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IX Pentecost – A friend of mine and
quite possibly a friend of yours, Ken Bode, in his column in Friday’s Indianapolis
Star, would seem to have issued a friendly challenge to Indianapolis area clergy, unless I misunderstood him when he wrote:
“If I’m right that blatant anti-Semitism has no place in the public dialogue and political campaigns of 21st-century
America, this deserves attention from the pulpit.” (He was also kind enough to refer to some of us as “ What Ken was referring to in his column was the recent appearance and dissemination of several inflammatory examples
of racist propaganda at some local political gatherings around the state. Fortunately, thanks to the luck of the draw, as far as the Gospel lesson appointed for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
is concerned, and provided I’m able to avoid engaging in partisan politics as much as possible, I think I can accept
his challenge. This week’s
lesson from Luke’s Gospel deals with the words that Jesus’ suggests that his disciples use, when they ask him
to teach them to pray. “Lord, teach us to pray,” they say to him, “as John taught his disciples.” The words that he teaches them have come to be known as “the Lord’s Prayer”, words that many
more folks than just faithful churchgoers know by heart in one version or another. This version of the prayer, as it is recorded in Luke’s Gospel, ends rather abruptly—more abruptly
than we expect. “And do not bring us to the time of trial,” is what Jesus says, and we naturally expect him to go on
with, “but deliver us from evil.” But he doesn’t;
the editors of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible relegate the phrase to a footnote, stating that “some ancient
authorities add ‘but rescue us from the evil one (or from evil)’”. Instead Jesus goes on to explain to the disciples, using several homespun illustrations, why they need to pray
in this way and what they can expect to receive if they do. And he concludes by telling them: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children,
how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” What intrigues me
most is the illustration that Jesus uses to arrive at that conclusion. “Is there anyone among you,” Jesus wonders, “who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a
snake instead of a fish? Or if a child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion?” Hmmm… Pretty strong stuff! Our first reaction is: “A snake instead of a fish? A scorpion instead of an egg? Of course not! We’re talking about parenting here!” Or are we, we “who are evil” (at least as far as Jesus is concerned)? I’m not so sure. Can we honestly say that we have always done right by our children? Or do we have to qualify such a statement by saying that we have always tried
to do right by our children? We may need to read more into Jesus’ quite possibly not so innocent question—irony, maybe? The truth is that
parents can fail miserably, either out of ignorance or arrogance or blind zealousness, to do right by their children. In fact whole societies can teach their children, by word and example, to believe in and to do what is evil (or
to do nothing to stop it), sometimes with the best of intentions. An awful lot of snakes and scorpions can end up getting doled out in the process, again with the best of intentions
(and sometimes not). Unless we go out of
our way to watch re-runs of “Zoo Parade”, we likely think of snakes and scorpions as poisonous things, and I can’t
think of anything more ideologically poisonous than the contents of a “A lot of this,” Ken admits, “is old, Jewish conspiracy junk, with references to The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion, the Jewish-run Chicago Mafia and the satanic symbolism of But a lot of it is not old junk: references to the president as “a Zionist puppet”, making a big deal
of the fact that people close to the president like Timothy Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Barney Frank, Rahm Emmanuel, and David
Axelrod happen to be Jewish—that’s not old junk. It’s new junk, and it smacks of the kind of racial profiling that inevitably leads to irrational hate and
can eventually ignite a whole nation’s smoldering resentment and anger, as it did in the 1930’s and ‘40’s
in Germany, with horrendous consequences. I’d like to
think that the organizers of these meetings put this I’d like to think this because it’s quite possible that I know some of these people and that I have
had reason to admire and respect them in the past. I would also like to think that they might consider distancing themselves completely from such insidious trash,
once they have been made aware, one way or the other, of the evil that it can bring. We do live in a country where laws allow people to twist facts as they see them into the most hideous of suppositions
imaginable and spread it around. But we don’t need to spread it any further, once we recognize it for the toxic waste that it is. “Is there anyone among you,” Jesus wondered, “who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a
snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion?” Again, I’d like to believe that most if not all of the leaders of these populist gatherings have no idea
how many nasty snakes and scorpions they may be foisting off on their children. “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re
doing,” I can almost hear Jesus praying. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine his not privately wishing that someone (I doubt he and his disciples
were that far into the virtues of recycling)—wishing that someone would simply gather up all those blankety-blank DVDs
and dump them in the lake! VIII Pentecost - July 18, 2010 - Year C -
Proper 11 (RCL)
“What would Jesus do?” A somewhat rhetorical question that has been in and out of fashion over the years—I
ran into it again this week on the internet while trying to follow the twists and turns of the debate in the Church of England
over whether women should be allowed to be bishops. The columnist who posed it—a feminist writer, I assume—was pointing out that
even though a majority of the General Synod (something like our General Convention) has voted in favor of it each diocese
will now have to weigh in before the Synod takes a second and final vote, then Parliament will have a go at it and the Prime
Minister, and what will the Queen say...etc., etc. She also expressed concern that the Synod had rejected a compromise measure proposed
by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York that would have provided alternative pastoral oversight in dioceses opposed to women
bishops, largely because of a campaign against the measure by women clergy, who are growing in number since they started being
ordained priests in 1994; apparently they weren’t exactly in the mood for compromise. This particular columnist, who indicated that she pretty much knew what Jesus would do
under these circumstances, didn’t even mention the other event which has added to the turbulence currently being experienced
in the English church: the blocking for the second time of the nomination of a highly respected, but openly gay priest to
become Bishop of Southwark in London. (I guess it’s nice to know that the Episcopal Church in the United States isn’t
the only member of the Anglican Communion dealing with controversy these days.)
If the only reasonable way to figure out what Jesus might do in a given situation is to look at what he actually did
and said, then this week’s Gospel lesson, the story of Jesus’ visit to his two friends, Mary and Martha, may not
seem, at least at first, to be the best choice because the incident in question has some aspects that are troubling and, I
suspect, a trifle irritating. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine that Jesus would knowingly or unknowingly side with
one sister against another. But isn’t that what he’s doing when he utters those fatal words: “Mary
has chosen the better part….”? It makes you wonder what Martha might have said to Mary after Jesus left! The tension that Jesus’ reply to Martha’s complaint
may well have generated makes me uneasy, and I know that I am hardly alone in that uneasiness. I’ve been an Episcopalian now for the majority of my adult life, and it’s
been my observation that Episcopalians are more likely to argue with the words of scripture than Christians of most other
denominations, so I’m not surprised to have heard quite a few times over the years—and not just from women—pronouncements
that sound something like: “I guess I’m more of a Martha than a Mary, and that’s o.k. with me.” I always wonder to whom words like these are addressed, besides whoever happens to be
talking with the speaker at the time: to Jesus…or maybe to God?
So it may be comforting to know that this uneasiness, this dissatisfaction with the outcome of this story—this
story in which Jesus seems to be favoring one kind of lifestyle over another, not to mention running the risk of antagonizing
two sisters who may or may not have gotten along before—it may be comforting to know that our uneasiness, our dissatisfaction
is nothing new. People in the Church have had trouble with this story for a long time.
Listen to one passionate commentator whose enlightened reaction I ran onto just this week in my reading: “This
Lukan story wants us to take sides,” writes Jane Carol Redmont, a priest in Oakland, California. “…But this story is not one of those cases where taking sides will be life-giving,” she
continues. “Why pit the sisters against each other, or their ministries
of domestic management and service on the one hand and attention to the living Word on the other? Of course, we busy ourselves with too many things, today more than ever, and need to refocus our attentions. But the story as it meets us should fill us with holy suspicion: What is the cost
of taking sides here? For whom will there be a cost? How can we converse with each other, with our homegrown traditions, and with Christ, in a way that will
build a church in which all ministries are honored, and in which the very shape of ministry can change in response to the
world’s needs?”
The Rev. Ms. Redmont makes a good case for adopting an attitude of “live and let live” here, but I would
like to propose an alternative way of looking at this story that does not ignore the fact that Jesus praised Mary for choosing
to listen to him but suggests that he didn’t do it at Martha’s expense. I propose this interpretation because of my “holy suspicion”, if you will,
that Jesus would not have said something that he didn’t mean but that he also would never have deliberately encouraged
a jealous rivalry between two sisters, who were his friends.
In this regard it helps to consider the context of Jesus’ visit to Mary and Martha. The incident comes right after Jesus’ telling of the story that we have come to
call “the Good Samaritan”, last Sunday’s Gospel lesson. Jesus told that story, you remember, in answer to a legal scholar’s pointed question:
“And who is my neighbor, this neighbor that I’m supposed to love as well as I love myself?” By the time Jesus finished the story, everyone knew the answer to the question. Even a Samaritan—one of those detestable foreigners—is my neighbor and may
know more about what it means to be a neighbor than I’ll ever know.
Today’s story, too, I believe, is told in answer to a question, though the question is not explicitly asked by
anyone. It is a detail in the story, but a very important detail, that prompts me to guess what
the question behind the story must have been. The writer of Luke’s Gospel describes Mary as sitting at Jesus’ feet and
listening to what he was saying. There is only one term to describe someone who sits at a teacher’s feet and listens
to what a teacher says, and that term is “disciple”. “And who is my neighbor?” was the lawyer’s question, and the answer
was “Anyone—even a Samaritan.” The question behind the story of Jesus’ visit to Mary and Martha must be “Who
can be a disciple?” By the end of the story everyone knows the answer. The answer probably sounds a bit anticlimactic because it concerns an issue you and I
sort of take for granted: Who can be a disciple?
Anyone—even a woman—can be a disciple. Even a woman can be a disciple.
So the story of Mary and Martha may not be extolling the virtues of “Type B” over “Type A”
behavior after all. Consider the circumstances under which the Gospel according to Luke came to be written. The Church was just beginning to organize itself, and the secular institutions it made
use of for a model were mostly of questionable value. At first, of course, life in the Christian Church was simply life in the Jewish synagogue
with a few modifications. But, now that such a thing as the Church existed, the question became urgent: “Could a woman be a disciple?
