Spirit and Relationship: sermons for Pentecost and Trinity

Trinity  May 26, 2013

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Psalm 8

Romans 5:1-5

John 16:12-15

The book of Proverbs, the scholars tell us, is divided into two kinds of writing. It is a series of lectures, interspersed with a series of interludes.

The lectures are what you expect to come from the kind of Wisdom Literature entitled “Proverbs.” They are the kinds of sayings a parent would give to a child: advice about how to live, how to prosper, how to be a good person. Practical. Time-honored.

In the interludes, however, we see a different kind of Wisdom. This is the Wisdom of the big picture. This Wisdom was around when God created the world; indeed, this Wisdom played in front of God while God created everything. Yes, that word is right there in the text. The Hebrew term which in our lesson today reads “like a master worker” could also be translated as “like a little child.”

Think of how this ambiguity allows both ideas to be true at the same time. To think of Wisdom as the “master worker” shows us "Wisdom as God’s helpmeet in creation, a craftsperson who assists God in the formation of the world."[1]

On the other hand, to think of Wisdom as a playing child, “reflects the delight that God takes in Wisdom, and that Wisdom takes in humanity.”[2] Among the people I think are wise are the Biblical scholars who can dig into a word, and find so much meaning there. Listen to this:

The ambiguity of the translation … allows both understandings to operate together, depicting Wisdom as the formative power of God’s delight. … Wisdom “is a beneficent, right-ordering power in whom God delights and by whom God creates; her constant effort is to lure human beings into life.”[3] Wisdom is the creative power of God that is embedded in the world; each created thing, and the creation as a whole, speaks of the Wisdom of God at its foundation.[4]

This dual understanding of Wisdom in Proverbs really tells us something about the nature of God, something humans are always trying to figure out. God in the Hebrew Bible is very active. God wants us to live a certain way, to behave, yes, but also to prosper, to delight, to have fun, to create. If we are made in the image of God, that also must mean we reflect HOW God is, and in Proverbs, God delights in the work of creation. Indeed, the work of creation is play, it is beauty, it is joyful. And if the nature of God is Wisdom, then this Wisdom of God is played out in the public square, in social and economic activity. It is not just about a “religious” activity. It is about life: how you live AND how you make a living. Who you are AND how you relate to the people around you. How you put bread on the table and a roof over your head AND how you make that bread and that roof into the beautiful things which would delight God.

You are right, also, if you hear echoes from the Prologue of the Gospel of John in how Wisdom describes

herself. The Wisdom of Proverbs becomes the Word of the Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God and the Word was in God.” As the early Christians were wrestling with what their experience of God meant to them, they reached back, of course, into their own tradition for images and explanations, and here was Wisdom, right there at creation, co-present, co-eternal, and very active, drawing all of humanity and of the whole created world into a loving relationship with God. It is that very dynamic relationship right at the heart of God, at the beginning of creation, that is the Trinity: God in three persons, delighting, playing, creating, loving, and pulling us along into that dance of joy and delight.

With such an awareness of God, and of what God wants for us, how can we help but be grateful? To want to give back? To fall all over ourselves to share in this delightful abundance? We have many ways to do this.

Did not our hearts stop last week when we heard about the tornado in Oklahoma? I know that every week, every day, every minute, there are people around the world crying out for help in the midst of pain and disaster – and yes, we can help any and all of these deserving brothers and sisters. But there are times when we stop, and focus our prayers and concerns in one terrible place. Today, if you are moved and able, we can send our own prayers and donations to the people rebuilding their lives and their communities torn apart

by tornados. We will send all our offerings today, that are not part of our pledges to St. David’s, to Episcopal Relief and Development, who will put them where they are most needed.

And next week is our ingathering for the United Thank Offering. It is the Blue Box into which all our prayers and thanksgivings go. The money collected in those Blue Boxes makes a difference in the lives of thousands of people each year, through the Episcopal Church here in the US and overseas.

Wisdom draws us out of ourselves, out of our private reveries into the crossroads of life, to the gates of community, to the highways and byways. Wisdom calls us to take everything we have, from the Celebration of the Arts to the change in our pockets and give it in service to God’s world. You know that God delights in our generosity. God does a dance every time we give something away.

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[1] Elizabeth Webb, ”What is the connection between wisdom and joy?  http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1708

[2] Ibid.

[3] Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1996).. 88.

[4] Webb, Op. Cit.

