1 Lent 26-A: Journey to God-consciousness

Lectionary: Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7; Psalm 32; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11 

Live-streamed sermon on Emmanuel YouTube. (Found at 32':25")

En el nombre de Dios, co-respirador y fuente de vida en nosotros... In the name of God, co-breather and source of life in us. Amen.

This Lent, our Scriptures lead us on a journey toward God consciousness. I spoke of Christ consciousness a few weeks ago in my sermon on 5th Epiphany. Today, the Genesis story illustrates the beginning of the development of God-consciousness among humans. It helps to know that Adam and Eve weren’t people, but archetypes. Adam means ‘human’ in Hebrew, and Eve means ‘first.’

This is a story of the first step in human relationship with God. Not unlike our own children, who, about the age of two, begin to self-differentiate, this story illustrates the beginning of our self-awareness and how we relate to our Divine Creator. This is not a story of human failure, but of human growth and development overseen, guided, and protected by our heavenly parent.

Like most children who are learning to differentiate from their parents, the humans in Genesis believe that their mistakes are the cause of the problems around them. They aren’t. In fact, as the story develops, we can see that those mistakes provide important opportunities for them to learn what they need to grow and thrive.

For example, it is impossible to live among humans and not learn right from wrong. It’s also impossible to live in relationship with God and not learn trust and humility.

We hear that at one point, Adam and Eve’s “eyes were opened” and they “knew they were naked.” Remembering that the biblical meaning of naked is ‘vulnerable,’ the truth being conveyed here is that in our vulnerability, God, who is always near and always watchful, will show us how to go, just as God does for Adam and Eve providing them what they needed to sew clothes for them to wear.

Clothing symbolizes protection. Adam and Eve put on the protection of God.

I think there are probably two things humans fear most: being totally alone and being totally unlovable. The story of Adam and Eve affirms for us that we are never alone because God is always faithful, always present, and always ready to redeem; and that God loves us so much that God will seek us out to maintain relationship with us.

In the Gospel from Matthew, the temptations Jesus confronts are also about archetypal. Jesus’ tempter says to him: “IF you are the Son of God…” then prove it. Like the serpent in Genesis, the tempter in Matthew speaks self-centeredness, that is, being the center of our own attention and concern, to Jesus.

In biblical terms, to speak something is to create it. Jesus, in his humanity, is confronting some very real human impulses here, and they’re the same ones we still face: Are we who we think we are? If we don’t take care of ourselves and what we need, who will? Are we really beloved of God – and what does that mean? How does that work in “real life?”

If you are a child of God, the tempter says, then prove that God loves you. Prove God is with you. Prove God will take care of you.

Proof is not the same as faith, and our faith assures us that God loves us. So, we can choose not to believe the lies of current culture, where protestors proclaim that God hates those other children of God because of their sexual orientation or gender fluidity. Around the world, rich and privileged children of God vilify and degrade poor children of God. Male children of God continue to oppress and abuse female children of God. The current Epstein scandal comes to mind.

But this isn’t new. For generations, girls, women, and other vulnerable groups have been and continue to be abused, trafficked, excluded from education, independence, and even leadership in the church. It’s a global and historical distortion of our right relationships. It’s sin, and as Rev. Naomi Tutu preached last Saturday, it makes me weep.

I have Good News to share about this, though. God hates nothing God has made.

That isn’t just my opinion. It’s in our Prayer Book. Did it sound familiar? It’s in the first prayer we prayed together at our Ash Wednesday service.

In biblical language to ‘love’ means to be loyal to, to be faithful to; and to hate means to turn away from, to desert. God hates no one and nothing God has made.

How do we know God hates nothing God has made? Because over and over, our sacred texts remind us that God is steadfast, faithful, merciful, loving, and always ready to help us. In the Genesis story, God covered the vulnerability of the first humans when they realized they were vulnerable. In the Psalm, God is our hiding place, our respite from trouble. In both of these stories, God shows us how to go, how to survive, how to thrive.

So then, why aren’t we thriving in the harmony God has created for us? Where did sin come from?

Our Scripture talks about the devil, the tempter, Satan, and the serpent. All of these are regarded as evil, but what is evil? According to our Judeo-Christian tradition, evil is anything or anyone who actively or on behalf of someone else sows division, pain, or heaps unfair burdens or hardships upon those they can oppress.

The devil, diabolos, is a person, desire, or thing that distracts us from God. The tempter refers to an internal challenge to test oneself, to see whether or not a thing can be done.

