Today is Palm Sunday and the Sunday of the Passion.  Today we enter into the holiest time of the church year, Holy Week, or Passion Week.  When I say that it is the "holiest" time, what I mean is that it is the part of the church year that captures the heart and soul, the essence of Christianity.  In the larger culture out there, Christmas has become the feast of feasts, but within the internal logic of the thing we call Christianity, the sequence Palm Sunday--Maundy Thursday--Good Friday--Easter Sunday marks the centre, the real content, the actual feast of feasts, the High Holy Days for us.

   This is a time of paradox and irony.  We begin with the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the event we "remembered" in our uplifting and joyful procession at the beginning of the service.  Then, in the middle of the week, as Jesus teaches in the Temple, the plots and schemes against him take shape.  On Maundy Thursday we witness his arrest.  On Good Friday his torture and execution, his total defeat.  And then, on Saturday we wait...wait...wait for the grain to germinate and sprout, for that which has died to come back.  Finally, on Easter Sunday, we experience the crowning victory.

   But this is a week of paradox and irony.  While the hopeful, expectant crowds cheered and hailed their king on Palm Sunday, when Easter comes, the Victor is greeted by small quiet groups, by astounded and confused hangers on who had given up hope.

   This is the week in which we are confronted by the reality of who we are as human beings, and who God is in Christ.  The crowds greeted Jesus because they thought he would give them what they wanted: political solutions, military solutions, economic solutions, systems, power, prosperity.  By Friday, where were the crowds?  Indeed, where were his followers, his inner circle?  Gone.  Scattered.  Hiding.  Saving their hides.

   This is the week when I have to ask myself the unnerving question: where would I have been?  Oh yes, on Palm Sunday I would have been there, cheering, welcoming the one who was going to solve all my problems.  But when the going got dangerous, where would I have been?  Gone.  Hiding.  Saving my hide.

   But here is the great paradox, the irony.  Jesus rises from the dead and appears to all those who abandoned him.  He does not say, "Where were you when I needed you?"  He does not say, "Now you're gonna have to work it off," or "You're gonna have to prove your loyalty to me."  No, he says, "Peace be with you."  Pure grace.  Total love.  Complete acceptance and embrace.

   But that "Peace be with you," if we just jump from Palm Sunday to Easter, looses a lot of its power for our psyches, for the way in which we process and take things into our consciousness and subconscious.  This is a "Peace be with you" that comes as a paradox, as an irony.  It comes to us  in spite of who we are, in spite of our fickle loyalties, in spite of our lax devotion, in spite of our oh too comfortable version of Christianity.

   I leave you with a challenge.  This week, not for Jesus' sake, because he does not need your piety or your devotion, but for your own sake, set aside the temptation to slide from Palm Sunday to Resurrection without facing the harsh days in between.  Walk the story.  Live in it.  Be with Jesus as he washes his disciples' feet and breaks bread with them one last time.  Accompany him to the cross, and stand with the four lonely figures who stayed close by, the last of his true friends in his lowest hour.  Then lay him in the tomb and wait...wait...wait.

   Then, when Easter comes... you'll see.  Amen.

      The story of Jesus is also a story of loyalty and betrayal, and as we approach Good Friday that element of the story begins to come to the foreground of our readings.  Today's reading from John's Gospel shows us the first cracks in the loyalty of Jesus' followers.  John, the narrator, accuses Judas of being a thief.  He implies that Judas only scolded Mary for wasting money because he would have been the real recipient of that money.  The theme of the betrayal of the master by an insider has become a major theme in western literature and story telling, at least in part because this account of the betrayal of Jesus by Judas figures so prominently in the story of Jesus.

   Let's step back for a moment and see what we can learn from the broader context of this story of betrayal.  First, it is important to note that this same story is also found in Matthew (26:6-3) and Mark (14:3-9), but in slightly different forms.  In Matthew and Mark, Jesus is in Bethany, but his host is identified, not as Lazarus whom he raised from the dead, but as Simon the leper.  Second, the woman who anoints Jesus' feet is not Mary the sister of Lazarus, but an unnamed woman.  Third, in Matthew, all the disciples scold the woman, while in Mark it says that, "...some were there who said to one another in anger, why was this ointment wasted in this way?"

