Thomas, Thomas, Thomas

Easter 2 B         April 15, 2012

Acts 4:32-35; Ps. 133

1 John 1:1-2:2; John 20:19-31

St. Thomas feels like a really familiar person to me. St. Thomas feels like someone who wants things just so. He edges into the perfectionist column on personality tests. He’s like what people used to say about Missouri: he is from the “show me” state. He’s got to touch it and smell it and pick it up with his own hands in order to believe it. Jesus was killed. Buried in a tomb. He’s over here, in this box, in this category. I’ve got my world all together. Maybe it’s not too great but I can understand it. Things used to be good, then they got bad, now they are not much better, but at least I know where things are right now. I know what is going on. I can make this work.

Thomas has got it so much “just so” that he wouldn’t know resurrection unless it hit him in the head. Until, of course, it does. It takes a little longer than the other disciples for Thomas to relinquish his hold on reality, his sense of control and perfection and order. It took a great big sign, but he did get it. What was absolutely incomprehensible had happened. Death, that ultimate control freak, was overturned. Life, in all its messy, complicated, sloppy, disorderly and miraculous, had won the day.

From the get-go of the resurrection, it seems, things get really sloppy. The abundance of new life just spills all over the place. The Acts of the Apostles is full of these ridiculous stories of extraordinary abundance.

Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

This is not easy to understand, this kind of abundance and profligacy. It really does not make sense to give up private property, to share everything we own, to eliminate need by redistributing the wealth. This has been tried, you know, and it doesn’t always go very well. Little human tendencies like greed and jealously and even perfectionism get in the way of living this wild, post-resurrection life.

In his novel, My Name is Legion*, the English writer A.N. Wilson puts this speech in the mouth of an elderly priest:

… our faith went to the Garden in the darkness of dawn three days later. Our faith did not find explanations, not did it find fake consolations. It found a new God.

This “new God,” Wilson has the priest go on to say,

… was to be found not in control, but in loss of control; not in strength but in weakness. He was no longer an explanation for what happens.

The priest, then, seems to be reflecting not only on the that ephemeral experience of the resurrected Jesus but always what happened to the Apostles, on the very real and very historical Church of the Apostles:

 … we can no longer look to an imaginary God to hand out morality, to feed the poor, to heal the sick, to refashion the world along just and equitable lines. That is our responsibility now, and if it seems like a Godless world, we shall be judged – we, not God.

Thomas, and all of us, who want the world to be tidy and predictable and orderly -- even the world in its most terrible should be that way – are really in for a shock on this 8th day after the resurrection. God has come even closer to us than he was when he was a baby in a barn. The wise teacher who did no wrong, who walked and talked among us, is now seen, to quote A.N. Wilson again,

… not in the highest heavens and heaven of heavens but in a wounded human body: in  bleeding hands, and pierced feet, and wounded side.

It is hard indeed for us to get back to that house with the locked doors, hard to stand there with Thomas. We know his skepticism, but find it harder to feel the mystery of what happens next.

But there is one way we can know it: in what we do together: in the hungry people we feed, in the community we create, in the love we share. Those things, however mundane, simple and everyday, are signs, just as glorious, of a new day, a new life, a new world.

* A.N. Wilson, My Name is Legion (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004) pp. 300-301

Like Mary, we have to run. We have a story to tell.

Easter --  April 8, 2012

Once upon a time, somewhere in America, there was a second grade classroom, with an incubator full of eggs. You know the story. The children would watch the eggs, turn them every day, keep them warm. Every week the teacher would take the children into the darkened cloakroom and hold the eggs up to a bright light. Inside the egg was the little chicken, growing and getting more defined with each peek. Finally the chickens began to break through the shells, piercing the casing that had kept them safe through their first weeks of life. The cracks grew larger, and finally each chick, wet and weak and bedraggled, squeezed themselves out into the world they had never seen before. The children were amazed. These little creatures had grown out of practically nothing, and certainly didn’t look like much when they first hatched. But soon they were walking around, pecking and scratching, their wet feathers now fluffed out and yellow. The children began to pick out their favorites. One child adopted one of the little chicks, and named him Junior.

Birth, even in the artificial atmosphere of a classroom incubator, is natural, normal. It is part of what we expect out of life. In the past few weeks, spring has slowly but steadily grown around us. The colors of spring are visible in trees and bushes. Rows of daffodils and hyacinths brighten our paths. The warm sun is waking up the roots and bulbs from their winter’s sleep.

The date of Easter is a natural occurrence. It always falls on the on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox. And what a full bright moon it was this week. Our bodies are tuned in to these natural cycles, yearning, as the plants do, for the turning of the earth, the turning of spring. It is the season of resurrection all around.

