“Do this to remember me.”
Jesus of Nazareth
An invitation to worship and reflection for the19th Sunday after Pentecost
GATHERING AND GREETING
As we gather, we acknowledge with respect the history, spirituality, and culture of the K’omoks First Nation and the Coast Salish peoples on whose traditional and unceded territory we meet. We also honour the heritage of all indigenous peoples as we recognize the need to seek a new relationship between the descendants of settlers and of those who were here before colonization. As a congregation of The United Church of Canada, we take responsibility both for past injustices and the need for healing and reconciliation. We love and honour this land upon which we meet and live and all whose footfall has trod and will tread upon it.
THE SINGING BOWL IS SOUNDED AND THE CHRIST CANDLE IS LIT
INVITING US TO BE ATTENTIVE TO WHAT CAN NEITHER BE HEARD NOR SEEN BUT WHICH IS PRESENT AND REAL
OPENING IN COMMUNION WITH THE ANCIENTS
Psalm 145, Part 1
Verses selected and adapted from “Psalms Now”: Leslie F Brandt, Concordia Press, 1973
My soul yearns for you, Eternal Flame of Love, longing to connect to the Great Mystery.
Every day I will bless You as I follow the Voice of wisdom. Great are You, who calls us to childlike wonder,
to the healing balm of forgiveness.
Each generation must learn anew the efficacy of silence, the wisdom of turning inward, The Beloved is gracious and merciful, |
allowing every soul to live in the freedom of abiding love. |
Lift up your hearts, all you who choose the path of love.
TAIZE CHANT: “Ubi Caritas”
Ubi caritas et amor; Ubi caritas, Deus ibi est.
(Where love is, God is)
READING FROM SCRIPTURE: Matthew 16:13-17
Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that |
the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.” Hear and consider what the Spirit is saying to the Church and to the whole created order: Thanks be to God. |
TED’S REFLECTIONS
0 … Jesus … 10
Visualize in your imagination, if you will, a spectrum of opinions and beliefs about Jesus. At the far end of the spectrum is the belief that everything the New Testament says about Jesus is literally true. At the beginning of the spectrum is the claim that Jesus is a fictional character who never actually existed but was created to convey a message – a character in an extended parable, so to speak. In between those two extremes lies a variety of positions about what parts of the story of Jesus are historically accurate and how much is the product of legend and dogma that has been painted over the original Jesus. I fall somewhere along that spectrum, with my understanding and beliefs about Jesus having shifted over the years for sure. And where I would place myself on any spectrum right now may not be my final parking place.
I do believe that Jesus was a real person, even if others have added legendary and dogmatic layers onto the bare bones of his actual life. He may or may not have been born in Bethlehem but he very probably grew up in Nazareth. Mary was certainly his mother and Joseph was probably his father, or at least his stepfather, with Jesus being the eldest of several children in their family. As a young man he was drawn to the teaching of John the Baptist and may have been one of John’s followers for a period of time, maybe even his cousin. At some point, though, he ventured out on his own, having developed his own integrated message, and travelled around sharing that message, impacting people along the way and gathering followers. He gained quite a reputation, popular with the common folk but also alienating himself from both the Jewish religious authorities and the Roman governing authorities. Whatever threat he posed to those authorities was enough to have him eliminated and almost certainly the way he was eliminated was by crucifixion, which was the Roman way of brutally making an example of any threat or nuisance. But, if Jesus himself had been silenced, his followers were not and the message and movement started by Jesus carried on after him, gradually spreading farther and wider until, even now in many different expressions, his story and his impact live on worldwide.
I have left out of that brief bio the more extraordinary elements the New Testament includes, things like: his birth to a virgin; his power to heal, to expel demons, to bend nature, to raise people from the dead; and maybe the most extraordinary of all, his own resurrection and reappearances following his burial. Those elements in his story can easily be explained as the legends that grow up around any folk hero, as exaggerations by his followers to raise him in public estimation and expand his following, and as intentional metaphors not meant to deceive but to unpack the deeper significance of his life and death. Even though I tend to interpret those more miraculous elements in his story in these ways, I do not dismiss those elements out of hand. His presence and the energies radiating from his presence may well have been able to heal and free people, especially from those ailments rooted in psychological, spiritual, and social dis-ease. And I have long wondered whether Jesus may have been a forerunner of an advanced stage of human evolution that unlocked in him gifts that the rest of us have yet to tap into. And who knows what dimensions of life and reality there are out there but not yet experienced or perceived by us in our more limited capacity? I mean, how much does the caterpillar understand about the butterfly? So all that taken into consideration, I leave open what may yet be revealed to me, especially about resurrection, since it is such a profound and critical event in the story of Jesus that cannot be dismissed lightly.
