Wow! Some of you may know Anne Lamott’s little book on prayer, Help, Thanks, Wow. Most of us are familiar with prayers asking God for help, especially in difficulties. Many of us also practice daily forms of prayerful gratitude. “Wow” is something else. So that’s what I’d like to focus on this Christmas morning, which is definitely a good time to say, “Wow!”
Let’s start with a fictional character: Ebenezer Scrooge. How many of you know who he was? Of course, you do. He’s the hero of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. It’s an old story now – Dickens wrote it in 1843 – but it still seems so relevant to me. In fact, I’ve always loved the story. I remember watching as a girl the 1951 black and white version starring British actor Alistair Sim, whose wonderfully expressive face and gestures so perfectly captured old Ebenezer for me. Of course, there have been many other versions of the story since then. For the last several years I’ve listened once a year at this time to an audio version of the original story read by Tim Curry, a gifted actor who wonderfully renders all the various voices in the story. Most of you probably know the story: how on Christmas Eve old, miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future and wakes up on Christmas day with a newly transformed heart.
A Christmas Carol is really a timeless fable, and every time I listen to it, I hear something new. This year I heard two motifs in the story that are connected, at least for me. The first is how isolated and alone Scrooge is before his conversion. He seemingly cares nothing for his clerk, Bob Cratchit, verbally abuses a couple of men collecting for the poor, and refuses the hospitality of his nephew Fred. After leaving his office on Christmas Eve, he goes home alone to his solitary, gloomy chambers in an empty and unused warehouse. The second motif is how excited Scrooge was when he woke up after the spirits’ visitations. In the 1951 version, after tucking his nightshirt into his trousers, Alistair Sim’s Ebenezer does handsprings, as he discovers that he is still alive. Even Tim Curry manages to convey the giddy joy Scrooge feels on Christmas morning. Wow!
The excitement Scrooge really speaks to me. Actually, today’s Scripture readings make me feel almost as excited, as joyfully giddy, as Scrooge felt. Wha…? The excitement was all last night, wasn’t it? Last night there were angels filling the skies, belting out “Glory to God in the highest….” There were astounded shepherd saying to each other, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see what the angels were talking about.” And this morning? No angels, no stable, no charming, weary mother, no shining baby.
But, believe it or not, hear it or not, this morning’s readings also give us some pretty exciting news, exciting enough perhaps to make us giddy and joyful. Take the reading from the prophet Isaiah. This portion of the book was probably written in the mid-6th century BC, towards the end of the Judean exile in Babylonia. Here the prophet begins to foretell the eventual return of the exiles to Jerusalem. Can’t you hear the prophet’s almost breathless excitement, as he pictures someone running to proclaim that God is in charge, and that God is delivering God’s people? The news is so exciting that the watchmen up on the walks break out in singing. Even the streets and walls of Jerusalem are commanded to sing. Imagine it: Would the walls of Warsaw have broken out in singing in 1945, or in Raqqa, or in an abandoned Appalachian coal town? And what were the watchmen and the ruined walls so excited about? They knew that God had done something so wonderful that no one could miss it, that all would see what God had finally accomplished on their behalf. Wow!
Even the opening of the Letter to the Hebrews, which sometimes overwhelms us with its theological understanding of Jesus, picks up the theme of what God has done. Actually it’s a sermon, not a letter. It was probably written sometime between 60 and 100 AD, i.e., probably after the gospel of Mark, the oldest gospel, and probably before the gospel of John, the latest. In order to prepare his hearers for his description of who Jesus was and what Jesus did, the writer begins by rehearsing the mighty acts of God in the past, some of which we just heard. Some “wow!” there too. And more “wow!” to come.
But it’s the gospel reading that, for me at least, contains the most exciting, even shocking, news of all we’ve heard. Wha…? “It’s all so abstract,” you say. “Bring back the baby and his charming mother.” Nope. This morning we get to hear something entirely different. And here let me say that what we just heard is not a “prologue,” as some call it, as if these verses are somehow detached from the story about Jesus that the evangelist has to tell. No, we have heard the very beginning of Jesus’ story, which we need to hear in order to understand the rest of the story. Actually, the very first words of this gospel would have excited, perhaps even shocked, its original hearers. “In the beginning….” Does that sound familiar? It should. Those are the opening words of Genesis, and the Greek words in John are exactly the same words as at the beginning of the Greek translation of Genesis.
“In the beginning” takes us back to the story of how God spoke Creation into being. That’s a “wow!” right there. So John’s hearers knew from the very first sentence that they were going to hear a creation story, i.e., something pretty spectular. They were ready for a story about God expressing Godself through God’s cosmic principle, what the Greeks called the Logos, or the Word. God expressed Godself through the Word, the evangelist told them, in order to produce the cosmos, to bring forth light – just as in Genesis – to shine that light onto all people and invite all people into that light. And now the exciting, even shocking part! That Word, that expression of the great hidden mysterious ground of the entire cosmos, that construction foreman of all that exists, joined itself to humanity and pitched its tent among us, or “became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood,” as Eugene Peterson puts it. Wow! Hear that again. What is eternal, unchanging, immortal, allowed itself to become changeable, mortal, and subject eventually to the same fate as all of humanity. What is distant, mysterious, and unseen, suddenly came right to us, plain to see. Wow!
This is the exciting, even shocking, good news of this day, in some ways even more exciting and shocking than the news of the baby and his charming mother, and everything else we see in Nativity scenes. This is what we celebrate today: that divinity and humanity are irrevocably joined, that God shines through to us in Jesus. And there’s more: because humanity and divinity are irrevocably joined, the same divine quality, the same light that we see in Jesus, we can now see also in ourselves. I’m risking heresy but I’ll say it anyway: it’s not the incarnation that we’re celebrating, it’s incarnation, that the great cosmic mystery is ultimately also incarnate in us. All of us who are awake to the presence of God within can also shine forth God to the world. Wow! We should be jumping up and down. We should be running out into the streets calling out, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it,” like the newsies in old movies.
Why don’t we do that? Well, of course, we Episcopalians don’t do that. We do “everything decently and in order.” A little swaying in the pew or chancel when the music gets a little dancy maybe, but calling out “Hallelujah, Praise the Lord?” I don’t think so!
Which brings me back to Ebenezer Scrooge. Waking up as a changed man and excited to discover that he was still alive, Scrooge excitedly ran to his window. The scene outside it was now in full, glorious sunlight. Scrooge then began the joy-filled, challenging process of reconnecting with the people around him. He called to a young lad to get the poulterer, so he could send an enormous turkey to the Cratchit family. He dressed and went church. On the way home he ran into the old gentleman soliciting funds for the poor. Scrooge apologized for abusing him and pledged an exceedingly generous amount. Then he did what was hardest of all: he went to his nephew’s house and begged forgiveness for his neglect and ill treatment. And of course, the good-natured nephew warmly welcomed him into the family gathering, now filled with Christmas warmth and joy.
So, just as Charles Dickens intended, as we seek to live more deeply into the mystery of incarnation, perhaps we can take Scrooge’s example to heart. In our excitement at what God has actually done, perhaps we too can come out of gloom, darkness, and isolation. Perhaps we too can welcome the brilliant light of day, seek forgiveness where we know we must, then renew, extend, and cherish our connections with the rest of the human family. Let the words of African-American theologian Howard Thurman speak to you:
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.
That God has called us and empowers us to do any of these things should surely cause all of us to say, “Wow!”
Monday, December 25, 2017
Sunday, June 4, 2017
Blown through the Red Doors
Why am I here? More important, why are you here? What blew you in through the red doors? Are you here because coming to church is what one does on Sunday? Are you here because you think that God expects you to come, and you want to please God? Do you want to be fed in the Eucharist? Do you hope that, if you take in Christ’s Body and Blood, you will become more like him? Do you seek strength for the journey, something to help you keep going in life? Or are you looking for a real community?
My friends, we are not here for any of these reasons. We are here because the Holy Spirit blew us here. Perhaps you didn’t even want to come. Certainly you have every good reason not to come. No one will look down on you for sleeping in, and no one will pat you on the back for waking up and actually getting here. We are here, because the Holy Spirit blew us in through the red doors – and for a reason.
Jesus is gone. We listened to Jesus. We prayed together, and we waited for him to make good on his promises. And then it happened! We crossed over the threshold, and discovered that God has let God’s Spirit loose in the world. But God’s Spirit is wily and changeable, and she has many ways of showing herself.
Some of us are inspired by the violent, life-changing experiences of the disciples in the Book of Acts. In Scripture a powerful wind is a sign of God’s presence. Remember the beginning of Genesis? “The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” Remember how Jesus tried to describe the Spirit to Nicodemus? “The wind blows where it chooses,” he said, “and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” For some of us, the Holy Spirit does feel like a great rushing wind, coming into our lives, carrying us along, even pushing us in unexpected directions.
Perhaps you are inspired by the disciples’ experience of being on fire. Fire in Scripture is also a sign of God’s presence. Remember the Pillar of Fire that followed the Israelites as they travelled through the Sinai? When the prophet Jeremiah could no longer keep from speaking God’s word, he said that God’s urging felt “like fire in the bones.” And when John Wesley felt himself come alive again spiritually at the Aldersgate meeting, he said his heart “felt strangely warmed.”
Or perhaps the Holy Spirit comes as a gentle breath, a quickening and an enlivening, a sense of being invisibly, yet inexorably, transformed. Although Elijah had expected God to come in thunder and fire, God spoke to Elijah in a whisper. After Jesus’ resurrection, the disciples in John’s Gospel felt Jesus breathe the Holy Spirit into them. “Breathe on me, breath of God,” says one of our hymns: gentle, easy, yet life-giving and utterly life-changing.
Still others of us feel the Spirit’s presence in a rush of deep emotion. Ricardo Avila lay prostrate on the floor of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, waiting to be ordained a priest. As the congregation began to chant the Veni, Sancte Spiritus, “Come, Holy Spirit,” the traditional invocation of the Holy Spirit at ordinations, he felt tears gush from his eyes, and then he began to sob. Others of us experience that emotion as deep joy, joy that makes us so giddy that those around us may be sure that we are drunk – and we are, drunk with the “new wine” that old wineskins cannot contain.
For yet others, the Holy Spirit comes in extraordinary, inexplicable experiences. The fractious members of the Christian community at Corinth suddenly had the ability to speak ecstatically in other languages. St. Francis of Assisi heard the crucifix in a country church calling to him. A woman knelt at the altar of a strange church and suddenly knew she was home. Back in his pew after taking Christ into his body, a man knew that God’s Spirit was lodged deep in his own heart. A student sang in a church choir, and all his resistance to the workings of the Holy Spirit melted away.
However the Spirit brought you here, as a strong but invisible force, as a gentle tug on the sleeve, or through a moment in your life you still can’t explain, you are here because the Spirit has brought you here. We are all here because the Spirit has brought us here. As Paul told the Corinthians who thought their ability to speak in tongues made them special, “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Spirit.” We are all here, because the Spirit needs us to be here. Paul reminded the Corinthian Christians that the Spirit had brought them together, because the community needed the abilities, talents, and gifts of many different people. All their various gifts had come from the same Spirit, and all were needed and important. Whatever the gifts were, whether they were teaching, administration, preaching, devotion, healing, or working miracles, all these gifts had been given to the community by the Spirit, distributed by the Spirit as the Spirit saw fit. Most important, the Spirit had given these gifts to the Corinthian Christians for a reason: “for the common good,” i.e. to build up the church in that place.
The Christian community at Corinth was just the beginning. The Spirit has given today’s church tons of gifts and talents, and the Spirit needs the church to use them all. In one sense, you could even say that the Spirit has given the churches different gifts. Perhaps the Spirit has intentionally scattered her gifts around. Perhaps every denomination, maybe even every faith community, has different God-given gifts and talents, and no denomination or faith has all the gifts necessary to bring God’s reign nearer. I love the Episcopal Church. I have been drinking from its deep well almost all my adult life. However, I know that we can learn from Lutherans and Roman Catholics, even Baptists and Pentecostals, even Muslims, Jews, and Hindus. In the same way, I believe that the Spirit has scattered her gifts around the various parishes in our diocese. All of us have God-given gifts, but none of us has all the gifts we need to bring the reign of God nearer. And the Spirit has certainly scattered her gifts here at St. Peter’s. All of us have different God-given gifts that this parish needs, and none of us, whatever our age, station, or life situation, is without gifts. The Spirit blew us here, the Spirit gave us all gifts and talents, and the Spirit empowers us to use our gifts.
My friends, there is both a mystery and a paradox here. The mystery is this: we don’t know how the Holy Spirit works. We say that the Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, with God the Creator and God the Redeemer. We reaffirm our faith in the Spirit every time we say the Nicene Creed: “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life ….” But we don’t know how the Spirit helps us to let go of old, destructive ways of life, helps us to forgive and be forgiven, and helps us to live more compassionately. We don’t know how the Spirit transforms our lives and helps us to do more and more of what Jesus did. We don’t know how the Spirit grabs our hand and takes us down a path of ministry we had never before contemplated. We only know that something has changed, that we have experienced transforming grace, and that we have discovered gifts within ourselves that we never knew we possessed.
And here is the paradox. The Spirit doesn’t give these gifts so that we can feel proud of ourselves spiritually, nor so that we may feel peaceful, nor even so that we may be strengthened for the journey. As one writer has observed, the truth is that the Spirit has given us gifts and talents that create problems for us and that may make us profoundly uncomfortable. After the disciples were blown over by the Spirit, they could not go back to their old lives. In the very last chapter of John’s Gospel, Peter, James, and John tried to return to fishing. Jesus caught up with them, and told Peter to “Feed my sheep.” Celtic Christians still use the image of the wild goose as a symbol for the unfettered Spirit. They know that the Spirit, like a noisy and bothersome wild goose, often shakes us out of our complacency and leads us in new directions.
We too are living in this paradox. Having been blown here by the Spirit, perhaps having been blown over by the Spirit, we know there is no going back to what our lives were before, no going back to a life focused solely on ourselves and our own narrow needs. The Spirit calls each of to use our gifts to reach out to people of every language, ethnicity, and social station. The Spirit calls all of us, young and old, women and men, to prophesy. The Spirit calls all of us to use our gifts to care for this planet, to bring the reign of God nearer, and to partner with God in God’s work, wherever we discern it. The Spirit calls all of us to ask, “Who needs us?” As you begin a new chapter in the life of this parish, I invite you ask, “How can this parish use its diverse gifts and talents to share God’s love in this community?”
We are here, because the Spirit has brought us here. Come, Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove: descend on us, reveal your love. Word of God and inward light, wake our spirits; clear our sight. Surround us now with all your glory; speak through us that sacred story. Take our lips and make them bold. Take hearts and minds and make them whole. Stir in us that sacred flame, then send us forth to spread your name. May it be so.
My friends, we are not here for any of these reasons. We are here because the Holy Spirit blew us here. Perhaps you didn’t even want to come. Certainly you have every good reason not to come. No one will look down on you for sleeping in, and no one will pat you on the back for waking up and actually getting here. We are here, because the Holy Spirit blew us in through the red doors – and for a reason.
Jesus is gone. We listened to Jesus. We prayed together, and we waited for him to make good on his promises. And then it happened! We crossed over the threshold, and discovered that God has let God’s Spirit loose in the world. But God’s Spirit is wily and changeable, and she has many ways of showing herself.
Some of us are inspired by the violent, life-changing experiences of the disciples in the Book of Acts. In Scripture a powerful wind is a sign of God’s presence. Remember the beginning of Genesis? “The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” Remember how Jesus tried to describe the Spirit to Nicodemus? “The wind blows where it chooses,” he said, “and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” For some of us, the Holy Spirit does feel like a great rushing wind, coming into our lives, carrying us along, even pushing us in unexpected directions.
Perhaps you are inspired by the disciples’ experience of being on fire. Fire in Scripture is also a sign of God’s presence. Remember the Pillar of Fire that followed the Israelites as they travelled through the Sinai? When the prophet Jeremiah could no longer keep from speaking God’s word, he said that God’s urging felt “like fire in the bones.” And when John Wesley felt himself come alive again spiritually at the Aldersgate meeting, he said his heart “felt strangely warmed.”
Or perhaps the Holy Spirit comes as a gentle breath, a quickening and an enlivening, a sense of being invisibly, yet inexorably, transformed. Although Elijah had expected God to come in thunder and fire, God spoke to Elijah in a whisper. After Jesus’ resurrection, the disciples in John’s Gospel felt Jesus breathe the Holy Spirit into them. “Breathe on me, breath of God,” says one of our hymns: gentle, easy, yet life-giving and utterly life-changing.
Still others of us feel the Spirit’s presence in a rush of deep emotion. Ricardo Avila lay prostrate on the floor of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, waiting to be ordained a priest. As the congregation began to chant the Veni, Sancte Spiritus, “Come, Holy Spirit,” the traditional invocation of the Holy Spirit at ordinations, he felt tears gush from his eyes, and then he began to sob. Others of us experience that emotion as deep joy, joy that makes us so giddy that those around us may be sure that we are drunk – and we are, drunk with the “new wine” that old wineskins cannot contain.
For yet others, the Holy Spirit comes in extraordinary, inexplicable experiences. The fractious members of the Christian community at Corinth suddenly had the ability to speak ecstatically in other languages. St. Francis of Assisi heard the crucifix in a country church calling to him. A woman knelt at the altar of a strange church and suddenly knew she was home. Back in his pew after taking Christ into his body, a man knew that God’s Spirit was lodged deep in his own heart. A student sang in a church choir, and all his resistance to the workings of the Holy Spirit melted away.
