I HAVE DECIDED TO FOLLOW JESUS

Sunday's lection is about choices. More importantly, it is about choosing God’s Kingdom over the Kingdom of Rome. It is--at its most fundamental--about taking sides with those whose only hope is God and rejecting Pax Romana, its pater familias, its peace based on war, its systems of patronage.

Foxes having holes and birds having nests allude to the imperial family and its domain-- the basic hierarchical unit of society--that provided food, clothing, shelter, safety, security, and honor. Those who follow the "homeless" Son of Man are members of a different oikos, God’s oikos where widows, orphans, and strangers are the most privileged and where even the most unwelcome is always welcome. Yes, even beggars.

Burial rites are again part of the rituals and obligations of the imperial family. Going and proclaiming good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, God's jubilee of justice, takes priority.

Anyone who has put a hand to the plow knows that looking back is unacceptable. The one who has decided to become a farmer in the Kingdom of God but yearns to go back to farming for the Kingdom of Rome, the complete opposite direction, is not fit to follow Jesus.

The song we learned in Sunday School is true. There is no turning back.

Those who think that following Jesus of Nazareth is easy, rewarding, and will bring us closer to heaven are following the wrong Jesus.


#25percentrevolution
#JusticeForMyanmar
#JusticeForNewBataan5
#FreePalestine
#EndTheCultureOfImpunity
#IAmWithJesus

*art, "Homeless Jesus," sculpture by Timothy Schamlz (at King's University College, Ontario), image from vanderbilt divinity library digital archives. 

FATHER'S DAY

Sunday is Father's Day.

We learned early in school that the family is the basic unit of society. The familia, with the father as its head, go back to the Ancient Romans. The father had absolute power over everyone in his family. Absolute meant exactly that: the father can disown, sell, even kill his children. For many fathers in antiquity, children were property. Possessions.

For the Ancient Romans, the emperor was the father of all fathers. For the emperor, occupied peoples and nations were property. Possessions.

Sunday's lection from Luke (which is also found in Mark and Matthew) possibly echoes the Roman army's massacre of Jewish rebels in Gerasa by Vespacian's general, Lucius Annius, around 67 CE. The "occupying forces" who possessed the Gerasene in the narrative is named Legion (which was the largest military unit of the Roman Army).

Jesus's exorcism reminds us, especially those among us who are fathers, that people are not property nor posessions. Especially not our children. And if we think they are, then we need an exorcism.

Sunday is Father's Day. It can also be Exorcism Day.

#EndTheCultureOfImpunity
#JusticeForNewBataan5
#JusticeForMyanmar
#FreePalestine
#25percentrevolution

*art, "Jesus, the Gerasene, and the Unclean Spirits," James Tissot, Brooklyn Museum (available at vanderbilt divinity library digital archives).

JUNE 12TH

June 12th is Trinity Sunday and many homilies will focus on explaining a mystery. (Of course, a lot of us know that this "mystery" was discussed, debated, formulated, and eventually enforced around the 4th century by privileged, propertied, and powerful Christian men.)

Many of us grew up with these centuries-old doctrines that made our heads hurt. Many of us grew up with doctrines that did not make sense, that created walls instead of bridges, that separated peoples instead of bringing them together, that made our faiths, our beliefs, our skin color, our sexual orientation, our class, our way of life sinful, less human, and, outright wrong!

There are still so many people who are convinced that the hardships they face every single day are tests and trials from God. There are more who believe that God has a grand plan just waiting to be disclosed in the future, if not on earth then in the hereafter. There are those, quoting scripture no less, who sincerely proclaim that every elected official, including tyrants, dictators, and children of tyrants and dictators, are God's chosen.

Then there are those who ask, in the midst of so much senseless suffering, sickness, hunger, poverty, greed, death, and destruction, how God chooses whom God heals, rescues, and saves.

June 12th is Trinity Sunday and many homilies will focus on explaining a mystery. June 12th is also Independence Day in the Philippines. Maybe some homilies will focus on breaking free.

#25percentrevolution
#ChooseJustice
#EndTheCultureOfImpunity
#IAmWithJesus
#JusticeForMyanmar
#JusticeForNewBataan5
#FreePalestine

*art, "Trinity," Kelly Latimore, 2016 (available at the vanderbilt divinity library digital archives)

WHERE IS GOD?

Philip's request to Jesus resonates with what many among us long for: "Show us the Father and we will be satisfied!" Some ask this question in the comforts of their armchairs inside their air-conditioned offices. Tens of millions ask this as they struggle to survive from one day to the next.

Where is God?

One seventh of one year's income from the richest 2,000 people on earth can eradicate poverty while 25,000, 40% of them children, starve to death every single day. Where is God?

The world's richest countries spend close to 2 trillion dollars a year on weapons of mass destruction when less than a third of that amount can provide basic education, health care, and decent housing for the poorest nations. Where is God?

Those of us who call ourselves Christian believe in the incarnation. Where is God? Among us. Between us. One of us. Often a stranger. Human. Anywhere and everywhere we experience goodness wrestling free from evil; where we find hope being triumphant over despair; where we encounter faith stronger than fear; where we see love chosen over indifference; where we experience life rising up in the midst of death.

#25percentrevolution
#IAmWithJesus
#EndTheCultureOfImpunity
#JusticeForNewBataan5
#JusticeForMyanmar
#FreePalestine

*art, "Pentecost," JESUS MAFA, 1973, from the vanderbilt divinity library digital archives.