When Mary Magdalene goes to the graveyard garden on the spring Sunday morning, she too, is expecting something completely natural. Death, after all, is just as natural as birth. Grief is natural, mourning is natural. Mary went to grieve for her friend, on the third day after his terrible, untimely, violent and unnatural end. But what she found there, of course, was anything but natural. A stone rolled away, angels, young men, and Jesus himself – but not himself. “Do not cling to me, Mary,” he said to her in her grief and astonishment. This was not natural.

When she ran out of the garden that morning, Mary Magdalene became the first preacher. “The Apostle to the Apostles,” she is called in the tradition. She was a person of high standing in Roman society who had joined Jesus’ band of disciples, and being the first witness to the resurrection gave her special authority. Early Christian art often depicts Mary preaching, her hand extended. One story has her traveling to Rome, where she met the Emperor Tiberias. “After describing how poorly Pilate had administered justice at Jesus' trial, she told Caesar that Jesus had risen from the dead. To help explain his resurrection she picked up an egg from the dinner table. Caesar responded that a human being could no more rise from the dead than the egg in her hand turn red. The egg turned red immediately.”

All Easters are like this red egg: absolutely remarkable, natural and unnatural at the same time. These Easter eggs look just as we expect them to look, but something new and different emerges. When Mary went to that graveyard garden, she expected a dead body to stay dead. But going against nature, Jesus was alive. Jesus’ absolute life could not be contained by the shell of death, just as those chickens could not be contained by their shells when they were ready to hatch.

All of our lives are like these shells – us individuals, our families, our communities, even this parish church. For a while we are contained, constricted, then new life breaks out. When something so new and so bold happens, it just cannot be stopped. Something will happen; we just don’t know what.

Once upon a time in that classroom, eggs were hatched. The children named them and watched them grow. They grew sad when they had to say good-bye to them for the summer. But by the next September, the children came back to school, looking for the chickens, Junior among them. But a remarkable thing had happened over the summer. “Junior” had had to be re-christened “June” when she started laying eggs of her own.

Life is like that: full of setbacks and disappointments and death and destruction. The ground shakes under out feet, tsunamis of grief overwhelm us, precious things are lost and the future seems bleak. But in this remarkable Easter, new life pushes out of the ground, angels stand at the openings of empty tombs and eggs turn red in the palm of your hand. A new creation is emerging, something so new we may not even recognize it yet. Like Mary, we cannot cling to what once was. Like Mary we have to run; we have a story to tell.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Palm, Maundy & Passion: darkness & light

Palm Sunday B             April 1, 2012

All of us know something about betrayal.

All of us know about events set in motion that take on a dangerous and powerful life of their own, events which sweep all of us along in an inexorable current. We may have a fixed idea of what is right, what should be done, and then in the course of events it all goes terribly wrong. We may be the one whose attempt at doing a good deed turned into betrayal. We may be the one who intended to do great harm. We may be the one, innocent or not so innocent, caught up in the whole mess, cast aside, discarded, expendable, betrayed.

Cold War spy dramas seem to catch this dynamic of inevitability very well. In those decades, there were two great systems, “the West” and “the East”, pitted against each other. All individuals, whether principled or mercenary, were caught in the rules of this great game – all individuals, whether principled or mercenary, were betrayed or betrayer. In the perceptive novels of that era, such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, all played the rules of the betrayal game, with an ultimate loyalty to those great causes which were, at the same time, not worthy of their loyalty.

In this great drama which is the last week of Jesus’ life, the political and the spiritual are intertwined; each play out their scripts on each other’s stage. Jesus’ whole concern, in the Gospel of Mark, the account that we are reading this year, has been with the proclaiming of the kingdom of God – proclaiming that God’s reign has begun, that God’s will for this world is to be done. In the 3rd chapter of Mark, it says, Jesus’ work has been “to bind the strong man,” to tie up Satan and all the forces of wickedness – to free the people of God from their bondage to sickness, to poverty, to oppression – to all those forces which keep the people of God from living an abundant life.

In this last week of Jesus’ life, we see less of the spiritual and more of the political. Take Judas, for example: we are given no “spiritual” clue to his motive; he just turns Jesus over to the authorities. When Jesus set his face to Jerusalem, it was because it was the place of confrontation with those authorities, the place of execution. Following Jesus “on the way,” as he had said to his disciples, had always meant following him to Jerusalem, where this trial, torture and death would lead to his rising again. The disciples never heard Jesus’ words about resurrection, because they could not bear to hear the words about execution and death. When the confrontation happened, when Jesus was arrested and tried, they were terrified -- they all betrayed Jesus; they all just ran away.