   So why the disparity in these accounts around the identity of Lazarus and/or Simon?  Clearly the event takes place just before Jesus' entry into Jerusalem; clearly it takes place in the town of Bethany.  I think we are talking about the selfsame incident, but the people are being identified differently.  It is quite possible that Lazarus, which is the Greco-Latin form of Eliezer, was known by different names, a practice still common in the Middle East today, and one which has given the antiterrorism authorities of western nations no end of grief.  Matthew's and Mark's Simon of Bethany is called a leper, and perhaps Lazarus was this same leper and died of complications from his disease.  It has been suggested that John knew these people personally, while Matthew and Mark did not, so in John's account they are identified in greater detail, and in Matthew's and Mark's accounts their identities are glossed over to get to the point of the story.

   In Matthew's and Mark's accounts the point of the story seems to be to link this event to Judas' decision to betray Jesus to the authorities.   For the sake of comparison, Luke (22:3), who does not include this incident, simply says that Satan entered into Judas, moving him to betray Jesus.  In this, Luke seems to be making a reference back a phrase earlier in his Gospel, just after Jesus had succeeded in fending off the devil's three temptations in the wilderness, where it says that the devil "departed from him until an opportune time."  So Luke sees this betrayal by Judas as the opportune time which the devil was waiting for, and therefore primarily a Satanic plot to undo Jesus.

   Going back to John's personal knowledge of these people, the ancient tradition of the Church says that Simon the leper was actually the father of both Lazarus and Judas; that Judas was actually the eldest brother of Lazarus and his two sisters Mary and Martha.  When both Judas and his father Simon are referred to in the Gospels as "Iscariot",the ancient tradition says that this comes from the Aramaic "ish Kerioth" meaning "man of Kerioth," a village in Judea.  A person would be called by a town name if they had moved to a new town, so it would make sense for someone from Kerioth living in Bethany to be known as "Simon, that guy from Kerioth."  It is possible that Judas was born in Kerioth, before the family moved, while his siblings were born in Bethany, and are therefore identified as being from Bethany.  This adds an interesting twist to Judas.  While all the other disciples were from Galilee, Judas was the outsider in that group in that he was from Judea.

   One well known scholar has suggested about the way Jesus taught, that he was essentially promoting the old, simple, rural piety of Galilee over against the sophisticated and strict religious practice of the Jerusalem elite.  His Galilean followers would have felt at home in Jesus' way of talking about things, but Judas would always have felt a little on edge about the Master's peculiar ways.

   But John is ambiguous about Judas' motivations for betraying Jesus.  On the one hand he speaks disparagingly about Judas as a thief, but on the other hand he, like Luke, tends to see this as a piece of spiritual warfare, saying things like, "during the supper, when the devil had already put into the heart of Judas, son of Simon Iscariot, to betray him," (13:2) and "after Judas received the piece of bread, Satan entered into him." (13:27)  But then again, earlier in John's Gospel (6:70), Jesus says to his disciples, "Did I not choose you, the twelve?  Yet one of you is a devil."  This ambiguity would make sense from someone who knew the family personally.  He would have a more complex picture of these people as people, and he would be more angry at the betrayer than someone who stood at a greater emotional distance from him.

   So let's try to pull the picture together a bit.  Why does anyone betray anyone else, especially their mentor or teacher?  I remember out of my own life, a time when I had a professor whom I simply adored.  He possessed a wealth of knowledge about all the things I was interested in, and many more things I had never heard of.  You could say that for a time I was one of his groupies, one of his inner circle of favourite students.  But then a series of incidents occurred that soured my relationship with this professor.  He was particularly unkind toward a friend of mine who was working as an assistant in this professor's department.  As my friend cried on my shoulder about this, I could no longer see my favourite professor in the same light.  The ease with which I had interacted with him disappeared, and I began to keep my distance.

   I think sometimes we betray or turn against our mentors when they cease to live up to our expectations of them, especially when we have made them into something they can never really be.  Our betrayal of them says as much about us as it does about them.