No, not if the Church followed the synagogue-model to the letter. It took ten men to form a synagogue. Nothing at all was said about women; women didn’t count; they were second-class
citizens. Could a woman be a disciple? From several of the New Testament epistles we know that the apostle Paul and other leaders
of the early Church were of two minds with regard to this issue. Their theology pretty much convinced them that in Christ there was no longer any distinction
between Jew and Greek, slave and free, or male and female, but the old patterns were deeply ingrained, and doubts still lingered,
such as, for example, whether women should have a voice in the governance of the Church. Luke’s story of a woman who became Jesus’ disciple—this story could
not help but have influenced the Church in making up its mind about this controversy, though in certain respects—specifically,
with regard to the ordination of women, not to mention the ordination of persons in same-sex relationships—the Church
as a whole is still making up its mind, as we well know, still trying to discern the mind of Christ, still passionately asking
itself: “What would Jesus do?”
Martha’s protest would have been heard as the voice of what was acceptable in society: “Lord, tell my sister
to help me do what women are supposed to do instead of forgetting her place.” The fact that all four Gospels make a distinction between “the disciples”
and “the women who followed Jesus” testifies to how long conventional thinking about what is proper and what is
not can hang on. But Jesus’ challenge to the voice of convention is unequivocal: “Mary has
chosen the better part, and what she has chosen will not be taken away from her. Anyone,
yes, even a woman can be my disciple.”
What delights me most about this way of looking at the story is that Jesus’ welcoming of Mary does not need to
be seen as a put-down of Martha. Jesus’ welcoming of Mary can be seen as Jesus’ loving invitation to Martha,
too, as Martha’s own personal invitation to discipleship. We don’t exactly know what it was that caused Mary to “leave her rightful
place” at Martha’s side to sit at the feet of Jesus. Jesus’ gentle chiding of Martha was his way of saying: “This is your rightful
place, Martha, with Mary. This is where you belong, too, more than anywhere else. This is where you belong—sitting at my feet.” Seen in this light, Jesus’ loving words are a gentle reminder to all Christians—to
each and every one of us: When all is said and done, there is really only one
place we need to be—like Mary and eventually her sister, Martha—sitting at the feet of Jesus. VII Pentecost - July 11, 2010 - Year C - Proper
10
“Go and do likewise.” That’s a pretty strong piece of advice. I wonder if the lawyer decided to follow it. He wasn’t an attorney, after all; he was a scholar, someone whose chief passion
was debating the fine points of the religious law, which was the only law in those parts, other than Roman law. Which means that he hadn’t come to Jesus for advice; he had come to Jesus to test
him, to find out how much he knew. He may or may have known that Jesus liked to tell stories to make his points, but he
probably didn’t expect Jesus to launch into the story we have come to know as “The Good Samaritan”.
“Good Samaritans” have kind of a checkered reputation in this day and age. Hospitals and medical centers all over the country are named “Good Samaritan”
(or just “Samaritan”) ; many organizations have a Good Samaritan fund that kicks in when a member’s resources
run out; news stories featuring people who unexpectedly reach out to help someone in an emergency often brand them as “good
Samaritans”. But there are times when good Samaritans can be seen as getting in the way; people who
drop off food and blankets to the homeless living under city bridges, for example, can be seen as enablers who just add to
the “problem”, when attempts are made to move the homeless into shelters, often against their will. (In that case, is there such a thing as being “a better Samaritan”?) Idle speculation aside, whether their efforts are welcome or not, good Samaritans are
known for their sometimes grim determination.
“Go and do likewise.” Instead of answering the lawyer’s rather cheeky second question: “And who
is my neighbor?”, Jesus’ story of the so-called “good Samaritan” shifts the argument from identifying
who one’s neighbor is to what it means to be a neighbor to someone and
suggests that being a neighbor involves showing mercy. Did our lawyer friend decide to do that: instead of continuing to split hairs, start
showing mercy without regard to whether the recipient necessarily “deserved it”? If he did, he must have been an exception because it usually takes more than friendly
persuasion to get folks to change their minds that much; sometimes asking someone to “think outside the box” just
isn’t enough.
I remember a colleague in seminary who found her parish field work assignment complicated from the very start by a
vestry member who was vehemently opposed to the ordination of women and did everything he could to make her feel unwelcome. If he had ever heard this particular lesson from the Gospel according to Luke (and he
probably had, as a longtime, church-going Episcopalian), he certainly hadn’t given it much thought. Part of my colleague’s training was to assist the rector as a Eucharistic minister,
and every Sunday she had to endure the glares of this angry man, as he made it a point to be seen deliberately avoiding the
section of the altar rail where she was administering the chalice. Whenever he was in a committee meeting with her, he made rude remarks, and he found a
way to sabotage almost every program she was assigned to oversee.
Then, shortly after the rector went out of town to attend an extended conference, the obstreperous vestry member was
nearly killed in an automobile accident. Suffering from many internal injuries, he ended up on life support in the intensive care
unit of the county hospital, a good thirty miles away from the seminary. When he finally regained consciousness after many days, the first face he saw was the
face of my friend, who had arranged her schedule so she could make the trek down the mountain to the hospital every day he
was there. Needless to say, by the time he was moved to a regular room they had become fast friends,
and his first Sunday back in church both of them wept when she helped him raise the chalice to his lips. And, if I remember rightly, he was one of her presenters, when she was ordained to the
priesthood a few years later.
Sometimes you get more than you bargain for. The grateful vestry member discovered that someone he thought he despised, whose ministry
he at first rejected, someone whose very vocation he had dismissed out of hand—a woman studying for the priesthood,
of all people!—was truly his neighbor, just as the pompous scholar of the law may have discovered that someone he had
been taught to despise and who had been taught to despise him—a Samaritan, of all people!—that this one, too,
was truly his neighbor, the one he was called to love as fully as he loved himself and that he could profit from the Samaritan’s
example of “being a neighbor”, too. As one commentator hastens to point out, the lawyer couldn’t bring himself to say
“the Samaritan”, when Jesus asked him to say which of the three was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands
of the robbers. “The one who showed him mercy,” was the best that the lawyer could do (though
we do need to remember that the writer of Luke’s Gospel is relating this particular incident). The lawyer’s answer, however reluctant, is honest, at least, and suggests that
Jesus’ words may have sent him away with something new to think about. Was he eventually able to take Jesus’ advice—to be the kind of neighbor that
the Samaritan turned out to be? I hope so, don’t you? VI Pentecost – The more I puzzle
over this lesson from the Gospel according to Luke—yes, puzzle over it—the more confused I become with what we’re
supposed to do with Jesus’ traveling instructions in this day and age. What Jesus sent out was an evangelistic team, but it was a team of vagabonds, vagabonds who had their work cut
out for them. They came back reporting that their efforts had met with great success, news that obviously pleased Jesus, but
from my vantage point it’s hard to imagine how they were able to accomplish what they accomplished. About the only strangers
with a religious message we’re likely to welcome into our homes, and then only for a brief stay, are Mormons and Jehovah’s
Witnesses, for various reasons, I suppose: out of politeness or we may be curious about what they have to say or we may even
feel sorry for them, if it’s a hot day, and feel like offering them a cup of cold water or some other kind of refreshment. Of course, we assume that they have homes of their own or at least have some place to stay. It would not occur to us—would it?—to offer to put them up for the night, let alone for any length
of time, but that is apparently what the seventy scouts that Jesus sent out expected, when they arrived in their target city
or village. True, “I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves,” is what Jesus had said to them, so
it can’t have been all sweetness and light. But it was a different
world then. People and the small communities they formed were isolated; news was hard to come by; visitors who came in peace
were usually welcomed with open arms; the code these communities went by even obliged a host to offer hospitality to a stranger,
who under other circumstances might be considered an enemy. And it was probably hard to resist the allure of a phrase like “The If news was hard to come by, there were always plenty of rumors to go around; to hear from these strangers they
welcomed that the And that was good news to these folks, many of whom had otherwise little reason to have much hope at all. Earlier I used the
term “vagabonds” to describe this team of volunteers that Jesus sent out ahead of him. It’s as good a term as any because they certainly were homeless, at least for the moment, and, it would seem,
jobless—maybe even out of work, if I may make that distinction. It was a different world then. Or was it? “Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are
there, and say to them, ‘The Kingdom of God has come near to you.’” Lucy tells me that the railroad was close enough to the farm where she grew up that a hobo who had hopped a freight
might occasionally wander by asking for a handout and that her mom, a bit wary because of the children, would still throw
together a sandwich to send him on his way; he probably said “Thank you,” but that was about it—hardly allowing
him enough time to “cure the sick who [might have been] there”, but still honoring the possibility of entertaining
angels unawares. (We don’t exactly know what Team Jesus did to “cure the sick who were there” in those towns;
we only know what they said when they got back: “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!” Maybe just paying attention to “the sick who were there” was all they needed to do to “cure”
them.) These days people
who are down on their luck will come to a church for help before they will come to someone’s house, the patterns of
society having evolved the way they have. (I know that it’s a stretch to liken the volunteers that Jesus sent ahead of him to people “down on
their luck”, but it’s not that much of a stretch; the only thing that sets them apart is “the curing-thing”,
whatever that was; otherwise we have to say that they were homeless and “between jobs”.) Somehow people who are down on their luck know that if they come to a church and ask for help they won’t
be turned away. (It doesn’t always work if it’s over the phone.) Do they somehow feel a nearness to the Kingdom when they come to a church? I hope they do. I know that I have felt it, when needy folks have found their way to the doors of our church (or the church office),
and I have often wondered whether that “nearness to the Kingdom” that I feel isn’t something that the visitors
themselves have brought. That’s certainly
how I felt last Saturday—that the kingdom of God had come near—when so many of us pitched in and offered hospitality—a
place to sit and talk and enjoy a meal—hospitality to so many neighbors in need who had come to our doors to get some
of the necessities of life, necessities of life—let’s face it—that you and I often take for granted. Sure, it was orderly and chaotic by turns—it always is, when you try something new. But it was exhilarating, and it was peaceful, too—peaceful in the sense of bringing healing and wholeness
and hope to a situation, where there had been little hope before. All of us experienced moments that day—I know we did!—moments when we wondered if we hadn’t gone
somewhere else, if we weren’t maybe in another place. (I suggested last Sunday that the only honest answer to the question:
“Whatever possessed us to be doing a crazy thing like this?” was, of course, “God’s Holy Spirit”.) The moment that will stick in my memory for a long time to come was the moment when the mother and her daughter
who had walked from across town in the heat were leaving and I started to apologize for not finding them a way back, only
to be told that a perfect stranger they happened to sit next to while waiting for their number to be called had already offered
them a ride. “See, I have
given you authority,” Jesus said to the seventy, “to tread on snakes and scorpions…”, though I don’t
think he meant that we should tread on snakes and scorpions deliberately, as some believers would maintain, but only if it
is necessary—whatever it takes to get the job done that God wants us to do—you know, Kingdom-stuff. When the members of Jesus’ advance guard reported back to headquarters, rejoicing that in his name even the
demons were submitting to them, Jesus reminded them that the fact that their names were written in heaven was all the more
reason for them to rejoice. We who might well claim membership in Christ’s rear guard, especially when God’s spirit gets hold of
us and we find ourselves doing “Kingdom-stuff” beyond our wildest dreams, watching in wonder as the demons of
indifference and self-centeredness and fear simply melt away before our eyes—we, too, need to take Jesus’ wise