I have been saying, this year as we have been reading the Gospel of Mark, that the forces of the Roman Empire were right here, the foreground, not the coloring book backdrop, of the story of Jesus. We see this most clearly in Jerusalem, in this last week of Jesus’ life. It’s not just that the conquering Romans “tolerated” the Jews, “let them have their religion” just to keep the peace. The Roman Empire ran Palestine. The point of Empire was to send the tribute – buckets and buckets of money and valuable stuff – back to Rome, and the Romans did it by taking over the Temple. The Romans appointed the chief priests. Kings like Herod “ruled” at their command. The Temple police, like the Roman legions, enforced the law. If the chief priests and elders “tried” Jesus, it was because the Romans wanted them to do that. The Romans used the Temple religion to bless their domination system. The taxes from the peasants flowed up – to the coffers of the rich Jewish elite on its way to treasury of the emperor in Rome. It was a massive system, every bit as sophisticated as the Cold War, a Satanic system without Satan – business as usual—profit over people. It was the kind of corruption and hubris and concentration of wealth that the Jewish prophets had been condemning for hundreds of years. Jesus knew what kind of a system he was marching into that day. He knew that when he said “love your neighbor,” that that would be a challenge to a system that killed all challengers in a systematic way.

But what about betrayal? What about those people who betrayed Jesus, who ran away? What about Judas? What about Peter? Why could they not have acted differently?

Think about those big institutions that rule our lives. Some, yes, are more benevolent than others – we have learned something in 2000 years. But sometimes even smaller institutions can behave in brutal ways – employers, organizations, businesses. Trusted colleagues all of a sudden turn on us, or we find ourselves in a situation where we have to deliver some “bad news,” terminate some employee not because we want to but because the “situation demands it.” What makes Judas so different from Peter? So different from anyone else we know?

Think about it this way: betrayal is bad, but despair is worse. Despair is the worse sin against God, because when we despair we deny hope – we deny that God can forgive us. We deny that we can, indeed, turn from our wickedness and live. When faced with that powerful system that would have killed him, too, had he stayed around, Peter ran way. But Peter then, if only to himself, confronted that domination system, that violent Empire in which he was caught up. Peter realized what he had done, and wept bitterly. Peter repented, and when he sees the risen Lord, he is forgiven. Judas? We never see him again in the Gospel of Mark; but, following Peter’s example, had Judas broken down and wept, had Judas repented, he, too, would have been forgiven, restored, included in that community of hope that was beginning to see the dawn break on the new day.

We sit at the end of this reading of the passion in a dark and unfinished place. The routine has won. Business as usual has restored order. The legions return to their barracks, the peasants to their homes, terrified once more that those who dare to speak words of hope will receive the same swift and efficient punishment. We see a few people break through the numbness, willing to take some tiny risks. Peter wept. Joseph, who had some standing with the authorities, asked permission to put Jesus’ body in a tomb, something not usually allowed for the crucified. Some women stood by, ready to take care of his body in death, as they had in life. There are some cracks in that “domination system.” There is some glimmer of hope that “the system” may not have the final word.

Wednesday in Holy Week -- April 4, 2012 

Hebrews 9:11-15,24-28

Ps. 69

John 13:21-35

In John's gospel, the contrast of darkness and light is one of the major themes. The darkness of Satan and of those who do not believe is contrasted with the light of Christ, the one who reveals God's glory. From the very beginning of the Gospel, John sets the stage for this passage: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." (1:5) The moment where Judas chooses Satan over Jesus is the moment where the darkness begins.

In a passage before today's reading, soon after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Jesus talks about darkness and light. Those who believe in him walk in the light. But there are others, whose eyes are blinded, who would believe in Jesus but out of fear of losing their religious and social status quo, refuse to confess their faith. "...They loved human glory more than the glory that comes from God," the evangelist tells us.

They, too, are the ones who walk in darkness. They, too, like Judas, have chosen Satan. They are people who slide into the choice of darkness over light, people who are willing to settle for less in their lives, people who harbor grudges, who add a sarcastic twang to their words, who nurse anger – who a little too frequently take a walk on that “dark side” of human nature. Human glory – or human one-ups-manship -- is so much more of an immediate reward than the glory of God, so much more tangible. We all have our own lists, don't we? Ways we kind of "back into" darkness, into betrayal of Jesus out of our love for human glory. How often do we settle for less than what God promises is ours?

Robert Penn Warren wrote a poem about looking back at his life, full of some nostalgia, some regret. He lays down in a ditch, looking at the sky, thinking about what he has done wrong, contemplating his own death. Abruptly, the poet rouses himself:

But why should I lie here longer?
I am not dead yet . . .
And I love the world even in my anger,
And love is a hard thing to outgrow.[i]

What will rouse us? -- we who are full of regrets, who know the times we have, like Judas, walked on the dark side? What brings us into the light? What causes us to jump up with new resolve? Love. "I love the world even in my anger," even in my darkness, even when Satan beckons; "I love the world even in my anger, /And love is a hard thing to outgrow."

