When Christianity First Lost Its Gospel Perspective - Richard Rohr

Before AD 313, the Church was on the bottom of society, which is the vantage point for understanding the liberating power of the Gospel for both the individual and for society. But then the Christian church became the established religion of the empire and started reading the Gospel from the position of maintaining power and social order.  In a sense, Christianity almost became a different religion!

The last great formal persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire ended in AD 303.

Ten years later, Christianity was legalized by Constantine I. After this structural change, Christianity increasingly accepted, and even defended, the dominant social order, especially concerning war and money. Morality became individualized and largely sexual.

The Church slowly lost its free and alternative vantage point. Texts written in the hundred years preceding 313 show it was unthinkable that a Christian would fight in the army, as the army was killing Christians. By the year 400, the entire army had become Christian, and they were now killing the pagans.

Before AD 313, the Church was on the bottom of society, which is the privileged vantage point for understanding the liberating power of the Gospel for both the individual and for society. Overnight the Church moved from the bottom to the top, literally from the catacombs to the basilicas. The Roman basilicas were large buildings for court and other public assembly, and they became Christian worship spaces.

The Christian church became the established religion of the empire and started reading the Gospel from the position of maintaining power and social order instead of experiencing the profound power of powerlessness that Jesus revealed.

In a sense, Christianity almost became a different religion! This shift would be similar to reversing the first of the 12 Steps to seek power instead of admitting powerlessness. In this paradigm only the 'winners' win, whereas the true Gospel has everyone winning. Calling this power 'spiritual' and framing success as moral perfection made this position all the more seductive to the ego and all the more disguised.

The failing Roman Empire needed an emperor, and Jesus was used to fill the power gap, making much of his teaching literally incomprehensible and unhearable, even by good people. The relationships of the Trinity were largely lost as the very shape of God: the Father became angry and distant, Jesus became the needed organizing principle, and for all practical and dynamic purposes the Holy Spirit was forgotten. An imperial system needs law and order and clear belonging systems more than it wants mercy or meekness or transformation.

By the grace of God, saints and holy ones of every century and in every denomination and monastery still got the point, but only if they were willing to go through painful descent--which Catholics call 'the way of the cross,' Jesus called 'the sign of Jonah,' Augustine called 'the paschal mystery,' and the Apostles' Creed called 'the descent into hell.' Without these journeys there's something essential you simply don't understand about the very nature of God and the nature of your own soul.

You try to read reality from the side of power instead of powerlessness, despite the fact that God has told us (through the image of the Crucified) that vulnerability and powerlessness is the way to true spiritual power. But Christians made a jeweled logo and decoration out of the cross, when it was supposed to be a shocking strategic plan, charting the inevitable path of full transformation into God.

Mercy Is Something God Is - Cynthia Bourgeault

Love Is Risky But Fear Is Worse - Sojourners

To be led by the spirit of a loving God means that when we see fear and pain and need around us, we head toward it. That’s the job description.

Giving in to fear takes us to many dark, ugly places. It’s the incubator for hatred, racism, sexism, homophobia, religious conflict, political wars, and the many other evils in the world. All of them are rooted in a fear of those who are different from us.

The alternative? Label fear for what it is — a vampire that sucks life and love out of us and our world. Recognize that those monsters beneath our beds are ones that we’ve created in our fearful minds.

It’s not easy, of course.

Fear is always tugging at us, trying to hold us back from loving — not only loving others, but ourselves, too. In those moments, we have to take a breath and act like the cowardly lion who, though still trembling, marches into the witch’s castle to save someone who needs us.

Even if that person is very different from us.

To be led by the spirit of a loving God means that when we see fear and pain and need around us, we head toward it. That’s the job description.

The full article is available here

Benediction: Agents Of Restoration and Renewal (based on Isaiah 43:19)

May we seek God's spirit within and around us so that we become agents of restoration and renewal in God's world; working to set things right and to make all things new again.

Reflection and Renewal: The Universe Is God's Handiwork (based on Psalm 19:1)

God, you've commanded us to be stewards of the Earth, which you created and called “good.”

Yet all too often we don’t see beyond our own interests. We can easily fall into a mindset that approaches your creation - and all that lives within it - as though we are its owners and it is ours to use as we see fit - instead of approaching it as your stewards.

We mask creation’s witness to your awesome beauty whenever our choices lead to harm, destruction, and disaster.  We sometimes fail to love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves; even as simply and indirectly as by existing within systems which benefit us at the end but involve injustice, exploitation, and pollution earlier in the process.