words to heart. It would be tempting to tell ourselves that we’re doing stuff like this—sometimes it’s called
“good works”—so that our names will be written in heaven, but that’s not it at all. No, believe it or not, you and I are doing stuff like this—“good works”, “Kingdom-stuff”,
whatever you want to call it—because our names are written in heaven. Thanks be to God! V Pentecost – “No one who
puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Jesus’ parting shot, if we can call it that, seems so negative, at least at first, the three would-be disciples’
plight seems so hopeless—where’s the so-called “good news” in all this? Well, let’s not jump to conclusions; there may be more here than meets the eye. In the first place today’s Gospel lesson gives us an idea of what it means to “follow Jesus”. Now, we don’t have to read very far in any of the Gospels to realize that “following Jesus” in
Jesus’ time not only meant profiting from his teachings; it also meant traveling with him. When Jesus said, “follow me,” he meant the invitation literally. Becoming a disciple of Jesus meant becoming his traveling companion on a journey into uncharted, often dangerous
territory. Not exactly hanging out down at the corner with your local rabbi. No wonder those whom Jesus called to follow him were often reluctant to answer the call! So what do you suppose
it means to “follow Jesus” in this day and age? Oddly enough, I think today’s lessons—particularly this week’s Gospel and the passage from Paul’s
Letter to the Galatians—may give us some clues. Let’s focus on Paul’s admonitions to the Galatian church first. As far as Paul was concerned, the world was more or less neatly divided into two camps: those who sought to gratify
“the desires of the flesh”, as he preferred to call them, and those who were “led by the Spirit”. Paul was big on making lists to drive home a point, so his list of the vices that gratifying the desires of the
flesh leads to is extensive: “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy,
anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.” (He sort of trails off at the end there, letting his readers use their imagination, I guess.) “[Those] who do such things,” Paul warns, “will not inherit the In sharp contrast, he then offers a list of virtues that those who are led by the Spirit will likely display: love,
joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Obviously, those who practice virtues like these, it is easy for us to infer, are the ones who will inherit the
Kingdom. For the apostle Paul,
who rightly imagined himself swimming against the cultural current, it was clearly a matter of either/or: You were either committed to the things of the flesh or committed to the things of the Spirit; there was
no in-between. The problem is—and Paul even went so far as to admit in some of his other writings to experiencing it: he
likened it to a war within himself—the problem is that there is in fact an in-between and that most, if not all human
beings fall somewhere on the spectrum of that in-between; we are creatures of both flesh and spirit, and, as the Church has
had to learn by long and bitter experience, mortifying the flesh for the sake of the spirit is can be as harmful to one’s
well-being as excessively gratifying the senses. Yet it was difficult for Paul to view the world in which he found himself in any other way. Beleaguered as he felt himself to be by the pagan culture around him, it was tempting, though not altogether fair,
to equate paganism with the pursuit of vice and Christianity with the pursuit of virtue. Unfortunately, Paul’s tendency to make such a one-to-one connection still finds its adherents today. “No one who
puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the At first glance, what I referred to earlier as this “parting shot of Jesus” would seem to echo Paul’s
contention that those who give in to the desires of the flesh will not inherit the Kingdom, but it helps to remember here
that Jesus is summing up a telling, if somewhat disappointing encounter with some would-be disciples. All three candidates rejected Jesus’ call to become his followers for one reason or another. We have to assume that the first one, who volunteered to follow Jesus wherever he went, got cold feet when Jesus
intimated that he would be joining a bunch of travelers who were effectively homeless; the second and third candidates begged
off to take care of some obligations: the one, to pay the proper respects to his dead father, the other, to say good-bye to
his family. Neither of the three is deemed to be “fit” for the But how are we to
understand the term “fit”? Must we automatically assume, as the apostle Paul might, that not to be “fit for” the Kingdom means
that one will necessarily be excluded from the Kingdom? Knowing that the word in the original Greek text can also be interpreted to mean “suited for” or even
“useful to” is helpful because it allows us to hear the tone of Jesus’ parting words not as condemnatory,
but rather merely as sad or sorrowful. And realizing that Jesus’ words are not condemnatory also allows us to identify with these three would-be
disciples in a way we might not have been able to before and opens the way for us to consider our earlier question: What does
it mean to “follow Jesus” in this day and age? Because all of a sudden we’re willing to admit that we’ve had our reservations, even if we haven’t
voiced them, with regard to God’s claim on our lives—I know I have. I have no trouble relating to the fellow who got uneasy when he realized that he, too, might end up with “nowhere
to lay his head”; quite honestly, I’ve always been of the opinion that even an occasional weekend of camping is
highly overrated. And it certainly would be very difficult for me to imagine giving the obligations due my family anything less than
the highest priority. So these would-be
disciples, who don’t quite make the grade—they’re like us—or we’re like them—however you
want to put it. We’ve got our excuses, we’ve got our priorities, and from time to time these other concerns get in
the way of our being of much use to what God wants to get done in the world (one way to define “the kingdom of God”)
at least for the moment; you might say that we’re simply too busy doing other things to follow Jesus right now. Sad, maybe, but true. Not necessarily bad news, but sobering news. The good news is that there other times in our lives—we’ve experienced them, you and I, and we’ll
experience them again—when distractions haven’t overwhelmed us and we have answered the call to follow Jesus—we’ve
put our hand to the plow, and we haven’t looked back—and our lives have been changed for the better, and not only
our own lives, but the lives of others. It’s at times like these that you and I are reminded again that we are a work in progress; God isn’t
finished with us yet, not by a long shot. It’s reassuring to know that someday we’ll be more than just useful for God’s purposes now and
again; we’ll be fit for God’s kingdom forever. That’s the goal. It’s going to happen. Because God is willing to wait as long as it takes for us to catch up to Jesus. We’ve got all the time we need. IV Pentecost – How does God get our
attention? (Why does God even go to the bother?) In this week’s Old Testament lesson Elijah, the prophet who finds himself almost continually battling a corrupt
King Ahab and his ruthless wife Jezebel, flees for his life into the wilderness, only to be confronted, after forty days and
forty nights, by a God who asks: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” As if God didn’t know! Or is it really the voice of God? Maybe, after forty days and forty nights, Elijah has begun talking to himself. “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts,” Elijah nevertheless replies. “[For] the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets
with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” (For some reason Elijah fails to mention the prophets of Baal, whom he also has “killed with the sword”,
unless that’s what he’s referring to when he says that he has been “very zealous for the Lord”!) For all the trouble
he has gone to Elijah is instructed to “go out and stand on the mountain” and wait. The Lord will be along shortly. But the Lord is not in the wind that comes up, strong enough to split rocks, nor in the earthquake that follows,
nor in the fire, however that may have manifested itself. No, finally things get very still, and there comes what my Old Testament professor preferred to translate as “a
pregnant silence” or, as the New Revised Standard version expresses it, “a sound of sheer silence”. We don’t know what will happen next, but it is bound to be important. So it’s a bit anticlimactic, when all Elijah gets from God is a repeat:
“What are you doing here, Elijah?” “Didn’t you hear me the first time?” we can almost imagine the poor guy saying, but he doesn’t. Elijah just repeats word for word what he answered before, only to be told that there is more work to be done,
more confrontations with the powers-that-be, and that he’d better get going. In a way God’s injunction to Elijah is probably as immediately disappointing as Jesus’ insistence in
today’s Gospel lesson must have been to the man who was freed from the demons—Jesus’ insistence that the
man not tag along with the disciples but that he go home—home to where the stress and strain of life may well have driven
him to distraction in the first place. Of course, there is
something “otherworldly” about wilderness encounters with God in the midst of wind, earthquake, and fire—even
though powerful forces like wind, earthquake, and fire often do wreak havoc in the realm of our modern-day experience—and
there is definitely something “otherworldly” about the healing of a demon-possessed fugitive from society. Elijah’s world and, yes, even Jesus’ world, seem so far away from our world of the here and now. But listen to what Annie Dillard has to say, the same Annie Dillard who insists that we “strap ourselves
in and wear crash helmets” when we come to church: “It is a weakening and discoloring idea that rustic people
knew God personally once upon a time—or even knew selflessness or courage or literature—but that it is too late
for us,” she writes. “In fact, the absolute is available to everyone
in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less. There is no less holiness at this time…than there was the day the How does God get our
attention? If I’m willing to go with Annie Dillard’s take on the enduring nature of spiritual reality (and put
aside her mention of the “bunch of souls in a tree” for the moment), I guess the answer is that God gets our attention
the way that God got Elijah’s attention and Jesus’ attention and everyone else’s attention that God ever
got. “Purity’s time is always now.” What Annie Dillard doesn’t mention (at least in this particular observation of hers) is the amount of time
that it may take to arrive at the point where our attention can be gotten; the journey can be long and arduous; it took Elijah
forty days and forty nights before he was spiritually ready to receive the word, even if the word he received was “go
back and face the music!” Forty days and forty nights is the biblical way of signifying “a long time”, which few of us seem able
to devote to such a pursuit these days. Extended retreats are one way that we clergy are encouraged to seek vocational guidance, but I’m afraid that
it’s often assumed in this 24/7 world of ours that clergy are a privileged class in that regard, if not just plain lucky
to have access to that kind of time. But I can recall occasions
in my life when I have come back from a plain old vacation—and most all of us get some sort of vacation time—knowing
what I did not know before I went: The thing that I definitely needed to do next. It’s amazing what being away from your usual routine for even a short time can do, especially if you can
find a way to open yourself to that which you suspect, to that which you know is beyond yourself. One tool that most any of us can use to engage in meaningful spiritual discernment is readily available right here
in Greencastle, thanks to the collaborative efforts of It’s intentionally (and it has to be intentionally) walking the labyrinth, a time-honored devotional practice
that permits anyone who is willing to slough off one by one, at least symbolically, the burdens of the present moment and
be still—“be still and know that [God] is God”—with the expectation that when we retrace our steps
to come out we will have gained, as did Elijah on the mountain, a spiritual perspective that we did not have when we went
in, even if the world we re-enter, like the world of the once demon-possessed man in our Gospel lesson, may present us with
as many challenges as it did before. What we will have discovered, perhaps something we once knew but had somehow forgotten, is, again, what Elijah
and, yes, what the man whom Jesus healed discovered: that we will not have to face the challenges we return to alone. And that makes all the difference in the world. Thanks be to God! II Pentecost – This week’s
Old Testament lesson and this week’s Gospel lesson both tell about someone being raised from the dead—someone
being brought back to life. The story about Elijah may have to do with a resuscitation: The boy had stopped breathing, and Elijah’s act
of stretching himself upon the child three times may be the description of a primitive form of C.P.R. Luke’s story of Jesus bringing a widow’s only son back to life is obviously harder to explain. But as one New Testament commentator hastens to point out: “A Church that exalts a Risen Lord can scarcely
question the Gospel claim that Jesus raised some people from [the dead].” And, if we are tempted to suppose that greater power was demonstrated when Jesus walked the earth than is possible
now, listen to what the great Anglican preacher Frederick Dennison Maurice had to say in a sermon in 1880: “There are
not many instances of our Lord raising the dead told in the Gospels. …[And]
I think it is good for us that there should [not be] more. …If widows who
are weeping for their sons in our day and land were to think that all the widows in Galilee and Judea at that time had their
children given back to them, they might ask, ‘why were we not born then?...’