“Who, then, do you say that I am?” was Jesus’ question to his close followers, a question addressed to each of us as well. And there are and have been and may yet be many different answers offered to that question and many different movements developed around those various answers. I can’t begin to name them all but some that come to mind include these: the promised Jewish Messiah finally come; a freedom fighter and resistance leader, standing up to the Roman occupying force then and, ever since, the champion of any movement against any repressive and unjust regime anywhere; a social and religious reformer, calling Israel back to its original vision; a miracle worker; a wisdom teacher; an avatar bringing God down to earth in
human form; a saviour to redeem the world from the burden of sin and death; a moral example to emulate; a compassionate friend for the outsider; a life raft to cling to in the storms of life; the ultimate lord of all heaven and earth, especially after the universe collapses back into its original black hole; and so on. My hunch is that there is a grain of truth in each of these and other understandings of Jesus but which, when isolated from the rest and given exaggerated importance, can result in distortions and even parodies of how Jesus understood himself.
So, let me get more personal and introduce you to my Jesus, so to speak.
I am not sure if I thought much at all about Jesus growing up but, if I did, it was probably to dismiss him as naïve and irrelevant. What began to change for me in my twenties, when spiritual matters were becoming interesting – even crucial – to me, were two things. First, in reading some parts of the Gospels – the Beatitudes are a good example – I was struck by how profound a thinker and gifted a wordsmith he was. The second thing that I saw in Jesus that I had not tuned into before was how – in the midst of everything in the air around me in the 60’s – Jesus came across as the consummate counter-cultural icon: the outsider – the outlaw even – who was the truly just one in an unjust system. I appreciated how he put himself at risk; how, even at the cost of his own life, he stood up for what he believed in and stood with those who were denied their full humanity by the systemic injustices built into the society of his day. Maybe not enough to throw in my lot with Jesus just yet but enough at least to prompt me to take another look at the namby-pamby Sunday School Jesus I had assumed he was.
For me, in my early and mid-twenties, the burning question in me was not so much what I thought about Jesus as it was about whether God was real and, if so, how to live in touch with God. Jesus really helped me with that in a couple of ways.
One of those ways then was the notion of Jesus as God in the flesh. I didn’t take that idea – the Incarnation, as it is called theologically – very conventionally then or now but Jesus did put arms and legs on God for me. God, who had become very real to me, was also a bit theoretical and ineffable. How do you relate to something or someone beyond access through our normal senses? I didn’t fully equate Jesus with God – certainly not in his physical appearance or gender – but I did sense how the energy and essence of god- like qualities seemed to inhabit Jesus and be expressed through him. Jesus provided me a way to experience some of the same intimacy with and insight about God that I longer for and that I sensed in him. Today many progressive theologians speak about the Universal Christ or Christ-Consciousness: how divine essence and energy inhabit the whole universe and can be birthed in and expressed through particular persons here and there throughout history, and how Jesus of Nazareth is one example of that. And further, although certain persons may experience and express that consciousness more fully than most, it is also an energy and consciousness that inhabits all of us just waiting to be tapped into and released. Jesus then and now helps me cross through a thin place that puts me in touch with such divine presence and potential always around me and within me.
The other way I found Jesus really meaningful then was the notion of him as saviour. I use that word cautiously because a lot of people will jump to conclusions about what I mean by that or even be turned off by that way of talking about Jesus. I didn’t really connect with the idea that, through Jesus, I would receive forgiveness for my sins and a free pass into heaven, but it certainly felt as if opening myself to God through Jesus gave me a fresh start in life. I could lay aside all the baggage and inner turmoil I had been collecting through my life to that point and look ahead to a new life with a clean slate. It felt like a burden lifted, a new freedom – a new birth even – a chance to leave a path that was leading me nowhere and to move onto a path of promise and hope. I now had a foundation upon which to build a life of meaning, purpose, and belonging.