However the Spirit brought you here, as a strong but invisible force, as a gentle tug on the sleeve, or through a moment in your life you still can’t explain, you are here because the Spirit has brought you here. We are all here because the Spirit has brought us here. As Paul told the Corinthians who thought their ability to speak in tongues made them special, “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Spirit.” We are all here, because the Spirit needs us to be here. Paul reminded the Corinthian Christians that the Spirit had brought them together, because the community needed the abilities, talents, and gifts of many different people. All their various gifts had come from the same Spirit, and all were needed and important. Whatever the gifts were, whether they were teaching, administration, preaching, devotion, healing, or working miracles, all these gifts had been given to the community by the Spirit, distributed by the Spirit as the Spirit saw fit. Most important, the Spirit had given these gifts to the Corinthian Christians for a reason: “for the common good,” i.e. to build up the church in that place.
The Christian community at Corinth was just the beginning. The Spirit has given today’s church tons of gifts and talents, and the Spirit needs the church to use them all. In one sense, you could even say that the Spirit has given the churches different gifts. Perhaps the Spirit has intentionally scattered her gifts around. Perhaps every denomination, maybe even every faith community, has different God-given gifts and talents, and no denomination or faith has all the gifts necessary to bring God’s reign nearer. I love the Episcopal Church. I have been drinking from its deep well almost all my adult life. However, I know that we can learn from Lutherans and Roman Catholics, even Baptists and Pentecostals, even Muslims, Jews, and Hindus. In the same way, I believe that the Spirit has scattered her gifts around the various parishes in our diocese. All of us have God-given gifts, but none of us has all the gifts we need to bring the reign of God nearer. And the Spirit has certainly scattered her gifts here at St. Peter’s. All of us have different God-given gifts that this parish needs, and none of us, whatever our age, station, or life situation, is without gifts. The Spirit blew us here, the Spirit gave us all gifts and talents, and the Spirit empowers us to use our gifts.
My friends, there is both a mystery and a paradox here. The mystery is this: we don’t know how the Holy Spirit works. We say that the Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, with God the Creator and God the Redeemer. We reaffirm our faith in the Spirit every time we say the Nicene Creed: “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life ….” But we don’t know how the Spirit helps us to let go of old, destructive ways of life, helps us to forgive and be forgiven, and helps us to live more compassionately. We don’t know how the Spirit transforms our lives and helps us to do more and more of what Jesus did. We don’t know how the Spirit grabs our hand and takes us down a path of ministry we had never before contemplated. We only know that something has changed, that we have experienced transforming grace, and that we have discovered gifts within ourselves that we never knew we possessed.
And here is the paradox. The Spirit doesn’t give these gifts so that we can feel proud of ourselves spiritually, nor so that we may feel peaceful, nor even so that we may be strengthened for the journey. As one writer has observed, the truth is that the Spirit has given us gifts and talents that create problems for us and that may make us profoundly uncomfortable. After the disciples were blown over by the Spirit, they could not go back to their old lives. In the very last chapter of John’s Gospel, Peter, James, and John tried to return to fishing. Jesus caught up with them, and told Peter to “Feed my sheep.” Celtic Christians still use the image of the wild goose as a symbol for the unfettered Spirit. They know that the Spirit, like a noisy and bothersome wild goose, often shakes us out of our complacency and leads us in new directions.
We too are living in this paradox. Having been blown here by the Spirit, perhaps having been blown over by the Spirit, we know there is no going back to what our lives were before, no going back to a life focused solely on ourselves and our own narrow needs. The Spirit calls each of to use our gifts to reach out to people of every language, ethnicity, and social station. The Spirit calls all of us, young and old, women and men, to prophesy. The Spirit calls all of us to use our gifts to care for this planet, to bring the reign of God nearer, and to partner with God in God’s work, wherever we discern it. The Spirit calls all of us to ask, “Who needs us?” As you begin a new chapter in the life of this parish, I invite you ask, “How can this parish use its diverse gifts and talents to share God’s love in this community?”
We are here, because the Spirit has brought us here. Come, Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove: descend on us, reveal your love. Word of God and inward light, wake our spirits; clear our sight. Surround us now with all your glory; speak through us that sacred story. Take our lips and make them bold. Take hearts and minds and make them whole. Stir in us that sacred flame, then send us forth to spread your name. May it be so.
Monday, May 29, 2017
You Will Be My Witnesses
“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
It was Ascension Day this past Thursday. Believe it or not, Ascension Day used to be a major feast day in the church. It was always forty days after Easter, thus always on a Thursday. As a major event in the life of Jesus, Ascension Day has inspired much beautiful artwork and many lovely hymns, a few of which we are singing today. Well into the twentieth century, many Episcopal parishes observed the day complete with a festal Eucharist and, of course, a potluck. Now Ascension Day is a largely forgotten feast of the church, especially in Protestant churches. And it’s a brave priest who would suggest that people ought to come for worship on a Thursday evening in spring. There just too much else going on!
Yet we shouldn’t overlook the Ascension entirely. Remembering it was important enough to Jesus’ earliest followers that the author of Luke-Acts described it twice, once at the end of the gospel and the second, what we just heard, at the beginning of the book of Acts. What we heard today actually comes at the end of a recap of the gospel story, as if the author wanted to make sure that his or her reader fully understood Jesus’ life’s work before beginning to reflect on the outward movements of his followers. What’s more, Paul also mentions the Ascension several times in his various letters. And of course, we affirm our faith in the reality of Jesus’ Ascension every time we say the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed.
And just what are we affirming in those creedal statements? Are we saying that we believe that Jesus was pulled up into the sky until he vaporized somewhere? It’s important to remember that in the ancient world, and well into the 16th century, people believed in a geometric universe, in which heaven was literally “up there.” The evangelist was trying to express something inexpressible, and so used images common to his time. We have a very different cosmology. We understand the vastness of space and time. Steven Davis of Claremont University reminds us that, “The Ascension of Jesus was primarily a change of state rather than a change of location. Jesus changed in the Ascension from being present in the realm of space and time to being present in the realm of eternity, in the transcendent heavenly realm.” In other words, in showing Jesus ascending into “heaven,” Jesus’ earliest followers were trying to express their belief that Jesus now existed in a realm beyond his physical body, beyond time and space. And yet, even though Jesus existed in that realm beyond time and space, he was still present to us, in a new and different way.
Perhaps it’s not important that we know exactly what happened on that day. What is important in this story is Jesus’ answer to his friends’ question. They had asked him if he were now going throw the Romans out of Israel and become a king like David. Did he give a straightforward answer? Nope. Instead he told them that God would empower them, and that they would be his witnesses: to their families and clans, to their friends and acquaintances, to their enemies, and, eventually, to the whole world. What could this mean, to be his “witnesses?” Jesus’ friends were puzzled and confused. Wondering what would come next, they returned to a familiar place, the upper room. They invited in Jesus’ women followers, his mother and brothers, and no doubt assorted other friends. Then they began to pray. Tune in next week to hear the answer to their prayers!
Of course, if you were here last Pentecost, you already know the rest of the story! And, if you know anything about the ongoing history of the church, you know something of what has transpired since then. After last December, you might even know something about how the Holy Spirit has been at work in this place. And, unlike those first followers of Jesus, we have been baptized, we have affirmed our faith in the statements of the Apostles Creed, we have made some significant promises, and we have rediscovered the Spirit’s power within ourselves. We too profess to be Jesus’ followers. Do we hear his words addressed to us? If so, hear him say them to you: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
Wait, this could be dangerous! Do we even want to be his witnesses? We’ve been hearing the first letter of Peter all during Easter tide. That letter was written to a community that was being persecuted because of their witness to Jesus. Today, we even heard the writer remind them there were forces that were ready to harm them as the persisted in being Jesus’ witnesses. It’s not a coincidence that the word “martyr” is a Greek word that means “witness.” Am I ready to be a “martyr” as a follower of Jesus?
As we cautiously say “yes,” we still might ask, in the 21st century, to what are we called to witness? Lots of people have given lots of very good answers to that question. Here are mine. I believe that we are called to witness to our commitment to Jesus by being transformed from single atoms to members of a web of love. Relying on God’s grace and the power of the Holy Spirit, we are called into membership in a new community, the Body of Christ. As one cell in that Body, in this place we are called to create a community bound together by our belief in Jesus’ shared life with God and by our participation in that life through our commitment to Jesus.
We are called to witness to the reality of God’s love for us by creating a community with a particular shape. First of all, we are a community that welcomes all comers. Gone are the days when St. Peters – or any Episcopal parish – ministered only to business people and professionals, when the few blacks around were relegated to the balcony – or preferably their own parish. Gone are the days when women could set the altar but not preside at it. Gone are the days when anyone not comfortably heterosexual stayed in the closet. We are called to be a community that transcends ties of blood, nationality, gender, sexual identity, or any other human marker. We are called to remember that God’s love extends to the ends of the earth – and beyond and ultimately embraces the entire creation.
Second, we are called to be a community that engages in prayer and ministry together. We may live in a culture that celebrates every tub on its own bottom, but as followers of the one who brought people together, we acknowledge that we are part of a web of love. We are part of community in which people care for one another. More important, we acknowledge our need to pray and work together, and we understand that prayer and ministry are not mutually exclusive but rather mutually enhancing, the one necessary for the other. Like Jesus’ first friends, we too are called to pray, ponder and reflect together in that upper room on what God calls us to do next.
Third, we are called to remember – and to remind those around us – that we are a counter-cultural community. We witness to our belief that the life that Jesus modeled, together with the promises that we made at our baptisms, promises to treat all with dignity and respect and to seek justice for all, call us to a different kind of life, a kind of life that may be at be odds with the prevailing culture. At the same time, we are not to disengage from our culture. Monasteries and convents are wonderful places for those who are called to the kind of life they offer. We may not even be able to form intentional communities that benefit our neighborhoods, but we are still called to witness to our faith in Jesus by taking his love out into the world, always grounded by our prayer and our trust that God empowers any work we may do. We witness to our faith in Jesus by reminding ourselves and those around us that we encounter Christ on two altars: the first in this sanctuary and the other in the world, in seeking to bring peace, justice, and healing to those who need our care and to helping, through our political, social, and economic decisions, to heal the corner of the world in which God has placed us.
Pentecost is coming. Our yearly celebration of the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost reminds us that we are already empowered by God. In our celebration of Pentecost we also renew our commitment here and now to be witnesses of Jesus’ power and his call of us into loving community. With God’s help and grace, we become a community that prays and ministers together and that seeks to model its social, political, and economic life on Jesus’ teachings. May it be so.
It was Ascension Day this past Thursday. Believe it or not, Ascension Day used to be a major feast day in the church. It was always forty days after Easter, thus always on a Thursday. As a major event in the life of Jesus, Ascension Day has inspired much beautiful artwork and many lovely hymns, a few of which we are singing today. Well into the twentieth century, many Episcopal parishes observed the day complete with a festal Eucharist and, of course, a potluck. Now Ascension Day is a largely forgotten feast of the church, especially in Protestant churches. And it’s a brave priest who would suggest that people ought to come for worship on a Thursday evening in spring. There just too much else going on!
Yet we shouldn’t overlook the Ascension entirely. Remembering it was important enough to Jesus’ earliest followers that the author of Luke-Acts described it twice, once at the end of the gospel and the second, what we just heard, at the beginning of the book of Acts. What we heard today actually comes at the end of a recap of the gospel story, as if the author wanted to make sure that his or her reader fully understood Jesus’ life’s work before beginning to reflect on the outward movements of his followers. What’s more, Paul also mentions the Ascension several times in his various letters. And of course, we affirm our faith in the reality of Jesus’ Ascension every time we say the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed.
And just what are we affirming in those creedal statements? Are we saying that we believe that Jesus was pulled up into the sky until he vaporized somewhere? It’s important to remember that in the ancient world, and well into the 16th century, people believed in a geometric universe, in which heaven was literally “up there.” The evangelist was trying to express something inexpressible, and so used images common to his time. We have a very different cosmology. We understand the vastness of space and time. Steven Davis of Claremont University reminds us that, “The Ascension of Jesus was primarily a change of state rather than a change of location. Jesus changed in the Ascension from being present in the realm of space and time to being present in the realm of eternity, in the transcendent heavenly realm.” In other words, in showing Jesus ascending into “heaven,” Jesus’ earliest followers were trying to express their belief that Jesus now existed in a realm beyond his physical body, beyond time and space. And yet, even though Jesus existed in that realm beyond time and space, he was still present to us, in a new and different way.
Perhaps it’s not important that we know exactly what happened on that day. What is important in this story is Jesus’ answer to his friends’ question. They had asked him if he were now going throw the Romans out of Israel and become a king like David. Did he give a straightforward answer? Nope. Instead he told them that God would empower them, and that they would be his witnesses: to their families and clans, to their friends and acquaintances, to their enemies, and, eventually, to the whole world. What could this mean, to be his “witnesses?” Jesus’ friends were puzzled and confused. Wondering what would come next, they returned to a familiar place, the upper room. They invited in Jesus’ women followers, his mother and brothers, and no doubt assorted other friends. Then they began to pray. Tune in next week to hear the answer to their prayers!
Of course, if you were here last Pentecost, you already know the rest of the story! And, if you know anything about the ongoing history of the church, you know something of what has transpired since then. After last December, you might even know something about how the Holy Spirit has been at work in this place. And, unlike those first followers of Jesus, we have been baptized, we have affirmed our faith in the statements of the Apostles Creed, we have made some significant promises, and we have rediscovered the Spirit’s power within ourselves. We too profess to be Jesus’ followers. Do we hear his words addressed to us? If so, hear him say them to you: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
Wait, this could be dangerous! Do we even want to be his witnesses? We’ve been hearing the first letter of Peter all during Easter tide. That letter was written to a community that was being persecuted because of their witness to Jesus. Today, we even heard the writer remind them there were forces that were ready to harm them as the persisted in being Jesus’ witnesses. It’s not a coincidence that the word “martyr” is a Greek word that means “witness.” Am I ready to be a “martyr” as a follower of Jesus?
As we cautiously say “yes,” we still might ask, in the 21st century, to what are we called to witness? Lots of people have given lots of very good answers to that question. Here are mine. I believe that we are called to witness to our commitment to Jesus by being transformed from single atoms to members of a web of love. Relying on God’s grace and the power of the Holy Spirit, we are called into membership in a new community, the Body of Christ. As one cell in that Body, in this place we are called to create a community bound together by our belief in Jesus’ shared life with God and by our participation in that life through our commitment to Jesus.
We are called to witness to the reality of God’s love for us by creating a community with a particular shape. First of all, we are a community that welcomes all comers. Gone are the days when St. Peters – or any Episcopal parish – ministered only to business people and professionals, when the few blacks around were relegated to the balcony – or preferably their own parish. Gone are the days when women could set the altar but not preside at it. Gone are the days when anyone not comfortably heterosexual stayed in the closet. We are called to be a community that transcends ties of blood, nationality, gender, sexual identity, or any other human marker. We are called to remember that God’s love extends to the ends of the earth – and beyond and ultimately embraces the entire creation.
Second, we are called to be a community that engages in prayer and ministry together. We may live in a culture that celebrates every tub on its own bottom, but as followers of the one who brought people together, we acknowledge that we are part of a web of love. We are part of community in which people care for one another. More important, we acknowledge our need to pray and work together, and we understand that prayer and ministry are not mutually exclusive but rather mutually enhancing, the one necessary for the other. Like Jesus’ first friends, we too are called to pray, ponder and reflect together in that upper room on what God calls us to do next.
Third, we are called to remember – and to remind those around us – that we are a counter-cultural community. We witness to our belief that the life that Jesus modeled, together with the promises that we made at our baptisms, promises to treat all with dignity and respect and to seek justice for all, call us to a different kind of life, a kind of life that may be at be odds with the prevailing culture. At the same time, we are not to disengage from our culture. Monasteries and convents are wonderful places for those who are called to the kind of life they offer. We may not even be able to form intentional communities that benefit our neighborhoods, but we are still called to witness to our faith in Jesus by taking his love out into the world, always grounded by our prayer and our trust that God empowers any work we may do. We witness to our faith in Jesus by reminding ourselves and those around us that we encounter Christ on two altars: the first in this sanctuary and the other in the world, in seeking to bring peace, justice, and healing to those who need our care and to helping, through our political, social, and economic decisions, to heal the corner of the world in which God has placed us.
Pentecost is coming. Our yearly celebration of the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost reminds us that we are already empowered by God. In our celebration of Pentecost we also renew our commitment here and now to be witnesses of Jesus’ power and his call of us into loving community. With God’s help and grace, we become a community that prays and ministers together and that seeks to model its social, political, and economic life on Jesus’ teachings. May it be so.
Sunday, May 7, 2017
Abundant Life
“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” What is “abundant life?” What is it that Jesus promises here, when he tells the crowd that he came so that people might have life abundantly? How would you know if you had life abundantly? Would you have a prolonged life? If you lived past 100, would that be living abundantly? If you were part of the 1%, rich enough so that you could buy everything you needed and have access to the finest medical care, would that be abundant life? If you were blessed with a large and attentive extended family, would that be abundant life? Actually today’s readings suggest that having life abundantly is none of these things, but something else altogether.
Despite his promise, neither Jesus nor the writer of the gospel according to John defines what “having life abundantly” means. Here I need to make the usual reminder about the fourth gospel. It was the last of the gospels, written in the ‘90s to a community of mostly Jewish followers of Jesus who were in conflict with the majority Jewish community. When you hear the contrasts in this passage, between the shepherd and the thief, or between the shepherd who protects the sheep and those who want to hurt the sheep, it’s all too easy to slide into anti-Semitism and hear a condemnation of all Jews here. That is emphatically not the case. If there is any implied condemnation in this passage, it is only of those religious leaders with whom the new followers of Jesus are fighting.
