Hebrews 2:10-18
Christmas 1 - Year A
The weakest person you meet today is still your long-lost sister or brother.
As their sibling, be not ashamed to proclaim wonders that they might overhear and put their life in a larger context. You will be proclaiming mysterious things such as death doing away with death-dealers and thus freeing those enslaved by fear of death.
You’ve been tested and sometimes come through. This is the authority you have to proclaim new life to someone who has had a test they didn’t altogether pass. To proclaim past our experience is to get into the tricky area of saying more than we know, having our praise become mere words and formulas. So stick with reality.
It may help to remember some of the tests Jesus faced—birthed in a no-account place by ordinary folk, being a refugee from persecution and knowing that innocent others were killed while he got away, growing up oblivious of the turmoil he caused by not traveling with the family, being in another no-account place for years of silent growth, hearing he is beloved and not letting it go to his head during some temptations, etc., etc. What tests have you faced? This is a grounding we need to be an evangelist.
G*D, Jesus, Spirit, Church, you, I—are to connect sisters and brothers with one another and creation. To work together is a position of hope and power. Through your testing experiences you have learned to be a merciful and faithful high-partner in the service of G*D. With this learning under our belt, we have only the small matter of implementation. Go ahead; be not ashamed of your long-lost sister or brother or whole clan; express G*D’s mercy.
As their sibling, be not ashamed to proclaim wonders that they might overhear and put their life in a larger context. You will be proclaiming mysterious things such as death doing away with death-dealers and thus freeing those enslaved by fear of death.
You’ve been tested and sometimes come through. This is the authority you have to proclaim new life to someone who has had a test they didn’t altogether pass. To proclaim past our experience is to get into the tricky area of saying more than we know, having our praise become mere words and formulas. So stick with reality.
It may help to remember some of the tests Jesus faced—birthed in a no-account place by ordinary folk, being a refugee from persecution and knowing that innocent others were killed while he got away, growing up oblivious of the turmoil he caused by not traveling with the family, being in another no-account place for years of silent growth, hearing he is beloved and not letting it go to his head during some temptations, etc., etc. What tests have you faced? This is a grounding we need to be an evangelist.
G*D, Jesus, Spirit, Church, you, I—are to connect sisters and brothers with one another and creation. To work together is a position of hope and power. Through your testing experiences you have learned to be a merciful and faithful high-partner in the service of G*D. With this learning under our belt, we have only the small matter of implementation. Go ahead; be not ashamed of your long-lost sister or brother or whole clan; express G*D’s mercy.
As found in Wrestling Year A: Connecting Sunday Readings with Lived Experience
The issue of suffering is a key one for a religious sensibility. One place to further investigate this beyond our usual parochial takes on suffering is a Monastic Interreligious Dialogue on Suffering and Transformation. [MISSING URL]
I recommend the site in general. Here is one small part of the several day event:
Samu Sunim
Father Thomas, I appreciated your talk last night very much. Your said that God is in limbo with us. You also said the presence of God is available to us twenty-four hours a day. Right now there is this terrible, heartbreaking conflict going on in the Middle East and in the institution of the Church. There is a conflict going on with the Buddhists in Asia. There is also conflict among the Buddhist clergy. My question is, where is God when all these conflicts break out?
Thomas Keating
You ask, "Where is God?" Well, I really don't know, except that he is there. This implies a view of God as the source of everything that is. This source, of course, is goodness. But if you introduce the human condition into this work or creativity of God, then the goodness of God is distorted by the human condition. To keep it very simple, since it's a complex concept, I'd like simply to say that there is no rational explanation for suffering, especially innocent suffering. The consolation in suffering, it seems to me, is that in some extraordinary and mysterious but maybe very simple way that we don't understand, suffering says something about the Ultimate Reality that nothing else can quite say. The bottom line is that God is incredibly humble; he seems to want to give himself away, or more exactly throw himself away. Suffering, insofar as you see God identifying himself with the human condition, is telling us that God loves us so much that he is prepared to go to any length to convince us of his extraordinary love for us and of his determination to transform not just us but the whole human family into the divine life. So, where is God in suffering? He is right in the middle of it. But I can't prove that. I just believe it. This, it seems, is what the passion and death of Christ symbolize; namely, the death of the individual self and the resurrection of the new self; or the self as the image of God, or the expression of God's infinite tenderness and goodness in the details of life, including the utmost tragedy.
