ON THE EVE OF PENTECOST, AS EASTER ENDS, AND IN THE FIRE-LIGHT OF THE  ECOFAITH SUMMIT, “FROM FEAR TO FIRE: IGNITING COMMUNITY FOR A PLANET IN PERIL”

“FROM FEAR TO FIRE, THE RESURRECTION ROAD”

 Meditate on your own present moment on the Lectionary journey since Lent began, continuing to Pentecost, just around the corner.  Contemplate this journey both as chronos movement and as kairos depth.  Consider the present moment in the light of the fire: “Let the fire of your justice burn…” “Canticle of the Turning, ELW 723,  and the recent EcoFaith Summit of the Upper Midwest, “From Fear to Fear: Igniting Community for a Planet in Peril”.

                  We are humans who receive and then proclaim the Word. We are also humans who receive the Word proclaimed.  This spoken Word emerges from the depths of penetration as we deeply tune into it, whether spoken by Creator in nature by inspired utterance in the written Word of Scripture, or by oral storytelling around chancels and campfires. 

We are in the season of spring, a time of renewal, having journeyed from the bleak midwinter of Ash Wednesday.  This is a time for fishing, not just to catch and eat fresh fish, but more importantly a time for being on a lake, experiencing the renewed depths of penetration into the beauty of Creation. 

                  For many years I have taken a ‘road less traveled’ to fish on the same small lake, uncrowded by other humans, with little bays lined by big trees, and with big beauty.  I go, not so much to fish as to descend into the depths of penetration, into solitude.  To tune in, get quiet, look around, listen.  Listen and hear. 

Ah, see there, down at the end of the bay, see the swans.  Over there, geese.  Up there in their nest, eagles.  And right over there, loons.  Along the brush on shore, the chickadees in their native Anishinaabemowin: “gijii-gijii-gaaneshiinh.”  Feathered friends all around.  Listen, listen and hear.  “Hear, O Israel!”  “Shema!” The Lord speaks: “Hear My Music,” when the swans trumpet, the geese honk, the eagles hit the high notes, the loons yodel, the chickadees sparkle.  A symphony.  Hear. Nature’s music, bringing forth the depths of penetration of the symphonic movements of all Creation. Angels sing from the great cloud of witnesses. “O, mortal (son-of-human), why are you not dancing?!”  (Falling out of the boat’ is not an acceptable answer.)

                  The angels’ eternal hymn celebrates all kinds of music.  Creation’s music is the best.  Human music as inspired by the Spirit is also great.  It can be classical, like Mozart’s four movements in symphony of Allegro, Adagio, Minuet, and Allegro (fast, slow, dance, climax).  Or it can be something more modern, as modern as the ‘60s, anyhow, maybe almost as modern as an old man can get, like the movement of Bob Dylan’s dialogues. The Word spoken by Creation can most purely reveal God’s own true Self in nature.  By grace, that true Self is also revealed in the musical movements of our efforts to interpret the Lord’s Word in Scripture. 

                  One scriptural movement in our common real-time journey that is presently coming to crescendo can be patterned by our Lectionary.  It is a movement that started in the wilderness, in solitude; and from that solitude is moving towards the univocity of the whole community, as that community becomes the grace-filled Church at Pentecost. 

What does that Word of Scripture proclaim today, in our present kairos?

                  In solitude, as we contemplate the Word, the ancient prayer practice of Lectio Divina can be very helpful.  Descending in meditation into the Word, waiting for a specific word or phrase that stands out and speaks in that moment, and doing that for each Gospel beginning with Ash Wednesday, provides a roadmap or journal of the journey.    

One additional contextual observation: Preachers who stand at a pulpit this Seventh Sunday of Easter might find themself clothed not only in alb and stole, but perhaps also in paradox.  Also, this paradox could subsist with neither concept being explicitly mentioned, like the proverbial “elephant in the living room,” maybe even like “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”   These two paradoxical concepts are: (1) one is not very likely to preach about “politics;” and yet: (2) unavoidably, one is in fact very likely in some sense to preach about “politics.”  