So what might the evangelist mean by Jesus’ promise of abundant life? Commentators have offered many different answers to that question over the centuries. Actually, most twenty-first century people don’t find the image of sheep in this passage very helpful. To begin with, probably none of us have kept sheep or even observed the work of shepherds. And who wants to be a sheep? Do sheep have life abundantly? Members of PETA would probably say “no.” Not being a sheep, I’m not sure. But I do know this: there is one very important aspect of sheep life that we should notice. Sheep are social animals. They literally flock together, and they get nervous when one of the members of the flock goes missing. In using the images of sheep and sheepfold, Jesus is talking about a flock that is a community, a flock that not only knows its shepherd, but also each other. These sheep are not isolated individuals. They are bonded to Jesus and to each other. It is those bonds that enable them to follow Jesus’ voice.
Our lesson from the book of Acts suggests what a community committed to Jesus might look like in human terms. The shape of community is a continuing theme in Luke-Acts. We can especially watch the formation of new Christian communities under Paul’s leadership as we follow his travels through the Book of Acts. We even have a hint of the importance of community in the story we heard last week from the gospel of Luke, of the encounter along the road to Emmaus. There we discovered that Christ comes to us walking and in the breaking of bread. And that’s the point: Christ comes to us. Even in that story we find a community, albeit a small one, of only two people, but they encounter Christ together. And their response? They rush back to Jerusalem to share the good news of their experience with the rest of the Jerusalem community.
In today’s reading we are in the aftermath of Peter’s speech on Pentecost. Last week we heard the end of the speech, and that 3,000 people had been baptized as a result. Today, we hear a description of what the communities of these new Christians might have looked like. To be sure, what we have here is probably an idealized picture. It uses some of the common descriptions of an ideal community, and it was probably what someone writing in the ‘80s had heard or believed about those first followers of Jesus.
Nevertheless, the author of Luke-Acts suggests important characteristics of the way of life of Jesus’ newest followers. First, we are told that these new followers continued to grow in their faith by continuing “in the apostles’ teaching.” They didn’t think they knew all there was to know about their new faith simply by having had water poured over them. Secondly, they continued to worship regularly. For them, that meant going to the Temple on the Sabbath, which was the form of worship that they knew. However, they also experienced Jesus’ presence with them sacramentally, i.e., by gathering together, most likely in each other’s houses, and sharing bread and wine. Finally, they were generous with each other. They shared fellowship over meals and they provided for each other’s needs. It’s a wonderful picture of abundant life: life shared with trusted friends, and time set aside for study, worship, sacrament, and a good meal.
It’s a picture of abundant life that has never lost its appeal. Actually, the ideal of life shared in community antedates the coming of Jesus. The Essenes, who flourished about the turn of the first millennium, and who left accounts of their community in the Dead Sea Scrolls, observed the same kind of community life that the author of Acts describes. In the fourth century AD, the Desert Fathers and Mothers were fed up with the rich and indulgent way of life of Christians in Alexandria. So they took off for the hills and caves of the deserts, where they lived a simple life in community and devoted themselves to contemplative prayer and study. In central Italy in the sixth century, Benedict of Nursia established monastic communities that encouraged a balanced life of study, prayer, shared work, and shared meals. Benedictines have flourished ever since. From them have come all the other vowed communities: the Franciscans, the Augustinians, the Dominicans, the Jesuits, the Cistercians, and all the rest. We even have vowed communities in the Episcopal Church and in the wider Anglican Communion. Here in Ohio, the Episcopal Community of the Transfiguration has been settled in Glendale near Cincinnati since 1906.
Pilgrimage, which I mentioned last week, is also a form of community, albeit a temporary one. Even so, study, worship, and generous sharing are important parts of the pilgrimage experience. And today we also have intentional communities of committed lay people who live together and share their time, prayer, food, and worldly goods with each other and with the neighborhood around them. And in Friday’s Columbus Dispatch I discovered a new kind of community of Jesus’ followers. There was an article about what they called “house churches.” These are groups of people who have formal worship in a church and then gather together in small groups in each other’s homes to discuss the lessons and sermon while sharing breakfast. Sounds like the community in today’s reading from Acts!
The truth is that there is a great longing in contemporary culture for true community, for communities not necessarily based on socio-economic class and geography, but on shared commitment to something larger than ourselves. In 2000, sociologist Robert Putnam wrote an influential book entitled Bowling Alone. In it, Putnam wrote about the collapse of community in the US and the decline of voluntary organizations, civic clubs, and religious communities. That collapse may well be even deeper today. We may have 24/7 access to social media, but do we have community? Are we perhaps finally reaching the limit of the individualism that is so rampant in our culture? Are we finally beginning to hear the lie in “Every tub on its own bottom” and “I’m all right, Jack?”
We long for authentic community. We may not be ready or able to run off to a convent or monastery, or even to form a new intentional community. But we long for true abundant life, of the life lived in community with other sheep, that Jesus promised us – and not just for an hour a week in a historic church building. Don’t we too want honest engagement with Scripture? Wouldn’t we like to deepen our relationship with God and each other through shared contemplative prayer? Perhaps this is a challenge that St. Peter’s can wrestle with in the weeks and months to come.
And more. Our abundant life in Jesus also calls us to reach out beyond the bounds of this parish, to see the welfare of others, and especially of those who are our immediate neighbors, as at least as important as our own. And we are called to do that together. African-American theologian Drew G.I. Hart describes the gathering of a group called to help people organize in Harrisburg, PA. After alluding to the “truth-telling, uninhibited joy, and extended grace” that the group experienced, Hart says, “Not all the insights that were shared were revelatory; some information could have been discovered more efficiently with a book or a Google search. Yet something is lost if our distinct bodies are never together, collectively participating in our Creator’s liberative activity for justice and peace.”1 Part of living abundantly is also acknowledging that we share this planet with everyone else on it, and their welfare ultimately has to be our concern as well. Which might also mean making a commitment as a parish to organizations such as Partners in Ministry in Liberia, Episcopal Relief and Development, or Doctors Without Borders, just to name a few. Choose your square inch of the world and embrace those who live on it as your sisters and brothers. Work against all those who would divide us.
Jesus has promised us abundant life. The life he holds out to us is life lived in community, in community where we can grow in faith, worship together, and share generously with each other. His promise still stands and still impels us forward.
1. “The Goodness of Gathered Flesh,” Sojourners, May 2017, p. 27.
Despite his promise, neither Jesus nor the writer of the gospel according to John defines what “having life abundantly” means. Here I need to make the usual reminder about the fourth gospel. It was the last of the gospels, written in the ‘90s to a community of mostly Jewish followers of Jesus who were in conflict with the majority Jewish community. When you hear the contrasts in this passage, between the shepherd and the thief, or between the shepherd who protects the sheep and those who want to hurt the sheep, it’s all too easy to slide into anti-Semitism and hear a condemnation of all Jews here. That is emphatically not the case. If there is any implied condemnation in this passage, it is only of those religious leaders with whom the new followers of Jesus are fighting.
So what might the evangelist mean by Jesus’ promise of abundant life? Commentators have offered many different answers to that question over the centuries. Actually, most twenty-first century people don’t find the image of sheep in this passage very helpful. To begin with, probably none of us have kept sheep or even observed the work of shepherds. And who wants to be a sheep? Do sheep have life abundantly? Members of PETA would probably say “no.” Not being a sheep, I’m not sure. But I do know this: there is one very important aspect of sheep life that we should notice. Sheep are social animals. They literally flock together, and they get nervous when one of the members of the flock goes missing. In using the images of sheep and sheepfold, Jesus is talking about a flock that is a community, a flock that not only knows its shepherd, but also each other. These sheep are not isolated individuals. They are bonded to Jesus and to each other. It is those bonds that enable them to follow Jesus’ voice.
Our lesson from the book of Acts suggests what a community committed to Jesus might look like in human terms. The shape of community is a continuing theme in Luke-Acts. We can especially watch the formation of new Christian communities under Paul’s leadership as we follow his travels through the Book of Acts. We even have a hint of the importance of community in the story we heard last week from the gospel of Luke, of the encounter along the road to Emmaus. There we discovered that Christ comes to us walking and in the breaking of bread. And that’s the point: Christ comes to us. Even in that story we find a community, albeit a small one, of only two people, but they encounter Christ together. And their response? They rush back to Jerusalem to share the good news of their experience with the rest of the Jerusalem community.
In today’s reading we are in the aftermath of Peter’s speech on Pentecost. Last week we heard the end of the speech, and that 3,000 people had been baptized as a result. Today, we hear a description of what the communities of these new Christians might have looked like. To be sure, what we have here is probably an idealized picture. It uses some of the common descriptions of an ideal community, and it was probably what someone writing in the ‘80s had heard or believed about those first followers of Jesus.
Nevertheless, the author of Luke-Acts suggests important characteristics of the way of life of Jesus’ newest followers. First, we are told that these new followers continued to grow in their faith by continuing “in the apostles’ teaching.” They didn’t think they knew all there was to know about their new faith simply by having had water poured over them. Secondly, they continued to worship regularly. For them, that meant going to the Temple on the Sabbath, which was the form of worship that they knew. However, they also experienced Jesus’ presence with them sacramentally, i.e., by gathering together, most likely in each other’s houses, and sharing bread and wine. Finally, they were generous with each other. They shared fellowship over meals and they provided for each other’s needs. It’s a wonderful picture of abundant life: life shared with trusted friends, and time set aside for study, worship, sacrament, and a good meal.
It’s a picture of abundant life that has never lost its appeal. Actually, the ideal of life shared in community antedates the coming of Jesus. The Essenes, who flourished about the turn of the first millennium, and who left accounts of their community in the Dead Sea Scrolls, observed the same kind of community life that the author of Acts describes. In the fourth century AD, the Desert Fathers and Mothers were fed up with the rich and indulgent way of life of Christians in Alexandria. So they took off for the hills and caves of the deserts, where they lived a simple life in community and devoted themselves to contemplative prayer and study. In central Italy in the sixth century, Benedict of Nursia established monastic communities that encouraged a balanced life of study, prayer, shared work, and shared meals. Benedictines have flourished ever since. From them have come all the other vowed communities: the Franciscans, the Augustinians, the Dominicans, the Jesuits, the Cistercians, and all the rest. We even have vowed communities in the Episcopal Church and in the wider Anglican Communion. Here in Ohio, the Episcopal Community of the Transfiguration has been settled in Glendale near Cincinnati since 1906.
Pilgrimage, which I mentioned last week, is also a form of community, albeit a temporary one. Even so, study, worship, and generous sharing are important parts of the pilgrimage experience. And today we also have intentional communities of committed lay people who live together and share their time, prayer, food, and worldly goods with each other and with the neighborhood around them. And in Friday’s Columbus Dispatch I discovered a new kind of community of Jesus’ followers. There was an article about what they called “house churches.” These are groups of people who have formal worship in a church and then gather together in small groups in each other’s homes to discuss the lessons and sermon while sharing breakfast. Sounds like the community in today’s reading from Acts!
The truth is that there is a great longing in contemporary culture for true community, for communities not necessarily based on socio-economic class and geography, but on shared commitment to something larger than ourselves. In 2000, sociologist Robert Putnam wrote an influential book entitled Bowling Alone. In it, Putnam wrote about the collapse of community in the US and the decline of voluntary organizations, civic clubs, and religious communities. That collapse may well be even deeper today. We may have 24/7 access to social media, but do we have community? Are we perhaps finally reaching the limit of the individualism that is so rampant in our culture? Are we finally beginning to hear the lie in “Every tub on its own bottom” and “I’m all right, Jack?”
We long for authentic community. We may not be ready or able to run off to a convent or monastery, or even to form a new intentional community. But we long for true abundant life, of the life lived in community with other sheep, that Jesus promised us – and not just for an hour a week in a historic church building. Don’t we too want honest engagement with Scripture? Wouldn’t we like to deepen our relationship with God and each other through shared contemplative prayer? Perhaps this is a challenge that St. Peter’s can wrestle with in the weeks and months to come.
And more. Our abundant life in Jesus also calls us to reach out beyond the bounds of this parish, to see the welfare of others, and especially of those who are our immediate neighbors, as at least as important as our own. And we are called to do that together. African-American theologian Drew G.I. Hart describes the gathering of a group called to help people organize in Harrisburg, PA. After alluding to the “truth-telling, uninhibited joy, and extended grace” that the group experienced, Hart says, “Not all the insights that were shared were revelatory; some information could have been discovered more efficiently with a book or a Google search. Yet something is lost if our distinct bodies are never together, collectively participating in our Creator’s liberative activity for justice and peace.”1 Part of living abundantly is also acknowledging that we share this planet with everyone else on it, and their welfare ultimately has to be our concern as well. Which might also mean making a commitment as a parish to organizations such as Partners in Ministry in Liberia, Episcopal Relief and Development, or Doctors Without Borders, just to name a few. Choose your square inch of the world and embrace those who live on it as your sisters and brothers. Work against all those who would divide us.
Jesus has promised us abundant life. The life he holds out to us is life lived in community, in community where we can grow in faith, worship together, and share generously with each other. His promise still stands and still impels us forward.
1. “The Goodness of Gathered Flesh,” Sojourners, May 2017, p. 27.
Sunday, April 30, 2017
Christ Comes to Us Walking
“Jesus came up and walked along with them.” I like to walk. At this time of year, you can find me trudging up the hilly streets of my neighborhood almost every morning. Whichever route I take, I’m sure I’m walking uphill all the way! I’m beginning to wonder if it’s worth it to drive to the bike path just so I can walk on level ground. In nasty or cold weather, you’re likely to find me on the treadmill at OU’s Wellworks or the indoor walking track at the Athens Community Center – definitely second rate to walking outside.
Jesus must have liked to walk too. Actually, in the ancient world almost everyone walked if they had to get somewhere. In contrast to the pious pictures of the Flight into Egypt, the truth is that only the wealthy could afford a wagon and animals to pull it, or even a single animal on which to ride. If you read the gospels carefully, you see that Jesus appears to have walked almost everywhere: all over Galilee and from Galilee to Jerusalem – a trip he made at least twice according to John. Those of us who participated in the Lenten study series and read Adam Hamilton’s The Call learned that Paul travelled great distances on foot, for almost all of his missionary journeys.
So it should not surprise us that, in Luke’s account of one of Jesus’ first post-resurrection appearances, Jesus comes up alongside Cleopas and his unnamed companion and meets them walking to a village about seven miles from Jerusalem. Perhaps so that we too can feel included in the story, we haven’t heard of a Cleopas before in the gospel stories. Moreover, the unnamed companion could possibly have been a woman, and, unlike other places mentioned in the gospels, scholars have yet to agree as to whether “Emmaus” actually existed, and, if so, where it was.
Be that as it may, this story still has plenty to say to us. It was still the day of Resurrection. Late afternoon perhaps? Dispirited, discouraged, deeply disappointed, perhaps even fearing for their own lives, Cleopas and friend trudge along a dirt road. Up comes a stranger, robed and hooded perhaps like a Star Wars Jedi knight. Even though they aren’t sure who he is, Cleopas and his companion befriend the stranger. Or rather, the stranger befriends them. He hears their sad story and takes in all their pain and grief. Then, amazingly, he helps them understand in a new way what they have experienced. The wise stranger helps them to get beyond their preconceived ideas, to think outside the box, and to see their history, traditions, and Scripture in new and fresh ways.
Cleopas and friend return the favor by extending their hospitality once again to the stranger, inviting him to share a meal with them after their long walk. In the act of sharing bread, Jesus the guest miraculously becomes Jesus the host. When he breaks the bread, when he repeats the familiar pattern of taking, breaking, blessing and giving, actions he had done so many times for his disciples, Cleopas and friend finally see who their mysterious companion on the way has been. Then Jesus vanishes, on the move again, perhaps now walking with someone else. Cleopas and friend are overwhelmed by joy, and they run the seven miles back to Jerusalem, to share their experiences with the others.
“Jesus came up and walked along with them.” Christ comes to us walking. He makes himself known to us at his table, as we share the Eucharist with him and with each other. But Christ also comes to us walking, in the midst of our lives. For some of us, Christ comes to us when we are literally walking. I am not alone in liking to walk in the mornings. Other people in my neighborhood also trudge up the hills. Most of us, myself included I’m sorry to say, walk with earphones. At least I listen to Richard Rohr’s sermons or podcasts of “On Being,” in which journalist Krista Tippett interviews spiritual teachers and writers! In addition to being wonderful exercise, morning walks can also be a good time to pray. Methodist pastor Bruce Epperly also likes a daily morning walk. He tells us, “I often use the time for intercessory prayer and personal centering, taking in God’s energy of love and sharing it with others.”1 There is even a form of very slow meditative walking, where we pause with every step to listen for God’s whisper or savor God’s presence in the world around us. I once was taking my morning walk on a country road – without earphones. I passed a cluster of very small white fungi popping up out of the earth. As I knelt down to look at them more closely, I suddenly had a deep sense of my connection to them and of our shared life in God, both of us as God’s beloved creatures.
Have any of you ever tried walking a labyrinth? We actually have one at the Procter Center, our diocesan camp and conference center in London, Ohio. Many churches and retreat centers have them – there’s a very famous one on the floor inside the great medieval cathedral at Chartres, France. The church where I served as a seminarian, St. Alban’s in Bexley, has one. Most labyrinths are outside. They are large stone circles, with concentric paths inside them that eventually lead to the center of the circle and then back out again. They can only be walked in one direction. Many people who walk labyrinths do so with a prayer intention. They carry the intention with them as they walk inward, stop in the center to stand in God’s presence, then move outward again, usually with a renewed sense of connection with God.