Samu Sunim
I think God is suffering. I think "God is suffering" could serve as a reference point for Christian and Buddhist dialogue as well as dialogue exchanged among all world religions right now. Deep and proactivist suffering is awakening from our delusion. Thank you
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2004/december2004.html
"The one who sanctifies and the one who is sanctified are all of one." [Footnote translation from NRSV]
There is a special bond between one who needs rescuing and one who rescues. It binds people together across all other barriers. In both cases the one is dependent upon and responsible to and for the other.
This is easiest for us to see in the felt sense of a saved one owing their life to the saver. This can easily be seen in stories of the rescued entering voluntary enslavement to the rescuer.
In this we can fail to see the negative effects of one act defining all future acts. Free-will is still operable even if voluntarily given up. We can also fail to see the reciprocal experience of the one who does the rescuing. It is not for nothing that another is saved. The rescuer can further invest in their growth potential coming to pass.
Here also there is a danger of taking on further and further responsibility for a weaker one and not allowing growth to proceed through a necessary wrestling with experience.
It is not that they both belong to a third. It is sufficient for them to rejoice in a relationship unexpectedly developed that can lead both to more interdependent growth if they can avoid the pitfalls of dependence.
Here after Christmas we are called to not have a Christmas savior take all the responsibility for the saving and to recognize those, like Joseph, who saved the savior. Now we are called to reciprocate whatever sense of salvation we have by following the journey laid out by Nikos Kazantzakis in his brief but powerful spiritual exercises, The Saviors of God.
My bias is to read it in a hardback version — that not only brings an excellent preface by the translator but allows time to savor and go back over the images. A second choice would be to print it out and format it according to your eye and then print it and read it away from the hustle and bustle. This would be a wonderful Epiphany gift for yourself. Order one during these 12 days of Christmas and see how it is for you.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2004/december2004.html
Hebrews 2:10-18
Isaiah 63:7-9
Psalm 148
Matthew 2:13-23
There is an image still being held - we will not deal falsely. In the meantime we cause distress and need healing.
Are you holding an image of the one who sanctifies being so yoked with the one who is sanctified that they have all things in common, that they are able to take turns sanctifiying until who knows where sanctification first began or will ever end?
Dealing falsely is shown in what we search for and how we respond to false dealing. Herod searched for destruction; Rachel for restitution. Neither found consolation, healing, safety, salvation, sanctifying. Herod's destruction finds him dead. Rachel's weeping finds her isolated.
Joseph's avoidance of death for Jesus as a babe doesn't avoid death on a cross by Herod's successors. False dealing lives on and on, generation and reign to generation and reign. Eventually the serpent's wisdom turns into an innocent dove and at that point vulnerability to false dealing cannot be avoided or further delayed. Ramah still weeps over how our spirits continue to be killed by one another.
And yet, to see one another as those who "will not deal falsely" is background to every sanctifying event, to every experience beyond fear of death. Those who find themselves with this vision refuse to out-Herod Herod or to out-weep Rachel. As a brother or sisters with sisters and brothers we work to transform the false within ourselves and allow the result to echo, "Peace on Earth . . . ."
- - -
Rachel wept as thought there was no tomorrow
wept and wept throughout Ramah
wept and wept beyond Ramah
wept and wept for all children
wept and wept for legal and illegal violence
wept and wept through all generations
wept and wept without consolationfinally there is no consolation
no healing, no saving
only weepingonly weeping come sweeping o'er the plain
and then the seeds that were sown in weeping
watered by the tears that ne'er cease to flow
begin to sproutstill no consolation for past distress
still weeping and weepingno consolation
only clear-eyed, weeping-eyed vision
children will not deal falsely
wept water will part to free
slavery by fear of deathcome unconsoled Rachel
come unconsoled weepers of Ramah
come unconsoled friends today
be unconsoled and comedo not deal falsely with hope
weep and hope
do not deal falsely with faith
weep and believe
do not deal falsely with love
weep and love
do not deal falsely with false dealing
weep unconsoled and live
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2006_12_01_archive.html
What does it mean to be made perfect through "suffering"?
