Father Adrian's Sermon from St. Mark the Evangelist Episcopal Church, Syracuse, NY

What's In A Name

2011-12-31T10:21:00.000-08:00

"When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us." So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb (Luke 2:15-21)."

When I was in college I dated a girl who constantly said “Jesus Christ” as a statement of shock, incredulity or exasperation. (It was my first encounter with an Episcopalian.) I had only uttered those two words in the context of worship or apologetics but never as exclamatory utterance. Whenever she said the words I was rattled by the irreverence. She was an intelligent young woman from a good family and had good friends. But her being unchurched made her insensitive to the faith of others who put that faith at the center of their lives. Since her own faith was nominal and she followed the religion of her own opinions she seemed unable to appreciate that the name of Jesus was unique and singular and should only be uttered with respect.

However, I have met people that utter the name of Jesus after every other word in the middle of every sentence. “ We were going down the street, praise Jesus, and all of a sudden, praise Jesus, this ball rolls across the street, praise Jesus, and this boy runs out after it, praise Jesus, and I hit the brakes, praise Jesus, and I saw that it was my sister’s boy, praise Jesus, so we knew that the birthday party, praise Jesus, was at my sister’s house, praise Jesus.” They treat the name of Jesus like a verbal talisman, an uttered charm, to baptize and make sacrosanct anything they say from a profound theological insight to the secret recipe of grand ma’s potato salad. Such carefree use of the Lord’s name leaves me cold and cynical.

The name Jesus is a special name. A name that revealed God’s movement in a person born in Palestine over 2000 years ago. Not that the name of Jesus was foreign to the Jews of the Middle East so long ago. The name “Jesus” was their “John”, “Juan”, or “Steve”. It was not uncommon to know someone or have someone in your family named “Jesus.” Actually, the name “Jesus” is the Greek form of the Hebrew name “Yeshua” (or “Joshua”). Yeshua means “Salvation.” It is a good name. It is a good Jewish name. Jesus’ Jewish name would have been “Yeshua Ben Yosef” (Jesus, Son of Joseph).

That very common name was given to a baby born over 2000 years ago who would be God’s salvation made manifest. The angel's message to Joseph was "You shall call His name 'God is salvation,' for He will save His people from their sins." That name tells us that it is through Him that God saves humanity. The person of Jesus is the way that God chose to save all of humanity from all that separates us from God.

The purpose of God’s Incarnation in Jesus was to reconcile humanity to God. In order to do this, God, in the person of Jesus Christ, choose to become fully human while always being fully divine. He experienced all the pain, temptations, and sufferings that all human beings face. Finally, having preached, taught, healed, and performed many miracles, he experienced the last pain that all people must undergo: death. He allowed Himself to be crucified. As a human being, he died. Yet,being God, he rose from the dead, proving that all who believe and follow him will do likewise since in baptism we are forever connected to, immersed into God’s life. This is why Jesus Christ is called "Savior," for He saves us from sin’s effect, death. Such a movement of God on our behalf in Jesus Christ our Lord must disallow any one of us from uttering Jesus’ name as an exclamatory utterance or as a mere verbal talisman but rather as a recognition of what God is willing to do for us.

Prayer is probably the best forum to utter the holy name of Jesus. The Church recognized this so very long ago. In order to enter more deeply into the life of prayer and to come to grips with St. Paul's challenge to pray unceasingly, the Church offers the Jesus Prayer, which is sometimes called the prayer of the heart. The Jesus Prayer is offered as a means of concentration, as a focal point for our inner life. The prayer is for teachers, social workers, business persons, nurses, professional baseball players (not necessarily used to win a game), protesters, university professors, high school students, soldiers, psychiatrists, or anyone else who has a pulse and has breath. All of us are invited to pray the Jesus Prayer as a way of being mindful of what God has done, what God is doing, and what God will do in our lives. Anyone, everyone, can say the Jesus Prayer. The most frequently used form of the Jesus Prayer is: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." This prayer, in its simplicity and clarity, is rooted in the Scriptures and the new life granted by the Holy Spirit. It is first and foremost a prayer of the Spirit because of the fact that the prayer addresses Jesus as Lord, Christ and Son of God; and as St. Paul tells us, "no one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit"(1 Cor. 12:3). Of course, there are so many ways to pray, so many ways to properly offer up unceasing prayer.

Many people utter the name of Jesus in prayer and praise when they are waiting for their teenage son to get home and it’s 2am in the morning, when a mother feels the flutter of butterflies within her as the child grows, when siblings watch their father take his last breath, when someone is told that their cancer is in remission, when a father sets his eyes on his newborn child for the first time, when a woman meets the man she is going to marry, when a single mother has lost her job and does not know how she is going to pay her mortgage or buy groceries, when the chronic pain from which one is suffering is unrelenting, when a relationship falters, when a spouse tells another that they are no longer in love, and when a baby who was thought not going to make it to term is baptized. For them the name of Jesus is a exclamation. It is an exclamation that God does indeed save and that we need God’s salvation-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

Laboring in the Vineyard

2011-09-22T08:16:00.000-07:00

When Jesus entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him as he was teaching, and said, "By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?" Jesus said to them, "I will also ask you one question; if you tell me the answer, then I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?" And they argued with one another, "If we say, `From heaven,' he will say to us, `Why then did you not believe him?' But if we say, `Of human origin,' we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet." So they answered Jesus, "We do not know." And he said to them, "Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.

"What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, `Son, go and work in the vineyard today.' He answered, `I will not'; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, `I go, sir'; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?" They said, "The first." Jesus said to them, "Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him ( Matthew 21:23-32).”

The chief priests and the elders of the temple are threatened by the authority with which Jesus speaks and even the authority that is given to him by the populace that see him as a true and trustworthy prophet. Yet, unlike a prophet, who speaks for God, Jesus never precedes or follows an utterance with the common “Thus says the Lord.” He simply speaks, acts, heals, and teaches. Those who witness the Kingdom of God do so and those who do not simply do not. What the chief priests and elders know for sure is that Jesus is undermining their own authority.

The leaders put a question to Jesus: Who gives you the right to preach, teach, and heal? Jesus responds that he will say so if they answer the same about John the Baptist. The people also were drawn to John the Baptist because of his fervor, integrity, and unabashed truth-telling. The chief priests and the elders know this and they know that Herod Antipas killed him for it so John the Baptist is considered a great martyr to the people. They are unwilling to answer because they are looking for the most expedient answer rather than the most truthful one. They want to answer so as to satisfy the people upon whom all their power relies. Without the people’s support they have nothing and they are unwilling to surrender such support and, therefore, their authority. If they state that John’s authority came from the people then they would surrender their authority to the masses who followed and respected John giving credence to their opinions and beliefs against the authority they claimed to possess. John the Baptist and Jesus in turn could care less about the message and practice of their ministries and it is their focus upon doing the will of God that draws people to them. The chief priests and the elders give no thought to the will of God but are focused upon the people and their satisfying the government of Rome and of Herod Antipas. The will of God is subservient to keeping the people’s respect and staying in the governments’ good graces.

If they claim that John the Baptist’s authority was derived from God then they would be saying that the God of the Jews is over and against the political powers that ruled Judea, therefore, setting themselves against Rome and the God-Emperor Caeser.

They are unwilling to answer Jesus and so they claim ignorance and maybe they are right in claiming ignorance. They are so concerned in answering Jesus in a way that does not threaten their station and status nor supports Jesus in any way that they have not even considered God.

Jesus is unwilling to answer them directly. Rather, he tells them a story where one son refuses to work for his father then changes his mind and does the work requested of him while the other son says that he will work for his father but never does. Through John’s ministry and through his own Jesus sees the Kingdom of God being made real in the lives of people whom the religious leaders have said are beyond hope, beyond grace, beyond favor, beyond redemption, beyond love, mercy, and compassion. Men who have betrayed their own people in order to collect taxes for the Roman State and women who have sold their bodies to whomever has enough coin are those who are responding to God’s call and in turn revealing the Kingdom of God in their lives and in the lives of others. The chief priests and elders, however, men who are living the epitome of the religious life and who model their life around the Torah for the sake of others, reveal nothing but their self-protecting concern for their rites, rituals, and the maintaining of the status quo. They do not see the undesirable, the sinful, the people on the margins or even outside of respectable society, as proof of God’s presence. They are unable to see the miracle of transformation happening in their midst. Jesus says that the tax collectors and prostitutes will be first in the Kingdom of Heaven before respected religious leaders who no longer seek the Father’s will nor can see the Kingdom of Heaven right before them will. Jesus does not say that the religious leaders are to be thrown out of the Kingdom of God but he does say that those who are most undesirable will be given primacy. This is enough to incite anger and shock among the priests and elders. They do not want to share the Kingdom of God with the likes of them.

In the end it is the miracle of people’s transformations, of the kingdom of God being made manifest in their lives, that is the proof of Jesus’ authority. The religious leaders are unable and unwilling to see the work that God has wrought in the lives of their fallen brothers and sisters. They do not see liberation. They do not see redemption. They do not see healing. They do not see reconciliation. They do not see salvation. They do not see the Kingdom of God. All they can see is the threat to their authority. They are blind to all else and ultimately they are blind to God.

Any one of us can have a vested interest in members of our community or even members of our own families being on the wrong side of the law, on the wrong side of common decency or of success or of a proper lifestyle. There may be no question that their self-destructive proclivities have led them and others into lives that are hard, troubled, and unhealthy. Disease, sin, and estrangement may be the defining marks of their lives. We could be sure that the choices we have made have made all the difference in our lives and in the lives of those whom we love and those that depend upon us. We may have chosen what was good, decent, life-giving, and Godly while strangers, friends, and family may not have and are suffering the effect of their choices. We can rest knowing that we have done well and are doing well and may be fully assured that God’s grace and presence exists in our lives and in our families’ lives. We know who they are and we know who we are. And we believe we know who God is. The reprobate assure us that all is fair in God’s world.

But God does not play fair. Life is not a game with a set of rules that destines some people to “win” and fates others to “lose”. Life is the opportunity to meet the lover of our souls, God. People who have been hurt by others and have hurt others, who have made poor choices, who live lives of crime, sin, and death are transformed by the Gospel, by the good news that Jesus is the proof that even they…even they…are called into God’s love and that that great, grand love is not thwarted by sin, sickness, disease, poor decision making, death, or hurt but that God uses such as the root of manifesting his love. People who experience the Gospel and the presence of God become transformed people. The mercy, compassion, love, and power of God changes them from the inside out. They still may have the pinhole burns, they still may have the scars inside and out, they still may have the tattoos, they still may have the sickness ravaged body, but they will also have Jesus and they will praise his name as they move from lives of darkness to lives filled with the light of Christ and the fire of the Holy Spirit.

And we the righteous will hate them for it.

We who played by the rules, who did everything right, who set the status quo will witness the miracle of their transformation and not see God. We will see their transformation through the lenses of our expectations, prejudices, and sense of decorum and decency and question its authenticity. We become the ones who fail to see the Kingdom of God in our midst. When we find that we are judging the transformation of another we then may find that it is we who need transformation…we who need the salvation that only Jesus can offer-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

The Feast Day of David Pendleton Oakerhater Deacon and Missionary, 1931

2011-09-01T07:18:00.000-07:00

O God of unsearchable wisdom and infinite mercy, you chose a captive warrior, David Oakerhater, to be your servant, and sent him to be a missionary to his own people, and to exercise the office of a deacon among them: Liberate us, who commemorate him today, from bondage to self, and empower us for service to you and to the neighbors you have given us; through Jesus Christ, the captain of our salvation; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Lessons:
Psalm 96:1–7
Isaiah 52:7–10
Romans 8:1–6
Luke 10:1–9

“God’s warrior” is an epithet by which David Pendleton Oakerhater is known among the Cheyenne Indians of Oklahoma. The title is an apt one, for this apostle of Christ to the Cheyenne was originally a soldier who fought against the United States government with warriors of other tribes in the disputes over Indian land rights. By the late 1860s Oakerhater had distinguished himself for bravery and leadership as an officer in an elite corps of Cheyenne fighters. In 1875, after a year of minor uprisings and threats of major violence, he and twenty-seven other warrior leaders were taken prisoner by the U.S. Army, charged with inciting rebellion, and sent to a disused military prison in Florida. Under the influence of a concerned Army captain, who sought to educate the prisoners, Oakerhater and his companions learned English, gave art and archery lessons to the area’s many visitors, and had their first encounter with the Christian faith. The captain’s example, and that of other concerned Christians, from as far away as New York, had their effect on the young warrior. He was moved to answer the call to transform his leadership in war into a lifelong ministry of peace.

With sponsorship from the Diocese of Central New York and financial help from a Mrs. Pendleton of Cincinnati, he and three other prisoners went north to study for the ministry. At his baptism in Syracuse, New York in 1878 he took the name David Pendleton Oakerhater, in honor of his benefactress.

Soon after his ordination to the diaconate in 1881, David returned to Oklahoma. There, he was instrumental in founding and operating schools and missions, through great personal sacrifice and often in the face of apathy from the Church hierarchy and resistance from the government. He continued his ministry of service, education, and pastoral care among his people until his death on August 31, 1931. Half a century before, the young deacon had told his people: “You all know me. You remember when I led you out to war I went first, and what I told you was true. Now I have been away to the East and I have learned about another captain, the Lord Jesus Christ, and he is my leader. He goes first, and all he tells me is true. I come back to my people to tell you to go with me now in this new road, a war that makes all for peace.”

The Feast Day of Charles Chapman Grafton

2011-08-30T11:57:00.000-07:00

Loving God, you called Charles Chapman Grafton to be a bishop in your Church and endowed him with a burning zeal for souls: Grant that, following his example, we may ever live for the extension of your kingdom, that your glory may be the chief end of our lives, your will the law of our conduct, your love the motive of our actions, and Christ’s life the model and mold of our own; through the same Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, throughout all ages. Amen.

Lessons for today:

Psalm 134

Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 50:16–21

Revelation 5:7–10

John 10:11–16

Charles Grafton was born April 12, 1830 in Boston, and attended Harvard Law School. He was confirmed at Church of the Advent—then a leading parish implementing the principles of the Oxford Movement—where he began seriously to explore his vocation. After graduation he moved to Maryland to study with the Tractarian Bishop William Whittington who eventually ordained him deacon on December 23, 1855, and priest on May 30, 1858.

Grafton served a number of parishes in Maryland but experienced a growing attraction to the religious life. In 1865, he left for England specifically to meet Edward Bouverie Pusey. In the following year, after a series of meetings held at All Saints, Margaret Street, Grafton and two others took religious vows and the Society of St. John the Evangelist had its beginning. In 1872, Grafton returned and was elected fourth Rector of the Church of the Advent, Boston.

In 1888, Grafton was elected second bishop of Fond du Lac. His consent process was difficult as many thought him too ritualistic, but he soon became known not only as an Anglo-Catholic but also as an ecumenist, deeply committed to improve relations with the Orthodox and Old Catholics. He founded the Sisters of the Holy Nativity.

Perhaps the most famous event during Grafton’s long episcopate was the ordination of his successor in 1900. He invited the Russian Orthodox Bishop Tikhon and the Old Catholic Bishop Anthony Kozlowski to participate. The service stirred up furor across the country with the publication of a photograph (called derisively “The Fond du Lac Circus”) that showed all eight Episcopal bishops and the two visiting bishops in cope and miter. It caused a church-wide furor over ritual and vestments that lasted for over six months, with accusations and threats of ecclesiastical trial flying from all corners, and with scurrilous attacks and virulent justifications. When the dust finally settled, the legitimacy of traditional catholic ritual and vestments had thereafter gained a permanent place in the liturgy in the Episcopal Church. Bishop Grafton died August 30, 1912.

John 1:1-3: In The Beginning-A Theological Commentary

2011-08-29T08:28:00.000-07:00

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.

An ancient Christian hymn connects the philosophical and personalized term of “Logos” to the very act of God’s creating all things seen and unseen. John repeats this hymn and affirms its underlying assumptions about God and creation. The Greek word “logos” means “word”, “speech”, “reason”, “principle”, “standard”, and “logic” and was understood to be present in all of creation. Every person has within them this Logos. This is what allows humanity as a part of the created order to reflect upon all of creation including itself and reach out to that which is ultimate. Such human reason is not the possession of humanity but is a human expression of that reason which permeates and orders the universe. The logos’ ordering of the stuff of chaos allows life to be, to be realized, to come into being. Such a life coming to pass is not simply the biological processes of a biosphere but the universe’s dynamism including the ever-present underlay of chaos that makes such life possible. Such an understanding is expressed in all major religions.

Early Christian thought identifies this “logos” with the Son. John is stating that Jesus is the “word”, “speech”, “reason”, “principle”, “standard”, and “logic” understood to be present at and in all of creation. The Father begets or generates the Son from his very self just as the sun begets or generates light and yet if it was not for the light itself we would not know that there was Sun. Also, there is that nature of the Sun that is not of light but by its very nature generates light for if light was not generated then that which does indeed generate light could not be. Without the sun there is no light. Without the light there is no sun. The two are one and the same but distinct. That which is created, therefore, is not intrinsic to the nature of that which is the creator and can remain uncreated or become uncreated without affecting the nature of the creator. However, that which is generated or begotten is intrinsic to that which generates or begets. To not be generated or begotten means that that which would generate or beget cannot exist. Therefore, God begets the Son rather than creating the Son. John understands this begotten Son as the one through which the universe is brought forth.

God's movement as the begotten Son at “the beginning” is to bring life out of the maelstrom of chaos. Yet, the stuff of chaos finds it source in God. Chaos in and of itself only holds within it the potential to bear life while only God is the source of such life. Chaos underlies reality not as a constant threat of de-evolving but as the malleable “stuff” of creation. Chaos threatens us for we have no hold over it but it is in no way a threat to God. It is important to notice that John begins this Gospel in such a way that the original readers of the Gospel would have automatically understood that such a beginning is meant to bring to mind the first book of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament). The Hebrews held an understanding of the Word of God being the dar Yahweh, that which brings forth all that is seen and unseen. The ancient belief of the Hebrews as communicated in Genesis 1 and the philosophical thought of the Greeks are being syncretized in order to bring ancient Jewish thought into the widely dispersed philosophical systems of the Greek Gentile world.

Both the Genesis and the Gospel of John do not necessarily speak of God’s creating the universe ex nihilo, “out of nothing.” The beginning of Genesis can also be read “When God began to create…” which hints at chaos’ presence at creation. The formlessness of chaos and the emptiness of life exist because God wills it so but such a reality does not fully express God’s desire but is part and parcel of the expression that is to come. One can even say that creation is ongoing and that any apparent chaos is part and parcel of such an ongoing creation. Such a reading does not threaten the view that all that exists which is not God has no reality outside of God. Creatio ex nihilo is not threatened. It is simply not explicitly addressed even though it may be implicitly understood.

There is one thing to keep in mind. Too often in the West we envision creatio ex nihilo in such a way that one imagines God residing in the midst of nothingness, in the midst of a void, and because of our anthropomorphizing of God we imagine God somehow affected by a divine “loneliness.” Yet, creatio ex nihilo, properly understood does recognize nothingness as being no other thing. The term creatio ex nihilo can properly be understood as “creation from no other thing.”

Rather, than imagining God residing in the midst of nothingness, we should envision nothingness as openness. There is only God and all that there is is God’s very Self. There is no such thing as nothingness. There is only divine Presence. Rather than envisioning nothingness, absence, one should imagine an encompassing, overwhelming presence willing to create something never before seen, witnessed or encountered as an expression of will and love. Rather than imagine “Divine Loneliness” we can imagine “Divine Possibility.” All possibilities are ever present before God, and God is ever open to them. Since God creates as an act of will, utterly free and utterly loving, dependent upon no-thing, then creation itself is utterly open since to create any thing from any other thing would consign and inhibit creation with boundaries and parameters independent of and alien to God’s will. This utter openness of God has been understood as God’s transcendence and God’s immanence and lays the foundation of our understanding of those events that reveal God and what we often call “miracles.”

All worlds realized and unrealized are due to God’s openness and will but are bounded. The universe (or our encounter with what we call “the universe”) that allows our selves to move and have our being is also the same universe that also moves us from dust to dust and ashes to ashes. The nature of our own fragility, the fragility of creation, and the nature of death and decay is also that which allows life to be, to come to fruition, to blossom, to expand, to encounter and to be encountered. Where humanity is concerned we can say that we are the universe’s self-contemplation, hence, we must be aware of the wonder and fragility of not just our own existence but that of creation itself. Our encounter with the said universe is also our encounter with our said selves. The material and immaterial aspects of our very selves are intrinsically finite just as the universe in which we find ourselves is intrinsically finite no matter the grand and overwhelming realities of such a universe. God’s openness has declared through Christ that we are not wholly defined by a finite reality but by the infinite reality of God’s will and love. Creatio ex nihilo can only be properly understood in this way.

The first chapters of both Genesis and John are primarily about a universe in which “Life” (zoe) itself is present and permeates all that is. Only such a presence is able to bring about life (bios) in all of its manifestations. Life (bios) is Life (zoe) ever unfolding itself. Since creation is ongoing then all such beginnings are of the initial creation of our universe even if such beginnings are separated by the meanest or grandest measure of time. The act of creation spoken of in both Genesis and John is, therefore, present to us rather than simply residing in the past. This may be why both procreation and artistic inspiration (among others) can be understood as semi-divine acts or blessed acts, as mitzvahs, that cooperate and continue to unfold God’s initial act of creation.

