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  • Phoenix Zones: Where Strength Is Born and Resilience Lives

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    One New Book for the Preacher

    D. Cameron Murchison

    Black Mountain, North Carolina

    Hope Ferdowsian, Phoenix Zones: Where Strength Is Born and Resilience Lives (Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2018)

    In the season of Pentecost, a preacher’s attention may be readily drawn to the third article of the Nicene Creed, with its classic rendering of God the Holy Spirit as “the Lord, the giver of life.” In reflecting on that theme in a world that often sees life “taken” rather than “given,” “faded” rather than “flourishing,” preachers may find a welcome conversation partner in Phoenix Zones: Where Strength is Born and Resilience Lives. The very title suggests that this is a book with Pentecost themes of new life writ large. That is to say, if the ancient mythology of Phoenix rising from the ashes may rightly be imagined as echoing Christian confidence in the life-giving power of God’s Spirit, then this book holds promise for the preacher in the season of Pentecost. Yet ironically, the capacity of this slender volume to be joined to Pentecost hopefulness in the “giver of life” is grounded in its resolute look into the abyss of hopelessness. Sticking with the title’s metaphor, we learn that the ashes from which Phoenix rises are true ashes, replete with genuine and incorrigible suffering. Writing about the deep vulnerability and suffering experienced by humans and animals who have endured abuse and torture around the world, Hope Ferdowsian discerns a pos­ sibility of resilience (and yes, new life) when certain key pillars are present. They include: 1. basic liberty and sovereignty, 2. commitment to love and tolerance, 3. promotion of justice and opportunity, and 4. belief in the dignity of each human and nonhuman animal. Her close contact with people and animals who have experienced some of the worst violence to body and spirit imaginable, yet who have found themselves in zones that led toward resilience and flourishing, has enabled her to identify these principles as source of the Phoenix effect. And what is even more remarkable is her discovery of how the wounded animals and humans contribute to their mutual healing in envi­ ronments imbued with such principles. Ferdowsian’s explorations detail these realities: the common beneficial effect of freedom from narrow confinement and abusive treatment on chimpanzees and humans alike; the way in which offering elephants and vulnerable people freedom of choice and a sense of agency heals both; the mutual relief from PTSD experienced by homeless veterans and rescued parrots sharing love and tolerance; a recognition that justice for abused youth encompasses the same for their companion animals; how providing concrete hope amid the effects of perennial war in the Congo can provide both girls and gorillas with a sense of life’s possibilities; and the clear evidence that both pigs and people can overcome unimaginable abuse and deprivation when treated with dignity.

    Pentecost 2019

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    From the early pages of the book, the connection between the fate of humans and animals is clearly sounded. An opening vignette shows how Henry Berg, founder of the American Society of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), clearly saw how his concerns for preventing abuse of animals was inseparable from a concern for the same protection for abused children in New York City circa 1874. Further, and less happily, research is identified that shows that a history of animal abuse is one of the most significant risk factors in identifying who is likely to become an abuser of an intimate partner, child, or stranger. This all can well lead preachers to ponder more closely how the “Lord and giver of life” should be grasped in our time. It will not be enough to focus on the well-being of humans for the simple reason of the inextricable link between human and animal well-being. Phoenix Zones provides a telling example when it describes how over the past three decades an increase in meat production at a rate ten times the popula­ tion growth rate has had deleterious effects on humans and animals alike. Billions of animals have, under the aegis of factory farming, been deprived of their dignity and sovereignty; while meat-based diets for humans have sponsored diseases of obesity, cancer, heart disease, and diabetes; and while meat production has contributed to the spread of emerging or reemerging pathogens threatening the health of people and animals alike. If Yuval Noah Harrari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind rests content with an account of how humanity has proven itself an “ecological serial killer,” Phoenix Zones has a higher ambition for the species. Ferdowsian asks plaintively, “What if we removed ourselves from the crown of creation? Could we then perhaps abandon our transgressions —not only against animals but also against one another?” (p. 133). Thereby the volume widens the meaning of the life of which God the Holy Spirit is the Lord and giver.