Try this – The word translated as "suffering" here is "pathema". It is a presumed derivative of "pathos" which can be heard as:
1. whatever befalls one, whether it be sad or joyous
a. spec. a calamity, mishap, evil, affliction
2. a feeling which the mind suffers
a. an affliction of the mind, emotion, passion
b. passionate deed
c. used by the Greeks in either a good or bad sense
d. in the NT in a bad sense, depraved passion, vile passions
Pathos, in turn, may be from the root "pascho":
1. to be affected or have been affected, to feel, have a sensible experience, to undergo
a. in a good sense, to be well off, in good case
b. in a bad sense, to suffer sadly, be in a bad plight
i. of a sick person
To push back through we can hear this suffering as a negative (bad, depraved, sick), positive (to be well off), or descriptively (whatever, to simply feel or experience).
Here we might say that Jesus was made whole through his experiences, his feeling the realities around him and beyond him.
This sense of wholeness, healed-ness, salvation is experience-based, not doctrine-based. Jesus, and those who draw near to G*D through his experience, appreciate his appreciation of his experience of what befalls everyone in the process of living. Therefore mercy is a key response to life. It is experienced life that draws us together (atonement, if you will).
"Suffering" has gotten a bad rap when it has only been seen in a negative light. I'm not sure the word can be redeemed from centuries of one-sided use. This might mean that we need to refrain from its use, or find a longer descriptor to say what we really mean because it can only be heard negatively, regardless of how we intended it.
To demonstrate this, see how hard it is to read this passage in terms of mutual identity through experience rather than one-way loss/sacrifice taking over another's experience.
Or, can you read this in terms of "passionate deeds" rather than through purgation? "Jesus (and those who follow his way) are made whole through passionate deeds." Does this say what needs to be said to move us off center of idolizing some second person of a three-person crowd?
Another approach to this is to look at the Indo-European root of the word "suffer" – "bher" which means to carry or to bear children. Here, too we might try putting it this way, "Jesus was made whole through birthing in others the ability to bear G*D". Might this be difficult/suffering? Yes. Might this be simply-the-way-life-is/suffering? Yes. Might this be participating-in-mercy/suffering? Yes.
Blessings upon you in this Christmas time to begin bearing on your own tongue better descriptors of salvation – difficult, simply-the-way-life-is, merciful – rather than falling back on the inadequacy of using "suffering" language.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_12_01_archive.html
The weakest person you meet today is still your long-lost sister or brother.
As their sibling, be not ashamed to proclaim wonders that they might overhear and put their life in a larger context. You will be proclaiming mysterious things such as death doing away with death-dealers and thus freeing those enslaved by fear of death.
You've been tested and sometimes come through. This is the authority you have to proclaim new life to someone who has had a test they didn't altogether pass. To proclaim past our experience is to get into the tricky area of saying more than we know, having our praise become mere words and formulas. So stick with reality.
It may help to remember some of the tests Jesus faced - birthed in a no-account place by ordinary folk; being a refugee from persecution and knowing that innocent others were killed while he got away; growing up oblivious of the turmoil he caused by not traveling with the family; being in another no-account place for years of silent growth; hearing he is beloved and not letting it go to his head during some temptations; etc., etc. What tests have you faced? This is the grounding we need to be an evangelist.
Today, while rejoicing over yesterday's defeat of "Don't Ask, Don't Tel"l and health benefits for 9/11 responders we can't forget the children of immigrants, allied with those from Ramah, denied a reasonable path to citizenship.
G*D, Jesus, Spirit, Church, you, me - are to help our long-lost sisters and brother. To work together is a position of hope and power. Through your testing experiences you have learned to be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of G*D. With this learning under our belt, we have only the small matter of implementation. Go ahead, be not ashamed of your long-lost sister or brother or whole clan, express G*D's mercy.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2010/12/hebrews-210-18.html
We ought be careful about equating suffering with death. Suffering came to Mary with the announcement; it is not easy to say, “Let it be.” Suffering came to Joseph, “What am I do do with Mary?” Suffering was present with decisions to be made by Shepherds and Magi. Suffering was with Rachel.2 and the populace in general. Suffering continues; it is not just about death.
Suffering is never just a test to pass. It is true to the bone or it is not suffering. It does not have an automatic ability to grant compassion. For all too many, even small suffering brings great bitterness.
Folks in that day, like today, are held in the slavery of fear, but not to death—to survival. For now it is enough to remember birth-pangs and all that needs pondering and treasuring about this one small event of birth in the midst of a sea of trouble. The future proceeds from every beginning and new beginning. It proceeds from your birth as well as Jesus’. Honor birth. Tomorrow is sufficient for its time. Right now, birth is sufficient for this time.