In that sense, Jesus saved me from a life that I could hardly bear anymore and helped me find another path into a healthier and more authentic way of living. I still relate to Jesus as my primary guide to finding intimacy with God and to discover more of my deepest potential and authenticity.
And, returning to the question from the Gospel reading today, if I were pushed to say most essentially who I think Jesus is, I would say he is a prophet of love. Love birthed him, nurtured him, inhabited him, and animated him. Love was both the essence of his teaching and of his lifestyle. He walked the talk in a way that makes me want to do the same.
Love as embodied and expressed through Jesus. Love: Jesus living out of a vision of God as pure love and, more than just as an idea, living in tangible intimacy with the one he called Abba. Love: practical compassion for the hurting, the misunderstood, the outsider, the oppressed, and for anyone who might chronically or circumstantially find life very hard to bear. Love: leading to a lifestyle of humble service for the common good. Love: necessitating an ethic of uncompromising non-violence as the only way to bring any real and lasting change in world affairs. Love: so deep that it allows us to see beyond differences and fear and danger to recognize and acknowledge the humanity even within those we call our enemies. Not the hearts and flowers love of Valentine’s card, this, though that is quite a lovely expression among every nuance the word denotes.
“God is love,” wrote John, having been so profoundly affected by the time he spent leaning on the bosom of Jesus and listening to the heartbeat of God.
“A new commandment I give you,” said Jesus as almost the last words he spoke to his family and friends as he shared his last meal with them, “love one another as I have loved you.”
Such a love as this makes a difference. A difference in the way we understand God and relate to God. A difference in how we value and carry ourselves. A difference in our personal relationships. A difference in the way we treat the Earth. A difference in how we address the issues and conflicts that arise between nations on the world stage. A difference in how, collectively, we care for the homeless, whatever the reason that put them out there; for our elders in care; for offenders incarcerated; for those abused and their abusers; for the original peoples of this land; for persons of other ethnicities and cultural practices; for those who don’t fit into mainstream expressions of gender identity or sexual preference; for those living in poverty; for anyone misunderstood and marginalized and even victimized because they don’t conform to customarily accepted societal norms…. Who am I leaving out? The point of this love is that no one is left out. Love is the essence of the universe and the right of every person, every creature whether plant or animal, every speck of dust from the centre to the edge of this expanding universe.
All of that and more is who Jesus is for me and how he leads me to want to live.
For Further Reflection:
- Who do you say that Jesus is?
- What role, if any, does Jesus play in your spiritual understanding and practice?
- What positive and/or negative experiences in your life have contributed to your impressions of Jesus?
- How can we cultivate “communion” with the presence of Jesus?
A SHARED TIME FOR REFLECTION, PRAYER, OFFERING & CONVERSATION
You are invited to use the quiet to reflect on the readings and ideas shared today, to light a candle or place a stone or shell as an expression of your intention or prayer, and/or to place an offering in the basket. If you get up to move about, please maintain safe physical distancing. And if you have a thought to share, please feel free to offer it aloud.
OUR DEDICATION
Psalm 145, Part 2 (Brandt) “Do you not know that your whole being is encompassed by love? |
I am the infinite and the eternal within your soul. O, that I might make Myself known to you! Choose love |
The time is nigh for you to choose, |
to see with spiritual eyes, O Heart of my heart, envelop me! |
let your glory within me shine out to the world.
HYMN: “COME TOUCH OUR HEARTS” (VU#12)
Come touch our hearts Come touch our souls Come touch our minds |
and teach us how to reason, Come touch us in the Come touch us now, |
A SUNG CELTIC BLESSING
May the road rise to meet you,
may the wind be at your back,
may the sun shine warm upon your face, may the rain fall softly on your feet,
and until we meet again,
may you be safe in the gentle, loving arms of God.
For everything there is a season,
a time for meeting, a time to say goodbye.
In all things God is near, always guarding your ways.
May the road rise to meet you,
may the wind be at your back,
may the sun shine warm upon your face, may the rain fall softly on your feet,
and until we meet again,
may you be safe in the gentle, loving arms of God.
For everything there is a season,
a time for listening, a time to speak the truth.
In all things God is near always guarding your ways.
May the road rise to meet you,
may the wind be at your back,
may the sun shine warm upon your face, may the rain fall softly on your feet,
and until we meet again,
may you be safe in the gentle, loving arms of God.
Peace to you. Amen
Ted