And then there are pilgrimages. Pilgrimages are perhaps the most famous way to meet Christ walking. Of course, pilgrimages are not unique to Christianity. Many other faith communities stress the importance of literally walking as a way to deepen one’s relationship with the divine. Pilgrimages were especially popular in medieval Europe. That’s what The Canterbury Tales are all about: stories told on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the martyred St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury Cathedral in England. Today you can still walk one of the most famous of the medieval pilgrimage routes, the Camino de Compostela, from southern France, across northern Spain, to the cathedral of St. James of Compostela, where legend has it that the remains of the apostle James are buried. You can walk the entire route, a little less than 500 miles. I young man I know did just that and met Christ in the faces, voices, and hands of his fellow pilgrims. You can also walk a short segment of the Camino, just a week perhaps, and still experience the power of a walk with Christ.
You can even take a metaphorical pilgrimage. The writer Christine Valters Paintner has a lovely book entitled The Soul of a Pilgrimage. In it Paintner describes eight stages of the pilgrim’s way – from hearing the call to coming back home. For each stage she describes scripture stories of great biblical journeys and suggests practices of prayer, writing, and photography to deepen the pilgrimage experience. And, in a sense, our daily lives can be pilgrimages. Don’t we often describe the spiritual life as a pilgrimage or journey? If you are ready to come together with other seekers, if you are ready to befriend strangers, if you can share the realities of your life with those around you, and if you are ready to welcome God wherever God shows up, whenever Christ comes up and walks alongside you, then you are on pilgrimage.
Christ comes to us in the breaking of the bread. But Christ also comes to us walking, whether our eyes are open to see him or not. God is always on the move. God calls us to join God on the open road, spiritually, ethically, and, for those who can, physically. And we are on the road with him. As this parish transitions to a new priest, perhaps you may wonder about the destination and future of St. Peter’s. Can we relate to the Emmaus story? We believe the good news, but perhaps you wonder how the good news will be made known here in the weeks, months, and years to come.
So heed Jesus’ words: don’t be afraid. Wherever we are on the road, Christ comes with new energy, new possibilities, and new life. Stay faithful, but keep moving. Keep envisioning new ministries, new liturgies, and new ways of serving God’s people. Rest assured, Christ comes to us walking. He will always be beside us on the road.
1. “The Adventurous Lectionary – Third Sunday of Easter – April 30, 2017.”
Jesus must have liked to walk too. Actually, in the ancient world almost everyone walked if they had to get somewhere. In contrast to the pious pictures of the Flight into Egypt, the truth is that only the wealthy could afford a wagon and animals to pull it, or even a single animal on which to ride. If you read the gospels carefully, you see that Jesus appears to have walked almost everywhere: all over Galilee and from Galilee to Jerusalem – a trip he made at least twice according to John. Those of us who participated in the Lenten study series and read Adam Hamilton’s The Call learned that Paul travelled great distances on foot, for almost all of his missionary journeys.
So it should not surprise us that, in Luke’s account of one of Jesus’ first post-resurrection appearances, Jesus comes up alongside Cleopas and his unnamed companion and meets them walking to a village about seven miles from Jerusalem. Perhaps so that we too can feel included in the story, we haven’t heard of a Cleopas before in the gospel stories. Moreover, the unnamed companion could possibly have been a woman, and, unlike other places mentioned in the gospels, scholars have yet to agree as to whether “Emmaus” actually existed, and, if so, where it was.
Be that as it may, this story still has plenty to say to us. It was still the day of Resurrection. Late afternoon perhaps? Dispirited, discouraged, deeply disappointed, perhaps even fearing for their own lives, Cleopas and friend trudge along a dirt road. Up comes a stranger, robed and hooded perhaps like a Star Wars Jedi knight. Even though they aren’t sure who he is, Cleopas and his companion befriend the stranger. Or rather, the stranger befriends them. He hears their sad story and takes in all their pain and grief. Then, amazingly, he helps them understand in a new way what they have experienced. The wise stranger helps them to get beyond their preconceived ideas, to think outside the box, and to see their history, traditions, and Scripture in new and fresh ways.
Cleopas and friend return the favor by extending their hospitality once again to the stranger, inviting him to share a meal with them after their long walk. In the act of sharing bread, Jesus the guest miraculously becomes Jesus the host. When he breaks the bread, when he repeats the familiar pattern of taking, breaking, blessing and giving, actions he had done so many times for his disciples, Cleopas and friend finally see who their mysterious companion on the way has been. Then Jesus vanishes, on the move again, perhaps now walking with someone else. Cleopas and friend are overwhelmed by joy, and they run the seven miles back to Jerusalem, to share their experiences with the others.
“Jesus came up and walked along with them.” Christ comes to us walking. He makes himself known to us at his table, as we share the Eucharist with him and with each other. But Christ also comes to us walking, in the midst of our lives. For some of us, Christ comes to us when we are literally walking. I am not alone in liking to walk in the mornings. Other people in my neighborhood also trudge up the hills. Most of us, myself included I’m sorry to say, walk with earphones. At least I listen to Richard Rohr’s sermons or podcasts of “On Being,” in which journalist Krista Tippett interviews spiritual teachers and writers! In addition to being wonderful exercise, morning walks can also be a good time to pray. Methodist pastor Bruce Epperly also likes a daily morning walk. He tells us, “I often use the time for intercessory prayer and personal centering, taking in God’s energy of love and sharing it with others.”1 There is even a form of very slow meditative walking, where we pause with every step to listen for God’s whisper or savor God’s presence in the world around us. I once was taking my morning walk on a country road – without earphones. I passed a cluster of very small white fungi popping up out of the earth. As I knelt down to look at them more closely, I suddenly had a deep sense of my connection to them and of our shared life in God, both of us as God’s beloved creatures.
Have any of you ever tried walking a labyrinth? We actually have one at the Procter Center, our diocesan camp and conference center in London, Ohio. Many churches and retreat centers have them – there’s a very famous one on the floor inside the great medieval cathedral at Chartres, France. The church where I served as a seminarian, St. Alban’s in Bexley, has one. Most labyrinths are outside. They are large stone circles, with concentric paths inside them that eventually lead to the center of the circle and then back out again. They can only be walked in one direction. Many people who walk labyrinths do so with a prayer intention. They carry the intention with them as they walk inward, stop in the center to stand in God’s presence, then move outward again, usually with a renewed sense of connection with God.
And then there are pilgrimages. Pilgrimages are perhaps the most famous way to meet Christ walking. Of course, pilgrimages are not unique to Christianity. Many other faith communities stress the importance of literally walking as a way to deepen one’s relationship with the divine. Pilgrimages were especially popular in medieval Europe. That’s what The Canterbury Tales are all about: stories told on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the martyred St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury Cathedral in England. Today you can still walk one of the most famous of the medieval pilgrimage routes, the Camino de Compostela, from southern France, across northern Spain, to the cathedral of St. James of Compostela, where legend has it that the remains of the apostle James are buried. You can walk the entire route, a little less than 500 miles. I young man I know did just that and met Christ in the faces, voices, and hands of his fellow pilgrims. You can also walk a short segment of the Camino, just a week perhaps, and still experience the power of a walk with Christ.
You can even take a metaphorical pilgrimage. The writer Christine Valters Paintner has a lovely book entitled The Soul of a Pilgrimage. In it Paintner describes eight stages of the pilgrim’s way – from hearing the call to coming back home. For each stage she describes scripture stories of great biblical journeys and suggests practices of prayer, writing, and photography to deepen the pilgrimage experience. And, in a sense, our daily lives can be pilgrimages. Don’t we often describe the spiritual life as a pilgrimage or journey? If you are ready to come together with other seekers, if you are ready to befriend strangers, if you can share the realities of your life with those around you, and if you are ready to welcome God wherever God shows up, whenever Christ comes up and walks alongside you, then you are on pilgrimage.
Christ comes to us in the breaking of the bread. But Christ also comes to us walking, whether our eyes are open to see him or not. God is always on the move. God calls us to join God on the open road, spiritually, ethically, and, for those who can, physically. And we are on the road with him. As this parish transitions to a new priest, perhaps you may wonder about the destination and future of St. Peter’s. Can we relate to the Emmaus story? We believe the good news, but perhaps you wonder how the good news will be made known here in the weeks, months, and years to come.
So heed Jesus’ words: don’t be afraid. Wherever we are on the road, Christ comes with new energy, new possibilities, and new life. Stay faithful, but keep moving. Keep envisioning new ministries, new liturgies, and new ways of serving God’s people. Rest assured, Christ comes to us walking. He will always be beside us on the road.
1. “The Adventurous Lectionary – Third Sunday of Easter – April 30, 2017.”
Sunday, April 16, 2017
Woman, Why are You Weeping?
“Woman, why are you weeping?” Why wouldn’t Mary be weeping? She has come in the dark to the rock tomb where Jesus’ body was hastily laid two days ago. She’s alone. She has no women friends with her. Jesus’ male disciples are still in hiding. She’s lost her teacher and dearest friend in the world. She’s lost all the hopes and dreams that she had had, that she had tucked away in her heart, for the new reign of peace, justice, and mercy that Jesus had taught, modeled, and promised.
Scripture tells us little about Mary Magdalene. Her name tells us that she was from Magdala, a fishing village on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee. The gospel according to Luke tells us that Jesus had healed her of seven demons, and that was also one of three independent women who traveled with Jesus’ company and bankrolled Jesus’ ministry. John further adds that she stood at the foot of the cross with Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary the wife of Clopas.
But it really doesn’t matter ultimately who she is. She comes to Jesus’ tomb in the darkness of her grief. She finds the stone rolled away and assumes that the last physical evidence of her friend’s existence, his physical body, has been moved – or possibly stolen. She runs to tell Peter and the beloved disciple. Perhaps they can find Jesus’ body. They run to the tomb, bend over, look inside, and see that, yes, Jesus’ body is gone. Then they turn around and head back into hiding.
Mary is still grief-stricken. The men are no comfort at all. Mary is still mourning, still feeling emptiness, absence, and loss. She is still looking for Jesus. She is still wondering where he is, and wondering where God is.
Are you with me? Have you ever been where Mary is? Who hasn’t been? We have all lost loved ones – some way too soon. Most of the time we at least have a body or ashes that we can lay to rest, a last piece of our beloved to which we can bid goodbye. We can lay our loved ones to rest “with sure and certain hope” that they are now in God’s care. We need that physical evidence of their existence. Those who have lost loved ones in war know exactly what Mary was experiencing. Not for nothing do we flock to military cemeteries and memorials, dutifully searching for our loved ones’ names and honoring their memories. I still remember how moved I was when I laid a stone on the memorial to Holocaust victims at the concentration camp in Buchenwald, Germany.
Yes, we know Mary’s grief, and, for some of us, it may still be as fresh as it was for her that dark morning. We also know those other forms of grief, loss, and absence: the death of relationships, lost friendships, divorce, or estrangement from siblings and adult children. We know the despair of addiction. We know about lost jobs and homes. We know about lost hopes and dreams, and about disillusionment, disappointment, and betrayal. We know about discrimination, injustice, and murder. We’ve all stood where Mary stood, searching for God, seeking consolation and finding none. “Woman, why are you weeping?” Why not?
“Woman, why are you weeping?” When Mary answers the angels, she is still feeling loss and emptiness. She is still asking where Jesus is. And even when the stranger, whom she supposes to be a gardener, poses the question, she still feels her loss. Even then, though it is Jesus himself speaking, she is still mired in grief and fails to recognize his voice. She repeats her plaintive question and is about to walk away.
And then. And then the risen Jesus simply calls her name. She stops in her tracks, the truth breaks into her consciousness, the light dawns, and all she can see is the risen Christ. This is the moment of resurrection for the evangelist! In John’s gospel, there are no angels announcing that Jesus has been raised. Jesus himself doesn’t announce that he has been raised. He simply speaks Mary’s name. This is when she realizes that Jesus is not absent but fully present. This is the turning point in her life. “My teacher,” she cries and reaches for him. “You can’t hold on to me,” he says, “everything is changed. Go tell the others.” She does. She is transformed from a woman in mourning to a woman able to proclaim good news. She becomes, as the Greek Orthodox Church calls her, the “apostle to the apostles.” She is an enduring witness to the call of women to preach and teach in the church.
“Woman, why are you weeping?” Are we also in the garden with Mary Magdalene? We don’t need to weep! In all our emptiness, losses, and griefs, there is good news! Didn’t you come here today to hear that good news? There is good news, and we too can hear it. The tomb is empty not because Jesus is absent, but because he is present, because he is always present to us! We too can hear Jesus speaking to us amidst the losses of our own lives. We too will hear him call us by name. He will astound us: he is alive, alive to us in a completely new and unexpected way. We too will hear his reassurance that we are God’s beloved friends. We too will realize that far from being absent, far from being the object of a search that never ends, that God is always present to us. We too will hear his promise to turn sorrow into joy, and death into life. We too will experience resurrection in our own lives.
Will we recognize it? Sometimes we may have to weep, sometimes we may have to acknowledge that we’ve run out of options, sometimes we have to turn to God and just be quiet before we can hear Jesus call our names. Sometimes we have to accept that God shows up in unexpected places. Sometimes we hear God’s voice in the voices of loved ones, friends, preachers, writers, perhaps even Facebook posts! Sometimes we hear Jesus calling us at the altar, as he nourishes us with his Body and Blood. I can’t count the number of times that I have trudged up the aisle dispirited, grieving, full of regrets, or just plain hopeless, and come away healed, filled, and revived. And sometimes we hear Jesus’ voice when we can finally say, “I’m ready to change.” Indeed, Joan Chittister reminds us that “to say ‘I believe in Jesus Christ … who rose from the dead’ is to say something about myself at the same time. It says that I myself am ready to be transformed. Once the Christ life rises in me, I rise to new life as well…. If I know that Jesus has been transformed, then I am transformed myself and, as a result, everything around me. Transformation is never a private affair. But it is always a decisive one.”
Yes, standing with Mary Magdalene, we hear the best news anyone could ever wish for! Then, having heard Jesus call our names, having known his presence truly, are we ready to share that knowledge? Can we hear Jesus’ charge to “go to my brothers?” Can we too say, “I have seen the Lord?”
You can, if you realize that all of us – white, brown, woman, man, old, young, gay, straight, trans, foreign-born – all of us who profess to follow Jesus are called to share our experiences of God at work in our own lives. This Lent we studied the missionary journeys of Paul by reading Adam Hamilton’s The Call and watching the accompanying DVD. In the last chapter of the book Hamilton reminds us that arguments about faith convince no one. Rather, he says, “the most compelling case I can make for my faith comes from my experience of God and the ways that my life is different as a Christ-follower….”
You can say, “I have seen the Lord” when you realize that all of us also experience grief and loss, if you have seen for yourself that we live in a broken, sinful, warring, selfish, and unjust world – the very same world that crucified Jesus, and that all of us need reassurance that Jesus is alive and present in that world. You can say, “I have seen the Lord,” if you trust with all your heart that God is never absent from us, and that in the Paschal Mystery life always triumphs over death.
Legend says that Mary Magdalene continued to proclaim the good news about Jesus, preaching in towns and villages until her death in Gaul in 72 AD. According to one story, she once brought an egg, symbolizing new life, to the Roman emperor Tiberius and told him about Jesus. “A person can no more rise from the dead,” the emperor said angrily, than that egg can turn red.” The egg in Mary’s hand immediately turned red. “Christ is risen,” Mary Magdalene said.1
“Woman, why are you weeping?” I am no longer weeping. I have seen the Lord. And I tell it out with joyful voice! Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia!
1. Sara Miles, “How to be an Evangelist,” Journey with Jesus, 09 April 2017.
Scripture tells us little about Mary Magdalene. Her name tells us that she was from Magdala, a fishing village on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee. The gospel according to Luke tells us that Jesus had healed her of seven demons, and that was also one of three independent women who traveled with Jesus’ company and bankrolled Jesus’ ministry. John further adds that she stood at the foot of the cross with Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary the wife of Clopas.
But it really doesn’t matter ultimately who she is. She comes to Jesus’ tomb in the darkness of her grief. She finds the stone rolled away and assumes that the last physical evidence of her friend’s existence, his physical body, has been moved – or possibly stolen. She runs to tell Peter and the beloved disciple. Perhaps they can find Jesus’ body. They run to the tomb, bend over, look inside, and see that, yes, Jesus’ body is gone. Then they turn around and head back into hiding.
Mary is still grief-stricken. The men are no comfort at all. Mary is still mourning, still feeling emptiness, absence, and loss. She is still looking for Jesus. She is still wondering where he is, and wondering where God is.
Are you with me? Have you ever been where Mary is? Who hasn’t been? We have all lost loved ones – some way too soon. Most of the time we at least have a body or ashes that we can lay to rest, a last piece of our beloved to which we can bid goodbye. We can lay our loved ones to rest “with sure and certain hope” that they are now in God’s care. We need that physical evidence of their existence. Those who have lost loved ones in war know exactly what Mary was experiencing. Not for nothing do we flock to military cemeteries and memorials, dutifully searching for our loved ones’ names and honoring their memories. I still remember how moved I was when I laid a stone on the memorial to Holocaust victims at the concentration camp in Buchenwald, Germany.
