Last week, I spoke on the birthday of the church, about the beloved community—a community of holy fools of God following Christ. Spirit as a mischief maker in our community is rooted in the imitation and following the holy foolishness of Jesus message about God’s reign.

The beloved community resists imitating churches throughout history who have been violent and intolerance of difference or non-conformity. I describe myself and hopefully yourselves as living an “embodied non-compliance” or “embodied mischief” to institutional Christianity. One of the erroneous perspectives of Christians is to visualize linearly the threefold divine community of Christ: God as Creator as old man full of wisdom and power, Jesus as the Christ who was sent to die on the cross and rise from the dead, and the Holy Spirit who becomes active in the world as Jesus has ascended to heaven.

But the mystery of the threefold divine community of love can be approached through what we know of the relationship of God to humanity and creation. And it can also be known through understanding of Jesus God’s Christ to us and through the Holy Spirit.

Our faith holds to a being –we name God with a divine unity yet threefold distinct constellations of energy force.

Orthodox Christianity understands God as three and one as a universal spiral dance (perichoresis) of a community of love. God is three: Parent begetting Child, God Child begotten, and the Holy Spirit generated from their love and as procession. It is a divine community of radical inclusive and polyamorous love, but this radical inclusive of three loving partners is metaphorically image as a spiraling, ecstatic dance (perichoresis) that breaks down all barriers of other by the dynamic and loving movement of interpenetrating communion. Leonardo Boff describes this dynamic:

Perichoresis means one person’s action permeates the other and allows itself to be permeated by that person. The interpenetration expresses the love and life that constitutes the divine nature. It is the very nature of love to be self-communicating, life naturally expands and seeks to multiply itself. Thus, the divine Three from all eternity find themselves in an infinite explosion of love and life from one to the other. (Boff)

It is a divine communion of radical inclusive love expressed in the creative image of line dancing. I want to think of folks participating in country dancing at Oil Can Harry’s in Studio City (CA). The partners in God are dancing circling with each other, changing positions in love, and the whole floor is whirling in a dynamic two-step dance. The partners inter-permeate or interpenetrate each other in an eternal and universe-spinning egalitarian dance. Each person spirally empties self and mutually surrenders to the other two, giving life, love, wisdom, goodness. The dancing of the three within God, circling in mutual love is dynamic and playful mystery of love, contagiously spiraling open and inclusively and lovingly pulling us into that dance of love. If God is dancing with all creation and us, God invites us to join in a community of dance.

If you place one hand on the wrist of your other arm, you will feel your pulse. If you utter word “grace” to each beat and continue to be mindful of the beat, you are hearing the divine dance of the trinity entangled in creation and in you. This reminds me that God’s dance is the green grace of life, and it points out that we do not live alone or for ourselves but live within the web of all life entangled with God.

There are two aspects of the divine threefold community that we carry as image and likeness in ourselves. Perichoresis or divine interrelating is a way of life, it is art of being ourselves. It is the instinct or drive to communion within ourselves and all life and towards God. Let me speak about God’s image and likeness and communion as concrete aspects of divine life in ourselves.

So interrelationship and communion are the traces of God within ourselves. These must be reflected with ourselves and creation.

Our scriptural heritage at the beginning of Genesis maintains that we are made in the image and likeness of God. How are we made in the image and likeness of God? Earlier Christian writers affirmed it was maleness the decisive factor. But what about women? Are they not made in the image of God? Some argued that women reflected the image of a male God only if they were controlled by the male husbands or male clergy if they were nuns.

Others have argued that it is our intellect and rationality reflect the image of God. I think this falls short, for it removes the richness of our emotional lives that connect us to God and one another. I want to suggest another aspect that
Our modern western heritage promotes a strong individualism with an emphasis on achievement and successes. We are seen as the pinnacle of God’s creation, and everything is about us. We think of ourselves as individuals, perhaps members of society of individuals or of the United States.

The poet Wallace Stevens writes, “Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelationships.” Everything is related to everything else.
See ourselves as part of the web of life, an incredibly vast, complex, subtle, beautiful web that amazes us can call forth our concern.