The Hebrew term “the satan” describes an adversarial role, not a particular character... Sorry – no, there’s no red guy with horns or a pitchfork – and the “S” is not capitalized. It isn’t a name.

In her book, “The Origin of Satan,” theologian Elaine Pagels says that the ancient Jewish understanding and literal translation of the word “satan” is: “one who throws something across one’s path.” If the path we’re on is bad for us, the obstruction is good; thus, the satan may have been sent by the Lord to protect a person from worse harm. (pp 39, 40) If the path we’re on is right and good, however, the satan is disruptive, distracting, evil, and intent on doing us harm.

The serpent is a pre-Christian symbol of the goddess, of feminine power, strength, and healing. Note how our forebears used this symbol. This matters because blaming women for sin and the cultural and spiritual consequences of that are being openly discussed right now on social media.

When Jesus went into the wilderness, he was showing us how to work out what our relationship with God and others should be. The self-differentiation of humanity begun in Genesis culminates in the full integration of humanity and divinity in Jesus.

We know where this led Jesus, so we are tempted to ignore the call. We don’t want to be led to our death. In fact, we resist death in general, whether it’s the death of our habits or of our understanding about God, the church, and our culture. We much prefer status quo, even when that status quo begins to harm and destroy people and creation.

As we’ve all watched the unfolding of the evils of the Epstein scandal, the rise of Christian Nationalism, ICE aggression, and billionaire-driven cultural influencing, I’ve had people say to me, “Oh, this will pass. It’s not as grievous or life-threatening as some are making it seem. Don’t overreact. It’ll all come back to the middle.”

The thing is, that “middle”, or as I call it, the waters we have been swimming in have been polluted by these evils for so long, we’ve stopped noticing the pollution. We’ve slowly adjusted ourselves to include and normalize the pollution.

It seems we have reached a tipping point. We can either recognize the opportunity God is giving us to restore divine balance, or we can watch the evil we have created destroy us like an aggressive cancer within the body of our humanity.

Jesus showed us what to do - if we have the will to follow him. Away with you, Satan, he said. We will worship and serve only the Lord our God, who, as we said before, is our ever-present, ever-watchful protector and hiding place; the co-breather of life in us. 

Then Jesus gave his life so we could have new life in God. We will have to give up our lives as we know them now and be guided into our new life in God.

Training ourselves to be God-conscious, that is, awake and aware of God’s presence, protection, mercy, and redemption in every situation, and for every human being, along with all of creation, is the work of Lent. Weeping with God for the suffering of anyone and earth itself opens us to love as God loves, and to work for divine harmony on earth as it is in heaven.

May each one of us, and all of us together, work toward God-consciousness this Lent, loving God, loving one another, and changing the world. 

Amen.

Ash Wednesday, 2026: Co-breathing the breath of God

Lectionary: Joel 2:1-2,12-17; Psalm 103:8-14; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6,16-21

 

En el nombre de Dios que continuamente insufla nueva vida en nosotros... 

In the name of God who continually breathes new life into us. Amen. 

Those of you who know me, know that on this day, we are entering my favorite liturgical season. I love Lent, but maybe not the Lent you’re thinking of.

The Lent I love is a season that reflects its name. “Lent” means “Spring”... literally the lengthening of days. It is a time that holds the promise of a new verdancy, a surge of the life force of God in us.

One saint who often accompanies me on my Lenten journey is Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century mystic, healer, botanist, composer, and spiritual advisor to priests and popes in her time. 

Hildegard was a mystic, which is a person who has direct experience of and with the divine. Hildegard heard the voice of God not with her ears but in her spirit, as images, which she then interpreted into words. She described her visions as the voice of the living light.

Hildegard “saw” that within all creation is a Divine life force, the breath of God, ruach, as it is called in Genesis. This, she says, is why everything in creation reflects and glorifies God – because everything contains the life force of God. She calls this life force viriditas which means, greening, and it is in us humans the way sap is in a tree.

Without viriditas we would die. In fact, for Hildegard, the only sin is “drying up,” letting ourselves become arid, disconnected, and distorted, in body or spirit. This sin she calls ariditas.

Hildegard sees all of creation as one living network sustained by this life force from God. That means our duty and our privilege as stewards of God’s creation is to nurture that living network, to tend, befriend, and heal it, not to control, exploit, or dismiss any part of it as worthless or useless.

