5th Sunday of Easter, May 10, 2020
Rosemary's Blessing:
We bless these women who mean so much to us:
May wisdom be in your minds and in your thinking.
May wisdom be in your hearts and in your perceiving.
May wisdom be in your mouths and in your speaking.
May wisdom be in your hands and in your working.
May wisdom be in your feet and in your walking.
May wisdom be in your bodies and in your loving.
May wisdom be with you all your days ~ to continue to lead us and inspire us.
Happy Mother’s Day!
Taken from Mother’s Day, May 10, 2020, Sr. Jean Amore, CSJ, Principal, Sacred Heart Academy, Hempstead, New York
(Adapted from Saran Primer Benediction,1636)
Thanks to the Team
Music, Shonda & Ben
Readers, John & Connie, Deacon Mike, & Buddy, the candle blessing
Homily & Eucharistic Prayer, John Cade
The Magic Zoom makers, Mike & Ben & Becky
Mother's Day blessing & Final Blessing, Rosemary & John
Community Finances, May 10, 2020
Expenses: $3035.00
Outreach: $200.00 (often for Souls Harbor, Legacy, etc.)
Thanks, Everybody. Your generosity is humbling.
Readings
Acts of the Apostles, 6, 1-7, 6, 1-7, It is not right for us to serve at table.
Psalm 33, Lord, let your mercy be upon us, as we place our trust in you.
1 Peter , 2, 4-9, The stone the builders have rejected has become the cornerstone
John 14, 1-12, Do not let your hearts be troubled.
How the cheese is made…
Reading 1
A Reading from the Acts of the Apostles
During this time, as the disciples were increasing in numbers by leaps and bounds, hard feelings developed among the Greek-speaking believers—the “Hellenists”—toward the Hebrew-speaking believers, because their widows were being discriminated against in the daily food lines. So the Twelve called a meeting of the disciples. They said, “It wouldn’t be right for us to abandon our responsibilities for preaching and teaching the Word of God to help with the care of the poor. So, friends, choose seven men from among you whom everyone trusts, men full of the Holy Spirit and good sense, and we’ll assign them this task. Meanwhile, we’ll stick to our assigned tasks of prayer and speaking God’s Word.”
The congregation thought this was a great idea. They went ahead and chose—
Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit; Philip; Procorus; Nicanor; Timon; Parmenas; and Nicolas, a convert from Antioch.
Then they presented them to the apostles. Praying, the apostles laid on hands and commissioned them for their task. The Word of God prospered. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased dramatically. Not least, a great many priests submitted themselves to the faith.
Our word for today.
The cheese makers…
Reading 2
A Reading from the First Letter of Peter
Beloved: Welcome to the living Stone, the source of life. The workmen took one look and threw it out; God set it in the place of honor. Present yourselves as building stones for the construction of a sanctuary vibrant with life, in which you’ll serve as holy priests offering Christ-approved lives up to God. The Scriptures provide precedent:
Look! I’m setting a stone in Zion, a cornerstone in the place of honor. Whoever trusts in this stone as a foundation, will never have cause to regret it.
To you who trust him, he’s a Stone to be proud of, but to those who refuse to trust him,
The stone the workmen threw out is now the chief foundation, the cornerstone.
For the untrusting it’s
…a stone to trip over, a boulder blocking the way.
They trip and fall because they refuse to obey, just as predicted. But you are the ones chosen by God, chosen for the high calling of priestly work, chosen to be a holy people, God’s instruments to do this work and speak out for him, to tell others of the night-and-day difference he made for you—from nothing to something, from rejected to accepted.
Our word for today.
And more cheese!
The Lord be with you. A Reading from the Gospel of John
Jesus said to his disciples: “Don’t let this throw you. You trust God, don’t you? Trust me. There is plenty of room for you in my Father’s home. If that weren’t so, would I have told you that I’m on my way to get a room ready for you? And if I’m on my way to get your room ready, I’ll come back and get you so you can live where I live. And you already know the road I’m taking.” Thomas said, “Master, we have no idea where you’re going. How do you expect us to know the road?” Jesus said, “I am the Road, also the Truth, also the Life. No one gets to the Father apart from me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him. You’ve even seen him!”