So instead of always working together to fix-up your world, we sometimes degrade and harm it.

Forgive us.

Help us to relate to everyone and everything that surrounds us in ways which recognize that the universe is your sacred handiwork; that all of creation is where you appear and where we worship you.

You are a God of endless creativity, incomparable beauty, and bottomless grace. For this, we give you thanks.

Amen.

It Is One Sacred World - Richard Rohr

Love Plants Hope Within Creation - Richard Rohr

God Move Us On Your Journey - Ruth Harvey

Life Abounds In Love's Overflow - Richard Rohr

Holy Saturday: Descending To The Place Of Death - Jeff Wiersma

It can be tempting for us to skip right to the good news of Easter Morning. However, it’s only after the pain of Good Friday and the grief of Holy Saturday that the revolutionary, universe-changing event that is Easter Morning is possible. 

“Jesus was crucified, dead, and was buried. He descended to the place of death.”

In between the painful, gruesome darkness of Good Friday and the radiant brightness of Easter Morning lies Holy Saturday.

 On that day, Jesus was buried behind a tomb. Some translations of the Apostle’s Creed describes it as Jesus “descending to a place of death;” a hell of sorts.

Jesus’ followers also descended into their own kind of hell. On Holy Saturday, they are hiding in justifiable fear that they might also be put to death by the Romans and the Religious Leaders. They are lost in overwhelming sorrow and confusion. Everything that they had based their life on was suddenly and traumatically obliterated.

Judas, who had been one of their fellow disciples - like a brother to them - had betrayed Jesus and then hung himself. Peter had his denials of the now-dead Jesus hanging over his head. All of them had failed to stay awake with Jesus in the garden when he was desperately afraid and distraught. All of them had fled or remained at a distance when Jesus was arrested instead of standing by him.

I’m sure all of us have had experiences like this - when injustice and cruelty seem to have free reign, when someone we’ve built our lives around is suddenly taken from us, when someone we trusted betrays us, or when we’ve done something to someone we loved which is so hurtful that it feels like our guilt will never go away.

This is why Holy Saturday is a key component of the Holy Weekend. It can be tempting for us to skip right to the good news of Easter Morning. However, it’s only after the pain of Good Friday and the grief of Holy Saturday that the revolutionary, universe-changing event that is Easter Morning is possible.

Likewise, when we face the reality of the inevitable pain and grief in our lives - and determine to lean into them instead of trying to avoid them - our view of the world has the potential to be transformed. We can begin to see that life itself is grace. We can begin to see God in all things once we have faced our darkness and discovered light in it.

The Cross: God As An Iconoclast Of Flawed Notions of God - Jeff Wiersma

At the cross God deconstructs many of our notions of what God is like, and in their place shows us a being whose very essence and nature is love and who is truly affected by creation.  This is where the rubber meets the road in Christianity.

Around mid afternoon, Jesus groaned out of the depths, crying loudly, “My God … my God … why have you abandoned me?!?”

This soul-wrenching plea that Jesus makes is a cry of utter despair, given when it feels like all hope is lost, and justifiably so. Jesus had been arrested, mocked, and beaten by religious hypocrites, then grotesquely whipped and sentenced to death by the wicked empire that those scheming religious leaders collaborated with.

Jesus‘ closest friends had all scattered. He is being blasphemously mocked by the crowd. Jesus is midway through the dying process; his torn flesh bleeding profusely and repeatedly congealing to and being peeled from a bare wooden surface. He is hemorrhaging brain tissue from the crown of thorns that was smashed into his skull.

The spikes through Jesus’ wrists and the one pinned through both of his feet are sending searing pain through his entire body - as they freshly tear through his muscles and nerves with each excruciating attempt he makes to lift his entire body weight to draw a breath.

It’s interesting to note that Jesus says, “My God” and says it twice. In quoting the lament from Psalm 22, Jesus is protesting the fact that someone who he has close relationship with is noticeably distant in his time of abandonment and torturous pain. It was a most natural time to cry out those words.

I’m sure that every one of us have had times where we also felt like God had forsaken us - times of tragedy, illness, and loss - times when we’re in valleys of the shadow of death.

In these times, we often echo Jesus’ protest. We demand to know why we suffer so painfully. We protest how the bad things that keeping happening violate our sense of justice - things like heartache, disease, abuse, corruption, racism, hatred, and violence. We cry out to a God who often feels distant when we feel abandoned.