Pentecost        May 19, 2013

Acts 2:1-21

Psalm 104

Romans 8:14-17

John 14: 8-17, 24-25

Pentecost. It’s 50 days: fifty days since Easter. Pentecost is also a Jewish feast, commemorating the 50 days it took the Israelites to get from Egypt to Mt. Sinai, where they heard the law – when Moses gave them the 10 Commandments. In the Acts of the Apostles, all the disciples were in one place to celebrate this Jewish feast of the giving of the law, to give thanks for the great freedom and blessing it brought them. They were not expecting this to be the “birthday of the church.” They were not expecting tongues of fire, a proliferation of languages, a mighty wind or ecstatic revelation. They were there to celebrate the giving of the law.

Now there is a story about the giving of the law – another version of this oft-told story of the Ten Commandments (without Charlton Heston). The rabbis say “that at Sinai all Israel heard the Ten Commandments, because the voice of God was divided into seven voices, and then went into seventy tongues so that all heard the law in their own language.”[i] Could this Pentecost of the Spirit, experienced by people who knew Jesus, be then an extension of that multi-tongued Sinai? Is this Pentecost a new life-giving law, a new way by which God establishes a new relationship with us? Is this a Sinai exploded beyond all expectations? A shattering of those old stone tablets in a great whoosh of fire and wind, each of us with a direct experience of God – in our own, intimate language, the language with which our mothers spoke to us in our cradles – and yet also a communal experience of God, each of us understanding God in exactly the same way?

With Pentecost, we go into warp speed – like on Star Trek, or in Star Wars, when Han Solo finally gets that old Millennium Falcon up and running and the galaxies streak by us like so many beams of light. St. Paul understood that Pentecostal Spirit – “all who are led by the Spirit are children of God.” No matter how we got here, we’re all here now, we’re all different but we are all together, each of us indispensable to this new life-giving, Spirit-filled law that has blown in from the desert.

This story from the Acts of the Apostles is about the world as we know it blowing apart in an ecstatic, joyful, creative way. Things catch on fire because this new thing is coming into being. This Pentecost is a chaos of hope.

The world, however, seems all chaos and little hope: it’s tornado season again, with whole communities being blown apart. The latest reports on global warming reveal CO2 levels something like 400x higher than what in our lifetimes was normal. Bombs explode on streets we have walked down. Even the IRS is caught up in a scandal. How much more can we stand? Where are the tongues of fire that can show us out of this mess?

In such times, we need to hear the Pentecost story more than ever, as a reminder of what IS possible in a world gone mad. On Mt. Sinai, the law gave direction to a people lost in the desert, wandering and aimless. The law gave them a purpose, a relationship with God, a set of rules about how to behave with each other. The powerful message of this Pentecost story is that not only does God have the last word, but God is The Word – and a Word that each of us can understand. We can make a mess of things, but God’s fiery and ferocious wind can wipe it all away:

Though humans crucify, God resurrects. Though humans divide and dominate, God communicates. God has the last word, and the word is wild. It changes everything. It rebuilds broken community. It breaks boundaries and enlarges the house. It makes possible understanding where before there was not understanding.[ii]

Our Pentecost prayer is “Veni Sancte Spiritus” -- “Come, Holy Spirit.” Guide us. Show us the way. Give us a clue about this chaotic, fractured, embittered world. Enlighten our blessings. Show us what to do, for life in this world is no longer as clear-cut as it was up there on Mt. Sinai. Give us the new vision we need to face the problems of today, to dream the dreams of the world as you would have it be.

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[i] Carl A. Volz, from Word and World (Luther Northwestern Theological Seminary, 1990)

[ii] Nancy Sawyer, “Blogging Toward Sunday,” The Christian Century (http://www.theolog.org/blog/2008/05/blogging-toward.html)

God at the intersection of art and justice

The Celebration of the Arts at St. David's is a remarkable event. For 43 years this parish church has turned itself inside out to welcome local artists and art appreciators. God's mission has a church, Bishop Ian Douglas often reminds us. The piece of God's mission that this church takes on is to identify the divine in the creative process, to connect art and justice, to be a place where the stories of the people of this community can be told in music, poetry, painting and sculpture. Two sermons here, from the 6th and 7th Sundays of Easter, that reflect on that piece of God's mission.