Chaos can be viewed as a subjective term. Chaos bears no threat against God so what humanity encounters as chaos may be to God openness. Chaos certainly threatens us because as created beings there are limits to our finite existence and there are other things created which do indeed threaten that finite existence. This is what we call chaos and from which are such distinctions as change, death, sin, history, time, and decay find definition.

Chaos’ intrinsic presence as part and parcel of creation and God’s undergirding presence in creation brings forth all such beginnings. God is present in all such beginnings simply because there is no place that God is not. Chaos is indeed present in our lives and in the universe but such chaos exists only to be ordered by God to such an extent that Life begets life. Existence comes forth. The chaos that threatens us is not an evil to escape or exorcise but a reality to surrender to God.

The Rev. Adrian A. Amaya

Get Thee Behind Me

2011-08-27T14:39:00.000-07:00

Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, "God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you." But he turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."

Then Jesus told his disciples, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

"For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom (Matthew 16:21-28)."

At the beginning of Lent we read those passages of the Gospels that deal with Christ’s temptation by Satan and his passing of those tests. The Gospel of Luke ends this scene with the line “When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time (Luke 4:13).” The temptations that assail Jesus are life-long. The Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel The Last Temptation of Christ which is loosely based on the Gospels portrays Jesus on the cross being tempted by a normal life, a life filled with the love of a woman and the blessing of a family. Satan offers Jesus what many take for granted and such an offer is able to undermine Jesus’ goal. Even though the Jesus of Kazantzakis’ novel is far from the Jesus of the Holy Scriptures and Christian experience he is on the mark when it comes to depicting temptation as finding its source in what is meant to be a good.

In the passage from the Gospel of the Matthew we are presented with an “opportune time.” There is no doubt that Peter loves Jesus. Peter is a man of strong emotions and is headstrong about his following of Jesus. This is what makes his denial of Jesus later on so tragic and his redemption after the Resurrection so beautiful. In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus starkly tells the disciples that suffering and death lies before him in Jerusalem. Peter is scared for Jesus. This is his friend. This is his mentor. This is his rabbi. Jesus is the one whom God has sent to reveal the Kingdom of Heaven. Peter takes Jesus aside and with passion and power rebukes him. His love, his fervor, his expectations and desires inform Peter’s reaction. It is this reaction that threatens Jesus. Why? Jesus does not only see Peter as a follower but Peter is his friend. He cares for Peter as much as Peter cares for him. It is this caring and this love that is the source of the temptation. This love and this caring is that from which the threat to Jesus ministry and God’s victory comes. Peter’s care, concern, friendship, and love is worth living for.

This begs the question “Is there anything worth dying for?” Jesus has always understood his mission to reveal the Kingdom of God, to reveal that no person or institution can stand between God and those whom God loves and that no one is outside of such love. This threatened the religious monopoly that the leaders of his faith fostered and inflicted upon the people of God. This is what they thought was worth killing for. And Jesus knows that. Yet, he also knows that if he stops and repents of the following of God’s will then his enemies would probably recede back into the shadows. Jerusalem would not have to be the place of suffering and death that he knows it will be if he continues his course.

In rejecting Peter’s rebuke he is affirming God’s call to him. He is affirming that God’s love for his people; for all people, is more important than anything else is even if answering God’s call will cost him his very life. Jesus reminds the disciples that following him is not about pride, self-righteousness, rebelling against authority, personal gain, garnering respect, choosing the right side, being right and righting wrongs, but is about declaring God and his kingdom. God’s will takes precedence over everything else. Only those who understand this can truly choose to follow Jesus. The cost of following Jesus may be a price that many of us may be unwilling to bear. This is not about calling ourselves “Christians” but about being a follower of Jesus. The true religion of Jesus is revealing the love of God to any and all no matter what and who may threaten us for there are some in the world who do believe and who will fight to keep certain people out of the Kingdom of Heaven.

There are some in the world who will spend any amount of money and use any means necessary to declare who is of God and who is not of God. There are those in the world who will set their will over and against God so that many can be kept desperate, poor, needy, wanting, distracted, pacified, coerced, entertained, ignorant, selfish, and oppressed. They will actively fight those who follow Jesus and if need be they will befriend those who will follow Jesus. Those of us who claim to follow Jesus must always be mindful that there is indeed a cost to calling Jesus Lord because in the end claiming Jesus as Lord is not about our salvation but about the salvation of others-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

The Sacrifice of Isaac

2011-06-23T12:43:00.000-07:00

God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you." So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, "Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you." Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. Isaac said to his father Abraham, "Father!" And he said, "Here I am, my son." He said, "The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" Abraham said, "God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son." So the two of them walked on together.

When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, and said, "Abraham, Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." He said, "Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me." And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place "The LORD will provide"; as it is said to this day, "On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided (Genesis 22:1-14)."

This story has bothered me. And it still bothers me when people try to defend God’s asking Abraham to prove his love for him by Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, Isaac who is God’s answer to Abraham and Sara’s life being void of children. Abraham is considered a hero of faith and because God provides another sacrifice, that of a ram, rather than allow Abraham to kill his son we are allowed a collective sigh of relief. Abraham’s willingness and God’s testing of that willingness terrifies and offends me. A superficial reading that does not take into account the culture that surrounds the Israelites can lead one to believe that what is horrific about this story must be celebrated.

The ancient cultures the Bible understood sacrifice as part and parcel of each of their various cultures and understood that their success and livelihood depended on the religious and political act of ritual and cultural sacrifice. Through sacrifice a people or leader made a covenant with the god or gods they worshipped. Human sacrifices are well-attested to in the areas around the land of Canaan and Genesis 22:1-14 is the only evidence that child sacrifice may have been practiced as there is no archaeological evidence stating as such. The story of King Mesha in II Kings 2 (to which is lent historical weight by the Mesha Stele found in Dhiban, Jordan) tells how the Moabite ruler sacrificed his son and successor as a burnt offering in order to secure a victory over the Israelite army. In Judges 11, the Israelite warleader Jephthah makes a vow to the Lord that “If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the Lord’s, to be offered up by me as a burnt-offering.” Of course, as befits a tragic story, the first person to come out of his house is his only child, his daughter. Of course, this is an account of what happens to God’s people who have forgotten the Lord in all but name and have adopted the practices of the cultures that have surrounded and influenced them (Notice that God does not ask for the sacrifice.)

Even though Genesis is meant to tell the earliest history of the Israelites/Jews, Genesis is one of the latest biblical texts to be rendered and serves to explain why the Jews who are in the midst of the Diaspora believe what they believe. When the Assyrians conquered Israel in 722 BC, the Hebrew inhabitants were scattered all over the Middle East; these early victims of the dispersion disappeared utterly from the pages of history. However, when Nebuchadnezzar deported the Judeans in 597 and 586 BC, he allowed them to remain in a unified community in Babylon. Another group of Judeans fled to Egypt, where they settled in the Nile delta. So from 597 BC onwards, there were three distinct groups of Hebrews: a group in Babylon and other parts of the Middle East, a group in Judaea, and another group in Egypt. Thus, 597 BC is considered the beginning date of the Jewish Diaspora.

The Jews were beginning to lose their culture in the midst of this Diaspora and as such began to write down and edit the stories, myths, legends, histories, poetry, etc. that made up the great narrative of their being the people of God. The story of Abraham and Isaac may speak to the ancient Israelite past and how god’s call to them to be a special people even when scattered make all the difference in the world.

There is no reason to believe that the people who made up the ancient Israelites or were the precursors of Abraham’s tribe did not practice human sacrifice with the sacrifice of children being a subset of that horrible practice. This story may be the narrative way of communicating God’s disgust of human sacrifice and of especially child sacrifice and that Abraham and those that are to come are to different than those around them.

God called Abraham to be the father of a great nation not because there was anything special about Abraham but because God needed to start somewhere. God saw potential in Abraham but Abraham is still the product of the brutal and hard cultures that made up the bronze age. Abraham answers God’s call to him and makes this God the God of his tribe, but he is still a creature of his environment. He is troubled and puzzled about how God’s promise of descendents greater than the stars in the heavens are the grains of sand on the earth will come to be if he sacrifices his son, Isaac. Yet, Abraham is not horrified by the prospect of killing his son. This is a man who has already sent his other wife Hagar and other son, Ishmael, into the wilderness to be exposed to danger and death. He has no qualms about doing such things and maybe that is the point.

I do not think that Abraham’s willingness to kill Isaac is to be celebrated. However, I do believe that God’s creation of a people that will learn to refuse to sacrifice human beings especially children in opposition to the cultures that surround them is the point. God wants in the end a people dedicated to life. But God must start somewhere. God begins with what is best and worst within us and redeems and transforms us from the inside out into people who cannot sacrifice others to our causes great and small.

I believe that God is still working on creating such a people. Yes, we are not a bronze age people accustomed to human sacrifice and willing to do anything in the name of God, but we know that there are still people even in this age that are willing to do so. Yet, lest we become to enamored with ourselves as a post-modern 21st century people we must become aware that we are a people willing to sacrifice the planet, generations of people, our very souls to laissez faire capitalism, we drool over sexualized entertainments that devalue people especially women and children, we adhere to banal ways of thinking that refuse to see the complexity that is inherent in the world we live in for fundamentalisms of all stripes and colors whether they be religious or scientific, our laws protect corporations and personages that wield power over nation-states, and we ally with nation-states that use their populaces as fodder.

Can the God of Abraham call and transform even the likes of us? Can we be transformed into people unwilling to sacrifice others? Will we sacrifice our children’s futures for the creature comforts of being consumers? Can we withhold the knife from the throats of our sons and daughters without God having to be the one to do it? Can we choose such? Do we have the capability?

Our life in Christ says that we can be more than all these things. Our life in Christ declares that we are to be a people that choose life over death and a people that believe that even if death occurs that we can be part of resurrection. God wants a broken and contrite heart to be the only sacrifice we are to make unto God and I believe that the closer we draw to Christ the closer we become to being the people that God ultimately wants-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

The Suffering of Believers

2011-06-01T11:04:00.000-07:00

Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ's sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed. If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you.

Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you. Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering. And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the power forever and ever. Amen (1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11).

Even though I was baptized on December 25^th, 1966 through the Roman Catholic Church in San Diego, Texas by Father Gijon of the Dominican Order of Preachers, I did not live my life as a Christian. I had a general belief in God but for most of my young life I was more invested in my belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. I did not choose to go to Church until I was 16 years old and was dragged by my best friend sometimes kicking and screaming to the Baptist Road Mission on Probandt Street in San Antonio, Texas (the building that once housed the church is now an auto repair shop). It was there that I learned that the Bible was not only a record of God’s dealings with certain people at certain times but that the entirety of it was a message from God to me. That is powerful stuff to a 16 year old kid whose religious sensibilities had been dis-nurtured his entire life. The services were a simple combination of singing hymns, offering up of extemporaneous prayers, the preaching of the 30-45 minute sermon that was very much like a bible study, and a congregation with dog-eared, floppy bibles on their laps and cups of hot steaming coffee. Faith was something one could delve into and the Bible was not a complete and utter mystery but a trustworthy and clear communication from God to God’s people. My Baptist tinted Evangelicalism was simple and accessible and created a way of approaching life and of understanding God’s will for me that was utterly absent in my home life. The problem was was that one family dominated my new found church community and their opinions, ideals, prejudices, and concerns heavily influenced me, an influence my family did not like. However, I must say that even though I no longer believe what I did in those early formative years and actively reject many of the things that that initial community of faith held to be above suspicion, I would not be an Episcopal priest without their influence. I left behind what was unhelpful and held onto that which was utterly essential.

One of the attacks leveled against me by members of my family who did not appreciate or understand my new found faith was often “If you are such a Christian why isn’t your life any better?” which I found to be a strange remark. I had indeed learned that in the best of times and in the worst of times I was not alone but that God was with me. I had learned that God was with me when I was at my best and at my worst. I had learned that come hell or high-water that God would be with me through thick and thin. But I had never learned that all of sudden the trials and tribulations of life were to cease since Jesus was my lord and Savior. I had never learned that Christians could escape living a real life because they believed in God. I had never learned that a life in God became suddenly charmed and that we were above the consequences of bad decisions and the fickleness of life itself.

The First Letter of Peter is addressing those persecuted Christian communities throughout Asia Minor who are suffering in the name of Christ. Belief in the Lord Jesus has led to their lives becoming difficult and there must be in minds of some that life would be easier if they had never believed or if they are believers then why are they being persecuted. Of course, their own Lord, Jesus Christ, was crucified for doing the work of his Father so why should they expect better? But, they have to also remember that the crucifixion was not the end. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ made all the difference in the world. The cross was seen as a victory by the temporal powers of religion and state but the victory of God over all powers is revealed in the Resurrection. The author of this letter wants these Christian communities to understand that being followers of Jesus Christ calls from them a way of life that brings glory to God and that such a holy life is intrinsically good. Such a life is to be lived because of whom God is and because of what God has done in Jesus Christ and not because of any benefits or blessings that some believe is due to the believer. Just as God’s response to the murder of his son was resurrection, God’s response to the troubles and sufferings of the early Christian community is “restoration, support, strength, and establishment.” We are promised the presence of God’s Holy Spirit when life is good and when life is hard. We are called to live holy lives in the best of times and in the worst of times. We are promised that the trails and the tribulations of life will not have the last word but that God and God alone will have the last word-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

The Presence of the Holy Spirit When God is Absent

2011-05-25T14:28:00.000-07:00

Jesus said to his disciples, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. "I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them." (John 14:15-21)

People were shocked when the personal memoirs of Mother Teresa of Calcutta became public. In those memoirs Mother Teresa revealed that for more than half her life she did not feel the presence of Christ and at times gravely doubted God’s existence. For many, such truth-telling was too much to bear. They could not bear Mother Teresa’s experience of God as hidden, as veiled, or as absent nor can they bear that she would not only experience such but allow it to be revealed to public scrutiny. Saints are not to suffer such doubt and despair and if they do it is to be for a limited time and be the precursor to a great deepening of faith. And yet her life also reveals and witnesses to the compassion and mercy that Christ calls forth from his people. Her life was a movement of Christ to the forgotten, to the dying, to the untouchables, and to all those who were probably much like her.

Maybe those that she served never experienced God or Christ or the Holy Spirit except through her ministry and the ministry of her order. Maybe they only experienced people and nothing more. And maybe Teresa’s experiencing of emptiness was her own experiencing what those whom she served experienced day in and day out as they lived and died in her care. Maybe such emptiness was a gift of the Holy Spirit. However, I have to admit that it was a cruel gift. Yet, her determination to be Christ to others was without falter. Such strength and determination can only be empowered by the Holy Spirit. Rather than the proof of the Holy Spirit’s life within her ministry being located in Mother Teresa’s emotional landscape it was located in the life being lived in the midst of her and those for whom she cared.

I do believe that we do worship a loving God but I also believe we worship a dangerous God who plays for keeps because the stakes are so high. Maybe the cost of caring for those people was the cost of Mother Teresa’s faith. Maybe God saw them as worth that and knew that only Teresa could bear such a profound loss. We too often associate the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives with our own experiencing of that presence via only certain feelings and emotions and in some Christian expressions with only certain actions. Yet, maybe the presence of God’s Holy Spirit is not about us and about how we feel. Maybe it is more about our being Jesus to the world. Willing to live our lives for the sake of others and if need be sacrifice, deny ourselves, for the sake of others. Now, I do not mind doing nice Christian things for other people but being like Jesus calls forth vast sums of courage, love, strength, and compassion that I do not have and, yet, there have been times when those qualities have been present. There have been times when the call and need to be Jesus was such that God’s Holy Spirit made up for any lack in my life so that Christ could be in the world through me.

We too often associate being in the Holy Spirit with our own exuberance and positive feelings that we forget that Jesus’ promise of an Advocate, of One who will stand with us, is about our being empowered by the Holy Spirit to reveal Christ to the world so that any and all can witness the life that God offers. If such a witness is proof of Christ’s presence in the world then Christ can and will be present through us just as he was present in the life and ministry of Mother Teresa-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

Where Are We on the Map?

2011-05-24T09:39:00.000-07:00

Jesus said, "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going." Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him." Philip said to him, "Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied." Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, `Show us the Father'? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it." (John 14:1-14)

I remember when the assistant of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church; San Antonio, TX, the Reverend Richard Craig, offered me the chance to check out The Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, TX. Anna and I were newly married and new to The Episcopal Church and I had already expressed an interest in entering the process to see whether or not I and the Diocese of West Texas could call me into the ordained priesthood. So in the Spring of 1994, Anna and I drove from San Antonio to Austin.

Austin is a great place. It is the capitol of Texas and the pink granite capitol building is taller than the capitol building in Washington, DC. It is the center of the Texas music scene spawning such musicians as Stevie Ray Vaughn, and Eric Johnson and became one of the important stops on every tour of important punk/new wave acts. Many of these bands, such as the Police, Joe Jackson, Blondie and the Talking Heads, played at the Armadillo. A number of them, including the Clash, Elvis Costello and Blondie would make appearances at other venues. In other words, Austin was and is a happening place. It is so “happening” that driving in Austin is a nightmare as the roads and by-ways cannot handle the traffic . The same is true today.

You have to drive by the Capitol building and the University of Texas football stadium without looking at them because you are traveling 80 miles per hour on IH-35 and don’t dare take your eyes off the road. You can’t even look at a map or even a GPS screen.

Austin at the time of Anna and I’s visit was going a through a huge period of construction and the map we had did not show the varied and many changes that was happening to Austin’s thoroughfares. We could see where we needed to go but we could not get there. We drove in, through, and out of Austin more than once and were beside ourselves. Having missed an exit that may have been or may not have been on the map, I gripped the steering wheel, my knuckles going white, and lost my mind. Then for the next 10 minutes Anna and I collectively lost our minds and greatly tested the bonds of our 5 month old marriage.

An outdated map, a broken compass, a misprogramed GPS, and an uncentered and misguided mentor can lead those who follow them to a bad end and even to destruction. Jesus in his very life reveals the Way, the Truth, and the Life of our lives. In Jesus we are witnesses and discoverers of who we are meant to be. In Jesus we discover that we have been created, been born, to reveal God’s love in Jesus Christ our Lord. We learn and practice that way of being with one another as we live our lives in and out of the Church but if we who are the Church cannot practice the life that Christ has set before us and reveal the immensity of Christ’s love to our brothers and sisters in Christ then how will the world experience Jesus Christ through us.

Jesus reveals that it is only by, in, and through him that we are able to live as revelations of God’s love. It is only by, in, and through Jesus that we are able to discover all that God offers us and all that we can offer to the world. It is by, in, and only through Jesus that the paths of life and of death are set before us. While we are indeed free to choose a path that is death dealing to ourselves and others Christ does want us to choose him as the path that is life-giving to ourselves and others.

When we follow Jesus Christ we experience Eternal Life as a present reality not as some event that happens to us after death, but as a quality of life that leads to more and more life, abundant life, because it eternally leads us to God who is the source of life and all that is good. We are revelations of Abundant Life, of Eternal Life, of a life that is centered and immersed in God and it is Jesus who is the One who leads into living lives of such revelation-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

The Good Shepherd

2011-05-12T11:08:00.000-07:00

“Jesus said, "Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers." Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.

So again Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly (John 10:1-10)."

In Philo’s, Life of Moses ( 1.60-62), a kid (a baby sheep) from Moses’ flock wanders away from the herd. Moses follows at a distance and watches the kid stop to drink water. After the kid finishes, Moses full of compassion and mercy, without anger, picks up the kid gently and carries it back to the herd. Because of this tendency toward mercy God chooses Moses and declares that he will be the shepherd of his people Israel and lead them from out of bondage and into liberation. Throughout the Old Testament and in other cultures of the ancient world the image of the shepherd is used to describe one who is a protector, a caregiver, a defender, a leader. One of the first Christian images was not of Christ on the Cross (the Crucifixion) or of the Crowned Risen Christ (the Christus Rex) but of Jesus as a shepherd boy bearing a kid across his shoulders.

Those who belong to Christ recognize that Jesus Christ is our protector, caregiver, defender, and leader. And like Moses who led God’s people Israel it is Jesus who leads us out of the bondage of sin and death and into righteousness and life. It is Jesus who calls us to follow him.

We hate to follow. It seems un-modern. It seems un-American. It seems wrong not follow our own counsel or follow our own lead. We hate to have to trust someone else and put our fate into their hands. We are the captains of our own fate. We don’t need leaders. We don’t want shepherds. We despise authority. Many people in our culture say such when they state with pride that “they don’t believe in organized religion”. (Do they believe in disorganized religion?) However, when we try to live our lives without trusting others and even without trusting God we often find that our lives become unanchored and rootless and that we can become faithless and lost. We live in a culture where people will choose to live desperate lives rather than the life that God offers.

So what is the life that Jesus offers? Jesus offers us a fully human life. He offers us a life that becomes full of promise and hope. Jesus reveals that it is only when we have an intimate connection with God that our life blossoms into the life God has created for us. Jesus is the only one who can reveal and lead us into that life. Modern day gurus and the founders of fictitious belief systems may charge us thousands upon thousands of dollars so we “can find ourselves” and dangerously fanatical leaders may convince the hopeless and the fervent to maim and kill in the name of God and for salvation’s sake, but Jesus offers a life that is not only life-giving to us but is also life-giving to others. Yet, we can only live into this life if we accept that Jesus is our shepherd. We can live into this fully human life when we accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior and allow God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ to impact, inform, and nurture our lives at home, work, and play. Jesus does not want thousands upon thousands of dollars nor does he want to destroy and corrupt our wisdom and conscious but he does want our entire life.

