Occupation Forces of Peace

Most mainline Christian denominations observe the last Sunday of November as "Christ the King" Sunday.  It is the last Sunday of the Christian year, which begins again with the first Sunday of the Season of Advent (the four Sundays before Christmas Day.) The scripture readings for Christ the King Sunday are commonly a repeat of the Holy Week passages about Jesus' trial and crucifixion.  In other words, Christ rules over sin by dying.

Not much of Jesus' teachings dwelt on human sinfulness nor on adhering to a set moral code of "Thou shalt/shalt not.". Moral codes crept into Christianity at the time Christianity was usurped by Emperor Constantine.  Constantine latched onto the burgeoning population of the new Christian faith to increase his popularity and strengthen the empire's cohesiveness. A super-sized chunk of what people object to today about Christianity is the fruit of this root in Roman Empire history and colonization. 

So what was the Jesus Ministry about?  Sadly, the majority of Christians don't even know apart from self-serving perpetrators of the religious orders since the Dark Ages. And because they don't know, they sow more about State Religion or Nationalistic Religion (ala Constantine) than they do about how the Rulership of God works through Christ. 

So many races and nations have tried to claim "chosen people" status in a conveniently constructed Godhead that only their little following have "the truth" to tell. But the majesty and glory of God's unending love doesn't have to be taught.  It is accessible through the experience of beauty found in every corner of the earth.  Starting with the angelic beauty spoken of at Jesus' birth, Jesus brought to earth a message of unqualified love, acceptance, and a simple message: "Can't we all just get along?" Can you feel what he feels?

While the rest of the human race has been in a warring arms race nearly from the first day, from Jesus' first day, he was on a peace mission.  He went throughout the near Middle East without bias, healing the wounds of people hurt by exclusion due to illness, birth defects, mental illnesses, and the woes of an agrarian economy that left many out. He brought peace and compassion to a new level that made the religions in the area nervous. He made a big impact, and because he did, he was sometimes associated with revolutionary movements. However, they were, as a rule, too oriented toward violence over love for the gentle beauty of human love.  He recognized humans as social creatures who needed a strong community to survive and thrive. 

The world does not need more domination, violence, and war.  It requires a large occupation force intent on spreading peace, nurturing cooperation, and teaching to hear/see/feel/smell our fundamental completeness in beauty.  Through this approach, all eat, all thrive, all are healed, and all traumas stop being perpetuated.

Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus

It takes a mature spirit and maybe a compassionate heart to look at the world through Jesus' eyes.  Half of this great divide happening in the soul of the United States is precisely the same divide that has existed since before Jesus' time.

Jesus was no stranger to the cruelties and domination of government powers.  No stranger to religious competitions to establish authority and judgment over others.  He knew and witnessed the harm of social class, the abandonment, and disgust for those deemed "sinful, broken, too poor, too lame, or less than."

Jesus' eyes were not pulled into that world. God has always stood with one foot inside and one outside our humanly created reality.  God stands in a universe far, far bigger than our wee bowl of Cheerios problems.  But in Jesus, something dramatic happened in the universe as big as any supernova.  God put that over-lording perspective aside to become human and to experience for God's Self what helplessness felt like against the earthly powers of humankind.  God stuck to that commitment throughout Jesus' life through all the torments that empires and religious authorities put him through unto death.

He came through an earthly mother, born useless and helpless in the borrowed manger of farm animals. He departed useless and abused at the hands of fearful, angry, abusive, and hard-hearted humans.  What do discerning persons capture of the Jesus Love light?  The love he showed his followers, his dinner guests, his disciples, his healed ones, and his huge extended family?

First, this world is busy daily poisoning our eyes, causing them to see opposites of love as virtuous life goals.  There is daily fighting over scraps, clawing in money, and using any means to acquire wealth and power even if it means high body counts across the globe.  Viewed daily, it hardens our hearts, and we shrink into self-comforting, avoiding the hungering looks in the swollen eyes of the useless.  Everyone but those closest to us become useless, commodities, or worse - a monster preying at our doorstep.  Soon we find ourselves cheering for the arrests, the executions, the promises of strong men, and the bombs that take out our fears. 

But we are fearful of our own uselessness.  We are lost because we have lost Jesus' eyes, and he is no longer our way or of use to us.  So we put him on the shelf on a pretty little crucifix as a lingering crossed-finger hope that he might still have a spare blessing even as we vote for his antithesis.

This Advent, may we each experience the healing hands of Jesus touching our eyes and taking from them the scales he took from the blind man's eyes*.  Let us not give up easily because our eyesight will be blurry at first.  But as our vision clears, may we recognize the Risen God with the eternal light of Love that has shown out into the darkness throughout the eons, claiming us, proclaiming our value, our significance, our worthiness, and see our key spot at God's table is not ours only but all of humanity's too. 

*Acts 9:10-19

A Prophet Speaks

When the blast of the ruthless was like a winter rainstorm, the noise of aliens like heat in a dry place, you subdued the heat with the shade of clouds; the song of the ruthless was stilled. Isaiah 25:4a-5

Few things in life are more pitiful than Seattle's rain in winter.  37 degrees and raining - so close to snow but instead torrential cold usually with wind in the face or to turn your umbrella inside out. That bone-chilling cold aptly describes each new cabinet nominee that President-Elect Trump chooses to be in charge of a government that has been a "shining city on a hill for decades." Now it is on a toboggan ride down the steep slope of chaotic hate aimed at half of the USA population - immigrants, women, LGBTQ, the poor, people of color, "liberals," and political opponents - perhaps even just those who might issue a cross word about the President-Elect.

This sort of inhumanity is not something new in human history.  Nearly every empire that ever arose out of dust eventually met its demise soon after its leadership developed a hateful mental illness and began fomenting enemies, stratifying society (us against them), and then imprisoning/deporting/executing the masses. Israel has experienced this cycle repeatedly in its history.  So have many different religious groups, even Christianity, during its period of the Reformation & Inquisitions.

The prophet Isaiah, like all prophets, brings warning alongside hope.  This period in American history is a time of travail, a time of small men reasserting their puny idea of dominance. But dominance and strength are not from power-wielding mad-hatter rants at phantom enemies.  Dominance doesn't come from putting down others.  It comes from building others up so that together, we thrive in a community with all peoples' skills and talents.  The people embraced together for their differences and strengths is the Divine shade that protects a nation from the heat of anger and hostility.  May all people of true faith remember this most basic tenet regardless of doctrine.  May we rise up strong in compassion, powerful in equality and justice, and may reasoned gentleness and healing bind up what is obviously now broken in America.