Homily, SMMCC
3rd Easter, and Earth Day, 4/18/21
 
Acts 4: 32-35
A Reading from A New Climate for Theology, by Sallie McFague
A Ute Prayer
1 John 5: 1-6
Mk 16: 13-14; Lk 24: 35-48
 
 
We are all One.
There once was a man named Lawrence Anthony, who lived in Zululand, S. Africa, and learned to calm traumatized elephants. He devoted his whole life to studying elephants, and other animals, and started several huge animal reserves. Once, when a herd of elephants became endangered by poachers because they kept escaping from whatever enclosure they were in, Anthony managed to calm the matriarch elephant, and saved all 9 in the herd from destruction. When Anthony died of a sudden heart attack, two elephant herds from his reserve spontaneously walked twelve hours to stand vigil around his house, similar to the way they mourn when one of their own number dies. After two days, they walked away, back into the bush. Scientists have no idea how they sensed Anthony had died.
We are all one.
After Jesus died and was raised, the apostles pooled their resources, and devoted all their time to preaching Christ’s living presence among them.
We are all one.
God has blessed us with an unbelievably complex and beautiful planet. We breathe oxygen, and give off carbon dioxide. Trees and plants breathe carbon dioxide, and give off oxygen. Every breath we take is a moment in the cycle of interrelatedness of all the plants, animals, and other creatures God has lovingly placed in this sphere of abundance we call Earth.
We are all one.
Indigenous wisdom is that if we are quiet and open our eyes and our ears, the Earth can teach us: humility, caring, courage, acceptance, selflessness, kindness, and many other truths. We depend on the earth, and the earth depends on us, for protection.
We are all one.
The love of God is this: that we fulfill the desire of God’s heart for the world.
We are all one.
Jesus, the Christ, came and lived among us as a human, possessing bones and flesh, hands, and feet, speaking, and eating, celebrating the beauty and complexity of the plants, animals, seas, and deserts around him, and forming relationships with many people. He was executed for daring to teach that God’s love for us is limitless, that God cherishes every single being on the Earth, and that our job was to love and protect one another, people, creatures, and planet, in the same unlimited way. Jesus’ life and his compassionate presence were so vivid to those who knew him, that they knew that it could never be extinguished, but would be alive with them, and for all generations after them, through all eternity. And because Jesus was alive, and we are all one, we can be alive, forever with the Christ, with the Earth’s Creator and with the Spirit of their eternal love, through every age, forever.
We are all one.
 

Holy Thursday, 4/1/21
 
Exodus 12: 1-8, 11-14
Ps. 107, Our Blessing Cup
1 Cor 11: 23-26
John 13: 1-17, 31, 33-35

​By Helen Weber-McReynolds, RCWP
            We Catholics tend to call today Holy Thursday, but many Protestant communities call it Maundy Thursday, I recently learned the reason why. It’s related to the word mandate- mandatum in Latin, translated “commandment,” because of Jesus’ words in the Gospel we just heard- “I give you a new commandment. Love one another as I have loved you.” Jesus was about to perform the ultimate act of love, for all of us, and gave us all a mandate at the Last Supper to love one another in the same way.

We find ourselves in a highly symbolic moment on this particular Maundy Thursday. Our situation tonight in the midst of a pandemic spurred at least in part by climate change is uniquely appropriate to the stories foundational to our celebration of Holy Thursday. There are some Old Testament scholars who conclude that the Exodus story is symbolic of a slave revolt against the cruel Egyptian Empire, touched off by an ancient catastrophic climate event which created its own public health emergency. They theorize that an aberrant El Nino Southern oscillation brought unseasonable warming to Egypt, causing a red algal bloom which poisoned the waters of the Nile. This killed fish and drove frogs onto dry land, causing insects to proliferate, which then infected cattle and people with various diseases. In other words, “a cascade of arthropod-caused and –born diseases,” as hypothesized by an article in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine.
        