    Journal for Preachers

  • Preaching Pentecost in a Secular Context

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    Preaching Pentecost in a Secular Context

    Kristy Farber Mercer Island Presbyterian Church, Mercer Island, Washington

    The first confirmation class that I met at my current church was filled with young people that I did not recognize. I assumed this was because I was new and, somehow, had missed seeing the twenty to thirty ninth graders in worship over those first six months while looking out at the faces of people in the pews. It turned out that the vast majority of the class was not in worship. Neither were their families. I learned that lack of involvement or connection to the church before the start of confirmation was a common experience at Mercer Island Presbyterian Church. Many people in the wider community of the church took the view of faith development that I had taken about swim lessons. I did not start my children in swimming lessons as infants or toddlers. I waited until they were old enough that I was no longer required to get into the pool with them. I didn’t want to get wet. I didn’t want to shower at the YMCA with plastic flip flops on and still have the lingering smell of chlorine in my hair. So for swim lessons, I waited. My kids began to take swimming lessons once I could walk them inside and point them toward the pool, reminding them to rinse off before greeting their teacher. Our confirmation class works in a similar fashion for 9th graders in our local community. Many families wait until their children can navigate a community of faith on their own, sign them up online, and point them in the direction of the youth room. Last year, one of my colleagues ran into a group of our confirmation students’ parents out at dinner and invited them to church. “Oh, thanks,” one mom responded in a friendly tone. “But, honestly, everything is going fine. We just don’t need church.” We just don’t need church. As a church leader, this is a hard comment to wrestle with, and yet is it the very real feeling of people in my own community and in communities throughout the country? Maybe there are areas of the country where people are less likely to name their disinterest in church out loud to a pastor in a restaurant, but that feeling exists for people in every community today. While the conversation around the unaffiliated church-goer has been on the rise for the past ten or even twenty years in the national landscape, it has been a constant reality in the Pacific Northwest since people from traditionally Christian cultures first began living here. More than a century ago, in 1914, religious leaders gathered for a symposium to try to understand what happened to good, faithful, active, church members who moved to Washington State. Did they forget the Great Commission somewhere around the Rockies? Did the book of Acts get forgotten? One professor described the problem simply: “In the East they were faithful church members; now they are not even church attenders.”1 Seattle, and the Pacific Northwest (PNW) as a whole, has been dubbed “the None Zone” – the place where its residents, when asked about their church affiliation, answered “none of the above” at a higher rate than any other region of the country. It is not that people have not heard about God. They just do not show up with any regularity to church. People in the PNW are not joiners. They do not show up to or­ ganized religion or to organized anything. There is no animosity toward the church,

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    just an overall lack of enthusiasm. The “Nones” may come to an Easter or Christmas service with someone, maybe a worship service when the youth are commissioned on their mission trip, to a memorial service for the parent of a friend, or something special for someone who asks. But they do not attend worship services because they feel compelled to participate in the life of the community of faith or give praise to God. Living and serving in this community has convinced me that Pentecost is not a sermon that we preach once a year. Pentecost is not a day. It is the gift of the Holy Spirit in perpetuity. It is the power of the Spirit to work and breathe in our lives and ministry, to point to the hope of the resurrection in places where we only see death and wreckage, to shift us out of our frozen state and bring us to life. Pentecost is something we need to preach in every sermon, in every youth mission trip commis­ sioning service, in every memorial service, and in every service where people who see no need for church walk through the door. Last year, Eric, the parent of one of our youth program alumni, asked if I had time to get together. His kids had grown up in the church, and so he had attended a handful of different services at MIPC over the years, all the while remaining firmly planted in the camp of “I just don’t need church.” His wife had been involved for years in the past, but from all I could tell, church was her thing. The request was the kind that came without a lot of information. I wasn’t sure what Eric wanted to talk about. I wondered if his wife was sick or one of his kids was in trouble. Or if he just wanted to rent out the gym for a fundraising event in the community. When Eric came in, he was visibly shaken. He said, “I’m going to tell you some­ thing that I don’t know if you’ll believe. I just don’t know who else to tell.” And then he went on to share that more than a month earlier, he was sitting at his kitchen table alone before the sun came up, drinking coffee. At the table he felt (and then he paused as if the next line would be something I might not have a category for) the presence of God. A God he never knew existed. It was clear to Eric in that moment that God knew him and loved him. In that moment he knew he needed more than his life currently offered. He held that story to himself. He did not trust that people would understand. He worried that a God experience would come off as him going crazy, seeing things, hearing things. Eric did not have a context to explain a feeling of God moving in his life. He did not know how to explain to his wife, so he held it. When the Holy Spirit moves throughout scripture, things change. The Spirit disrupts. It pours out God’s love. It changes our lives in a disarming way. Eric had never considered the Holy Spirit as an active agent in the world. He had no category for the work of God, through the Holy Spirit, to further Jesus’ ministry in the world. How could he? He had never heard Pentecost preached. Pentecost interrupts and transforms. With its fire and wind, it has the power to shake us, to shake the world. It even has the power to move those who do not realize their need to be shaken. These people are all around us. Many of them will not show up to worship on June 9, 2019, Pentecost Sunday. By June, our attendance starts to dip as the sun shines longer and people stop hibernating from the long, wet Seattle winter. They may not show up to worship in June, but they need Pentecost all the same. For newcomers to the Pacific Northwest and those considering the move today,