Philip said, “Master show us the Father; then we’ll be content.” “You’ve been with me all this time, Philip, and you still don’t understand? To see me is to see the Father. So how can you ask, ‘Where is the Father?’ Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I speak to you aren’t mere words. The Father makes each word a divine act.
“Believe me: I am in my Father and my Father is in me. And if you can’t believe that, believe what you see—the works that I do.”
The Good News of John
SPAM??? Not in this Community!
JEWISH LITURGICAL CALENDAR
Major Holy Days
Passover: Celebrates the beginning of the Jewish nation, when the Jews came out of Egypt and began to fulfill their national destiny. [April]
Shavuot: Celebrates Moses receiving the Torah from God on Mt. Sinai. Hebrew for Weeks – 7 Weeks after Passover. Also Pentecost – fifty days after Passover. [End of May or early June]
Rosh Hashanah: Celebrates end of time when Messiah inaugurates kingdom of God on earth. [Late September or early October]
Yom Kippur: Celebrates Day of Atonement, ten days after Rosh Hashanah, and together are called the High Holy Days. [Late September or early October]
Sukkoth: Harvest festival of Jewish year, a kind of Jewish Thanksgiving Day. This one is now overshadowed by bigger celebrations but, at time of Jesus a most anticipated and enjoyed holy day of Jewish year. [November]
Dedication-Hanukkah: Festival of ‘Light’, celebrating how the light of ‘true worship’ was restored to the Temple in 2nd century BCE. [December]
About three months after Dedication-Hanukkah, the Jews were back to the first month of their year (Nisan), and their liturgical cycle started all over again with Passover. The Jewish calendar should not surprise Christians who also follow an annual liturgical cycle of holy days, with the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter and Pentecost.
Please Remember these special people:
For all the medical personnel struggling to treat the tsunami of sick people, in particular, locally, Cindy's staff at Presby, Dallas and at Frisco Presby, the mother of Harper and Betsy, Kendle, working in labor & delivery; ; For Frank having hernia surgery this week; For Joe Hogan with cancer, For Loretta's aunt Alicia; For Ryan, Rosemary's nephew, who had surgery; For Bill Hammond, For Sydney; & For Sir Charlie; Shonda's mom; For Gilberto: for Michelle; For a friend, a neighbor, & a doctor, Karen, with brain cancer; For Rick Turner searching for a kidney donor, Type O neg; For Meredith, cancer free.; For Hue; For John O'Donnell; For Dee, and for her daughter, Lisa; For John Schanot's continued health; For Anthony & Sabrina; For a young man who is suffering from depression; John Cade's mother in law, Kalliopi Piskiouli and Lambrini;
Birthdays: Barb Senter & Monica Froebe
Annicversary: Jessica Bresson & Steve (8th)
The Gospel of Matthew and the Jewish Synagogue—Talk Seven
Take a deep breath; this is my final talk on the Gospel of Matthew and the Jewish Synagogue. We have walked through the gospel of Matthew, discovering that it was written as a liturgical document, created in and for the Jewish synagogue. We have seen how Matthew told the Jesus story against the background of the liturgical year of the synagogue.
We started with Passover, the first festival on the Jewish liturgical calendar, when Jews celebrated the birth of the Jewish nation.
Next came Shavuot or Pentecost. In this celebration the Jews remembered the giving of the law by God to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The major event of being In a covenant relationship with God was the moment they believed that these former slaves of Egypt had been given by God the law of God, known as the Torah. The giving of the Law or Torah, beginning with the Ten Commandments, was when Moses received it and read it to the people, and they agreed to be governed by these laws. Once each year the Jewish people renewed the Sinai covenant in the form of a twenty-four hour vigil, divided into eight three-hour segments. That is how liturgy functions. Psalm 119 was written for this occasion, a hymn to the beauty and wonder of the Law. Matthew presented Jesus as the new Moses, standing on a new mountain, giving the people a new interpretation of the Law. That new interpretation of the Law was the “Sermon on the Mount.” The prophet Isaiah wrote that people would know the kingdom of God was arriving, when they saw the blind receiving sight, the deaf being able to hear, the lame receiving the ability to walk and leap, and the mute being able to speak and sing. For Shavuot Matthew related stories of Jesus accomplishing each of these signs.