Yes, we know Mary’s grief, and, for some of us, it may still be as fresh as it was for her that dark morning. We also know those other forms of grief, loss, and absence: the death of relationships, lost friendships, divorce, or estrangement from siblings and adult children. We know the despair of addiction. We know about lost jobs and homes. We know about lost hopes and dreams, and about disillusionment, disappointment, and betrayal. We know about discrimination, injustice, and murder. We’ve all stood where Mary stood, searching for God, seeking consolation and finding none. “Woman, why are you weeping?” Why not?
“Woman, why are you weeping?” When Mary answers the angels, she is still feeling loss and emptiness. She is still asking where Jesus is. And even when the stranger, whom she supposes to be a gardener, poses the question, she still feels her loss. Even then, though it is Jesus himself speaking, she is still mired in grief and fails to recognize his voice. She repeats her plaintive question and is about to walk away.
And then. And then the risen Jesus simply calls her name. She stops in her tracks, the truth breaks into her consciousness, the light dawns, and all she can see is the risen Christ. This is the moment of resurrection for the evangelist! In John’s gospel, there are no angels announcing that Jesus has been raised. Jesus himself doesn’t announce that he has been raised. He simply speaks Mary’s name. This is when she realizes that Jesus is not absent but fully present. This is the turning point in her life. “My teacher,” she cries and reaches for him. “You can’t hold on to me,” he says, “everything is changed. Go tell the others.” She does. She is transformed from a woman in mourning to a woman able to proclaim good news. She becomes, as the Greek Orthodox Church calls her, the “apostle to the apostles.” She is an enduring witness to the call of women to preach and teach in the church.
“Woman, why are you weeping?” Are we also in the garden with Mary Magdalene? We don’t need to weep! In all our emptiness, losses, and griefs, there is good news! Didn’t you come here today to hear that good news? There is good news, and we too can hear it. The tomb is empty not because Jesus is absent, but because he is present, because he is always present to us! We too can hear Jesus speaking to us amidst the losses of our own lives. We too will hear him call us by name. He will astound us: he is alive, alive to us in a completely new and unexpected way. We too will hear his reassurance that we are God’s beloved friends. We too will realize that far from being absent, far from being the object of a search that never ends, that God is always present to us. We too will hear his promise to turn sorrow into joy, and death into life. We too will experience resurrection in our own lives.
Will we recognize it? Sometimes we may have to weep, sometimes we may have to acknowledge that we’ve run out of options, sometimes we have to turn to God and just be quiet before we can hear Jesus call our names. Sometimes we have to accept that God shows up in unexpected places. Sometimes we hear God’s voice in the voices of loved ones, friends, preachers, writers, perhaps even Facebook posts! Sometimes we hear Jesus calling us at the altar, as he nourishes us with his Body and Blood. I can’t count the number of times that I have trudged up the aisle dispirited, grieving, full of regrets, or just plain hopeless, and come away healed, filled, and revived. And sometimes we hear Jesus’ voice when we can finally say, “I’m ready to change.” Indeed, Joan Chittister reminds us that “to say ‘I believe in Jesus Christ … who rose from the dead’ is to say something about myself at the same time. It says that I myself am ready to be transformed. Once the Christ life rises in me, I rise to new life as well…. If I know that Jesus has been transformed, then I am transformed myself and, as a result, everything around me. Transformation is never a private affair. But it is always a decisive one.”
Yes, standing with Mary Magdalene, we hear the best news anyone could ever wish for! Then, having heard Jesus call our names, having known his presence truly, are we ready to share that knowledge? Can we hear Jesus’ charge to “go to my brothers?” Can we too say, “I have seen the Lord?”
You can, if you realize that all of us – white, brown, woman, man, old, young, gay, straight, trans, foreign-born – all of us who profess to follow Jesus are called to share our experiences of God at work in our own lives. This Lent we studied the missionary journeys of Paul by reading Adam Hamilton’s The Call and watching the accompanying DVD. In the last chapter of the book Hamilton reminds us that arguments about faith convince no one. Rather, he says, “the most compelling case I can make for my faith comes from my experience of God and the ways that my life is different as a Christ-follower….”
You can say, “I have seen the Lord” when you realize that all of us also experience grief and loss, if you have seen for yourself that we live in a broken, sinful, warring, selfish, and unjust world – the very same world that crucified Jesus, and that all of us need reassurance that Jesus is alive and present in that world. You can say, “I have seen the Lord,” if you trust with all your heart that God is never absent from us, and that in the Paschal Mystery life always triumphs over death.
Legend says that Mary Magdalene continued to proclaim the good news about Jesus, preaching in towns and villages until her death in Gaul in 72 AD. According to one story, she once brought an egg, symbolizing new life, to the Roman emperor Tiberius and told him about Jesus. “A person can no more rise from the dead,” the emperor said angrily, than that egg can turn red.” The egg in Mary’s hand immediately turned red. “Christ is risen,” Mary Magdalene said.1
“Woman, why are you weeping?” I am no longer weeping. I have seen the Lord. And I tell it out with joyful voice! Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia!
1. Sara Miles, “How to be an Evangelist,” Journey with Jesus, 09 April 2017.
Sunday, April 2, 2017
Out of the Depths
“Out of the depths have I called to you, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice….”
Should our readings from Scripture be only sweetness and light? Should the preacher deliver only good news? You know as well as I do that there is plenty of pain in Scripture. You even heard some of it today. And there is also plenty of pain and anguish in our corporate and personal lives. Wouldn’t a preacher be dishonest if she refused to see or preach about the pain in our lives? Perhaps in Lent we are especially called to acknowledge the depths in our lives and to ask where God is when we can’t hear the good news.
Our psalm for this morning calls us to do just that, to consider our cries from the depths. Traditionally, Psalm 130 is part of a group of what is called the Psalms of Ascent, i.e., psalms 120 to 134. This group of psalms is called Psalms of Ascent, because these psalms were traditionally said on the way to the temple in Jerusalem. In ancient times you were literally in the depths as your approached the temple, as it was built on a very high rock. Today that rock is called the Temple Mount, and it houses the Dome of the Rock. It is still a holy place for Jews who come to pray at the Wailing Wall, the last remaining wall of the Second temple, i.e.,the temple of Jesus’ time.
But the “depths” to which the psalmist alludes represent more than the valley floor. Now this is not a psalm of lament like, for example, Psalm 22, in which the psalmist expresses a deep sense of abandonment by God. Here, the psalmist is in some unnamed pain. Perhaps the psalmist cannot even name the source of the pain. Even so, the psalmist calls out from the depths of that pain. What is more important, the psalmist doesn’t just shout out incoherently, though one might do that in great pain. Rather, the psalmist calls out to God – not in complaint, not whining, or grumbling. The psalmist calls out to God for an attentive hearing: “Let you ears consider well the voice of my complaint.” It’s as if crying out to God is sufficient and will in itself lead to hope. When in pain, the psalmist in effect says, “Keep shouting out to God.”
I’m right there with the psalmist. I’ve been reading lately about World War II. Last week I mentioned All the Light We Cannot See, set in France during the war and featuring the blind girl Marie-Laure. I’ve also been listening to The Zookeeper’s Wife, a true story set in Poland during the war. In fact, the film version of the book has just opened in theaters. I’ve found myself wondering how those experiencing the war, and especially Jews and those who helped them escape the Holocaust, might have heard this psalm. Would it have encouraged them?
More to the point, does it encourage us? Many people today look at the state of world, especially the chaos in Washington and what feels like endless war, and are plunged into despair. Others look at the policies and acts of Congress that threaten to undo all the progress we’ve made in recent decades and are deeply worried about the future of our nation and the world.
And certainly we have all known – and know – the depths of our own lives. You can’t open the newspaper or your favorite news app or turn on the television without confronting the depths of addiction our state is experiencing. Drug overdose deaths alone claimed 3,050 lives in Ohio in 2015, not to mentioned the children and other family members affected by drug use, or addictions to other substances. Not for nothing do twelve-step programs say that one has to “hit bottom” before starting the path to recovery. Even if you’ve never been addicted to anything and have been clean and sober your entire life, you’ve certainly experienced dislocation, when dreams vanish and everything in life seems to go awry. Then there’s divorce, loneliness, estrangement from family members, illness, and injury. And, of course, as we were graphically reminded on Ash Wednesday, there’s also death, of our loved ones, and eventually of ourselves. When the psalmist calls “out of the depths,” we have been there too.
But the psalmist does more than cry out to God. The psalmist also then reflects on who this God is whose ears are called for. This is a God who doesn’t keep a “watcher’s eye” out for sins. Rather, this God is always willing to restore right relationship with God’s people. This God is always there for us, a loving God on whom we can count. What a wonderful image in verse 5: the watchman doesn’t “hope” that dawn will come, the watchman knows that the sun will come up! The psalmist may have to wait for God to act but does so with absolutely certain confidence that God will act.
There is good news in this psalm after all! Do you hear it here? Can we cry out to God from the depths of our lives with the same confidence that we have in the sunrise? I’m reminded of that wonderful song from “Annie:” The sun will come out/ Tomorrow/ Bet your bottom dollar/ That tomorrow/ There'll be sun!/ Just thinkin' about/ Tomorrow/ Clears away the cobwebs,/ And the sorrow/ 'Til there's none!” Do we have that confidence in God?
Susanna Metz tells of her days as a boarding student with the sisters of the Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The sisters have the custom of reciting psalm 130 every evening at 7:00 PM. When the bell rang at 7:00, the students in the study hall would put down their homework and pray the psalm with the sister in charge. Later, as a sister herself, Metz found the psalm to be “a comfort, a habit that made me stop and remember that no matter what, God was with me, waiting … for me to acknowledge that presence within.” Now, no longer a sister, Metz still feels the connection through that psalm with the community and, more important, with her faith in God. Would we benefit from reciting psalm 130 nightly?
Reciting the psalm more regularly might also remind us that the rest of today’s readings from Scripture also reflect sure confidence in God’s action on our behalf. The wonderful vision of the prophet Ezekiel reminds us that God will act when we are in the depths, when we are as lifeless and scattered as the dry bones. Just as Ezekiel saw God reviving the house of Israel, so will God revive us. Our gospel from the gospel according to John is a chaotic and multi-layered story, much like most of John’s gospel. In fact, I could easily imagine this story as reader’s theater! However, if nothing else, the story gives us a dramatic foretaste of the Paschal Mystery, the promise that God will bring us from the depths to the heights, from death to life. What could be better news than that!
And yet there’s one more thing we need to say about this psalm, which we dare not overlook. The psalm ends with two important shifts: from the individual to the corporate, and from addressing God to addressing Israel. Once having asked God to hear and having regained confidence in God’s actions, the psalmist then shares that confidence with the community of Israel. And not because God’s help has already come – it has not by the end of the psalm – but because the psalmist trusts God’s promise of mercy, forgiveness, help, and grace.
We too are called to share our confidence in God’s loving actions with others. We are “Easter people,” people who trust the Paschal Mystery, people who trust that we don’t remain forever in the depths, and that death leads eventually to life. We are called to share that faith especially in this parish. One way we can do that is by praying for each other – that’s one reason for our prayer list, so that we can share with each other the needs of those on our hearts. Perhaps we can do that also by “waiting” with each other in times of stress and difficulty, either in person in sick rooms or at grave sites, or again in prayer. And we can share our faith and trust in God by praying and working for the future of this parish, holding on to our confidence that God will continue to uphold and support a community of Jesus’ followers in the Anglican tradition in this place.
We can also share our confidence in God’s active love with the wider world. If we worry about war, we can pray and work for peace. We can welcome the stranger and those of other faith communities. We can insist that all people be treated with respect and dignity. If we are fearful about the future of our country, we can pray and work for those issues close to our hearts. In particular, we can contact our elected representatives in Columbus and Washington and remind them of our commitment to peace and justice – just as the psalmist reminds the house of Israel.
Most important, all our readings encourage us not to stay in the depths but to confidently call on God – and then share with others our confidence that God’s reign has come near us.
Should our readings from Scripture be only sweetness and light? Should the preacher deliver only good news? You know as well as I do that there is plenty of pain in Scripture. You even heard some of it today. And there is also plenty of pain and anguish in our corporate and personal lives. Wouldn’t a preacher be dishonest if she refused to see or preach about the pain in our lives? Perhaps in Lent we are especially called to acknowledge the depths in our lives and to ask where God is when we can’t hear the good news.
Our psalm for this morning calls us to do just that, to consider our cries from the depths. Traditionally, Psalm 130 is part of a group of what is called the Psalms of Ascent, i.e., psalms 120 to 134. This group of psalms is called Psalms of Ascent, because these psalms were traditionally said on the way to the temple in Jerusalem. In ancient times you were literally in the depths as your approached the temple, as it was built on a very high rock. Today that rock is called the Temple Mount, and it houses the Dome of the Rock. It is still a holy place for Jews who come to pray at the Wailing Wall, the last remaining wall of the Second temple, i.e.,the temple of Jesus’ time.
But the “depths” to which the psalmist alludes represent more than the valley floor. Now this is not a psalm of lament like, for example, Psalm 22, in which the psalmist expresses a deep sense of abandonment by God. Here, the psalmist is in some unnamed pain. Perhaps the psalmist cannot even name the source of the pain. Even so, the psalmist calls out from the depths of that pain. What is more important, the psalmist doesn’t just shout out incoherently, though one might do that in great pain. Rather, the psalmist calls out to God – not in complaint, not whining, or grumbling. The psalmist calls out to God for an attentive hearing: “Let you ears consider well the voice of my complaint.” It’s as if crying out to God is sufficient and will in itself lead to hope. When in pain, the psalmist in effect says, “Keep shouting out to God.”
I’m right there with the psalmist. I’ve been reading lately about World War II. Last week I mentioned All the Light We Cannot See, set in France during the war and featuring the blind girl Marie-Laure. I’ve also been listening to The Zookeeper’s Wife, a true story set in Poland during the war. In fact, the film version of the book has just opened in theaters. I’ve found myself wondering how those experiencing the war, and especially Jews and those who helped them escape the Holocaust, might have heard this psalm. Would it have encouraged them?
More to the point, does it encourage us? Many people today look at the state of world, especially the chaos in Washington and what feels like endless war, and are plunged into despair. Others look at the policies and acts of Congress that threaten to undo all the progress we’ve made in recent decades and are deeply worried about the future of our nation and the world.
And certainly we have all known – and know – the depths of our own lives. You can’t open the newspaper or your favorite news app or turn on the television without confronting the depths of addiction our state is experiencing. Drug overdose deaths alone claimed 3,050 lives in Ohio in 2015, not to mentioned the children and other family members affected by drug use, or addictions to other substances. Not for nothing do twelve-step programs say that one has to “hit bottom” before starting the path to recovery. Even if you’ve never been addicted to anything and have been clean and sober your entire life, you’ve certainly experienced dislocation, when dreams vanish and everything in life seems to go awry. Then there’s divorce, loneliness, estrangement from family members, illness, and injury. And, of course, as we were graphically reminded on Ash Wednesday, there’s also death, of our loved ones, and eventually of ourselves. When the psalmist calls “out of the depths,” we have been there too.
But the psalmist does more than cry out to God. The psalmist also then reflects on who this God is whose ears are called for. This is a God who doesn’t keep a “watcher’s eye” out for sins. Rather, this God is always willing to restore right relationship with God’s people. This God is always there for us, a loving God on whom we can count. What a wonderful image in verse 5: the watchman doesn’t “hope” that dawn will come, the watchman knows that the sun will come up! The psalmist may have to wait for God to act but does so with absolutely certain confidence that God will act.
There is good news in this psalm after all! Do you hear it here? Can we cry out to God from the depths of our lives with the same confidence that we have in the sunrise? I’m reminded of that wonderful song from “Annie:” The sun will come out/ Tomorrow/ Bet your bottom dollar/ That tomorrow/ There'll be sun!/ Just thinkin' about/ Tomorrow/ Clears away the cobwebs,/ And the sorrow/ 'Til there's none!” Do we have that confidence in God?
Susanna Metz tells of her days as a boarding student with the sisters of the Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The sisters have the custom of reciting psalm 130 every evening at 7:00 PM. When the bell rang at 7:00, the students in the study hall would put down their homework and pray the psalm with the sister in charge. Later, as a sister herself, Metz found the psalm to be “a comfort, a habit that made me stop and remember that no matter what, God was with me, waiting … for me to acknowledge that presence within.” Now, no longer a sister, Metz still feels the connection through that psalm with the community and, more important, with her faith in God. Would we benefit from reciting psalm 130 nightly?
Reciting the psalm more regularly might also remind us that the rest of today’s readings from Scripture also reflect sure confidence in God’s action on our behalf. The wonderful vision of the prophet Ezekiel reminds us that God will act when we are in the depths, when we are as lifeless and scattered as the dry bones. Just as Ezekiel saw God reviving the house of Israel, so will God revive us. Our gospel from the gospel according to John is a chaotic and multi-layered story, much like most of John’s gospel. In fact, I could easily imagine this story as reader’s theater! However, if nothing else, the story gives us a dramatic foretaste of the Paschal Mystery, the promise that God will bring us from the depths to the heights, from death to life. What could be better news than that!
And yet there’s one more thing we need to say about this psalm, which we dare not overlook. The psalm ends with two important shifts: from the individual to the corporate, and from addressing God to addressing Israel. Once having asked God to hear and having regained confidence in God’s actions, the psalmist then shares that confidence with the community of Israel. And not because God’s help has already come – it has not by the end of the psalm – but because the psalmist trusts God’s promise of mercy, forgiveness, help, and grace.