Jesus wants to be the shepherd of our entire lives. He wants to be the Lord of all that is best in us and all that is worst in us and everything else in between. Jesus wants to transform, bless, and redeem both our private and our public lives. And even though we like to hang on to the lives we now have with a death grip, the promise of a life holding onto Jesus with a “life grip” can lead to an experiencing of God filled with life and power-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

The Death of Osama Bin Laden

2011-05-03T10:49:00.000-07:00

“Repay them according to their work,
and according to the evil of their deeds; repay them according to the work of their hands; render them their due reward (Psalm 28:4).”

and

“But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful (Luke 6:35-36).”

I do have a joyful relief that a man who has planned, celebrated, and who was directly involved in the murder of almost three thousand of our citizens; Jews, Muslims, Christians, Atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, Agnostics, and anyone else; will no longer be a progenitor of evil. He had also been directly involved in the murders of hundreds upon hundreds of people before 9/11. The feelings that people are feeling about the event is more than simply the banal exclamation of knowing an enemy has been killed or beaten. However, am I happy? No. I am relieved and I think that most of the country is too. As a nation we are feeling a cathartic mixture of joy, relief, sadness, regret, anger, etc. the entire palette of human emotion-and wondering how guilty or ashamed we should feel for feeling such. The feelings are so visceral that it will take time for us as a nation and as individuals to sort out and reflect upon why we feel what we feel.

I would have been just as satisfied had he been arrested just as long as his capacity for evil was removed. However, I cannot shed a tear for this man. I am to forgive my enemy for what my enemy has done to me but I cannot forgive an enemy for what they have done to others. To forgive someone for what they have done to others may be convenient or even beneficial to me especially if such a one has a hold on my emotional landscape or upon my spiritual well-being but such may be more about comforting and serving ourselves. Of course, re-orienting ourselves towards peace is always a good but it must always be an orienting that does not confuse peaceful sentiment with being principled in the midst of violence or allow an orientation that allows others to be maimed and killed to the benefit of our own self-image and piety.Can I forgive Hitler for the mass extermination of Jews, Romani, homosexuals, and the mentally challenged? I can only forgive him for the effects those acts have had upon me personally. I can only work toward a world where such cannot happen to my neighbors during my lifetime.

This man found a home in the Sudan and with his millions supported Arab Islamic aggression and horrendous violence against the African Christians in the South. Here in the Diocese of Central New York we know their stories because they worship in my parish and in others throughout the diocese. Then he went to Afghanistan and funded the Taliban there and around the world so that in addition to the murders of over 3000 men, women, and children in New York City he also created a theocracy that allowed women and children to starve to death and brutalized and executed women for not following the Taliban’s moral codes. This man funded a regime that would take unarmed women into the soccer stadium of Kabul and in a carnival-like atmosphere shoot them through the head with automatic weapons. I mourn that we live in such a world where such things happen and I mourn that we live in a world that this man believed that he was following God’s will. I mourn that the Navy SEAL operators had to kill him. I pray for Jesus to come back. I pray that in the end that all will be as God wants it to be but I cannot shed a tear for this man. I don’t have it in me to do such. Maybe a better man would but I can’t. I can only shed a tear for the man he never became-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

The Hard Work of Lent

2011-03-16T08:15:00.000-07:00

The Hard Work of Lent The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya

The word Lent is an Anglo-Saxon word which simply means “Spring.” However, anybody who has ever tilled the ground knows that both human beings and nature work hard and suffer long for the blossoms and fruit of spring. It has been a hard winter with snow upon snow upon snow and ice upon ice upon ice. Yet, beyond, and in spite of, the snow and ice, the blossoms of spring are fighting to break through it all.

There is an old story, and I would say that it is a modern parable, of the young boy and the chrysalis. A young boy who loved and marveled at butterflies found a broken twig in his backyard with an undamaged chrysalis and within it a healthy caterpillar just beginning its transformation.

He gently protected the cocoon and carried it home and gave it a temporary home in a wide-top mason jar with holes in the lid. He placed the jar on the window sill of his bedroom for easy viewing.

The boy watched the chrysalis day after day until almost imperceptibly at first, it moved. A small opening appeared, and the boy sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled and fought to force its body through that little hole. Then, it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could and could go no further. The boy decided to help.

He removed the lid on the jar, took a sharp pen knife from his desk drawer, and carefully made a tiny slit in the side of the cocoon. Almost immediately, one wing appeared and then out stretched the other. The butterfly was free.

It seemed to enjoy its freedom and walked along the edge of the mason jar and along the edge of the mantle. But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings. The boy continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time.

Neither happened! In fact the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly.

What the boy in his kindness and haste did not understand was that the restricting chrysalis and the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening was nature’s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.

Being in love takes hard work. Being a human being takes hard work. Being saved takes hard work. Growing in grace takes hard work. That is why the Church has always understood that to grow in grace takes hard work. It takes discipline and exercise. The Greek word for exercise and applied to the hard work of growing in grace is ascesis. It is where the word “asceticism” comes from which is the living of a disciplined spiritual life.

Christians are called to practice a lifestyle characterized by prayer, fasting, meditation, study, simplicity, solitude, submission, service, confession, worship, guidance, and celebration. We as Christians work out our salvation and experience liberation by disciplining our bodies and minds so that the power of the Holy Spirit can transform us into the likeness of Christ. Our becoming Christ to the world is where our salvation, liberation, holiness, sanctification, and deification is made real in the here and now. Being a good citizen, obeying the rules in and out of Church, being a nice person, and believing the right things have no power to transform us or save us. These disciplines in and of themselves serve to open our hearts to God so that we may receive the very presence of our Lord and Savior. Only Jesus can save us.

Imagine an athlete who drinks protein shakes but eats cheeseburgers and pizza, talks about his or her sport to others incessantly, talks about all the contests and medals they will win and yet, does not exercise, train, or practice a healthy and disciplined health regimen. That person is not an athlete and is not even competent to compete let alone even place. Without the struggle, without the hard work, without the fight, we stay weak, powerless, enfeebled, listless, directionless, and dependent.

The Christian life is the same. We can hear the Holy Scriptures and receive the Body and Blood of Christ on Sunday but fill our minds and spirits with banal and even unhealthy entertainments and distractions, we can talk about the Scriptures and about praying but never actually read and study the Scriptures or actually pray, we can talk about our being loved by God and our being saved but refuse to be loving and refuse to share the Good News of the One who is the source of our salvation, Jesus Christ.

In order to be the women and men of God and disciples of Christ we must work hard at being the Church. We are not members of the Church, we do not go to Church, nor do we join the Church. We are the Church, we are the Church gathered in Jesus’ name, and we, flesh and spirit, are the Body of Christ alive in the world today.

This takes hard work so I hope that you (as I have) have dedicated yourselves to the hard work of this year’s Lent. Let us all grow in grace and break through the snow and ice-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

A Do It Yourself Bible Study

2011-02-02T19:29:00.000-08:00

“When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.

Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. But we speak God's wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written,

‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,

nor the human heart conceived,

what God has prepared for those who love him’ --

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God's except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual. Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God's Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. Those who are spiritual discern all things, and they are themselves subject to no one else's scrutiny.

"For who has known the mind of the Lord

so as to instruct him?"

But we have the mind of Christ. (1 Corinthians 2:1-16).”

1. The Apostle recalls in his letter when he first came to the Corinthian church. His reputation was not one of being an eloquent teacher schooled in rhetoric but as a persecutor of the early Christian community. It is no wonder that Paul’s initial approach to this Christian community had been filled with fear and trepidation because it may be that his own reputation had had preceded him and that the Corinthian church like so many others would not have trusted him and, therefore, his bearing of the Gospel would have been in vain. Have you met someone whom you did not initially like or trust but later changed your mind? What was it about them that allowed you to change your opinion of them or reevaluate your initial impression?

2. St. Paul relies on the power of God moving through his ministry to prove itself rather than depending upon his self reliance on his own abilities to debate and argue which in the Jewish tradition was considered a proper way to teach. Also, he would neither employ the Socratic Method which was a formal tool in rhetoric nor debate for the Greeks. He simply wants to tell the story of Jesus Christ. What makes the story of Jesus Christ so evocative, profound, or powerful? Why?

3. Yet, the Apostle Paul does hold thoughtful discussions with those who have been well-schooled and who themselves may be catechists involved in preparing men and women for baptism in what in the early church came to be three years of instruction in the faith. Why do many Christians not challenge themselves by studying the writings of the Early Church, contemporary theologians, or taking advantage of the Christian education or spiritual formation classes and forums offered in their own churches? What are some ways that Christians in the 21^st century from all walks of life begin to or continue to educate themselves in their faith?

4. St. Paul recognizes that much of what he proclaims and much of what others have accepted requires the presence of God’s Spirit because if one is left to their own human but meager resources then God’s wisdom would not be discerned in the events of Jesus’ life. The presence of God’s Holy Spirit is integral to accepting and understanding the importance of the life of Jesus Christ and how we are being saved through such. Not only is education an important part of our lives as Christians but of the utmost importance is a life that cultivates and nurtures a relationship with the Holy Spirit. What are some ways the Christians can nurture their relationship with God’s Holy Spirit? How does a person know that they are doing such? What are some concrete ways that you yourself can grow in grace intellectually and in relationship with the Holy Spirit?

5. Are there Christians that you know that are more mature in the faith than you are? Who are they and why do you think that they are mature in their faith? How can they specifically help you mature in your own faith?

A Do It Yourself Bible Study

2011-01-28T08:07:00.000-08:00

“The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,

and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.

Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord (1 Corinthians 1:18-31; NRSV).’”

1. Read the above passage. How would you feel if you walked into your church one day and saw in a prominent place in your worship space an electric chair, a gurney used for lethal injection, a hangman’s noose and gallows, etc. Why?

2. The Roman government used crucifixion as a form of punishment for non-Roman citizens who threatened Rome’s rule because the practice elicited ridicule and horror and was shaming to the crucified’s family for the person crucified was often naked and exposed, the dying process extremely painful, tortuous, and prolonged by design, and unequivocally public so as to prove Rome’s power over populaces. Why would it be seen by Christians as something worth proclaiming and celebrating? How does this counter the fact that many in the Apostle Paul’s age saw the cross as proof that Jesus was not blessed by God?

3. The culture of the Greeks (or Gentiles) was one in which philosophical wisdom and logic was much sought after and deemed to be an important part in one’s being human and a proper citizen of the Empire and/or the region or community in which one lived. Why does such wisdom seem to be a barrier? Does it always have to be? Why is the proclamation of Christ’s crucifixion able to draw people even though it is seen by many as foolish?

4. The Apostle Paul claims often that he not only proclaims Christ but proclaims his crucifixion. Why would Jews see the crucifixion as proof that Jesus was not anointed by God? Why would the gentiles see the crucifixion as proof that Jesus is not to be followed? Why are they unable to recognize God’s salvation through what God had done in the events of Jesus’ life?

5. Jesus is literally “God’s weakness,” God’s humanity in the flesh. Why does this say about the nature of God that God would take on the vulnerability of human flesh?

6. Those that are in the church are those who do not have the proper pedigree nor are the leaders in the culture in which they live, nor wield influence or power. Such was seen by many as proof that the Church was neither of divine origin nor worth exploring or respecting. Why did the Church draw so many who were seen as of being of no consequence and not worthy of respect? Why would this be seen as strength and as a blessing by the Apostle Paul?

7. Current Church planting strategies stress seeking out the powerful, the influential, the wealthy, the charismatic, the upper-middle class, and those who live in suburbia. Why is that? How can this be detrimental to the life of the Church? Why?

The Pharisee and the Tax Collector

2010-10-28T19:09:00.001-07:00

Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, `God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.' But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, `God, be merciful to me, a sinner!' I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted (Luke 18:9-14)."

Pharisees held to a liberal interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures with the aim of making following the Torah open to all. He a leader among his fellow Jews, a mentor for those who wish to follow God’s law as revealed in the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures. He is meticulous in his religious observance and is generous with his money. He is respected. The problem is not his piety, his religious life, but his inability to see his own dependence upon God. He walks away from the Temple with his piety intact but without experiencing God.

Tax collectors were collaborators who profited from the Roman occupation and the oppression of their fellow Jews. They were venal, unscrupulous, and dishonest. They over taxed, gave the Romans their due, then kept what was left for themselves as salary. They lived well when others did not. They accepted bribes. Yet, this particular man comes to the Temple and without pretense. He stands before God without excuse. Without conditions. Without expectations. Without self-loathing. Without a single claim except a trust in God’s mercy.

Sometimes the immensity of our sin, our betrayals, our wrong-doings, can thankfully drive us to the God of Jesus Christ. Major mistakes are sometimes needed for us to see our need for God’s grace and forgiveness.

What is it that allows us to come before God and be honest? Why can we bow ourselves down before our maker with our faces in our hands and say to God what we cannot sometimes say to others? To understand what allows us to open our hearts and reveal our deepest selves to God is to understand Jesus’ revelation of God. Jesus reveals a God who loves us with an unbounded passion; a God who desires our lives to be immersed in the Kingdom of God. Jesus reveals to us that the compassion and mercy of God draws us not only closer to God but closer to who we are meant to be.

God’s love for us is not dependent upon our religious acts, our prayer life, our worship, our good works, our giving to the needs of others. It is not something we can coerce or for which we can bargain. It can only be received. And when we are broken and have broken others, the only thing that can restore us and hopefully them is the reception of God’s love, compassion, and especially mercy. Because this is the God that Jesus reveals we can always humble ourselves before God and know that it is God’s Self and not ourselves from where our salvation comes-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

In the Image of the Trinity

2010-05-26T09:45:00.000-07:00

Imagine a person who loves only their self. They love no one and no thing. They love no man. They love no woman. They love no child. They love not even a pet. They give no part of themselves away. They sacrifice nothing for another. They do not care for the world or for what others care about. In time, this self-love becomes twisted and this person begins to hate all that is not him or her. They close themselves off from others wanting to receive nothing and to give nothing. They keep everything for themselves and hoard and hoard and hoard life itself. They become like super massive black holes expecting all to orbit them and letting no one and no thing escape their grasp. They become dark and dense and from them no light shines. In them love dies.

We Christians declare that God is love, but for love to be love it must be expressed to another. It must be given away and in being given away it is not depleted but finds itself expanding and filling up all the empty spaces that haunt people. Such an expanding and filling becomes an unceasing outpouring of care, concern, nurture, forgiveness, mercy, compassion and other actions of grace. This is God’s very nature.

God does not practice a self-love that eventually becomes twisted and ugly. Love is at the heart of God. Before creation itself. Before time and before space there was God...there was God in love. There was the Trinity; the Father loving the Son and the Holy Spirit, the Son loving the Father and the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit loving the Father and the Son. Love flowing eternally before the Big Bang. To be in relationship is at the heart of God’s very nature.

And so here we are. We are more than monkeys that learned how to shave our backs and learn to use car keys (based on a quote by my good friend Jesse Lerma). Being made in the image of God means that it is in our nature to love and care for others. We were created for relationships. Being made in the image of God has nothing to do with being of a certain age, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, or having a certain IQ or number of limbs. Being able to give ourselves away in love and being able to receive love from others is how we reflect who we are and whose we are. It also disallows us from claiming that we are of God while wounding, hurting, and even killing others in the name of God. Being for God while harming others actually disavows God.

As Christians, we are called to live into this Trinitarian life. We are called to unlearn all those things that keep us fearful of being caring and selfish with the love that resides within us for the sake of the world. We are called to be hoarders of God’s love and salvation. We are called to study the life of Jesus and witness such love realized in flesh and blood so to be Jesus to the world. We are called to make this way of living a reality in our families and in our churches. There will also be those times that we fail miserably to be the people that God has called us to be, but there will also be those times that we experience what it means to be lovers of God and in turn glorify God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Such times is when God’s light shines forth and the Spirit lights upon us-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

God is About Life

2010-03-05T08:53:00.000-08:00

"There were some present who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, "Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them--do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did."

Then he told this parable: "A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, 'See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?' He replied, 'Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down (Luke 13:1-9).”

Life can be downright brutal. People get sick. People are cut down by crime or war. People suffer disease and violence. People hurt. We see it around us. It happens to those we love. And we ourselves do suffer hardship, suffering, and loss. Sometimes when something bad happens we look for a reason because maybe, just maybe, if we can find a reason to someone else’s suffering then we may find ourselves strangely comforted by the fact that we have not made the mistakes or choices that they themselves may have made. If we can find a reason their suffering then maybe we can keep suffering at bay where our own lives are concerned. On some level we feel the need to know that if people bring their own suffering upon themselves then we can try to live in such a way that we do not bring it upon ourselves or upon our family. We cast our faith upon cause and effect.

Those who come to Jesus are asking for an answer to why Pontius Pilate was able to kill their fellow Galileans or why eighteen people were killed when a tower fell upon them crushing them. On some level they need to know that there was reason for their deaths and they are even willing to believe that God has punished them by their being murdered and killed. Jesus who believes and reveals the mercy and compassion God refuses to make God responsible for such horrific events. Jesus has proclaimed ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:18-19).’ Pilate is responsible for his own cruelty and faulty construction is responsible for the Tower of Siloam collapsing. Not God.

Jesus speaks plainly and to the point. He says everybody dies, but not everybody lives. Jesus is not concerned about death. He is concerned about life for God is the God of the Living. Jesus shifts the focus to proclaiming that faith and trust in God is not dependent upon whether or not we are to receive a measurable benefit. Jesus knows that living into the Kingdom of God does indeed have a cost and it will cost him his very life. For Jesus, trusting in God allows the Kingdom of God to enter the world so the poor and downtrodden can experience “Life,” the life that only God can give.

Those who are to follow Jesus are to reveal the Kingdom of God no matter what may come and what may go. They are to proclaim the love, mercy, compassion, and tenderness of God in the best of times and in the worst of times. They are to preach the Gospel when greeted in fellowship and hospitality or when surrounded by violence and hostility. What will come will come.

We, who are the Church, Christ’s Body in the here and now, are to proclaim the goodness and love of God in all circumstances not only when life is easy, or when it goes our way, or when nothing bad happens to us or to those whom we love. We are to proclaim God’s Kingdom in the midst of life as it is. Not as we want it to be, or imagine it to be, nor think it should be, but in the very midst of it as it is. We are to proclaim “Life” in the midst of life-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

The Temptation of Jesus

2010-02-20T19:37:00.000-08:00

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread." Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone.'" Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, "To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours." Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'" Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'" Jesus answered him, "It is said, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time (Luke 4:1-13).

After his baptism, Jesus is led into the desert by the Holy Spirit so that he may be tested and so that victory of God can be made manifest in Christ’s surrender to God’s will. This takes place out in the wilderness, a place where resources are scarce if at all present and where the environment offers to both souls and bodies no second chances. Survival is victory in the desert. Yet, not only is Jesus’ physical life being tested, his very soul is under assault by the devil.

First, he is tempted by the very healthy need for food. Jesus is not hungry. He is suffering from hunger. He is in the midst of starvation and his body is probably turning upon itself for sustenance. He is being offered life itself by the devil but the devil has no power to offer life. Only God can offer life to Jesus and it is upon God alone that Jesus will wait.

The devil then tempts Jesus with what is already to be his-his kingship. The devil offers Jesus a kingdom. He offers the entire world since Jesus has been anointed by God. The devil is claiming that Jesus is indeed the Kings of Kings and that he should take hold of that title. But again, the devil has no power to offer anything in God’s stead. Yet, the kingdom of God is not built out of armies, grand parades, triumphs, and military splendor. The Kingdom of God is built upon God’s self-revelation in Jesus and humanity’s being transformed by that revelation-that God is love. This is the only kingdom that Jesus will be king.

Then the devil tempts Jesus with his own faith. The devil attempts to use that which Jesus has relied upon his own life…that which makes him who he is being used against him. The devil is going after what is most important to Jesus. He is asking Jesus to prove that God will indeed take care of him. He even quotes from the Holy Scriptures in order to proof-text that such is true. Unlike the devil who is so willing to test God, Jesus will not do so. He will wait upon the God who will not even save him from the cross but will save him from the tomb. In Jesus’ being true to his baptism and anointing he refuses to accept any offer, no matter how seemingly good, from the devil. With every temptation Jesus considers the source. So must we.

Like Jesus we are assailed by temptations left and right, subtle and gross, with the threat to sin ever present. We are tempted by what is even best in our lives. For we Christians, our baptisms provide the forgiveness of sins, but baptism does not remove sin. Our baptisms do fill us with God’s power and strength so that when we find ourselves in a desert, a parched wasteland of serpents and scorpions, we will find that within our souls is a deep well of living water from which to drink. That well in our souls is filled to the brim with God. Yet, it is only when the Spirit leads us out into the desert do we learn how to drink from that well, to rely upon the power of God given to us in baptism, and find our deepest thirst quenched not by what our temptations offer us but by what God offers us-His very Self--The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

The Transfiguration

2010-02-11T09:00:00.000-08:00

“About eight days after Peter had acknowledged Jesus as the Christ of God, Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, "Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah"--not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, "This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!" When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen (Luke 9:28-36).”

What the disciples witness is what God wants for our lives. We are not to be spectators to what God has done to others but we are to witness by our very lives the transforming power of God, the transfiguring power of God. God desires to utterly transform and transfigure us from the inside out and from the outside in. John, James and Peter witness true humanity in seeing not only Jesus’ glory but seeing humanity’s glory in Jesus. They are glimpsing the Resurrected life in the here and now-a life that is utterly present in your life and in my life but is veiled by our being spectators to God’s movement in our lives and in the lives of other people. The Transfiguration of Jesus happens in the midst of an ordinary night. Nothing special preceded it but Jesus’ presence.