First solitude, then community.  First prayer, then action.  First lectio, then politics.

Lectio.

From an EcoFaith context, how do the words “world” and “kingdom” and “earth” relate to such terms as “creation,” “nature,” or “planet in peril?”  May the depth of our meditation penetrate beyond the language of English, and before that the German, Latin, and Greek, all the way back to the Hebrew/Aramaic linguistic as well as cultural context of such words, later written down, but originally spoken by first century Galileans.  

John 17:11: “And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you.  Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”

Word or phrase: “name;” “world;” “one.”

Acts 1:6-9: “… they asked him, ‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’  He replied, ‘It is not for you to know the times or periods the Father has set by his own authority.  But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses…to the ends of the earth.’”

Word or phrase: “restore;” “kingdom;” “Israel;” “authority;” “power;” “earth.”

Hymn: “…Let the fire of your justice burn….”

Word or phrase: “fire;” “justice.”

Name: YHWH; Yahweh. Father, source of all being; Son, eternal Word; Holy Spirit, spirit of life. “…name that you have given me”: Savior? Messiah?

World, Kingdom, earth: All of the Creation?  What about works of human hands?  Plowshares?  Swords, bombers, nukes?

Israel: All of us, perhaps in a question: “in God’s eyes, who today is not Israel?” Is the Body of Christ, i.e. the Church, is that “Israel?”  If not, to whom is it that the kingdom will be restored by the Lord?

Power, authority:  Not inherently ours as creatures, but only from God; to us only by the Holy Spirit, by grace.

Restore: Reclaim, renew, revive, redeem; “resurrectionally” transform. 

Fire: The fire of the light of the world, the way, the truth, the life.  

Justice: This is the foundational Eco-Creation principal of sedeq, as ordered by mishpat; as supported by emunah; it is steeped in the penetrating depth of emet, hesed, and shalom. Ps.85:10-13. It embodies compassion; it embodies empathy, it is the “justice” mishpat of Micah 6:8.  True justice is the Lord’s sedeq, God’s own “justice” as an essential element of God’s own true nature.  It is deeply relational, not merely transactional, juridical, or forensic.  ¹

This sedeq “justice” is the fire that goes before our named Creator YHWH lighting the way.  This sedeq “justice” shall make the Lord’s footsteps (paam) our pathway (derek), our “Resurrection Road:” “[Sedeq] shall go before him; and shall set us in the way of his steps.” Ps.85:13 KJV. ^[i]

So, we human creatures do not walk the Lord’s derek pathway by human effort; we can only walk the pathway the Lord has from the beginning created for us to walk in. Eph.2:10. We members of the Body of Christ walk this Planet in Peril only by the pure, awesome Pentecostal power of grace from the Holy Spirit, in community, as “one” Church. 

So that for me is the lectio part, as best as I can articulate.  May each of us descend the depths of penetration of our own wilderness solitude and let the living Word speak to us in our souls as we prepare our own preaching.

Politics. 

Let’s allow the modern-day prophet Bob Dylan to “rip the band-aid off,” from 1965, It’s Alright Ma I’m Only Bleeding:

“Preachers preach of evil fates.

Teachers teach that knowledge waits. 

Can lead to hundred-dollar plates. 

Goodness hides behind its gates. 

But even the president of the United States

Sometimes must have to stand naked.”

Pentecost is around the corner.  About 40 days (has a nice ring to it) after that we will observe, like it or not, the 250^th Fourth of July celebration of the secular United States of America, a quarter-millennium of “democracy;” we are also more than a half-millennium since not only the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s, but also the beginning of the full-on genocidal assault by imperial colonialism upon the Indigenous “Americas,” (named for an Italian mapmaker), called in history the “Age of Discovery.”