But if they read of this one widow…--they might begin to consider that [Jesus’ act of bringing her son
back to life] must have been intended as a sign to a multitude of people beside….” A sign to a multitude
of people. What sort of sign might Dr. Maurice have had in mind? Well, besides testifying to the fact that, wherever Jesus happened to be at a given moment, life the way it would
be if God were completely in charge was on display—Jesus embodied the Kingdom of God; he carried it with him—this
account in Luke’s Gospel emphasizes Jesus’ compassion, and as well, I believe, the importance of direct response
in the face of deep, human need. Did you notice what Jesus does as soon as he speaks the words of comfort to the woman? He touches the funeral bier; he touches the pallet that the young man’s body is being carried on, without
giving it a second thought. Jesus does what no one else present would think of doing: He violates a taboo; by touching the funeral bier Jesus
makes himself unclean, ritually unclean. Of course, in this
day and age, we wouldn’t consider Jesus’ action “ritually unclean”, but, in one way or another, we
still tend to distance ourselves from the reality of death. People can be as reluctant to get too near a casket as they are to get too near an altar, though they may find
that they have the strongest urge to touch a casket in farewell as they file by. The subject of death is often scrupulously avoided in the presence of someone who is terminally ill, though the
subject may be on everybody’s mind to an agonizing degree. Yet by shielding ourselves from the reality of death we run the risk of not dealing with it at all. I’ve told this
story before, but it bears repeating because I think it does an admirable job of illustrating how being more honest with ourselves
about the reality of death can be a healing experience.
There was a time when our family, like many families, had its share—maybe more than its share—of…gerbils
in the household, and there came a day—I think it was in late spring—when our daughter Lanie, who was much younger
then, discovered that something was terribly wrong with one of them. Actually, Lucy and I had already noticed that one of the little guys wasn’t acting quite right; it hadn’t
been vying with the other ones for a share of the food, and it had been stumbling around against the sides of the cage. Of course, we’d seen gerbils go this way before, so, for one reason or another, we were kind of hoping that
this one would go quickly. Then we could dispose of the little creature’s body before Lanie was the wiser. But it was not to
be. When Lanie discovered the little fellow thrashing around on the floor of the cage, there was nothing to be done
but to rush him to the vet—Don Brattain of blessed memory was still practicing full time then. Vets are neat people—at least the vets I’ve known—and Doc Brattain was no exception. He examined the gerbil carefully and explained to Lanie that it had already lived longer than the average gerbil
and that it might well have an inflammation of the brain. Then he gave her a little bottle of vitamin and mineral supplements for small animals and showed her how to give
it a few drops from the bottle twice a day with a little water. The gerbil might feel a little better, and it might live a few more days. (Vets are neat people.) So each day Lanie
would gently lift the little creature out of the cage and cuddle it, concerned when it wouldn’t stay still long enough
for her to give it its medicine, happy when it seemed to quiet down and rest in her hand. She kept telling anyone who would listen that the gerbil was probably going to die, but that at least it was a
little more comfortable this way. Then one Saturday morning, when I came downstairs, Lanie and her friend Emily, who had stayed the night, informed
me that the gerbil was dead. Lucy and I had noticed how still it was lying the night before and had checked to see if it was alive (still entertaining
hopes, perhaps, of whisking it away before Lanie saw it). But by that morning it was truly over. Lanie reminded me that Emily had offered us one of their baby gerbils as a replacement—same color and everything—and
was off to find a box to put the now rigid little body in. By the time I left the house, she and Emily had wrapped it in a big napkin, put it in the box, and buried it near
the garden by a big rock, on which they were preparing to write: “Gerbil—we’ll miss you—we loved you.” Oh, yes; they had also gathered up handfuls of blossoms from all over the yard and had strewn them on the grave,
along with some lettuce leaves. Rather a commonplace
story, I suspect; many of us could tell similar ones, maybe even more entertaining ones. The value of such experiences is found in what it seems we human beings learn from them over and over again about
life and about death. But touching stories about the way children deal with the death of a pet or even more touching stories about the
way children deal with the death of a member of the family also suggest ways that we Christians can be more helpful to others. No doubt Lucy and I were sincere in our desire to spare Lanie the trauma of watching one of her pets die. But kindly wisdom, drawn from experience of a deeper sort than ours, overruled our fears and our caution and underscored
the truth that the best way to fathom the mystery of death is to face it head on, even if you’re a young child. Jesus was moved by
compassion to courageous, loving action—he reached out and halted the mournful procession and raised the young man to
life. A little girl was taught a lesson in compassion and learned how she, too, could ease the suffering of one of God’s
creatures, if only for a brief time. To have shielded her from the experience, however we may have wanted to, would have been unfortunate, to say the
least. For us to have blocked Lanie’s opportunity to reach out in this way would have been to suggest that Jesus
had second thoughts about stopping the procession and laying his healing hand on the young man. Did Jesus turn away from those around him who were weak or suffering or in pain? No, he had compassion on them. “In the midst
of life we are in death,” is the way one of the anthems that can be read at a gravesite service begins. I rarely choose to read it; I’ll admit it; there is another anthem in the Prayer Book that can be read that
sounds a little more upbeat. But the anthem that I tend to avoid—at least that opening sentence—does have an eloquence of its own. It can serve to remind us that although it is inevitable, death will not have the final word, that the But it can also serve to remind us that although death is inevitable, the forces which lead to untimely death both
here and abroad—not enough food, inadequate shelter, untreated disease—such death-dealing forces need not prevail. I hope someone is recording the services that are being held today at St. Luke’s Jesus never turned away from those who were weak or suffering or in pain. No, he had compassion on them and brought healing, especially in those circumstances where death did not need to
have the last word. All of a sudden efforts like the food pantry, the A-Way Home shelter, even our own Non-Food Pantry take on a whole
new meaning; wonder of wonders, they actually hold the potential to stave off the scourge of untimely death wherever it may
threaten and to promote life as it was meant to be! By the grace of God, may we who have inherited Christ’s ministry in the world be strengthened to follow in
his footsteps: not to draw back in fear, but to reach out in love, even in the face of death itself—to reach out and
offer the blessed touch that brings hope, healing, and wholeness to every one of God’s children. Trinity Sunday –
This morning, instead of puzzling too much over the doctrine of the Trinity, instead of trying to wrestle with a concept
that has frustrated as well as fascinated the best theological minds for centuries, let’s take a few moments to consider
the mystery of the Trinity, a reality too big for us to hold onto, but a reality
that definitely has a loving hold on us. We have this three-part name for the God we worship: “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—a
formula we use when we baptize, when we bless or when we are blessed, often when we end a prayer—we have this three-part
name because of Jesus, the one “who shows us God,” as one of our hymn writers so eloquently put it. Without the witness of Jesus, the Christ of God, the people of the early Church would
not have had to struggle the way they did to put together the statement we know as the Nicene Creed, the creed we say almost
every Sunday. But, even more important, without the witness of Jesus, the Christ of God, we’d
know a lot less about the God who, more than anything else in the world, wants to be friends with us. In fact, friendship with God is what today’s lesson from the Gospel according to
John is all about.