We too are called to share our confidence in God’s loving actions with others. We are “Easter people,” people who trust the Paschal Mystery, people who trust that we don’t remain forever in the depths, and that death leads eventually to life. We are called to share that faith especially in this parish. One way we can do that is by praying for each other – that’s one reason for our prayer list, so that we can share with each other the needs of those on our hearts. Perhaps we can do that also by “waiting” with each other in times of stress and difficulty, either in person in sick rooms or at grave sites, or again in prayer. And we can share our faith and trust in God by praying and working for the future of this parish, holding on to our confidence that God will continue to uphold and support a community of Jesus’ followers in the Anglican tradition in this place.
We can also share our confidence in God’s active love with the wider world. If we worry about war, we can pray and work for peace. We can welcome the stranger and those of other faith communities. We can insist that all people be treated with respect and dignity. If we are fearful about the future of our country, we can pray and work for those issues close to our hearts. In particular, we can contact our elected representatives in Columbus and Washington and remind them of our commitment to peace and justice – just as the psalmist reminds the house of Israel.
Most important, all our readings encourage us not to stay in the depths but to confidently call on God – and then share with others our confidence that God’s reign has come near us.
Sunday, March 26, 2017
I was Blind
All the Light We Cannot See is a recent novel that is set in occupied France during World War II. It tells the story of Marie-Laure LeBlanc who, at the age of six, becomes blind from a degenerative condition. Her widowed father is a master locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. To help her navigate the world and live independently, Marie-Laure’s father builds her a scale model of her neighborhood, and then walks her through the streets, teaching her to count her steps. He also has her learn Braille and brings her books that open up her world.
When the Nazis invade France in 1940, Marie-Laure and her father flee to Saint-Malo on the Atlantic coast, where they live in the house of great-uncle Etienne, a recluse. Again Marie-Laure’s father builds her wooden scale models and teaches her to navigate Etienne’s house and neighborhood. Although her father is arrested by the Nazis, partly because of his diligence in mapping Saint-Malo, Marie-Laure is able to function without him, draw out Etienne, help her neighbors, and change the life of Werner, a young German soldier of the occupation. There’s much more to the story, and I highly recommend that you read it for yourself. And why do I recommend it? It is not only the character of Marie-Laure that captivates us. What is more important is that the novel reminds us that there are different kinds of blindness, and that physical blindness does not necessarily lead to a life of misery, but only if the world around us is willing to support us and enable us to “see” differently.
Today’s readings from Scripture also ask us to consider the meanings and varieties of blindness. As you heard the reading from the first book of Samuel about the choice of a king to succeed Saul, couldn’t you just picture the parade of Jesse’s sons passing by the prophet Samuel? Tall, strong, probably accomplished horsemen, hunters, and fighters, wouldn’t they all have made excellent kings? No one in the story here is physically blind, but all are inwardly blind, as they seem to focus only on outward physical appearance. Even Samuel, when he sees tall Eliab, thinks that Eliab must be God’s choice. However, Samuel is also attuned to God, and so he is able to hear God say, “Do not look on his appearance … for the Lord does not see as mortals see….” When David is finally summoned from tending the sheep and is brought before Samuel, Samuel is able to hear God say, “Rise up and anoint him; for this is the one.”
Our Gospel story from the Gospel according to John similarly intrigues us with its depiction of different kinds of blindness. But first, there are some caveats, or warnings, when we talk about this gospel. Remember that it was written in the 90’s, i.e., sixty years after Jesus’ death. More important, it was written for a community in conflict with the mainline Judaism of its day. “The Jews” in this text are the religious leaders opposed to Jesus, not all Jews and not even all religious leaders. When this particular story mentions that followers of Jesus were “put out of the synagogue,” it refers to what Jesus’ followers in the 90’s were experiencing, not the experience of Jesus’ first disciples. And finally, remember that the overarching theme of this gospel is proving Jesus’ divinity, which you can hear here in “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”
So keeping that all in mind, let’s look at this challenging story. Here we see different kinds of blindness and different ways of responding to what is plainly in front of us. To begin with we see the man born blind, i.e., physically blind like Marie-Laure. However, unlike Marie-Laure, this man is stigmatized by his community because of his disability. Considered unclean, he is forced to become a beggar. Yet by God’s grace he is able to allow Jesus to touch him with a mixture of mud and saliva, and to follow Jesus’ instruction to wash in the pool of Siloam. Knowing he has been healed, he declares Jesus to be a prophet and one who had surely come from God.
Meanwhile, everyone else in the story is unable to see what has happened. The bystanders waffle: maybe it was he who was healed, maybe it wasn’t. The man’s parents cannot or will not say that their son has been healed. And the religious leaders, like so many people we know, cannot believe what they see and hear. Why? Because what has happened does not conform to their view of the world, the Law of Moses, or what are permissible activities on the Sabbath. While the evangelist seems to portray these religious leaders negatively, I can easily understand their desire to hold on to tradition, their inability to accept a changed reality, and their certainty that they are right.
And more important, aren’t we too in these stories? We are surely in the story from first Samuel. So many of us are just like Samuel! We too can’t see beyond outward characteristics! Don’t we judge other people on the basis of looks? Actually, our culture is obsessed with looks, especially how women look. Just look at the ads in any magazine! But don’t we also judge people on the basis of gender, age, religion, ethnicity, nationality, social class, and disability? “You only get one chance to make a first impression,” the how-to-succeed books say. But so often that first impression is so wrong. For most of us, it takes more than one encounter for us to see the real person beneath the outward trappings. How hard it is to see “as God sees.”
And don’t we also find it hard to see that God has done and is doing a new thing in our lives or in our world? Do we find it difficult to accept the reality of God’s actions because, like the bystanders, we don’t trust the evidence right in front of us, or because, like the beggar’s parents, we are afraid of what others might say if we commit to some new understanding? Or more than likely, we find it hard to see God at work, doing a new thing, because we are still looking through the lenses of the past. Like the religious leaders, we dismiss the possibility that God is changing our lives or our world, because we can’t let go of cherished beliefs and practices. “Tradition!” says Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, when he attempts to explain life in his village. Do we still cling to outmoded traditions and beliefs?
We don’t have to stay blind! Marie-Laure learned to “see” through her father’s models and measured walks. Samuel learned to see by trusting God’s voice inside him, as he rejected all of Jesse’s older sons. The blind man was able to see through trusting a strange rabbi. The bystanders, the man’s parents, and the religious leaders were not able, at least in this story, to learn how to see.
How do we learn to see more clearly? To me, we begin to see more clearly when we give up our own sense of “how things are” and allow for the possibility that God does see differently than we do. We see more clearly when we can grasp that reality might be different than we think it is. We see more clearly when we are willing to give up our intense control of our lives and admit that we are not always right. For some of us, that is very difficult!
And how do we cultivate discernment and inner sight? How do we learn to let God help us see more clearly? There are lots of formal processes and good books about discernment out there. The Jesuits are especially good at teaching us discernment through meditating on Scripture. They also teach an especially good practice of walking through our day, watching for where God might have shown up. In the secular world, strategic planning, especially when it includes visioning exercises, can lead to clearer sight. Parishes can engage in communal discernment practices, and, again, there are many good books, consultants, and programs out there for that. Some of you are familiar with the discernment processes that accompany a felt sense of call to ordained ministry.
For us as individuals, perhaps the best way to learn to see more clearly is to spend some time, preferably every day, in intentional silence. Lectio divina, i.e., slow reading of Scripture, intentionally listening for God’s word to us, is one practice that, like new eyeglasses, can improve our sight. Or just sit in silence, even for five or ten minutes, setting aside your own thoughts and even conscious prayers, just listening for God’s word. Have you ever considered a silent retreat? They are wonderful for bringing us to a place of openness to God and for enabling us to consider how God might want to do something new in our lives. If you’re not ready for a week in silence – even though I highly recommend it – I invite you instead to try this spiritual exercise. Sit quietly. Take a few deep breaths. Ask yourself: what does God see in me? What does God see in N? Is there anything about N that I might not be seeing?
Ultimately, our goal as followers of Jesus is to cultivate wisdom, about ourselves, the world, and God, which is how we truly see. As we listen for the Word made flesh, i.e., God present to us in Jesus, we will learn wisdom. We will not be blind, but we will truly see God at work in ourselves and in all whom we encounter.
When the Nazis invade France in 1940, Marie-Laure and her father flee to Saint-Malo on the Atlantic coast, where they live in the house of great-uncle Etienne, a recluse. Again Marie-Laure’s father builds her wooden scale models and teaches her to navigate Etienne’s house and neighborhood. Although her father is arrested by the Nazis, partly because of his diligence in mapping Saint-Malo, Marie-Laure is able to function without him, draw out Etienne, help her neighbors, and change the life of Werner, a young German soldier of the occupation. There’s much more to the story, and I highly recommend that you read it for yourself. And why do I recommend it? It is not only the character of Marie-Laure that captivates us. What is more important is that the novel reminds us that there are different kinds of blindness, and that physical blindness does not necessarily lead to a life of misery, but only if the world around us is willing to support us and enable us to “see” differently.
Today’s readings from Scripture also ask us to consider the meanings and varieties of blindness. As you heard the reading from the first book of Samuel about the choice of a king to succeed Saul, couldn’t you just picture the parade of Jesse’s sons passing by the prophet Samuel? Tall, strong, probably accomplished horsemen, hunters, and fighters, wouldn’t they all have made excellent kings? No one in the story here is physically blind, but all are inwardly blind, as they seem to focus only on outward physical appearance. Even Samuel, when he sees tall Eliab, thinks that Eliab must be God’s choice. However, Samuel is also attuned to God, and so he is able to hear God say, “Do not look on his appearance … for the Lord does not see as mortals see….” When David is finally summoned from tending the sheep and is brought before Samuel, Samuel is able to hear God say, “Rise up and anoint him; for this is the one.”
Our Gospel story from the Gospel according to John similarly intrigues us with its depiction of different kinds of blindness. But first, there are some caveats, or warnings, when we talk about this gospel. Remember that it was written in the 90’s, i.e., sixty years after Jesus’ death. More important, it was written for a community in conflict with the mainline Judaism of its day. “The Jews” in this text are the religious leaders opposed to Jesus, not all Jews and not even all religious leaders. When this particular story mentions that followers of Jesus were “put out of the synagogue,” it refers to what Jesus’ followers in the 90’s were experiencing, not the experience of Jesus’ first disciples. And finally, remember that the overarching theme of this gospel is proving Jesus’ divinity, which you can hear here in “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”
So keeping that all in mind, let’s look at this challenging story. Here we see different kinds of blindness and different ways of responding to what is plainly in front of us. To begin with we see the man born blind, i.e., physically blind like Marie-Laure. However, unlike Marie-Laure, this man is stigmatized by his community because of his disability. Considered unclean, he is forced to become a beggar. Yet by God’s grace he is able to allow Jesus to touch him with a mixture of mud and saliva, and to follow Jesus’ instruction to wash in the pool of Siloam. Knowing he has been healed, he declares Jesus to be a prophet and one who had surely come from God.
Meanwhile, everyone else in the story is unable to see what has happened. The bystanders waffle: maybe it was he who was healed, maybe it wasn’t. The man’s parents cannot or will not say that their son has been healed. And the religious leaders, like so many people we know, cannot believe what they see and hear. Why? Because what has happened does not conform to their view of the world, the Law of Moses, or what are permissible activities on the Sabbath. While the evangelist seems to portray these religious leaders negatively, I can easily understand their desire to hold on to tradition, their inability to accept a changed reality, and their certainty that they are right.
And more important, aren’t we too in these stories? We are surely in the story from first Samuel. So many of us are just like Samuel! We too can’t see beyond outward characteristics! Don’t we judge other people on the basis of looks? Actually, our culture is obsessed with looks, especially how women look. Just look at the ads in any magazine! But don’t we also judge people on the basis of gender, age, religion, ethnicity, nationality, social class, and disability? “You only get one chance to make a first impression,” the how-to-succeed books say. But so often that first impression is so wrong. For most of us, it takes more than one encounter for us to see the real person beneath the outward trappings. How hard it is to see “as God sees.”
And don’t we also find it hard to see that God has done and is doing a new thing in our lives or in our world? Do we find it difficult to accept the reality of God’s actions because, like the bystanders, we don’t trust the evidence right in front of us, or because, like the beggar’s parents, we are afraid of what others might say if we commit to some new understanding? Or more than likely, we find it hard to see God at work, doing a new thing, because we are still looking through the lenses of the past. Like the religious leaders, we dismiss the possibility that God is changing our lives or our world, because we can’t let go of cherished beliefs and practices. “Tradition!” says Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, when he attempts to explain life in his village. Do we still cling to outmoded traditions and beliefs?
We don’t have to stay blind! Marie-Laure learned to “see” through her father’s models and measured walks. Samuel learned to see by trusting God’s voice inside him, as he rejected all of Jesse’s older sons. The blind man was able to see through trusting a strange rabbi. The bystanders, the man’s parents, and the religious leaders were not able, at least in this story, to learn how to see.
How do we learn to see more clearly? To me, we begin to see more clearly when we give up our own sense of “how things are” and allow for the possibility that God does see differently than we do. We see more clearly when we can grasp that reality might be different than we think it is. We see more clearly when we are willing to give up our intense control of our lives and admit that we are not always right. For some of us, that is very difficult!
And how do we cultivate discernment and inner sight? How do we learn to let God help us see more clearly? There are lots of formal processes and good books about discernment out there. The Jesuits are especially good at teaching us discernment through meditating on Scripture. They also teach an especially good practice of walking through our day, watching for where God might have shown up. In the secular world, strategic planning, especially when it includes visioning exercises, can lead to clearer sight. Parishes can engage in communal discernment practices, and, again, there are many good books, consultants, and programs out there for that. Some of you are familiar with the discernment processes that accompany a felt sense of call to ordained ministry.
For us as individuals, perhaps the best way to learn to see more clearly is to spend some time, preferably every day, in intentional silence. Lectio divina, i.e., slow reading of Scripture, intentionally listening for God’s word to us, is one practice that, like new eyeglasses, can improve our sight. Or just sit in silence, even for five or ten minutes, setting aside your own thoughts and even conscious prayers, just listening for God’s word. Have you ever considered a silent retreat? They are wonderful for bringing us to a place of openness to God and for enabling us to consider how God might want to do something new in our lives. If you’re not ready for a week in silence – even though I highly recommend it – I invite you instead to try this spiritual exercise. Sit quietly. Take a few deep breaths. Ask yourself: what does God see in me? What does God see in N? Is there anything about N that I might not be seeing?
Ultimately, our goal as followers of Jesus is to cultivate wisdom, about ourselves, the world, and God, which is how we truly see. As we listen for the Word made flesh, i.e., God present to us in Jesus, we will learn wisdom. We will not be blind, but we will truly see God at work in ourselves and in all whom we encounter.
Sunday, March 5, 2017
Serve and Protect
It’s a fable. The enchanting – or perhaps frightening – story of Eve, Adam, the serpent, and the tree is a fable. We know that the earth isn’t just 6,000 years old. We accept the Big Bang theory and believe that our cosmos came into being about thirteen billion years ago, and that it’s still continuing to expand. The theory of evolution tells us that human beings didn’t just appear exactly fully formed as we are today. We know that the first woman was not formed out of one of the ribs of the first man. If anything, scientists tell us that the first humanoid might have been a woman. We even know that there were alternate humans, the Neanderthals, who eventually blended in with our species, homo sapiens. (If you’re interested in humans and Neanderthals, look into Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.)
It’s a fable. The sages who finally included the story in the Torah, and all the rabbis who have commented on it since, knew it was a fable and not to be taken literally. But the sages who compiled the Hebrew Bible included the two stories of human creation because both of them contain deep truths – truths to which we must still pay attention. Today’s story in the reading from the book of Genesis especially contains within it lessons about our place in creation and God’s expectations of us. As we begin our Lenten journey to the Cross, it is important that we not miss what the story of Adam, Eve, the serpent, and the tree has to tell us.
Today’s reading comes from the second creation story in Genesis. What you heard is actually two disconnected pieces, with an important piece missing. In the first part of the story, God has made the first human being “Adam” from the dust of the earth, “adamah” in Hebrew. In the Bible, yes, we truly are “dust.” Then God created a garden and placed the first human in it. God gave the first human two instructions: what our translation renders as to “till and keep” the garden (“dress it and keep it” in the KJV), and to refrain from eating from a certain tree. After this, there is the story of the creation of a second human, a woman, which our reading skips over. Then we have the second part of our reading, the story of the interplay among the woman, the man, the serpent, and the fruit of the forbidden tree.
So what are we supposed to learn from this fable? Both creation stories, and especially the first one, give us a breath-taking picture of God speaking creation into being. “Let there be light,” God thunders in the first creation story, and there was light. Let the waters recede, and let there be sun and moon, and vegetation, and animals, and – finally – humans created in God’s own image. And it was all good.
The second creation story, the one we hear about this morning, begins right with the creation of the first human being, followed by the creation of the Garden of Eden. Why did God create the human being? Here is the answer: to “till and keep” the garden, and by implication all of creation.1 In the context of ancient creation myths this reason is quite amazing. Other creation stories show humans as an accident, or an after-thought, or even a mistake. In our modern creation myth, we humans tend to see ourselves as the apex of creation, the point of it all. In contrast to both these points of view, the Genesis story says that humans are not created for themselves, but are created to till and keep the garden.
Do you wonder what “till and keep” means? Actually, this isn’t a good translation of the Hebrew. A better translation would be to “serve and protect.” In other words, we humans were created, as the teller of the Genesis story understands it, to take care of creation – not to exploit it. We were created so that we could pay attention to the needs of creation, rather than to our own needs, to love creation as God loves it. And we are responsible for its well-being, both now and into the future. We are to be concerned “for those who come after us.”. In a word care for God’s garden is our mission as human beings.