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    the biggest hesitation that many have is no longer the rain, or the dark. The biggest hesitation is the Seattle freeze—a widely held belief that it is exceptionally hard to make friends in Seattle. A reporter for the Seattle Times writes, “Seattle is like that popular girl in high school. The one who gets your vote for homecoming queen because she always smiles and says hello. But she doesn’t know your name and doesn’t care to. She doesn’t want to be your friend. She’s just being nice”2 Seattle is a hard place to break into. People are very polite, yet reserved. You can live in a neighborhood and never talk to the people who live next door. You can join a class without ever talking to someone else. People in the greater Seattle area are more likely to participate in individualized activities than teams —skiing, hiking, bike riding, kayaking. People go on walks alone, drink coffee alone, read books alone. Even Millennials, who na­ tionwide are struggling to get by financially in this new economic reality, are living alone at a much higher rate in Seattle than anywhere else in the country.3 They are living alone in Seattle, where housing prices are skyrocketing at San Francisco rates. There is a pride in making it on our own here. “Many newcomers come to the PNW and break with their cultural or family traditions. Often, once here, the bounty of the natural environment becomes more central to their lives.”4 Even among people of faith, believers in Jesus, there is little interest in belonging. I serve a church in a particular area of the country with particular quirks and chal­ lenges, but I know that the struggles that face my congregation in a Seattle suburb are not unique. I have also served a church in the Southeast, and while not every element of Seattle is the same as Asheville or Atlanta or New York or Kansas City, or wherever in the country you find yourself, preachers face congregations with varying degrees of these elements everywhere. People of all ages in all parts of the country are alone more and more. Stress and anxiety have grown into an epidemic among teens as they navigate a world of tech­ nology and pressure unlike anything previous generations experienced. Our oldest generation is more and more at risk for isolation, living farther away from family and trying to keep in communication with an ever-changing world. Twenty percent of people over 65 are at risk of aging alone. There is even a name for this group, coined in 2016: “elder orphans.”5 In 2018, the New York Times alone published more than a dozen stories about rising levels of loneliness. The Seattle Freeze may be a regional phenomenon, but this creeping isolation is real throughout our world. It freezes us relationally. It stops us from knowing how to talk to one another, be with one another, interact with one another. It stands in opposition to the experience of Pentecost, where God’s Spirit begins the work of forming us as a people. Pentecost invades our lives and our world, It assaults the isolation that we have purposely created and the isolation in which we unwittingly find ourselves. On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit exposes the limitations of human connections, bringing together people who would never have otherwise spoken to one another. The Holy Spirit works a miracle by “creating a people who were ‘once not a people.’”6 People are desperate for the disruption of Pentecost that binds us together in community. We need Pentecost to change things in ways we cannot even imagine. In Acts 2, Pentecost arrives with wind and fire, strong enough to blow people out of the places where they are stuck and alone, melting what is frozen in their lives. This happens as they are filled by the Holy Spirit, with the beautifully peculiar result of tongues loosed in all kinds of languages—language of meaning, of relationship,

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    of connection. “The Greek verb that the NRSV translates as ‘to speak’ is apophtheggomai , a verb that appears in the New Testament only in Acts (1:4,14; 26:25). It means to speak solemnly, although not necessarily ecstatically.”7 This solemn speaking is not grave or somber, but rather a well of sincerity. It speaks language into being that cares about things that are sacred and meaningful and mysterious and magnificent. It allows people to hear each other’s holy stories. The podcast, Invisibilia, tells the story of a group of eight friends gathered around a backyard dinner table in Washington D .C., to celebrate family and friendship. Michael Rabdau, along with his wife and 14-year-old daughter were a part of the picturesque evening. Michael describes the time as “one of those great evenings—lots of food and French wine.. .a magical night.” After enjoying the meal and dessert, the whole group lingered, enjoying each others’ company. That is when the magical night took a different turn. Michael, who had been standing beside his wife, saw an arm with a long barrel of a gun, come between them. In that moment, he felt as if the world began moving in slow motion. Everything got quiet. The gun belonged to a man, medium in height, wearing designer sweats, a stranger to them all. He first raised the gun toward Michael’s friend Christina and then to Michael’s wife before saying, “Give me your money.” He kept repeating the same thing over and over again, harsh and angry. “Give me your money.” Fear rose around the table. This man was not joking around. The man’s gun was their first problem; the second was his demand. Like so many people today, not a single one of them had any cash. What he wanted, they couldn’t give. No one had any money. So…they started talking, grasping for some way to dissuade the man. They started with guilt. “What would your mother think of you?” one person asked. “I don’t have a mother,” he replied, with a few expletives. “Give. Me. Your. Money.” Michael remembers thinking that this was going to end badly. As everyone was filled with panic, Christina piped up with an offer. “You know, we are celebrating,” she said. “Why don’t you have a glass of wine?” All of a sudden, the look on the man’s face changed. It was like a light switch. He took a sip of wine. “That’s a really good glass of wine,” he observed. Then he reached for the cheese and, as he did so, he placed the gun in his pocket. He drank his glass of wine. He ate more cheese. Everyone else stood there, watching, frozen in that moment. And then the intruder said something that no one expected. ‘7 think I’ve come to the wrong place.” Quickly, everyone responded with things like, “Oh, hey, yeah, I understand,” and, “Of course, this kind of thing happens.” For a moment, they all sat there with the twinkling stars overhead and the sound of chirping insects in the night. And again the intruder said something else that nobody expected. He said, “Can l get a hug?” It was Michael’s wife, who had a gun pointed at her just minutes earlier, who gave him a hug. And then another person from the dinner party. After those hugs, he asked, “Can we have a group hug?” And everyone got up and formed a circle around the man. The experience was beyond strange. When the group hug finished, he simply said, “I’m sorry,” and walked out of the front gate with a glass of wine in his hand. Later that evening, after everything had calmed down, the friends found that wine glass neatly placed on sidewalk by their alley—not thrown, not carelessly

