“…that … we may proclaim your truth with boldness, and minister your justice with compassion….”
Naboth’s vineyard: it’s one of the most terrifying stories in Scripture. How could this story possibly be good news? Really, it’s more like a tragic opera. In the first act, we are introduced to the characters and their relationships with each other. First, there’s poor Naboth, the tragic victim. He has the misfortune to own a vineyard abutting a palace belonging to King Ahab. Naboth and his ancestors have kept the vineyard in their family, as the Law of Moses prescribed, and have worked hard to make it productive. Enter King Ahab. If we are serious opera buffs, we know that Ahab has done more evil than any king before him. Disregarding God’s commandment not to covet another person’s property, Ahab desires Naboth’s ancestral land. For a vegetable garden? When law-abiding Naboth rightly refuses to sell, Ahab goes home and sulks. Enter Ahab’s wily, foreign-born wife Jezebel, who assures Ahab that she has the power to wrest the vineyard from Naboth and give it to Ahab.
The second act is the tragic act. Jezebel misuses the king’s authority and initiates her scheme. Law-abiding Naboth keeps the fast and attends the assembly. The covenant between God and Israel is further set aside, and another commandment is broken, as the scoundrels perjure themselves and give false testimony. On the most questionable evidence, poor innocent Naboth receives the supreme penalty and dies an extremely painful and ignominious death. Triumphant, Jezebel bids the king, who is fully complicit in what has happened, to take possession of the vineyard. Was there anyone even there to weep over Naboth’s death? Perhaps we are the only ones, as we head out to intermission.
It’s a very old story, isn’t it? But we live in a society of laws, and things like that don’t happen anymore. Are you sure? How about this opera? It was 1948. Florida's orange industry was exploding. Citrus barons got rich through the labor of poor African-Americans, who worked under Jim Crow laws, had not been able to vote since the turn of the century, and struggled for justice in a state controlled by whites. The rich planters knew that Sheriff Willis V. McCall would keep order in Lake County. The blacks knew that McCall was a sadistic tyrant. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl said she had been raped by blacks, McCall soon arrested four young African-American men: Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin. Shepherd and Irvin were both veterans of World War II.
Now the tragic act. Thomas was killed as a suspect by a posse after leaving the area. Greenlee, Shepherd, and Irvin were taken to jail and were beaten to force them to confess. Irvin refused to confess falsely. The three surviving men were convicted by an all-white jury. Greenlee was sentenced to life because he was only 16 at the time of the event; the other two were sentenced to death. A retrial was ordered by the United States Supreme Court after hearing their appeals, led by Thurgood Marshall, who was then working for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In 1951, as a new trial was underway, Sheriff McCall shot both Shepherd and Irvin while they were in his custody. He said they tried to escape. Shepherd died immediately. Irvin told investigators that the sheriff had shot them in cold blood. At the second trial, Irvin was convicted again and sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted to life by the governor in 1955. He was paroled in 1968 and died a year later.
Intermission is over. We now return to Naboth’s vineyard. Will anyone be punished for the death of the innocent Naboth? Naboth wasn’t even cold when Ahab goes to seize his vineyard. Enter the last character: Ahab’s nemesis, the prophet Elijah. Elijah has heard God’s command and confronts Ahab. Elijah names Ahab’s crime and pronounces God’s punishment, a disastrous death, in which dogs will lick Ahab’s and Jezebel’s blood. God is still a God of righteousness, evildoers will be punished, and God’s justice will be served. And as opera buffs know, Ahab died in battle. When his body was brought back to Samaria, the dogs licked his blood, and prostitutes washed themselves in it. Jezebel was thrown out a window of the palace and was trampled to death by horses. Dogs licked her blood as well. Naboth was avenged. We can leave the theater affirming the psalmist’s assertion that God hates “all those who work wickedness.”
Were the deaths and imprisonment of the Groveland Four, as the men in Lake County, Florida came to be called, ever avenged? Sheriff McCall was investigated numerous times on civil rights violations but was never convicted.
So here’s another story. The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its citizens than any other first-world country. A disproportionately high number of those imprisoned are poor and African American or Latino. Thirty-one states, including Ohio, have the death penalty. Anthony Ray Hinton, an African American, was convicted of murdering two fast food restaurant managers in the Birmingham, Alabama area in 1985. Bullets that the state’s experts claimed matched a .38 revolver recovered from Hinton’s home were the only evidence against him. There were no fingerprints. Neither was there eyewitness testimony linking Hinton to the murders. Even so, Hinton was sent to death row. Two years ago, after years of appeals by his attorney, Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction and ordered a new trial. A year ago, three experts from the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences concluded that the bullets from the robberies didn't match each other and could not be linked to the supposed murder weapon. Two months shy of his 59th birthday, Hinton was finally a free man. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, he was the 152nd person to be exonerated from death row. Many of those 152 people owe their lives to the Equal Justice Initiative, the Innocence Project, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Ohio Innocence Project, and other similar organizations.
Given that you are more likely to be condemned to death if you are poor, African American, or Latino, is it time for the U.S. to rethink the death penalty? Is it time for Ohio to set aside the death penalty? We profess to be followers of one who was condemned to death on the testimony of false witnesses, and who was executed by the state. Is it time for us as Christians to work for the abolition of the death penalty? Admittedly, Christians do differ on this issue. However, the Episcopal Church has been unequivocally against the death penalty since 1959. At General Convention last year, deputies and bishops passed a resolution that reaffirmed our longstanding call to put an end to the death penalty. The resolution also encouraged us to lobby our respective state governments to support legislation to abolish the death penalty, and directed bishops to appoint task forces of clergy and lay people to develop a witness to eliminate the death penalty. In Oklahoma, Bishop Robert Moody has asked parishes to ring bells at 6 p.m. on days of executions, or hang black drapery on an outside door, or tie ribbons around trees or utility poles. "I recognize that Christian men and women differ on this issue," he said. "However, as your bishop, I ask you to prayerfully address this issue anew. For me, I have concluded that capital punishment contributes nothing that betters our society, and I cannot imagine our Lord condoning capital punishment."
And we Episcopalians are not alone. Since its first official statement on the issue in 1959, reaffirmed again in 1977 and 1978, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has opposed the death penalty. In 1956, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church passed legislation officially declaring the church’s opposition to the death penalty. In 1980 and 2000, the UMC passed resolutions reaffirming its opposition and encouraging its membership to advocate for the abolition of capital punishment. Although the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church sanctions the use of the death penalty as a last resort, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has repeatedly called for the abolition of capital punishment in the United States in all circumstances. If you’ve seen the 1995 film, “Dead Man Walking,” you know about the work of Sr. Helen Prejean CSJ. Through her organization, Ministry Against the Death Penalty, Sr. Helen has worked tirelessly to save the condemned and bring about abolition of the death penalty, which she calls “one of the great moral issues facing our country.”
So like the story of Naboth, many of our contemporary operas do not end happily. We weep both for the innocent victims and for the accused. We weep most especially for those who are falsely accused and spend countless wasted years on death row, often receiving little compensation or support when they are finally released.
And yet, we are people of faith. We trust in God. We trust that God’s justice will triumph. We trust that good will triumph over evil. We remember that we are an Easter people, and we trust that life triumphs over death. We work to bring the good news of God’s victory to others, as we also work to change unjust structures that bring about injustice and death. We pray, as followers of the one who was crucified and raised, that we might be in the vanguard of those working for justice with compassion.
Monday, June 13, 2016
Sunday, June 5, 2016
It's a Miracle
It’s a miracle! How often we have all said that! And yet I wonder. Have any of us seen a real miracle, an event that seems so out of the ordinary that we can only attribute it to divine intervention?
Of course, Scripture is full of miracles. You can hardly turn a page in either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament without encountering what can only be called a miracle. Just look at today’s readings. Our reading from the Hebrew Bible contains not one but two miracles. After winning the competition with the priests of Baal, Elijah is on the run from the unscrupulous king Ahab. In Zarephath, he comes upon a gentile woman and begs a meal from her. When she explains her dire circumstances, he makes a bold promise: if she feeds him and puts him up, in the midst of severe famine, she, her son on whom she depends for support, and Elijah himself will always have enough to eat. And they do! And, of course, the second miracle: when the boy is struck down by a deadly illness, Elijah does what sounds like CPR and revives him. Then he “gives him back” to his mother.
Our psalm has a hint of the miraculous. God is the source and ground of all that is, “who made heaven and earth, the seas and all that is in them.” Instead of trusting limited and fallible human beings, we rightly praise God for all that God has created. And yet that same God, beyond all human understanding, has made a covenant with human beings, and “keeps his promise forever.” More than that, this same God cares about what happens to human beings, especially those who are oppressed, those who hunger, and those who are blind or in prison. Most surprising of all, this God “cares for the stranger; he sustains the orphan and widow….”
Our gospel reading parallels the story of the widow at Zarephath. Last week, you may remember, Jesus was in Capernaum, where he healed, at a distance, the slave of a Roman military leader. Luke’s gospel is a bit sketchy on geography, but, having come to the village of Nain, Jesus and his friends have walked about twenty-five miles. Picture it: dusty and tired from their journey, Jesus and his friends come face to face with a party of mourners carrying a body for burial outside the village. No coffins in those days, just a body wrapped in sheets lying on a platform and wheeled or carried by family members or friends. From the laments of the mourners, Jesus realizes that the dead person is the only son of a widow. Neither she nor the other mourners seek Jesus’ help. Even so, Jesus is moved by her plight. Knowing well that without either a husband or son, this woman’s future is precarious at best, Jesus reaches out to her. He also does something unthinkable for an observant Jew: he touches the dead man and commands him to rise. The dead man comes back to life, and Jesus “gives him back” to his mother – even the Greek words here are the same in both the Greek Old Testament and Luke’s gospel!
And then there is Paul. You remember that in this letter to Christians living in Galatia, Paul is addressing gentile converts who are being pressured by other evangelists to adopt all the outward signs of Jewish life, to be circumcised and to keep the Jewish dietary laws. Last week, we heard Paul’s first rebuke of this tactic. Now, just to prove he knows what he is talking about, Paul trots out his qualifications as an observant Jew. He then alludes to the miracle that occurred in his own life: how in the midst of persecuting the earliest followers of Jesus, he had a vision on the road to Damascus. Blinded until he was subsequently baptized, Paul received from Jesus a new commission as evangelist to the gentiles, a commission to welcome all into the fellowship of God’s son.
Miracles all! And there are many more in Scripture. Indeed, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are full of stories of miraculous calls, victories over enemies, and healings. But why does Scripture depict all these miracles? Are we to suppose that there was something special about those on the receiving end of these miracles, that others were not worthy of receiving miracles, or that they did not pray hard enough? Jesus gave the lie to that notion in his first recorded sermon, earlier in Luke’s gospel. He had told his hearers that Isaiah’s prophecy had just been fulfilled in their hearing. Some of his hearers had scoffed that he was just Joseph’s son. Then, mentioning the very story from 1 Kings that we just heard, Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.”
No, the miracles depicted in Scripture are signs. They are signs that tell us something important about God and about ourselves. F.D. Maurice, a late nineteenth-century preacher and reformer suggested to his flock that, if people who wondered about miracles “only read of this one widow of Nain – they might begin to consider that that must have been intended as a sign to a multitude of people …. And then they may ask, ‘And what is it a sign of? How are we better for the sign?”