    Jesus found himself immersed in a resistance movement against the tyrannical oppressive Roman Empire. In fact this story of people trying to escape exploitation by corrupt government had been repeating itself again and again throughout human history, and continues to do so today. Jesus stood up for those most singled out for abuse by the Romans, because they were Jewish, women, blind, or lame. The Realm of God Jesus preached was, like all apocalyptic movements, an ideal of equity, freedom, and mutual social support. It was and is a goal to shoot for, and an ideal of how to leave the suffering of injustice behind. That’s why the Exodus of Israel, renewed by Jesus as the “New Moses,” has been adopted by generations of oppressed peoples as a spiritual template, such as by enslaved Africans in the US, and exploited farmers in Latin America.
          
   Tonight’s Scriptures describe so beautifully how Jesus symbolically crystalized two essential elements of the Realm of God. First, he tied a towel around his waist and washed his disciples’ feet, ritualizing his service to us, and how we must pass it on to one another. Then he gathered his friends to break bread, giving us all a liturgy of mutual sharing, and gratitude to God, which can unify us with God and one another, over and over, to strengthen us for our own continuing Exodus journeys. Service and Communion with one another and God, to help us learn how to grow in love and liberate ourselves from human greed and selfishness—that’s what our Holy Thursday readings add up to. A mandate to witness how God loves us, how Jesus made that crystal clear in human flesh, and then to love one another in the same unselfish, non-violent, honest, liberating way.

Readings from the Catholic Comprehensive Lectionary: 
1 Kings 1:28–30, 32–35, 38–40;
Ps. 45; Phil 2:6–11, Mark 11:1–11