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    discarded — placed .8 That group of friends experienced the new language of Pentecost, a language that broke down fear and violence. That led to apologies, and connection. Pentecost has the power to transform our communities, the gift of the Holy Spirit which points us to the promises of the resurrection. When UCC minister Martin Copenhaver preached his last sermon at a church where he had pastored for nine years, he decided to spend almost the entire sermon speaking devotionally about Jesus. This is the conclusion of that sermon entitled “What’s It All About?”

    As I am about to leave, there is something I want to tell you. I want to tell you what Jesus means to me. I want to share my belief that everything depends on him. I want to urge you to learn from him. I want to assure you that you can lean on him in times of trouble. I want to tell you that I believe that you can entrust your life to him. I want to affirm that he is Lord of this church and that in his name you are freed to love one another and empowered to share that love with a hurting world. I want to profess that, though once people could not look at the face of God and live, now we are invited to look at the face of God in him, in Jesus, and live as we have never lived before. He is Emmanuel, God with us, God with us all, whether we are together or apart. That’s what it’s all about. That’s all I know. Amen.

    When the service was over, Copenhaver stood at the door of the sanctuary, shak­ ing hands with people for the very last time as their pastor. “One woman,” he writes, “a beloved saint of the church, came to head of the line but was so overcome with emotion that she could not speak and went to the back of the line. I assumed she simply did not know how to say goodbye. When she finally reached me, she extended her hand to mine, her shocking blue eyes filled with tears. Her voice cracked as she asked, “Why didn’t you tell us this before?”9 We cannot assume that people know the power of Pentecost. We cannot assume that people know the gift of the Holy Spirit that points to the hope in Jesus. We can­ not assume that people believe the Holy Spirit is coming to look for them. We cannot assume that anyone who walks into the doors of the church has been here before or will come back again. As preachers in 2019, we need to preach every sermon like it is the only sermon people will hear. We need to call on the power of the Holy Spirit to proclaim the promise of the resurrection. We need to remind people that God is moving in the world, now, today. Pentecost is gift of the Holy Spirit for the insiders and the outsiders, a gift for those whose needs are desperate alongside those who do not realize they have any need. It is for pastors and wanderers and thieves and neighbors alike. Pentecost calls for a universal witness to extend the hope of Jesus to all people, in all places, and at all times. In my ministry context, I consider this call a gift and a challenge to hold in front of me with every opportunity to proclaim the Good News of Jesus.

    Notes 1 Patricia O’Connel, Killen and Mark Silk, eds., Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The

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    None Zone (Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press 2004), 9. 2 Julia Sommerfeld, “Our Social Dis-ease: Beyond the Smiles, the Seattle Freeze Is on,” The Seattle Times, February 13, 2005, https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/our-social-dis-ease-beyond -the-smiles-the-seattle-freeze-is-on. 3 Gene Balk, “Millenials Are Most Likely to Live at Home with Parents – But not in Seattle,” The Seattle Times, November 30, 2018, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/bucking-nationaltrend -seattle-millennials-least-likely-to-live-at-home-with-parents/. 4 James K. Wellman, Jr., Evangelical vs. Liberal: The Clash of Christian Cultures in the Pacific North­ west (New York, NY: Oxford University Press 2008), 190. 5 Marwa Eltagouri. “Growing Old Alone: More Seniors at Risk of Becoming Elder Orphans,” The Chicago Tribune, December 24, 2016, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-elder-orphans-met20161212 -story.html. 6 Stanley Hauerwas and William H Willimon, The Holy Spirit (Nashville, TN: Abington Press2015), 35. 7 Justo Gonzalez, Acts: The Gospel of the Spirit (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 34-35. 8 Lulu Miller, Hanna Rosin, and Alix Spiegel, “Flip the Script,” Invisibilia. Podcast audio, July 15, 2016 http://www.npr.Org/podcasts/510307/invisibilia. 9 Martin Copenhaver, Jesus Is the Question (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2014), 107-108.