Next was Rosh Hashanah. Matthew brings back John the Baptist, as the stand-in for the prophet Elijah who was to prepare the way for the messiah. Like Elijah, John the Baptist was clothed in camel hair with a leather girdle around his waist. Like Elijah he was located in the wilderness and ate a wilderness diet of locusts and honey. The John the Baptist we meet here was not the one of history; here he is the new Elijah, preparing the way for the messiah.
Next was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The word “atonement” first appeared in the book of Exodus, when Moses went up Mt. Sinai to receive from God the Law of Torah, beginning with the Ten Commandments. Moses came down with two tablets of stone and found the people worshipping a golden calf they had created. Moses exploded in anger and smashed the stone tablets. When God wanted to annihilate the entire nation and start over with the descendants of Moses, Moses said, “I will go to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for you.” Atonement here was about forgiveness, being given a second chance, God being willing to carve into stone the Ten Commandments a second time. This meaning came to be the one used in the liturgy of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. For one long 24-hour day the people were to meditate on their sinfulness, before their forgiving God. The source of their sin was not “original sin”, which they had never heard of. Their sin was in the experience of comparing the person each individual knew themselves to be, with the person they believed they had the capability of being.
They believed they were created in God’s image. They were meant to share in God’s perfection and, clearly, failed in that purpose. The point in Yom Kippur, is that the status of being unclean, of being a sinner, fades away before the divine presence. We can no longer call unclean anything that God has made, nor see any person loved by God as having no worth. I added a section on how Christianity misunderstood the meaning of Yom Kippur and “atonement”, how we invented a fall from an “original sin” and required atonement through the sacrifice of Jesus. This “atonement theology”, it turns out, is not the pathway to life; the ability to give ourselves to others, in love, is.
Modern Christianity, strongly influenced by St. Augustine in the fourth century, has been built on a sense of human alienation from God. Augustine’s misunderstanding of the first two chapters of Genesis helped to forge atonement theology. We were perfect (Gen: 1). We disobeyed God and henceforth were estranged from God with Adam’s “original sin” (Gen: 2). By the end of the fourth century CE, Christianity was a legal religion in the Roman Empire. The great majority of the world’s Christians no longer understood or cared about the original Jewish worldview in which the Biblical stories had been created. They were Greek-speaking Gentiles, not Hebrew-speaking mythmakers. They saw the world not as a unity, but as a duality. Good was separated from evil. God was separate from the world. We humans were alienated from God, needing saving.
Substitutionary atonement, Jesus standing in for us, had become the cornerstone of Christian theology, and would remain so through the centuries, until this very day. Atonement theology assumes that we were created in some kind of original perfection and fell from that state. We now know that life emerged from a single cell that evolved into self-consciousness over billions of years. There was no original perfection; so, no fall from perfection. The idea of a God who, in order to forgive, requires a human sacrifice and blood offering, doesn’t hold up. And who would want to worship such a God? If the father God has to kill the divine son on the cross, as atonement theology constantly implies, does that make God the ultimate child abuser?
Our liturgy and hymns assume the definition of human life as “fallen.” Our liturgy tells us we are not worthy to “gather the crumbs” from underneath the Lord’s table. What we need is to discover a meaning in life that is so powerful that it enables us to give our lives away to others. We need to be loved just as we are, and thus be called beyond our boundaries into being all that we are capable of being. Atonement theology is not the pathway to life. The ability to give ourselves to others, in love, is.
Next was Sukkoth, the harvest festival. Matthew used a series of harvest parables, e.g., the parable of the sower who sowed seed on four different kinds of soil; and the parable of the wheat and the weeds that grow together until the harvest. For Matthew the end of the harvest had become the end of the world, and judgment was the theme.