by Angela N. Meyer, Deacon, RCWP

Good evening, friends.
As we gather on this Palm Sunday, I would like to invite us into a time of faithful questioning.
Our readings today flood us with a vast variety of images, characters, actions, symbols, and theological movement. My first response in reading them was a sense of feeling overwhelmed. I’m not sure how I feel about them, much less how to preach them!
In the very first sentences of our first reading, we are reminded that King David, the same man who the Bible tells us killed Goliath, wrote many of the Psalms, devoted himself to God (YHWH), and expanded the Israelite community, is a murderous adulterer.
The very first words we hear in our holy Liturgy of the Word remind us that our text and tradition are marked by broken commandments and bloodshed. The King promises the woman he cheated with and killed for that her son, Solomon, will become his heir. This is the same line of succession that Jesus will claim.
(Side note: we know nothing about Bathsheba’s participation in this murderous affair. We know that David covets her, sleeps with her, impregnates her, and has her husband killed so that he can marry her, but for all we know, she had no say or consent in the matter. Though she might have. The storyteller does not think it important to say. God strikes down the child begotten of their affair, and we are told Bathsheba weeps. To console her, David sleeps with her again, and this time; Solomon — the heir, is born. It seems the throne is important to the storyteller; however, we get to say what matters to us. What about Bathsheba?)
Why have our lectionary editors reminded us of David’s transgressions before announcing what might otherwise be most important to us on Palm Sunday: the imagery and events of kingly succession? I think the feminist scholars of the Catholic Comprehensive Lectionary have thrown us an important curveball before highlighting Solomon’s kingly procession.
We might gloss over the violent details by telling ourselves this is a tale that was written some 2500 years ago and adopt the stance of so many Christians that the “New Testament” is superior. It’s not violent like that. Jesus was “better.”
I highly advise against this for multiple reasons. First, it is very anti-Jewish and it leads us to wrongly interpreting Jesus outside of his own Jewish context. Secondly, the New Testament depends entirely on its relationship with the so-called “Old.” Thirdly, the “New Testament” is not without its own contradictions, violence, and flaws. Neither is Catholicism, for that matter. We know that all too well.
Finally, the Gospel writers evoke the powerful cultural memory of Solomon’s ride into Jerusalem to strengthen the claim of Jesus’s kingly inheritance. This connection is intentional.
The people sing “Hosana!,” which means, “Save! We pray,” in Aramaic. “Blessed is the coming reign of the ancestral house of David and Bathsheba!”
As Christians, I’m not sure how well we hear these words. “Blessed is the coming reign of the ancestral house of David and Bathsheba!” They are deep reminders of Jesus’ commitment and intentionality for his own community of people: the Israelites, those we now recognize as Jewish.
And what about the leafy branches that people spread on the road in anticipation and celebration of Jesus’ arrival? The ones the Gospel of John specifies as “palms,” which gives us the name for our holy day? Their use echoes a similar celebration in 1 Maccabees:
On the twenty-third day of the second month,[a] in the one hundred and seventy-first year, the Jews entered the citadel with shouts of praise, the waving of palm branches, the playing of harps and cymbals and lyres, and the singing of hymns and canticles, because a great enemy of Israel had been crushed. (1 Macc 13:51).
Who was the great enemy of the Maccabees? The Seleucid Kings, foreign occupiers not so different from the Romans of Jesus’ time.
As Judaism expanded under the reign of the Maccabees, religious differences emerged among Jews, creating theological and ideological divisions between the Hasmoneans, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees. Those differences eventually led to civil war, which weakened Israel politically and led to its conquest by Rome.
This is the context and setting where Jesus enters the city, riding a mule, with Israelites preparing the way with cloaks, green branches, or palm fronds.
So what do we do with this today? It’s so complicated.
(Breathe.)
When I was younger, I absorbed each reading with the attention of someone aching for the Word of God. I understood the Bible as the ultimate source of Truth, and I expected to only receive goodness and straight truths from it. Because God is Good, and Truth is obvious, right?
It took a long time for me, and I suppose for many if not most of us, to begin to grapple with the reality that the Bible is extremely complex. Not all of its words are “good,” and its “truths” aren’t always easy to discern. Perhaps some words are warnings or calls to conscience. Perhaps some serve as reminders of who we are and where we come from. This can provide us a helpful and holy sense of identity, and also a sense of how we can learn from our ancestors and do better.
As we move into Holy Week, we might ask ourselves who this Jesus is that we celebrate, mourn, and await.
Much of Catholicism has been founded on the idea of Jesus as savior. It has also been a religion that has not only ignored but capitalized on the deep problems of patriarchy and womanizing in the Bible.
And yet, today, we sing “Hosana,” and we await the one who saves. The one who bears witness to the history and traditions of the Israelite people. We do so with love, expectancy, and faith because of and despite the stories and religion that have formed us.
And in just a few days, we will celebrate Jesus’ last supper, which he celebrated on the night of Passover. And I think it is important that we realize how deeply important that overlap is with Jesus’ mission and the intentionality of our Gospel writers.
As my thesis advisor, Nancy Bowen, pointed out to me, if the Gospel writers wanted to announce the death and resurrection of Jesus for the primary purpose of the forgiveness of sins, they could have positioned the Last Supper, death, and resurrection around Yom Kippur, the Jewish feast of atonement.
But they didn’t. Jesus’ passion coincides with Passover, the feast of liberation. Palm Sunday echoes songs of celebration from the Maccabees and associates Jesus with the one who will ascend to reign over Israel, a notion that flies in the face of the Caesar and occupying Roman Empire. It ultimately leads to his death on a cross: the standard Roman torture and execution device.
Again, what do we do with this?
Finding wisdom in the Bible means engaging in deep discernment. I think we are a community that practices this well. It requires less acceptance of “what is written” and more questions of “why” and “how does this really apply?”
Today, we are called to ask: who is this Jesus we welcome into our lives? As we wave our palms, or place them before us, what space are we preparing for God? What space are we preparing for our community?
What violence are we noticing in our own lives, histories, and ways? Who among us (like Bathsheba) is not being fully seen, and what hope do we place before God for liberating change?
I would like to invite us all to pause now, and do our own pondering. Close your eyes if you feel comfortable, or soften your gaze upon something non-distracting, and take a few deep breaths.
Stay in this space a moment, and ask yourself: what am I called to know, learn, feel, or realize, this Palm Sunday?
Hosana! God save us, we pray.
Follow Angela: https://medium.com/she-preaches-homilies-of-a-deacon/kings-affairs-murders-and-palms-a-deconstructionist-homily-for-palm-sunday-651a0bc36f4c