The Earth Charter from the 1990s states as its first principle, “Respect Earth and life in all its diversity. Recognize that all beings are interdependent and every form of life has value regardless of its worth to human beings.” (Earth Charter)

We have forgotten that humanity was made from humus, or the soil, and that Adam and Eve, son and daughter of the Earth and our ancestors, came from Adamá, land of fertility.

If we withdraw in prayer into our center, we discover that we are not alone. The root of existence is God, and we are immediately and wonderfully in touch with God.

The spiritual practices of peoples of faith—Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, or indigenous peoples—lead us to discover that we exist in relationship to everything else. We are interconnected to a vast network of relationships where God abides, animates, and sustains those relationships.

There is no such things as a self that is separated, isolated, or individual. Even physics points us that nothing exists in isolation, but exists in relationship to something else, and that something is also related to vast number of something elses as well. This is goes to the farthest parts of the unimagined vast universe.
All life is interrelated to us. Prayer allows us to enter the cosmic dance of God as community. We meet the God: “For in God, we live and move have our being.” (Acts17:28)

Brian Swimme, a mathematical cosmologist, in Hs wonderful book and documentary, Journey of the Universe, that are isolation and loneliness are unreal cosmic states. Spiritual author Kathleen Fischer notes,

For we are born from the Earth community and are deeply bonded to it, relatives of atoms and bacteria, roses and sparrows, insects and whales, galaxies and planets. …

Every child should know she is the energy of the sun and feel her face shining with the joy found in it this primordial relationship. Sunlight streams though the oceans and hums in the forests. We learn from the sun’s generosity in bestowing energy, discovering the in its underlying impulse of the universe our own urge to contribute to the wider community. Swimme tells us to contemplate the solar system in which the Earth is swung around its massive cosmic partner, the sun, “is to touch an ocean of wonder as you take the first step into inhabiting the actual universe and solar system and the Earth.” Yes we are pilgrims, but each moment of our journey we are filled with the light from the beginning of time, from the birthplace of the universe fifteen billion light years away. Suffuse with the vision of the universe, we might be moved to pause on our journey, lifting our faces to the sun to take in energy of God’s love.

We human beings fall prey to a false perspective that we are alone and isolated selves, we get caught in desperate attempts to immerse ourselves in consumerism and materialism, failing to appreciate how are connected to a universe of interconnected realities. We are interrelated to everything and never separated.

This realization of our interconnectedness and interrelatedness I would suggest is what is our likeness and image of God. We are interrelated as a community of life.

The second aspect of God as threefold community of inclusive love is the drive we have towards community. Our interrelation with God who reveals Godself in creation and to us in history invites us to deepen the bonds of connection or love with one another. Our interrelatedness to the Earth and other life and to one another includes a sense of community. Community that reflects the divine community of love is always radically inclusive. It is neither exclusive of humanity only nor is exclusive of only certain types of people. Jesus’ teaching is instructive here: “Be compassionate as God is compassionate to you.”
Compassion is the nature of our God, and we are invited to imitate compassion.

One of the best definitions of compassion I have found is by Henri Nouwen:

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human…

Compassion includes several related notions: radical inclusiveness and hospitality; identification with the suffering, the poor, and marginalized life; to engage the suffering of others and alleviate their suffering; feasting together to celebrate God’s reign in our midst.

Radical inclusive love and hospitality welcomes those who are different from ourselves into relationship of care and sharing. Compassion keeps open to outside, always vigilant to expand include the excluded. It builds on the nature, reflecting the image and likeness of God as interrelated to everything but deepens that interrelationships into an explicit community of equality and love.
Ideally we move into deepening our community, always welcoming and caring for the stranger and those who are different, and love for one another, we celebrate the diversity of the community of life. The divine communion is open and inviting, thus it critiques social exclusions and hierarchies. We image in an imperfect way that original grace of divine inclusion of creation and the final welcoming fully of all created life into the love life of God.

At the heart of the threefold divine community of love is there divine sharing and participation of the actions of love together. The experience of the one is also simultaneously the experience of all three. From all eternity, they are interwoven and interrelating, and that means they are interwoven and interrelated in our living out the grace of our image and likeness of God.