Jesus - crying out in such a desperate state, brutalized and bloodied to a pulp - tends not to look very much like God to us. We’re used to picturing God as transcendent and “up above” it all somewhere. And we’re used to a limited, cynical understanding that sees strength and power as operating in terms of control, command, and dominance.

But when God willingly entered into the human pain and suffering we experience, it showed us an entirely different idea of strength; a power shown in vulnerability, which is the greatest kind of strength that there is. In Jesus, we see the truest picture of God; a loving servant whose approach to the universe is one of sacrificial love - which is the greatest kind of love that there is.

This doesn’t mean that there are easy answers to the difficult mystery of suffering. It still hurts. It still feels unbearable. We’re still tempted to wonder why God won’t supernaturally intervene. It still violates our sense of justice.

But what Jesus’ suffering on the cross shows us is that God voluntarily chose to leave the glory of heaven and genuinely participate in human suffering. In doing so, Jesus made the realities of suffering, pain, humiliation, and death part of the life that God lives as the Trinity.

At the cross God deconstructs many of our notions of what God is like, and in their place shows us a being whose very essence and nature is love and who is truly affected by creation.  We see a God of compassion, which literally means “to suffer together.”

This is where the rubber meets the road in Christianity. This God of grace is not only capable of but is - quite literally - dying for genuine relationship with creation!

The Garden of Gethsemane: Jesus Chooses His Path - Jeff Wiersma

The time in the garden reminds us that Jesus chose his path, and that we can choose our own as well.

[Jesus and his disciples] came to an area called Gethsemane. Jesus told them, “Sit here while I pray. “ He took Peter, James, and John with him and began to be filled with horror and great dread. And he said to them, “My soul is crushed by sorrow to the point of death!”


In the first hours of Good Friday, Jesus knew what would happen if he followed God’s will that day; violent arrest, cruel torture, public humiliation, and brutal execution. For obvious reasons, this troubled him greatly.

But from our standpoint in history, this can seem strange to us - thinking of Jesus as having fears and doubts, as asking for a way out, as needing human compassion - because we know how this story ends. But try to put yourself in Jesus’ shoes that night and imagine facing what he was facing.

In the garden, Jesus prayed in anguish and asked for a way out. He prayed like a man who knew he would be hurt by his friend’s abandoning him and the betrayals of Judas, Peter, and his own countrymen who would hand him over to the Romans to be killed. Jesus agonized like a man who would feel the excruciating pain of being whipped, made to carry his own cross after being whipped, and then being crucified on that cross. He prayed as a man who knew that if he would follow God’s will, there would be indescribable suffering.

In the garden, Jesus was unmistakably human. When he says to his disciples, “The spirit is indeed willing, but the flesh is weak,” you get the feeling that he was saying it as much about himself as he was saying about them.

And yet, Jesus followed through as a human who decided to follow God’s will and give love sacrificially. The time in the garden reminds us that Jesus chose his path, and that we can choose our own as well.

We can follow the path that our competitive culture lays out - living in a way that looks out for number one, striving for comfort without regard for its effect on others, ignoring the outcast, condemning the poor, treading on the orphan and window and migrant, and seeing people’s value only in terms of what they can do for us.

Or … we can follow Jesus’ example and say to God, “Not my will, but yours be done."

The Last Supper: A Whole New Kind Of Kingdom - Jeff Wiersma

Jesus loved to teach in parables. At this Passover supper, he was trying to teach his disciples that the new kingdom God was launching was not concerned with taking or maintaining power.

When Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table, he said to them, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” He did the same with the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is ... my blood, poured out for you.”

When Jesus broke the bread and passed the cup with his disciples to celebrate Passover, he gave them a tangible symbol of his impending death. Jesus identified himself as the sacrificial lamb from the Hebrew story of Passover and deliverance from slavery in Egypt, an analogy that was unmistakable to these Jewish men who were his followers.

Can you imagine the disciple’s confusion? Jesus had told them that he was the Messiah; the promised one sent from God, the one whose arrival their people have been waiting centuries for. They believed that the Messiah would forcefully lead them out of the oppression of Empire and establish a new kingdom of Israel. The disciples were expecting the Messiah to be like the Moses of the Passover story, not the lamb that was slaughtered. Yet Jesus is speaking of himself as the sacrifice!

It can be difficult from our perspective 2,000 years later to remember that the disciples had no way of knowing that Easter would follow Jesus’ execution. After all, every lamb which they had seen serve as the Passover sacrifice did not miraculously come back to life.