Easter 7 C; May 12, 2013

Acts 1:4-11; Psalm 47; Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21; John 17:20-26

This Lion and this Dragon are replicas from the parish church in a small town in Essex, England. When Conrad Noel went to Thaxted, in the early 20th century, he went there to develop what he called the Catholic Crusade: a movement to make the church into the embodiment of the kingdom of God on earth – to be the herald, the vanguard, to make this earth as beautiful as heaven – with music, with art, with color, with dancing, with processions which gathered up all bystanders in joyful party.

And that party, for Noel, always began in church, with the sacraments, with

… the common meal, the bread and wine joyously shared among [the] people… The Lord thus chose the human things of everyday life, [Noel wrote,] the useful bread and genial wine, to be the perpetual vehicles of his presence among us till his Kingdom should come on earth as in heaven.[i]

So apt, then for this second Sunday of the Celebration of the Arts. Noel would endorse such a Celebration as we have here: the church turned inside out to show the works of people’s hands and hearts and voices. The beauty we see and hear reflects the beauty of God – God, Noel wrote, who was

… the maker of the sense of wonder, justice, love and worship; of the sense of color which delights in the flowers, pictures, sunrises and gay fabrics … of the sense of smell which rejoices in roses and frankincense; of the sense of hearing which responds to poetry and music.

All of this beauty, Noel would say, starts in the church, in this place of community and communion, of bread and wine and fellowship. The church is the community of the ascended Lord, this Lion who rules the earth, this Jesus who shares our human nature, now taken with him into heaven.

Yet if all this beauty stopped here, if we hoarded it only for ourselves, it would be corrupt and perverted. It is like that tempting and beautiful leviathan, that serpent, that dragon. Noel points out that for God, beauty is always connected to justice. Not only are there sufficient material goods to go around – indeed, the benefits of God’s commonwealth are for all of God’s people – but with that living wage goes a living beauty, and embodies a living hope: that the imperfections of the world, where want, greed, death and destruction threaten God’s creation, will be transformed, and the dream of God fulfilled.

We commemorate the Ascension of Our Lord every year, but every year it means something new. Some established order we thought was there forever is changed, gone, displaced – what we that was impermeable is now, we see, transformed into something new. At the Friday night performance, someone asked the new artistic director of the Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company what had happened to that community group since it lost its performance space, and what had called him to work to revive it. “The Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company was formed in 1982,” he said, “And it’s no longer 1982.” This company which was founded to give a voice and a stage to African American playwrights

and performers found itself in a world where the best and the brightest of those playwrights and performers could achieve great heights on any stage. But there are still stories needing to be told – not the same stories that were told in 1982, and not necessarily stories that will “sell” in the way that commercial theater has to “sell” in order to stay in business. These are stories that are worth far more than that, Ryan Johnson-Travis told us on Friday night. These are the stories of our community today, a multi-cultural community, a community where people embody gender and sexuality in different ways, a whole community, not only of the “south side” or “the 16th ward” but of the suburbs and the University and the immigrant north side. These are stories of hope, of a new reality, of the dragon of despair and alluring nostalgia trampled under foot.

We’ve done a lot of new things with the Celebration of the Arts this year, and there are more new things to come. Just as the Robeson company discovered it was no longer 1982, we can readily see that it is no longer 1970. Forty-three years is a glorious run, but “what we’ve always done” can get in the way of seeing what is going on around us now, can get in the way of hearing new voices, new stories, new music – can prevent us from welcoming the new people who embody the dream of God today.

Every Ascensiontide, we are given a choice. As the disciples watch Jesus ascend into heaven, no doubt mouths agape and eyes incredulous, two men in white robes ask them, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” That’s our choice: do we stand there forever, feet rooted, necks craned, lost in the glorious and beautiful past of the days Jesus was with us? Or do we become Apostles, walking out into this new world, this wild and different and multi-cultural and multi-lingual and complicated and beautiful world, with our useful bread and genial wine, and share with everyone what God has dreamed this world could be?

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[i] Conrad Noel, from archival papers, quoted by Kenneth Leech in “Some Light from the Noel Archives.” Conrad Noel and the Catholic Crusade: A Critical Evaluation, ed. by Kenneth Leech (London: The Jubilee Group, 1993)

Easter 6C          May 5, 2013

Acts 16:9-15; Psalm 67

Revelation 21:10,22-22:5
John 14:23-29

Even here, in this suburban garden of prayer, we sit by a river. It is a small river, yes – the fountain in the Memorial Garden – but it is the river to us. The river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God, surrounded by trees and blossoms and fruit.