Jesus knows Judas is about to betray him, yet he extends his hand, with a piece of bread in it, to Judas in love. In this act, the evangelist echoes something he wrote in the beginning of the Gospel: "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son..." (3:16) Love, in the Gospel of John, is an act, a moral act, an act of courage. Jesus gives Judas the bread in love, knowing he will betray him, and at that moment when Judas accepts the bread "without changing his wicked plan to betray Jesus means that he has chosen for Satan rather than for Jesus." [ii] "And it was night."

The darkness begins. But the darkness even of this betrayal, crucifixion and death are necessary, as John sees it, for God's glory to be revealed. Indeed, through this darkness, God's light will shine. Even in the face of this disappointment and death, in this life of backsliding and anger and dark moments, an act of love is taking place.

---

[i] Robert Penn Warren, “American Portrait: Old Style” from The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, ed. by John Burt (LSU Press, 1998) pp. 339-342

[ii] Raymond Brown, The Gospel of John, p. 578

Maundy Thursday        April 5, 2012

Exodus 12:1-4, 11-14

Ps. 116:1, 10-17

1 Corinthians 11:23-26

Mark 14:1-25

What would Jesus do?

Do you remember those plastic bracelets that were very popular around 10 or 15 years ago? You could proclaim you faith – and your moral superiority, perhaps – on your sleeve. Wearing such bracelet implied you DID know what Jesus would do, and that you were very like capable of doing it, whatever it was, too.

What WOULD Jesus do? What car would Jesus drive? Where would Jesus take his vacation, buy his clothes, have his hair done?

The phrase, “What would Jesus do?” comes from a late-19th-century novel that was very popular with social reformers of the day. In this novel, a minister talks with a homeless man, who challenges the complacency of churchgoers who ignore the struggles of the poor – who, indeed, seem to ignore poor people altogether:

"I heard some people singing at a church prayer meeting the other night,
'All for Jesus, all for Jesus,
All my being's ransomed powers,
All my thoughts, and all my doings,
All my days, and all my hours.'

and I kept wondering as I sat on the steps outside just what they meant by it. It seems to me there's an awful lot of trouble in the world that somehow wouldn't exist if all the people who sing such songs went and lived them out. I suppose I don't understand. But what would Jesus do? Is that what you mean by following His steps? It seems to me sometimes as if the people in the big churches had good clothes and nice houses to live in, and money to spend for luxuries, and could go away on summer vacations and all that, while the people outside the churches, thousands of them, I mean, die in tenements, and walk the streets for jobs, and never have a piano or a picture in the house, and grow up in misery and drunkenness and sin."[i]

Judas knows exactly what Jesus would do, doesn’t he? Some say that Judas’ anger at Jesus’ apparent non-Jesus-ness confirmed his resolve to betray him to the authorities. You can see and hear a group of disciples clucking and snarking when the woman comes in with her expensive jar of ointment. “What would Jesus do,” they snort, “if he could see this woman wasting all this money that can and should be given to the poor!”

Of course, they are right, just as the homeless man in the 19th century novel is right. Some people do have too much stuff. Sometimes we hoard our goodies at the expense of someone else’s starvation or nakedness. We live here in comfort in DeWitt, while neighbors not so far away live in communities bereft of jobs, grocery stores, safe streets and good schools. We know they are they and we choose not to see. What would Jesus do?

The story of the woman anointing Jesus’ head is framed by stories of betrayal. Just before, we read, “The chief priests and the scribes were looking for a way to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him.” Just after, Judas goes to those chief priests, ready to turn Jesus over to them.

Repeatedly in this Gospel we read how those closest to him – Jesus’ disciples – don’t “get it.” It is the people on the fringes who do – the people Jesus heals, the former lepers, the used-to-be demoniacs, and certainly the women, like the one in this story. Those people on the fringes get it that Jesus is about life – not about merely living, not about just getting by, not about just making do, but about living life abundantly. Jesus is never stingy, never weighs the pros and the cons, never worries that there will not be enough to go around. Jesus never parcels out healing, never is parsimonious about wholeness. The woman in this story knows that when she pours out all that expensive ointment there will still be more and over flowing. The woman in this story shows the only bit of gracious hospitality, of love, of beauty, of compassion, of self-lessness in the whole account of the Passion – the only time in anything we have read this week that anyone shows Jesus any kindness at all. Framed by two stories of betrayal is this story of the woman who embodies the Good News. Indeed, Jesus says, “wherever the Good News is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”

In the context of our Prayers of the People tonight, we will all be invited forward for our own anointing, our own prayers for healing, our own wholeness, our own experience of the Good News. Bring your own body to the altar rail – bring your own cares, and bring your concerns for the people you love. Do it tonight in remembrance of her – she who knew that Jesus, even on the night he was betrayed, gathered around him a beautiful, beloved community where all of us, with all of our frailties and failings, can be made whole.

