway. The second servant song from Isaiah can be read to confirm the establishment of the church as “the light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” Paul’s greeting to the Church in Corinth reminds us that God is faithful, and we are called by God into fellowship with his Son.

What are post-Christian exiles supposed to do with this?

Perhaps treat it as how not to start an institution, because institutions, like civilizations, inevitably fall into the trap entitled Piety, War (violence), Victory, Peace. Institutions, like civilizations, are prone to act in their own self-interest. John Dominic Crossan is careful to point out that this is not an indictment of human nature. In other words, our self-governing organizations do not fall into the imperial pattern because humans are basically evil or selfish. Instead, when individuals band together for collective security – whether economic, intellectual, spiritual, or physical – the rules devised for peaceful prosperous community slide easily into control, hierarchy, consequences for divergence, retribution, sin, and salvation.

What the Elves that concocted the three-year span of the Revised Common Lectionary seem to be setting up is a confrontation between those who – like Jesus – experience a seamless relationship between humanity and the rest of creation (Covenant) and those who insist that God and God’s kingdom are inaccessible except through an intermediary: Jesus and his representatives – the priest, the bishop, the pope. Starting with Epiphany, Jesus is revealed as the Messiah by Kings, then by John the Baptist, then revealed to Simon by his brother Andrew. Apparently even the great Peter can’t recognize the Lord on his own – perhaps confirming his inability at a later time to recognize the Lord while waiting in Pilate’s courtyard.

Hierarchy, a vertical relationship, most commonly seen in imperial systems that lead inevitably to inequality and injustice, is implied as the norm in these readings. The opening to Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians is used to bolster that normalcy of power-over others in the early Christian community. But contemporary scholarship is suggesting that was not Paul’s intention. Paul was arguing for horizontal equality of relationships in the Christian community, and Covenant with God’s kingdom of justice-compassion as taught and modeled by the life of Jesus. Paul insists on a kenotic community that, while diverse, uses its many talents for the common good – a radical abandonment of self-interest that results in covenant, non-violence, distributive justice, and peace.

Nor is the reading from the second servant song in Isaiah to be interpreted as the Church triumphant. God tells the servant (the nation of Israel) that Israel is given as the light to the nations – the example of how to live in God’s justice – so that God’s salvation (liberation from injustice) may reach to the end of the earth. This is Covenant, not imperial theology, and it is counter to the demand for apostolic succession being cultivated by the writer of John’s Gospel, and implied as settled orthodoxy. Jesus’s great Sermon on the Mount, preaching Covenant, non-violence, distributive justice, and peace, is left out of the readings selected from Matthew’s Gospel, and Paul’s passionate argument for kenotic community is ignored because the Roman church won the fight over how the timing of the celebration of Easter is calculated.

The Covenant is universal. The servant says that while s/he realizes the original purpose may have been to reconcile the people of Israel with their God, that is not enough. Certainly it is true today that “saving” one particular nation or way of life is not enough. The Planet is in the midst of one of the greatest extinctions of life forms since the beginning of Earth’s existence. The loss of diversity means the loss of flexibility in evolution that creates niches for survival among all the beings in the Universe.

If the unique contribution that humanity has to make is consciousness, then we cannot remain unconscious – unaware – of the impact of the human life form on the others. God says, “It is too light a thing [not enough] that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel . . .” The very survival of the planetary biosphere and the thousands of ecosystems that live within it appears to be at stake. The time for intermediaries is past. There is still mystery and wonder to be enjoyed, explored, explained, and experienced, but we no longer need priests or shamans to tell us what to do in order to be in covenant relationship with that mystery. All we have to do, says Jesus, in the portions of Matthew we are not supposed to read this year, is open our eyes, and look, and listen.

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