In our reading today from the Acts of the Apostles, we see Paul and his friends in a strange city, and as they look for a place to pray, they come to the side of the river, to the springs of the water of life. It could be any river, in any city or town – and there they find a place of prayer.

A synagogue, for faithful Jews, is a gathering of ten men – ten Jewish men. A Minyan. But look: the place that Paul and his friends find is a place where women gather for prayer – all kinds of women. “All kinds of women” were certainly not the people with whom Paul and his friends would have gathered for prayer in their former lives.

But this is, of course, not their former lives at all. These are the early days of their transformed lives, when the reality of what Jesus risen from the dead is just beginning to be understood. The roof has been blown off the synagogue. All bets are off. The invitations have gone out far and wide, and people, all kinds of people, women, even, are believing that even they are welcome to sit and pray and worship God by the river of the water of life.

Sharon Bottle Souva's
wall quilt in the
Celebration of the arts

We read about Lydia because she is an exemplary Christian: she is the person of faith we should aspire to emulate. She is open to God. She listens to the preaching and teaching of the Good News, and it makes sense to her. She knows it will make her life better. As soon as she opens her heart, she also opens her home. From faith flows hospitality. From the awareness of the abundance of God’s gifts and God’s grace comes this primal response: “Come to my house. Stay at my home. Eat at my table. Let me give to you some of the good things that God has given me.”

Lydia also must have very good taste. She is a dealer in fabrics, rich, beautiful, expensive fabrics. The fabrics of which Kings make their garments. Lydia is a woman of the world, an independent entrepreneur, no doubt an artist in her own right, a woman who recognizes good goods when she sees them. Lydia would be delighted to come to the Celebration of the Arts. Lydia’s favorite 20th century novel would be The Color Purple, and her favorite character would be Shug Avery, the woman who says, “I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice it.” The color purple that is the color of God’s glory. The color purple that is there for everyone to see. The color purple which comes from the plants which grow by the side of the river of the water of life. The color purple, bright as crystal, that flows from the throne of God.

Almost better than any other poet in the English language, George Herbert expresses the human desire to worship and delight in the beauty of God. God’s beauty is all around us, in the people we love and who love us, in art, in music, in language. We see God’s beauty when dismal neighborhoods are transformed into livable communities. We see God’s beauty when the hungry are fed and the desperate are cared for and when the prisoners are set free. We see God’s beauty when the sick person is made whole and when the abundance of God’s riches are spread among all who need them.

George Herbert was, more or less, a high church Anglican in the century when there was some tension between those who thought the Church of English should maintain some of its historic connections with medieval Catholicism, and those who thought the church should be pure, stripped bare of artifice and pretension and privilege. Herbert died in 1630, and in 1640 the Puritans won the English Civil War. The high churchmen, aristocratic or not, were thrown out, and the plain Word of God reigned.

But I think it is a mistake to think Puritan Calvinists were dry as dust. The great reformer John Calvin rooted his theology, much as George Herbert did, in the glory of God, and in the joyful duty of each believer to bask in that glory and beauty. But yes, the Puritan reformers were concerned with lots of things – political things, powerful things – and George Herbert, as we see in these poems we are singing and listening to today, gave up power and politics to sit in a garden like this, to listen to river of the water of life, and to write down all he heard and saw and smelled and tasted. The beauty of God filled his heart. The music of God filled his ears.

God has given all of us all of these things. The roof has blown open and all bets are off. It is time to take all that we have, and give it all away.

A new heaven. A new earth. A new church.

Easter 5-c         April 28, 2013

Acts 11:1-18

Psalm 148

Revelation 21:1-6

John 13:31-35

Years ago, I joined a tennis club. I did not then, and do not now, know how to play tennis, and I’m not quite sure why I joined. No one at the club was mean to me, but no one was really interested in me, either. I suppose we’ve all tried out membership in all sorts of clubs, or we’ve been in clubs when we knew that some of the people who walked through the doors just weren’t supposed to be there. What do clubs do when someone doesn’t have the right coat, or doesn’t know how to use the right fork, or, in the case of the apostles, doesn’t eat the right meat?