   Matthew and Mark link Judas' decision to betray Jesus to an incident over money and giving to the poor.      This seems to have been the straw that broke the camels back, at least as these two Gospel writers see it.  Certainly, if Judas was as intense about things as he seems to have been, someone who wholeheartedly took up Jesus' solidarity with the poor, especially if he saw it as a program for social or political reform, would be deeply troubled by what would seem to be Jesus indulging himself in a bit of narcissism.  Moreover, Jesus had been saying for some time now that he would have to die and then rise from the dead.  The Gospel writers all agree that the disciples did not understand what Jesus meant, and it may well be that this seeming incoherence and obtuseness by the Master created a certain amount of dissatisfaction or alienation in Judas.

   This leads us to another theory about the meaning of Iscariot.  Modern scholars have noted that there was a group of extreme nationalist zealots in the time of Jesus called the "Sikarioi" or "dagger men."  The word is a construction on a type of Roman dagger called a "sicarius" which in Greek is rendered "sikarion."  A member of this group would be a "sikariote."  These people went around assassinating high profile Romans and high profile Jews who collaborated with the Romans.  It may well be that Barabbas, who is called a murderer in the Gospels, was also a Sikariote, and was being held to be crucified because this would have been the normal punishment for this kind of treasonous activity.  It may well be that Judas and other Sikarioi conspired to frame Jesus and to free their own.  The possibilities are many.

   But the words Sikariote and Iscariot are not quite the same.  From this, many modern scholars suggest that early on a scribal reversal crept into the texts turning "Sikariote" to "Iskariot."  Perhaps it was accidental, as those who lived outside of Palestine or who lived after the facts would not have recognized the word, especially after this group ceased to exist; or perhaps it was an intentional change, to suppress Jesus' revolutionary connexions, in order to ingratiate Christianity to the Romans.  The problem with this latter suggestion is that it would actually be in Jesus' favour to have been betrayed or framed by a Sikariote, because this would put Jesus on the same side as the Romans.

   Whatever the mechanism or reason behind the reversal of the first two letters, Judas is seen by many today to have been a member of this underground group, or the son of someone who was, because his father is also called Simon the Iscariot (for which many would now read, Simon the Sikariote).  Maybe father and son were both involved in this political assassination movement.  With this in mind, it is easy to imagine that someone steeped in the desire to throw the Roman occupiers from the homeland would become impatient with a Messiah who disowned violence and murder, even for the most holy cause.

   I think that Jesus was pursuing a kind of middle way which was neither outright collaboration with the Romans, nor was it an intentional working against the Romans.  I think that the way of Jesus was a simple and radical obedience to God.  Jesus, in the most literal sense, held nothing to be more important than God.  The problem with most movements or religions which say that for them nothing is more important than God, is that they may say the words, but their actions betray other priorities.

       For example, when a religious group destroys and kills in the name of total devotion to God, they betray the fact that they are really devoted above all to creating a power monopoly for themselves.  They cannot abide any rival ideologies, and so they must kill and destroy in order to assert themselves and eliminate the competition.  Jesus did quite the opposite.  He told his followers to turn the other cheek, to give more than the occupiers demanded, to share with all, to forgive all, to pray for all.  The way of Jesus is not a way of power, but a way of surrender.  It is the most radical of all transformations, because literally nothing is more important than God.

   On the other side, many religious groups see themselves as the upholders of order and decency.  They walk hand in hand with the powers of their society to keep people in their place.  This is the primary social function of all established religions.  Jesus went against the grain of the religious establishment.  He flaunted their laws when they contradicted his simple, literal, complete surrender to God.  What he knew was that God was seeking the lost, God was healing the broken, God was showing mercy and compassion to outcasts.  If one of the laws got in the way of this, he simply ignored it.

   This middle way was bound to get him into trouble eventually.  He would alienate both the powers of order and decency, and the powers of revolution and overthrow.  Appropriately, then, in the Gospel narratives, we see exactly this.  He is betrayed by those who want an uprising, and by those who want to keep a lid on an uprising.  His middle way became a narrow way on which he was captured and crushed.

   Today it is as difficult as then to walk the middle way of Jesus.  To do so always means to be caught between the pressure to conform and the pressure to rebel.  The radical nature of the middle way of Jesus, so difficult for us to wrap our minds around, and more difficult still to surrender our hearts to, means that we all have the potential to betray the Master because he is either too revolutionary for us to assimilate into our way of living, or he is too passive or restrained for our urgency to change the world.  Of all the things, the hardest is always to let God be God, because really, we want God to do our bidding and to get other people to be how we want them to be.  We betray our mentors when they do not conform to our expectations, and God will never conform to us.  Rather, we must conform to God.  Amen.