Although Maurice had a good explanation for what miracles signify, I’d like to suggest what those signs might be for us twenty first-century people. I’d like to suggest that miracles in Scripture are signs of three attributes of God and one challenge to us. First, miracles signify that God shows up. God visits us, again and again. God showed up in the time of Ahab, in the prophecy and works of Elijah and his successor Elisha. God showed up decisively in the time of the Roman Empire in the person of Jesus. And God continues to show up, through God’s Holy Spirit. God continues to pour God’s grace on us. Even when we don’t ask for God’s help – neither widow in our stories explicitly asked for help – God does not leave us alone, but comes to us again and again with power to love, support, restore, and challenge us.
Secondly, when God visits, God is most likely to come first to the least, the lost, the left behind, and the outsider. Widows in ancient Israel, along with orphans, in a patriarchal society, were without male protection and thus were the most vulnerable members of society. Just as Jesus healed the son of the widow at Nain, just as Jesus healed the slave of the gentile centurion, just as Jesus healed those who were possessed, lame, blind, or bent over, just as Jesus let a sinful woman wash his feet with her hair, God comes to the most vulnerable, even the most despised among us. And God still does: Franciscan theologian Richard Rohr carried on prison ministry most of his adult life. Fr. Greg Boyle has been working for many years with the Home Boys and Girls of inner city Los Angeles. On the East End of London, St. John’s of Bethnal Green has had a long-standing ministry to “working girls.” The fifty congregations of many different faiths that make up the ecumenical organization BREAD in Columbus lobby politicians for adequate healthcare facilities and services to inner-city public schools.
Third, God is not indifferent to human needs. As Elijah lay atop the dying young man, he cried out to God, “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again.” And “[t]he Lord listened to the voice of Elijah….” Our psalm explicitly lays out all the ways in which God loves us, cares for us, and sustains us. Similarly, Jesus is deeply moved when he sees the widow of Nain and her dead son. He acts with compassion. God does not stand aloof from us, ignoring our griefs and sorrows, but mercifully moves to bring us strength and support.
Which brings me to us. If God is compassionate and moved by human need, if God shows up, especially to those in need, through whom does God show up? Through human beings! God worked God’s miracles in Zarephath through the very human Elijah. God worked God’s miracles in Capernaum, Nain, and elsewhere through Jesus in the flesh. St. Teresa of Avila famously reminded us that,
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks with
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
We are the ones created in the image of the God, who, though source of all, “keeps his promise forever,” and continues to care for the oppressed, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan. We are the ones who profess to follow the one who ministered to all with tender compassion. We are the ones who are called to do what Jesus did, in his name, and with his power. We are the ones who are called to be his body in the world. We are the ones who are showered with God’s many blessings and are moved, called, and empowered to bring God’s love and mercy into a broken and hurting world. We are the ones who see the miracle of God’s presence, even in small things, and become, through our own actions, instruments of miracles for others. The widows are all around us. Do you see them?
Of course, Scripture is full of miracles. You can hardly turn a page in either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament without encountering what can only be called a miracle. Just look at today’s readings. Our reading from the Hebrew Bible contains not one but two miracles. After winning the competition with the priests of Baal, Elijah is on the run from the unscrupulous king Ahab. In Zarephath, he comes upon a gentile woman and begs a meal from her. When she explains her dire circumstances, he makes a bold promise: if she feeds him and puts him up, in the midst of severe famine, she, her son on whom she depends for support, and Elijah himself will always have enough to eat. And they do! And, of course, the second miracle: when the boy is struck down by a deadly illness, Elijah does what sounds like CPR and revives him. Then he “gives him back” to his mother.
Our psalm has a hint of the miraculous. God is the source and ground of all that is, “who made heaven and earth, the seas and all that is in them.” Instead of trusting limited and fallible human beings, we rightly praise God for all that God has created. And yet that same God, beyond all human understanding, has made a covenant with human beings, and “keeps his promise forever.” More than that, this same God cares about what happens to human beings, especially those who are oppressed, those who hunger, and those who are blind or in prison. Most surprising of all, this God “cares for the stranger; he sustains the orphan and widow….”
Our gospel reading parallels the story of the widow at Zarephath. Last week, you may remember, Jesus was in Capernaum, where he healed, at a distance, the slave of a Roman military leader. Luke’s gospel is a bit sketchy on geography, but, having come to the village of Nain, Jesus and his friends have walked about twenty-five miles. Picture it: dusty and tired from their journey, Jesus and his friends come face to face with a party of mourners carrying a body for burial outside the village. No coffins in those days, just a body wrapped in sheets lying on a platform and wheeled or carried by family members or friends. From the laments of the mourners, Jesus realizes that the dead person is the only son of a widow. Neither she nor the other mourners seek Jesus’ help. Even so, Jesus is moved by her plight. Knowing well that without either a husband or son, this woman’s future is precarious at best, Jesus reaches out to her. He also does something unthinkable for an observant Jew: he touches the dead man and commands him to rise. The dead man comes back to life, and Jesus “gives him back” to his mother – even the Greek words here are the same in both the Greek Old Testament and Luke’s gospel!
And then there is Paul. You remember that in this letter to Christians living in Galatia, Paul is addressing gentile converts who are being pressured by other evangelists to adopt all the outward signs of Jewish life, to be circumcised and to keep the Jewish dietary laws. Last week, we heard Paul’s first rebuke of this tactic. Now, just to prove he knows what he is talking about, Paul trots out his qualifications as an observant Jew. He then alludes to the miracle that occurred in his own life: how in the midst of persecuting the earliest followers of Jesus, he had a vision on the road to Damascus. Blinded until he was subsequently baptized, Paul received from Jesus a new commission as evangelist to the gentiles, a commission to welcome all into the fellowship of God’s son.
Miracles all! And there are many more in Scripture. Indeed, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are full of stories of miraculous calls, victories over enemies, and healings. But why does Scripture depict all these miracles? Are we to suppose that there was something special about those on the receiving end of these miracles, that others were not worthy of receiving miracles, or that they did not pray hard enough? Jesus gave the lie to that notion in his first recorded sermon, earlier in Luke’s gospel. He had told his hearers that Isaiah’s prophecy had just been fulfilled in their hearing. Some of his hearers had scoffed that he was just Joseph’s son. Then, mentioning the very story from 1 Kings that we just heard, Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.”
No, the miracles depicted in Scripture are signs. They are signs that tell us something important about God and about ourselves. F.D. Maurice, a late nineteenth-century preacher and reformer suggested to his flock that, if people who wondered about miracles “only read of this one widow of Nain – they might begin to consider that that must have been intended as a sign to a multitude of people …. And then they may ask, ‘And what is it a sign of? How are we better for the sign?”
Although Maurice had a good explanation for what miracles signify, I’d like to suggest what those signs might be for us twenty first-century people. I’d like to suggest that miracles in Scripture are signs of three attributes of God and one challenge to us. First, miracles signify that God shows up. God visits us, again and again. God showed up in the time of Ahab, in the prophecy and works of Elijah and his successor Elisha. God showed up decisively in the time of the Roman Empire in the person of Jesus. And God continues to show up, through God’s Holy Spirit. God continues to pour God’s grace on us. Even when we don’t ask for God’s help – neither widow in our stories explicitly asked for help – God does not leave us alone, but comes to us again and again with power to love, support, restore, and challenge us.
Secondly, when God visits, God is most likely to come first to the least, the lost, the left behind, and the outsider. Widows in ancient Israel, along with orphans, in a patriarchal society, were without male protection and thus were the most vulnerable members of society. Just as Jesus healed the son of the widow at Nain, just as Jesus healed the slave of the gentile centurion, just as Jesus healed those who were possessed, lame, blind, or bent over, just as Jesus let a sinful woman wash his feet with her hair, God comes to the most vulnerable, even the most despised among us. And God still does: Franciscan theologian Richard Rohr carried on prison ministry most of his adult life. Fr. Greg Boyle has been working for many years with the Home Boys and Girls of inner city Los Angeles. On the East End of London, St. John’s of Bethnal Green has had a long-standing ministry to “working girls.” The fifty congregations of many different faiths that make up the ecumenical organization BREAD in Columbus lobby politicians for adequate healthcare facilities and services to inner-city public schools.
Third, God is not indifferent to human needs. As Elijah lay atop the dying young man, he cried out to God, “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again.” And “[t]he Lord listened to the voice of Elijah….” Our psalm explicitly lays out all the ways in which God loves us, cares for us, and sustains us. Similarly, Jesus is deeply moved when he sees the widow of Nain and her dead son. He acts with compassion. God does not stand aloof from us, ignoring our griefs and sorrows, but mercifully moves to bring us strength and support.
Which brings me to us. If God is compassionate and moved by human need, if God shows up, especially to those in need, through whom does God show up? Through human beings! God worked God’s miracles in Zarephath through the very human Elijah. God worked God’s miracles in Capernaum, Nain, and elsewhere through Jesus in the flesh. St. Teresa of Avila famously reminded us that,
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks with
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
We are the ones created in the image of the God, who, though source of all, “keeps his promise forever,” and continues to care for the oppressed, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan. We are the ones who profess to follow the one who ministered to all with tender compassion. We are the ones who are called to do what Jesus did, in his name, and with his power. We are the ones who are called to be his body in the world. We are the ones who are showered with God’s many blessings and are moved, called, and empowered to bring God’s love and mercy into a broken and hurting world. We are the ones who see the miracle of God’s presence, even in small things, and become, through our own actions, instruments of miracles for others. The widows are all around us. Do you see them?
Sunday, May 29, 2016
All are Included
In another life, I taught a large introductory course at the University of Arizona called Oriental Humanities. It covered the art, literature, and religions of the Middle East and India. Because it had the dubious distinction of satisfying two categories of General Education requirements at the same time, it often attracted more than 300 students. I always announced my own religious affiliation at the outset. I told the students that I was a member of the Episcopal Church and a committed Christian. However, I also wanted them to know that I would try to teach about Islam and Hinduism from an insider’s perspective, i.e., as sympathetically as I could, as an outsider to both traditions. Invariably, at the end of the course, one or more of the comments in my student evaluations would read something like, “How can she, as a committed Christian, teach as if these other religions are also true?”
That’s a real question, and one that is still very much alive today in today’s religiously plural world. Often we fall on one side of the question or the other. On one side, like the students questioning my stance in the Oriental Humanities class, we assume that commitment to one faith means that there is nothing good in other faiths, and that we must reject those who hold those faiths. On the other hand, we might think that, in the interest of tolerance, we must deny our own beliefs and focus only on what we hold in common with other faiths. Neither stance is helpful. Despite all the current political rhetoric, the real challenge for us as people committed to Christ is how can we remain grounded in our own tradition while, at the same time, showing sympathy for others and respecting – perhaps even learning from – others’ unique traditions.
