16 May, 2010

Acts 16:16-34
Psalm 97
Revelation 22:12-13
John 17:20-26

Everyone at the nursing home called her The Buddha – nurses, physicians, aids, social workers, residents – everyone. And you didn’t have to look twice or much wonder to figure out just why that was. The resemblance between her and nearly every statue of the Buddha you’ve ever seen was immediately recognizable, and like those statues, she really didn’t move much either, just sat there, her face serene as could be, a slight smile on her lips, but never speaking, never responding, never giving the slightest indication that she could hear anyone around her or had any clue what was going on. Her eyes were always half-closed, almost unblinking, and her gaze – it was a classic example of “lights on, nobody home.” In spite of that, however, she was regularly wheeled in to the community room of the nursing home for the monthly Lutheran communion liturgy. And every month, she was pretty much the same – seemingly impervious to everything going on around her. And as I communed the faithful gathered, I would come to her with the consecrated host, extend it to her with the words, “The Body of Christ, given for you.” But nothing. Her hands remained in her lap, her lips remained closed and on them that same gentle smile, and her eyes fastened on something far, far away.

9 May 2010

Acts 16:9-15
Psalm 67
Revelation 21:10, 22–22:5
John 14:23-29

As you heard, our first reading for this Sixth Sunday of Easter was from The Acts of the Apostles. This book was compiled and written by the same person who wrote the Gospel According to Luke. The author of these two books is keenly aware of the limits of human reason and strength, keenly aware that our notions of what needs doing, where, when, and how are seldom in synch with what the Spirit of God has in mind. In the section of Acts that is prior to today’s story, we hear all about the Apostle Paul’s plans for how he will grow the church – he’s got his mission strategy all figured out. Luke, however, is intent on telling us that God’s way of doing things is . . . is . . . is probably what we would call . . . perhaps . . . highly irregular. To say the least.

2 May 2010

Acts 11:1-18
Psalm 148
Revelation 21:1-6
John 13:31-35

I’ll be honest with you, every time I see a reading from Revelation show up in the lectionary, as it does today, I groan and start trying to figure out some way to cut it from the liturgy without anyone noticing. It’s not that the book of Revelation itself is problematic – rather it’s the uses to which it’s been put, especially in American fundamentalist religion. Ripping the text of Revelation completely out of context, while inventing something called, “the rapture,” a something that isn’t even in the Bible, a British evangelical preacher, John Nelson Darby, along with con-man, forger, and deadbeat dad Cyrus Scofield, in the late nineteenth century conjured up and then brought to the States the concept of dispensationalism, this dispensationalism being nothing more nor less than a delusion wrapped in near complete denial of the Gospel, a delusion that turns the peaceful, loving Lamb of God into a psychopathic, mass-murderer whose lust for blood on a mammoth scale would make every earthly perpetrator of genocide appear pathetically amateurish and grossly ineffectual by comparison. And at the hands of the dubiously educated faculty and graduates of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and the Dallas so-called-Theological Seminary and aided and abetted by countless televangelists and authors like Hal Lindsay (The Late, Great Planet Earth) and Tim LaHaye (The Left Behind series), Revelation has been turned from being an epic poem meant to comfort persecuted peoples into being a book of arcane, secret codes and prophesies used almost solely by North Americans to persecute variously Russians, Jews, Muslims, gays, Democrats, Catholics, blacks, Italians, Irish, and whoever the scapegoat de jour might be along with every last family member and undocumented neighbor that you’d like to see being torturously burned into a everlasting crisp in a lake of inextinguishable fire. The book of Revelation is the weapon of choice in a false and dangerous religious system fabricated less than 200 years ago that among other things is currently being used by American fundamentalists to advocate for a foreign policy that would purge the Holy Land of all Palestinians and restore an all-Jewish Israel to its imagined boundaries during King David’s reign while rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem – all of this and more in order to bring on the Second Coming of Christ who would in turn then annihilate every Jew refusing to acknowledge and bow down before the blood-thirsty Lamb-of-God-with-fangs. And they’ll know we are Christians by our love!?! I think not.