The Transfigured life underlies what we believe to be an ordinary and mundane existence-what we call “everyday life.” Your life in God is extraordinary because God is extraordinary. Your life is already transfigured because that is what God does. God transforms and transfigures life and then invites us into experiencing that same life. God reveals on that mountain and through his presence in our lives today what living really is-what life is about-what it looks like even in the worst of times or the most unexciting of times.

It is true that not everyone has the kind of experience that Jesus shared here. Yet, no one has to; there is no necessity. Our salvation, God’s love for us realized, is not dependent upon such experiencing. Such happenings are simply gifts undeserved and unforced and are at God’s discretion and they do happen.

We are not to encounter this story so that we may envy John, James and Peter or feel separated from them because we have not had such an experience. This Gospel is read and proclaimed in the life of the Church so that we may know that the transfigured life is present within our everyday lives and it peeks through it at God’s discretion, but it is utterly there. This awareness is necessary and in tough times a necessity.

The three disciples who witness the Transfiguration were given a gift truly of God, and it spoke truly about who God has been, who God is, and who God will be. What the disciples saw at the Transfiguration was Jesus glorified-Jesus as he would be when all things were complete, when all the roads had been walked, when the struggle was finally over. They also saw a glimpse of their transformed and transfigured humanity secured by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. In the Transfiguration they may have also seen themselves-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

Fishing For Men

2010-02-05T13:16:00.000-08:00

Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch." Simon answered, "Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets." When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people." When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him (Luke 5:1-11).

I am not a hunter or a fisherman. I have done both but do not seem to have the personality that enjoys such pursuits. Many people I know who hunt and fish enjoy the pursuit immensely. For some the enjoyment stems from being in the cool quiet morning with another person who shares the same passion. For others the enjoyment stems from being alone and mulling over the deeper questions of life or contemplating nothing at all. Sometimes the challenge that lays beyond the evergreens and the snow and that which moves underneath the waters is what is evocative. Very possibly, on some level, the knowledge that one has the ability to provide food for themselves and their family if need be must create a sense of satisfaction.

For most of our history and pre-history, the act of hunting and fishing was not about sport but about survival. It was about feeding one’s self and one’s family and giving themselves a fighting chance at staying alive another day. In the end, such pursuits speak to the very human awareness that life and death always lay before us and that the trappings of our cars, homes, jobs, and sundry entertainments can only distract us from this fact.

Unlike the men in the synagogue of his hometown who were so enraged by his words, the people beside the lake of Gennesaret are excited to hear his words. They want to witness the Kingdom of God present in the teachings and healings of this man Jesus. On the shore of this lake Jesus spots two boats and a group of men who are frustrated and upset that they have spent the whole night working with nothing to show for it. They are cleaning their nets before putting them away. They are tired. They are angry. They have no time for preachers and messiahs. Into their frustration and tiredness Jesus enters and tells them to put one of the boats out onto the water and away from the beach. They may have grumbled and even have cursed but they did it. From the boat, Jesus preaches. All hear his words but one must wonder whether or not the fisherman including Simon Peter and James and John, the sons of Zebedee, felt that they were having their patience tested. These men were men of action. Words did not fill their nets. Words didn’t put coins in their coffers. Words didn’t put food on their tables or feed their families. Fish did. Not words.

After Jesus preaches, he tells Simon Peter to go out into the deep water. Simon shakes his head and tells Jesus that it is useless but Jesus makes the request anyway and Simon obliges. Even though good sense said otherwise, Simon heads out to the deep water and is amazed by the overabundance of fish that is in his nets. The catch is so amazingly huge that Simon must call for help to bring it in and haul it onboard. It is in fish, and not words, that Simon witnesses the Kingdom of God. St. Francis said, “Preach the Gospel at all times and in all places and if necessary use words.”

Jesus calls men who understand their fishing as not only being their livelihoods but the work that keeps poverty, starvation, degradation, and death away from their door. Their work is holy because it fights for life itself and proclaims the One who is life itself. Their vocation as fisherman is witnessed in the scars and calluses of their hands, the rope burns that decorate their arms and legs, the busted knuckles and gnarled fingers, the salt of their sweat drying on their skin and staining their clothes, the constant burning and peeling of their skin by the sun, and the ever watchful eye that scans the sky for storm clouds. These are men who understand that their work matters. They understand how easily life can slip into death.

Jesus’ call to them to “fish for people” is a call to affirm life itself in the midst of a tough world where survival reigns. These men are not called out of the corpulent and rich few but out of the mass of humanity who pray to God and live for one another watching for God’s reign in the midst of their chores and struggles.

This is why Jesus calls these men. He knows that they will understand that his ministry and their part in that ministry will be for many the difference between life and death. For them, it is that stark.

Our own callings are no less stark. The fact that we are alive and that we move and have our being in God must matter. It must make a difference to whether someone eats or drinks or is clothed or is housed or is comforted in the midst of affliction or whether they discover or re-discover that God loves them. Our salvation must be their salvation-The Rev Adrian A. Amaya.

The Saints and saints of God

2009-10-29T10:30:00.000-07:00

All Saint’s Day is a day we remember an important fact. It is the day we remember not who we are but whose we are. We belong to God. We belong to God not because there is anything special about who we are. God loves every person in the world with an extraordinary amount of passion. Saints are those who respond to God’s love. Nothing more. Nothing less. Yet, that extraordinary love of God transforms the life of the person who accepts it. The glory of God and of God’s Kingdom not only turns the world upside down but changes us from the inside out. We lift up on this day all the saints of the church. Those known and those unknown.

There are two such saints that I remember. I grew up in San Antonio, Texas and lived across the street from Edison High School. It was a lower middle class area mainly populated by Hispanics. Everyone knew everyone else. During the summer, every one had a card table out front along with lounge chairs set right outside their front doors. On the tables sat pitchers of Kool-Aid, bottles of Coca Cola, beer, and lemonade. Neighbors sat together. The men sat together. The women sat together. And they talked well into the night especially on the weekends. We ran from house to house to house until we were called in for supper and then we could go back out as long as our own parents were outside. It was one of those laid back neighborhoods that seem to no longer exist.

During the summer of 1975, we witnessed the appearance of a white bus lettered in blue with the words “The San Pedro Church of Christ”. Most of us were Roman Catholic and even though we did not go to church we were members of St. John’s Roman Catholic Church, a goodly sized but not well off church.

They would drive by the neighborhood everyday for two weeks and scoop kids up from around the neighborhood. No permission slips. No insurance forms. And most of the time not even with our parent’s knowledge. They would scoop us up at about 3pm and transport us to the better side of town to the San Pedro Church of Christ. We would spend the trip singing Bible songs which most of the kids in my neighborhood didn’t sing because Roman Catholics in the 1970s didn’t sing bible songs. Singing bible songs was too Protestant.

Some kids spent their time jumping on the seats, screaming out the windows, and some laughed loudly whenever the name “Boaz” was mentioned in a certain bible song. My brother, Alex, my best friend, Albert, and I called the bus “The Crazy Bus” because of the way kids acted on the bus.

We would be dropped off at the Church and then quickly ushered into a bible class. I remember only two minor things about the class. One was a film about a plane lost in a sandstorm and the pilot, like John F. Kennedy Jr., relying on his own senses rather than upon his instruments to fly the plane. The plane crashes killing all aboard. The moral of the film was that God is the compass of our lives and without God we are lost. The other memory was Alex, Albert, and I giggling during this film about the stuff Albert was pulling out of his pockets. Suddenly, two hands grab him under the armpits and we gazed at him as he was lifted over the chair like Jesus ascending to heaven. They made him empty his pockets and he pulled out rubber bands, little plastic cowboys and Indians colored in bright plastic primary colors, pennies, a marble, and lint. After this class and a snack of cookies and milk we were led like cattle into the brightly lit very non-Roman Catholic auditorium that was their sanctuary. Alex, Albert, and I sat together. This is where I met two saints of God.

Two blue haired old ladies sat behind us. They were Anglo, well-dressed, and regular attendees of the church’s services. They belonged there as much as we didn’t. I don’t know what led to my turning around and asking one of the most important questions of my life. For the life of me I cannot remember. But I turned around to face these two ladies and asked them, “When will God end?” One of the ladies responded, “Never. God doesn’t end.” I turned around and sat down. I was satisfied with the answer because for all I knew nine year olds also lasted forever. It was easy for me to imagine immortality for myself let alone for God. For all I knew nine year olds are immortal. But then, I sat up and turned around and asked them, “When did God begin?” And the other woman answered, “God has no beginning.” That answer blew my little nine year old mind. I could not imagine not having a beginning. But rather than shut me down, the answer opened up to me the imaginative world of possibilities and that the world could indeed be beyond what I thought. I was amazed. I was thrilled. I was enthralled. I was pleasantly puzzled. And my being amazed, thrilled, enthralled, and pleasantly puzzled has been with me ever since.

This event is part of my faith story. It is part and parcel of my discovery of God, Jesus Christ, and the Kingdom of God. These two elderly ladies took the time to have a short conversation with a little boy from another side of town who didn’t look like their grandsons. I never saw them again and I have never known their names. But, these two saints of God were instrumental in my discovery of Jesus. God knows them and they knew God and God knows their names even if I do not. But I remember them. I remember them all the time-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

Being for Other in Jesus' Name

2009-09-25T09:48:00.000-07:00

"John said to Jesus, "Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us." But Jesus said, "Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us. For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward (Mark 9:38-50).”

When my wife was a public health nurse for the State of Tennessee back in the late nineties one demographic of patients she served were people from Mexico and Central and South America who worked the local farms and nurseries and the Tyson chicken plants in the area. Most of these people followed the ebb and tide of the agricultural business throughout the nation and did backbreaking work in order to live a life that so often you and I take for granted. Most of them knew very little English if at all and some of them didn’t even speak Spanish. For some of them, Spanish was a second language. For example, the only single indigenous language spoken by more than a million people in Mexico are the Nahuatl languages. Nahuatl is one of the native American languages with a large population of native speakers, along with Quechua, Aymara and Guaraní and some Mayan languages. The public health nurses in Tennessee assumed that all such dialects were simply Spanishm because Spanish was an alien language in middle Tennessee. The language barrier made the relationship between caregivers and care-receivers difficult as both sides struggled to communicate. Into this breach, into this gap, came this woman. She would come in with them. She would come in day in and day out with these non-English speakers and translate for them and for the nurses that needed it which were all of them except Anna. She was not paid. She did not receive compensation for her services. But she was there. She showed up. She showed up when no one else would. And yet, the staff looked down upon her. They looked down upon her because she was not a Christian. She was a Jehovah’s Witness.

Remember, this was the Bible Belt. Baptist churches, Pentecostal churches, Four Square Gospel churches, Church of God churches, Church of God in Christ churches, and Cumberland Presbyterian churches to name a few. Nashville, Tennessee has been referred to as the Protestant Vatican because of many of the Protestant headquarters and publishing houses located there not to mention that many Christian musicians and bands have their music cut in studios in Nashville.

Since Jehovah’s Witnesses are not Trinitarian and do not understand Jesus as being fully God and fully human they are not considered not to be a catholic or orthodox community of faith in both the little “c” and little “o”
meanings of the words. This woman was looked down upon because her tradition’s theology was not right enough, correct enough, nor Bible belt enough and they knew without a shadow of a doubt that she did not know Jesus or the God of Jesus for that matter. (I wonder if any of then had ever or had yet to realize that Jesus wasn’t a Christian.) They confused belief in Christian dogmas and doctrines for following Jesus as Lord and Savior. This woman was there when she was needed because she cared more about being Jesus to those in need than what people thought of her. She cared and she expressed her caring and the love of Christ for the poor and the voiceless in her being there for them. This was her mission in the world.

It is easy and sometimes appropriate to take a doctrine or dogma to task or put a religion’s belief system to the test but we must recognize that the love of God and the healing power of Christ flows into the world through flesh and blood, through regular everyday, common people. There is only one God and the New Testament proclaims that God is love. All love finds its source in God and in God alone for without God there would be no love just as there would be no existence. Caring, compassion, nurture, and kindness are all expressions of love and where they exist there God is.

We are a messy species. We can hold all sorts of paradoxes in our heads. We can believe things that are plain wrong. We hold onto truths that are not truths. We can misunderstand. We are ignorant and often not as smart as we think we are. We sometimes get it wrong.

But it is possible to love and care and nurture and be compassionate without having it all together. It is possible to be Jesus without knowing and understanding everything. It is possible to be a healing presence in the world no matter what others may think or what we may even think of ourselves. When we witness any act of kindness, compassion, healing, and nurture then we can rest assured that we are witnessing the presence of Christ in the world even though the person or persons who are involved in such acts of love may not even claim to know or believe in Christ. We claim that Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth and, therefore, we are claiming that Jesus is indeed the Lord of all acts of love. It is possible to see God at work through another even though that other person may hold beliefs that we do not hold or understand. It is even possible to celebrate such. The beauty of following Christ Jesus as Lord is that any act that communicates God’s love is an act which no person can steal away from us nor can we from any others. Our claim is that Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth and, therefore, we are also claiming that Jesus indeed is the Lord of all acts of love-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

Who Is Jesus?

2009-09-10T12:10:00.000-07:00

Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that I am?" And they answered him, "John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets." He asked them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered him, "You are the Messiah." And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels (Mark 8:27-38)."

Many people describe Jesus as a good man. They would describe Jesus as a heroic man- a man after God’s own heart even. Some see him as a rebel who fought the law and the law won. Many see Jesus as a saint of God or a prophet of God. There are some who see Jesus as a divine creation of God sent to us from the beyond. Yet, St. Peter, the first leader of the Church, affirmed none of these descriptions.

God the Father reveals to Peter who Jesus is. Jesus is the one upon who all hope is placed. He is the one that can bear all our fears, all our pain, all those things that we hope never see the light of day, all those petty and grand evils visited upon us and that we have visited upon others, and all those sins known and unknown that keep us far from God and one another. Peter sees in Jesus a God who has chosen to come after us because we could not get to him. Peter declares that Jesus is the one who totally, unreservedly, and passionately reveals God’s love for every man, woman, and child. Jesus is the fullest and ultimate expression of both God and what it means to live with and for God as a human being. Peter realizes that it is not looking up to the heavens where one sees God but it is in Jesus where God is encountered. Peter’s declaration is graced. God the Father reveals to this simple fisherman, this blue-collar business-owner, that Jesus, his friend, is salvation itself.

St. Peter as the first among equals declares what would be the Church’s faith-that God the Father revealed his love and salvation through Jesus, the Messiah (“the Christ” in Greek). Both Peter’s being the first bishop (Gk. episcopos; “overseer”) of the Church and his declaration that Jesus is “the Christ” is the rock upon which the Church is built. He was so humbled by his role as the head of the Church that when he was martyred in Rome he asked to be crucified upside down because he felt unworthy to be crucified like his friend, his Lord, his Savior, Jesus.

Those that believe in their heart and confess with their lips that Jesus is the Christ make such a declaration only because God the Father has revealed such a truth to them. Such a confession is in itself a sign of being blessed, a proof of grace, and should never be wielded as some sort of spiritual badge of honor. Any Christian man, woman, or child should be humbled by such a revelation and should respond to the world with the same humility that Jesus himself practiced, that St. Peter practiced, and that good Christian folk have practiced for over 2000 years. We should be humble before our non-Christian neighbors and friends for we are called to bear Christ into the world not because there is anything special about us but because God is special. We are simply ordinary people having an extraordinary experience.

Also, we Christians are not called to be optimistic people. We are called to be hopeful people. There is a grand difference between being optimistic and hopeful and we often mistake the two for being the same thing. Optimism states that one’s attitude and bearing will determine how well a situation will end. Hope declares that the end or goal believed in is so evocative and true that it guides a person through life whether a given situation is good or bad. Optimistic people smile their way through life with the self-assured smugness that a positive attitude and a happy disposition will bring about a good end to any situation. The tougher the situation, the more they smile and say that everything’s fine. It is difficult to imagine Jesus bearing the cross through the streets of Jerusalem smiling and saying that everything’s fine. I can’t imagine him telling the women of Jerusalem as they weep, “Don’t worry, ladies. Be happy. It’s all good.” Jesus was hopeful not optimistic.

Jesus believed that God’s kingdom on earth would be made real through his dedication and self-sacrifice no matter how hopeless and terrible life must have been with that cross on his shoulders and to all that it would lead. Jesus’ trust in God the Father empowered him to keep on keeping on. Jesus chose to bear that cross to that forsaken hill outside Jerusalem because he believed his Father in heaven would be glorified, honored, and victorious through what he was going through. The passion of Christ was a bloody affair not because the wrath of God demanded it but because the wrath of human beings demanded it. The wrath of God turned our demand into resurrection.

The same God in whom Jesus’ hope was founded is the same God that calls us through the Church. We are born into circumstances beyond are control and choosing. Some us are poor. Some of us are rich. Some of us are sickly. Some of us are healthy. Some of us lack faith. Some of us are filled to the brim with it. Yet, God calls us like Christ to choose a hard road. It may be to struggle through a friend’s chemotherapy. It may be a husband and wife’s decision to fight for their marriage rather than let it disintegrate. Such a cross may be choosing to give birth and then a raise a child with Down’s syndrome. Such a cross may be to believe in God when everyone and everything around you is saying to do otherwise. Such crosses can only be borne with the hope that in the end God will wring victory through them. Our hope is that in the end God wins-The Rev. Adrian A. Amaya.

What is the difference between a sermon and a homily? –question asked by Dana Marzynski

2009-09-08T13:10:00.001-07:00

In the Western Church, the terms “sermon” (Latin: sermo) and “homily” (Greek: homilia) were often interchangable. The words seem to be used in this way in the titles of the printed collections which have come down to us: "Sermons of St. Peter Chrysologus" and "Homilies of St. Valerian."

These two words “sermon” and “homily” have been to describe the preaching event in the Episcopal Church. The distinction is popular and somewhat artificial and no such distinction is taught in seminary (well, at least in the seminary that I went to) but to some people, lay and ordained, there is indeed a difference. There is no “official” or theological distinction between a sermon and a homily and such a distinction seems to be found mainly in the Roman Catholic and the Anglican/Episcopal traditions. Protestants, especially those that are low-church (non-sacramental), usually use the word “sermon” to describe the “preaching event” no matter the purpose or the focus of that event.

The difference seems to be thus. Homilies seem to be more informal and are more about connecting the Holy Scriptures to the lives lived by those in the pews. The word “homily” comes from a Greek word that means “to share.” Therefore, the preacher views his or her’s preaching as the sharing of a common faith. The preacher is attempting to connect God’s revelation in the Holy Scriptures, both Old and New, to real life, therefore, the preaching is much more laid back, relaxed, and not as complex, studied, or intricate. They also tend to be shorter-about 15 to 20 minutes.

Sermons on the other hand seem to be understood as an intense immersion into the Holy Scriptures and are meant to teach Church dogma, doctrine, and theology, deal with issues of morality and ethics, and tease out the subtleties of the Holy Scriptures in a way that guides one’s intellectual and moral life. They are seen as discourses or lectures in the classical sense of the word. They tend to be more structured, are written, and have a clearly outlined and articulated point. Sermons as such can utterly be prophetic and challenging to those in the pews. More than likely, the best homilies and sermons contain a bit of all the elements mentioned above-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

Jesus and "The Others"

2009-09-03T09:57:00.000-07:00

Jesus set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." But she answered him, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Then he said to her, "For saying that, you may go-- the demon has left your daughter." So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, "Ephphatha," that is, "Be opened." And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They were astounded beyond measure, saying, "He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak (Mark 7:24-37)."

Jesus has been preaching and healing. He has also been attacked by the Pharisees and the scribes because his disciples were not as fastidious as they were in keeping to the laws of Moses as interpreted by them. Jesus tells them that true cleanliness comes not from rules and regulations but from one’s heart. Therefore, he leave his own people for a time and goes to Tyre, a land filled with non-Jews who live without following Jewish laws, rules, and regulations and who have no care for the interpretations of those same laws, rules, and regulations.

Jews, much to the consternation of the Phoenician mayor at the time, began to settle this region in 1350 BC. So even though the very land was seeded by non-Jews, Jews had been living alongside non-Jews in Tyre for over a thousand years. So Jesus’ journey to Tyre was not something out of the ordinary but it would continue to offend the sensibilities of the Pharisees and the scribes who already thought him too lax at best concerning the rules and regulations that made up Pharisaical Judaism and a betrayer of Mosaic Law at worst. The Pharisees and scribes believed that Jesus was undermining their authority by not teaching people to be ritually better Jews and now here he was moving into the territory where Jews chose to and had to interact with those who were considered unclean.

Even in the notoriously pagan areas of the cities of Tyre and Sidon the reputation of Jesus is well known. These two cities were commercially significant cities and bastions of not only paganism but pagan success. These cities beckoned people from all around to come and make their fortune since the 9th century BC. Even there among the Canaanite temples to Melqart, Astarte, and other Caaanite gods and goddesses, Jesus’ name was spoken with respect and awe. These people beholden to different gods wanted to see Jesus and if possible in some cases experience the healing power of Jesus.

It is curious that Jesus’ presence in Tyre was not meant to be a part of a public ministry but that he went to a home for a private visit. However, word did indeed get out and a woman, a non-Jew, a Syro-Phonician, came to the house and presented herself in the most humbling manner to him, she prostrated himself at her feet. This woman, a pagan, whose beliefs were an offense to Jewish religious sensibilities comes to Jesus, a Jewish Rabbi through and through, and asks that Jesus free her daughter from her torment.