If the only Scripture reading you heard this morning was the lesson from 1 Kings, you might say that there is no challenge, that we must reject all other faith traditions. Elijah has been sent to Ahab’s kingdom. In an attempt to bring the people of Israel back into covenant with God, Elijah engages in a fierce competition with 450 priests who serve the pagan god Baal. As the priests of Baal dance up and down and wail their pleas, the people stand by watching mutely while nothing happens. Then Elijah, after having upped the ante by dousing the altar three times, calls upon God to consume the burnt offering. And, of course God does! Seeing this, the people finally find their voices as they fall on their faces and cry out, “The Lord indeed is God.” Israel had a long history of flirting with the religions of the other nations around it. So perhaps it is justifiable that Scripture would portray yet another story in which God, through Elijah, seeks to again call Israel back to the God of their ancestors. Rather than wholesale rejection of other faith communities, perhaps the contest for us in this story is between apathy and commitment to God. And perhaps the lesson for us should be that, unlike the people who stood by mutely, we are called to understand our faith as a serious and demanding commitment.
Our gospel story begins to suggest what mutual respect between people of different faith communities might look like. Here we see a Roman centurion, a member of the hated occupying forces in Israel, who has yet been a benefactor of the local synagogue. The centurion’s slave is mortally ill. Seeking help for the slave, the centurion is willing to approach the Jewish rabbi, whose fame as a healer has been spreading. However, the centurion respects the boundaries between himself as a gentile and Jesus as a Jew. Therefore the centurion does not approach Jesus directly, but sends emissaries. Nor does he force Jesus to enter his house, but rather sends the message that he understands that Jesus’ healing power will work at a distance, just as the centurion’s authority does. The Jewish elders are grateful for the centurion’s respect for the Jews and his gift of a synagogue, and they willingly approach Jesus on his behalf. And, of course, the centurion’s slave is healed.
More clues, though perhaps a little less obvious, are in this opening section of Paul’s letter to the Christians in Galatia. If you think Paul is testy in this opening part, wait till we get to chapter 3! The issue here is that the majority of these new Galatian Christians are gentiles. They have not been circumcised, and they do not follow Jewish law. To many observant Jews, their way of life was extremely distasteful. After Paul had evangelized them, the so-called “Judaizers” visited them, i.e., evangelists who told the Galatians that they had to be circumcised and follow Jewish law in order to join the fellowship of Jesus’ followers. Paul is livid. For him, the gospel that he preached was an inclusive gospel, i.e., that fellowship in the Christian Way is open to all, that Christ died for all, and that God’s love extends to all. The “different gospel” that Paul rails against in this letter is one that makes the Christian way into an exclusive Jewish sect, one that “restricts, narrows, or limits the love of God to an exclusive few, i.e., those gentiles willing to live as Jews. “The ‘true gospel’ that Paul defends is one that expands the love of God in Christ to all people without exception…. Through the one particular man Jesus, the love of God embraces all the world.”1 Reiterating this argument, Paul says later in his letter to the Christians in Ephesus, that God is the father of all fatherhood, the father of the whole human family, even of the entire unseen world.
Political rhetoric aside, perhaps this isn’t so difficult for Americans to understand. Ethnic and cultural diversity is the very bedrock of our country. Even before the various waves of Europeans arrived here, there were diverse communities of Native Americans speaking mutually unintelligible languages and following very different ways of life. Once in this country, the various immigrant communities from Europe founded Roman Catholic parishes, Protestant churches of various denominations, Eastern Orthodox parishes, and Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and Hasidic synagogues. In fact, now forty percent of all Jews in the world live in the United States. Some African slaves may originally have been Muslims. Muslims from the Middle East have been in this country since at least the mid-nineteenth century. Immigrants from Asia, especially after the end of the Asian Exclusion Act, have brought Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism to this country. Near Pittsburgh, you can see the Sri Venkateshwara temple, built in 1975. In my Oriental Humanities course, I used to show a film depicting how the temple was built, with the help of Hindu priests, according to precise Hindu specifications. The first Sikh gurdwara, i.e., Sikh temple, was built in Stockton, California in 1912.
We are, and have been, a mosaic of ethnic and religious communities in this country, as are most other countries now. That is why I cringe when I hear the rhetoric calling for contraction of immigration or restrictions on the rights of Muslims or any other community. Certainly, we want to guard against terrorists from abroad, even as we remember that we have our own strain of domestic terrorism. But thanks be to God, the diverse communities that have come here have flourished here, and all of us have benefited from their courage in leaving their ancestral homes to come here. A story earlier this month in the Columbus Dispatch detailed the miraculous recovery from lung and kidney failure of Scott Hamilton of Mt. Sterling, Ohio. He was fortunate to receive the first lung-kidney transplant ever at OSU hospital. The name of the leader of his surgical team: Ashraf El-Hinnawi. What do you think Dr. El-Hinnawi’s religion was?
So, as faithful followers of the one who reached out to all people, regardless of their religion or ethnicity, how indeed do we remain faithful to our own commitment while respecting those of others? The first step, so wonderfully exemplified by Jesus’ treatment of the centurion, is to see the goodness in the other, to accept that others are as worthy of respect and compassion as we ourselves are. Consider reading Brian McLaren’s insightful book, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? Or consider these few simple principles. Speak honestly about your own faith and allow others to do the same. Understand what contributions different faiths have made to the religious landscape. Be critical both about your own faith and those of others. Consider what you might learn from another tradition and what questions you have about your own tradition. Most especially, open your “hands, hearts, and minds to receive the gift of the other for who the other is, finding ways to serve one another and with one another.”
Egyptian Christian Safwat Marzouk reminds us that, “When people take both their own faith and the other person’s faith seriously, when they find healthy ways to both cross boundaries and maintain them, then they can turn their differences into a source of theological enrichment. They can join together to bring healing, well-being, and peace to our broken world.”2 Are you ready to join with others in the repair of the world? Are you ready to let the gospel be good news for all, even for those who journey to God on different paths?
1. Dan Clendenin, “No other Gospel, Journey with Jesus, May 29, 2016
2. “Living by the Word, Christian Century, May 10, 2016
That’s a real question, and one that is still very much alive today in today’s religiously plural world. Often we fall on one side of the question or the other. On one side, like the students questioning my stance in the Oriental Humanities class, we assume that commitment to one faith means that there is nothing good in other faiths, and that we must reject those who hold those faiths. On the other hand, we might think that, in the interest of tolerance, we must deny our own beliefs and focus only on what we hold in common with other faiths. Neither stance is helpful. Despite all the current political rhetoric, the real challenge for us as people committed to Christ is how can we remain grounded in our own tradition while, at the same time, showing sympathy for others and respecting – perhaps even learning from – others’ unique traditions.
If the only Scripture reading you heard this morning was the lesson from 1 Kings, you might say that there is no challenge, that we must reject all other faith traditions. Elijah has been sent to Ahab’s kingdom. In an attempt to bring the people of Israel back into covenant with God, Elijah engages in a fierce competition with 450 priests who serve the pagan god Baal. As the priests of Baal dance up and down and wail their pleas, the people stand by watching mutely while nothing happens. Then Elijah, after having upped the ante by dousing the altar three times, calls upon God to consume the burnt offering. And, of course God does! Seeing this, the people finally find their voices as they fall on their faces and cry out, “The Lord indeed is God.” Israel had a long history of flirting with the religions of the other nations around it. So perhaps it is justifiable that Scripture would portray yet another story in which God, through Elijah, seeks to again call Israel back to the God of their ancestors. Rather than wholesale rejection of other faith communities, perhaps the contest for us in this story is between apathy and commitment to God. And perhaps the lesson for us should be that, unlike the people who stood by mutely, we are called to understand our faith as a serious and demanding commitment.
Our gospel story begins to suggest what mutual respect between people of different faith communities might look like. Here we see a Roman centurion, a member of the hated occupying forces in Israel, who has yet been a benefactor of the local synagogue. The centurion’s slave is mortally ill. Seeking help for the slave, the centurion is willing to approach the Jewish rabbi, whose fame as a healer has been spreading. However, the centurion respects the boundaries between himself as a gentile and Jesus as a Jew. Therefore the centurion does not approach Jesus directly, but sends emissaries. Nor does he force Jesus to enter his house, but rather sends the message that he understands that Jesus’ healing power will work at a distance, just as the centurion’s authority does. The Jewish elders are grateful for the centurion’s respect for the Jews and his gift of a synagogue, and they willingly approach Jesus on his behalf. And, of course, the centurion’s slave is healed.
More clues, though perhaps a little less obvious, are in this opening section of Paul’s letter to the Christians in Galatia. If you think Paul is testy in this opening part, wait till we get to chapter 3! The issue here is that the majority of these new Galatian Christians are gentiles. They have not been circumcised, and they do not follow Jewish law. To many observant Jews, their way of life was extremely distasteful. After Paul had evangelized them, the so-called “Judaizers” visited them, i.e., evangelists who told the Galatians that they had to be circumcised and follow Jewish law in order to join the fellowship of Jesus’ followers. Paul is livid. For him, the gospel that he preached was an inclusive gospel, i.e., that fellowship in the Christian Way is open to all, that Christ died for all, and that God’s love extends to all. The “different gospel” that Paul rails against in this letter is one that makes the Christian way into an exclusive Jewish sect, one that “restricts, narrows, or limits the love of God to an exclusive few, i.e., those gentiles willing to live as Jews. “The ‘true gospel’ that Paul defends is one that expands the love of God in Christ to all people without exception…. Through the one particular man Jesus, the love of God embraces all the world.”1 Reiterating this argument, Paul says later in his letter to the Christians in Ephesus, that God is the father of all fatherhood, the father of the whole human family, even of the entire unseen world.
Political rhetoric aside, perhaps this isn’t so difficult for Americans to understand. Ethnic and cultural diversity is the very bedrock of our country. Even before the various waves of Europeans arrived here, there were diverse communities of Native Americans speaking mutually unintelligible languages and following very different ways of life. Once in this country, the various immigrant communities from Europe founded Roman Catholic parishes, Protestant churches of various denominations, Eastern Orthodox parishes, and Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and Hasidic synagogues. In fact, now forty percent of all Jews in the world live in the United States. Some African slaves may originally have been Muslims. Muslims from the Middle East have been in this country since at least the mid-nineteenth century. Immigrants from Asia, especially after the end of the Asian Exclusion Act, have brought Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism to this country. Near Pittsburgh, you can see the Sri Venkateshwara temple, built in 1975. In my Oriental Humanities course, I used to show a film depicting how the temple was built, with the help of Hindu priests, according to precise Hindu specifications. The first Sikh gurdwara, i.e., Sikh temple, was built in Stockton, California in 1912.
We are, and have been, a mosaic of ethnic and religious communities in this country, as are most other countries now. That is why I cringe when I hear the rhetoric calling for contraction of immigration or restrictions on the rights of Muslims or any other community. Certainly, we want to guard against terrorists from abroad, even as we remember that we have our own strain of domestic terrorism. But thanks be to God, the diverse communities that have come here have flourished here, and all of us have benefited from their courage in leaving their ancestral homes to come here. A story earlier this month in the Columbus Dispatch detailed the miraculous recovery from lung and kidney failure of Scott Hamilton of Mt. Sterling, Ohio. He was fortunate to receive the first lung-kidney transplant ever at OSU hospital. The name of the leader of his surgical team: Ashraf El-Hinnawi. What do you think Dr. El-Hinnawi’s religion was?