      The Parable of the Prodigal Son, which we heard today from Luke's Gospel, is probably one of the most famous and one of the most beloved parables from the four Gospels.  It is a story that functions on many different levels, so, although the traditional title for it is "The Parable of the Prodigal Son," other possible titles for it could be:

1) "The Prodigal Father," because the father in the story behaves in a way that is contrary to the normal way fathers would have been expected to handle this situation in those days;

2) "The Two Lost Sons," because each of the sons is "lost" in his own way, and needs the father's love to "find" them;

3) "Here We Go Again," because the Old Testament has many stories of brotherly hatred, and this one seems to stand in that tradition;

4) "Bowen Family Systems Theory in Parable Form," because this story portrays very nicely certain dynamics of that theory of relationships;

5) "Money and Inheritance Destroy Another Family," for reasons anyone who has ever witnessed a family self-destruct over these matters will understand.

   So, this parable of Jesus is rich and multilayered, always opening itself up to the reader in new ways, depending on where the reader is coming from, on what issues the reader is facing, and on the reader's understanding of the broader themes and symbols of Scripture.  Any one of the possible titles I suggested could be a sermon unto itself, and no single sermon, I think, could ever exhaust the possibilities of this story.  From this perspective, it is truly the greatest of Jesus' parables.

   For our context here, I would like to look at this parable from another point of view, from a point a view which would give to this story the title, "An Insider and An Outsider in the Household of God."

   Jesus' ministry was very much a ministry to the outsiders in his society.  Jesus taught and healed and cast out demons usually, in one way or another, bringing people in from the fringes of the society, and restoring them to their communities.  Lepers were cleansed and brought back into the community.  Demoniacs were freed and restored to their families.  Sight was restored, hearing restored, speech restored, mobility restored, not simply as a service to individuals, but rather as an act of bringing the community together.  Zacchaeus was reconciled to his neighbours.  Lazarus was restored to his family.

   At the same time, Jesus confronted those whose rules and pretensions to holiness created division in the community.  The religious leaders of the day set up so many rules that only people of means and leisure, who were not engaged in certain professions, such as tanning, dung gathering, or shepherding, could live up to them.  Here is where Jesus fought and pushed and decried.  Why?  Not because he hated rules, but because the rules caused divisions in the community.

   This "Parable of the Brothers at Odds with Each Other" (there's another good title) or of "An Insider and An Outsider in the Household of God" seems to also speak to this.  When the younger brother returns, shamed and humbled, the older brother resents the special treatment he gets.  The older brother would probably like to see some sort of punishment.  It is in our nature, when we have worked hard at something and see someone else getting the reward, to feel resentment.  But the father in the story turns the logic around.  Instead of feeling sorry for yourself, that you worked so hard and someone else is reaping the benefits, why not be glad that someone who was lost has been found; that someone who was dead has come alive again?

   The inside group in any congregation is the group of those who work hard.  They -- we -- put in time, energy, effort, money, to keep the organization going, to keep the programs going, to make the church function.  It is a dangerous and natural temptation for those on the inside to feel resentment toward those on the outside, those who don't seem to be quite as -- what word shall I use? -- committed.  Jesus pleads with us in this story, through the person of the father, to let go of this, to lay it aside, and rather to rejoice every time someone comes alive, gets interested, shows up at the door, becomes present in this place.

   The flip side of this is a phenomenon I have often observed.  There are many people "out there" who, for many different and complicated reasons, left the church, drifted away, or even felt pushed out.  Sometimes they make an effort to come back, but they feel so much shame and inadequacy, that even the most gracious and heartfelt welcome is not enough to keep them coming back.  Like the younger son, they feel as though they can't measure up, can't get it together like those church people.  Maybe they have struggled with alcohol or drug addiction.  Maybe their family life seems like a shambles.  Maybe they, like the younger son, squandered their financial resources, and feel shame for this.  They may project their sense of failure by feeling resentment toward those "phony people who go to church".   But isn't every act of blame a subtle admission of one's own inner demons?  Doesn't Jesus need to cast out these demons to restore us to the community of faith?