This is not to say that indications of this desire on God’s part to establish a closer relationship with all
of creation can’t be found in the testimony of earlier witnesses. In the passage we heard from the Book of Proverbs we are introduced to the figure of
Lady Wisdom—she sort of describes herself as God’s personal assistant, existing before the heavens and the earth
were created and actually helping in some way, not exactly specified, with creation. “…I was there,” she says, “[when God] established the heavens,
…when [God] drew a circle on the face of the deep, …when [God] assigned to the sea its limit, …when [God]
marked out the foundations of the earth, ….” From the very beginning, she says, she was there. Lady Wisdom depicts her participation in the birth of the cosmos as so vast, so majestic
in its scope that we almost miss the jubilant playfulness with which she goes about her work (if it can be called work): “…I
was daily [the Lord’s] delight,” she exults, “rejoicing…in [God’s] inhabited world and delighting”—and
note especially this friendly turn of phrase—delighting “in the human
race.” Any impression that we are dealing with a God who is distant from or above the created
order is swept away by the testimony of this exuberantly feminine alter ego, and
we are immediately put in mind of the tenderness of the Creator, lovingly bending over the clay and fashioning it into the
divine image, as described in the Book of Genesis. Christian testimony will ultimately transform the co-creating Old Testament figure of
Lady Wisdom into the idea of the logos, as it is developed in the Gospel according
to John, the logos, the Word, who was in the beginning with God and was God, without
whom nothing was made that was made, the divine Word who chose to become flesh and live among us, Jesus, the Christ, whom
we know as the Second Person of the Trinity.
But, to be sure, the promise of friendship with God is stated even more explicitly in today’s Gospel lesson. Jesus is talking to the disciples about his impending death and resurrection. “Now I am going to [the one] who sent me,” he has already told them. “[It] is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate
will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” Their friendship with God, which the disciples have experienced in the person of Jesus,
the Christ, will not change, but it will be different. “When the Spirit of truth comes,” Jesus tells them, “he will guide
you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, …. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and
declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that [the Advocate, the Spirit of truth] will take what is mine and declare it to
you.” An “advocate” is someone you can call on for support
whenever you need it—in other words, a friend you can always count on. Just as Jesus, who is God the Son, is able to count on the friendship of God the Father,
so Jesus’ disciples and the Church that comes after them will be able to count on the friendship of God the Holy Spirit
that Jesus promises to send, the Third Person of the Trinity. Once again, the God that Jesus reveals to us is a God who, more than anything else in
the world, wants to be friends with us.
How does the vision of a God who wants to be our friend square with the pictures of God that some folks are apt to
draw: a stern, demanding, humorless God (often resembling the personality of the folks who draw the pictures), an angry, intolerant
God who can’t wait to smite us for our misdeeds? More of us than we may realize subconsciously go along with the notion of a God who is
at best too busy to be concerned with our plight and at worst capricious and even vindictive. Do we not do better to imagine a God who would rather walk on tip-toe than tread on the
thinnest filament of creation, a God who in the person of Jesus, the Christ, was willing to give up his life for his friends,
a God of compassion who desires that none should suffer, but, having endured every suffering, chooses to be with us in our
suffering, whenever disaster or misfortune strikes? This is the God that theologian William Placher calls the “vulnerable God”,
the God who knows that to love is to risk the pain of suffering and loss, but who also knows that to love in the face of such
a risk is to be most fully human, that to love in the face of such a risk is to participate most fully in the life of God. Beams of self-giving love intersect at the heart of the Trinity, the mystery that is
God, the risking, suffering, loving God that Jesus shows us, who himself is God, who himself is the one who has sent us the
Spirit, even the very Spirit of God, to be our friend. Day of Pentecost – Every year on the
Day of Pentecost we try to add a few special effects to the mix: Several times in the past we’ve had the kids run up
and down the aisles with brightly colored streamers flying behind them and blow bubbles to suggest the point in the Gospel
narrative when Jesus breathed on his disciples and said: “Receive the Holy Spirit!” Or like last year, when we heard the lesson from the Second Chapter of Acts read in several different languages
and had all the readers read the last line at the same time. This year, thanks to a fairly cheap audio recording I was able to download on my computer and thanks to the CD
player compatible disc our Senior Warden was finally able to burn from it when I couldn’t, we were able to interrupt
Dennis’s reading with the sound of a mighty wind and rain down a bunch of balloons from the choir loft, courtesy of
the young and the young at heart. I’m glad to see that some of them are still bouncing around! Balloons were the closest we thought we’d better come to tongues of fire for safety’s sake, but if
you’re looking for a more spectacular re-enactment of the Day of Pentecost, you’d be amazed at what you can find
on You-tube! Talk about special effects! “When the day
of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” They were watching and waiting, as they had been told to do by their risen Lord, right before he vanished from
their sight, watching and waiting to be baptized with power from on high, though as to what that might be they probably didn’t
have a clue. If this were next Sunday, which is not only Trinity Sunday, but also Race Day, “Ladies and Gentlemen: Start
your engines!” would be a fair way to sum up the word those disciples of Jesus were given that day. No more watching and waiting. It was time to act. What a scene! It must have been wild—wild enough that some of the bystanders thought that the disciples were drunk. But it wasn’t spirits they were full of; it was the Spirit. Besides, as one wry comment I ran onto on the internet put it, it was No, it was the Holy Spirit they were full of, and their enthusiasm, literally their “filled-up-ness with
God” had spilled out into the streets, where the cosmopolitan crowd that had gathered by this time couldn’t believe
their ears because they could understand every word these Galileans were saying; it sounded like these Galileans were speaking
in the native languages spoken by these many visitors to Jerusalem without help from simultaneous translators. Each could hear the message “about God’s deeds of great power” loud and clear; each could hear
the Good News of God in Jesus Christ in his or her own language. Mennonite theologian
Michael King, writing in The Christian Century ( There’s no better place to start to turn that around, King maintains, than in the Church. “What would it look like if in our worship, our sermonizing, our Christian education, our delegate conventions,
our speaking truth to power, we invited the Holy Spirit among us to bring us the miracle of understanding? …What if I could at least grasp that had I been shaped by another’s life,…I might think
as another does even though my life has shaped me to think [that] that person is dead wrong?” Actually, if our local
clergy group that meets two mornings a month at Almost Home is any indication (and there are groups like ours meeting all
over the country) we may be making progress in this regard. Some of you may have even read about us in a recent issue of the Banner
Graphic. Not that we haven’t been meeting off and on for years. But recently we started doing more than drink coffee; we started praying with each other, praying for each other,
and praying for each other’s congregations. This is a new development, and it’s no longer just an experiment. I think that our commitment to pray together every time we meet helped bring us to the point a few weeks ago where
we could join forces to plan several local observances of the National Day of Prayer, despite the controversy that arose about
the day itself in some parts of the country. What made us begin
listening to each other and praying with each other and respecting each other as brother clergy (as well as a sister) instead
of treating each other as rivals or being tempted to think that some of us were “better Christians” than the others,
if not the working of the Holy Spirit? There’s special effects, and there’s special effects. A bunch of local clergy joining hands in prayer down at the Swizzle Stick can be as powerful a witness to the working
of God’s Holy Spirit as a mighty wind from heaven or even tongues of fire, whatever they were. Of course, the only special effects that had any real effect that first Day of Pentecost, the only special effects
that really counted were some faithful disciples suddenly transformed into zealous apostles—zealous apostles, who couldn’t
wait to spread the Good News to the ends of the earth. There’s special effects, and there’s special effects. The sound of a mighty wind and a cascade of balloons may gain people’s attention for a moment or two, but
the only special effects that will ever have a lasting effect, the only special effects that really count are ordinary Christians
like you and me, faithful Christians who can “go forth into the world, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit”.
“The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you
in me, that they may be completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have
loved me.” The vision that Jesus offers to his disciples in his so-called “High Priestly Prayer”
is a vision of special relationship, unity with God and in God; perhaps “community”, though it’s a word
we tend to work to death these days, would be a better word than “unity” here:
The special relationship in the vision that Jesus offers is one of community—community with God and in God.
Today’s lesson from the Gospel according to John sends us back once more to the time of farewell between Jesus
and his disciples, a time when Jesus is depicted as trying to reassure his disciples, trying to calm their fears. Things were about to change dramatically in the relationship that they had with him,
but he wanted them to know that their relationship with him was not going to end; it would be different, but it was not going
to end; it was going to be transformed. We know now what they did not know then: that they would lose their beloved leader, that
Jesus would be arrested, condemned, and killed; they themselves would become so confused and frightened that they would abandon
him completely, most likely in hopes of saving their own skins. We know this, of course, because of what happened next. In a few short days the disciples discovered that the tomb where Jesus’ body had
been placed was empty; almost immediately the miraculous appearances began. It did not take the disciples very long to realize that the one they had abandoned had
not abandoned them, but was now with them and among them in a new and more powerful way. The leader they thought they had lost was not lost at all; he had become their risen
Lord.
Then, after a relatively short time, the appearances ceased; there were no longer times when the disciples could see
the risen Lord in their midst. We know the event that put an end to Jesus’ appearances after his resurrection
as “the Ascension”. Traditionally, this final leave-taking of Jesus from his disciples took place forty days
after the resurrection. Ascension Day always falls on a Thursday, a weekday, so it has become a custom in the
Church to commemorate the Ascension on the following Sunday as well. The writer of the Book of Acts describes what happened without much fanfare: “…as
they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” The disciples realized that he would not appear among them again, but they also had his
promise: “…before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit. [And] you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall
be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.” So they knew that, though he was leaving them, he was not abandoning them; they would
have the abiding presence of God’s Holy Spirit among them; the very same Spirit that was in Jesus, the Christ of God,
would also be in them. And the abiding presence of God’s Holy Spirit would empower them to continue the
mission and ministry in the world that Jesus had begun. The abiding presence of God’s Holy Spirit would also be the connecting link with
their risen Lord, uniting them with him, as he was united with the Father. Then the great plea of Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer would be granted; Jesus’
wish would be fulfilled: “As you, Father, are in me and I in you, may they
also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
We see the dynamics of this unique relationship with God that Jesus offered the disciples played out in the experience
of the apostles, as they traveled from city to city in the ancient world, making convert after convert, founding church after
church. This morning’s reading from the Book of Acts finds the apostles Paul and Silas
(accompanied, perhaps, by the author, who may be Luke, the physician), having been offered hospitality in a strange city,
healing a mentally tormented slave-girl and running afoul of her owners, who, no longer able to exploit her condition for
financial gain, denounce the apostles to the authorities as rabble-rousers. Actually, at first glance the liabilities of “being one” with God in Christ
seem to outweigh the advantages, especially when Paul and Silas end up being flogged in the public square and thrown into
prison—and, indeed, in all honesty, “being one” with God in Christ often does turn out to be a mixed blessing. Nevertheless, it is in fact their unique relationship with God—“being one”
with God in Christ—that enables Paul and Silas not only to bring healing and wholeness to an intolerable situation,
but also to endure the brutal treatment that they receive at the hands of the authorities and prove to be such effective witnesses
to the Gospel that their jailer asks them to baptize him along with his entire household.