---

[i] Charles Sheldon, In His Steps (1896), cited in the Wikipedia entry for “What would Jesus do?” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_would_Jesus_do%3F#cite_note-2

Good Friday -- April 6, 2012

Isaiah 52:13-53:12

Hebrews 10:1-25

John 18:1-19:37

Almighty God ... behold, this your family ...:"

           

Use any of the current pop psychology buzz words to describe this human family, gathered at the death of a brother: dysfunctional, broken -- here we all are, at our worst.

I think it is important that the collect for the day uses the word "family" rather than "children." God’s family implies a broader group, a clan of adults. We enter Good Friday as adults, bearing responsibility for all that we have done.

Another preacher has said, "The temptation of Good Friday has been to talk about someone else’s pain." And guilt, I would add. If we were children we could get off the hook; as adults, we must face into it all.

Good Friday is the day of classic projections: other people (the Roman authorities, at the behest of the Jews) killed Jesus. Someone else caused his pain, suffering, death; yet all of this bad stuff, this stuff we project onto the "other" is what makes us human -- it is what we have in common with every other human being. The pain, suffering, hatred which is ours has caused Jesus’ death.

We stand here together, in the depths of our humanity, in solidarity with each other at our worst. We do not yet know if there will be any good news. It is enough to be human right now. We so rarely let enough pain into our lives in order to feel the humanity we feel today.

Being human does teach us lessons, though. Jesus our brother has taught us what it means to be human, to be one of "The People," as the North American native peoples say about themselves.

To be human is to serve. We follow Jesus’ commandment from the last supper, but there is more to service than even that. Service is the nature of everyday life. We cook, we clean, we make the beds, we wipe noses, we care for those in our households: at its most basic, the maintenance of life itself is service. It is what we humans do at our most ordinary and most intimate. From there service extends to the world: visiting the sick, prayer, hospitality, social activism and advocacy, teaching, counseling -- in all these ways and more we serve the human family, and, of course, in serving the human family we serve God, the one whose service is perfect freedom.

What a relief it is, then to read in the Epistle: "... let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another ..."

A good friend and colleague of mine often said we are called not to empower people but to encourage them. Human beings can only encourage one another; power is not ours to give. One human being is not higher than another, dropping bits of power on those lower than her. We’re only human; we’re together in all this, all created in the image of God.

We can’t put people down, because no one is lower than we are, but we can appeal to our human natures: we can "provoke one another to love and good deeds," not as solo good-deed-doers, but as one of "the people," of the family. We can encourage each other to be human -- fully human -- and can support each other in our service.

We are left with nothing but our humanity this day, as we watch one of our own hanging on the cross, and with that humanity, with our hatred and dissent, with our lies and betrayals, with our love and our pain, we wait.

Hunger Games: bread and circuses in the 21st century

Lent 5 B; March 25, 2012

Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 119:9-16

Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33

How many of you went to see “The Hunger Games” this weekend?

How many of you read the book?

How many of you know what I am talking about?

I have to admit that the most I know about “The Hunger Games” came from the reviews of the movie in Friday’s newspapers. The story takes place in, as the New York Times calls it, a “picturesque dystopia.” Every year in this post-post-United States North America, a set of teenagers is chosen to fight to the death – and to have these games televised – until one hero or heroine survives. This plot device is a direct steal from the Roman Empire, from the custom of “bread and circuses.” The name of the empire in “The Hunger Games” is even “Panem,” the Latin word for bread.

This formula [of bread and circuses, historians tell us] offered a variety of pleasures such as: the distribution of food, public baths, gladiators, exotic animals, chariot races, sports competition, and theater representation. It was an efficient instrument in the hands of the Emperors to keep the population peaceful, and at the same time giving them the opportunity to voice themselves in these places of performance. … [1]

The emperors and their minions organized the games, and the gladiators were the peoples of the lands conquered by the Empire:

German, Spanish, Welsh, Britannic, black Africans, nomadic Russians, and Jews from Jerusalem. … using the defeated enemy to entertain the public was a triumph in victory.[2]

I think this is indeed what “The Hunger Games” is based on: a central, imperial power using brute force to divide and conquer subjected people.

If we read the Gospels closely, we will see that this reality of empire, this ever-present reality of brute force, of violence, of subjugation, is the foreground of the gospels. The story of Jesus takes place in the face of this empire, of its fear, of its force. It is the social context in which the Jews, and Jesus, lived. It is the air they breathe, the water they drink, the bread they consume.