   In this story Jesus has a plea for these folks.  Please don't let your sense of shame or inadequacy stop you from coming back.  Please, reconnect, first with the father figure, with God, with the Spirit, with Jesus, and then let the Spirit of God, let the presence of Jesus in your life, do the work of reconnecting you with the others.

   It's a two way street, and both sides of the equation need a lot of nudging and cajoling from God.  Find yourself on that spectrum and hear the part of the message meant for you.  If you're on the inside, be open and embracing and rejoice with those who cautiously test the waters.  If you're on the outside, let God welcome you in, let the Spirit be your way in, let Jesus bridge the divide caused by your own sense of inadequacy.  No wound of the heart is too great for Jesus the healer to make whole.  No demon of your self-perception is too powerful for Jesus to cast out.

   We are all, in our own ways, lost.  May God's love find us and bring us back.  Amen.

      In today's reading from I Corinthians, Paul has the line, "...God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness."  In the Gospel reading, Jesus says, "...unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did."  In both cases, the reference is to a set of events that took place in the past where people perished.  Paul refers to events in the book of Exodus, and Jesus refers to something that happened in the near past.  In both cases they are using the events as examples to teach and warn.

   The idea that God punishes people by causing them to perish was once a standard part of Christian thinking, but today, especially in the prosperous western countries, has fallen out of favour.  We recoil from the idea of a God who punishes and causes us to perish.  Rather, we imagine a God who is loving, supportive, and stands with us through tough times.  Many people will say about the punishing God, "if that's how God is, I don't believe in God," or something along those lines.

   I have this theory that our image of God is strongly shaped by our image of parenting.  People who see the parental role primarily as one of disciplinarian, enforcer, and corrector, will also see God in this way.  People who see the parental role primarily as providing material needs, but otherwise letting the kids do their thing, will also see God in this way.  People who see the parental role primarily as teaching, guiding, imparting knowledge, and preparing for something, will also see God in this way.  Add to this our love or hate for the way we were raised, our own embrace or rejection of our parents' way of raising us, and there are bound to be a wide variety of views of God.

   The Bible seems to have all of these kinds of images of God in it, and I wonder if that's because so many different people were the witnesses and testifiers who wrote down and interpreted their times and experiences in what we now call the Bible, that we also have all the various parenting approaches represented.

   But of course, there's more here than mere parenting approach.  Our image of God is also shaped by our life experiences, and -- just as importantly, our interpretation of those life experiences.  As the saying goes, "biography is theology," when we remember that biography is an interpretation of a life; it is not the life itself.  So, we all have our lives, but we all put a slant on those lives, emphasizing some things, de-emphasizing others.  This all shapes how we imagine God.

   But of course, there's more than life experience too.  Our image of God is also shaped by what we know or think we know about the functioning of the universe.   Here we are often shaped by the theories we espouse and work with to make sense of things.  In the time of Jesus and Paul, they believed the universe to be a relatively small affair: the earth was surrounded by spheres where dwelt heavenly beings who ran the whole thing at God's command.  We now know the universe to be something close to infinite, filled with endless variety and with bizarre and unexpected phenomena.  This all shapes how we see God.

   So, I struggle with the God who punishes and causes us to perish for the following three reasons:

1) I would not punish or cause my child to perish in this way.  Rather, I would seek to work through my relationship to my child to love him and win his loyalty to me.  So I see God working this way too.

2) My life, materially speaking, has been relatively easy and crisis free.  My extended family, however, was drastically affected by the calamities of World War II; many died; relationships were strained or broken for practical and political reasons.  And yet, out of the chaos, I see that good has emerged.  When family were wanting, neighbours and friends acted as spiritual guides.  All this influences how I see God working in my life, and by extension, how I imagine God to be working in others' lives.

3) When I was about nine years old, my mother started taking me on a regular basis to the Griffith Observatory and Planetarium, where we would take in shows.  This went on well into my teen years.  We even enrolled in a course on the Theory of Relativity.  This corresponds roughly to the time when I became involved in religious things under the influence of neighbours of my grandmother's.  So my view of the universe is big and informed by modern theories of physics and cosmology.  I read the Bible through this lens.  At the same time, I have always loved history, and already as an nine year old would go to the public library on a regular basis and lose myself in the history section, especially the ancient history section, where I absorbed what I could about ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome, and the Minoan civilization.  I also loved dinosaurs and ancient mammals like mastodons and saber toothed tigers, which were well represented at the La Brea Tar Pits in L.A.  So my thinking and faith were, early on, shaped by relativity and evolution, and I saw that human history was a sort of relative developmental process.