From the point of view of the rest of the apostles, Peter should not be eating with THOSE kinds of people. These apostles are followers of Jesus, yes, but they do not see why they should break with their Jewish past. They know well that Jesus said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.” But perhaps they hear more continuity than drastic change in what Jesus says. This commandment comes from God, like Jesus comes from God – and not some new, innovative God. John – and Jesus, and Peter, and all the rest of the apostles are talking about the same God they have known from childhood – and the same God their parents, and their parents’ parents, and their parents’ parents before them knew, the God who taught them about love, and who expected them to love each other. This is the same God who gave them rules to live by – rules about food – but also rules about caring for strangers, about mercy and forgiveness, about justice and compassion. God has always been about pushing the boundaries of the community out, out out, into the whole known world. God pushed and pulled us together as a people so we could be lights of God’s goodness for the whole world. When God saw the people of Israel getting too inward, too narrow, God pushed them, gave them a new challenge, something new that forced them to re-think what it meant to be the people – not only of Israel, but of God.

One of the ways God gets to people in the Bible is through dreams and visions, and God caused Peter to have quite a vision. In that vision, God caused a complete up-ending of everything Peter thought was “the way we do things in our club”, the place where the rules said you could only eat certain kinds of meat. Make no mistake: God had handed down those rules about what to eat, and Peter knew those rules. “We” ate a certain way, and “they” ate a different way. But now Peter heard God say, “Do not make a distinction between them and us,” and Peter was shocked. He had to hear this three times before he realized that it meant he had to go into that house and eat that food with those people.

And then the miracle happened: “they” became “us.” No doubt Peter was just as odd to them as they were to him. They, too, took a risk with their hospitality, but look what happened: A whole bunch more people became Christians, got the light, learned the story, and started to believe that they were in “the club”, too. This is how Peter explained what happened to his equally shocked co-apostles: “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?"

Indeed: Who was I that I could hinder God?

Note that the word used there is not “should” but “could.” It’s not, who am I, that I should hinder God. It’s, who am I that I COULD hinder God? God’s spirit pushes and pulls us, loving us along the way, always insisting that we can do more, love more, open more, be more. We can invite oddballs like Peter into our house, invite him to sit at our table, and amazingly, there will still be enough to go around – amazingly, some amazing things can happen. The world can look like a new place. A new heaven. A new earth. A new church.

You might guess where I’m going with this. I had the strangest vision when I was praying over these texts, when I was trying to figure out what they might mean to us, here, St. David’s, DeWitt, today. I saw a medical clinic in South Sudan, and Bol Garang meeting his mother at Kennedy Airport. I saw meal after meal served at the Samaritan Center. I saw day old baked goods loaded into a van and taken to Temple Concord. I saw total strangers, grieving and sad, being welcomed here and given food and drink and comfort.

And I saw people who had not paid even their $25 Patrons membership fee drinking champagne at the opening of the Celebration of the Arts. I saw all of us – or a lot of us, any of us who want to come – whether we’ve paid our $25 or not -- wearing our name tags and welcoming people, and shaking their hands, and giving them a drink -- all those people, who came through our doors, thinking they were here just to see some art and listen to some music – people who aren’t Christians, who don’t want to be Christians, who go to other churches, people who eat all kinds of meat or no meat at all – people who came here thinking this was just some ordinary place – some ordinary church --  but what they saw, what they really saw, was a new heaven, and a new earth. 

The hand of God rebuilds the world that vengeance and violence destroy

Easter 4 C       April 21, 2013

Acts 9:36-43

Psalm 23

Revelation 7:9-17

John 10:22-30

The Gospel for this week takes us, curiously, out of Easter and back into the confrontations between Jesus and the people who did not like him, the people who got him put to death. “It was winter,” the Gospel tells us. The Feast of the Dedication is what we now call Hanukkah. This is the feast commemorating the rededication of the Temple by the Maccabees, an army of Jews fighting a war of independence against Syrian invaders. The Syrian king had desecrated the temple, and as the Maccabees cleansed the temple and rebuilt the altar, they found enough oil in the lamps to last eight days: a great miracle of light – God’s light – shining in the darkness of violence and bloodshed and desecration – a sign of the hope that defeats despair.

After the events of this week – of this spring – of this year – of this decade – it is tempting for us to say we have “lost our innocence.” But you would have to go back to the Garden of Eden, to the time before Adam and Eve lied about taking a bite out of that apple, to discover humans living in innocence. Of course, there are innocent and blameless individuals, and there are even whole societies of humans who live in peace, but really and truly: history is marked by horrific, blood-thirsty and wrenching violence.