  • On Sunday Worship, Its Origin and Meaning

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    On Sunday Worship, Its Origin and Meaning

    Justo L. Gonzalez

    Decatur, Georgia

    I have been invited to write a brief article summarizing some of the key points of a book I published last year, A Brief History of Sunday. I must confess that I find the task difficult, for I meant it when I claimed that the book was a brief history, and now I am requested to make it even shorter!

    Constantine’s Invention? It is often said that the reason why Christians gather for worship on Sunday is because in the fourth century Emperor Constantine decreed that it should be so. This is simply not true. What Constantine did was to set aside the day of the sun, Sunday, as the day of rest. Practically all economic and legal activity in cities was to cease, while necessary agricultural tasks would be allowed to continue. Quite possibly, Constantine did this because he and his family had long been worshipers of the Un­ conquered Sun {Sol Invictus), and for a long time he wavered between that religion and Christianity, often seeking to combine the two. In any case, there was nothing in his decree about Christian worship. Later Christian writers, seeking to promote the prestige of this emperor who would eventually come to be called “St. Constantine,” ascribed a particularly Christian inspiration to his decree. In truth, Christians had been worshiping on Sunday since time immemorial. They called this day the kyriaka or the dominica, Greek and Latin words meaning “of the Lord.” The earliest references we find to this appear in Acts 20:7 and Revelation 1:10. In the first of these, the narrator says, “On the first day of the week, when we met to break bread….” In the second, John says that his vision took place when he “was in the spirit on the Lord’s day.” The first day of the week was a day of particular significance when Christians would gather for their central act of worship, breaking bread together.

    A Bit of History The first day of the week was important for Christians for three main reasons, to which I shall return later. However, before we move on to this day itself and its significance, it is important to clarify what was meant by “the first day of the week.” Jews did not count days as we do, from midnight to midnight. Lor them, a day ended and a new one began with the setting of the sun. This is why in Genesis 1, we repeat­ edly read that “there was evening and there was morning,” while we would normally say “morning and evening,” in the opposite order. Thus, the Sabbath began with the setting of the sun on the sixth day of the week and ended with the setting of the sun on the seventh. It is quite likely that at first Christians most often met to celebrate communion on what today we would call Saturday evening, but to them was the beginning of the first day of the week. This would be particularly convenient for early Christians, most of whom were Jews. Through the centuries, Jews had found ways and occupations that would allow them to keep the Sabbath on the seventh day of the week. Lor Jews who

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    became Christians, it would be relatively easy to gather for communion immediately after the setting of the sun on the Sabbath, at the beginning of the first day of the week. This is why in Acts 20, we are told that the Christian community gathered on the first day of the week, and that Paul “continued speaking until midnight.” They did not meet early on Sunday and continue until midnight. Rather, they met after sunset on what we today would call Saturday, and Paul was preaching until what today we would call midnight between Saturday and Sunday. Fairly soon, however, as the church became more Gentile and less Jewish, this brought about changes in Christian worship. On the subject of the Lord’s day, it was easier for Christians to meet in the very early hours of the morning than in the evening. A slave or an employee could not tell the master or the supervisor that he could not work on a Saturday evening, but it was relatively easy for a slave or an employee to rise early to attend worship on the first day of the week. It is clear that by the late second century, the normal time for the church to gather in order first to hear and study the Word and then to partake of the Table was what today we would call the wee hours of Sunday. This was also more in agreement with the Roman way of counting days as beginning at midnight, as we do. Thus, we find most Christian writers of the second century referring to their day of worship sometimes as the “Lord’s day” and sometimes as the “day of the Sun,” depending on whether they were addressing Jews and fellow Christians or pagans. What Constantine’s decree meant was that Christians did not have to rise in the very early hours of the morning in order to gather for worship. Their day of worship was also a day of rest, and they could gather at a more convenient hour. Before the time of Constantine, Christians often referred to the Sabbath and its place within Christianity. Some felt that it should still be observed as a day of rest, while the next day was a day of worship; some rejected it altogether as a damnable Jewish practice; and many allowed for much freedom on the matter—which probably reflects a time when in the same church, Jewish Christians would continue observing the Sabbath and many Gentile Christians would not. But when the first day of the week had become a day of rest by imperial decree, things began to change. Frequent imperial decrees focused on which activities would be allowed on the first day of the week and which would not. Eusebius tells us that shortly after Con­ stantine’s edict about rest, he ordered that on the day of the sun, soldiers should pray, addressing “our only God and our king,” a phrase which still reflects Constantine’s religious ambiguity. As the fourth century advanced, and particularly during the fifth century, imperial legislation seems to reflect Christian concerns. For instance, there was repeated legislation forbidding certain public spectacles on the first day of the week, legislation whose very repetition indicates that it was not generally obeyed. In 409,Theodosius II seems to have been moved by Christians to decree that on Sundays, judges should inquire about the conditions in which prisoners were kept. Christian influence on this legislation may be seen also in the naming of the day itself. In the earlier decrees, it is called the “day of the sun,” dies soiis, but as the years passed, it came increasingly to be known as the “Lord’s day,” dominica. As the Middle Ages progressed, there was ever increasing legislation, both civil and ecclesiastical, regarding Sunday. Soon these laws began imitating and expanding on the Sabbath laws of the Hebrew Scriptures. Thus, Sunday became a day of rest