So, as faithful followers of the one who reached out to all people, regardless of their religion or ethnicity, how indeed do we remain faithful to our own commitment while respecting those of others? The first step, so wonderfully exemplified by Jesus’ treatment of the centurion, is to see the goodness in the other, to accept that others are as worthy of respect and compassion as we ourselves are. Consider reading Brian McLaren’s insightful book, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? Or consider these few simple principles. Speak honestly about your own faith and allow others to do the same. Understand what contributions different faiths have made to the religious landscape. Be critical both about your own faith and those of others. Consider what you might learn from another tradition and what questions you have about your own tradition. Most especially, open your “hands, hearts, and minds to receive the gift of the other for who the other is, finding ways to serve one another and with one another.”
Egyptian Christian Safwat Marzouk reminds us that, “When people take both their own faith and the other person’s faith seriously, when they find healthy ways to both cross boundaries and maintain them, then they can turn their differences into a source of theological enrichment. They can join together to bring healing, well-being, and peace to our broken world.”2 Are you ready to join with others in the repair of the world? Are you ready to let the gospel be good news for all, even for those who journey to God on different paths?
1. Dan Clendenin, “No other Gospel, Journey with Jesus, May 29, 2016
2. “Living by the Word, Christian Century, May 10, 2016
Sunday, May 22, 2016
The Spirit Will Lead You
Can a twenty first-century person be a Christian? Our language of Scripture, liturgy, and prayer mostly reflect a premodern understanding of the cosmos. Even if we understand that the language of Scripture and liturgy is poetic and metaphorical – in this church we are not, for example, asked to believe that the account of creation in Genesis is literal – how are we to follow Jesus in our own time and place? What does it mean for me as a twenty first-century person to commit myself to the revelation of Scripture, especially when the scientific discoveries of the last few centuries have given us a vastly different understanding of the world than the one that the writers of Scripture held?
Of course, these are not completely new questions. Scientists and religious thinkers through the centuries have been using their God-given reason to understand both creation and the revelation of God in Christ. When Galileo proposed that the earth was round, not flat, for example, and that the earth both rotated on its axis and revolved around the sun, his ideas were considered heretical and contrary to Scripture. He was even briefly imprisoned and forced to publicly recant his discoveries. Now, thanks to the work of astronomers we know that our corner of the universe is just a single small galaxy, that the universe is vaster than we can imagine and slowly expanding, and that the entire cosmos probably began about 13.6 billion years ago with a Big Bang.
Astronomers and biologists have also taught us that all existing matter was created in the Big Bang, that all the atoms in our bodies and everything around us are simply being recycled, and that all life, all things, are interconnected. We thus have a responsibility to respect and work with people, animals, the earth, all of creation, rather than to rape, pillage, and destroy. Mendel and Darwin, and host of other biologists and geneticists have taught us more about the mechanisms of life than ancient physicians, skilled as they were, could even begin to imagine. And more: for the writers of Scripture the known world consisted more or less of the Mediterranean world. Little, if anything, was known of sub-Saharan Africa or Asia. Nothing at all was known of the civilizations in central and South America that began to flourish well before the time of Christ, and whose ruins we are still discovering!
So how do we reconcile what we now know – what God has enabled us to know through the gift of reason – with Scripture? Must we take the Bible literally, as some “creationists” do, or do we have to throw it out altogether, as many atheists do? Worse yet, do we profess one thing when we come inside this building and something else altogether on the other side of the red doors? Perhaps today’s gospel reading helps answer these questions. Clearly, the disciples were confused and afraid – and asking lots of questions. It was their last night with Jesus in the account in John’s gospel. Talking a long time, Jesus had been explaining his reasons for leaving them and how they were to carry on once he was gone. He warned them that they wouldn’t understand right away what was happening. Then he made them a promise: the Spirit of truth would be with them and would guide them into all truth.
John’s gospel tells us a different story of Jesus’ last night with his friends than the story the other three gospels tell. Writing in the ‘90s or later, the evangelist was addressing a community that was separating from the wider Jewish community. These new followers of Jesus needed a deeper understanding of who Jesus was. They also needed reassurance that they had made the right choice in following him. For that reason, the gospel of John is less a historical account of Jesus’ life and more a theological study of Jesus. Seeking to explain for new followers who Jesus truly was, the gospel emphasizes throughout that Jesus is the Word made flesh, i.e., “God with skin on.” However, especially through Jesus’ words in today’s reading, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth,” the gospel writer also reassures these new followers that they don’t have to understand everything about Jesus all at once. The gospel writer assures the hearers of this gospel that, by following Jesus, they would be led by God’s Spirit to understand more deeply who God is, who Jesus is, and how God’s Spirit works in their lives. Most important, the gospel writer promises them that the Spirit of truth would continually help them to be transformed into faithful followers of Jesus, and that they – and by extension all faithful followers of Jesus – would continue to reinterpret, as individuals and as a community, the mission of Jesus and its meaning for their lives.
So can a twenty first-century person still follow this Jesus? Just as scientific understanding has changed over the centuries, so too has our understanding of Jesus. Thinkers in the earliest centuries after Christ wrestled with the question of how Jesus could be both human and divine. While orthodox Christianity asserts that Jesus was both, often the emphasis was on Jesus’ divinity. Indeed, the Nicene Creed, which we faithful recite as part of our Sunday worship, represents an attempt by the early leaders of the church to reach some consensus as to who Jesus was, and what his relationship was to God the creator and God the Spirit. Since the Renaissance, and especially since the eighteenth century, scholars and theologians have tended to emphasize the humanity of Jesus. Today, many interpreters of Scripture emphasize Jesus’ social teachings, emphasizing Jesus’ call to seek peace, end capital punishment, care for the poor, welcome the outcast in society, and end exclusion based on gender, sexuality, race, or socio-economic status.
Every era has been called on to reinterpret Jesus’ mission and relationship to God. Indeed, one writer suggests that continued reinterpretation of Jesus’ role is the very thrust of this part of John’s gospel. “What the text wants most to do,” this writer suggests, “is to encourage within the community an openness to fresh encounters with the revelation of Jesus. John intends to shape a community that is receptive to Spirit-guided growth. It is not that there will be new ‘truth’ beyond that of the ‘Word made flesh’…. John imagines a Christian community that is not locked into the past but understands what Jesus means for its own time. He anticipates that changing circumstances and the emergence of new questions – stem cell research, for example, or the ability to prolong life by artificial means, or growing religious pluralism – will require the community to think afresh.”
My friends, this is our call too. God has given us reason, and God has enabled us to understand Scripture, creation and each other more deeply than earlier centuries perhaps did. In our century we too are called to “think afresh.” Or maybe we need to ask ourselves is, do we really want to “think afresh?” Or would we rather let Jesus be a figure in some interesting stories, rather than someone to whom we have committed our lives? If we really want, as twenty first-century Christians, to continue to grow in our understanding of Jesus, how might we do that?
If we believe Jesus’ promise in John’s gospel that the Spirit will guide us into all truth, then we have to be open to the work of the Spirit. We have to let the Spirit teach us, in our own private prayer. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’ll ask again: can you find a time in your day – busy as you are – to regularly place yourself in God’s presence and let the Spirit begin to work within you? The Spirit also nourishes us in Word and Sacrament. Have you ever felt, sitting here or in any worship service, that sudden shard of understanding, that sudden glimpse of the reality of Jesus in your life? The Spirit especially leads and guides us in our study – of Scripture, theology, science, history, and social justice, to name just a few. Again, I’ll risk sounding like a broken record: God was not done with you when the priest poured water on your head, or the bishop laid hands on you. No less than the first hearers of John’s gospel, we too are called to “think afresh” about Jesus and how our commitment to following him impacts our life. The Spirit also leads us in our practice of mission. Sometimes when we are acting as God’s hands, when we look deeply into the eyes of people striving for justice and hear their stories, we learn more about the reality of Jesus than any book can teach us. And one more thing: growth in our understanding of Jesus is not in the end a do-it-yourself project, important as private prayer and study are. Ultimately, we are called to grow as a community of Jesus’ followers, to be Jesus in the world as a fellowship, and to do his works to the best of our ability.
God has blessed us with reason and skill. Jesus has promised us that we will continue to grow in our understanding of him and of the cosmos. And so, this week I invite you to meditate on these questions. Who is Jesus for you? How has your understanding of Jesus changed over the years? How does your life reflect your commitment to Jesus? Are you open to “thinking afresh” about the work of the Spirit in your life? Rest assured that Jesus’ promise still stands: even with all the discoveries that we have made over the centuries, the Spirit is still at work within us, helping us to see anew, to understand more deeply, and to follow more faithfully.
Of course, these are not completely new questions. Scientists and religious thinkers through the centuries have been using their God-given reason to understand both creation and the revelation of God in Christ. When Galileo proposed that the earth was round, not flat, for example, and that the earth both rotated on its axis and revolved around the sun, his ideas were considered heretical and contrary to Scripture. He was even briefly imprisoned and forced to publicly recant his discoveries. Now, thanks to the work of astronomers we know that our corner of the universe is just a single small galaxy, that the universe is vaster than we can imagine and slowly expanding, and that the entire cosmos probably began about 13.6 billion years ago with a Big Bang.
Astronomers and biologists have also taught us that all existing matter was created in the Big Bang, that all the atoms in our bodies and everything around us are simply being recycled, and that all life, all things, are interconnected. We thus have a responsibility to respect and work with people, animals, the earth, all of creation, rather than to rape, pillage, and destroy. Mendel and Darwin, and host of other biologists and geneticists have taught us more about the mechanisms of life than ancient physicians, skilled as they were, could even begin to imagine. And more: for the writers of Scripture the known world consisted more or less of the Mediterranean world. Little, if anything, was known of sub-Saharan Africa or Asia. Nothing at all was known of the civilizations in central and South America that began to flourish well before the time of Christ, and whose ruins we are still discovering!
So how do we reconcile what we now know – what God has enabled us to know through the gift of reason – with Scripture? Must we take the Bible literally, as some “creationists” do, or do we have to throw it out altogether, as many atheists do? Worse yet, do we profess one thing when we come inside this building and something else altogether on the other side of the red doors? Perhaps today’s gospel reading helps answer these questions. Clearly, the disciples were confused and afraid – and asking lots of questions. It was their last night with Jesus in the account in John’s gospel. Talking a long time, Jesus had been explaining his reasons for leaving them and how they were to carry on once he was gone. He warned them that they wouldn’t understand right away what was happening. Then he made them a promise: the Spirit of truth would be with them and would guide them into all truth.
John’s gospel tells us a different story of Jesus’ last night with his friends than the story the other three gospels tell. Writing in the ‘90s or later, the evangelist was addressing a community that was separating from the wider Jewish community. These new followers of Jesus needed a deeper understanding of who Jesus was. They also needed reassurance that they had made the right choice in following him. For that reason, the gospel of John is less a historical account of Jesus’ life and more a theological study of Jesus. Seeking to explain for new followers who Jesus truly was, the gospel emphasizes throughout that Jesus is the Word made flesh, i.e., “God with skin on.” However, especially through Jesus’ words in today’s reading, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth,” the gospel writer also reassures these new followers that they don’t have to understand everything about Jesus all at once. The gospel writer assures the hearers of this gospel that, by following Jesus, they would be led by God’s Spirit to understand more deeply who God is, who Jesus is, and how God’s Spirit works in their lives. Most important, the gospel writer promises them that the Spirit of truth would continually help them to be transformed into faithful followers of Jesus, and that they – and by extension all faithful followers of Jesus – would continue to reinterpret, as individuals and as a community, the mission of Jesus and its meaning for their lives.
