"Cosmics & Civics: "Speaking Our Truth
to the Powers"
This is a dangerous Sunday to preach. It’s not always both
Thanksgiving Sunday and the last Sunday of the church year. We have to
say everything left to be said before the new year begins, agreed? May
take us a while! As we just heard from Paul, we should end the old year,
and begin the new year, and probably spend Thanksgiving Day as well,
bowed on our knees before the Awesome One "from whom every family
in heaven and earth takes its name!" What a time to remember, out
of One we are created, complexified and diversified, to grow into Many!
Each one of us so strong in our inner being as to live out the love of
our rooting and grounding in Christ! And so be filled with the fullness
of God. What are we so thankful for? The fullness of God!
We come the full circle. We complete the four cycles – winter,
spring, summer, fall. This is Buzz Lightyear Sunday: "To the
trinity, and beyond!" So much of our common life with the earth
comes in fours – the seasons, the directions, the elements of
earth/wind/fire/ water, even the life-stages of birth/adolescence/
maturity/death. We see correspondence with the nature and history, the
being and doing of God – Creator/Redeemer/Sanctifier/Sustainer. God’s
promise/ passion/presence/power.
I call them, compassion/communion/engagement/endurance. Except in
tough times, like the book of Revelation’s and like these, we add,
refusal/resistance. Like United Methodists’ "quadrilateral"
– scripture/tradition/reason/experience. Like Liberation Theology’s
see/judge/act/reflect. The "four paths" of Matthew Fox and
"creation-centered spirituality" –
positive/negative/creative/transformative.
Praise/confession/proclamation/response. We get the idea. Thanks, Buzz!
It’s also "there must be a better way" day! Surely this
is not all there is. God cannot call this "done with us yet."
As the witnesses to a new way of global justice, who gathered again this
week, in Miami, keep insisting, "Another world is possible!"
Another world is possible. That is the meaning of this day: This world
under God is not fixed and static! It is changeable, permeable, even
impregnable with the seed of new life! Only, in the Zen saying, "No
seed ever sees the flower!" So this Sunday has to stand for
everything ever promised of God! Perhaps the Sunday of the Messiah, whom
we like to say has come in Jesus. But we cannot prove it by our lives!
So, naturally, many others are still waiting.
This has been called the Sunday of "Christ the King,"
though only since 1925, the Sunday we associate with "Judgment
Day," the "Second Coming" of Jesus, as we say in the
creed, "in glory to judge both the quick and the dead." Some
call it Sunday of the "Reign of Christ," getting away from the
singular/ male/hierarchical /imperial image of "king." I
prefer Sunday of the "Coming of the Cosmic Christ," the Christ
who is, literally, "all in all," as Paul says, this time not
dropping down from the sky but rising up from the earth, born again of
the earth, not just in one but in every tradition, with the help of
every culture. What true Creator of this earth would choose to leave
anyone out of its salvation and redemption?
Matthew Fox says the primary sources for a creation-centered
spirituality are, 1) the ancient scriptures of every great faith
tradition; 2) the emerging cosmology of modern science, owing more to
"mystics" like Einstein than to "mechanics" like
Newton; 3) the experience, the wisdom, and the perspective of women;
and, 4) the experience, the wisdom, and the practices of indigenous
peoples. It is a spirituality of Thanksgiving, an attitude of gratitude,
for God in all of creation.
The meaning of this Sunday as springboard into the new earth church
year lies in our grasp of the biggest "Big Picture" of life,
the legacy of all the saints and the elders, the wisdom of the s/ages,
which is the closest we come to a "God’s eye" view of the
world, the earth, and of our place as humans, one species among so many.
We must seize the chance to reclaim a "living cosmology," a
sense of vital, creative, hope-giving relationship to the universe, --
to all that is, to all that lives, to all that is human. And that is who
Jesus is for us on this day, the one who is the most fully human of all,
the one who is the most freely alive of all.
Matthew Fox says such a cosmology is, "Our joyful response to
the awesome fact of our being in the universe and our expression of that
response by the art of our lives and our citizenship." Which why I
call this a Sunday of both "cosmics," the art of human living
itself, and "civics," the art of human life together, life
that, at least, keeps us from the suicide our own species and the
extinction of others.
Otherwise, we are not long for this planet. This planet can no longer
be for us. And this planet has been for us, loving us to life, for the
past five billion years!
Fox goes on to wonder, "When a civilization is without a
cosmology it is not only cosmically violent, cosmically lonely and
depressed. Is it possible that the real cause of the drug, alcohol, and
entertainment addictions haunting our society [Could we add, gambling
and violence, shopping and sex addictions, probably among others?] is
not so much the ‘drug lords’ of other societies but cosmic
loneliness haunting our own? Perhaps alcohol is a liquid cosmology and
drugs are a fast-fix cosmology for people lacking a true one." If
we do not find ways, as religions are meant to help us, to get
"high" on the fact of our very being in all the universe, and
how we express that, in worship and beyond, then we will get
"high" on some cheap substitute for life and living, for
"cosmics and civics."