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    with many of the characteristics of the older Jewish Sabbath.

    Languages and Sabbatarianism This does not mean, however, that Christians immediately declared that Sunday was the Sabbath. On the contrary, medieval Latin still referred to the seventh day of the week as sabbatum. The persistence of the Sabbath along the Mediterranean basin is such that even today both in Greek and in most Romance languages, the seventh day of the week is called the Sabbath, Sdbbato in Greek, sdbado in Spanish and Portuguese, sabato in Italian, simbata in Rumanian. In French and some related languages, the name for this day derives from a contraction meaning “the Sabbath day,” samedi. Jointly with the Sabbath, the “dominica” or Lord’s day also persisted: domenica in Italian, domingo in Spanish and Portuguese, duminica in Rumanian, and dimanche in French. Even in some Slavonic languages the same name persists, although this is mostly the result of Greek and Latin influence. This is interesting because in most Western European languages, the ancient pagan names for the days of the week remain, except for these two, the first and seventh days of the week. In most cases, the second to the other days of the week still retain their ancient pagan names, day of the sun, day of the moon, and so on. The medieval church objected to this. As late as the seventh century, Isidore of Seville was still insisting that the names of the days between Sunday and the sabbatum should be simply “second day,” “third day,” etc. But in the long run, this practice was rejected by most languages, while Portuguese and Greek retained it, refusing to use the names of pagan gods. The first day of the week, now commonly known as the Lord’s day, increasingly took the characteristics of the Jewish Sabbath, even though most of Western Europe retained the name of “Sabbath” for the seventh day of the week. The result is that during the Middle Ages, while there was a sort of Sabbatarianism in that the observa­ tion of the Lord’s day, the first day of the week, was patterned to a great extent by the ancient laws of Israel or at least by an emphasis on abstaining from certain activities, and even though several authors saw the connection between the laws regarding the first day of the week and ancient Sabbath laws, they did not call that first day of the week the “Sabbath” or sabbatum, for that was already the name of the seventh day. When we come to modern times, this meant that in areas where the seventh day was not called the Sabbath, it became customary to refer to the first day of the week as the Sabbath. Such was the case in English and similar languages where the name of the seventh day still retains its pagan roots as the day of Saturn, Saturday. In Puritan England, and in much of Protestantism from then on, insistence on “the Sabbath” meant an emphasis on the strict keeping of various practices and regulations to be followed on Sunday. Actually, when someone spoke of “the Sabbath,” what they actually meant was Sunday and its observance in ways similar to the ancient Jewish Sabbath. This was not possible in countries where the Sabbath still retained its ancient name, or some variation thereof, sdbado, sabato, etc., for it would never make sense in Italian, Greek, or Spanish to call Sunday “the Sabbath,” a name that was already taken by the seventh day. But at the same time, it was possible to say in English that “Sunday” was the “Sabbath.” It was therefore in the environment of English and other similar languages that a type of Sabbatarianism arose. This sort of Sabbatarianism insisted that the true Sabbath was Saturday, the seventh day of the week, and that this was the day that Christians should observe.

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    It is this history that takes us back to the need to distinguish between the Lord’s day and the Sabbath. Claiming that Sunday is the Sabbath, as is common in the Eng­ lish language, is only possible in English and similar languages. In the practice and understanding of the early church, the Lord’s day had little to do with the Sabbath. This in turn leads us back to the manner in which the early church understood the Lord’s day and the significance of the first day of the week. In early Christian writ­ ings, this significance revolves around three main points.