And how well are we fulfilling our mission as human beings? The story of Adam, Eve, the serpent, and the tree suggests that we are not doing very well. In a word, we let ourselves get distracted and forget about God’s mission. We get distracted by our physical needs. Eve thought that the forbidden tree was “good for food.” Those in our country who still worry about where their next meal is coming from – and whether their SNAP dollars will last through the end of the month – are very appropriately distracted by physical needs. Most of us, though, are distracted by our desire for “stuff,” for clothes, cars, electronics, airplanes, weapons – you name it. Do really need the latest style of tennis shoes, or a new cell phone every two years? Our landfills are bursting, and still we keep buying – and tossing out. Worse, we get distracted by physical substances that do us real harm, especially alcohol and drugs. You have only to open the daily newspaper to know that, despite the “war on drugs,” our opiate addiction is killing us – right here in southern Ohio. (If you’re interested in the drug problem right here at home, look into Dream Land: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones.)
If we are not distracted by physical needs, many of us are distracted by things that dazzle and entertain us. For Eve, the forbidden tree “was a delight to the eyes.” Well, sometimes I get dazzled by flowering trees, but most of us are more likely to become dazzled and enthralled by football games or other spectacles. Or maybe you’re hooked on video games. For some of us it’s social media. Am I the only one who looks around after an hour or so and says, “Did I just spend all that time on Facebook?”
Aren’t we also distracted by our need for control? Eve thought that the forbidden tree would “make one wise,” i.e., that it would allow her and Adam to be like God. Do we think we can know all the variables that will affect our lives and then control them? We know we cannot, yet we can get seduced into thinking that we can.
And finally, of course, we get distracted by the illusion that we will not die. This is the serpent’s most perverse lie: “You will not die.” But we believe it! Or we live as if we do. We live as if there’s still time to turn our lives around. We live as if there’s yet another day to do the right thing. We think we have plenty of time to apologize and make amends to those we have hurt – or to forgive and reconcile with those who have hurt us. We put off working for peace and justice, because there’s still plenty of time for us to do those good things. We don’t take care of our bodies, nor do we care whether our neighbors have enough to eat or have access to decent healthcare. We don’t make wills. And we don’t prepare for the day when we will actually take our last breath.
My brothers and sisters, it’s just a fable, but it’s a fable that is also describing our lives. What happened in that garden also happens to us. The story of Adam, Eve, the serpent, and the tree is also a story about us. We still have a responsibility to serve and protect the earth, in the 21st century now perhaps more than ever. The Paris agreement on climate change still matters, as does the ability of our federal and state agencies to fund research. In our relatively under-populated country, we may still think that the earth will regenerate itself after we’ve harmed it – or that we can just move further west. The truth is that the network of mines under southeast Ohio will last forever. The mountains in Kentucky and West Virginia that were flattened by the mining companies will be scarred for centuries. The fracking water that we’ve pumped underground will stay there forever – we hope.
Lent is a time to acknowledge and recommit ourselves to stewardship of the earth – and to remind our elected representatives to be mindful of the needs of “this fragile earth, our island home.” Lent is a time to recognize and repent of all the things that distract us from our responsibilities. It is a time to turn our backs on the blandishments of the serpent and return to our responsibility for creation and its inhabitants. It is a time to read Scripture attentively and note, for example, how Jesus responded to the distractions from his mission that he was offered. Lent is a time to examine our lives and ask how we, as individuals, as a parish, and as a community, need to change. Lent is a time to pray that now, in this mortal life, God’s Holy Spirit will lead us to amendment of life and commitment to God’s holy mission. Lent is time to be confident in God’s mercy and open to God’s leading. May it be so.
1. With thanks to Jon Berquist in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 2 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox), pp. 27ff., for suggesting the theme of “till and keep” for this story.
It’s a fable. The sages who finally included the story in the Torah, and all the rabbis who have commented on it since, knew it was a fable and not to be taken literally. But the sages who compiled the Hebrew Bible included the two stories of human creation because both of them contain deep truths – truths to which we must still pay attention. Today’s story in the reading from the book of Genesis especially contains within it lessons about our place in creation and God’s expectations of us. As we begin our Lenten journey to the Cross, it is important that we not miss what the story of Adam, Eve, the serpent, and the tree has to tell us.
Today’s reading comes from the second creation story in Genesis. What you heard is actually two disconnected pieces, with an important piece missing. In the first part of the story, God has made the first human being “Adam” from the dust of the earth, “adamah” in Hebrew. In the Bible, yes, we truly are “dust.” Then God created a garden and placed the first human in it. God gave the first human two instructions: what our translation renders as to “till and keep” the garden (“dress it and keep it” in the KJV), and to refrain from eating from a certain tree. After this, there is the story of the creation of a second human, a woman, which our reading skips over. Then we have the second part of our reading, the story of the interplay among the woman, the man, the serpent, and the fruit of the forbidden tree.
So what are we supposed to learn from this fable? Both creation stories, and especially the first one, give us a breath-taking picture of God speaking creation into being. “Let there be light,” God thunders in the first creation story, and there was light. Let the waters recede, and let there be sun and moon, and vegetation, and animals, and – finally – humans created in God’s own image. And it was all good.
The second creation story, the one we hear about this morning, begins right with the creation of the first human being, followed by the creation of the Garden of Eden. Why did God create the human being? Here is the answer: to “till and keep” the garden, and by implication all of creation.1 In the context of ancient creation myths this reason is quite amazing. Other creation stories show humans as an accident, or an after-thought, or even a mistake. In our modern creation myth, we humans tend to see ourselves as the apex of creation, the point of it all. In contrast to both these points of view, the Genesis story says that humans are not created for themselves, but are created to till and keep the garden.
Do you wonder what “till and keep” means? Actually, this isn’t a good translation of the Hebrew. A better translation would be to “serve and protect.” In other words, we humans were created, as the teller of the Genesis story understands it, to take care of creation – not to exploit it. We were created so that we could pay attention to the needs of creation, rather than to our own needs, to love creation as God loves it. And we are responsible for its well-being, both now and into the future. We are to be concerned “for those who come after us.”. In a word care for God’s garden is our mission as human beings.
And how well are we fulfilling our mission as human beings? The story of Adam, Eve, the serpent, and the tree suggests that we are not doing very well. In a word, we let ourselves get distracted and forget about God’s mission. We get distracted by our physical needs. Eve thought that the forbidden tree was “good for food.” Those in our country who still worry about where their next meal is coming from – and whether their SNAP dollars will last through the end of the month – are very appropriately distracted by physical needs. Most of us, though, are distracted by our desire for “stuff,” for clothes, cars, electronics, airplanes, weapons – you name it. Do really need the latest style of tennis shoes, or a new cell phone every two years? Our landfills are bursting, and still we keep buying – and tossing out. Worse, we get distracted by physical substances that do us real harm, especially alcohol and drugs. You have only to open the daily newspaper to know that, despite the “war on drugs,” our opiate addiction is killing us – right here in southern Ohio. (If you’re interested in the drug problem right here at home, look into Dream Land: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones.)
If we are not distracted by physical needs, many of us are distracted by things that dazzle and entertain us. For Eve, the forbidden tree “was a delight to the eyes.” Well, sometimes I get dazzled by flowering trees, but most of us are more likely to become dazzled and enthralled by football games or other spectacles. Or maybe you’re hooked on video games. For some of us it’s social media. Am I the only one who looks around after an hour or so and says, “Did I just spend all that time on Facebook?”
Aren’t we also distracted by our need for control? Eve thought that the forbidden tree would “make one wise,” i.e., that it would allow her and Adam to be like God. Do we think we can know all the variables that will affect our lives and then control them? We know we cannot, yet we can get seduced into thinking that we can.
And finally, of course, we get distracted by the illusion that we will not die. This is the serpent’s most perverse lie: “You will not die.” But we believe it! Or we live as if we do. We live as if there’s still time to turn our lives around. We live as if there’s yet another day to do the right thing. We think we have plenty of time to apologize and make amends to those we have hurt – or to forgive and reconcile with those who have hurt us. We put off working for peace and justice, because there’s still plenty of time for us to do those good things. We don’t take care of our bodies, nor do we care whether our neighbors have enough to eat or have access to decent healthcare. We don’t make wills. And we don’t prepare for the day when we will actually take our last breath.
My brothers and sisters, it’s just a fable, but it’s a fable that is also describing our lives. What happened in that garden also happens to us. The story of Adam, Eve, the serpent, and the tree is also a story about us. We still have a responsibility to serve and protect the earth, in the 21st century now perhaps more than ever. The Paris agreement on climate change still matters, as does the ability of our federal and state agencies to fund research. In our relatively under-populated country, we may still think that the earth will regenerate itself after we’ve harmed it – or that we can just move further west. The truth is that the network of mines under southeast Ohio will last forever. The mountains in Kentucky and West Virginia that were flattened by the mining companies will be scarred for centuries. The fracking water that we’ve pumped underground will stay there forever – we hope.
Lent is a time to acknowledge and recommit ourselves to stewardship of the earth – and to remind our elected representatives to be mindful of the needs of “this fragile earth, our island home.” Lent is a time to recognize and repent of all the things that distract us from our responsibilities. It is a time to turn our backs on the blandishments of the serpent and return to our responsibility for creation and its inhabitants. It is a time to read Scripture attentively and note, for example, how Jesus responded to the distractions from his mission that he was offered. Lent is a time to examine our lives and ask how we, as individuals, as a parish, and as a community, need to change. Lent is a time to pray that now, in this mortal life, God’s Holy Spirit will lead us to amendment of life and commitment to God’s holy mission. Lent is time to be confident in God’s mercy and open to God’s leading. May it be so.
1. With thanks to Jon Berquist in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 2 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox), pp. 27ff., for suggesting the theme of “till and keep” for this story.
Monday, February 27, 2017
Up a High Mountain
There they stand, hundreds of them, in southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras: massive limestone pyramids, flat on top, with stone staircases up one side. They were built by the ancient Maya people, mostly between 250 and 900 AD. Many of them reach almost 200 feet in height. They stand in complex cities that once contained as many as 3,000 buildings. The people who built these massive structures were literate – they had a hieroglyphic writing system, similar to that of the ancient Egyptians, although using different characters. They also had a complex calendar, an astrological system, and a unique mythology. Their writings tell us that their massive buildings were temples, used for many different religious ceremonies. The people considered these temples to be mountains that would allow their priests who conducted the many ceremonies on top of them to draw near to the gods.
Were the Mayas right? Do we need to climb mountains to draw near to God? Certainly our own Scriptures are full of stories of people having mountain-top encounters with God. Strange things seem to happen on mountains. Almost every time Scripture mentions a mountain, we know that there will be an encounter with the Divine, a terrifying, mysterious, cloud-shrouded, ultimately inexplicable experience of nearness to the Holy One.
In our reading from the book of Exodus, Moses is summoned by the Holy One, the God whose name is only a form of the verb “to be.” As Moses ascends the mountain, he enters into a “cloud of unknowing,” a mysterious space where all is shrouded in mystery. It is from this space, this space of encounter with God, that Moses receives the tablets of the Law, the Law that will define Israel as a nation, the Law for which Moses will forever be named transmitter and interpreter.
At the end of his life, Moses has another, a different kind of mountain-top experience. As we hear at the end of the book of Deuteronomy, Moses knows that he is close to death. He has blessed the people whom he led through the wilderness and prepared Joshua to succeed him. Again God leads Moses up a mountain. As Deuteronomy tells us, “Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho, and the Lord showed him the whole land: Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, and the Plain – that is, the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees – as far as Zoar. The Lord said to him, ‘This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, “I will give it to your descendants;”’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.” Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, at the Lord’s command.”
In our gospel reading for today, we hear of yet another kind of mountain-top experience. In the passage before today’s reading, Jesus has heard Peter declare him to be the Messiah, God’s Anointed. Perhaps to clarify for Peter and his other friends just what “messiah” means, Jesus then warns his friends that he is heading to Jerusalem, and that he will die there.
“Six days later,” we are told, Jesus leads three of his closest friends up an unnamed mountain. On this mountain the three also have an encounter with the Divine, a mysterious, inexplicable, even terrifying experience. They see Jesus in all his glory, they understand that Jesus is the fulfillment of both the Law of Moses and the promises of the prophets, and they hear that Jesus is the one on whom they are to model their own lives.
Throughout the centuries, in our own tradition, and in the traditions of other faith communities, saints and others close to God have had similar experiences, similar encounters with the Divine. Some encounters have been on mountains, some in other “thin places,” as Celtic spirituality calls those places where the veil separating heaven and earth becomes “thin” enough for us to get a glimpse of the divine reality that grounds our lives.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a man of deep prayer. Throughout his life he struggled to discern God’s will. As he endured attack dogs, fire hoses, and angry, rock-throwing mobs, he often sought reassurance in prayer that he was on the right path. One night he was sitting alone in prayer at his kitchen table. He heard what he called an “inner voice” telling him to do what he knew was right. From then on, he felt sure that God was leading him, and he was able to courageously lead his people to face what lay ahead.
King’s trust in God’s leading led him eventually to Memphis, to participate in a strike by city sanitation workers. In his speech on April 3, 1968, he encouraged the workers to persevere in their struggle and to remain united. Then, echoing Moses, he said, “Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live - a long life; longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” Twenty-four hours later, King was cut down by an assassin’s bullet.
Do these mountain-top encounters mean anything to us? Often such experiences are mysterious, even indescribable. Yet those who encounter God this way, who have this kind of epiphany, come down from the mountain transformed. They are not the same people! After his experience of receiving God’s Law, Moses had a deeper relationship with God and was a stronger, more effective leader as the Israelites journeyed to the Promised Land. Jesus’ friends caught a glimpse of Jesus’ true nature, an inkling of his glory. As they descended the mountain they were able to follow Jesus to Jerusalem, perhaps reassured that they had made the right decision in staying with him. Like Jesus, Martin Luther King continued to work with the sanitation workers, despite his premonition of his approaching martyrdom.
And we ourselves? Yes, strange, even terrifying, things may happen on mountain tops and other thin places. But we need these mountain-top experiences. We need these times when God comes near, to reassure us and to challenge us. With the old spiritual we may sometimes sing, “Sometimes I feel discouraged, and think my work’s in vain….” Then we need God to reassure us that we are on the right path in committing our lives to Jesus’ way – just as his friends did. We also need God to challenge us, and even to transform us. We need God to help us change the way we see the world. Trust me, once you have had an encounter with the Holy One, once you’ve glimpsed God’s future as it is revealed in Jesus, it cannot be business as usual. You are not the same person. Having glimpsed his reality and seen his glory, you have to come down the mountain wanting to follow him more closely and wanting to share with others the love and compassion that he embodies.
And so where do we encounter God? Do we need to climb to the top of a Mayan temple to encounter God? Do we need to go up Mt. Nebo with Moses? Do we need Jesus to lead us up the unnamed mountain of his transfiguration? Where are the “thin places” in our lives?
The truth is that there are “thin places” everywhere if we could but see them. Mountains – or Mayan temples – certainly give us a sense of God’s infinite grandeur. But we can also encounter God in more mundane places – at the kitchen table as did Martin Luther King, in the woods, or our own backyard, or in our own room. Wherever and whenever you can pull apart from our noisy, 24/7 world, wherever and whenever we can quiet down, wherever and whenever we can engage in silent, contemplative prayer, then and there there’s a chance that God might show Godself to us, that God might speak to us in the silence of our own hearts, that God might move us to deeper compassion and service. For, when we let God get a word in edgewise, there’s no telling what can happen. Is that why most of us shy away from prayer and silence?
We are on the cusp of Lent. Ash Wednesday is this Wednesday. The church gives us the gift of forty days in which to examine our spiritual lives more closely. During Lent this year, I invite you to ask yourself: where are your “thin places,” your mountain tops, the places where you get a glimpse of Divine life? And then, what is more important, how is God inviting you to change?
So here is my prayer for you, for all of us. God be with you and grant you to stand in “thin places,” where the Presence is deeply known and Mercy abounds and Wisdom flourishes. Amen.
Were the Mayas right? Do we need to climb mountains to draw near to God? Certainly our own Scriptures are full of stories of people having mountain-top encounters with God. Strange things seem to happen on mountains. Almost every time Scripture mentions a mountain, we know that there will be an encounter with the Divine, a terrifying, mysterious, cloud-shrouded, ultimately inexplicable experience of nearness to the Holy One.
In our reading from the book of Exodus, Moses is summoned by the Holy One, the God whose name is only a form of the verb “to be.” As Moses ascends the mountain, he enters into a “cloud of unknowing,” a mysterious space where all is shrouded in mystery. It is from this space, this space of encounter with God, that Moses receives the tablets of the Law, the Law that will define Israel as a nation, the Law for which Moses will forever be named transmitter and interpreter.
At the end of his life, Moses has another, a different kind of mountain-top experience. As we hear at the end of the book of Deuteronomy, Moses knows that he is close to death. He has blessed the people whom he led through the wilderness and prepared Joshua to succeed him. Again God leads Moses up a mountain. As Deuteronomy tells us, “Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho, and the Lord showed him the whole land: Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, and the Plain – that is, the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees – as far as Zoar. The Lord said to him, ‘This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, “I will give it to your descendants;”’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.” Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, at the Lord’s command.”