As Hildegard said in her prayer: “O Holy Spirit, … you are the mighty way in which every thing that is in the heavens, on the earth, and under the earth, is penetrated with connectedness, is penetrated with relatedness.”

Viriditas, the life force of God, fills and transforms us, continually connecting and reconnecting us to God, one another, and all of creation. And this is where we find our path for our Lenten journey.

In what ways have we become disconnected from God, ourselves, one another, or creation? Where are our lives no longer penetrated with connectedness? Where has our relatedness become distorted and destructive, whether by us or on our behalf?

When we observe a holy Lent, we do so not because we’re bad, but because we are beloved! God loves us and wants to be connected to us. Remember our prayer earlier, “Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent.”

Penitence is simply the awareness of our sadness and remorse from being disconnected. The prophet Joel reminds us that our fear of punishment is a result of our disconnection because God is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” So celebrate, Joel says, “Blow the trumpet ... sanctify a fast... gather the people.”

And do it now, St. Paul says, for “Now is the acceptable time.. now is the day of salvation – the day of rescue from all that has distorted our relatedness and disconnected us. Now. Today – not after we die.

This Lent, we are called to let the life force of God, the viriditas, flow freely again in us. Let there be no obstacle for us or for anyone, for we are all beloved of God, all reconciled to God through Jesus the Christ.

Our gospel affirms this, offering us a deeper truth about this connectedness. Doing things to prove to others that we are worthy, prayerful, or penitent is hypocritical. No one is more valued - or less valued – than anyone else.

Jesus says, “But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” In other words, go into a quiet place and reconnect with God. God is already there, waiting for you to come.

That’s the reward Jesus is speaking about. It isn’t a prize or honor or even a recognition. It’s reconnection through a conscious and very real co-breathing the breath of God – and that gives us life, no matter what we are confronting in the world around us.

In fact, we can’t possibly live in or respond to the world around us without this co-breathing. We will dry up, as Hildegard says. It will kill us.

We often go about our lives basically unaware that the demands and influences of the world have caused the soil of our souls to slowly but steadily dry up. Our soul-soil hardens and cracks like a dried-up river bed.

When we practice Lent, we enter into a period of self-examination that brings to our awareness just how dry we’ve become – a revelation which brings with it the realization that we are unable to irrigate ourselves. There is almost a desperateness in this moment of revelation, a deep knowledge that without this irrigation, our souls will completely dry up and turn to dust.

But our faith assures us that it is from the dust we were created in the first place. So, we trust… and we wait… through these 40 days, and 40 nights.

At our invitation, the hands of our Creator reach into the soil of our souls, breaking through the dry surface. The Almighty kneads the soil of our souls removing any hardened bits in there like anger, judgment, hatred of self or other, and other distortions of connectedness such as addictions, a desire for power, money, or praise.

Then our Creator irrigates our soul-soil with viriditas – the very life force of God – until we are ready to receive the seeds of new life being planted by our Creator. Then God smooths the surface of the soil of our soul, pats it down, sprinkles on a bit more viriditas, and asks us to wait while those divine seeds within us take root and grow.

This is Lent. Now maybe you understand why it’s my favorite liturgical season.

One final thought - and it's on fasting. If you choose to fast, please remember that fasting isn’t about food, as we heard from Isaiah last week. Fasting from food can work as a catalyst for our self-emptying, which we must do in order to reconnect with God and others, but we can accomplish that by fasting from many things: criticizing ourselves or others, complaining or harsh words. We can fast from over-exposure to the news or from doom-scrolling on social media. If any activity distracts you from your Lenten self-emptying, fast from that.

My friends, my siblings in this beautiful journey, may we all enjoy a blessed, honest, and holy Lent. Amen.

5 Epiphany 2026-A: Christ Consciousness

Lectionary: Isaiah 58:1-9a, [9b-12]; Psalm 112:1-9, (10); 1 Corinthians 2:1-12, [13-16]; Matthew 5:13-20

En el nombre de Dios: nuestra luz y nuestra vida... In the name of God, our light and our life. Amen.

There are times being a modern English-speaker is a disadvantage. For example, when we use the word “you,” it could be singular - an individual, or plural - y’all. We can’t tell except from the context, and sometimes, not even then.

This matters when we read the ancient texts in our Bible. All of our readings today, use the plural “you,” referring to the community. There is not a single reference to you, the individual. Yet most of us apply what we read in the Scripture to ourselves as individuals. How does this speak to my experience or guide my actions...?