    Back to Sunday and Its Meaning: (I) The Day of Resurrection The first and probably the most ancient reason for gathering for worship on Sun­ day was that this is the day of the Resurrection of Jesus, as the Gospels make clear. Long before a Christian year was established, Christians followed a weekly cycle in which the last days of the week were particularly important. This may be seen in the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles or Didache, a document that seems to date from the late first century and certainly not later than the second. There one finds instructions regarding two particular days of fasting, of which the second is called “the day of preparation,” which in our present-day language would be Friday. The New Testament repeatedly refers to “the day of preparation” as the day of the crucifixion. Therefore, it was a proper day for fasting. Then after the Sabbath on the seventh day came the Lord’s day, the day of Resurrection, the first day of the week. It was on this day that, as we have seen in Acts 20, Christians gathered for their own form of worship, which centered on the breaking of bread. On this day one would not fast not only because worship itself included eating, but also because fasting was a sign of mourning, and this was inappropriate for the day of the Resurrection of the Lord. The great moment in the life of Jesus that Christians most celebrated was the Resurrection. While the cross was always important, for without it there would never have been a resurrection, it was in rising from among the dead that Jesus had conquered the powers of death and destruction, and thus opened the way for the final victory of those who were joined to him as part of his body. (Very rapidly, particularly in the West and after the fourth century, Christian faith became increasingly focused on the cross and less on the Resurrection. An interesting note is that the church building in Jerusalem that the Eastern church called the church of the Resurrection, the Western church came to call the Holy Sepulcher.) Thus, when the early Christians broke bread, they were not primarily commemo­ rating the death of Jesus, but rather celebrating his resurrection and victory. Sunday worship was originally a joyful event which in later centuries became increasingly somber and funereal. In a way, this meant that every Sunday was a day of Resurrection—perhaps one could say, a little Easter. Eventually, a particular Sunday became the great day of Resurrection, which we now call Easter, and which became one of the main anchors of the Christian calendar. But this would take us far beyond the limits of this brief essay.

    Sunday and Its Meaning: (2) The Day of the New Creation As we read the very first chapter of the Bible, we become aware that the first day of the week is also the first day of creation. Christians understood that in Christ “there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become

    Page 17

    new!” (2 Co 5.17). As the beginning of the Gospel of John shows, Christians were also convinced that this one they had seen in the flesh and who for their sake had been crucified and had risen was also at the beginning of the first creation. Thus, the new creation would destroy what was evil in the first, and this too was celebrated on Sunday, the beginning of both the first creation and the new. We see this understanding already in the mid-second century, when Justin, ad­ dressing pagans and therefore referring to the first day as “the day of the Sun,” said, “We hold this general gathering on the day of the Sun, because it is the first day in which God made the world, moving darkness and matter. It is also the day in which are Savior Jesus Christ rose from among the dead” (1 Apol. 67.7). Once again, this has important implications. One of them was that, contrary to what Marcion and the Gnostics claimed, there is no radical discontinuity between the first creation and the second, or between the physical world and the spiritual. But, also once again, this would take us far beyond the scope of our purpose here.

    Sunday and Its Meaning: (3) The Eighth Day Calendars are generally based on repetitive cycles. If we look for instance at the Hebrew Scriptures, we see a calendar based on a cycle of weeks, then a week of weeks leading to Pentecost (7X7 = 49), then a week of years, and finally a week of weeks of years —the Jubilee on the 50th year. Something similar is true in any other calendar. In order to measure time, we understand it in terms of cycles, not only the days in a week, but even hours in a day, minutes in an hour, and seconds in a minute. While this repetition of cycles makes it possible to plan for the future, it also seems to be a never-ending rut from which we cannot escape. However, both Jewish and Christian faiths affirmed that at some point in the future, this cycle would be broken. In early Christian literature, this was signified by pointing out that the first day of the week is also the eighth day of the previous week. This was seen as a sign and a promise that a time will come when, upon awakening after the seventh day of the week expecting once again another first day, we will discover that we are now no longer in the never-ending cycle of weeks and time, but in the new order of eternity. As far as I can tell, the earliest extant Christian author to speak of the first day of the week as also the eight is Pseudo-Barnabas, early in the second century. A few decades later, Justin Martyr employed the same language, and later so did Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian as well as Cyprian. But probably the clearest example of the connection between the eighth day and the eschatologi­ cal hope is found in St. Augustine. After a long review of human history organized into six ages reflecting the six days of creation, Augustine said, “The seventh age will be our Sabbath, which will have no sunset, which will come on the Lord’s day, the eighth day, the eternal day, consecrated by the resurrection of Christ, and which prefigures the eternal rest not only of the spirit, but also of the body. There we shall rest and see; see and love; love and praise. Behold the essence of the endless day!” {City of God 22.30.5).