Today we celebrate the birthday of the church. I want to offer some reflections on what church is and what it is not. Many churches fall into the “what it is not” category. I want to speak of a church alive as the beloved community and truly alive to the Spirit. Most churches are not alive but promote unhealthy notions around Jesus and ministry.

One example was the Arizona Congressman who maintained last week there is no obligation to the poor stated in the bible. He was criticizing Francis I for his care for the poor. He quotes 2 Thessalonians 3:10:

For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.
Paul here is not saying that if you are poor, you need to work. Nothing should be given to you.

Here exactly is the misuse of scripture to support a heartless political policy that would deny food stamps to families and their children, healthcare, and social benefits while the 1% in our country become richer and greedier with deeper tax cuts. In the US, the Bible is used by fundamentalist to preserve and justify the status quo of not caring for the poor or other unpopular issues.

Paul is criticizing those who are not working but who have actively become busybodies in the community. These people are capable of work, but use their time to create trouble and gossip in the community. This verses from Paul have nothing to do with whether social welfare—such as Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, and social services and helping the homeless, the elderly, the disabled, and the vulnerable–should be available in our society. The political agenda to cut social benefits for the poor and the burdened middle class for the extremely wealthy 1% stands against the interpretation of this verse and most of the bible where God exercises a preferential option for the poor and the marginal.

I nearly gagged on this statement from this Arizona congressman. There are nearly 2000 times the word “the poor” is used in the scriptures. He deliberately distorts the Bible to justify his political ideology of greed and lack of compassionate care for the poor. This is not Christianity, and those churches that promote such position for not caring for the poor and vulnerable are not what churches are or should be. Many churches, I am sad to say, have become servants of corporate America and the wealthy and the fail to listen to the gospels.

I want to share God does not reject you video. It has been banned on tv in several states. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRcv9u9x3z8

I want to say what I believe in my heart that Christ’s church should be place where God’s fools come together. Where are fools for Christ who follow the path of God’s kindom today? Where is the beloved community to be found? I often had been labeled a “troublemaker” by folks and more recently the MCC hierarchy. I took the criticism as a badge of doing something correct in following Jesus in discipleship and integrity.

Many church leaders promote the beatitudes as I read one UCC pastor Robin Meyers characterized as type of “cereal box” Christianity. He argues that the beloved community is an “embodied force opposed, a beloved community of defiance, a joyful but resilient colony of dissenters from the forces of death—both physical and spiritual—that destroy and marginalize creation.” (Meyers)

Meyers speaks of the beloved community, a church who promotes a “resistance as for of direct or indirect action opposing anything in the dominant culture that brings death and indignity to any of the human family, or to creations itself.” Both definitions include the poor and creation, harmed directly by human actions, apathy, and callous actions. Are you surprised at the oil spill of a hundred thousand barrows into the ocean coast hurting the environment and ocean life when the company has been cited for over a 100 safety violations in the last decade?

God’s call to us, individually and as community, is right here this morning. This is a place of grace where the gospel of Jesus Christ calls us to a joy in sharing his ministry in a world that is broken and hungry for grace.

Many churches like individuals fill the empty space of our lives and communal lives with lots of things, but fail to hear the real message to fill the empty spaces of church and our lives with God’s grace.

Here is wonderful quotation from Rev. Peter Gomes, an American Baptist minister, and African-American clergy who grew up in Plymouth MA where the Pilgrims first landed, and became chaplain at Harvard University:

Good news to some will almost inevitably be bad news to others. In order that the gospel in the New Testament might be made palatable as possible, its rough edges have been shorn off and the radical edge of Jesus’ preaching has been replaced by a respectable middle, of which niceness is now God. When Jesus came preaching, it was to proclaim the end of things as they are and the breaking in of things that are to be: the status quo is not to be criticized; it is to be destroyed. (Peter Gomes)

The Christianity that I see promoted on the television, radio, and internet sickens me. It is anything but the gospel of Jesus. It proclaims a Christ that is distant from the poor, immersed in the mall and in the latest war, or in fearful responses to change and inclusion such LGBT folks, peoples of color, or undocumented migrants. Or a Christianity takes the scriptures literally to advocate environmental exploitation or radical exclusion justifying the exclusion of those that fall victim to the social circumstances of losing a job, becoming addicted, or just being different.