The festival of the Dedication celebrates righteous violence, if there is such a thing. The Maccabees used military might to defeat a cruel invader. The drumbeat of vengeance was loud in those days, and we hear it today. There are people in our world for whom honor is more important than life, for whom shame must be punished by death. There are no innocents in such a calculation. Swords are drawn, armies march in, bombs explode: there are no bystanders, innocent or otherwise, in such a culture of war and vengeance, honor and shame. All take part, as protagonists or antagonists.

The events of the past week have caused me to read this brief Gospel passage in a way I never read it before. I now see so much more clearly that Jesus stands right in the middle of that culture of violence. Jesus places himself always in the center of that death-spiral of blood-vengeance, of honor and shame. Even in the midst of that festival that commemorates a righteous act of violence, Jesus says, Stop it all. Your culture holds life less important than honor? Stop it. To follow me is to gain eternal life. Your culture frightens people by threatening to take everything away from them? Stop it. No one will snatch my followers away from me. The hand of God does not wield a sword or pull a trigger; the hand of God brings comfort, and bread, and healing, and wholeness. The hand of God rebuilds the world that the culture of vengeance and violence – even righteous violence – destroys.

There is a reason why today’s reading from Revelation is so familiar to us: it is read at funerals. When someone we love dies, or is critically ill or injured, we are taken to a very raw and exposed place. It is the kind of place where we can see God so much more clearly than when life is ordinary and we think we have it all together. Revelation was written by and for people on the receiving end of that terrible culture of violence, and in some places of this complex book we read images of war and apocalypse.

But here, in these verses, we read what God means to people whose lives have been shattered. God is shelter from all danger, comfort from all pain, refreshment from all want. How can God be on some glorious, remote throne, when it is the very hand of God that wipes every tear from their eyes?

There are few people in the world today who have first-hand experience of a shepherd. Sentimental Victorian church art has made it even more difficult for us modern Christians to understand; stained glass windows crowd our imaginations with clichéd images of fuzzy sheep and Jesus in a pristine, white robe.

But look here: Peter, in the story from the Acts of the Apostles, looks more like the shepherds we would

recognize today. Who comes to us today, in the midst of our ordeals? Who pulls us away from scorching heat? Who rehydrates our parched lips, ties tourniquets around our shattered limbs, pulls us out from the rubble caused by earthquake, tornado or bomb? Who carries us to a tent, or slides us into an ambulance? Who reassures us with strong hands and calm voice, that now we can rest, that now we will be taken care of? Who rushes into the middle of that vortex of violence and chaos and dust and blood, and brings order and hope and a way out?

We know—we have always known – that we see the hand of God at work in the world around us – that the hand of God is none other than the hands of those who reach out to help, who go where they may not even have known they were needed. The hand of God is attached to the arms of people who have listened to the voice of Jesus all of their lives, and not known what it meant until some moving story, some situation of grief, some moment of overwhelming need compels them to act.

The shepherd is in our midst, saying “Stop that! But embrace this. And here, let me wipe the tears from your eyes.”

How we see the Risen Lord is revealed to us in the signs in our lives

Easter 2-C

April 7, 2013

Acts  5:27-32

Psalm 118:19-24

Revelation 1:4-8      
John 20:19-31

Since we cannot see God, it is only human nature that we should want some sort of sign that God exists and that God loves us. We want some sort of proof, for the realities of human existence can be dismal and anything we are only promised will be good must be touched, felt, tasted, smelled -- somehow demonstrated to be real -- before we can believe in its goodness.

Looking for that sign can make us kind of wacky. Do you know the Monty Python movie, The Life of Brian – a bit of a spoof on a sometimes desperate search for a savior, set in 1st century Palestine? The crowd has somehow fixated on an ordinary person called Brian, and they begin chasing Brian through the desert near Jerusalem. He is running to get away from them, convinced he is no messiah. He loses a shoe but keeps running. “His shoe!” they all cry, “A sign!” And they immediate take of their shoes and run with one bare foot through the stony desert.

Or do you know this story, from the Middle Ages? During the Plague, the Pope was saying mass to pray for relief for the Romans, and he had a vision of an angel with a sword floating in the sky over the Castel Sant’Angelo. He knew it was a sign from God that the plague would soon end. And it did.

The Easter story is also about searching for signs – real signs that the promise of Jesus' resurrection from the dead was indeed true. In the Gospel of John alone there are four different ways the disciples come to believe in the resurrection. "[John] comes to faith after having seen the burial wrappings but without having seen Jesus himself. Magdalene sees Jesus but does not recognize him until he calls her by name. The disciples see and believe. Thomas also sees him and believes …” but only after he insists on seeing those actual wounds.