Love always crosses boundaries and never respects the lines that divide people from other people. Her love for her daughter drives her away from her deities on the chance that this Jesus of Nazareth who believes in the God of Israel can live up to the reputation that has proceeded him. Jesus’ reaction to her is not positive and the question is whether we are privy to a prejudice of Jesus or is something else going on. Just as the Pharisees and the scribes were offended by the faith life of the common Jew maybe Jesus is forcing his disciples to come to terms with their own prejudice. Jesus’ being a self-righteous bigot seems unlikely given his ministry so far. He may be responding to her with all the judgmental bias that his disciples and she herself would expect in order to not only heal but to teach. He may be seeing how the disciples respond to his ignoring, excluding, and the name calling of this woman. He may want to see how she responds to it.

Jesus says that she is not worth God’s grace. The disciples still don’t get it. Not one of them comes to her defense. They view her as a bother. As someone who is getting in the way of Jesus’ mission. But she is the reason for Jesus being there. God meant for her and Jesus to meet. God meant for that encounter to be remembered in the pages of Holy Scripture for our benefit.

Jesus’ use of the word “dog” is strong and is as degrading a term then and it is now in the Middle-East. Dogs are considered filthy animals in the Middle-East. Even though the Romans used them and used them quite well in the service of the Empire, cultures of the Middle-East viewed the dog as an animal with no scruples. It would eat the dead, return to its own vomit, scavenge and fight, run in packs and yet turn on its own, and would often be riddled with parasites seen and unseen. Gentiles were often called “dogs” by both pious and impious Jews.

Because no one will stand up for and her daughter she stands up for herself as a witness that even the lowest of the low need and want God’s grace. By standing up for herself and not allowing herself to take “no” for an answer, she has preached the Gospel and has claimed its message for herself. Even she and her daughter, followers of other gods, need the grace of the God of Israel. This is utterly important because if it is not true for her then it is not true for anyone. Jesus has been preaching and showing the people of Israel that this is true. In this pagan place with its pagan people it must be even truer if it is to be true at all. God knows no boundaries, God knows no bounds, and God knows no limits. This is what she proclaims for herself and for her daughter in spite of the prejudice against her and her people. She proclaims the Gospel by proclaiming that God is more than the prejudice that Jesus articulates and that the disciples share.

Then, from there, Jesus travels to the Decapolis, a union of ten cities on the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire in Jordan, Palestine, and Syria. The ten cities were not an official league or political unit, but they were grouped together because of their language, culture, location, and political status. The Decapolis cities were centers of Greek and Roman culture in a region that was otherwise Semitic (Nabatean, Aramean, and Jewish). Again, Jesus enters a world that the Pharisees and the scribes looked down upon. This is where Jesus meets the deaf man.

The history of people who are deaf is very long indeed. As early as 355 B.C., Aristotle is quoted as saying that those, "born deaf become senseless and incapable of reason." In ancient Israel, people who were born deaf weren't allowed to own property or do any form of business. They also weren't liable, and weren't punished for any damage or injury they caused. In ancient Greece, deaf people were considered to be "non-persons", and were rejected by their parents. Deaf children, and other disabled children, were killed. Roman law stated that deaf people had no legal rights or obligations, couldn't marry, and were required to have guardians look after them.

The deaf were seen in Jesus’ time as somehow devoid of something essentially human. They were seen as mentally deficient and barely more than animals. They were uneducated and unsocialized and often could be treated inhumanely by the unscrupulous. By Jewish standards and by Greek standards, this man who is a non-Jew and Greek in culture, was a non-person. Jesus is not simply healing this man of his deafness, but is restoring to this man his dignity as a human being, as a person worthy of respect. Like the Syro-Phonician woman, he is being restored to personhood and Jesus through both encounters is forcing the world to recognize that each person is indeed worthy of respect and care.

For each one of us, there is a person or type of person that we look down upon. The ignorant among us relish in it and proclaim from the rooftops their hatred of that other person who is unlike them in some way. The knowledgeable among us are aware of and fear such prejudice and hatred in ourselves so they police it, keep it under guard, and at times overcompensate for it. The only way to exorcise such from our lives is to take on God’s point of view where other people are concerned. Every human being who has lived, who is living, and who is to live is valued by God and are to be treated as such whether or not they know it or even believe it themselves.

We are called by Jesus to treat those who are most unlike ourselves and those whom we have on some level dehumanized with the care and concern and respect that God would have them be blessed. Through us God is to be present to everyone but especially to those whom we and the world have cast into outer darkness. For if we do not, it is we ourselves who cast ourselves into such-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

Defiled Hands

2009-08-26T09:29:00.000-07:00

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,

'This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.'
You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.’

Then he called the crowd again and said to them, "Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person (Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23)."

Some of Jesus’ disciples have forgotten their manners. There is no judgment upon Jesus so we can assume that Jesus was following the letter of Jewish law but some of those who were following him were not as fastidious or as reverent.

The people have come from all around to bring their sick, diseased, and broken loved ones to Jesus so that he may lay his hands on them or that they may at least touch the hem of his robe and be healed. They have come from far and near. They have come motivated by love and desperation. They have come putting all their faith and hope in Jesus. Jesus over and over again lays hands on them. He touches sores and boils and twisted limbs and broken flesh. He lays hands on those whose souls are stained by sin and those whose minds are touched by mental illness and those haunted by troubles. He lays hands on those who are soul-sick.

Then come the Pharisees, rich and respected followers of the Law, and the scribes, brilliant and learned men who interpreted the law. They are offended by the mass of humanity that surrounds Jesus. They are offended that Jesus has the love and respect for these people and that Jesus cultivates a relationship with these people. More than likely these people were unable to follow all the laws of Moses as was required of a good Jew and yet God was blessing them through Jesus with healing-healing of body, of mind, and of soul. From the point of view of the Pharisees and the scribes these people were not worthy of such grace for they were not perfect practitioners of God’s law.
Jesus sees his ministry as the unabashed and unapologetic blessing of God’s children. Jesus is motivated by God’s love to reach out to the people around them no matter who they may be; no matter how far from God or how close to God they may be. Jesus understands that God is no respecter of persons and that God is a God of love and that God’s move towards any person is his choice. God will do what God will do and no one will stand in the way of that.

The Pharisees and the scribes understand that God has chosen his people, the Jews, to be a special people. They are a special people not because there is anything intrinsically better about those persons who call themselves Jews and those who do not. They are a special people because they have entered into a covenant relationship with the Living God to live a certain way. They are to be a people dedicated to God and, therefore, be witnesses to who God truly and wonderfully is. To live other than the way that God has established is to cut one’s self off from the covenant that God has established. Even though Jesus himself is following the letter of the law, those who are his disciples (and there are many beyond those that would later become the Apostles) are not as diligent.

The Pharisees and the scribes are more worried about the following of ritual than celebrating the fact that they worship a God who has done great things for his people in the healings that took place. The scene before them offends the Pharisees and the scribes. But Jesus is offended also.

Jesus is offended at their defining holiness by doing this, that, or the other thing while being so utterly willing to sacrifice people to their standards. The Pharisees care so much about their worship and honoring of God that they look down upon the everyday people who look up to them. They despise the everyday piety of common Jews. Jesus declares that it is the caring for others that determines true worship and honoring of God and gives life to the Law of Moses.

All the rites, religious observances, and practices in the world mean nothing if those who observe such do not care for others. All the beliefs and opinions about kneeling, standing, or sitting in Church, whether or not instruments should or should not be used, whether or not the guitar or the organ is proper for worship, whether or not the New Revised Standard Version or the King James Version of the Bible is to be used, whether or not the liturgical colors are right for the season, whether or not wine or grape juice or wafers or loafs of bread are to be used at communion, whether or not women should wear pants or dresses, or whether or not a Church is traditionalist or progressive mean absolutely nothing if those concerned with such issues do not care for others in the Church and out of the Church with the same passion and love that God has so freely given through Jesus. Shame on us when we care more for the things of God rather than the people for whom God sent his only begotten Son-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

Go

2009-07-02T14:40:00.000-07:00

“He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics. He said to them, "Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them." So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them (Mark 6:7-13).”

Within us is a wondrous power. Within us is the power and presence of God’s Holy Spirit. Within us is the love, mercy, and compassion of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Within us the majesty of the Father resides. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. God’s power and presence within us and our being fearfully and wonderfully made is part and parcel of who we are. So why do we fear being the people God has created us to be?We have been given so much and we have scarcely begun to explore how our gifts can make a difference. We have been blessed with the possibility of witnessing our grandest and most meager gifts being used by the Holy Spirit to make Jesus present in the lives of people. There is not one gift that cannot further the Kingdom of God no matter how insignificant we may hold that gift to be. As Christians we are to offer what ever we have to God so that we can see God at work through our gifts. But there is a real fear in the hearts of people today. We fear that God may actually be real. We fear that the God of heaven and earth who incarnated in a virgin’s womb may actually have a claim upon our lives and upon who we are. If we offer our gifts to the Lord and witness God doing miraculous things then there is no option but to become immersed into a life that follows Christ’s own self-offering to the Father.

Many Christians are willing to believe in God if the benefit is salvation, prosperity, blessing, or whatever good thing may come our way. But what if we have to subject and surrender ourselves to God’s will? That is very different. We do not mind God being involved in our lives as long as he rewards the status quo and the pedestrian and shallow piety that now passes for Christian spirituality. But we often fear God who lays claim to the entirety of our lives.Fear keeps us from seeing God at work in the world. We are afraid to offer our hands, our voices, our intellect, our gardening, our knitting, our praying, our hospitality, our hobbies, our work, and all the things which we have been blessed because we fear that God will take over our lives and leave nothing for us. In the surrendering of our talents to God’s will we believe that we will rob ourselves of ourselves. Yet, the God that calls us to use whatever gifts we have for the good of friends, neighbors and even enemies is the same God who declares that he will give us the desires of our hearts.Maybe another fear is that we are afraid of conversion. Maybe if we witness God at work in the world through us we will never be the same again and that is what scares us. We will have to approach every aspect of our lives in a new way and that threatens the way we live our lives now. It threatens who we understand ourselves to be and who we understand ourselves to be where God is concerned. It threatens our understandings of God and opens our souls to what God really wants for our lives. Yet, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is the One who has promised us abundant life…life so filled to the brim that the cup of our lives spills over with God’s presence. To not offer our gifts to God is to let them waste away and allow our lives to become devoid of witnessing and experiencing the miraculous power of God to transform lives...even our own-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

Calling Out To God

2009-06-26T10:14:00.000-07:00

“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications! If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered. I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning…(Psalm 130:1-6).”

The Psalmist in his penning his plea to God is sharing with us how desperate his life has become. Thousands of years stand between the writer of this Psalm and ourselves and yet it is as if this writer is speaking for us as he speaks for himself. “Out of the depths I cry to you. O Lord,” the Psalmists pleas. This call like so many others is an act of faith. From out of the depths of divorce we call out to God. From out of the depths of losing a child we call out to God. From out of the depths of suffering from diabetes, cancer, or heart disease we call out to God. From out of the depths of drug and alcohol addiction we call out to God. From out of the depths of an abusive relationship we call out to God. From out of the depths of a haunted past or an seemingly empty future we cry out to God. From out of the depths of being shallow, materialistic, and selfish we cry out to God. From out of the depths of feeling unloved we cry out to God. From out of the depths of despair and depression we cry out to God. From out of the grave we cry out to God.

We cry out to God from countless upon countless depths. We need someone greater than ourselves to swim down into that depth, grab hold of us, and bear us to the surface-bear us to light and life.

Life can be desperate and sometimes our own prayers to God are less eloquent but are nonetheless impassioned. I know that in my own life that the only prayer I have been able to utter at times is the word “Ayudame (Help!)” In that one word all my weakness, all my pain, and all my fear has been given to God. Through that one word my own psalm is prayed.

It is rational to not want to suffer nor want those whom we love to suffer. However, the reality is that we do indeed suffer and no one is immune even though some may suffer immensely more than others. Life is filled with joys and sorrows, with blessings and suffering, healings and losses, wholeness and brokenness.

Jesus is God experiencing the human condition, and therefore, the mystery of suffering. More than likely the words of the Psalm 130 were on Jesus’ lips often as he encountered suffering in his own life and in the life of others. Because he knew the pain of rejection by his own people, friends, and followers, knew the loss of a friend, Lazarus, knew the so called "failure" of his life's work, knew fear, knew betrayal, knew the anguish of Gethsemane and the torture of Calvary; and knew the feeling of abandonment by his God in the midst of it all, we have one who understands when we cry out from the depths. If Jesus can call out to God in the midst of such suffering then our own suffering and our own calls out to God are to be understood as a sacred act of prayer.

St. Paul in his letter to the Roman Church (Romans 8) spoke of God’s coming to his own rescue. He witnessed time after time God making himself known in his life. Through experiencing God’s presence when things were at their worst he could proclaim that nothing in life, nothing in death, nothing in all of creation could separate any of us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. God will make his presence know in some way, shape, or form when we call out from our depths because nothing can keep God from swimming down to the depths for us. He has promised us no less-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

2009-06-12T10:34:00.000-07:00

THE COLLECT FOR PURITY (The Book of Common Prayer 355)

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

In the service of our celebrating the Holy Eucharist we soon come before God and present ourselves. This prayer gives voice about who we are to be as we come before God. These words, reminiscent of Psalm 51, began in the 11th century as a private prayer by the priest as he vested for Mass. We Anglicans included them in our entrance rite and these words have been part of Anglican Eucharistic worship since 1549 AD; for 460 years.

After we bless God for all who God is we offer ourselves to God’s presence. We become present to the One who is already present to us. We claim that who we are deep down inside is the one who actually shows up for worship. Not our reputation. Not our false self. Not the person that we want others to think we are. We are claiming at this point in the service that it is we ourselves who want to be present to God.

We also state the obvious. There is nothing that God doesn’t know. God knows us through and through. God knows those things that we desire for good or for ill. God knows all our secrets... even those secrets that we keep from our very selves...even those secrets that we hope never see the light of day. But the great wonder of it all is that no desire nor secret will so offend God that God will not choose to be present. Actually, the more honest we are in presenting ourselves to God, warts and all, the more we allow God to be present to us. We begin to understand that our best and our worst do not lessen God’s great love for us. We show up so God shows up.

We then ask God’s very Self in the person of the Holy Spirit to touch our innermost self and bless those good things that we hold dear and by which we guide our life. We also ask God to exorcise, to drive away, those things that we hold dear which will ruin our lives and the lives of others. Only then God’s presence in our lives can allow us then to simply love God for who God is and love what and who God’s very Self loves-creation itself and the people with which we share it.

Through such love we then reveal to all the world to see who God really is. We show the world that God indeed is love. But we can only do this if we are open to receiving the work of the Holy Spirit. We can only do this if we allow ourselves to be utterly and completely vulnerable and transparent to the Living and Loving God. God will not force God’s Self upon anyone who does not want God to be present. If we want God to be present to us then God will be. If not then God won’t. God will always give us our heart’s desire even if our heart’s desire is God’s effective absence.

As Christians, we make such a request of ourselves and of God the Father only by the presence of God’s Holy Spirit through Christ our Lord who offers this request to the One who is beyond imagination and definition but whose love flows to us through Christ Jesus our Lord and by the power of God’s Holy Spirit-AAA+

Blessed Be God

2009-06-02T11:42:00.000-07:00

The Episcopal service of the Holy Eucharist (Rite II) opens with these words:

Celebrant: Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

People: And blessed be his kingdom, now and for ever. Amen.

Most Sundays after our opening hymn and the procession of the priest, the acolytes, and the choir, the celebration of the Holy Eucharist begins with these words. Like the Jews, like Jesus, we begin our service by blessing God which of course begs the question “What does it mean to bless?” To bless God is to exclaim our thankfulness that God is God. We begin our service of giving thanks by recognizing that the One who is the source of all blessings is indeed in a state of blessedness. We start the service proclaiming that as a people we are thankful that we are able to come before the Living God who created the heavens and the earth and from which all joy finds its source. Yet, we also make this affirmation as Christians. God’s oneness has been encountered by God’s People in the Church as transcendent, intimate, and relational all at the same time as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is a case of 1x1x1=1.

The Christian dogma of the Trinity is the way that God’s people have experienced and continue to experience God’s presence in the life of his Church. It also speaks to the Christian affirmation that God is love.God is first and foremost love. It is the essence and source of God’s movement toward humanity and the bringing of creation into being. All that God has done, all that God is doing, and all that God will do finds its source in the love that dwells in the heart of God before creation. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit have been in relationship with one another since before the world began and Jesus is the best and ultimate expression of this love. God has been in love since even before time and space began. It is the very nature of God to be in love. The Trinity is the revelation that such love has no bounds and no limits. The Church has been empowered by the Holy Spirit to continue this revelation that this love took on flesh in Jesus Christ. We open the service by blessing God for blessing us with this revelation.

It is this revelation of God’s love to the world that makes the Kingdom of God present in the here and now. The Kingdom of God is not some “pie-in-the-sky” place set aside for those who believe or live the right way and awarded as a prize after death. It is a present reality that is encountered and experienced in the here and now whenever and wherever the People of God allow the love of God to flow through their lives out into the world. Whenever and wherever people encounter compassion, help, care, and nurture they are experiencing the Kingdom of God. This is why we as the People of God say these words “Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit /And blessed be his kingdom, now and for ever. Amen.”And for all of this we bless God-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

The Called

2009-05-22T10:02:00.000-07:00

"Looking up to heaven, Jesus prayed, "I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth (John 17:6-19)."

We do not belong to this world. We belong to God for the sake of the world. For those of us who choose day after day to follow Jesus as Lord and Savior we are promised the companionship, the help, the comfort, and the strength of the Holy Spirit to be Christ’s presence in the world. In both the book by Cormac McCarthy and the movie directed by Ethan and Joel Coen “No Country For Old Men,” a Texas lawman, Ed Tom Bell, shocked and dismayed by his inability to capture a sociopathic hitman and protect a misguided Vietnam vet with found drug money from Mexican hitmen states that he thought God would come into his life but never did. I wonder at this line. I have heard this line uttered by real life people so it is a real sentiment. I often have wondered and have indeed asked for what were they looking or for what were they expecting. Were they expecting burning bushes and choirs of angels? How did they get to the place where they could not nor would not understand that the ordinary circumstances of their lives are and where the seeds for the extraordinary works of God come to life?

Every single person is called through the ordinariness of their lives into the extraordinary life that God offers. Yet, since it is an offer it is up to us to accept what God offers. It is indeed an offer we can refuse. When we accept this offer we are also accepting who we were meant to be...who we are born to be. In accepting God’s offer of extraordinary life we are also accepting both the responsibility and the privilege to make the Kingdom of Heaven present on the earth. Making God’s Kingdom present is why we were created. The world, the culture, and the pressures of society and other people’s expectations fight to shape us and our lives into other than what God desires for us.

God does indeed have a plan for your life. It is not a shallow plan of a shallow God where you struggle in choosing vanilla or chocolate ice cream while wondering which choice is part of God’s plan or where getting a good parking place is part of God’s unfolding plan for you and creation. Choosing God’s offer of an extraordinary life is the living of a life that cultivates, nurtures, discovers, and reveals both an awareness and presence of the Living God of Jesus Christ our Lord. It is choosing a life that you and I are meant for rather than the life with which the world would have us be satisfied.

We are unique individuals able to nurture unique gifts that are particular to each one us. God does not want you to become me nor does God want me to become you. Through the unique gifts that we have been given we can become Christ to the world-revelations of God the Father.

As we have matured as men and women, we learn that we are a treasury of traits, interests, and abilities and that accepting that others possess differing characteristics creates a diversity that is part of God’s plan for us as well as it is for them.

As Christians, God has called us to use our very ordinary selves so that the world may witness the presence of Jesus Christ in our very lives. God had called us to be Jesus to our neighbors and to the world at large. You possess the Holy Spirit and those unique gifts that allow you and you alone to do that in a very extraordinary way through the very ordinary life that you lead. No one else can do what you are meant to do. God has called you. God has called me. God has called us together to reveal his glory and because God has called us we belong not to the world but to God and to God alone-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

The Importance of Being A Mother

2009-05-08T07:30:00.000-07:00

“Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children. Do you understand? Your daughter is waiting for you out on the streets." This is a line from a movie from the nineties. In this scene, a mother who is a heroin addict is confronted with the reality of her neglect of her 12 year old daughter who roams the streets of Detroit watched over by a guardian angel. She is healed of her addiction and discovers the sacred ordinariness of being the mother she was born and called to be.

Beyond the many hats that mothers must wear and the amount of pins they must juggle, a mother’s primary vocation is to teach their children about what God feels like. When a child is kissed upon, hugged by, held by, and nurtured by a loving mother that child is immersed in an expression of faith more profound than any theology. A child’s first imaginings of God are based upon their interaction with their parents. Our streets and prisons are filled with people whose parents were unable (sometimes by circumstance) or unwilling to love with such unreserved abandon. For many, their image of God as an adult is tainted by their being raised by aloof, abusive, or dysfunctional parents. A mother, like a father, are fundamental to our children understanding and discovering who God truly is.

This spiritual reality is proclaimed by Jesus in the Gospels and claimed by Saint Paul in his letters to the Romans and to the Galatians. Holy Scripture and the earliest traditions of the Church recognizes that in our heart of hearts we are children crying out for the love of our “Abba” (daddy) and “Amma” (mommy). That the child who resides behind the walls of our carefully crafted reputations and our spiritual insensitivity is our truest self. That child is the Self that recognizes God and yearns for God.