So can a twenty first-century person still follow this Jesus? Just as scientific understanding has changed over the centuries, so too has our understanding of Jesus. Thinkers in the earliest centuries after Christ wrestled with the question of how Jesus could be both human and divine. While orthodox Christianity asserts that Jesus was both, often the emphasis was on Jesus’ divinity. Indeed, the Nicene Creed, which we faithful recite as part of our Sunday worship, represents an attempt by the early leaders of the church to reach some consensus as to who Jesus was, and what his relationship was to God the creator and God the Spirit. Since the Renaissance, and especially since the eighteenth century, scholars and theologians have tended to emphasize the humanity of Jesus. Today, many interpreters of Scripture emphasize Jesus’ social teachings, emphasizing Jesus’ call to seek peace, end capital punishment, care for the poor, welcome the outcast in society, and end exclusion based on gender, sexuality, race, or socio-economic status.
Every era has been called on to reinterpret Jesus’ mission and relationship to God. Indeed, one writer suggests that continued reinterpretation of Jesus’ role is the very thrust of this part of John’s gospel. “What the text wants most to do,” this writer suggests, “is to encourage within the community an openness to fresh encounters with the revelation of Jesus. John intends to shape a community that is receptive to Spirit-guided growth. It is not that there will be new ‘truth’ beyond that of the ‘Word made flesh’…. John imagines a Christian community that is not locked into the past but understands what Jesus means for its own time. He anticipates that changing circumstances and the emergence of new questions – stem cell research, for example, or the ability to prolong life by artificial means, or growing religious pluralism – will require the community to think afresh.”
My friends, this is our call too. God has given us reason, and God has enabled us to understand Scripture, creation and each other more deeply than earlier centuries perhaps did. In our century we too are called to “think afresh.” Or maybe we need to ask ourselves is, do we really want to “think afresh?” Or would we rather let Jesus be a figure in some interesting stories, rather than someone to whom we have committed our lives? If we really want, as twenty first-century Christians, to continue to grow in our understanding of Jesus, how might we do that?
If we believe Jesus’ promise in John’s gospel that the Spirit will guide us into all truth, then we have to be open to the work of the Spirit. We have to let the Spirit teach us, in our own private prayer. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’ll ask again: can you find a time in your day – busy as you are – to regularly place yourself in God’s presence and let the Spirit begin to work within you? The Spirit also nourishes us in Word and Sacrament. Have you ever felt, sitting here or in any worship service, that sudden shard of understanding, that sudden glimpse of the reality of Jesus in your life? The Spirit especially leads and guides us in our study – of Scripture, theology, science, history, and social justice, to name just a few. Again, I’ll risk sounding like a broken record: God was not done with you when the priest poured water on your head, or the bishop laid hands on you. No less than the first hearers of John’s gospel, we too are called to “think afresh” about Jesus and how our commitment to following him impacts our life. The Spirit also leads us in our practice of mission. Sometimes when we are acting as God’s hands, when we look deeply into the eyes of people striving for justice and hear their stories, we learn more about the reality of Jesus than any book can teach us. And one more thing: growth in our understanding of Jesus is not in the end a do-it-yourself project, important as private prayer and study are. Ultimately, we are called to grow as a community of Jesus’ followers, to be Jesus in the world as a fellowship, and to do his works to the best of our ability.
God has blessed us with reason and skill. Jesus has promised us that we will continue to grow in our understanding of him and of the cosmos. And so, this week I invite you to meditate on these questions. Who is Jesus for you? How has your understanding of Jesus changed over the years? How does your life reflect your commitment to Jesus? Are you open to “thinking afresh” about the work of the Spirit in your life? Rest assured that Jesus’ promise still stands: even with all the discoveries that we have made over the centuries, the Spirit is still at work within us, helping us to see anew, to understand more deeply, and to follow more faithfully.
Sunday, May 1, 2016
Who is God Calling Us to be?
Is God calling you? Who might God be calling you to be, and how are you responding to God’s call? If you are in the last quarter of your life, are you accepting God’s call to age gracefully, or are you fiercely resisting going “gentle into that good night?” If you are younger, how is God calling you, your spouse, and your family? How is God calling this parish? In 1841 a small group of Episcopalians decided to begin meeting. To what might this community be called 175 years later? And are we as individuals or as a parish called to partner with God in bringing God’s reign nearer?
Today’s readings from Scripture invite us to wonder about God’s call and possible responses to it Actually, from Genesis to Revelation, Scripture is filled with stories of people hearing God’s call and wondering about how to answer it. Think of Jacob at Haran, how he dreamed of a ladder on which angels were going up and down and heard God’s promise to bring him back to the land of Israel. What did Jacob say when he woke up? “’Surely the Lord is in this place; and I did not know it.’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’” Or think of Moses and the burning bush, or Isaiah in the temple, or Jeremiah. All knew themselves called by God, and all answered at first, “Surely, not me!” Even so, all eventually heeded God’s call and were transformed into leaders and prophets.
Do we see something similar in today’s Gospel reading? Jesus is about to depart from his faithful friends. Before the end, he gives them a preview of what life after his resurrection might look like. He promises that the Holy Spirit will lead and guide them and will call them to new, more confident life in him. In the last chapter of Revelation, the culmination of many visions, John of Ephesus has a foretaste of God’s future, of the re-creation and renewal of the entire cosmos. And, of course, the reading from the Acts of the Apostles depicts a point in the history of the early church where visions, calls, and responses proved decisive for the fledgling Christian community.
We enter the story at the point where Paul is making further plans for sharing the good news of Jesus. Having left Jerusalem, his plan was to stay in Asia Minor, i.e., what is today western Turkey. However, he “had a vision” of a call to Macedonia, i.e., the northern part of what today we call Greece. Taking with him the younger Timothy, he sailed about 100 miles northwest from Troas on the west coast of Turkey. He then went inland about ten miles to the Roman colony of Philippi, an area that had been settled mostly by veterans of the Roman wars who had been given land in return for their service. In a new place, Paul’s practice was to look for a synagogue where he might begin teaching devout Jews about the new Way of Jesus. So on the Sabbath day, he went where he thought they might gather, expecting no doubt to meet that “man of Macedonia” who had called to Paul in his vision. Sitting down to teach – that was the normal way in the ancient world – Paul found instead that he was teaching women.
One among these women, Lydia, heard God’s call through Paul’s teaching. Lydia was originally from an area of Asia Minor especially known for its expensive purple dye. Perhaps she was an agent of a company there. She was probably a widow and an independent businesswoman who owned her own home, to which she could invite Paul and Timothy. Most likely she was a gentile but also what was a called a “God-fearer,” i.e., someone who respected Judaism and worshipped with Jews without converting. Because of her devotion to God and her regular worship, because of her openness to God, she was able to hear God calling her to join the community of Jesus’ followers. From that moment on, her life was transformed. She was baptized, offered Paul and Timothy hospitality, eventually became a leader of the Christian community in Philippi and an evangelist in her own right, and even offered Paul her home after he was released from prison later on.
Through regular worship and prayer, both Paul and Lydia were able to hear God’s call. Both were transformed by God’s call. Paul left Asia Minor to evangelize Europe, even eventually planning trips to Rome and Spain. Lydia joined other women leaders of the early church, trusting in God’s promises, and courageously spreading the good news of Jesus wherever the Holy Spirit led them.
Does God still call us? On Monday I returned from a week-long CREDO conference at the retreat center of the Diocese of Virginia. The conference asked us to discern several questions. Perhaps the most important of these questions were “What is God calling me to do?” and “How am I responding to God’s call?” Nineteen of us officially retired clergy, all older than 68, attended the conference. Most were fully retired, but a few, like me, were still serving parishes. We were joined by eight faculty members, four of whom were also priests, representing the financial, vocational, health, and spiritual aspects of ministry. All of the faculty members were very candid about their faith journeys, how they had felt called, how they had responded, and what call they were now hearing. In small groups, each of us looked both back and ahead, sharing our own sense of how we were living out our call.
Some of you have heard my own call story, but perhaps this is a good time to share it. I was not like Lydia! Actually, I thought I heard a call to ordained ministry as a teenager, but I am old enough that no one was ordaining women in those days. As an adult I was busy with raising three children and pursuing a demanding academic career at three different universities. In 1998 I had organized a quiet morning at Good Shepherd in Athens led by a sister from the Community of the Transfiguration in Cincinnati. As I sat praying in the sanctuary, I distinctly heard God’s call. But I answered, “Not me, Lord! Go away.” In 2000, I chaired a parish discernment committee for another person. To my surprise, I asked myself the same questions that we were asking her. Again I said, “Nope, not me.” Shortly after the long-time rector of Good Shepherd left in late 2002, a sister from the Community of the Holy Spirit in New York, Sr. Faith Margaret whom some of you have met, came to talk with then Vestry members about the transition. I spent about five minutes with her talking about Vestry matters and the rest of the time about my lack of prayer life. Following her counsel, I began to pray again and in May 2003 became an associate of the Community.
Perhaps all the prayer had finally opened my ears. Perhaps the Holy Spirit finally shouted at me loud enough. In early 2004, I opened my mouth and said to Sr. Faith Margaret, “I’m thinking about ordained ministry.” She was the first person I had ever said those words to besides my spouse. After that, the Holy Spirit grabbed my hand and off we went: I was a postulant for the priesthood eleven months later, took early retirement from Ohio University in 2005, was ordained priest three years later, and have now stood before you for eight years. By God’s grace, and with the help of you all, my spiritual directors, and many others, I am still learning and growing as a follower of Jesus.
What is God calling you to do? Do you create the time in your day, in your week, so that you can hear God’s call to you? Is there any Sabbath time in your life, so that you too might go outside the gate by the river and hear life-changing teaching? Have you perhaps had a vision or heard a call, as Paul and others in Scripture did? Or perhaps God’s words have pierced your soul as you have read, sat in silence, or even sung a hymn. Is God calling you to have the courage to change the course of your life, to minister in some new way to those around you, to leave behind those habits and addictions that keep you from following Jesus? How are you answering God’s call?
What is God calling us to do? Are we as a parish called to leave our comfortable home in Asia Minor and cross over to Macedonia? Perhaps there’s a Lydia waiting to hear from us. Soon after Johnny “Knuckles” DeVincenzo left prison after a 44-year sentence, he heard a child crying in the lobby of his Harlem apartment building. Her mother explained that they were both hungry, so DeVincenzo took them out to dinner. So began a most unusual partnership between the leaders of the Fortune Society, a New York-based nonprofit whose mission is to reintegrate formerly incarcerated people into society, and “The Castle,” a Gothic-style apartment house. Partnering with a development firm, Fortune opened an eleven-story building adjacent to the Castle that houses both former convicts and low-income families. As so many former convicts are older and male, and so many of the low-income families are headed by single mothers, The Castle has become a unique haven. After having previously having been on the own, both the men and women have found surprisingly supportive families and healing for their souls.
Whenever we are moved by love, we are being sent by God. Who is God calling us to be? Where is God sending us? How are we answering God’s call?