One of the central controversies of the early church was what to believe about the Risen Lord. People went to great extremes on both sides of the argument to make their points: "Jesus was just a vision," was countered with detailed and nearly gory accounts of his death and rising. Late in the first century, around the time the gospels were written, was the time when the eyewitnesses to the resurrection -- Mary, Peter, Thomas and the rest -- were dying. How do John and the other evangelists communicate this truth to the newer Christians -- the ones who were not around to see the signs of the Risen Christ and yet do believe?

After Thomas sees the signs of death in Jesus hands and believes in his resurrection, Jesus says, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." In saying this, Jesus in a sense turns away from the disciples around him (who indeed have or will soon see the Risen Lord) and turns to address us. Christians down through the ages, from the second generation of believers to us here today have not seen the Risen Lord and yet we believe. In our just-the-facts-ma’am-please world of the 21st century, it makes even less sense to say we believe in the resurrection of the dead that it did for those people who lived in the first or second centuries.

What died on the cross was the idea of a God who was also a magical mystery worker. Because we have this story of Thomas putting his finger through the hole in Jesus’ hand, we get the joke behind the story of the one-shoed false messiah. As the English writer A.N. Wilson put it, these stories of the resurrection provide us with no easy explanations or “fake consolations.” He goes on to describe why it is so hard to be a Christian:

The new God 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. He was now a person – a mysterious person who only the minute before had looked very much like the gardener sweeping the path. That has the profoundest implications for the human race and for human history for as long as it lasts. For 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.

The Twelve did not recognize the friend who had been killed, brutally and savagely killed – they did not recognize him at first. But the one who doubted most of all saw, with the eyes of hindsight, that his Lord and his God was to be found 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 was in the presence of that abject vulnerability that Doubt was cast aside, and Faith could say, My Lord and my God![1]

"I shall be there," Jesus says. That is how the gospel of John ends, with Jesus' assurance that his spirit will

remain with us always, until the end of the age. How we understand that spirit -- how we have seen and continue to see the Risen Lord -- is revealed to us in signs – signs we see in our own lives, in the most surprising spots in life where the spirit breaks in – in relationships, and friendships, and moments of grace, in the food we serve to hungry people, in the children we teach, and the sick people we visit, and in the breaking of bread.

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[1] A.N. Wilson, My Name is Legion, pp. 300-301

Like that grass breaking through the sidewalk

Easter;  March 31, 2013

Acts 10:34-43

Ps. 118

1 Corinthians 15:19-26

Luke 24:1-12

I don’t think we are too terribly sure about resurrection. As it says in the Gospel, “these words seemed [to us] to be an idle tale.” If the first witnesses to Jesus’ rising from the dead don’t believe, how can we?

We are so terribly caught up in the here and now, the to-do list, the worry and strain of everyday life. Life does consume us: children and grandchildren, sickness and health, unemployment and underemployment, being bored and stressed. “The world is too much with us,” as the poet William Wordsworth wrote

… late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; --

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon![i]

Of course, that is not the curse only of modern, industrial life – or post-modern, digitized life. Wordsworth wrote in the early 19th century, and the disciples lived in the 1st. All the disciples, women and men, were so caught up in the mundane they could not see the glorious even when it hits them in the face. As they approach the tomb on that Sunday morning, they go there still as disciples, followers of Jesus – but disciples who don’t remember the lessons, and followers who have forgotten the way.

They have forgotten the everyday miracles Jesus performed among them: the people he healed, people who were restored to family, to community, to life, from their crippling infirmities that kept them isolated and alone. They have forgotten the stories he told, where the lost were found, the alienated and rejected reunited with their loved ones, the children restored to the bosom of their families. They have forgotten the grace, the no-holds-barred welcome God gives each of us, all the time, the assurance that there is now and always enough – and more – to go around. The world – from the entry into Jerusalem, to the Passover meal, to the betrayal, arrest, trial and crucifixion – has indeed been too much with them.

As disciples, on that Sunday morning, they have forgotten all those things. But it is at the moment when we see them realize that this indeed could be the most powerful of all of Jesus’ miracles that they change from disciples into apostles – from forgetful students into the ones who run pell mell into the world to tell this story, eye-witnesses to the amazing thing that had happened.