The love and nurture of a mother lays down the foundation for her child to recognize God as an adult. We are created to recognize first and foremost what God feels like and bring this awareness to our intellectual understandings about God. We must first experience love in order to recognize God who is the source of that love. Without being loved first, any ideas, opinions, understandings, theologies, dogmas, and doctrines held, no matter how orthodox, mean nothing for love lies at the heart of God’s being.

Saint Paul in the eighth chapter of his letter to the Romans states that nothing in life, nothing in death, nothing in all of creation can keep us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Dionysius the Areopagite following Paul’s holy declaration wrote in the year 500 AD, “Is it not true that Christ draws near with love to those who turn away from him? That he struggles with them, begs them not to scorn his love, and if they show only aversion and remain deaf to his appeals, becomes himself their advocate?” Mothers teach us that no matter how far we may stray or how close we may remain, the love of God is wholly passionate where we are concerned.

Our mothers, all mothers, and all who would be mothers are called by God’s very Self to teach their children before anything else what God feels like. This was the work of Jesus’ Blessed Mother. She taught Jesus through her love and care how to recognize God. This is the vocation of all mothers. When mothers live revealing who God is to their children they are protecting their children from believing in concepts of God that are destructive, oppressive, and evil. Through our mothers our children become strong, loving, and compassionate revelations of the Living God. Because of mothers children’s minds and spirits will follow what their hearts will already know-The Rev. Adrian A. Amaya.

What's In A Name?

2009-05-02T19:25:00.001-07:00

"We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us-- and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?

Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God; and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him.

And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us (1 John 3:16-24)."

When I was in college I dated a girl who constantly said “Jesus Christ” as a statement of shock, incredulity or exasperation. (It was my first encounter with an Episcopalian.) I had only uttered those two words in the context of worship or apologetics but never as exclamatory utterance. Whenever she said the word I was rattled by the irreverence. She was an intelligent young woman from a good family and had good friends. But her being unchurched made her insensitive to the faith of others who put that faith at the center of their lives. Since her own faith was nominal and she followed the religion of her own opinions she seemed unable to appreciate that the name of Jesus was unique and singular and should only be uttered with respect.

However, there were people in my small non-denominational Church that uttered the name of Jesus after every other word in the middle of every sentence. They treated the name of Jesus like a verbal talisman, an uttered charm, to baptize and make sacrosanct anything they said from a profound theological insight to the secret recipe of grand ma’s potato salad. Such carefree use of the Lord’s name left me unimpressed.

The name Jesus is a special name. A name that revealed God’s movement in a person born in Palestine over 2000 years ago. Not that the name of Jesus was foreign to the Jews of the middle-east so long ago. The name “Jesus” was their “John”, “Juan”, or “Steve”. It was not uncommon to know someone or have someone in your family named “Jesus.” Actually, the name “Jesus” is the Greek form of the Hebrew name “Yeshua” (or “Joshua”). Yeshua means “Salvation.” It is a good name. It is a good Jewish name. Jesus’ Jewish name would have been “Yeshua Ben Yosef” (Jesus, Son of Joseph).

That very common name was given to a baby born over 2000 years who would be God’s salvation made manifest. So the angel's message to Joseph was "You shall call His name 'God is salvation,' for He will save His people from their sins." That name tells us that it is through Him that God saves humanity. The person of Jesus is the way that God chose to save all of humanity from all that separates us from God.

The purpose of God’s Incarnation in Jesus was to reconcile humanity to God. In order to do this, God, in the person of Jesus Christ, had to become fully human while always being fully divine. He had to experience all the pain, temptations and sufferings that all human beings face. Finally, having preached, taught, healed and performed many miracles, he had to experience the last pain that all people must undergo: death. He allowed Himself to be crucified. As a human being, he died; but, being God, he rose from the dead, proving that all who believe and follow him will do likewise. This is why Jesus Christ is called "Savior," for He saves us from sin’s effect, death. Such a movement of God on our behalf in Jesus Christ our Lord must disallow any one of us from uttering Jesus’ name as an exclamatory utterance or verbal talisman but rather as recognition of what God is willing to do for us.

Prayer is probably the best forum to utter the holy name of Jesus. The Church recognized this so very long ago. In order to enter more deeply into the life of prayer and to come to grips with St. Paul's challenge to pray unceasingly, the Church offers the Jesus Prayer, which is sometimes called the prayer of the heart. The Jesus Prayer is offered as a means of concentration, as a focal point for our inner life. The prayer is for cab drivers, social workers, business persons, teachers, professional baseball players (not necessarily used to win a game), or psychiatrists. We pray the Jesus Prayer to do God's will, not our own bidding. Anyone, everyone can say the Jesus Prayer. The most frequently used form of the Jesus Prayer is: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." This prayer, in its simplicity and clarity, is rooted in the Scriptures and the new life granted by the Holy Spirit. It is first and foremost a prayer of the Spirit because of the fact that the prayer addresses Jesus as Lord, Christ and Son of God; and as St. Paul tells us, "no one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit"(1 Cor. 12:3)-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

It's Still Easter

2009-04-22T12:15:00.000-07:00

While the disciples were telling how they had seen Jesus risen from the dead, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, "Peace be with you." They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, "Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, "Have you anything here to eat?" They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence.

Then he said to them, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you-- that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled." Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things (Luke 24:36b-48)."

The disciples are sharing with others who have not encountered the Risen Lord the miracle of Jesus’ Resurrection and no doubt they are encountering disbelief, doubt, puzzlement, and bemusement. And why not? The dead stay dead. That is the way of things. Common sense and sane judgment understands that the dead stay dead; anything else is a fairy tale or crazy talk. It is in the midst of faith and doubt, credulity and incredulity, that Jesus appears to those proclaiming the Resurrection and to those hearing their message. He presents to all his hands and feet and shows that the wounds that mark his death are indeed real and that the person before them is no ghost, no phantasm, no figment of one’s imagination, and no product of wishful thinking. Whether or not we believe Luke’s account, there is an earnest proclamation by Luke that the Risen Lord is more than an ethereal experience.

After, Jesus blesses them with the shalom of God and calms their shock, Jesus sits on the beach with the men, believers and unbelievers alike, and eats broiled fish. The Gospel of Luke wants the readers and hearers of the Gospel to understand that the Risen Jesus is both a physical encounter and an experience beyond imagining. Another famous encounter the Gospel of Luke is the story of the travelers who meet the Risen Lord on the road to Emmaus (Lk. 24:30-31). It is at their fellowship, the breaking of the bread, that they realize that Jesus is in their midst. Luke wants the people of God, the Church, to understand that the Risen Lord is made manifest in the community of faith. In and through God’s people, Christ is alive and the empty tomb is made present. Of course, this begs the question of some of whether or not, Jesus did in fact literally and actually rise to life beyond the cross in a way that could be witnessed by those living at the time. St. Paul in 1 Corinthians (5:1-11) writes so matter of fact about his own and others’ encounter with the Risen Lord that one would believe so and the early Church preached so. But we must remember that the Gospel of Luke was written after the letters of St. Paul by about 25 years. The Gospel of Luke is written through the lens of the Resurrection and through the lens of Pentecost. Like the Gospel of John, the Lucan Gospel understands that for the people of God, the experiencing of the Resurrected Christ cannot be disconnected nor divorced from the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church, in the people of God. The victory of God was not an event in the distant and unexperienced past but is a present reality.

For the secular world, Easter has passed. That one Sunday two weeks ago was celebrated with Easter egg hunts, barbeques and spring sales events with the ever needful spring shopping spree at Carousel Mall or the Great Northern Mall. Yet, for the Church, Easter is a season that is fifty days long and not simply a Sunday in April. The Easter season for the Church lasts from Easter Sunday through the Day of Pentecost, May 31st, the Church’s birthday. The Easter season represents Jesus’ being with his disciples after his Resurrection as he taught and empowered them to continue his ministry and culminates with the celebration of the day of Pentecost, the day when the Holy Spirit created the Church out of a diverse and scattered people and united them for the sake of others.

But it isn’t May 31st yet. The Church is still hearing Easter hymns, shouting “Alleluias,” bearing the colors of gold and white, reading and hearing the stories of the Resurrection of Jesus and hearing sermons of how God’s victory over sin and death in the Resurrection makes all the difference in the world. Why so much attention to Easter? Because if Christ did not rise from the dead then our faith is in vain and our hopes are made null and void. If Christ did not rise from the dead then nothing matters. If Christ did rise from the dead nothing else matters-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

Doubting Thomas

2009-04-16T09:05:00.001-07:00

“When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord." But he said to them, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe."

A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe." Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God!" Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name (John 20:19-31).”

Thomas’ doubt is a believing doubt. Unlike the Pharisees and scribes that stood before the cross and taunted Jesus by stating that they would indeed believe that he was the Messiah if he would only take himself off the cross, Thomas wants to believe but can’t. He can’t wrap his mind around the unbelievable. He wants to believe that Jesus has risen from the dead but he cannot believe it. The brutal reality of the cross overshadows his hope in God and his love for Jesus. He cannot see nor imagine God’s victory in the lifeless body of Jesus, his rabbi. He wants to believe the witness of the other disciples but their witness sounds as if they have gone mad. You cannot uncrucify the crucified. His head knows that even though his heart yearns for the impossible. The only thing that can convince him that the witness of the other disciples is true is not to be told about the Risen Lord Jesus but to meet the Risen Lord Jesus...to encounter God’s victory in Christ in the here and now.

The Christian life is about encountering Jesus in the here and now because it assumes that Jesus is alive and well and that the God of Israel, the Father, is not the God of the dead but the God of the living. Our worship, our very lives, and even creation itself speaks to the reality that life is stronger than death and that love is stronger than hate. In the midst of worship, in the midst of our lives, and from out of the very heart of creation the power of God’s victory in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord is part and parcel of our lives. Only by encountering that power do any one of us read the Gospels’ witnessing to the Resurrection and understand the Church’s faithful proclamation of it as being utterly true. Such is especially true of our dark times; in those times where all of life seems to be set against us and we cannot catch the break that we need. Yet, in our hopelessness the promise is that Jesus will show up...that God will be there whether or not that dark time is the loss of a friendship or the facing of one’s own impending death. In and through our losses, God is there and the power of the Resurrection is also there whether or not we can believe it...or even wrap our minds around it.

The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead and how that reality becomes present in the lives of the baptized cannot be coldly understood since it is a reality beyond our intelligence and imagination. It is a reality that is experienced in the here and now via the Christian life...through a life dedicated to prayer, the reading and study of Holy Scripture, the doing of good works, and the receiving of the Sacraments. This life prepares us to see God with our hearts. The Risen Lord makes himself present when our hearts, our center, our truest Self, needs the Risen Christ because when we can no longer believe the unbelievable. Like Thomas our doubt can become a mark of faith allowing God’s declaration of victory through the Risen Lord, Jesus the Christ-The Rev. Adrian A. Amaya.

Christ is Risen

2009-04-13T09:12:00.000-07:00

"When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint Jesus. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, "Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?" When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, "Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you." So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid (Mark 16:1-8)."

Easter recognizes that those things that haunt us, prey upon us, threaten us, defeat us and sometimes kill us do not have the last word. God has the last word. Two thousand years ago, Jesus’ enemies thought they had won. Their proof was in the dead body removed from the cross, wrapped in bandages and spices and laid in a cold and barren tomb. They thought they had won because they saw the disciples scatter and hide in confusion and fear. They thought they had won because they had silenced the Word made flesh who declared God’s Truth and revealed God’s love. But the Father, the maker of heaven and earth, of all things seen and unseen, the God of the interstellar vastness of the universe and the infinite microcosm of the atomic world, the God of unimaginable glory and power and of intimate tenderness and compassion, would not be thwarted by the passions and designs of mortals.

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is God’s declaration that Love is stronger than death and that Truth is stronger than betrayal. In the Resurrection, all of humanity is introduced to what are lives are meant to be. Not what we wish it to be. But what are lives will be no matter the event of our own deaths. Dying is an event and not a state of being. It has a beginning and an end. The life offered to us through the Risen Lord is eternal. It is not an event. It has no beginning and it has no end for Life Eternal finds its source in God. It is a state of being. Dying ends a biological process. Nothing less. Nothing more.

However, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ gives to all of humanity, those who have lived, those who are living, and those who are to live, the power to become fully human by way of becoming immersed into Life itself…Jesus Christ. For those who have not encountered the power of the Living God, a day like Easter Sunday is an empty celebration of an event that they believe probably did not happen. The Christian claim for the truth of the Resurrection is beyond belief and credulity. Our claim to them that Christ is risen is as much a mystery to them as the color red is to a blind man

Christianity recognizes that without God, the dead stay dead. Physically, literally, spiritually, figuratively, and in all the ways that one can be dead. Without God there is no life in the first place let alone in the second place, Life Eternal. God’s will for humanity is not thwarted by loss, sin, regret, and death for the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ is the God of the Living…a God who delights in life blossoming and coming to fruition. God delights in a Life that asserts itself over and over against death, destruction, and decay. Not only life in a general sense but also life in the specific. Your life. My life. Our lives.

Our very life means something to God and the fact that you and I have lived and are living and will always live is a statement of God’s victory and glory. From conception to resurrection our lives are meant to be declarations of God’s will, mercy, compassion, power, glory, sovereignty, and love. Our lives are meant for nothing less but to declare God’s goodness. Alleluia! Christ is Risen!!-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

The Footwashing

2009-04-08T19:52:00.000-07:00

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, "Lord, are you going to wash my feet?" Jesus answered, "You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand." Peter said to him, "You will never wash my feet." Jesus answered, "Unless I wash you, you have no share with me." Simon Peter said to him, "Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!" Jesus said to him, "One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you." For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, "Not all of you are clean."After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, "Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord--and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them. Jesus said, "Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, `Where I am going, you cannot come.' I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:1-17, 31b-35)."

In the ancient Middle-East (as it probably is now in most of the world) people wore sandals throughout their day. Throughout the day, dust, sweat, scat, and other filth would collect upon a person’s feet causing them to not only be unsightly but also smell and stink. More often than not a guest to someone else’s home had feet that were filthy and even at times may have been soiled. It was a common issue to both the poor and the rich. Because it was such a common occurrence, it was the custom that as a sign of hospitality a guest would have his feet washed as they entered the threshold of a home. This great act of hospitality was often performed by the person of the lowest station in a household. This sign of hospitality on the part of the host was a demanding task for the one who had to actually perform it.

During their last Passover meal together, Peter sees Jesus rise during supper to remove his outer garment and wrap a towel around his waist. Peter, just as all the others, knew that such an act was to be performed by slaves or servants. Since this was a private gathering there were no slaves or servants present to carry out this menial job of removing sandals and washing the feet of guests.

Jesus moved from disciple to disciple washing each of their feet. Such an act must have been somewhat scandalous as no rabbi, no teacher, would dare to perform such a task upon anyone let alone their disciples. One would expect that the reverse would be true. When Jesus finally gets to Peter is so righteously horrified by Jesus’ demeaning of himself that he does not want Jesus to wash his feet. The parable that Jesus is enacting is lost on Peter.On this last night of freedom, Jesus chooses to be the servant of all. He chooses what is least so that God may reveal what is best. This is what Peter is unable to receive. He is unable to be vulnerable to Jesus so that he can receive the gift that Jesus offers. If Peter cannot allow Jesus to perform this intimate and demanding act then how can he perform such for the sake of others.

To serve the world we can only give what we are willing to receive. In not willing to receive the servanthood of God through the life of Jesus, a person removes themselves from being a servant of God for the sake of others. To give Jesus we must receive Jesus. One cannot give what one does not have-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

Palm Sunday and the Cross

2009-03-31T12:04:00.000-07:00

“When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples and said to them, "Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it. If anyone says to you, `Why are you doing this?' just say this, `The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.'" They went away and found a colt tied near a door, outside in the street. As they were untying it, some of the bystanders said to them, "What are you doing, untying the colt?" They told them what Jesus had said; and they allowed them to take it. Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it; and he sat on it. Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting,

"Hosanna!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!"

Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve (Mark 11:1-11).”

On Palm Sunday, in a space of an hour and fifteen minutes, we move from cries of “Hosannas!” to the cries of “Crucify Him!” We move from exaltation to condemnation. We move from recognizing God in our midst to killing God because he would dare upset our pre-conceived notions. We move from affirming life to denying life. From triumph to execution. On the first Palm Sunday, over 2000 years ago, our Lord came into Jerusalem hailed by the people as the Son of David, the One who comes in the Name of the Lord. He came not on a white stallion but on a donkey. He came not with a brandished sword but with only the clothes on his back. He came not as a warrior but as the Prince of Peace. Five days later, all those palms waved and cloaks set down before him became shaken fists, hurled abuse, and incredible torture. Upon Jesus, God in the flesh, will humanity through the people of Jerusalem and the government of Rome pour its cruelty, malice, violence, hatred, disease, and sin. Every grand and petty evil ever committed would be poured upon the Only Begotten Son of God as he was betrayed, arrested, tried, tortured, and executed upon a Roman cross.

What is startling about the cross is how typical the cross is. The human capacity to inflict the most unimaginable and unspeakable horrors upon our fellow human beings and upon creation itself is as prevalent today as it was 2000 years ago. And left to our own resources there is no evidence that we would be any less bloodthirsty 2000 years from now. The 20th century, a century filled with technological miracles and enlightened sensibilities, has been the most violent and horrific century in the entire history of humanity. It is amazing that this age so filled with discovery is simultaneously a dark age. The 21st century is turning out to be no less.

Our current culture does not want us to realize that the King of the Universe, Almighty God, came to us in weakness, humility, and mercy...that the God who created the heavens and the earth showed us that his love was made real in flesh and blood, wood and nails, thorns and spit...that God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and the Jewish man, Jesus the Christ, were one and the same. This week we celebrate the heart of the Christian faith…this week we enter into the mystery of God’s love for us and the world.

Christ is God’s declaration that such a life filled with sin and death will not have the last word. Sin, death, war, crime, oppression, disease, tragedy, and disaster are all events. They are finite. They have a beginning and an end and they do not define who and whose we are. The infinite and inexhaustible love of God is greater than anything that this age can visit upon us. God defines who we are and who we are meant to be and who we are to become. Upon the cross, Jesus takes all that is poured upon him and offers it in his very self to the Father who redeems it, transforms it, and claims victory over it. Through Christ’s sacrifice upon the cross, God Almighty will declare that there is nothing in life or in death or in all of creation that can separate us from his love-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

Losing Life to Gain Life

2009-03-27T08:17:00.001-07:00

“Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, "Sir, we wish to see Jesus." Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.

Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say-- `Father, save me from this hour'? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name." Then a voice came from heaven, "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again." The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, "An angel has spoken to him." Jesus answered, "This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die (John 12:20-33).”

The life to which God call us through Jesus Christ inherently involves loss. It involves giving up and surrendering all those things that draws us away from the life that God freely offers to us. It doesn’t matter whether these things are either good or bad or respectable or disrespectable. It does not matter whether a thing is either one’s love for one’s children or one’s love for crystal-meth. They are both less than God and must take second place. We must lose, cast away, both the good things and the bad things that keep us from discovering God, from deepening our relationship with God, and from being filled with God’s presence for it is God’s very presence that Jesus wants us to encounter and into which he wants us to be immersed. This life that God offers involves loss. Yet, in this loss is the offer of the very presence of God

Jesus knows that the path that lays before him…the path that leads to and through the cross will open to humanity a life of grace and intimacy with the Living God. For my sake and for your sake, Jesus is willing to undergo that which causes his “soul to be troubled.” But for whatever reason (May we call it “grace?”), God believes that we are worth it. As the shadow of the cross becomes a reality and Jesus’ ministry of revealing the unabashed love of God will lead to his betrayal, torture, and murder, it is no wonder that worry, fear, and terror are living alongside his love for God and for God’s people. Yet, no matter how haunting the near future may be, Jesus will choose to serve God and God alone. It is courage and love that defines Jesus and his ministry as he heads toward Jerusalem. God the Father, the Ruler of the Universe, Creator of all things seen and unseen, the Ground of all Being is about to do a thing that has never been done…a wondrous thing…a beautiful thing…a powerful thing…and all for us…mere men, women, and children. For this Jesus will lose his life.

The promise that Jesus and that the Gospel of John is proclaiming is that only a life that is willing to risk loss is able to receive the miraculous. The Life that God offers to his people is a life where the wondrous victory of God will be experienced as we choose to move through those times that threaten to unmake and undo us. As God’s people we do not get to escape “real life” but rather we are called further into it. We are called further into it because for many people life is being experienced as soul-crushing and death-dealing and they, just like us, need to hear that there is One who will wring victory from what threatens us and that life eternal and abundant has always been present, is present, and will be present. They will know that the cross which some thought would be the proof of Jesus’ defeat would in reality become a sign of God’s victory over all that threatens us-The Rev. Adrian A. Amaya.

The Gospel in Miniature

2009-03-17T11:16:00.001-07:00

Jesus said to Nicodemus, "Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God (John 3:14-21).”

The reformer, Martin Luther, called John 3:16 “the Gospel in Miniature.” Jesus is God’s love in action. Not an antiseptic, aloof, genteel, and sentimental love, but a love that is not afraid to have its heart broken, a love that is not afraid to be vulnerable and transparent, a love that is built of unbounded passion, a love filled with God’s humanity. This love can only appear as nothing less than a human being. For you and me, we receive love and give love away as human beings, soulful creatures having an earthly experience.