   All this is to say that I do not read the Bible as a blank slate, and it seems likely that no one does.  We all bring ourselves as lenses to the task, and so we either resonate with or react to various parts of the Bible based on who we are.  We also reinterpret for ourselves.  Again, as a teen, I quickly reinterpreted the Big Bang to be the moment when God said "Let there be light," and reinterpreted the evolutionary process leading up to early humans as being sort of "between the lines" of those early chapters of Genesis.  I made different ideas and theories fit together, because somehow, I thought, they must.  Where I got that idea from, I don't know.  Maybe because my extended family was so disjointed and shattered, and yet still formed a family, that at a subtle level I imagined the universe the same way.

   So, today's readings do not fit my personal comfort zone for thinking about God.  But is God confined to my personal comfort zone?  Am I the measure of God?  No, of course not.  None of us is the measure of God.  So I have to be careful not to reject something just because I don't like it.  Ultimately, our task is to let God be God in our lives.  God, if we let God be God, will surprise us and will also disturb us (remember: it's a big universe with lots of weird things in it).

   When it comes to these texts which trouble us, I think we do ourselves a disservice if we simply reject them or ignore them.  Rather, I think we have to let them disturb us.  We have to let the hidden wisdom of them seep through the cracks of our personal defenses.  Only when we let ourselves be stretched and challenged beyond our comfort zones can God begin to shape us into someone more, toward something beyond.  Why do I say this?  Because somehow this all has to fit together, doesn't it?  Amen.

      "Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us.  For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you with tears [Paul is here weeping for them; he writes with compassion about them].  Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is shame; their minds are set on earthly things.  But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ."

   So writes Paul to the little group of Christians in the city of Philippi.  I have long struggled with the relationship of morality to Christianity.  For many people the two are the same.  Christianity equals morals, and morals are the reason for Christianity.  Many people who bring their children to church or send them to Sunday School say things like, "Church is the place where kids learn positive values and good morals."

   But this picture puts the cart before the horse.  Christianity is not first and foremost about morals, it is rather first and foremost an encounter with Jesus; or to put it more precisely: Christianity begins in us when God reaches out to us in and through Jesus Christ, and we are confronted by Jesus Christ. The morals or ethics grow out of that encounter, they do not exist on their own, and they certainly don't come first.

   Those who grow up in the church have the peculiar disadvantage that they may get all the moral teaching and never meet Jesus.  I think most of the many millions who were raised by Christian parents and have simply turned their back on the church had this experience.  They got all the rules but never had that encounter with Jesus.  So, they looked around and realized the truth: Christianity does not have a monopoly on being good.  In fact, many non-Christians are better at being good than many Christians.  When morality becomes the main reason or purpose for Christianity, Christinaity becomes a dead, hollow shell of religious rules, and it is better that we all just walk away from it.

   But Christianity is first and foremost an encounter with Jesus Christ, God-with-us.  This was Paul's experience.  Paul was Mr. Hypermoral Observant Defender of Decent Religion, when Jesus confronted him on the road and said, "Why do you persecute me?"

   Here's what Paul says about all his moral goodness, earlier in this letter to the Philippians: "If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more... (for) as to righteousness under the law, (I was) blameless.  Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.  More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.  For his sake I have suffered loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ, and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousnes from God based on faith.  I want to know Christ and the power of his reusrrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead" (Philippians 3:4,6-10).

   Notice how Paul sweeps aside the rules.  There are no more rules.  The morality that is a check list of "do's" and "don't's" is gone.  All that remains is to know Christ and his cross.  This is the source and content of the new morality, of the way of being which can rightly be called Christianity.  Think about that.  Whenever we have moral debates, about what is acceptable and what is not, if we turn to the Bible for rules, we have missed the point and have once again become dead under the law.  Rather, we have to do one thing: look to Jesus, seek him out in prayer, attend to his presence, expect him to confront us and confront our self-generated righteousness, confront our goodness that we want to impose on others and hear him say: "Why do you persecute me?"  All we can do is surrender ourselves to Christ and to the cross.