But what about us? We for whom this 21st century world is still too much with us? The writer Anne Lamott has chronicled this world, and how a confused, sometimes fragile, often brave in spite of the odds, ordinary American woman keeps in touch with her own spiritual center and finds much evidence of grace in the world around her. I picked up her book Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, for my Good Friday-to-Easter reading, because I knew she would ground me in the here and now – and help me find a way to understand the resurrection in this world that is too much with me.

Lamott lives in northern California, and as an adult, over twenty years ago, found her desperate way into an ordinary Presbyterian church, which she still attends. What she means by prayers of “help” and “thanks” I’ll leave to you to read on your own, but this little bit about the prayer of “wow” stood out to me:

Even though I often remember my pastor staying that God always makes a way of no way, periodically something awful happens, and I think that this time God has met Her match – a child dies, or a young father is paralyzed. Nothing can possibly make things okay again. People and grace surround the critically injured person or the family. Time passes. It’s beyond bad. It’s actually a nightmare. But people don’t bolt, and at some point the first shoot of grass breaks through the sidewalk.[ii]

Even in this early early Easter, when winter snows could still come swirling back tomorrow – in these late days, when we are dealing with a world of burdens and worries – resurrection is all around us, like that grass breaking through the sidewalk. If we pay attention to this world around us, we can, like the disciples, make that transition from forgetful learner to amazed apostle. As Anne Lamott says, “… when all else fails, follow instructions.”

… breathe, try to slow down and pay attention, try to love and help God’s other children, and – hardest of all, at least to me – learn to love our depressing, hilarious, mostly decent selves. We get thirsty people water, read to the very young and old, and listen to the sad. We pick up litter and try to leave the world a slightly better place for our stay here.[iii]

Paying attention to that – to all of that – to those ordinary miracles Jesus taught us, of bringing health and wholeness and hope and life in the simplest of ways – we can be very sure there is resurrection.

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[i] “The World Is Too Much With Us” by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

[ii] Anne Lamott, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012), p. 84.

[iii] Ibid. p. 101.

This Friday of death we call good

Good Friday; March 29, 2013

Isaiah 52:13-53:12

Ps. 22

Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9

John 18:1-19:37

Year after year of reading this story of Jesus’ passion and death can numb us to the horrific brutality it describes. After all, we know the end of the story. Aren’t the lilies stored somewhere, lilies-in-waiting to be gloriously displayed come Saturday night? Is not the bread already baked for the festival eucharist, the brass polished and the linen ironed? We know the end of the story so well it is a challenge to be here, now, listening to the story of a violent death.

Since this is probably the only story about first-century Palestine that most of us will ever read, we may think that this was a unique event, or that this crucifixion was singled out by the ordinary person of the day. We might even think that people paid attention to what was going on on that hill that afternoon.

Yet in first-century Palestine – during Jesus’ lifetime and the lifetimes of those who wrote the gospels – brutality was commonplace. The Romans as an occupying force had no qualms about using every form of state violence to quell those who tried to rise up against them. Urban terrorists ran through streets in which blood ran – their blood, the blood of their victims, blood shed by Roman weapons. Crucifixion was a common form of death for these insurrectionists, as well as for the innocent and the unarmed who tried to resist the violence with non-violent means. Thousands would be crucified when the Romans would quash rebellions. There was little unusual about what happened to Jesus in those violent days – except that some were allowed to take his body down from the cross and bury it.

The violence of human society is never far from the surface. Sometimes, late at night, I’ll still be awake and listen to the BBC World Service, hoping for some thoughtful story, or even for something dull to put me to sleep. More often than not, though, I hear horrendous stories, more vivid that we see on TV news, of brutality from some far away country, some account of an innocent person abused, a massacre, a pillage, a plunder. To remember those 21st century stories on this day, this Friday of death we call “good,” is to remember that Jesus knew that reality as well, as it swirled around him and carried him to his death.

Jesus faces that violence vulnerable and defenseless – all too human, we could say. Yet he resists the whole way, especially as John tells the story. He refuses to let the authorities, Roman or Jewish, who have the power of death over him, to have the power of life. He refuses to play by their rules, to show anger or retribution or force. He defines his own truth against their story of brutal defeat.

As night falls, Jesus is laid in a tomb – John describes a burial as extravagant as a king’s. Is this the beginning of a new kingdom? Jesus died as he lived, preaching that the kingdom of God will be entered not by force or wisdom or magic tricks, but by vulnerability and love. Those who enter it will do so as Jesus did: as their all-too-human selves, stripped raw and naked, childlike and vulnerable, confident that the worst death the world can deal holds no power over their lives.