Through our bodies, minds, and spirits we experience love in all the ways possible to us. Jesus reveals that we can also experience God’s love through one another and be the means by which others can experience love. It is what we are truly built for. It is what we are meant for. It is why we were born; to cast God’s love far and wide with no reservations. Our lives as the people of God are about giving ourselves to the discovery of this truth. That we are living icons, sacraments, mysteries, and revealers of God’s love. There is nothing less than this just as there can be nothing more than it. A life of prayer, study, works, worship, and service is about living in a way that fights to discover, to learn, that God did indeed so love the world and that nothing in this world can replace God or satisfy us the way that God can. Knowing that we are loved in this way can lead us to share with others that their worth is defined by such and that nothing, not one thing, in this world can define us, pigeon-hole us, mark us, over and against God’s love as revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The world tells us that we are guilty of this or that, that we are worth less than our neighbors, that our neighbors are worth less than us, that our lives are meaningless moments strung together, that what we hold dear is illusionary, fleeting, and worthless, that we are deserving of being used as fodder, that we are nothing but cogs in a machine and statistics to be graphed, and that God’s love if there is such a thing is not for us. To choose such rather than choosing God is to choose what the world with its de-humanizing systems say about us. In choosing Jesus, we choose to be defined by God; to be defined by God’s love in Christ our Lord. This is the light to which we are called and the light to which we must call others-The Adrian A. Amaya.

Jesus Drives Out the Moneychangers

2009-03-13T10:42:00.001-07:00

The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, "Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!" His disciples remembered that it was written, "Zeal for your house will consume me." The Jews then said to him, "What sign can you show us for doing this?" Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." The Jews then said, "This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?" But he was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken (John 2:13-22).

The sellers and money-changers who took up shop in the Temple area were meant to provide a much needed service to those Jews who were traveling a long distance to worship and sacrifice at the Temple in Jerusalem. They were set up in the Court of the Gentiles, a location in the massive Temple complex setup specifically for the purpose of purchasing sacrificial animals and—out of necessity—a place where Jewish pilgrims could exchange their foreign coinage for the appropriate local currency, the Jewish Temple shekel which did not bear the image of the Emperor nor the stamp of the Empire itself. A market was held there for the sale of animals and those things necessary for the Temple service. Money would also be required to purchase the needed materials for the offerings; to present as free-offerings to the temple treasury, to pay the yearly temple tax of half a shekel due from every Jew, however poor. All this had to be paid in the native coin called the Temple shekel which was a local coin. Jews from outside of Jerusalem, therefore, had to change their Roman, Greek, or Eastern money, at the stalls of the money-changers to obtain the coin required. This in itself was not a problem but an unfair exchange was built into the system so as to create a profit incentive for the money-changers who knew that those visiting the Temple had no choice. It was now a part of the religious system and was not only tolerated but was probably looked upon by some as essential to the Temple’s workings. The foreign money was then used to pay Roman taxes. The oppressed came to worship God while the money they had brought with them was also being used to keep them oppressed. The financial system of the Temple that supported the very worship of Israel’s people was being used to keep them in bondage. Their religious life was being used against them. This is what angered Jesus.

Then the animals themselves were being sold at exorbitant prices with the focus on the needs of their fellow Jews meaning nothing when compared to the profit incentive. Some people believe that since most visits to the Temple created a need for some kind of sacrificial offering that there was also some fraudulent commerce going on as well besides the exchange rate racket. Any animals to used for sacrifice had to be without blemish, ritually perfect according to the laws of Moses. The Temple may have had official inspectors of the animals who have rejected those animals offered, therefore, forcing a worshipper to purchase an approved animal at a substantial mark up.

Jesus’ anger at the moneychangers at the Temple is about their putting a barrier between the people of Israel and the God of Israel. Jesus hated anything that that kept God and the people of God apart. Even his beloved Judaism with its focus upon the Temple of Jerusalem had been sold to the highest bidders, those filling their pockets at the expense of the poor. Jesus saw this practice for what it was: an unnecessary barrier between God and the children of God. He heard the arguing and haggling over whether the moneychangers were charging a fair exchange and he had enough. Jesus drove all those out that dared to place commerce between the people and God. Jesus’ zeal for God was also his zeal for the people of God for Jesus loved those that God loved. God’s passion is his passion.

Then Jesus declares at the top of his lungs that the new temple will be his very self, the crucified and risen Lord. He himself will replace the stones and mortar of the temple with its pious sacrificial system and its surrounding environment of opportunistic commerce. God’s people will no longer need to spill the blood of animals in sacrifice in order to be in a righteous relationship with God. Jesus, the new temple, through his own self-sacrifice will make such animal sacrifices unnecessary. Yet, this message is lost upon his disciples and his enemies use his reference to the temple against him at his trial.

Week after week and year after year the Holy Spirit invites to hear God speak to us in the lessons and invites us to approach God who is at his Table and present in the Holy Eucharist. Too often we hear the Holy Scriptures and partake of the Body and Blood of Christ with too much ease and like the moneychangers who plied their trade in the shadow of the temple and yet felt no awe we ourselves are in danger of becoming too cynical and blasé. We become to cool to care. Then we are surprised when God sometimes uses the most drastic means to call us back to him because God knows that those who want to meet the God of Jesus Christ may witness our lack of awe and gratitiude and be scandalized by it. We ourselves become the barrier between them and God.

God does accept us and he does forgive us but that doesn’t mean that we do not sometimes choose to be rebellious or sinful. God does not put up with such nonsense. God wants us and calls us to live the Gospel.

This is the Gospel. Nothing is to stand between a person and God. No other person. No religious system. No rite or ritual. No theology. No situation. No measure. Not one thing is to keep you from God. Yet, there is one thing...only one that so often does. We ourselves are the only thing that keeps us from God. Only I can keep me from God. There is no one responsible for our alienation but our very selves. In keeping ourselves from God we then become barriers to others finding and discovering God.

God wants us to live in the world with a gift in our hearts, minds and souls. It is Christ that we bear. We bear Christ Jesus because we can't win the war of sin within and without by ourselves because without Christ we become both exploiters and the exploited. In Christ we are new beings, who accept all others because we have been made acceptable by Jesus-- who is our Paschal Lamb-The Rev. Adrian A. Amaya.

Taking Up Your Cross

2009-03-04T13:04:00.000-08:00

Then Jesus began to teach his disciples that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things." He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels (Mark 8:31-38)."

Christians are not called to be optimistic people. They are called to be hopeful people. There is a grand difference between being optimistic and hopeful and we often mistake the two for being the same thing. Optimism states that one’s attitude and bearing will determine how well a situation will end. Hope declares that the end or goal believed in is so evocative and true that it guides a person through life whether a given situation is good or bad. Optimistic people smile their way through life with the self-assured smugness that a positive attitude and a happy disposition will bring about a good end to any situation. The tougher the situation, the more they smile and say that everything’s fine. Sometimes the pasted-on-smile masks their need for God’s presence. It is difficult to imagine Jesus bearing the cross through the streets of Jerusalem smiling and saying that everything’s fine. I can’t imagine him telling the women of Jerusalem as they weep, “Don’t worry, ladies. Be happy. It’s all good.”

Jesus was hopeful not optimistic. Jesus believed that God’s kingdom on earth would be made real through his dedication and self-sacrifice no matter how hopeless and terrible life must have been with that cross on his shoulders and to all that it would lead. Jesus’ trust in God the Father empowered him to keep on keeping on. Jesus chose to bear that cross to that forsaken hill outside Jerusalem because he believed his Father in heaven would be glorified, honored, and victorious through what he was going through. The passion of Christ was a bloody affair not because the wrath of God demanded it but because the wrath of human beings demanded it. The wrath of God turned our demand into resurrection. The same God in whom Jesus’ hope was founded is the same God that calls us through the Church.

We are born into circumstances beyond are control and choosing. Some of us are poor. Some of us are rich. Some of us are sickly. Some of us are healthy. Some of us lack faith. Some of us are filled to the brim with it. Yet, God calls us like Christ to choose a hard road; sometimes a terrible road. It may be to listen to a family member’s pain without needing to fix them. It may be to struggle with a friend through their chemotherapy. It may be a husband and wife’s decision to fight for their marriage rather than let it disintegrate. It may to love someone without understanding them. Such a cross may be choosing to give birth and then a raise a child with Down’s syndrome. Such a cross may be to believe in God when everyone and everything around you is saying to do otherwise. Such crosses can only be borne with the hope that in the end God will wring victory through them. Our hope is that in the end God wins-The Rev. Adrian A. Amaya.

The Temptation of Jesus

2009-02-25T06:15:00.000-08:00

“In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased. And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news ’ (Mark 1:9-15)."

After his baptism, Jesus is led into the desert by the Holy Spirit so that he may be tested and so that victory of God can be made manifest in Christ’s surrender to God’s will. This takes place out in the wilderness, a place where resources are scarce if at all present and where the environment offers to both souls and bodies no second chances. Survival is victory in the desert. Yet, not only is Jesus’ physical life being tested, his very soul is under assault by the devil.

First, he is tempted by the very healthy need for food. Jesus is not hungry. He is suffering from hunger. He is in the midst of starvation and his body is probably turning upon itself for sustenance. He is being offered life itself by the devil but the devil has no power to offer life. Only God can offer life to Jesus and it is upon God alone that Jesus will wait.

The devil then tempts Jesus with what is already to be his-his kingship. The devil offers Jesus a kingdom. He offers the entire world since Jesus has been anointed by God. The devil is claiming that Jesus is indeed the Kings of Kings and that he should take hold of that title. But again, the devil has no power to offer anything in God’s stead. Yet, the kingdom of God is not built out of armies, grand parades, triumphs, and military splendor. The Kingdom of God is built upon God’s self-revelation in Jesus and humanity’s being transformed by that revelation-that God is love. This is the only kingdom that Jesus will be king.

Then the devil tempts Jesus with his own faith. The devil attempts to use that which Jesus has relied upon his own life…that which makes him who he is being used against him. The devil is going after what is most important to Jesus. He is asking Jesus to prove that God will indeed take care of him. He even quotes from the Holy Scriptures in order to proof-text that such is true. Unlike the devil who is so willing to test God, Jesus will not do so. He will wait upon the God who will not even save him from the cross but will save him from the tomb. In Jesus’ being true to his baptism and anointing he refuses to accept any offer, no matter how seemingly good, from the devil. With every temptation Jesus considers the source. So must we.

Like Jesus we are assailed by temptations left and right, subtle and gross, with the threat to sin ever present. We are tempted by what is even best in our lives. For we Christians, our baptisms provide the forgiveness of sins, but baptism does not remove sin. Our baptisms do fill us with God’s power and strength so that when we find ourselves in a desert, a parched wasteland of serpents and scorpions, we will find that within our souls is a deep well of living water from which to drink. That well in our souls is filled to the brim with God. Yet, it is only when the Spirit leads us out into the desert do we learn how to drink from that well, to rely upon the power of God given to us in baptism, and find our deepest thirst quenched not by what our temptations offer us but by what God offers us-His very Self--The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

The Tranfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ...and maybe ours, too!

2009-02-18T03:21:00.000-08:00

“Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, "Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, "This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!" Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus. As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead (Mark 9:2-9).”

What the disciples witness is what God wants for our lives. We are not to be spectators to what God has done to others but we are to witness by our very lives the transforming power of God, the transfiguring power of God. God desires to utterly transform and transfigure us from the inside out and from the outside in. John, James and Peter witness true humanity in seeing not only Jesus’ glory but seeing humanity’s glory in Jesus. They are glimpsing the Resurrected life in the here and now-a life that is utterly present in your life and in my life but is veiled by our being spectators to God’s movement in our lives and in the lives of other people. The Transfiguration of Jesus happens in the midst of an ordinary night. Nothing special preceded it but Jesus’ presence.

The Transfigured life underlies what we believe to be an ordinary and mundane existence-what we call “everyday life.” Your life in God is extraordinary because God is extraordinary. Your life is already transfigured because that is what God does. God transforms and transfigures life and then invites us into experiencing that same life. God reveals on that mountain and through his presence in our lives today what living really is-what life is about-what it looks like even in the worst of times or the most unexciting of times.

It is true that not everyone has the kind of experience that Jesus shared here. Yet, no one has to; there is no necessity. Our salvation, God’s love for us realized, is not dependent upon such experiencing. Such happenings are simply gifts undeserved and unforced and are at God’s discretion and they do happen.

We are not to encounter this story so that we may envy John, James and Peter or feel separated from them because we have not had such an experience. This Gospel is read and proclaimed in the life of the Church so that we may know that the transfigured life is present within our everyday lives and it peeks through it at God’s discretion, but it is utterly there. This awareness is necessary and in tough times a necessity.

The three disciples who witness the Transfiguration were given a gift truly of God, and it spoke truly about who God has been, who God is, and who God will be. What the disciples saw at the Transfiguration was Jesus glorified-Jesus as he would be when all things were complete, when all the roads had been walked, when the struggle was finally over. They also saw a glimpse of their transformed and transfigured humanity secured by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. In the Transfiguration they may have also seen themselves-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

The Healing of a Leper

2009-02-13T12:03:00.000-08:00

A leper came to Jesus begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean." Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, "I do choose. Be made clean!’ Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them’" But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter (Mark 1:40-45).”

To be leprous in Jesus’ time was to suffer from any skin ailment such as severe acne, eczema, psoriasis, favus, vitiligo and Hansen’s disease which we normally associate with the very deforming and often lethal leprosy of the pre-modern world (Hansen’s disease is now curable though the medication is expensive). Any one of these skin conditions would be a reason for an Israelite or Jew to be excluded from the faith community since to suffer from such was considered to be a defilement and in some cases the proof of God’s disfavor. Regardless of one’s position, honor, power, possessions, or wealth, leprosy was no respecter of persons. Therefore, all decisions in this matter, in both Old Testament and New Testament times, was the responsibility of the priest before whom a person was to appear. Those who were suspected of leprosy and those who claimed to be healed of leprosy were to present themselves to the priest who would judge the matter according to the rules set out in Leviticus and exclude or restore the person affected or healed to or from the community of Israel. In all cases of acknowledged leprous infection, the person affected was to "have his clothes hanging loose, his head bare, his mouth covered with a cloth" and he was commanded to cry out that he was defiled and unclean. As long as the disease lasted, he had to "dwell alone without the camp".

This man that Jesus had met had to cry out, “unclean, unclean,” and had to wear a black cloth with a hoods covering his face. He had to live outside the city walls. People feared those who had leprosy. Because of the nature of the disease, the leper was often considered to be already dead; they were seen to be living a kind of living death. It is this living death that Jesus confronts.

This leper forced to live separated from friends and family and his community of faith asks with all humility that Jesus heal him of his affliction. With compassion and pity for the man and anger toward the man’s condition, Jesus heals him. He cleanses the man of the disease that was keeping him from the life meant for him by God. Jesus unlike the rest of the world is not threatened by the man’s condition. He touches the man. He not only makes himself ritually unclean but he actually touches the untouchable. Jesus shows this man that the compassion of God has no limits. True compassion reaches even to the lowest level where life is messy and threatening.

In our becoming like Jesus, we are to pray without ceasing that we too can move toward such compassion. When we don’t have compassion for another’s plight, it is because we may believe that our good health, good circumstances and good reputations are too precious to be infected by someone else’s life. We want our lives to be separated from those who suffer because we may believe that on some level that their suffering and misfortune will infect us. We may believe that their poor life choices, their poverty, their grief, their physical and emotional pains, or their soul-sickness will infect us. We may believe that someone may be in their present situation because of some fault of their own. We may believe that we would not have done whatever it was that got them in such a terrible position. In our fear of being infected we ourselves become like lepers. We become separated from others and from our humanity-from God’s humanity made present within us through Jesus Christ. We become separated from the life we are called to live and ultimately separated from the One who calls us, the God of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

Jesus Heals Peter's Mother-In-Law

2009-02-05T14:06:00.001-08:00

“Jesus left the synagogue at Capernaum, and entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon's mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them. That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, "Everyone is searching for you." He answered, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do." And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons (Mark 1:29-39).”

Jesus’ fame has spread. People are drawn to him. In him they see the revealing of the Kingdom of God. They see it through his teaching and healing. Others are drawn to him simply because they want to see the person of which others had spoken. Jesus and two of the disciples, James and John, go to Peter and Andrew’s house. Jesus needs a place to rest-a place where he can eat a meal, nap and be with a few people rather than the crush of the crowd that now often surrounds him. Yet, even in the midst of this safe and quiet place there is still a need for God’s healing to be present. Peter’s mother-in-law is ill with fever. So ill that she cannot be a good host to the popular guest now under her roof. She is unable to perform one of the most important tasks of the ancient Middle-East-being the gracious host.

The environment of the desert and arid land in most of the Middle-East is harsh. For a traveler, access to water and food was a matter of life and death. Most settlements were built near available water or wells. The traveler needed to have access to the water. Hosts were obligated to provide for travelers that stopped at their tents, and under these customs the hosts could expect some protection from hostile actions from the "stranger." This Middle-Eastern cultural “rule” even set the norm for households in Jesus’ time.

Even though the fever is not a threat to her life, Jesus reaches out to Peter’s mother. Jesus touches her, lifts her up, and she is able to serve those who are guests in her home. She is able to keep her self-respect. Jesus in healing her restores her dignity and keeps her from shame. The physical healing has a corresponding non-physical effect. Healing allows her to be the woman that she wants to be. Healing allows a person to experience the life meant for them by God.

At sunset, the beginning of the Jewish day, Jesus goes to the mass of humanity gathered outside of Peter and Andrew’s house to heal the sick and cast out demons. It goes on hour after hour into the early morning hours. After some sleep, Jesus awakens before sunrise and finds a deserted place in order to pray so that he may be filled with the power of God so that he can release that power into the world. Without constant reliance upon God, Jesus cannot reveal God’s love and power to those who need it most.

We are no different. Our nature is built to reveal the Kingdom of God to the world. Our humanity is fully realized when we are able to bring healing to the world. Healing of the body, healing of the mind, and healing of the soul are demonstrations of God’s power but when we confuse knowing things about God for knowing God we can never realize our capacity to demonstrate God’s power to the world. We are to be like Jesus. Like him we are to have and nurture a constant hunger and thirst for God. A deliberate life of prayer is necessary to become Jesus to our friends, neighbors, and even our enemies. We must find our deserted places and return to them time after time to encounter the living God so that others may experience and encounter that “Jesus is Lord” for such a declaration can only be for those who have experienced God in their body, mind and spirit-The Rev. Adrian A. Amaya.

Jesus and the Demons

2009-01-27T06:13:00.001-08:00

“There was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, ‘What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.’ But Jesus rebuked him, saying, ‘Be silent, and come out of him!’ (Mark 1:23-25)”

Whenever Holy Scripture speaks of demons we tend to get uncomfortable. Our modern scientific sensibilities dismiss such references as the belief of a bygone era while others see demons hiding in their closets and under their beds. One group dismisses the powerful message that such passages present while the other uses such passages to view themselves as being the central figures in an engagement between the forces of good and evil. The existence of forces both physical and spiritual that rebel against God has always been an aspect of Christian belief. Since God is the maker of all things seen and unseen then those same seen and unseen things can be twisted to such a point that they cannot reflect the glory intended for them by God. The early Church viewed demons through this theological understanding. Demons were seen as angels who had rejected their intended roles as messengers, protectors and intermediaries in the affairs of God and humanity. As demons they were understood to threaten and destroy the relationship ordained between God and humanity.

For Jesus, there is no such wondering whether or not demons exist. He is aware that this man in the synagogue is under the control of something other than God and that the thing which has possessed him seeks to destroy his life-body, mind and soul- and ultimately his relationship with God. The Risen Christ present in our lives is also aware that there are forces within us that threaten to keep us from an ever-deepening awareness, encounter and relationship with God. One should not underestimate the power of such forces in our lives because one should not underestimate our ability to nurture and feed such forces.

Pride and envy and the use of others to serve our ego needs may drive us to place ourselves at the center of the universe while regulating God to orbit our needs and desires. Eventually, the god in which we believe is merely an idealized projection of ourselves rather than the God of Jesus Christ. Having been created in God’s image in order to become the likeness of Christ we create a god in our own image so that we replace Christ as Lord and Savior. We become the masters of our own souls and in turn become enslaved. We may even cover such a move away from God with a pious life filled with good actions, verses memorized and recited, a passionate adherence to dogma and doctrine and a sensibility easily offended by the lack of a religious life in others.

Evil has no existence of its own. It is merely an absence…a deficit of that which is good. A dark room is dark because there is an absence of light in the room but as soon as light is present darkness vanishes. It does not go anywhere. It vanishes. The only way we can exorcise pride, envy or any kind of evil that threatens our lives is not to not be prideful, envious or the opposite of whatever assails us but to fill our lives with the light of Jesus. We ourselves feed the demons that keep us from becoming the likeness of Christ. Only Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior of our body, mind and souls can drive out from within us those things that attempt to possess us-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

Fishing For People

2009-01-24T16:49:00.000-08:00

16 As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake—for they were fishermen. 17And Jesus said to them, ‘Follow me and I will make you fish for people.’ 18And immediately they left their nets and followed him. 19As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. 20Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him (Mark 1:16-20).

I am not a hunter or a fisherman. I have done both but do not seem to have the personality that enjoys such pursuits. Many people I know who hunt and fish enjoy the pursuit immensely. For some the enjoyment stems from being in the cool quiet morning with another person who shares the same passion. For others the enjoyment stems from being alone and mulling over the deeper questions of life or contemplating nothing at all. Sometimes the challenge that lays beyond the Texas mesquite trees and moves underneath the waters is what is evocative. Very possibly, on some level, the knowledge that one has the ability to provide food for themselves and their family if need be must create a sense of satisfaction.

For most of our history and pre-history, the act of hunting and fishing was not about sport but about survival. It was about feeding one’s self and one’s family and giving themselves a fighting chance at staying alive for another day. In the end, such pursuits speak to the very human awareness that life and death always lay before us and that the trappings of our cars, homes, jobs, and sundry entertainments can only distract us from this fact.