In our gospel reading for today, we hear of yet another kind of mountain-top experience. In the passage before today’s reading, Jesus has heard Peter declare him to be the Messiah, God’s Anointed. Perhaps to clarify for Peter and his other friends just what “messiah” means, Jesus then warns his friends that he is heading to Jerusalem, and that he will die there.
“Six days later,” we are told, Jesus leads three of his closest friends up an unnamed mountain. On this mountain the three also have an encounter with the Divine, a mysterious, inexplicable, even terrifying experience. They see Jesus in all his glory, they understand that Jesus is the fulfillment of both the Law of Moses and the promises of the prophets, and they hear that Jesus is the one on whom they are to model their own lives.
Throughout the centuries, in our own tradition, and in the traditions of other faith communities, saints and others close to God have had similar experiences, similar encounters with the Divine. Some encounters have been on mountains, some in other “thin places,” as Celtic spirituality calls those places where the veil separating heaven and earth becomes “thin” enough for us to get a glimpse of the divine reality that grounds our lives.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a man of deep prayer. Throughout his life he struggled to discern God’s will. As he endured attack dogs, fire hoses, and angry, rock-throwing mobs, he often sought reassurance in prayer that he was on the right path. One night he was sitting alone in prayer at his kitchen table. He heard what he called an “inner voice” telling him to do what he knew was right. From then on, he felt sure that God was leading him, and he was able to courageously lead his people to face what lay ahead.
King’s trust in God’s leading led him eventually to Memphis, to participate in a strike by city sanitation workers. In his speech on April 3, 1968, he encouraged the workers to persevere in their struggle and to remain united. Then, echoing Moses, he said, “Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live - a long life; longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” Twenty-four hours later, King was cut down by an assassin’s bullet.
Do these mountain-top encounters mean anything to us? Often such experiences are mysterious, even indescribable. Yet those who encounter God this way, who have this kind of epiphany, come down from the mountain transformed. They are not the same people! After his experience of receiving God’s Law, Moses had a deeper relationship with God and was a stronger, more effective leader as the Israelites journeyed to the Promised Land. Jesus’ friends caught a glimpse of Jesus’ true nature, an inkling of his glory. As they descended the mountain they were able to follow Jesus to Jerusalem, perhaps reassured that they had made the right decision in staying with him. Like Jesus, Martin Luther King continued to work with the sanitation workers, despite his premonition of his approaching martyrdom.
And we ourselves? Yes, strange, even terrifying, things may happen on mountain tops and other thin places. But we need these mountain-top experiences. We need these times when God comes near, to reassure us and to challenge us. With the old spiritual we may sometimes sing, “Sometimes I feel discouraged, and think my work’s in vain….” Then we need God to reassure us that we are on the right path in committing our lives to Jesus’ way – just as his friends did. We also need God to challenge us, and even to transform us. We need God to help us change the way we see the world. Trust me, once you have had an encounter with the Holy One, once you’ve glimpsed God’s future as it is revealed in Jesus, it cannot be business as usual. You are not the same person. Having glimpsed his reality and seen his glory, you have to come down the mountain wanting to follow him more closely and wanting to share with others the love and compassion that he embodies.
And so where do we encounter God? Do we need to climb to the top of a Mayan temple to encounter God? Do we need to go up Mt. Nebo with Moses? Do we need Jesus to lead us up the unnamed mountain of his transfiguration? Where are the “thin places” in our lives?
The truth is that there are “thin places” everywhere if we could but see them. Mountains – or Mayan temples – certainly give us a sense of God’s infinite grandeur. But we can also encounter God in more mundane places – at the kitchen table as did Martin Luther King, in the woods, or our own backyard, or in our own room. Wherever and whenever you can pull apart from our noisy, 24/7 world, wherever and whenever we can quiet down, wherever and whenever we can engage in silent, contemplative prayer, then and there there’s a chance that God might show Godself to us, that God might speak to us in the silence of our own hearts, that God might move us to deeper compassion and service. For, when we let God get a word in edgewise, there’s no telling what can happen. Is that why most of us shy away from prayer and silence?
We are on the cusp of Lent. Ash Wednesday is this Wednesday. The church gives us the gift of forty days in which to examine our spiritual lives more closely. During Lent this year, I invite you to ask yourself: where are your “thin places,” your mountain tops, the places where you get a glimpse of Divine life? And then, what is more important, how is God inviting you to change?
So here is my prayer for you, for all of us. God be with you and grant you to stand in “thin places,” where the Presence is deeply known and Mercy abounds and Wisdom flourishes. Amen.
Monday, January 9, 2017
Seek and Serve Christ in All Persons
Celebrant: Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself? People: I will, with God’s help.
On the morning of January 2, students and faculty arrived at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati to find a swastika painted on the entrance sign to the campus. For 140 years, HUC-JIR has peacefully co-existed with its neighbors. Those who saw the swastika, both Jews and non-Jews, instantly recognized it as a reminder of the profound evil visited on Jews, gays, gypsies, disabled people, and other marginal groups during the Holocaust. The next day, about twenty-five people gathered at the sign in freezing temperatures. Many of them were members of Call to Action, a progressive Roman Catholic organization. Faith Kemper, the organizer of the event said that her father had fought in World War II, and that for her the swastika represents leaders who are power-hungry and hateful. She was joined by several members of her St. Monica-St. George Parish, whose church is on nearby McMillan Avenue. One carried a sign that said, "We support our Jewish neighbors."
Reflecting on the vandalism at HUC-JIR and other similar events, another participant wondered whether the recent presidential campaign had suggested that such acts were OK. Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley said, "I am deeply offended and disturbed by these actions. The City is committed to using all of our resources to bring these criminals to justice. As we work to build a more welcoming and inclusive City, we will not stand for this intimidation." Alan Dicken, a Disciples of Christ pastor, went further. In a letter dated January 5, Dicken reminded his fellow Christians of what their response to such acts of vandalism should be: “I can reach out to those who need to hear a gospel of love and acceptance,” He wrote. “I can do my part to show the world that the Christ that I follow, who for the record was Jewish, [was] a leader of love and a prince of peace. I can listen to my friends who are rabbis and leaders in the Jewish community and respond in ways that they feel would be helpful and supportive to them. It may not seem like much, but it is a hell of a lot more than doing nothing. Doing nothing gives permission for this culture to continue.”
Twenty-eight hundred years before the events at HUC-JIR, an Israelite prophet reflected on the state of his people. They were no strangers to violence and desecration. Their holy city of Jerusalem had been overrun by the Babylonians, and their sacred temple had been destroyed. The elite of the country had been forced into exile, while the peasants were left to scratch out a living in a drought-ridden land. And yet, as the prophet reflected on the fate of his people, he heard God whispering a new message to him, one of hope, rather than despair. He heard God promising that the community would have a new leader, indeed that the whole community would be a leader among the nations. Led by the new leaders, they would be loving servants, who would treat all with gentleness and compassion. They would follow a leader who would “not cry or lift up his voice,” who would “faithfully bring forth justice,” and who would help them to be “a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness.”
Eight centuries later, another prophet reflected on the state of his people. Like his forebear in faith, John beheld a people suffering under the oppressive rule of both the Romans and their local collaborators. He saw religious leaders focused on punctilious observance of sacrificial ritual and not the welfare of ordinary people. He called people of all walks of life to change their way of life. To reflect their commitment to change, he invited them to undergo a traditional Jewish ritual of cleansing, through immersion in flowing water. Into this scrum of people gathered on the banks of the Jordan, walked an itinerant rabbi from Galilee, who asked his cousin John to administer the ritual cleansing to him. As the writer of today’s gospel tells us, John demurred. He knew there was something special about his cousin. But Jesus insisted. “Do it,” he said. “God’s work, putting things right all these centuries, is coming together right now in this baptism.” So John did it.
As Jesus came up out of the Jordan, he experienced a deep sense of acceptance by God, a sense of God’s affirmation of him as God’s own beloved. He knew himself to be empowered for ministry by God’s Spirit. Almost immediately after his baptism, God’s Spirit drove him into the Judean hills for a period of reflection and discernment. During those weeks in the wilderness Jesus knew that he had to forego all forms of coercive power. Reflecting on the Scriptures that he knew so well, i.e., the Hebrew Scriptures, he came to understand himself as the leader foretold by Isaiah, as the one who would not break a bruised reed or quench a dimly burning wick, who would bring forth justice and release those in prison. In his first recorded sermon in the gospel according to Luke, Jesus reminded his hearers of those words of the prophet. He read from the scroll of Isaiah, “God’s Spirit is on me; he’s chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor, Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind,
To set the burdened and battered free, to announce, “This is God’s year to act!” Then Jesus said, “You’ve just heard Scripture make history. It came true just now in this place.” The evangelist even echoes Jesus’ self-description. Further along in the gospel of Matthew, the evangelist uses this very passage from Isaiah that we just heard to describe how Jesus was doing what God expected of him.
Since 1963, volunteers in the Simon Community in the UK have been ministering to homeless people on the streets of London. They provide two houses with shelter for the night and a day center to connect homeless people to available social services. In addition, every night volunteers carry flashlights into the dark corners of the streets to bring soup and sandwiches to those who, for whatever reason, do not want to come to the shelters. Young and old, representing all ethnicities, church members and non-members, these volunteers seek out the needy in derelict buildings and back alleys, on the streets, and under bridges and overpasses. They keep in touch with the latest news on the streets, and monitor how many people are sleeping outside at different times of the year. They also keep in close contact with as many people as possible, and respond as far as they can to people’s needs. They recognize that each homeless person has different needs, but to all they offer hands of friendship and welcome without judgement. Many of the volunteers work with the community fulltime. They receive room and board but no stipend. Why do they do it? A volunteer named Joe Bailey described why he marched with the community in support of help for the homeless. “In the face of diminishing availability of support accessible to vulnerable people,” he said, “we see the effects of austerity measures run deeper and deeper into society, and it can make us feel helpless. But albeit a small shout out in protest, there is hope in the work that we do, and we are not alone in our dedication to offer support to those who need it.”
My brothers and sisters, the waters that rolled over Jesus have also rolled over us. We too went down into the Jordan with Jesus, and we too came up out of the water with him. The baptismal font is our River Jordan. Whether we were brought to the font by someone else, or whether we came of our own free will, whether we were immersed or sprinkled, Jesus was standing beside us as those waters flowed over us. As we rose from the water, the Holy Spirit descended on us, and God proclaimed us to be God’s beloved sons and daughters. In joining ourselves to Jesus, we too are affirmed, empowered, and commissioned. And we are called to model our lives after his.
It is still God’s year to act – perhaps even more urgently now than in many other years. With Jesus we too are called to embrace Isaiah’s vision of compassionate leadership and a just and peaceful world. We too are called to remember and celebrate our solidarity with Jews, and also with Muslims, with Hindus and Buddhists, with all people of all faiths and no faith. We too are called to resist any attempt to demean, harass, or persecute people of any community, even if they are wearing a yarmulke or a hijab. We too are called to seek out the least, the lost, and the left behind, and to minister to their needs, whoever and wherever they are. We too are called to love God, love ourselves, and care for all those – all those – whom God has called beloved.
Celebrant: Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself? People: I will, with God’s help.
On the morning of January 2, students and faculty arrived at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati to find a swastika painted on the entrance sign to the campus. For 140 years, HUC-JIR has peacefully co-existed with its neighbors. Those who saw the swastika, both Jews and non-Jews, instantly recognized it as a reminder of the profound evil visited on Jews, gays, gypsies, disabled people, and other marginal groups during the Holocaust. The next day, about twenty-five people gathered at the sign in freezing temperatures. Many of them were members of Call to Action, a progressive Roman Catholic organization. Faith Kemper, the organizer of the event said that her father had fought in World War II, and that for her the swastika represents leaders who are power-hungry and hateful. She was joined by several members of her St. Monica-St. George Parish, whose church is on nearby McMillan Avenue. One carried a sign that said, "We support our Jewish neighbors."
Reflecting on the vandalism at HUC-JIR and other similar events, another participant wondered whether the recent presidential campaign had suggested that such acts were OK. Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley said, "I am deeply offended and disturbed by these actions. The City is committed to using all of our resources to bring these criminals to justice. As we work to build a more welcoming and inclusive City, we will not stand for this intimidation." Alan Dicken, a Disciples of Christ pastor, went further. In a letter dated January 5, Dicken reminded his fellow Christians of what their response to such acts of vandalism should be: “I can reach out to those who need to hear a gospel of love and acceptance,” He wrote. “I can do my part to show the world that the Christ that I follow, who for the record was Jewish, [was] a leader of love and a prince of peace. I can listen to my friends who are rabbis and leaders in the Jewish community and respond in ways that they feel would be helpful and supportive to them. It may not seem like much, but it is a hell of a lot more than doing nothing. Doing nothing gives permission for this culture to continue.”
Twenty-eight hundred years before the events at HUC-JIR, an Israelite prophet reflected on the state of his people. They were no strangers to violence and desecration. Their holy city of Jerusalem had been overrun by the Babylonians, and their sacred temple had been destroyed. The elite of the country had been forced into exile, while the peasants were left to scratch out a living in a drought-ridden land. And yet, as the prophet reflected on the fate of his people, he heard God whispering a new message to him, one of hope, rather than despair. He heard God promising that the community would have a new leader, indeed that the whole community would be a leader among the nations. Led by the new leaders, they would be loving servants, who would treat all with gentleness and compassion. They would follow a leader who would “not cry or lift up his voice,” who would “faithfully bring forth justice,” and who would help them to be “a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness.”
Eight centuries later, another prophet reflected on the state of his people. Like his forebear in faith, John beheld a people suffering under the oppressive rule of both the Romans and their local collaborators. He saw religious leaders focused on punctilious observance of sacrificial ritual and not the welfare of ordinary people. He called people of all walks of life to change their way of life. To reflect their commitment to change, he invited them to undergo a traditional Jewish ritual of cleansing, through immersion in flowing water. Into this scrum of people gathered on the banks of the Jordan, walked an itinerant rabbi from Galilee, who asked his cousin John to administer the ritual cleansing to him. As the writer of today’s gospel tells us, John demurred. He knew there was something special about his cousin. But Jesus insisted. “Do it,” he said. “God’s work, putting things right all these centuries, is coming together right now in this baptism.” So John did it.
As Jesus came up out of the Jordan, he experienced a deep sense of acceptance by God, a sense of God’s affirmation of him as God’s own beloved. He knew himself to be empowered for ministry by God’s Spirit. Almost immediately after his baptism, God’s Spirit drove him into the Judean hills for a period of reflection and discernment. During those weeks in the wilderness Jesus knew that he had to forego all forms of coercive power. Reflecting on the Scriptures that he knew so well, i.e., the Hebrew Scriptures, he came to understand himself as the leader foretold by Isaiah, as the one who would not break a bruised reed or quench a dimly burning wick, who would bring forth justice and release those in prison. In his first recorded sermon in the gospel according to Luke, Jesus reminded his hearers of those words of the prophet. He read from the scroll of Isaiah, “God’s Spirit is on me; he’s chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor, Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind,
To set the burdened and battered free, to announce, “This is God’s year to act!” Then Jesus said, “You’ve just heard Scripture make history. It came true just now in this place.” The evangelist even echoes Jesus’ self-description. Further along in the gospel of Matthew, the evangelist uses this very passage from Isaiah that we just heard to describe how Jesus was doing what God expected of him.
Since 1963, volunteers in the Simon Community in the UK have been ministering to homeless people on the streets of London. They provide two houses with shelter for the night and a day center to connect homeless people to available social services. In addition, every night volunteers carry flashlights into the dark corners of the streets to bring soup and sandwiches to those who, for whatever reason, do not want to come to the shelters. Young and old, representing all ethnicities, church members and non-members, these volunteers seek out the needy in derelict buildings and back alleys, on the streets, and under bridges and overpasses. They keep in touch with the latest news on the streets, and monitor how many people are sleeping outside at different times of the year. They also keep in close contact with as many people as possible, and respond as far as they can to people’s needs. They recognize that each homeless person has different needs, but to all they offer hands of friendship and welcome without judgement. Many of the volunteers work with the community fulltime. They receive room and board but no stipend. Why do they do it? A volunteer named Joe Bailey described why he marched with the community in support of help for the homeless. “In the face of diminishing availability of support accessible to vulnerable people,” he said, “we see the effects of austerity measures run deeper and deeper into society, and it can make us feel helpless. But albeit a small shout out in protest, there is hope in the work that we do, and we are not alone in our dedication to offer support to those who need it.”
My brothers and sisters, the waters that rolled over Jesus have also rolled over us. We too went down into the Jordan with Jesus, and we too came up out of the water with him. The baptismal font is our River Jordan. Whether we were brought to the font by someone else, or whether we came of our own free will, whether we were immersed or sprinkled, Jesus was standing beside us as those waters flowed over us. As we rose from the water, the Holy Spirit descended on us, and God proclaimed us to be God’s beloved sons and daughters. In joining ourselves to Jesus, we too are affirmed, empowered, and commissioned. And we are called to model our lives after his.
It is still God’s year to act – perhaps even more urgently now than in many other years. With Jesus we too are called to embrace Isaiah’s vision of compassionate leadership and a just and peaceful world. We too are called to remember and celebrate our solidarity with Jews, and also with Muslims, with Hindus and Buddhists, with all people of all faiths and no faith. We too are called to resist any attempt to demean, harass, or persecute people of any community, even if they are wearing a yarmulke or a hijab. We too are called to seek out the least, the lost, and the left behind, and to minister to their needs, whoever and wherever they are. We too are called to love God, love ourselves, and care for all those – all those – whom God has called beloved.
Celebrant: Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself? People: I will, with God’s help.
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