If you think about it, we Christians cannot really understand why the Romans had Jesus executed. He was such a nice person, who said such nice things. It is hard to get back into that space, where the surrounding world was so brutal, and what Jesus said and did was in such enormous contrast. What was going on, 2000+ years ago?

One historian who has helped me make sense of this context of Jesus ministry is John Dominic Crossan. “Most of the world works on a greed system,” he says.

Keep that in mind. On a big scale, we like to keep ours and take lots of other peoples’ things. So empires usually run on that principle and on the premise that they own the world. The Roman emperors had not the slightest doubt that they were in charge of the entire world … if I were to attach a motto to the Roman Empire, I would say, “First victory, then peace.” It’s the program the world’s been run on for about 5,000 years.

What was so shocking to some, and so thrilling to others, in the first century, was that Jesus proclaimed a very different kind of empire, a different kingdom ruled by a different king. Instead of vanquishing your enemies in the “hunger games,” where death is the final answer, Jesus says, ”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.” The standard for Jesus, and for the kingdom of this God is not victory but service; not smashing one’s enemies but justice. Crossan puts it this way:

Jesus’ program is: “First justice, then peace.” That’s the real thing. Otherwise, you have peace for a while, but then eventually wars break out, and you start all over again.

Jesus’ message was thrilling to some, and threatening to others, because he challenged the “victory” status quo. Peace in the kingdom of heaven came when people realized there was enough to go around, when there was justice, when God worked in a collaborative way. Peace came to Caesar’s empire only after the enemies were vanquished, and forced to “entertain” in the arena of bread and circuses. It became a never-ending cycle of violence and vanquish: there was always someone rising up who did not want to be conquered.

When we enter Holy Week, walking that way with Jesus, we enter that alternate reality, that explanation of the world that Jesus followers found so compelling that they were willing to risk angering the Empire to follow him. We, too, are tired of a world of violence and vanquishment. We too are ready to hear a different story, a different vision of how we can live our lives. We, too, are ready to hear the story of a God who cares about us, who brings us a new vision of how the world works.

---

[1] http://www.capitolium.org/eng/imperatori/circenses.htm

[2] http://www.capitolium.org/eng/imperatori/circenses.htm

John Dominic Crossan, quoted in an interview in "Zion's Herald" -- http://www.zionsherald.org/interviewJuly05.html

Everyone is friended

Lent 4 B           March 18, 2012

Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22

Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. [i]

There are people who are putting an “end to the world” spin on this “mild” winter and “early” spring. A Gallup poll released last week measured opinions on global warming – opinions of people like US, mind you; not the learned opinions of climatologists. Nevertheless, here are some of the results: over the past decade, Republicans have become slightly less convinced that global warming is occurring. Yet now almost third more Democrats as ten years ago are convinced that global warming is here, and they are nearly twice as likely as Republicans to believe this! Independents, as you might guess, although they tend to be a little closer to Democrats in their opinion on global warming, are somewhere in the middle. Wherever you are on this issue is Ok with me.

This famous “John 3:16” gospel – strewn across billboards and the foreheads of Christian athletes – seems kind of associated with the “end times” but if we look closer at it, and at the passage in the Book of Numbers to which it refers, I think we would get another reading. The Gospel of John, despite its being the favorite of people who might consider themselves conservative Christians, is not about the wrath at the end of time, not about the rapture, nor the division of the good and the bad into the sheep and the goats. In the Gospel of John, we read in this third chapter, Jesus affirms that God loves THE WORLD. The WHOLE world. God in the Gospel of John is a universalist: God sent Jesus into the world so that everyone, everywhere might be saved. The invitation is to all of us. The end times in the Gospel of John is one big love-fest, a come-as-you-are party. Everybody is “friended.”

The connection between this passage in John, where Jesus refers to Moses and the snakes, and the passage about Moses and the snakes, is – healing. Think of the caduceus, that ancient symbol for medicine, with snakes entwined around a staff. As Moses lifts up his staff, Jesus says, the Son of Man – referring to himself – will be lifted up – a sign, not of the end times or terrible days, but of eternal life.

God’s great mission, as the Gospel of John sees it, is for all of us to gain eternal life. For all of us to find healing and wholeness. For all of us to walk in the light and not in the darkness. For all of us to follow Jesus into that place of blessedness. Listen to all of these ways Jesus describes himself and his mission: I am the bread of life, the bread that came down from heaven. I am the light of the world; whoever follows me will never walk in darkness. I am the gate for the sheep; whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. I am the good shepherd. I am the resurrection and the life. I am the way, the truth and the life. I am the vine, you are the branches. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself – to this cross on which the glory of God is revealed, this cross, which is the medicine of the world, which brings about the healing of the world.