   So what does this morality look like, this morality which arises out of knowing Jesus?  Paul holds himself up as the example.  "Follow my example, immitate me," he says in several places in Philippians.  Unfortunately, unlike the Philippians, we don't know Paul personally, so we can't watch him.  However, we do have some of his suggestions, and more importantly we have examples out of the life of Jesus.

   In Philippians, Paul concludes his discourse with these words: "Whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.  Keep on doing the things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you" (Philippians 4:8-9).

   Recently I came across a wonderful description of this new life in Christ, this new morality that arises out of that encounter with Jesus, as opposed to the morality that is merely the following of rules and avoiding forbidden things. It comes from a letter written by one Mathetes, to one Diognetus.  The author of the letter may well have been a disciple of Paul.  He would have written this letter sometime in the early 100's, personally I would put it right around the 100, based on how old he would have been when he wrote the letter.  Diognetus, the recipient of the letter, is a Pagan Roman who is wanting to learn more about Christianty.  Listen to this:

"For the Christians are distinguished from other people neither by country, nor language, nor the customs they observe... but, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life.  They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners.  As citizens, they share in all responsibilities with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners.  Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers.  They marry, as do all others; they beget children; but they do not harm their offspring.  They share meals in common, but they are not common.  They are in the flesh, but do not live after the flesh.  They pass their days on earth, but are citizens of heaven.  They obey the laws of the land, and at the same time surpass these laws by their lives.  They love all people, and yet are persecuted by all.  They are unkown and condemned put to death, and yet are restored to life.  They are poor yet make many rich; they are in lack of all things, and yet abound in all; they are dishonoured, yet in their very dishonour they are glorified.  They are ill spoken of, and yet they are justified; they are reviled, and yet they bless.  They are insulted, and yet they repay insult with honour.  They do good, and yet are punished as evil doers.  When they are punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life... to sum up in one word -- what the soul is in the body, that are Christians in the world." (Epistle to Diognetus, chapters V & VI)

   Here we still see the vision of a life of following Jesus in which the life of Jesus is the source of the ethic or morality, rather than a list of things to do and things to avoid.  It is about bringing blessing and goodness into every circumstance.  It is about responding to evil with good.  It is about being the suffering servant of Isaiah, about changing the energy of a place or a situation with grace, love, embrace, hospitality, and generosity.  It is about a self-understood role of being the soul of the world, and in this way embodying even now the struggles of Jesus.

   Whenever our morality becomes narrow, judgmental, finger-pointing, rigid, self-satisfied, or produces feelings of superiority or disdain for others, it has likely lost its connexion to Jesus.  It has become just a morality, but it is no longer a Christ-ian morality.  Like Paul, we could say of it, that it is all rubbish compared to knowing Christ.  Or, picking up on Mathetes, we have ceased to be the soul of the world and have become just the world.  Amen.

      "A sower went out to sow..." begins the parable which is our Gospel reading for today.  A few verses later, Jesus unpacks the parable by saying that the seed being spoken of here is "the word of God" and that the path, the rock, the thorns, and the good soil each stand for people whose hearts are in various states of preparedness to receive the seed of the word of God.

   I am a visual thinker.  I learn and remember things by seeing pictures in my mind.  These parables are wonderfully suited for someone who has my learning style, because they teach in pictures.  But I am also aware that the particular picture I may construct in my mind may also get in the way of what Jesus was really getting at.

   Nowadays, when we hear the phrase "word of God," the first picture that comes to mind is of a Bible.  The Canadian Bible Society uses the picture of a sower sowing seed as its logo, under which are the words, "Canadian Bible Society".  The immediate association is that the seed of the sower from Jesus' parable equals the Bible.

   But there is one problem with this.  When Jesus told this parable, there was no Bible, at least not in the sense that we now know it.  The New Testament had not been written yet, and what we call the Old Testament had not yet been assembled into any standardized volume.  Instead, there were many different texts, accepted or rejected to varying degrees as sacred by the many different sects of Judaism of that time.