The promise of “being one” with God in Christ is no less available to us in the Church today than it was
to the Church then, nor is it, for that matter, any less problematic. If it were a task we had to accomplish on our own, “being one” with God in
Christ would be, of course, impossible. But “being one” with God in Christ is nothing that you and I have to accomplish;
rather, it is something that God accomplishes in us; it is God’s gift to us in Jesus Christ our Lord through the power
of the Holy Spirit; it is freely offered to us, just as it was freely offered to those first disciples, our spiritual forebears,
so long ago. It is nothing less than an invitation to enter into the sacred mystery of Christian community,
an invitation for us to enter into the very life of God, which is love itself. We often think of community as something we have to work at,
something we have to build, rather than something at work in us, something being built in us. The community that Jesus envisioned for his Church, the community which Jesus asks for
in his High Priestly Prayer as it is expressed in the Gospel according to John, springs to life at the point where the love
that the Father has for the Son and the love that the Son has for the Father intersect. In a sense, all we have to do to enjoy that unique relationship, to become part of that
relationship, is to park ourselves in the middle of that loving embrace—to “get in the way” of God’s
love, so to speak. And the way we become part of this sacred mystery is, itself, no mystery at all: Through worship together, through prayer and meditation, through reaching out to each
other and schooling ourselves to reach out and welcome the stranger (who just might be an angel in disguise) into our midst,
through being open to the possibility that God will use us to accomplish some good in the world far beyond our hopes and dreams—this
is how we deepen our experience of Christian community; this is how we discover what it means to be “one with God in
Christ”. Of course, every one of us, by virtue of being members of Christ’s body, has an
idea of what this community, of what being “one with God in Christ” feels like; at one time or another we’ve
all felt its warmth; we’ve all felt its pull; we’ve all felt its power. It can be comforting; it can be exhilarating; it can even be a little frightening. Look at what happened to Paul and Silas. Once we really let God’s love grab hold of us, there’s just no telling where
it will lead. VI Easter – May 9, 2010 – Year C ( Today in the Adult
Forum several of us talked about “thin places”, a way of looking at the experience of the sacred that originated
with 5th Century Celtic spirituality; Marcus Borg focuses on “thin places” in the eighth chapter of
his book, The Heart of Christianity. “Thin places” can be a way to talk about sacraments, for example, but it can be a way to talk about
a lot more than sacraments too. Hearing a particular piece of music played or a poem read (it doesn’t need to be an especially religious
one either) or remembering what that piece of music or that poem sounds like in your head—that can be a thin place;
a favorite painting or piece of sculpture or a piece of artwork you’ve never seen before can be a thin place; an actual
geographical location, say, at a certain time of day can become a thin place; theoretically, there can be as many thin places
as there are moments in a given day. “Thin places” are simply points in our lives when it suddenly dawns on us that we are in the presence
of God. Can we say, then,
since this is Sunday morning and the logical time to be talking about sacraments, something like “all sacraments are
thin places, but not all thin places are sacraments”? Not necessarily, since experiencing any particular moment as a “thin place”, sacrament or not, depends
on the perception of the individual, making it a highly subjective maneuver. But what I think we can say with a certain amount of certainty is that
participating in a sacrament can become a thin place for any of us at any time, often when we least expect it. Finally, is it possible to, shall we say, “induce” a thin place by asking ourselves at a critical juncture
something like: “Is what I am experiencing right now a thin place?”? Perhaps. (You can always try it and see what happens.) But, all talk of “thin
places” aside, we Christians presume to say that a sacrament is “the outward and visible sign of an inward and
spiritual grace”, and by saying that we proclaim that God is actively involved in every sacramental moment, whether
we perceive it or not. After all, sacraments are beyond our control—thank God for that! All we need to do is open ourselves up to their possibilities. God does the rest. It does help if the outward and visible signs we employ are somewhat out of the ordinary so that a sacramental
act like stretching out our hands to receive a morsel of bread or reverently pouring water over a person’s head while
saying a few prayers is not something we would normally do, say, on a bus, unless, of course, it was the only place available. We Christians can
claim God’s involvement in every sacramental act because of Christ’s parting promise to his disciples and to all
believers, as it is recorded in this morning’s Gospel lesson from John: “I have said these things to you while
I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will
send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” We Christians can claim God’s involvement in every sacramental act because of the promised presence of God’s
Holy Spirit within us and among us. This is the certainty that we bring with us every time we celebrate the Holy Eucharist together. This is the certainty we bring with us every time we break the bread and share the cup in Christ’s Name. And this is the certainty—the
certainty of God’s Holy Spirit present within us and among us—that we bring with us this morning, as we welcome
little Elyse Ensley into the Body of Christ through the sacrament of Holy Baptism. “Pour into our hearts [,O God,] such love towards you,” we prayed in this morning’s collect,
“that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire.” “Pour into our hearts, …O God,….” I invite you to imagine, when parents and godparents say for her the words that little Elyse cannot yet say for
herself, when big brother Boyd pours the water into the font and the water of baptism is prayerfully poured over her head—I
invite you to imagine that God’s love, the gift that God alone can give, is being poured into her heart and into our
hearts in profusion and in abundance. This is the love, God’s own love, that will enable little Elyse, as it enables us, to love God more and more,
as she grows in the Faith. This is the love, God’s own love, that assures her, as it assures us, that she is not only the child of Cathryn
and Jim, but that she is also first and foremost a child of God and always will be. V Easter – May 2, 2010 – Year C ( The trouble with the
way this morning’s New Testament lesson tells of how the religious movement we know as the Church began to spread all
over “the known world” is that it’s told so matter-of-factly, as sort of a story within a story, that it
sort of takes the edge off. By the time we hear Simon Peter telling his Jewish colleagues about what made him begin to associate—eat
with—non-Jews, the shock of Peter’s conversion—and that’s what it is, a conversion—has worn
off, and he is using his powers of persuasion, which are, to be sure, considerable, to convince his Jerusalem brothers (and
maybe sisters) that the Good News of God in Jesus Christ is not meant just for them, but for all people. As part of his pitch
Peter tells them about this dream he had, but it must have been more like a nightmare, the kind of unthinkable horror that
can make you wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Peter and the other disciples were still recovering from being rocked by the entry of the impossible into their
lives: Their beloved teacher, who they thought had been killed by his enemies, had been raised from the dead; he was alive
again and, one way or the other, would always be with them. Life would never be the same. When they had tried to go back, if only to get their bearings—when Peter and some of the others had decided
to take a break and go fishing, Jesus, their risen Lord, had met them on the beach and said not just once, but three times:
“Feed my sheep!” (And he didn’t mean “Feed ‘em with fish”!) But if there was no
going back, well, then, they still had their identity as observant Jews: Males underwent circumcision; ever since their wanderings
in the wilderness certain foods and combinations of foods had been strictly prohibited and were never eaten; Jews simply did
not associate with non-Jews, except to transact business. If nothing else, it was something they could hold onto, if only for dear life: their identity. Peter makes his change in behavior sound like a logical progression, when he addresses the elders in Jerusalem,
but what he experienced on that rooftop must have been devastating: to be told—and by God, no less—that at least
for him kosher would no longer be of any significance at all and that he would
soon be consorting with all manner of Gentiles, people who were as unclean as the unclean stuff they ate must have scared
the bejeezus out of him. Or maybe into him. I mentioned last Sunday
that I had started reading Phil Gulley’s new book, If the Church were Christian. I finished it this week, and it’s a blockbuster, filled with insights that could cause some of us to re-think
everything (if we haven’t already); it’s what conversion—being “born again”—is really
all about. Phil weaves anecdote after anecdote into his argument, recounting signal events in his pastoral journey as a Quaker
minister, many packing a wallop not unlike Peter’s conversion experience on the rooftop. In the chapter with the subtitle “What would it mean if the church cared more about love and less about sex?”