One of the temptations of the Gospel of John is to read it personally – this healing, this welcome, this walking in the light is only about ME. Yes, of course we need healing in our own bodies, in our own lives, but do we not resonate with that universal message of John? Just as the love of God is not only for us alone, but for us together, healing, too, is more than personal. It is social, corporate, world-wide, universal.

… come, you who are burdened by regrets and anxieties, you who are broken in body or in spirit, you who are torn by relationships and by doubt, you who feel deeply within yourselves the divisions and injustices of our world.[ii]

For God so loved the world that he sent his Son – not to end the world but to show us the way, to bring us light, to heal and to refresh and to feed and to lead and to guide.

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[i] “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost

[ii] From the Iona Service of Healing

There is enough to go around

Lent 3 B           March 11, 2012

Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

“Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.”

That is how our collect, or opening prayer for this Sunday started out. That is a peculiarly un-Anglican statement, although it is a statement of completely orthodox Christian theology. It’s like St. Paul: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” It’s like St. Augustine, reflecting that on that passage from Paul: “Who then should deliver me from the body of this death, but your grace only, through Jesus Christ our Lord?” [i]

Augustine devoted much of his writing to refuting the thought of the followers of the British monk, Pelagius, who believed that we did indeed have “the power in ourselves to help ourselves.” Pelagius thought Christians were depending on the grace of God just to get themselves off the hook, to live, as he regarded it, morally irresponsible lives. In modern words, Pelagius would say:

God has given you free will. You can choose to follow the example of Adam, or you can choose to follow the example of Christ. God has given everyone the grace he needs to be good. If you are not good, you simply need to try harder.[ii]

"Pelagius" is the Latin name
for the Welsh monk, Morgan

There are many times in my life when I have found this “heresy” of Pelagius far more compelling than the orthodox theology of grace. Pelagianism makes more sense when I am stewing over someone who has really wronged me, over someone who has taken those 10 Commandments and cast them to the wind, put his or her hands up, moaning with cheap repentance, with a shallow restatement of Paul’s “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” line. Grace seems far too cheap for some people – but wait. I’d better stop here, before I persuade you of what really is a central distortion of how we understand how God works in the world. People do sin, and yes, there are consequences, but the first, last and most powerful response of God is grace, love and forgiveness.

So then, why do we need “the law” at all, if grace abounds? The very un-Anglican John Calvin described the law as mirror, fence, and guide. The mirror shows the harsh reality (what we have done, and left undone). The fence restrains bad behavior – remember all of those Puritan “blue laws”? (Don’t buy liquor on Sundays – or else!) Finally, Calvin’s image of the law as a guide for living comes closest to how the faithful Jew understands the law, which, as we sang in Psalm 19, is a delight and a joy. The heart of the law, for a Jew, is the Sabbath, the goal of life is this day of rest, the time when all commerce, all work, stop, when you refrain from doing anything else to change the world God has created.

But the world we live in is very big, where the rules society has us follow are not necessarily determined by God. Some people, and we hear them on that endless news cycle, think we should “go back” to a whole society living by God’s rules. Alas: it was never thus. Go back to those 10 Commandment times: the Jews were a tiny group, living in a big imperial sea. They always had to live as a cell inside a larger and sometimes voracious organism: the Egyptians, the Philistines, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans. The law was something profoundly counter-cultural, something which indeed freed you from the tyranny of all those “-isms.” The law is holiness, yes, but it is also justice. The 10 Commandments make it possible not only for YOU to live the good life, but for your neighbor to live it as well. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says the Sabbath rest, the heart of the law is

… for self, for neighbor, and even for God … the goal and quintessence of life….a kind of 'at-homeness' that precludes hostility, competition, avarice, and insecurity…and anticipates a community of peace, well-being, and joy.[iii]

Which is how we get to Jesus throwing the money-changers out of the Temple. The law of the Lord is perfect – not a place for hostility, competition, avarice and insecurity. The law is the mirror, the fence and the guide: the money changers in the Temple jumped the fence long ago, they have smashed the mirror and have forgotten the guide. Yesterday’s New York Times[iv] ran an article about the national organization of religious congregations taking their money out of banks, like the Bank of America, which profited shamelessly from writing bad mortgages to people they knew could not pay them, banks whose scandalous behavior tipped the economy into disaster with the foreclosure crisis. Throw those money changers out of the Temple, Jesus would say. God’s world was created with enough for everyone, with enough to go around. Part of what happens during the Sabbath rest is that all of those goodies are redistributed, and what Jesus was doing with all that ruckus in the Temple was to announce that God’s true Sabbath was about to begin.