As we contemplate the meaning of this day as ending and beginning
again, I hope we want to be re-membered, that is, shaken apart and put
back together again, as a congregation, a tree planted by the Truckee,
who cares enough for our children, all our children, to abandon all
cosmologies of destruction and death and to give ourselves for
cosmologies of creation and life. Is that what we want? Can I get a
witness? For the plain, brutal fact of the matter is, where we see no
way for us to create, we most certainly will destroy. Where we see no
hope, we will harm all we can. We are only as strong, as safe, as the
weakest among us.
And so we began our worship this day with this "Canticle of
Hope" based on the very last chapter of the last book of our
Hebrew-Christian Bible, the book of Revelation. Revelation means
precisely, the Bible is for us only the first, not the last, word of our
lives. God is not done with us yet! God is Alpha and Omega, A and Z,
first and last, beginning and end, -- our persistent hope amidst
persecution, exile, and death, in the early church of Revelation. Now we
ask God to be our same hope amidst self-centeredness, short-sightedness,
and narrow-mindedness in the church today! Long before any particular
persecutor, and particular problems; in fact, long before any humans at
all, God is! And God rocks! God is in the rocks, the stars, the
mountains, the trees! God is in all the earth, bringing forth life, and
light, and love, this and every "last day!"
The Day of Judgment in Greek is the day of "krisis," of
disaster, which is the flip side of "kairos," of opportunity.
We say, God never closes a door on us without opening at least a window!
God’s covenant with us, -- God’s promise and passion, God’s
presence and power with us, -- will not be denied or deserted. Jesus is
only "the first fruits of those who have died," proclaims Paul
in 1 Corinthians 15. Then at his coming again, the coming of his Spirit
on Pentecost, "those who belong to Christ." Then, with this
day, "comes the end," says Paul, the Coming of the Cosmic
Christ, when Christ gives back to God the promise of God fulfilled in
all of the earth! The full fruition of God, the full harvest of God,
which is the Thanksgiving of God, in all the earth! For in Christ
"every ruler and every authority and power," even every enemy,
is encountered, embraced, engaged, endured, until every last threat
against anyone has been transformed! And "the last enemy to be
destroyed is death" itself! "That God may be all in all."
That God may be all in all! This day is all about the "allness"
of God in all persons and in all things. Do we wonder what that looks
like? This last chapter of Revelation is here to tell us: It looks like
a whole new heaven and a whole new earth! At the very least, a whole new
way of our seeing and acting on heaven and earth. On this day we know,
as Henry Miller says, "Our destination is never a place, but rather
a new way of looking at things." Look! Listen! If we will but find
eyes to see and ears to hear! From the cosmic garden, Eden, at the
beginning of the Bible, to the civic metropolis, new Jerusalem, of all
torn and tattered places, at the end -- God truly is all in all! God is
not just about saving and setting free persons, healing and making them
whole. God is not just about love. God is about justice as well. God is
saving and setting free, healing and making whole systems and
structures! Powers and principalities! God, in judgment and mercy, comes
to liberate both the oppressor and the oppressed.
The glory of God is in Greek the "doxa" of God, which gives
us "doxology," as we sing of God, and with God, and for God
each Sunday. Singing is of the essence of God, and of our struggle to
keep faith together with God. Catherine and Justo Gonzalez write of God’s
promise come fully on earth: "The Bible does not depict God’s
plans for humankind basically in terms of individual privacy, but rather
in terms of one vast community where all will live with each other in
peace and justice. . . . The Bible nowhere speaks of the redeemed as
floating around on private clouds, playing their own private music on
golden harps. The Bible speaks of cities and kingdoms, and when it
speaks of music, it speaks of choirs!" Walter Wink says we are not
"sober pilgrims grimly ascending the mount of tears," but
"singers enjoying the struggle because it confirms our
freedom!" Every freedom struggle endures by the music inspiring and
accompanying it.
Our John Emerson might remind us, God is not only cosmic, but comic!
God has such a sense of humor, of irony. The one we call king, lord and
savior of all, rides into Jerusalem on a young donkey! His followers
wave not arms but palms! By the end of the week he is stripped, robed in
purple, crowned with thorns, handed a reed for a scepter, hailed and
nailed to the cross as "King of the Jews!" "Am I a
Jew?" scoffs Pilate. To be anything but a Jew! And yet Jesus was,
and is, and will be forever. A Jew for all people, -- his body, the
church, an Israel for the whole world. We must always remember the
historic hatred and contempt for Jews into which the church was born,
became, and remains such a willing contributor. It always is part of who
we are, even as we seek to reach beyond it.
When I think of Jesus, hands bound, speaking his truth to Pilate, I
think of pictures of Fr. Dan Berrigan (