July 4 will be the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a truly glorious document declaring independence from the imperial king by proclaiming that all humans “are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with … unalienable rights … to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness… [secured by] governments … deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Some of those in the world pretend to claim that we have God on our side?  Again quoting Dylan, 1964, “With God On Our Side:”

                  “Through many a dark hour I’ve been thinking about this

                  That Jesus Christ was betrayed by a kiss

But I can’t think for you, you’ll have to decide

Whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side”

You may deem it too far-fetched, but these days I often wonder what I would be doing if I were alive a couple of generations ago in 1930s Germany.  Would I be like…

Bonhoeffer (martyred at Flossenberg)?

“One act of obedience is worth a hundred sermons.”

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.”

St. Titus Brandsma (martyred at Dachau)?

 “True mysticism leads to Calvary…dying upon the bloodless heart of Jesus.”   

“We must not let ourselves be surpassed in love by anybody….

“Whoever wants to win over the world to higher ideals must have the courage to come into conflict with it.”

St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, formerly Edith Stein, famed Jewish philosopher (martyred at Auschwitz)?

 “Those who remain silent are responsible.” 

“Our love of neighbor is the measure of our love of God.  For Christians … no one is a ‘stranger.’  The love of Christ knows no borders.”

Maybe some consider it premature to accept the analogy to Hitler’s Germany.  Nonetheless, the politics compelled by EcoFaith undeniably suggests that these present times are already in fact very dire, unjust times.  The survival and salvation, of the imperiled life on our planet is inextricably entwined with secular politics. 

These times desperately need and cry out for great and courageous hope. As we embrace the challenge of preaching the Word during these times as integral members of the imperiled Creation, as we discern and courageously proclaim how to follow Christ on the Way today, let us deeply and persistently ask ourselves and one other:  Where do we find hope for the sake of the world? 

What is our own true, powerful and just response to this question?  Here are two first responses emerging from one person’s own wilderness solitude’s depths of penetration into the Living Word:

“To [His saints] God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”  Col.1:26-27

                  “[Jesus] said to them, ‘I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.” Luke 10:18.

 From “Where is the hope?” it is a short distance to the question: “how is it with your soul?”  May we each proclaim today: “I am who I am in the eyes of God, by the grace of God, so help me God.”

May the journey of the Church from fear to fire on the Resurrection Road reflect the image of Teilhard’s risen Christ of the Cosmos glorified, as celebrated in this lovely quote from Rosemary Haughton, The Passionate God:

“The cry of Jesus on the cross at the very end was therefore the cry of awareness that all was indeed accomplished, brought to its consummation.  He knew that he could, at last, give back to the One he loved the unshackled fullness of love, and in so doing carry with him on the surge of that passion the love which is the essential being of all creation.  This is, in a sense, the moment of resurrection, or rather it is the moment at which that process begins, for the resurrection is not a single event but the ever-extending ‘outflow’ of the energy previously dammed up by the power of sin and death.”

May the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts bring the light of the fire of justice as inspired by the Spirit of Pentecost onto our Lord’s pathway, this hodos road our Lord has created for us to follow, as we akoloutheo, as we walk with God in the power of the Lord’s grace, on this planet in peril, from fear to fire, along this Resurrection road.

 Amen.

^[i][i] “… the three concepts, sedeq, mishpat, emunah, all apply to God and in this their application they represent the cosmic principles by which God relates himself to the universe.  Sedeq is the very principle of creation.  It is the principle of potency in fullest identity with the Good.  Mishpat is the principle of the appropriate balancing and “measuring” of the universe which is responsible for the law and orderliness intended by God’s plan.  Emunah is God’s faithfulness in maintaining His creation; it is the principle of universal continuity sustained by God’s loyalty toward His handiwork.  They are principles of being, foundations of cosmic reality.  As God’s ways with the world, they are archetypes of values.  Because the world came into being in sedeq, because it is ordered by mishpat, because it is sustained in emunah, [humanity] too, in imitation of God, should strive in sedeq, order [their] life in mishpat, and act toward all life with emunah.”                                                 Berkovitz, “Man and God,” p.339-340