A more faithful approach is to apply the lessons of Scripture to us, the people of God living in community. Salvation in ancient Israel, was always about the people of God. Salvation in Jesus is about humanity - collectively. As N.T. Wright, the Bp. of Durham once said, “there are no individual Christians.”

We know this. Christianity is, by definition a body: the body of Christ in the world. Still, we get tripped up because our cultural habit is to focus on self: my wealth, my beauty, my position, even my salvation, as if we could – or want to - extricate ourselves from the rest of humankind.

Today’s lessons offer us a refresher course on community-centered consciousness characterized by love, mercy, and compassion, or as priest and theologian Jim Marion calls it, “Christ Consciousness” or as Paul calls it in his epistle, “the mind of Christ:” wisdom taught to us by the Spirit of God enabling us to spiritually discern in every circumstance we find ourselves.

In Christ Consciousness, our relationship with God is living, dynamic, ever-evolving, potent, and actively transforming us and through us, our world. This is what Jesus’ whole life and ministry demonstrated for us. Over and over Jesus showed us that Christ consciousness takes us beyond obedience to the letter of the law to fulfillment of the law of love which forgives, restores, and reconciles all (all!) the world to God.

In Jesus we witness a beloved life lived in the world, and his world was fraught with violence, oppression, bigotry, and corruption – not unlike our world today. Yet, no matter how the world reacted to him or treated him Jesus maintained a consciousness of love and mercy even forgiving his executors from the cross on which they hanged him.

Christ Consciousness.

We don’t have to strive for this consciousness. It’s ours for the asking. All we need to do is invite it. That means, however, putting aside our goals, plans, and hopes, and putting God’s in their place.

This is denying self, or in other words, fasting, and this is the fast the prophet Isaiah is talking about. It isn’t about food. It’s about us (in the community sense of the word ) and our how we relate with God, others, and among ourselves.

Jesus uses two metaphors to teach this: salt and light. Salt was valuable in the ancient world, not only because it has the unique ability to enhance the flavor of food, but also because it preserves food, which in ancient times, often meant preserving life. Salt, however, can also be an irritant, as anyone who swims in the ocean knows.

Jesus proclaims us to be the salt of the world. We are meant to preserve life. We also are meant to irritate those who seek to destroy life, just as Jesus irritated those in power in his day.

Jesus also says that we are the light of the world. That’s both really interesting and kind of scary.

We are the light that is present in the world. This completely transforms our understanding of our relationship with God. Julian of Norwich described this in her concept of “oneing” saying, “For [God] says... ‘I am loving you, and you are loving me: and our loving shall never be parted in two.’” (John Skinner, ed., Revelation of Love, Julian of Norwich, 129.) In other words, we can never be completely cut off from God’s love – and neither can anyone else, whether they are judged to be good or evil, worthy of praise or deserving of punishment.

When Jesus says, “let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works…” it helps to remember that his Jewish listeners understood that he was talking about mitzvah - works of mercy, reconciliation, and service to others. These works glorify God because God is the source of the mercy, compassion, and love that is in us.

When we take ourselves out of the center of our universe and focus our attention and God-given gifts where God guides us, we will find our lives and ministries looking more like Jesus’ life and ministry. I hope everyone saw this in Our Annual Meeting magazine which acquaints us with the many ways Emmanuel’s light shone and glorified God last year.

This light continues to break forth from us now, like the dawn signaling a new day, a new way to be in relationship with God, one another, and among ourselves in our time. We won’t always get it right, but what I see happening at Emmanuel right now is a commitment to fulfillment of the law of love which forgives, restores, and reconciles all the world to God.

The world will often disagree with us as it did with Jesus, and push back, attempting to cover or douse our light with condemnation. That’s OK.

When those in power blame and withhold assistance from the poor, hungry, or disabled, we will continue to welcome them into our midst, offering them dignified friendship as we feed, and tend to their needs as best we can.

When those in power deride people for their sexual identity or whom they love, we will continue to proclaim that God is the creator and author of all love, and they are our siblings in the family of God. 

When the world vilifies immigrants, documented or undocumented, as evil, deceitful, or dishonorable, we will continue to draw them close in community knowing they all worthy of respect because we are all one in God.

People of Emmanuel, you (and I mean y’all) are set apart as holy, consecrated to God. Y’all are salt and light. I have seen it and I can testify to it. I bless you and pray that you freely, bravely, and continually let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to God. Amen.