But the Messiah being a suffering servant and not a violent conqueror is what Jesus’ life was all about. At this Passover supper, he was trying to teach his disciples that the new kingdom God was launching was not concerned with taking or maintaining power. Jesus’ mission as the Messiah wasn’t about giving those carrying out oppression a taste of their own medicine. The Messiah's work was not playing the same game as, nor turning the tables on, those doing harm - because violence and oppression dehumanize both the perpetrator and the victim.

Rather, Jesus’ mission was about setting an entirely new table where, by grace, all are rehumanized and free from the cycles of oppression, violence, and hate. Jesus is saying that sacrificial acts of love are the way that God’s kingdom works to reaffirm the basic, inherent dignity of all.

I’m sure that all of us have seen instances when a small act of kindness and giving has set amazing transformations into motion. Jesus understood this quite well. Throughout his life, Jesus transformed ordinary loaves of bread into something extraordinary; moments of radical, unqualified love for whoever needed love at that time, regardless of and in intentional subversion of the oppressive social order of that time.

At the last supper, Jesus transformed an ordinary meal into the launch of God’s extraordinary kingdom of love and grace.

Imagine If You Were There: Making Holy Week Feel Real - Jeff Wiersma

The stories of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday are endurable each year because we already know how the story ends. We know that Jesus' crucifxion is not a defeat, but rather a victory revealed by the events of Easter Sunday.   But what if we - like the people that we read about in these stories - didn’t know that? 

"God so loved the world that he gave his only son - even to the obscene horror that is the cross.” - Frederick Buechner

The days of Holy Week that precede Easter don't match the usual qualifications of events one usually considers worth celebrating.  These days are the ones Christians remember Jesus; God in human form – who came to announce good news to the poor, liberation for the oppressed, sight for the blind, and life to the lifeless - was executed by the powers-that-be.

Maundy Thursday is a day that saw the betrayal of a close friend and false arrest by scheming religious authorities who controlled the Temple that Jesus called his "father's house."

Good Friday is a day of pain; a day of thorns and cross and wood - a day of betrayal and abandonment by friends and the casual cruelty of violence. It is a day when love was put to death - when the evil and powerful seemed to have the last word.

Holy Saturday is a day of fear, uncertainty, and dwelling in the "place of death."

These stories of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday are endurable each year because we already know how the story ends.  We know that Good Friday is not a defeat, but rather a victory revealed by the events of Easter Sunday.
 
But what if we - like the people that we read about in these stories - didn’t know that? What if we were experiencing it in real time for the first time?

What if the pain and suffering we witnessed caught us by surprise and shook us to our very core?  What if we were confused by what was happening and felt devastated when our expectations and hopes were dashed? What if someone we loved dearly was suddenly and brutally taken from us?

Wouldn't it feel exactly like “real life” itself does sometimes?

This year, try imagining that you're witnessing these stories taking place right as they're unfolding, even though you've likely heard the hundreds of times.  You might be surprised at what you realize, feel, and encounter.

The Politics of Palm Sunday: The “Untriumphal” Entry - Sojourners

When Jesus entered Jerusalem riding a donkey, he was performing a political act. He was revealing that the reign of God is in stark contrast to the reign of Rome and every other political ideology that seeks triumphant victory by subduing people with violence and coercion.

Make no mistake: the Gospel is political.

Throughout his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus is political. He influences people to live into the Kingdom of Heaven. For Jesus, Heaven is not essentially some place off in the distance where you go after you die. No, Heaven is a way of life to be lived right here, right now. We see this clearly in the prayer he taught his disciples: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

When Jesus entered Jerusalem riding a donkey, he was performing a political act. He was revealing that the reign of God is in stark contrast to the reign of Rome and every other political system that seeks triumphant victory by subduing people with violence and coercion.

Jesus was engaged in political street theater. The procession into Jerusalem on a donkey was symbolic street drama, a parody of the popular expectation of a triumphant military liberator entering on a powerful war horse. Jesus came into Jerusalem as a King of Peace! He flipped the popular militaristic image of the messiah on its head.

Jesus revealed the alternative; a political way of life based on humble service, not triumphant violence.

This is not just a call to a personal ethic; this is a political ethic. Indeed, the politics of Jesus seeks to influence our personal lives, but it also seeks to influence our political lives. Wherever personal or political systems use violence, power, and coercion to be triumphant and victorious, Jesus beckons us to follow him into a different kind of politics – into the Kingdom of God that lives and dies by love, service, and forgiveness.

The full article is available here