Jesus calls men who understand their fishing as not only being their livelihoods but the work that keeps poverty, starvation, degradation, and death away from their door. Their work is holy because it fights for life itself and proclaims the One who is life itself. Their vocation as fisherman is witnessed in the scars and calluses of their hands, the rope burns that decorate their arms and legs, the busted knuckles and gnarled fingers, the salt of their sweat drying on their skin and staining their clothes, the constant burning and peeling of their skin by the sun, and the ever watchful eye that scans the sky for storm clouds. These are men who understand that their work matters. They understand how easily life can slip into death.

Fishing for them is what St. Paul will mean when he writes that we are to “fight the good fight.” Jesus’ call to them to “fish for people” is a call to affirm life itself in the midst of a tough world where survival reigns. These men are not called out of the corpulent and rich few but out of the mass of humanity who pray to God and live for one another watching for God’s reign in the midst of their chores and struggles.

This is why Jesus calls these men. He knows that they will understand that his ministry and their part in that ministry will be for many the difference between life and death. For them, it is that stark.

Our own callings are no less stark. The fact that we are alive and that we move and have our being in God must matter. It must make a difference to whether someone eats or drinks or is clothed or is housed or is comforted in the midst of affliction or whether they discover or re-discover that God loves them. Our salvation must be their salvation-The Rev Adrian A. Amaya.

Philip's News and Nathanel

2009-01-13T11:40:00.001-08:00

The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, ‘Follow me.’ Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him, ‘We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.’ Nathanael said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’ When Jesus saw Nathanael coming towards him, he said of him, ‘Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!’ Nathanael asked him, ‘Where did you come to know me?’ Jesus answered, ‘I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.’ Nathanael replied, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’ Jesus answered, ‘Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.’ And he said to him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man’ John 1: 43-51.

Today is the day that God meets us. Today and no other. Yesterday is gone and tomorrow does not exist. The day is today. We are not called to be good enough to meet God. We are simply being called to be open to God’s making God’s Self known to us in some way, shape and form. The point of the religious life is not to earn our way into heaven or into God’s good graces but to prepare ourselves...our very hearts...the centers of our being...our very souls… to experience thr only God that there is, the Living God. Philip declares to Nathaniel ( otherwise known as Bartholomew) that he has met the Messiah-the One who reveals God’s kingdom of salvation. Nathaniel, of course, has no time for Philip’s news. Nathaniel is incredulous and has no qualms about telling Philip that nothing good can come out of a place such as Nazareth.

Yet, when he meets Jesus he is able to see past his pre-conceptions and prejudices and encounter God’s self-revelation in Christ. His heart tells him who Jesus is. Not his intellect. Not his reason. Not his five senses. Not his emotions. But his very being. His heart reveals to him that Jesus is the Messiah. It is Nathaniel’s epiphany. The sudden and blinding revelation that God is present before him in the person of this humble carpenter from Nazareth. He may have questioned his friend’s wisdom when Philip claimed to have found the Messiah but when he met the Messiah himself he knew the truth. Jesus found Nathaniel prepared to receive him through Nathaniel’s life of reading the Holy Scriptures, his life of worship, his life of good deeds and his life of prayer. It is no less for any one of us.

What we truly believe lays down deep in the core of our being. The question is-what is it we believe deep in the core of our being. Those things that we hold to be true may be of God or may not be of God. They affect our reason and our emotions and not the other way around. The religious life is about learning what is truly true and not about acquiring facts about God. The religious life is about the preparation of one’s true self to encounter and experience God and not about getting right with God or storing up merit in order to earn a place in heaven. It is about creating in one's self, in one’s own soul, the capacity to recognize God in all the ways possible in the lives that we are living. The reason that this is so important is that the transformation that Christ desires to accomplish in your life and in my life happens from the inside out; from the depth of our being out into the world at large. The Kingdom of God is not an alien place but a state of being that resides in that interior space where you truly live and where God is meant to dwell-your heart of hearts. It is Nathaniel’s heart that is able to see God in Christ. His eyes simply would have seen a humble carpenter from Nazareth but his heart, his truest Self, saw God-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

The Baptism of the Lord

2009-01-06T13:14:00.000-08:00

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’ (Mark 1:9-11).

All the water that you will ever see, feel, or drink has been here since even before the age of the dinosaurs. The same water that you have cooked your pasta in may have been or will be part of a catastrophic Tsunami centuries ago or centuries from now. The ancients who created the Gilgamesh Epic (from around 3000 BC), told of a flood coming with such destructive force "that the gods cowered like dogs". Hebrew sages used this theme to show how Yahweh acted on the stage of human history. Unlike God, water is neutral. It can bring death and destruction and provide life and health. We begin the first months of our lives in water swimming, breathing, and having our being in our mothers’ wombs. Two-thirds of our body is made up of water. Water is the essence of our physical lives. Without water, human beings cannot live for more than a few days. It plays a vital role in nearly every function of the body, protecting the immune system – the body’s natural defences – and helping remove waste matter. Water is also important to the very well being of the planet Earth, our only home.

The Greek word from which we get our English word “baptism” literally means immersed. For those who argue whether a person is “truly” baptized by either being dunked in or sprinkled by water miss the point. When we are baptized we are being immersed into the life and presence of the God who made heaven and earth, who created the universe-all that is seen and unseen. Such a wondrous God does not withhold his presence based upon being immersed in or sprinkled by water. Christians, and Jews before them, for thousands of years have understood that God does not withhold himself from those who thirst for him. Baptism recognizes that the thirst is a spiritual one and that water serves as the symbol of such a thirst that is life-long.

Most of us have been thirsty but very, very few of us of suffered from thirst. Suffering from thirst is a painful experience as your body’s very cells wither from the moisture of which they are mostly composed of and as the body depletes the minerals and electrolytes that the nervous system and the muscular system need to function. Headaches, organ failure, and muscle cramps assail the victim of thirst. After, three days the typical person may find themselves beyond recovery. The human soul without the presence of God can find itself in the same state no matter the health of the body. The people who are coming to John the Baptist recognize that it is God alone who can satisfy their deepest thirst, their deepest needs.

But why does Jesus come to John the Baptist?

The key word here is the word “repentance.” This word literally means “to turn away.” It is also important to remember that in turning away there must be a turning to. Jesus is indeed turning away. He is turning away from a life made up of his family and himself. He is turning away from a life that is as private as the ancient world allows. He is turning toward the ministry that God has set before him. He is turning toward the creation of a family that more than blood relations. He is turning toward a life lived and given for the sake of others. He is turning away from his own desires and wants and turning toward the needs of others. He is turning away from his personal past and turning toward the future; toward the Kingdom of God.

Jesus Christ submitted himself to the baptism of John the Baptist in order to "fulfill all righteousness." Jesus' gesture is a manifestation of his self-emptying; of his identifying with those he is to save and those whom he loved to the end. The Holy Spirit who had hovered over the waters of creation descended then on the Christ as a prelude to the new creation, and in this the Father revealed Jesus as his "beloved Son." Through Jesus, the Holy Spirit is creating a new ministry on the face of the earth. We the People of God are the legacy, the descendents, of Jesus’ turning from one way of life to a life given for the sake of others.

The new life we have in Christ began with water in a font or pool just as our physical lives began and were nurtured in the water of our mothers’ wombs. Through that baptismal water our spiritual life began and is still nurtured by the One who gives us Living Water, the water that slakes the deepest thirst of our souls for we thirst for God. We thirst for the God we do not know and for the God that we do know. And there is nothing that can satisfy such a thirst but the water that God gives; Jesus, the Living Water. Without water, physical death awaits us. Without the Living Water the desiccation and withering of our souls will ensue. In Jesus’ baptismIn Baptism was our first drink of the water that Christ offers-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

The Journey of the Magi

2008-12-31T15:19:00.000-08:00

God calls out. God calls out far and wide. God calls and waits. God calls and expects. God calls and hopes. God calls out so that he may reveal his own self to every single one us no matter where we may be. No matter who we are. No matter how far or how near we are to the Kingdom of God. No matter how faithful or faithless we may be. No matter whether we are newly born or are taking our last breath. God calls and calls and calls. He shines forth in the darkness and lights up the path to his very self. God draws all of us to God’s own self. And there is no one that God is not willing to call out to.

The magi that visit Jesus when he is almost two years old are from a strange and far land. Their lives are built of strange and arcane ways. They are practitioners of the occult. Their beliefs are so alien and so threatening to Israel that anyone practicing such magic and such strange arcane ways were to be put to death. In the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) Moses addresses the people just before they cross the Jordan River to enter the promised land to drive out the pagan nations and says,

“When you come into the land which the Lord your God gives you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations. There shall not be found among you any one who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination, a soothsayer, or an augur (that is, an enchanter, one who looks for and uses omens), or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or a medium, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord; and because of these abominable practices the Lord your God is driving them out before you. Their very existence is an affront to God (Deuteronomy 18:9-12).”

And yet, we hear in the Gospel of Matthew God’s calling out even to the likes of them. These astrologers from another land noticed that Jupiter underwent two occultations ("eclipses") by the Moon in Aries in 6 BC. Jupiter was the regal "star" that conferred kingships - a power that was amplified when Jupiter was in close conjunctions with the Moon. The second occultation on April 17 coincided precisely when Jupiter was "in the east," a condition mentioned twice in the biblical account about the Star of Bethlehem. In August of that year Jupiter became stationary and then "went before" through the Aries Constellation where it became stationary again on December 19, 6 BC. This is when the regal planet "stood over" - a secondary royal portent also described in the Bible. In particular, there is confirmation from a Roman astrologer that the conditions of April 17, 6 BC were believed to herald the birth of a divine, immortal, and omnipotent person born under the sign of the Jews, which we now know was Aries the Ram.

God called these magi, these readers of heavenly portent, through what they knew; through the only lives that they knew. The Magi were wise enough to recognize something special in their astrological calculations and responded and in responding they encountered the power and glory of the Living God of Israel in the life of a child named Jesus. They did not let Jesus’ poor station and the low station of his parents, Mary and Joseph, turn them away from knowing that through the life of this child nothing would ever be the same again.

No one is beyond God’s call. No matter how far we’ve fallen. How hopeless we are. How down and out. How faithless. How ignorant. How broken. No matter how far we have run away. The world into which we may now find ourselves immersed may be very far from the Kingdom of God, so far that we can’t find our way back on our own. That land may be one filled with anger, sin, regret, hopelessness, disease, soul sickness, poverty, banality, and a deeply rooted apathy and now we can only imagine ourselves to be a stranger in a strange land where God is concerned. We may even follow other gods; gods that we create and posses and who in turn posses us.

But that strange land which seems empty of God’s presence does resonate with the faintest echoes of God’s voice. The land is not forsaken because even in that dark, dark place a star shines, a candle burns in spite of the wind, and our path home to God is lit up. All journeys begin with a single step. The journey to God begins with that single step from shadow into the light. The story of the Magi is the Gospel proclamation that no one is outside of God’s invitation into the Kingdom of God as it is known through Jesus Christ, the world’s Lord and Savior. It is an invitation to receiving God’s very Self and in turn drive away from not only our lives but in the lives of others all that separates us from God and one another. God does not care from where you begin your journey. God cares that you begin. God cares that you discover that God cares. It doesn’t matter where you begin. Just that you do-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

God in the Flesh

2008-12-22T19:56:00.000-08:00

December 25 is “The Feast of the Nativity.” On this date in the Western Church and on January 6 in the Eastern Church is the celebration of the historical fact that the Creator of all that is, seen and unseen, came to us. On these dates, Christians throughout the world will celebrate that the glory, majesty, and power of God came to us in utter vulnerability. In a world which relishes slack-jawed violence, banal entertainments, and grand gestures of terror it seems that a birth of a child would seem insignificant except to those who would care for that child. The world into which Jesus was born is no less dangerous than the world into which my own children have been born…into which most children have been and are being born. So why is it important that God Almighty would choose such a birth?

In Jesus, God reveals the richness and depth of a human life when it is intimately connected to God who is the source of all life. In Jesus, God reveals that through such a connection what is best about us is what is best about God. In Jesus, God reveals that our salvation in the end is not about us, but about others. In Jesus, we discover and witness who we truly are and not who the world would have us believe we are.

Until Christ’s life becomes ours, we are merely human. We are creatures who suffer under and participate in a very dangerous world. Yet, when we are immersed into the fully human and fully divine life of Jesus we begin to grow into and bear the likeness of Christ. That is salvation.

It begins in the very life of Jesus Himself with His conception in the womb of his mother, the Ever Blessed Virgin Mary, and comes to fruition in His crucifixion upon a Roman cross, His mighty Resurrection and in His glorious Ascension. That life becomes our life through baptism.

Jesus’ humanity graced and empowered by God’s Holy Spirit reveals to you and I what a fully human life is like…what abundant life is like…a life that not even death can threaten.

Salvation is not about being saved from the punishment of an angry God. Salvation is about being restored to wholeness by a loving God. Without God in our lives, we are merely human at best, but when our lives are lived in God through Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit we become fully human-we become whom we are meant to be; children of the Living God.

It is in our choosing the One who chose to come after us that we are immersed into what a Spirit-filled, sacramental, holy life is like. In God’s coming to us in Christ Jesus our Lord…in Mary’s bearing God into a world that was not hospitable to Him…we are introduced to the life that we ourselves are meant to live. God Almighty has shown us the path-the way, the truth, and the life that is Jesus-and invites us to walk in the very steps of his Son. Just as Christ’s humble beginning in a mother’s womb is also our beginning, the wonderful life Jesus lives in the glory of God is also to be ours. Christmas is our invitation to that life…to that salvation-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

Mary's Yes

2008-12-20T20:20:00.000-08:00

“Mary said, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’ Then the angel departed from her (Luke 1:38).”

It is a wondrously dangerous thing to say, “Yes” to God for it means that a person has committed themselves to God’s kingdom and God’s thwarting of our expectations. Time and time again we come to God in the guise of faithfulness and make declarations about whom God is and how God should act in our lives and the world around us. Yet, the Living God of the Holy Scriptures is a God who will not be domesticated nor hemmed in nor defined nor beholden to the beliefs or theologies of the faithful. God does what is unexpected and he does it all for our sakes. The Advent season (the four weeks before Christmas Day) is filled with apocalyptic imagery. Such biblical imagery declares that the wrath of God is coming so we must be ready. Everything will be turned upside down. The sun and moon will darken and the heavens and the earth will be rendered, torn apart, and the living and the dead will witness the glory and victory of God. Satan, the great Adversary, and all of hell will be forced to recognize the futility of rebellion against God, the Ruler of the Universe. God’s wrath will shatter, unmake and destroy all that is not of God and then recreate all that is seen and unseen and there will be a new heavens and a new earth.

And God does indeed do this. But not in the way expected by the faithful…of those so sure what God will do and when he will do it. The poetry of divine violence so prevalent in the apocalypses of the Holy Scriptures takes place not in the crass imagery of the “Left Behind” series but begins in the simple “Yes” of young Jewish girl named Miriam known to us Christians as Mary.

Mary followed the teachings of Judaism. She worshipped God and learned the prayers and songs of the Hebrews of old. Only the educated elite could read the scrolls. Singing and storytelling conveyed the religious life of common folk like Mary. She knew the songs. She knew the stories. Mary trusted God. And she said, “Yes” to the God whom she trusted.

Through this young Jewish girl and her “Yes” to bearing, nurturing and raising the Christ-child, God’s victory over sin and death and the rendering of the heavens and of the earth ensues. The divine violence we expected begins with a young virgin saying “Yes” to becoming a mother. We expect swords and armies and fire and destruction but God chooses birth and family to turn everything upside down.

In her “Yes” is the beginning of our salvation. The Virgin Mary in her womb and through her motherhood protected, nurtured, and loved God. She bore God for our sakes. She is the first to recognize God’s salvation in Jesus. She is the Church before there was a Church. She is the one in whose womb God did dwell and become as we are-a human being made in the image of God worth saving. That is why in the eastern church she is named the “Theodotkos” (God-bearer) and in the western church she is “the Mother of God.” These titles witness to Mary’s willingness to risk scandal and death for the sake of the world. She answered God’s asking of the unexpected by being open and vulnerable to God’s call to her. But that is what a mother does. In her, the love of God was made real...taking on flesh. Through the Ever Blessed Mary’s “Yes” God’s wrath against sin and death is made manifest in Jesus Christ himself and his love for all-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

Trusting God

2008-10-19T22:00:00.000-07:00

The salvation that God offers through Jesus Christ is not about being good. We would like to think it is because there is always someone else who is not as good as we are. We say to ourselves that we are good people. We haven’t done this and we haven’t done that. Certainly not those things that a civilized society may punish. The problem is is that God’s salvation in Jesus Christ our Lord is not about being good. When Jesus himself is called good by those who truly admire him, he rejects the compliment and states that only God is good. Jesus always deflects any attention directed toward himself toward the One who is the source of all that is-the Living God of Israel; the God Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Rebecca, of Jacob, Leah, and Rachael, of Joseph and Mary.

Anyone who has seriously studied the bible with any sensitivity quickly learns that the heroes of God are not always the best people around. What makes them special is not their goodness. They are heroes of the faith because of their ultimate trust in God. There is nothing intrinsic in them as to why God chooses them except that they were able in spite of their fears, their weaknesses, their frailties, and even their sins to cast all their trust upon God and allow their lives to become the very proving grounds of God’s work in the world. Being good is too easy because we measure our goodness against someone else’s badness. Trusting God to work in the world through our lives is not. It is hard work.As a priest I am privy to people’s struggles. And sometimes these struggles are such that I would not wish them upon my worst enemy and wish I could wave a magic wand making such hardships disappear. However, there is no mojo that can undo life itself and the events, good or bad, that make up the story of our lives. I wish there was but there isn’t.

Prayers and sacraments are for life as it is and not for the life that we often wish that was or the life we would like it to be. Yet, I have also witnessed people trusting in God in the midst of utterly trying times and encountering God when the life they have known has been taken from them. Trust and not goodness invites God into the messy and sometimes tragic events of our lives. God does indeed show up especially when we invite God into those times that threaten to unmake us, bring us low, decimate us, and rob us of any joy. I hunger and thirst for the presence of God in the worst of times. Probably because in the best of times I tend to take God’s presence for granted. There is no place where God is not. God is in all times and all places. God is always present.

The problem is that we are usually not the ones present to God. Christians do not go to Church because they are good or even want to be good. They go to Church Sunday after Sunday, to become present to Jesus who has been and who is and who will be present till the end of the age. Being present to God in Christ Jesus our Lord is not about being good. It is about trusting that God is already present even in the midst of tragedy and troubles. All our prayers and worship are about keeping ourselves open to God’s presence and allowing God to bring forth whatever God will bring forth from the best and worst of times. Trusting that God’s salvation makes itself known through life as it is is better that believing that God cares about who is being good and who is being bad because in comparison to God who can claim to be good. God is the God that all of us, saints and sinners, can indeed trust. The salvation of God is not about being good. The salvation of God is trusting that God will show up when we need God the most-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.

Rendering Unto God

2008-10-19T21:23:00.000-07:00

Many people of the ancient Middle-East had in their possession household gods. These small carvings of gods made from marble, wood, clay, silver or gold and stored in a special place so that the family could be assured of the gods’ protection provided the family with security. Gifts of fruits, vegetables, or flowers, measures of grain, oil, or milk, and incense would be offered to these idols to assure their constant vigilance on behalf of the family. These gods were fickle and had to appeased or the crops would fail, the water-well would go bad, a child would become sick, or a career would not advance

We 21st century Americans tend to interpret Jesus’ statement about “rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s” as a biblical affirmation of the Jeffersonian concept of the separation of church and state or Holy Scripture’s blessing upon one’s support of their government no matter how that government’s policies stand in opposition to the Kingdom of God. Some do interpret this passage to state that our spending habits are secular by nature and, therefore, beyond any spiritual concerns except when such spending habits may seem to put us on God’s good side. For many, we carry our family idols in our pockets, purses, and wallets. These idols made from copper, nickel, silver, and paper bear the images of Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, and Franklin. And they are our gods. Let’s face it. American’s value money to such an extent that the worth of any given thing is instantly converted to dollars and cents.

Because we treat God as thing to be marketed, to be packaged and sold, we wind up with religious leaders passing off good advice and positive thinking or the latest end-of the world trend as being the Gospel. Joel Osteen and John Hagee pass off pap with a Christian gloss because it sells and because the image on the dollar bill is the household god of America. Stamping “In God We Trust” on our money does not exorcise such idolatry.

Money is not the problem. We are. Jesus’ statement about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s is meant to have us beg the question, “Then what belongs to God?” Holy Scripture witnesses over and over that everything belongs to God and to God alone. Nothing belongs to Caesar! Absolutely nothing! Our loyalties, our very selves, our material possessions, and even the very change in our pockets belong to God no matter whose countenance is stamped on that coin.

Taxes, money-markets, CDs, stocks and bonds, tax write-offs, tax cuts, insurance policies, mutual funds, savings account, checking accounts and the very dollars and cents in your pocket, wallet or purse are neutral-neither good nor bad. All of these things can be used for the Kingdom of Heaven because they like everything else seen and unseen belong to God. Our wealth, no matter how grand or how much of a pittance, can feed the hungry, clothe the naked, take care of the poor, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, find those lost to drugs and alcohol, comfort the afflicted and even afflict the comfortable. And in the end we may find ourselves no longer carrying our household gods in our pockets-The Rev. Adrian A. Amaya.