   When Jesus said that the seed represented the word of God, he certainly did not mean a book.  In fact, read closely and you will notice that Jesus says each time that the people represented by the path or the rock or the thorns or the good soil "hear" the word and then either keep it in their hearts or do not.  Jesus is talking about something that is proclaimed, that is spoken, delivered live by a living person.  I would say that Jesus has in mind very much what happened with the ancient prophets: that the word of God was the inspired utterance of certain people sent by God to the people.  Furthermore, I think that Jesus sees himself very much as one of these prophets, especially in the tradition of Isaiah, because Jesus seems to have had a particular affinity to the work of this prophet.

   So what is this word of God?  I think in Jesus' use of this phrase, it is his proclamation: repent, that is, return to God, because God's reign is here, it is among you and within you; and what does God's reign look like?  It's made of healing the sick, binding up the broken, bringing in the outsiders, freeing those who are held captive by spiritual or earthly powers.  This reign of God is ushered in by leaving off from violence, by forgiving the offenses of others, and always, by turning unwaveringly to God.

   This distinction, between understanding the word of God as a book and understanding the word of God as a message is important.  It helps us guard against something called "Bibliolatry" or worshipping the Bible.  Even later, when Paul commends the written word to his pupil Timothy, he speaks very broadly about the role of these written texts.  He writes, "All scripture inspired by God is also useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness..." (II Timothy 3:16)  He says this just after having emphasized to Timothy how he (Timothy) had learned by observing Paul's way of life, urging him to "continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it..." (II Timothy 3:10-14).  My point is that Paul emphasizes the personal proclamation in his own life, and refers to the writings as supplementary, but of course very useful.

   Now some of this may arise out of the reality of a society in which most people could not read, and in which texts, which all had to be copied by hand, were expensive and hard to come by; in other words, a still largely oral society relying on oral traditions and teaching by example over what we would now call "book learning".  Nevertheless, I think what I am describing is a truer picture of what Jesus and Paul are doing, what they have in mind, and what the reality of their world is.

   Bibliolatry is giving to written texts the honour and worship that is only rightly given to God.  The word is built out of two Greek words: biblios, which means book, and latreia, which is a special word used in Greek translations of the Bible to refer to the worship that is properly directed toward God.  It is too easy for us to approach the bible with such reverence, that we make it into God, rather than remember that it is a tool, a symbol, a witness and testimony to God.  The Bible points to God, but it is not the word of God.  This is not a new distinction, and Luther was merely echoing earlier teachers when he compared the Bible to the manger in which the Christ Child lay or the donkey on which Jesus rode into Jerusalem: in other words, that the Bible is a vehicle for God to come to us.

   In the context of our theme for today, this is very important to remember.  Too often we confuse the distribution of Bibles and the teaching of the Bible with the real word of God which is made concrete in our lives.  The word of God, as Jesus seems to have meant it, is lived, is embodied, is proclaimed.  Paul also seems to be moving in this direction when he emphasizes the personal example of his life as the inspiration for Timothy's faith.

   This means that it is urgent for us to be proclamation in our lives, in our way of living.  It is important for us to understand ourselves as living witnesses, modelling something for the world.  Faith is something that is lived.  It bears fruit in one's life.  It shines out to others like the lamp on the lamp stand or the city on the hill, in other parables of Jesus.  Again, Jesus said that those who hear him are "the salt of the earth" and the leaven in the loaf.  Then he poses the challenge: if salt has lost it saltiness, what can salt it? (Matthew 5:13-16).  Later in this same section (the Sermon on the Mount) Jesus says that those who hear his words and do them are like the wise man who builds his house on a firm foundation, and those who hear them but do not do them are like the foolish man who builds his house on a shaky foundation. (Matthew 7:24-27)

   We are planting seeds by our actions, seeds in the minds and hearts of others.  They will grow, but what kind of fruit will they bear?  Are we planting seeds of God's reign, seeds of Jesus' message?  Or are we planting other kinds of seeds?  Does it seem clear that God is our highest good and highest loyalty, or do we seem rather to be faithful to other kinds of things or ideas?  Are we planting seeds of the reign of God, seeds of healing, reconciliation, forgiveness, and love for those pushed to the margins of our society?  What seeds are we planting?  What will come of them? Amen