Today’s readings from Scripture invite us to wonder about God’s call and possible responses to it Actually, from Genesis to Revelation, Scripture is filled with stories of people hearing God’s call and wondering about how to answer it. Think of Jacob at Haran, how he dreamed of a ladder on which angels were going up and down and heard God’s promise to bring him back to the land of Israel. What did Jacob say when he woke up? “’Surely the Lord is in this place; and I did not know it.’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’” Or think of Moses and the burning bush, or Isaiah in the temple, or Jeremiah. All knew themselves called by God, and all answered at first, “Surely, not me!” Even so, all eventually heeded God’s call and were transformed into leaders and prophets.
Do we see something similar in today’s Gospel reading? Jesus is about to depart from his faithful friends. Before the end, he gives them a preview of what life after his resurrection might look like. He promises that the Holy Spirit will lead and guide them and will call them to new, more confident life in him. In the last chapter of Revelation, the culmination of many visions, John of Ephesus has a foretaste of God’s future, of the re-creation and renewal of the entire cosmos. And, of course, the reading from the Acts of the Apostles depicts a point in the history of the early church where visions, calls, and responses proved decisive for the fledgling Christian community.
We enter the story at the point where Paul is making further plans for sharing the good news of Jesus. Having left Jerusalem, his plan was to stay in Asia Minor, i.e., what is today western Turkey. However, he “had a vision” of a call to Macedonia, i.e., the northern part of what today we call Greece. Taking with him the younger Timothy, he sailed about 100 miles northwest from Troas on the west coast of Turkey. He then went inland about ten miles to the Roman colony of Philippi, an area that had been settled mostly by veterans of the Roman wars who had been given land in return for their service. In a new place, Paul’s practice was to look for a synagogue where he might begin teaching devout Jews about the new Way of Jesus. So on the Sabbath day, he went where he thought they might gather, expecting no doubt to meet that “man of Macedonia” who had called to Paul in his vision. Sitting down to teach – that was the normal way in the ancient world – Paul found instead that he was teaching women.
One among these women, Lydia, heard God’s call through Paul’s teaching. Lydia was originally from an area of Asia Minor especially known for its expensive purple dye. Perhaps she was an agent of a company there. She was probably a widow and an independent businesswoman who owned her own home, to which she could invite Paul and Timothy. Most likely she was a gentile but also what was a called a “God-fearer,” i.e., someone who respected Judaism and worshipped with Jews without converting. Because of her devotion to God and her regular worship, because of her openness to God, she was able to hear God calling her to join the community of Jesus’ followers. From that moment on, her life was transformed. She was baptized, offered Paul and Timothy hospitality, eventually became a leader of the Christian community in Philippi and an evangelist in her own right, and even offered Paul her home after he was released from prison later on.
Through regular worship and prayer, both Paul and Lydia were able to hear God’s call. Both were transformed by God’s call. Paul left Asia Minor to evangelize Europe, even eventually planning trips to Rome and Spain. Lydia joined other women leaders of the early church, trusting in God’s promises, and courageously spreading the good news of Jesus wherever the Holy Spirit led them.
Does God still call us? On Monday I returned from a week-long CREDO conference at the retreat center of the Diocese of Virginia. The conference asked us to discern several questions. Perhaps the most important of these questions were “What is God calling me to do?” and “How am I responding to God’s call?” Nineteen of us officially retired clergy, all older than 68, attended the conference. Most were fully retired, but a few, like me, were still serving parishes. We were joined by eight faculty members, four of whom were also priests, representing the financial, vocational, health, and spiritual aspects of ministry. All of the faculty members were very candid about their faith journeys, how they had felt called, how they had responded, and what call they were now hearing. In small groups, each of us looked both back and ahead, sharing our own sense of how we were living out our call.
Some of you have heard my own call story, but perhaps this is a good time to share it. I was not like Lydia! Actually, I thought I heard a call to ordained ministry as a teenager, but I am old enough that no one was ordaining women in those days. As an adult I was busy with raising three children and pursuing a demanding academic career at three different universities. In 1998 I had organized a quiet morning at Good Shepherd in Athens led by a sister from the Community of the Transfiguration in Cincinnati. As I sat praying in the sanctuary, I distinctly heard God’s call. But I answered, “Not me, Lord! Go away.” In 2000, I chaired a parish discernment committee for another person. To my surprise, I asked myself the same questions that we were asking her. Again I said, “Nope, not me.” Shortly after the long-time rector of Good Shepherd left in late 2002, a sister from the Community of the Holy Spirit in New York, Sr. Faith Margaret whom some of you have met, came to talk with then Vestry members about the transition. I spent about five minutes with her talking about Vestry matters and the rest of the time about my lack of prayer life. Following her counsel, I began to pray again and in May 2003 became an associate of the Community.
Perhaps all the prayer had finally opened my ears. Perhaps the Holy Spirit finally shouted at me loud enough. In early 2004, I opened my mouth and said to Sr. Faith Margaret, “I’m thinking about ordained ministry.” She was the first person I had ever said those words to besides my spouse. After that, the Holy Spirit grabbed my hand and off we went: I was a postulant for the priesthood eleven months later, took early retirement from Ohio University in 2005, was ordained priest three years later, and have now stood before you for eight years. By God’s grace, and with the help of you all, my spiritual directors, and many others, I am still learning and growing as a follower of Jesus.
What is God calling you to do? Do you create the time in your day, in your week, so that you can hear God’s call to you? Is there any Sabbath time in your life, so that you too might go outside the gate by the river and hear life-changing teaching? Have you perhaps had a vision or heard a call, as Paul and others in Scripture did? Or perhaps God’s words have pierced your soul as you have read, sat in silence, or even sung a hymn. Is God calling you to have the courage to change the course of your life, to minister in some new way to those around you, to leave behind those habits and addictions that keep you from following Jesus? How are you answering God’s call?
What is God calling us to do? Are we as a parish called to leave our comfortable home in Asia Minor and cross over to Macedonia? Perhaps there’s a Lydia waiting to hear from us. Soon after Johnny “Knuckles” DeVincenzo left prison after a 44-year sentence, he heard a child crying in the lobby of his Harlem apartment building. Her mother explained that they were both hungry, so DeVincenzo took them out to dinner. So began a most unusual partnership between the leaders of the Fortune Society, a New York-based nonprofit whose mission is to reintegrate formerly incarcerated people into society, and “The Castle,” a Gothic-style apartment house. Partnering with a development firm, Fortune opened an eleven-story building adjacent to the Castle that houses both former convicts and low-income families. As so many former convicts are older and male, and so many of the low-income families are headed by single mothers, The Castle has become a unique haven. After having previously having been on the own, both the men and women have found surprisingly supportive families and healing for their souls.
Whenever we are moved by love, we are being sent by God. Who is God calling us to be? Where is God sending us? How are we answering God’s call?
Sunday, April 10, 2016
Who is a Mystic?
What do you think of when you hear the word “mystic?” Do you think of people sitting around in a trance, perhaps trying to contact the dead, like the spiritualists of the last century? Do you think of whirling dervishes, dancing their way into a spiritual frenzy? Do you think of some mad tribal ritual, where people go into raptures and speak in strange voices?
I once heard a priest, a well-respected man about the age I am now, say in a sermon that he had never had a mystical experience. And I thought to myself, “Are you sure?” Mystical experiences are not necessarily strange or exotic. What we are talking about when we say “mystical experience” is a direct sense of the reality of God, of the divine or holy foundation of life. It is a sense of faith based on direct experience, rather than intellectual assent to certain creedal statements. Mystical experiences also include a sense of being addressed by God or even of being commissioned by God. Most important, when we have a mystical experience, we know that we are in God’s presence. So perhaps mystical experiences are not so strange after all?
All of today’s readings depict what we could call mystical experiences, experiences of direct encounter with God. The reading from the book of Acts actually lets us see two mystical experiences. In the first, the more dramatic one, we see Paul stopped dead in his tracks and temporarily blinded. Sensing that he is in God’s presence, but in a very different way than he had ever before experienced God, Paul asks the only possible question, “Who are you, Lord?” Along with the answer to his question, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” Paul receives a hint of the commission that awaits him: “You will be told what to do.”
But Paul isn’t the only one in this story to have a direct sense of God’s presence. Ananias too, has a vision, a vision in which he too receives a commission. He hears God command him, despite his reservations about Paul, to go to Paul and minister to him.
The psalmist too has had a direct sense of God’s presence. Pondering the ebbs and flows of life, the psalmist knows that God has been with him, supporting him and upholding him. As a result, the psalmist can exultantly shout, “my heart sings to you without ceasing/ O Lord my God, I will give you thanks forever.”
That we are hearing about a mystical experience is most obvious in the reading from the book of Revelation. Actually, the whole book depicts a series of visions that John, the leader of a community of Christians in Ephesus, saw while he was exiled by the Romans on the island of Patmos. In the brief reading that we heard this morning, John sees himself ushered into the divine presence, where he is surrounded by virtually all of creation joined together in praise of Christ. As he joins in praise, he sees Christ as the sacrificial lamb, now reigning triumphantly in heaven.
The reading from the gospel according to John also shows the disciples having a direct experience of the risen Christ. Interestingly, notice who realizes first that the stranger standing on the beach is Jesus. It is the “beloved disciple.” He was Jesus’ intimate friend, and the one who was lying right next to Jesus at his last meal. You might remember that last week I mentioned Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting of the empty tomb. In the painting, Peter is downcast and doubtful, but the beloved disciple is radiant, glowing with an inner light. Could it be that intimate friendship with Jesus helps us recognize him, as the beloved disciple did here from the boat?
Of course, Peter too has a direct experience of being in the presence of the risen Christ. Like the others, Peter also receives a commission: to let his love for Jesus be reflected in feeding Jesus’ sheep, i.e., in satisfying the hunger, both physical and spiritual, of those to whom he is sent. Even the beloved disciple has a commission. In the very last verses of this last chapter of John’s gospel, which we don’t hear today, the writer tells us that his task is to testify to “these things” and to write them down.
So, all our lections show us God bringing about personal transformation in people through direct encounter. By God’s grace, the psalmist, Paul, Ananias, John of Ephesus, the beloved disciple, Peter, and presumably everyone else who was on the beach that day had a direct experience of God’s reality and Christ’s risen presence. And all were charged and commissioned to share the good news of God’s love through concrete acts of mercy.
Are the psalmist, Paul, Ananias, John of Ephesus, the beloved disciple, Peter, and the others in the boat that day the only ones ever to have had experiences like the ones we just heard about? Oh sure, you might say, maybe there have been a few saints since the time the Scriptures were written. Julian of Norwich, who lived in the fourteenth century, wrote down her vivid visions of Jesus. Teresa of Avila also wrote about her visions of Jesus and imagined the soul as an interior castle in which he comes to live. And you can still read the journals and other writings on contemplative prayer of Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who died only in 1968.
So, do real, ordinary people, people like us, have such direct encounters with God? Actually, they do. Some years ago, I visited the church where Julian was thought to be enclosed. Most of us would not choose the life she chose: living intentionally in a room built onto the side of a church and spending her days in prayer and contemplation. But what was surprising to me when I visited the church was that a group of people were sitting in Julian’s enclosure spending an hour in silent prayer! You can also visit Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, the Trappist monastery where Merton lived. In fact, lay people from all over the world have come to the monastery since its founding in 1848. You can go for a long weekend or for four and half days. Either way, you spend the entire time in silence, except for the seven daily sung offices, which lay folks can join. Those who come to the church of St. Julian or to Gethsemani come to have that same direct experience of God that the people in Scripture and so many others since have had.