Between Sukkoth and Dedication he told his two stories of the miraculous feedings of the multitude, which were two Eucharistic stories, not literal miracles. In between the feeding stories was the account of Jesus walking on the water. Both were new Moses stories. Feeding the multitudes: then, Moses providing manna in the desert—now, Jesus feeding as Eucharist. Exercising power over water: then, Moses holding back the Red Sea—now, a Jesus walking on water. These are not history, but Jesus stories as the new Moses.
Next is Dedication, better known as Hanukkah. In it, the Jews celebrated the return of the light of true worship to the Temple. Here Matthew placed the story of Jesus’ transfiguration, in which the light of God, the “shekinah”, was bestowed upon Jesus, not the Temple. Matthew, who was seeking to transform Judaism from being a religion of one people into being a universal religion for all people, suggested that Jesus was himself the new Temple, the new place in which divine and human came together. With that celebration, the yearly cycle of Sabbath liturgies begin ended and would start all over again.
Matthew used Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 to provide details for the twenty-four hour vigil from sundown on what we call Holy Thursday and sundown on what we call Good Friday. We saw how the passion narrative was not the report of eyewitness observers, for there were none (except some women who “watched on from afar”). Like many who recently suffered with Covid19, Jesus died alone. The passion and crucifixion was a carefully planned and orchestrated liturgical vigil with each of the eight three-hour watches of the twenty-four-hour day marked with details of the passion narrative.
The gospel of Matthew is not about God, understood as an external being invading the world to rescue “fallen” human beings, lost in sin. The Good News of Matthew’s gospel is of human beings discovering the divine that is always in our midst.
Matthew’s Jesus walks through every observance of the Jewish liturgical year, opening all of them to their universal meaning. The law of God embraces all people at Shavuot. The kingdom of God comes to all people at Rosh Hashanah. Atonement and a second chance are available to all people at Yom Kippur. The good harvest that will accompany the Day of Judgment will be universal at Sukkoth. The light of God will fall not just upon the Temple, but upon Jesus, the life in whom God can be seen, the life that invites us all to “come unto him”. It is “all of you”, not some of you, to whom the invitation is given. And, in the crucifixion and resurrection part of Matthew’s story, the barrier, that once made death seem like the ultimate human boundary, is broken open, because it is in the freedom to give one’s life away in love to another that death is transformed.
In Matthew’s last chapter (Ch. 28), the disciples have climbed the mountain in Galilee. Jesus has come out of the sky transformed—to speak to them. We have called the words he speaks the “Great Commission.” We have traditionally interpreted these words of Jesus as a missionary charge to go convert the heathen. Remember the “Crusades”; remember the missionaries to North and South America and around the globe. That mis-interpretation flies in the face of everything Matthew has tried to communicate.
In Matthew the risen Jesus says: Go to all nations, go to those you have judged as inadequate, go to the uncircumcised, the unclean, the unsaved, the unbaptized, and the different. Go to those who threaten you. Embrace them as part of the human family. Accept them as fellow pilgrims walking into the mystery of God. Proclaim to them the good news of God’s unconditional love, that embraces us all. Allow your fears to melt away; and with those fears gone, bid farewell to your insecurities, your prejudices, your boundaries. The human community has room for all. There are no outcasts from the love of God. That is what the Great Commission means.
The final promise of Matthew’s glorified Christ, on that mountain in Galilee, is simply a translation of the word “Emanuel”. Matthew began his Jesus story with the angel telling Joseph that this child about to be born would be called “Emmanuel,” which, he said, means “God with us.” Matthew ends his gospel with Jesus, once and for all, making the Emanuel claim: “Lo, I am with you always, to the end of the ages.” (Matt. 28:20)
It comes down to this: Matthew is saying that extending your awareness of the presence of the holy in everyday life is what being the messiah means. That is what the Christ symbol in his gospel is all about. That is what the life of Jesus means. Matthew has painted a portrait of Jesus, who is so at one with God that he is beyond every sectarian boundary that religious people have ever tried to impose on him; he is the revealer of that life for which all finite and mortal people yearn. That is why the Christian story is meant to be a universal story. Matthew said it. Can we get it?
Shalom!