Writer Ann Lamott, pens, “You can safely assume you created God in your image when it turns out that God hates the same people you do.” Isn’t that statement very true? God does not hate anyone, neither should we.

I can look past at my life and see multiple threads of embodied non-compliance or perhaps better framed in language I use, “embodied mischief.” It is embodied mischief to institutional Christianity, its orthodoxies, and misrepresentation or perversion of God’s grace. I have witnessed this in the Roman Catholic Church, the MCC, and numerous other churches where we find justification for so many positions but forgetting the basic gospel message of compassion and care for the poor and the vulnerable. I am not a good game player when it comes to integrity or ego-centeredness of leadership, the institutional church, or even myself.

Peter Gomes is correct that Jesus preached the gospel not to just criticize the status quo but to destroy the status quo that disenfranchises people from God’s grace and the necessities to live, flourish, and the well-being that God intends for all of us. That is the rough edges of the gospel, and it produces reactions how God disturbs our world. Do we forget that we are commanded to love our God with our whole heart and our neighbor as ourselves.

When the Holy Spirit descended on the men and women that day hidden in the upper room on Pentecost, people heard a babbling in other languages and perceived an intoxication of emotional feeling and joy. But they witnessed an intoxicated of foolishness for Christ. They became like Christ “holy fools of God.” They came out with courage and stepped out of their roles to witness to an event that disrupts their whole lives since the death of Jesus and his resurrection. You see God’s resurrection of Christ created a faith born of wonder, loosing fear, hope, unconditional love, and radical amazement and absolutely fabulous “foolishness” for God.

The beloved community is resistant not only to the practice of Christianity as lived by many Churches and Christians but also resistant to the dominant cultural threads of consumerism, gospels of prosperity, corporate greed, and separation of yourselves from others. Christianity is not a set of beliefs but a relationship with Jesus Christ. God does not save or reward those with correct beliefs or orthodox practices; God saves those who dare to love beyond the boundaries and barriers that culture, religion, and society set up to exclude.

I read about the board of a church in Massachusetts that warned its newly hired pastor, “no politics from the pulpit.” It reminds me the story in Luke when Jesus preaches in his hometown synagogue, he upsets the neighbors and residents of his hometown so much that they attempt to murder him by throwing over the cliff.

We have spiritualize and sanitized Jesus to make acceptable to the widest audience; our message is condensed to correct beliefs and salvation while we ignore the dangerous message of the gospel of concrete care and relationship to a kindom of nobodies. Jesus’ message is dangerous, and the grace of that message becomes real to us a beloved community when a preacher unleashes the powerful memories of grace and liberation. The gospel creates resistance, if not outright rebellion, to currents of softening the message of unconditional grace that frees us to become a community of resisters or mischief-makers. Jesus addressed hunger and poverty and oppression within his society. The voice of Jesus, along with the voice of the preacher, must coincide to represent the dangerous memories of Jesus’ resistance and rebellion of the good news.

The shortest verse in the gospel is “Jesus wept.” He wept not because of wrong beliefs, but wept and continues to weep for heartless religion that fails to promote compassion, encouraged a fundamentalism that builds walls of exclusion, emboldens leaders to become prelates and not servants, and makes unconditional love a commodity for sale, and denying people accessibility to grace. And he wept and still weeps for uncaring institutions whose sole purpose becomes greed and exploitation, pushing violence and war over precious resources, and will treat people as throw-away and disposable.

The vision of Pentecost is to follow the Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit does not differ in her actions than Jesus. If Jesus was a rule breaker for the sake of compassion and God’s radical inclusive love, She breaks also boundaries for compassion, she breaks religious rules as Jesus did on a daily basis. She colors outside the lines, creating holy mischief not for the sake of creating foolishness but a foolishness for humanity but a profound wisdom of God’s nature. A person seized by the Holy Spirit knows what it means to be a holy fool, living the good news of Jesus Christ and fighting for a just kindom and a compassionate society of care, forgiveness, and unconditional love. ‘

My prayer for you this morning is that you allow the Holy Spirit, allow the Spirit to to make you a holy fool, to live the message of compassionate care for the poor, and to break rules in your discipleship to follow Jesus—God’s Christ.