But you don’t have to go to England or Kentucky to have such an experience – although going to such places is definitely worth the effort. And it’s not only especially holy people who experience God’s presence with them directly. All of us called to know in our own flesh the reality of God and of Christ’s risen presence with us. We might have such a direct experience of God in nature or when we are at table with Jesus in the Eucharist. More likely, we may have direct sense of God’s presence when we allow ourselves some time to be alone with God, when we “recline next to him,” like the beloved disciple, when we let God love us.
And what happens when we actually have such a direct experience of God’s presence in our lives? Like the psalmist, we may have a deeper trust in God’s mercy, forgiveness, and love. God may start in us a process of inner transformation, in which we begin to become the person we were truly created to be. We may be able to reflect more clearly for others God’s love for us and for them. We may have a clearer idea of what God is calling us to do. God may even strengthen our ability to minister to God’s people.
At this point, you might be thinking, “Wait, wait, none of this applies to me.” To be sure, our temperaments are different. Some of us are called to a more contemplative life, while others of us are called to engage more actively with the world. And we are at different stages of life. Some of us have demanding jobs and families who need our attention. However, as we age, and our social and familial responsibilities lessen, many of us feel called to life that includes more prayer and contemplation. Indeed for many of us, the key to graceful aging is to let go of our tight self-concern and begin to see ourselves as connected with both God and Jesus’ “sheep.”
Almost all of us can discover, or rediscover, that our life is rooted in God, and that our ministry, whatever it is, ideally flows out of the relationship that we develop with God through prayer. And the key to a deeper prayer life? Intentional practice. Our way of putting ourselves into God’s presence does not have to be elaborate or protracted, but it does have to be regular. Whether you spend five, ten, thirty, or more minutes a day with God is immaterial. What does matter is that, when we regularly open ourselves to God’s presence and allow God into our lives, God will grace us with what we need. So I invite you to examine your life. Where are the times when you can allow God to be present to you?
And here is the good news: God meets us where we are. Whether we are in an upper room fearing for our lives, whether we are on the road to Damascus, whether we are out fishing, whether we are in our own rooms, whether we are on the road to Columbus, or whether we are out on our morning walk, if we open our eyes and ears, the risen Christ will make himself known to us. He will gently take us by the hand and graciously begin to work his will for us. We only have to let him.
I once heard a priest, a well-respected man about the age I am now, say in a sermon that he had never had a mystical experience. And I thought to myself, “Are you sure?” Mystical experiences are not necessarily strange or exotic. What we are talking about when we say “mystical experience” is a direct sense of the reality of God, of the divine or holy foundation of life. It is a sense of faith based on direct experience, rather than intellectual assent to certain creedal statements. Mystical experiences also include a sense of being addressed by God or even of being commissioned by God. Most important, when we have a mystical experience, we know that we are in God’s presence. So perhaps mystical experiences are not so strange after all?
All of today’s readings depict what we could call mystical experiences, experiences of direct encounter with God. The reading from the book of Acts actually lets us see two mystical experiences. In the first, the more dramatic one, we see Paul stopped dead in his tracks and temporarily blinded. Sensing that he is in God’s presence, but in a very different way than he had ever before experienced God, Paul asks the only possible question, “Who are you, Lord?” Along with the answer to his question, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” Paul receives a hint of the commission that awaits him: “You will be told what to do.”
But Paul isn’t the only one in this story to have a direct sense of God’s presence. Ananias too, has a vision, a vision in which he too receives a commission. He hears God command him, despite his reservations about Paul, to go to Paul and minister to him.
The psalmist too has had a direct sense of God’s presence. Pondering the ebbs and flows of life, the psalmist knows that God has been with him, supporting him and upholding him. As a result, the psalmist can exultantly shout, “my heart sings to you without ceasing/ O Lord my God, I will give you thanks forever.”
That we are hearing about a mystical experience is most obvious in the reading from the book of Revelation. Actually, the whole book depicts a series of visions that John, the leader of a community of Christians in Ephesus, saw while he was exiled by the Romans on the island of Patmos. In the brief reading that we heard this morning, John sees himself ushered into the divine presence, where he is surrounded by virtually all of creation joined together in praise of Christ. As he joins in praise, he sees Christ as the sacrificial lamb, now reigning triumphantly in heaven.
The reading from the gospel according to John also shows the disciples having a direct experience of the risen Christ. Interestingly, notice who realizes first that the stranger standing on the beach is Jesus. It is the “beloved disciple.” He was Jesus’ intimate friend, and the one who was lying right next to Jesus at his last meal. You might remember that last week I mentioned Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting of the empty tomb. In the painting, Peter is downcast and doubtful, but the beloved disciple is radiant, glowing with an inner light. Could it be that intimate friendship with Jesus helps us recognize him, as the beloved disciple did here from the boat?
Of course, Peter too has a direct experience of being in the presence of the risen Christ. Like the others, Peter also receives a commission: to let his love for Jesus be reflected in feeding Jesus’ sheep, i.e., in satisfying the hunger, both physical and spiritual, of those to whom he is sent. Even the beloved disciple has a commission. In the very last verses of this last chapter of John’s gospel, which we don’t hear today, the writer tells us that his task is to testify to “these things” and to write them down.
So, all our lections show us God bringing about personal transformation in people through direct encounter. By God’s grace, the psalmist, Paul, Ananias, John of Ephesus, the beloved disciple, Peter, and presumably everyone else who was on the beach that day had a direct experience of God’s reality and Christ’s risen presence. And all were charged and commissioned to share the good news of God’s love through concrete acts of mercy.
Are the psalmist, Paul, Ananias, John of Ephesus, the beloved disciple, Peter, and the others in the boat that day the only ones ever to have had experiences like the ones we just heard about? Oh sure, you might say, maybe there have been a few saints since the time the Scriptures were written. Julian of Norwich, who lived in the fourteenth century, wrote down her vivid visions of Jesus. Teresa of Avila also wrote about her visions of Jesus and imagined the soul as an interior castle in which he comes to live. And you can still read the journals and other writings on contemplative prayer of Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who died only in 1968.
So, do real, ordinary people, people like us, have such direct encounters with God? Actually, they do. Some years ago, I visited the church where Julian was thought to be enclosed. Most of us would not choose the life she chose: living intentionally in a room built onto the side of a church and spending her days in prayer and contemplation. But what was surprising to me when I visited the church was that a group of people were sitting in Julian’s enclosure spending an hour in silent prayer! You can also visit Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, the Trappist monastery where Merton lived. In fact, lay people from all over the world have come to the monastery since its founding in 1848. You can go for a long weekend or for four and half days. Either way, you spend the entire time in silence, except for the seven daily sung offices, which lay folks can join. Those who come to the church of St. Julian or to Gethsemani come to have that same direct experience of God that the people in Scripture and so many others since have had.
But you don’t have to go to England or Kentucky to have such an experience – although going to such places is definitely worth the effort. And it’s not only especially holy people who experience God’s presence with them directly. All of us called to know in our own flesh the reality of God and of Christ’s risen presence with us. We might have such a direct experience of God in nature or when we are at table with Jesus in the Eucharist. More likely, we may have direct sense of God’s presence when we allow ourselves some time to be alone with God, when we “recline next to him,” like the beloved disciple, when we let God love us.
And what happens when we actually have such a direct experience of God’s presence in our lives? Like the psalmist, we may have a deeper trust in God’s mercy, forgiveness, and love. God may start in us a process of inner transformation, in which we begin to become the person we were truly created to be. We may be able to reflect more clearly for others God’s love for us and for them. We may have a clearer idea of what God is calling us to do. God may even strengthen our ability to minister to God’s people.
At this point, you might be thinking, “Wait, wait, none of this applies to me.” To be sure, our temperaments are different. Some of us are called to a more contemplative life, while others of us are called to engage more actively with the world. And we are at different stages of life. Some of us have demanding jobs and families who need our attention. However, as we age, and our social and familial responsibilities lessen, many of us feel called to life that includes more prayer and contemplation. Indeed for many of us, the key to graceful aging is to let go of our tight self-concern and begin to see ourselves as connected with both God and Jesus’ “sheep.”
Almost all of us can discover, or rediscover, that our life is rooted in God, and that our ministry, whatever it is, ideally flows out of the relationship that we develop with God through prayer. And the key to a deeper prayer life? Intentional practice. Our way of putting ourselves into God’s presence does not have to be elaborate or protracted, but it does have to be regular. Whether you spend five, ten, thirty, or more minutes a day with God is immaterial. What does matter is that, when we regularly open ourselves to God’s presence and allow God into our lives, God will grace us with what we need. So I invite you to examine your life. Where are the times when you can allow God to be present to you?
And here is the good news: God meets us where we are. Whether we are in an upper room fearing for our lives, whether we are on the road to Damascus, whether we are out fishing, whether we are in our own rooms, whether we are on the road to Columbus, or whether we are out on our morning walk, if we open our eyes and ears, the risen Christ will make himself known to us. He will gently take us by the hand and graciously begin to work his will for us. We only have to let him.
Sunday, April 3, 2016
Where is the Risen Christ?
“Where did you meet the risen Christ this Easter?” The question from my spiritual director stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t answer it, so she decided to tell her own story. She is a Dominican sister, and for some years she had worked in adult formation in a large Columbus parish. For the Easter vigil this year, she and another sister decided to go back to that parish. As she was walking into the sanctuary, she felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned around. It was a man she had worked with some years back. Let’s call him “Bill.” When my director had first met him, Bill was an alcoholic. He had already lost two marriages and declared bankruptcy twice. Things went well for a while. But by the time my director left that parish, Bill had gone back to drinking, lost another business, and dropped away from the church. However, one look at Bill’s face at the Easter vigil this year told my director that something had changed. “Sister,” said Bill excitedly, “I’ve cleared up my debts, my business is stable, and I’ve been sober for two years!”
Where do we meet the risen Christ? Where did Thomas meet the risen Christ? Actually, if you think about it, we have an odd set of readings for this Sunday. In our lesson from the Acts of the Apostles, we hear Peter’s declaration that he must obey God rather than human authorities, and that, as a witness, he must continue to proclaim Christ crucified and risen. Our psalm exhorts us to praise God joyfully and noisily, most especially for God’s “mighty acts.” In our reading from the book of Revelation, which we will hear throughout Easter tide, John of Ephesus proclaims the Christ “who is and who was and who is to come.” He reminds us that the same Christ has brought us into a kingdom, in which we are all priests – all of us.
And then we hear the gospel passage, which, at first glance, seems to contrast with the joy of the other lessons, especially the exuberant tone of the psalm. It’s a passage, as you’ve just heard, with two episodes. In the first we see the anxious disciples, afraid that they will be the next to be executed. Jesus comes among them and reassures them. He gives them a commission: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Then Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit into them. They are good to go.
We don’t know why Thomas wasn’t with the group of disciples when Jesus appeared to them that Easter evening. Actually, we don’t know much about him at all. We might infer from the three times that he appears in the Gospel of John that he bluntly “tells it like it is.” We first saw him when Jesus heard of the death of Lazarus. Jesus decided to return to Bethany, even though he knew that he was a marked man. “Come along,” Thomas said to the others, “we might as well die with him.” We next encountered Thomas at Jesus’ last meal with his friends. Jesus told them that they would live as he did, since they knew where he was going. Thomas countered, “Master, we have no idea where you’re going. How do you expect us to know the way?”