Phil tells of one such incident early in his career, when he was still in college, but already pastoring a small Quaker meeting
in the vicinity. It wasn’t in a dream; it happened in real life. An elderly couple, both widowed, had begun living together, and Phil was approached by the equivalent of a Vestry
member to go talk to them because they were not married and were, as his informant put it, “living in sin.” “Like many people of my generation,” Phil writes, “I’d been taught that couples who were
romantically involved and living together should be married. It was a principle
I’d never questioned,… [So] I went to visit them. [And after being warmly welcomed and shown] pictures of their respective children and grandchildren…and…of
their deceased spouses…I…commented on their relationship, offering to marry them if they wished. ‘We can’t afford to,’ Tom said quietly. ‘We’d
lose too much Social Security. It’s all we have.’…‘We
know we shouldn’t be living like this,’ Maggie said, ‘but a person just gets lonely.’ I thought for a moment,” Phil writes, “then said, ‘You know, friends, I think God has
bigger things to worry about. Let’s just be grateful you have each other.’” When on the following Sunday the board member asked Phil if he had spoken with the couple, Phil said that he had
and explained to him the financial hardship they would face if they were to marry, “then suggested he reimburse them
their lost income so they could get married. Not surprisingly,” Phil relates,
“[the gentleman] declined my proposal.” Phil goes on to recount
a few more eye-opening or should I say “heart-opening” experiences involving human relationships in his ministry
and finally reaches this conclusion: “Though not advocating an uncritical acceptance of any and all sexual expressions,
I do believe that the mind-set that has long dominated the church, permitting us to casually reject those who fail to meet
our standards, is no longer helpful. We are adults, and it is long past time
to talk openly and honestly about our needs, desires, and orientations, without fear of shame, ridicule, or rejection. It is, as the apostle Paul so famously declared, time to put away childish ways.” It wasn’t a
dream or a waking vision (and it certainly wasn’t something he read in the Bible) that finally prompted Phil Gulley
to reach a conclusion like this; it was real life; it took getting to know real people trying to make sense out of their existence
to make him see things differently. If Phil needed more than a gentle nudge or two, Simon Peter needed a world-shattering experience the likes of a
pagan banquet dumped in his lap to grasp the full implications of what he had heard Jesus say at their last supper together,
as it is recorded in this week’s Gospel lesson from John: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” “Love one another.” But who did Jesus mean by “one another”? Who did that include? Peter would learn pretty vividly that it included every human being, even people he wouldn’t have been caught
dead with in his previous life. And what did Jesus
mean by “love”? Scholars will tell us that the word “agape”, meaning “a generous act for the sake of the other”,
is a relatively recent construction in classical Greek that soon became the nearly exclusive property of the early Church. “Love one another, just as I have loved you.” But just how far should that love extend and in what ways should that love be expressed? Phil Gulley’s call for a Church that does less moralizing and more loving is very welcome news. If anything, it helps to remind us that the Episcopal Church is not the only denomination these days that is having
to wrestle with issues of diversity in the expression of human sexuality, where earnest questions like “Who should be
welcomed into our congregations?” get trumped by questions like “Who then should we ordain?”. Not that such concerns
remain “safely” confined to the national scene for very long; eventually local congregations end up having to
deal with every one of them. Just the other day we received an email message in the office asking whether St. Andrew’s wanted to be included
in a directory with over 6,000 other congregations that “provide a welcoming and affirming atmosphere to gay, lesbian,
bisexual and transgender Christians”, as well as to “persons who are heterosexual, married, divorced, single,
[and] remarried”. Now that’s a pretty tall order for any church to fill. But as I pondered the phrase in our mission statement posted in the parish hall that commits us “to welcome
all people, celebrating our differences as well as our similarities”, I fell to wondering just how welcoming we really
are and what kind of test it might take for us to find that out. IV Easter – I’ve just started
to read Phil Gulley’s new book, If the Church were Christian—sounds
like Phil, doesn’t it, if you happen to remember the title of the first book he wrote with Jim Mulholland, If Grace is True, and the title of the second, If God is Love—anyway,
I’ve just started to read it, and I think I’m going to suggest that we take a look at it, perhaps in Adult Forum,
after we’re finished with Marcus Borg’s The Heart of Christianity because
Phil’s argument: that Christians might do well to spend less time worshiping Jesus and more time trying to follow the
example he set when he was on earth dovetails nicely with Marcus Borg’s invitation to see the Christian life not so
much as preparation for a blessed afterlife but more as an opportunity to grow into Christlikeness by seeking to have a deeper
relationship with God in the here and now. What happens when
we take that approach to a passage of scripture like this week’s lesson from the Gospel according to John, where the
writer documents an encounter that his disciples remembered Jesus having with some Jewish religious leaders before his death
and resurrection, an encounter that served to increase the determination of those leaders to put an end to Jesus once and
for all? The feelings of hostility reached fever pitch when Jesus finally got around to answering their question: “Are
you the Messiah?” by saying, “The Father and I are one.” The very next verse reports that they started picking up stones to throw at him. Telling them that they didn’t belong to his sheep probably didn’t help the situation any either. But what else could
he say? “My sheep hear my voice.” That was Jesus’ criterion for acceptance into the flock, but these folks obviously weren’t listening. If they had been listening or watching or paying better attention to the way he carried himself, they might have
gotten the point, the point that Jesus’ disciples finally got, though it was well after the resurrection before they
got it: that if shepherding was a reasonable description of the love that God had for all creation (think “The Lord
is my shepherd”) and if being a shepherd was a reasonable description for Jesus’ approach to his ministry, then
shepherding was something that the Church had better be about. It may have taken
Jesus’ disciples a while to get the idea, but when they finally got it, they got it big time. Look at Peter in today’s New Testament lesson from Acts. Peter gets word, much as Jesus got word from Mary and Martha about their brother Lazarus, that one of the faithful
in the town of Joppa (and notice that she is called “a disciple”) has
died, and he is urged, to “come…without delay” and do what needs to be done. The members of the fledgling church there obviously see Peter as an inheritor of Jesus’ mantle, someone who
has taken seriously Jesus’ parting injunction, repeated three times: “Feed my sheep!” They expect action, and they get it. After kneeling down and praying, he turns to Dorcas or Tabitha and tells her to get up, and she does. Not unlike Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, Peter raises Tabitha from the dead. In that moment Peter not only represents the Good Shepherd; Peter is
the Good Shepherd. And here I might take
issue with the title of Phil Gulley’s new book, though I need to remember that changing the title to If the Church were more Christian would surely weaken it, even if turned out to be closer to Phil’s original
intentions: because shepherding is not only something that the Church had better be about; shepherding is the Church at its
best; indeed, it is and always has been religion at its best. When Peter and the other disciples dared to take on the mantle of pastoral leadership bequeathed to them by their
Master, the ministry we know as the cure of souls had its beginnings. But it was really nothing new. And shepherding, not even good shepherding, is hardly the exclusive property of religion. Wherever the winds
of the Spirit choose to wander, whether inside the Church or anywhere else, human beings have been moved to shepherd others,
sometimes well, sometimes badly. No doubt all of us can point to teachers or coaches or bosses, for whom our respect and admiration know no bounds;
we may even be a better teacher or a better coach or a better boss because of some life lesson that one of those sainted individuals
was able to drive home to us. Then again there may be a few we’d just as soon forget. Jesus had a name for lousy shepherds; he called them “hired hands”, and I suppose he may have meant
by that that the stake those hired hands had in the sheep they were obliged to tend went no further than the money they were
paid; one of the milder names Jesus had for shepherds who abuse their power was “hypocrites”, but he used that
epithet sparingly.
When I was on the
staff of St. Paul’s in Indianapolis years ago, we started a kind of weekly Elderhostel program for senior citizens called
“The Shepherd’s Center”; I think we were thinking of Jesus, when we named it, but there were more shepherds
on duty than sheep in that program (maybe even a few sheepdogs), and many of them turned out to be the people we served. Some time later a coalition of Here in Greencastle
a St. Andrew’s has partnered with Gobin Memorial United Methodist Church for almost that long offering at risk
children in the county educational extras and two nutritious meals in the Summer Enrichment Program, where sheep who might
otherwise tend to stray learn what good shepherding can be. Then the former director of the local housing authority had a dream that enough churches, organizations, and local
government agencies were willing to buy into, a middle school student named it, and the A-Way Home shelter opened its doors
to the homeless and, thanks to generous donors, has been able to keep them open. I need only mention our own Non-Food Pantry ministry, which began its second year of monthly distribution to needy
neighbors yesterday, to complete the picture, which, I know, is sketchy at best. But, ideally it always begins within the fellowship of a faith community, as it did in the apostle Peter’s
day, and spreads, as the logical and indispensable outgrowth of the love and the care we offer each other. Needless to say, I’m
going to have to finish Phil Gulley’s book, before I make too many more pronouncements about it, but the Church has
been trying to be Christian for as long as it has been in existence, not always with the greatest success, for it is a human
institution, but passionately and persistently because it is loved and cherished by God. And we do it thankfully because we have the example of the Good Shepherd to guide us. “My sheep hear my voice,” Jesus said. “I know them,
and they follow me.” He might have added: “And if they really hear what I’m saying, they will follow my example. And if they follow my example, they will never go wrong.”
A week ago we witnessed the disciples beginning to come to terms with the fact that Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified
one, was indeed the Christ of God and had been raised from the dead. Appearing to them in the room where they were hiding because they were afraid they might
be arrested themselves, Jesus breathed on them and said: “Receive God’s Holy Spirit.” Empowered by this Spirit they were to carry on Jesus’ work—assuring those
who turned to them for healing that their sins were forgiven and that God loved them. Last Sunday in his sermon and in his appeal in support of the fine relief work that “Food
for the Poor” is doing in All they needed to do was follow Jesus’ instructions and get going.
But it just wasn’t that simple. So we shouldn’t be surprised that, instead of immediately heading off into the
world to spread the Good News of God in Jesus Christ, the disciples decided to go fishing instead. The arrest, the trial, the execution of Jesus had left the disciples in a kind of stupor. They really didn’t know which way to turn. And seeing Jesus alive again filled them with joy—they were amazed; they were excited—but
it also added to their confusion. What in the world was happening to them? Where would it all lead? That’s why they stayed huddled together in one place and didn’t venture forth,
except, as we learn in today’s Gospel, to visit old haunts. Visiting old haunts was one way for them to try and get their bearings. Wherever they were, they needed to make sense out of what they
were experiencing. It has become a custom in the Church during Eastertide to take the lessons for the week
exclusively from the New Testament as a way of focusing on the developing consciousness of the disciples. All the little band of Jesus’ followers that was becoming the Church had to go
on, of course, was, oddly enough, what we choose to exclude during this season; all the disciples had were the sacred Jewish
writings we call the Old Testament—those writings plus any memories they could piece together of what Jesus had said
and done while he was among them. Most likely the way they would have had access to these sacred writings was to go to
the synagogue on the Sabbath like everybody else and hear them read, then think them over and discuss their meaning together
whenever they could during the following week. We have evidence in the New Testament, particularly in the book we call “The Acts
of the Apostles”, from which we began reading on Easter Day, that the disciples did attend the synagogue regularly after
Jesus’ resurrection and even after they had begun to proclaim to anyone who would listen that Jesus was Lord.