So, despite all those people who have wronged us, and made us really mad, and committed all those crimes and misdemeanors, Pelagius is wrong and Augustine is right. We are all enfolded in God’s grace after all, and before all, and above all, and around all. No, we don’t have to do it ourselves. We can throw the bums out, but there will be enough to go around for them, too. We can forgive people who have wronged us, as we have been forgiven by God, but we don’t have to reconcile with them. We don’t have to be their best friends anymore; God’s grace will take care of that, too. We can be enraged, as Jesus was enraged, but, like Jesus, we can lead Sabbath-filled lives, knowing that there is enough for everyone – even enough grace – to go around.

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[i] http://www.augnet.org/default.asp?ipageid=415

[ii] http://augnet.org/default.asp?ipageid=131

[iii] Walter Brueggemann, from The Covenanted Self: Explorations in Law and Covenant, quoted in Kathryn Matthews Huey, http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/march-11-2012-third-sunday.html

[iv] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/us/churches-send-repentence-message-to-banks.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

Lent 2 B & St David’s Day

March 4, 2012

Genesis 17:1-7,15-16
Psalm 22:22-30

Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38

It’s a comfortable world we live in, with cute little saints traditions. We have friends who paint their doors blue, an old Celtic custom, I guess – “to keep the pixies away,” my friend said. To confuse those dangerous pagan characters from sneaking into your house at night and snatching your children while they are asleep.

At Coleman’s “Irish” pub, the green beer arrived last weekend – the first Sunday in Lent, no less. I thought bishops in predominantly Irish Roman Catholic dioceses had to give special dispensations so the faithful could celebrate St. Patrick’s DAY without breaking their Lenten obligations. Now it’s a month of green beer, like the month of green milk at Byrne Dairy. 

At Coleman’s, and other such places, apparently, it is all cultural trappings, with no allusions to the reasons behind them; they even built the leprechauns their own “wee door” – a sure sign that the death knell to tradition is its appropriation as “cute” by commercial culture.

Thank goodness the Welsh maintain their allegiance to the stark and the serious. St. David himself was the serious leader of a serious monastic community – so serious they drank no beer at all, only water, and ate only bread, with salt and herbs. Work hard, he said to his brothers in the sermon he preached on the Sunday before his death on March 1 in the year 598. “Do the little things that you have seen me do and heard about. I will walk the path that our fathers have trod before us.”

Whether the customs for these saints’ days are silly or serious, however, they all have this in common: they come from a time long before this one, when people looked at the world in ways far different than the way we moderns do. We no longer understand the world as one full of spirits or saints or devils or pixies. Locks are our safety, not prayers. Miracles have scientific explanations, and God is personal, quiet, domesticated. The kinds of questions we ask have predictable answers.

Until they don’t. Until something unpredictable happens to us: we get bad news. Something shocking shakes up our world. Everything we thought we could count on gets overturned. The easy answers we get from the world around us – from the glib and superficial showmen of our commercial culture – offer us no help or guidance that we can use.

Today’s lessons come from the realm of the world-upsetting. Elderly Abraham and Sarah are given the promise of new life with the birth of a son: astounding and impossible. The love and devotion which Peter shows toward Jesus is denounced as Satanic. To follow me, Jesus says, means to renounce your life and take on my death, that your life is worthless unless it is given up for Jesus, for the gospel, for God. Questions are raised by these life-shattering stories that defy predictable answers. God is not so easily defined.

The contemporary Welsh poet, R.S.Thomas, who died a few years ago, was an Anglican priest. He served congregations in small, stone buildings, surrounded by graveyards, within hearing of the surf and the sea. He was a Welsh nationalist, a pacifist and anti-nuclear activist, and he also hated those English vacationers whose second-home developments were ruining the countryside. He was a critic of this modern, commercially-tainted culture. He saw the world, as his fellow-Welshman Archbishop Rowan Williams wrote, “increasingly denuded of recognizable signals of meaning, increasingly dominated by … ‘the machine’ …”, a world whose chatter and clamor effectively blocked the voice of God in our lives. For Thomas, God was known by his absence, elusive and silent:

He is such a fast
God, always before us, and
leaving as we arrive.(1)

To one kneeling down no word came,
Only the wind’s song, saddening the lips
Of the grave saints, rigid in glass;
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.

Was he balked by silence?  He kneeled long,
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body. (2)

R.S. Thomas is our poet for St. David’s Day, channeling an experience of God that cannot be contained by modern conveniences or explanations – an experience of God that stands open to the inexplicable – that shows the cross, which so confounded Peter and the disciples, always with us, before us, above us. The cross, once more, in the poet’s vision, something strange, a harsh instrument of death, no longer the domesticated symbol of the triumphant church, but a symbol of love poured out, love unending, love strange and unknown: blazing, golden, dark and silent, full of unsettling and life-giving grace.

1. Pilgrimages
2. In a Country Church