And now here we are, a week after Jesus first visited the frightened disciples. Like many of us, Thomas refused to accept hearsay evidence. Someone else’s report of the risen Christ would not convince him. And really, wasn’t such good news too good to be true? As we know, he was not the first or the only one to wonder about reports that Jesus had been raised. Thomas was especially not ready to believe that Jesus had been raised – not after that horrific execution. If you were Thomas, would you have believed such a report?
By God’s grace, Thomas receives the confirmation that he needs. He meets the risen Jesus. Jesus has all the wounds that prove that it is he, not a ghost nor a hoax, nor some other deity. Thomas is then able to make a deep profession of faith: “My Lord and my God.” Then Jesus gently reminds Thomas that all those who follow Thomas in faith will not need to see Jesus’ physical body to trust that Jesus was indeed raised from the dead. We hear no more of Thomas in John’s gospel, but perhaps he received the same commission as the other disciples. Tradition has it that Thomas spread the good news in India. In fact, the Mar Thoma church in south India traces its founding to Thomas.
So where do we meet the risen Christ today? We are among those who will not see Jesus’ physical body. But is God still bringing life from death? As I continued to meditate on my director’s question, I thought about a woman I have come to know through the Wellstreams program. When I first met her, I was sure she was “not my type.” And indeed, at first glance ours is an unlikely friendship: she is about fifteen years younger than I, has been a stay-at-home mom to five children, is delightfully artistic, and is a committed Roman Catholic. By God’s grace, when she contacted me after the program ended, I was able to say “yes,” and we have met regularly over coffee ever since. Our relationship has been a gift to me, and I felt truly blessed by our last visit. Has the risen Christ made himself known to me in her?
Perhaps Episcopal priest and writer Barbara Crafton is right. Crafton has a daily e-message. For the last few months, she has been sending paintings of Scripture stories, with her own commentary. On Friday she sent a picture of a painting by the early twentieth-century African-American artist, Henry Ossawa Turner. Depicting Peter and John at the empty tomb, the painting shows a somber, puzzled-looking Peter. On the other hand, John is transfixed. He is radiant and glows with an inner light. We know he has had a life-changing experience. Instinct tells me that Crafton is right. “We see the resurrected Christ best,” she says, “by seeing the people who see him.”
But there’s more. As the frightened disciples, the walkers on the road to Emmaus, and Thomas discovered, the risen Christ also shows up in unexpected places, in places where old lives are being renewed, where people are welcomed into fellowship, where death is turned to life. Look around you, you may discover him too. Here are some other places he has recently turned up. Marcel Visser discovered the risen Christ through his friendship with a member of the L’Arche community for disabled adults in Cape Breton, Canada. In the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan, Ibrahim, a six year-old Syrian refugee who is deaf, is learning sign language through the Holy Land Institute for the Deaf and its partner agencies. Ibrahim and other refugee children like him might have been condemned to a minimal life. However, with the support of Episcopal Relief and Development and other organizations, hearing-impaired children, blind children, even those with mental disabilities are receiving education and, with it, hope for the future.
And one more. I don’t normally read the Sunday New York Times sports pages. However, a couple of days ago, an article caught my eye, and I knew that the risen Christ had unexpectedly turned up in, of all places, a boxing club in Toronto.1 You’ll see all the trappings of a standard boxing club in the Newsgirls Boxing Club: a rope, rings, speed bags, heavy bags, and a punching mannequin. Initially aimed at women, the club is now a welcoming haven for all. The club especially welcomes transgender people, who often find daily life difficult, even dangerous. For many the club is a place of sanctuary and empowerment, even though they will never box anywhere else. Recently, a newcomer to the club, who had come for a few times, asked club founder Savoy Howe a simple question that profoundly moved her. “Why are you so nice to trans people?” the person asked. Howe’s eyes filled with tears as she told the interviewer the story. Then she paused, composed herself, and said, “I mean, why wouldn’t you be?”
And you? Where did you meet the risen Christ this Easter? Where are you meeting him? Have you met him at the altar, when he nourishes you with his Body and Blood? Have you met him in your own prayer time, when you stay silent long enough to hear his faint whispers? Have you seen him in the faces of other people who have seen him? Or perhaps you have met him in your loved ones and friends, those who minister to you and bless you, and those with whom you share God’s blessings. Have you met him in nature, when you look with loving eyes on the beautiful earth which God has given us? Have you met him in the faces of those whom you serve, in work or ministry? Or perhaps he has turned up in places where you never expected he would turn up, in places where outcasts are welcomed, the neglected are cared for, and lives are transformed.
I invite you this week to look around you, to see if by chance the risen Christ has shown up. Be sure: he has and he will. And when he does, he will reassure you that, although we do not see his physical body, we are still blessed with his presence in our lives.
1. David Waldstein, “Sunday Sports,” March 27, 2016, pp. 1, 6.
Where do we meet the risen Christ? Where did Thomas meet the risen Christ? Actually, if you think about it, we have an odd set of readings for this Sunday. In our lesson from the Acts of the Apostles, we hear Peter’s declaration that he must obey God rather than human authorities, and that, as a witness, he must continue to proclaim Christ crucified and risen. Our psalm exhorts us to praise God joyfully and noisily, most especially for God’s “mighty acts.” In our reading from the book of Revelation, which we will hear throughout Easter tide, John of Ephesus proclaims the Christ “who is and who was and who is to come.” He reminds us that the same Christ has brought us into a kingdom, in which we are all priests – all of us.
And then we hear the gospel passage, which, at first glance, seems to contrast with the joy of the other lessons, especially the exuberant tone of the psalm. It’s a passage, as you’ve just heard, with two episodes. In the first we see the anxious disciples, afraid that they will be the next to be executed. Jesus comes among them and reassures them. He gives them a commission: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Then Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit into them. They are good to go.
We don’t know why Thomas wasn’t with the group of disciples when Jesus appeared to them that Easter evening. Actually, we don’t know much about him at all. We might infer from the three times that he appears in the Gospel of John that he bluntly “tells it like it is.” We first saw him when Jesus heard of the death of Lazarus. Jesus decided to return to Bethany, even though he knew that he was a marked man. “Come along,” Thomas said to the others, “we might as well die with him.” We next encountered Thomas at Jesus’ last meal with his friends. Jesus told them that they would live as he did, since they knew where he was going. Thomas countered, “Master, we have no idea where you’re going. How do you expect us to know the way?”
And now here we are, a week after Jesus first visited the frightened disciples. Like many of us, Thomas refused to accept hearsay evidence. Someone else’s report of the risen Christ would not convince him. And really, wasn’t such good news too good to be true? As we know, he was not the first or the only one to wonder about reports that Jesus had been raised. Thomas was especially not ready to believe that Jesus had been raised – not after that horrific execution. If you were Thomas, would you have believed such a report?
By God’s grace, Thomas receives the confirmation that he needs. He meets the risen Jesus. Jesus has all the wounds that prove that it is he, not a ghost nor a hoax, nor some other deity. Thomas is then able to make a deep profession of faith: “My Lord and my God.” Then Jesus gently reminds Thomas that all those who follow Thomas in faith will not need to see Jesus’ physical body to trust that Jesus was indeed raised from the dead. We hear no more of Thomas in John’s gospel, but perhaps he received the same commission as the other disciples. Tradition has it that Thomas spread the good news in India. In fact, the Mar Thoma church in south India traces its founding to Thomas.
So where do we meet the risen Christ today? We are among those who will not see Jesus’ physical body. But is God still bringing life from death? As I continued to meditate on my director’s question, I thought about a woman I have come to know through the Wellstreams program. When I first met her, I was sure she was “not my type.” And indeed, at first glance ours is an unlikely friendship: she is about fifteen years younger than I, has been a stay-at-home mom to five children, is delightfully artistic, and is a committed Roman Catholic. By God’s grace, when she contacted me after the program ended, I was able to say “yes,” and we have met regularly over coffee ever since. Our relationship has been a gift to me, and I felt truly blessed by our last visit. Has the risen Christ made himself known to me in her?
Perhaps Episcopal priest and writer Barbara Crafton is right. Crafton has a daily e-message. For the last few months, she has been sending paintings of Scripture stories, with her own commentary. On Friday she sent a picture of a painting by the early twentieth-century African-American artist, Henry Ossawa Turner. Depicting Peter and John at the empty tomb, the painting shows a somber, puzzled-looking Peter. On the other hand, John is transfixed. He is radiant and glows with an inner light. We know he has had a life-changing experience. Instinct tells me that Crafton is right. “We see the resurrected Christ best,” she says, “by seeing the people who see him.”
But there’s more. As the frightened disciples, the walkers on the road to Emmaus, and Thomas discovered, the risen Christ also shows up in unexpected places, in places where old lives are being renewed, where people are welcomed into fellowship, where death is turned to life. Look around you, you may discover him too. Here are some other places he has recently turned up. Marcel Visser discovered the risen Christ through his friendship with a member of the L’Arche community for disabled adults in Cape Breton, Canada. In the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan, Ibrahim, a six year-old Syrian refugee who is deaf, is learning sign language through the Holy Land Institute for the Deaf and its partner agencies. Ibrahim and other refugee children like him might have been condemned to a minimal life. However, with the support of Episcopal Relief and Development and other organizations, hearing-impaired children, blind children, even those with mental disabilities are receiving education and, with it, hope for the future.
And one more. I don’t normally read the Sunday New York Times sports pages. However, a couple of days ago, an article caught my eye, and I knew that the risen Christ had unexpectedly turned up in, of all places, a boxing club in Toronto.1 You’ll see all the trappings of a standard boxing club in the Newsgirls Boxing Club: a rope, rings, speed bags, heavy bags, and a punching mannequin. Initially aimed at women, the club is now a welcoming haven for all. The club especially welcomes transgender people, who often find daily life difficult, even dangerous. For many the club is a place of sanctuary and empowerment, even though they will never box anywhere else. Recently, a newcomer to the club, who had come for a few times, asked club founder Savoy Howe a simple question that profoundly moved her. “Why are you so nice to trans people?” the person asked. Howe’s eyes filled with tears as she told the interviewer the story. Then she paused, composed herself, and said, “I mean, why wouldn’t you be?”
And you? Where did you meet the risen Christ this Easter? Where are you meeting him? Have you met him at the altar, when he nourishes you with his Body and Blood? Have you met him in your own prayer time, when you stay silent long enough to hear his faint whispers? Have you seen him in the faces of other people who have seen him? Or perhaps you have met him in your loved ones and friends, those who minister to you and bless you, and those with whom you share God’s blessings. Have you met him in nature, when you look with loving eyes on the beautiful earth which God has given us? Have you met him in the faces of those whom you serve, in work or ministry? Or perhaps he has turned up in places where you never expected he would turn up, in places where outcasts are welcomed, the neglected are cared for, and lives are transformed.
I invite you this week to look around you, to see if by chance the risen Christ has shown up. Be sure: he has and he will. And when he does, he will reassure you that, although we do not see his physical body, we are still blessed with his presence in our lives.
1. David Waldstein, “Sunday Sports,” March 27, 2016, pp. 1, 6.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)