Why did the disciples still attend the synagogue? They attended the synagogue because they were devout Jews and that was still the main
way they worshipped God; visits to the Remembering the times when they had shared a meal with Jesus—before and, as today’s
Gospel describes, after his death and resurrection—the disciples also gathered regularly and shared a meal together
when the Sabbath was over, on the first day of the week. When they broke the bread and shared the cup, they remembered Jesus’ words: “This
is my body. This is my blood.” Eventually, when the disciples and their followers were no longer welcome in the synagogues,
they would take parts of the synagogue service and construct their own liturgy, which always began with the readings and the
prayers and always ended with the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the cup—the form of worship we know today
as the Eucharist. Of course, by the time these disciples and their followers
had their own liturgy they also had their own identity; by then they were known as “Christians”. But without these first reassuring moments at the very beginning, when the risen Lord
appeared in their midst, and without the process of faithfully examining their religious heritage in the light of what they
were experiencing, these early Christians might never have been able to put their broken world back together. They might have stayed stuck in their confusion. They might have stayed stuck in their fear. They might have stayed stuck in their anger.
Yes, it’s entirely possible that Jesus’ disciples were not only confused and afraid at first; it’s
entirely possible that they were angry, too. The disciples would have been more or less than human if they hadn’t been angry
at the leaders of the It is entirely possible that the disciples were angry at God. But with the help of God they did not stay stuck in their anger, even though staying
stuck in your anger is a perfectly common reaction when your world is falling apart.
Take Paul or, rather, Saul, as he is referred to in today’s reading from the Book of the Acts: “…Saul,
…breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord”—Saul, the hatchet man, who would miraculously
become Paul, the point man, the apostle, who would labor tirelessly to spread the Gospel throughout Asia Minor and on into
Europe. Saul was awfully angry; he was so angry, as that old saying goes, that he couldn’t
see straight. His world, too, was falling apart—it didn’t make sense anymore either—which
frightened him and made him angry. Saul and the temple officials he worked for, who thought that they had seen the last
of this Jesus when they turned him over to the Romans, were now intent on rooting out every last follower of this new faith
that simply would not die. Saul was so frightened and so angry that he was simply beside himself. It would take something like an earthquake to stop him in his tracks; it would take a
light from heaven to shut his anger down; it would take the voice of the Lord himself to turn him completely around.
Times haven’t changed all that much. People can still get caught in their fear; people can still get caught in their anger—when
they feel that their world is falling apart—and some never get out of it. Feeling helpless and hopeless, they lash out at anything and everything they think might
be responsible for their frustration. So people do senseless things like the man who flew his plane into one of the regional
offices of the I.R.S. in a kind of mock 9/11 attack.
What do you do when you think your world is falling apart? What does anybody do? Too often the answer seems to be: You lash out in fear and in anger, the way Saul did,
before he became the apostle Paul, the way the disciples likely would have, had they had no knowledge of a religious tradition
to fall back on, had they not sensed the reassuring presence of the risen Lord in their midst. Fear and anger accumulate and are easily displaced in every imaginable direction, often
resulting in senseless acts of violence aimed at innocent people. Times have not changed. After all, it was displaced fear and anger that brought about the death on the cross
of an innocent man some two thousand years ago in
How can we ever hope to break this cycle of fear and anger that inevitably leads to violence? By insisting that life has meaning, even when the world seems to be crumbling around
our shoulders. That’s where a faith community like the Church comes in. Without the anchor of the sacred writings to test their immediate experience against
and the timely appearances of the risen Lord in their midst, even the first disciples could have wound up feeling that there
was no meaning in their lives. They certainly didn’t have a lot to go on. But it was all they had, and it was enough. It’s all that we have to go on today—it’s all the Church has ever had
to go on—but it is enough. The Easter faith—born in the women’s stupendous story of the empty tomb,
born in the bestowing of God’s Spirit on the disciples that night in the upper room, born in the simple sharing of a
meal at sunrise on the Galilean shore, then spread by a once angry young man named Saul and by other faithful messengers to
the corners of the known world—the Easter faith is the greatest gift that God could have given. And all that we have to do as Christians is all that we’ve ever had to do: share
the truth of the Easter faith in word and deed with everyone we meet, until violence and the frustration, fear and anger which
feed its flames are no more. “Risen Lord, be known to us [and to every human being] in the breaking of the bread.” Easter Day, 2010 – Year C ( “Were you there,
when they crucified my Lord?” is what we sang together after sharing in the Holy Communion last Sunday morning. “Were you there?”—a penetrating question, a question which can mean “Did you see it?”,
“Were you a witness to it?”, or perhaps more evangelistically put: “Does the fact that Jesus died on the
cross have the deep significance for you that it has for me?” But, if “Were you there, when they crucified my Lord?” is an appropriate question for Holy Week, what
is an appropriate question for Easter Day, now what we have arrived at that most holy of holy days? We have already raised the Easter acclamation: “Christ is risen! The
Lord is risen indeed!” “Christ is risen” answers one question anyway: “What happened?” There is a version of “Were you there…?” which goes on to add the verse, “Were you there,
when he rose up from the grave?”, but in all honesty I’m afraid the question isn’t “Were you there…?”,
but rather “Who was there…?”—“Who was there, when he rose up from the grave?” Who was there? Most likely no one. Only in the Gospel according to Matthew is it recorded that some soldiers from the temple guard had been posted
at the tomb with the consent of Pilate, the governor. It is these soldiers who became “like dead men”, when, as the writer of Matthew describes it, “an
angel of the Lord descended from heaven and…rolled back the stone [that had covered the entrance to the tomb] and sat
on it.” The so-called “Gospel of Peter”, one of the later accounts of Jesus’ death and resurrection that
was not included in the canon of the New Testament, would suggest that what made the soldiers become “like dead men”
was the sight of Jesus, in blazing majesty, coming forth from the tomb, but it is because of fantastic descriptions of this
nature that certain narratives were kept out of the New Testament in the first place. “Who was there, when he rose up from the grave??” Who actually witnessed the resurrection? If we stick with the accounts that are available to us in the New Testament, probably no one. Which is, of course, the problem: In this day and age, if you can’t verify it empirically, scientifically,
concretely, it probably didn’t happen. Then why does faith
in the resurrection of Jesus Christ persist? It persists because of the powerful witness of those who were not there
when Jesus rose from the dead, but whose way of looking at their relationship with God was utterly changed once they did get
there and began to realize that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead and would be with them always. Faith in the resurrection persists because of the disciples who went to the tomb and found it empty, then went
to tell the others. Faith in the resurrection persists because people like Mary Magdalene, who was the first disciple on the scene
as far as the Gospel according to John is concerned, suddenly found themselves face to face with the risen Lord. Not that resurrection
was something they had counted on. The idea that the dead would be raised when God brought the world to an end was familiar enough to them; Jesus
wasn’t the only rabbi who stressed the hope of resurrection in his teachings. But resurrection now—resurrection as God’s answer to a cruel and unjust death—resurrection of
that kind was simply unheard-of. It was not only good news; it was shocking news. No wonder the disciples had so much trouble taking it in at first! Mary Magdalene’s
first reaction, when she saw the stone rolled back from the tomb, was to think that Jesus’ body had been stolen or at
least taken somewhere else. I imagine you and I would have probably thought the same thing, had we been there. The other two disciples—Peter was one, John may have been the other—rushed to the tomb, when Mary brought
them the news, and pretty much came to the same conclusion. So it’s a good thing that Mary stayed behind, when Peter and the other disciple went back home. What was it that made
her stay? Was it sorrow or confusion, or was it, perhaps, a glimmer of hope? Whatever it was, it left her open to the full revelation of God’s unconquerable love. Once the other disciples had left the scene, calm could descend, and she could notice the angels, who were sitting
inside the tomb, and tell them of her distress. How often it seems that God must wait for us to get ourselves to those islands of stillness, to those graciously
uncluttered, though sometimes inexpressibly painful places in our lives, before we are able to truly hear, before we are able
to truly see! It is in the depths of her sorrow, in the depths of her despair that Jesus calls to Mary, and even then she does
not recognize him at first. There are times in
our lives when God can truly be found at the center or our consciousness. All of us can point to those times. There are other times when we have to admit that God can only be found at the very edge of our consciousness, if
God can be found at all. Sometimes we let God slip away to the sidelines to be recalled if needed. Other times we may deliberately drive God from our lives, the way our First Century counterparts drove Jesus out
of Still, no matter how great the distance we may put between him and ourselves, the Christ of God is able to slip
back into our lives, whenever he needs to. Or he can burst forth
in radiance from the tomb, as on that first Easter morning so long ago. And say our name, as he said Mary’s name, and we will turn around and see him and believe. Lutheran theologian Don Armentrout has written that “the cross and the tomb are symbols of what humanity
does to God when God comes to humanity in human flesh. “At the same time,”
he adds, “the cross [and the tomb are symbols] of what God does for humanity.” “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” This is what we say every time we recite the Nicene Creed as part of our worship, as we will do in a few moments. It would make no sense for us to say that we “look for the resurrection of the dead” if we did not
believe, along with Mary Magdalene and the other disciples, that Jesus rose from the dead and is alive. To be sure, on some days we may believe that more strongly than on others, especially on those days when we have
the sense that God is near. On other days we may not be so sure; we may need to take another look; we may need to get a second opinion. On days like that it might just pay to give God the benefit of the doubt. Theories about how
Jesus somehow feigned death on the cross as part of a plan to be resuscitated later on will be around as long as there is
breath to speculate; remember that the disciples themselves assumed at first that his body had been stolen; they could not
imagine that they would ever see him alive again. But once they realized that their Lord was indeed risen from the dead—after appearing to Mary he would eventually
appear to every one of the other disciples—they understood once and for all that the God they worshiped was a God who
would never forsake them, that death does not have the last word, and that they, too, would share, as will each one of us,
in the resurrection to eternal life. How wonderful to know that Easter isn’t just a one time thing, that the hope of Easter wasn’t just
for Jesus, that the hope of Easter is for every human being! Thanks be to God! |
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