    Sunday and Its Meaning: Manifestations in Worship All of this was expressed not only in teaching and in writing, but also in worship itself. Indeed probably for most Christians, this was best understood not in terms of words, but rather in terms of ritual and experience. Too often we think that it is our

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    theology and our teachings that are expressed in worship, when it is at least equally true that what is done in worship shapes the faith and theology of believers. Thus, while we can trace elements of the significance of Sunday in early Christian writings, we come to understand it better as we see it manifested in worship practices. Modern readers are often surprised to learn that in the early church, one was not expected to kneel in prayer on Sundays. The Council of Nicaea reaffirmed the notion that not to kneel in church on Sundays was proper behavior and ruled that all churches should follow it. Kneeling is an act of obeisance that is quite appropriate when unworthy petitioners approach a king. It is therefore appropriate in prayer when one is repenting for one’s sins and asking for forgiveness. But Sunday is the day of our adoption as children of God. On this day we approach God not as the petitioner approaches a king, but rather as his children do. By virtue of our baptism and our adoption as children of God, we are heirs of the Great King, and therefore on this first day of the week, we proclaim our adoption by looking at God no longer as petitioners, but now as children and heirs. A similar understanding of adoption and of the meaning of baptism may be seen in what we know of the practices and rites of Christian baptism at least by the late second century. Upon coming out of the water (sometimes in an octagonal baptistry, signifying that one had now entered the eighth day of creation), a neophyte was dressed in a white robe. This did not mean, as it would today, that the neophyte was now pure, for at that time white was not a sign of purity, but rather of victory. Conquering generals returned to their cities dressed in white and riding white horses. Now this person coming out of the water, a slave, an artisan, or a fishmonger, was dressed in the same color that was used to honor victorious generals. And not only that, but the neophyte was also anointed with oil, as were the ancient kings and priests of Israel. The neophyte was now not only a victor, but also a king and a priest, part of a “royal priesthood” (1 P 2.9). And then, to show this as clearly as possible, this neophyte, now dressed in a victor’s white and anointed as a priest and king, for the first time joined the royal priesthood in prayer not only for the church, but also for the rest of the world, including the emperor who thought he was lord, but could not appeal to the high throne of the true Lord of all. The neophyte and the Royal priesthood could.

    A Look at the Future What does all this mean as far as today’s church is concerned? Although I do not know what the future will bring, I do hope that at a time when most Christians live in the bonds of poverty and oppression, Sunday will repeatedly remind us that the one whose resurrection we celebrate is also the one who was at the beginning when all things were made and the one who will be at the end when all of creation comes to fruition, on that eighth day when, as Augustine would say, “We shall rest and see; see and love; love and praise.”

  • Stronger and More Tender

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    Stronger and More Tender

    Matthew 5:6 and Acts 10:1 -17, 34-35

    Shannon J. Kershner

    Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, Illinois

    Have you ever had a surprising experience—good or bad—that caused your whole worldview to change or perhaps caused even your whole life to change direc­ tions—an experience that made your heart grow stronger and more tender at the same time? Perhaps one that made you realize just how hungry and thirsty you were for the righteousness Jesus promised? That is exactly what Coach Bob McKillop hopes is happening right now to the young men on his team. McKillop is the head coach of the Davidson College men’s basketball team. Davidson is a Presbyterian-affiliated liberal arts college with an enrollment of around 1,800, located right outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. Those of you who enjoy college basketball would know it due to one of its famous alumni—Stephen Curry. Curry led the team to the edge of making it into the Final Four back in 2008, when he was a college sophomore. During this week in 2018, however, what happened ten years ago is not the focus for either the coach or the current team. Rather, what matters to them right now is what happened beginning in 1940 and lasting until 1945. You see, Coach McKillop took his entire basketball team from Davidson College to Auschwitz. In his own words, here is why he believed the pilgrimage was critical: “The volatility of our world right now requires a response informed by both a respect for human dignity and an understanding of what happens in its absence… .We are step­ ping into a moment in time when, for millions, evil seemed to have triumphed and humanity [had] vanished… .1 want them to understand this experience, for life, and to bring it back here, not just as a lesson but to live what they learned. Our world needs leaders who aim to lead and to serve,… guided by human instincts and creative and disciplined minds. We need advocates for, and defenders of, human dignity… .That is why we are going.”1 We could add the words from Matthew: We need leaders who hunger and thirst for righteousness and will not be satisfied until they are full. Over the four days they were there, I would imagine the Davidson College men’s basketball team undoubtedly had some experiences that caused their whole worldview to change. Perhaps as a result of what they learned, what they saw, what they heard from their guide who is a survivor of that very concentration camp, some of those young men might even decide to study something else or to go into law or advocacy or ministry or please—politics. My prayer is that God is using that moment in their young lives to make their hearts stronger and more tender at the same time. That God is expanding their vision about who is family and why that matters. That they are being immersed into the profound importance of both recognizing the dignity of every person and lighting for that dignity to be seen by every person. And now that their journey is over and after they have had time to debrief with each other and with their families, I hope they will write about their experiences. Because, as their coach stated, quoting General Eisenhower, “the lessons of ‘ indescribable horror’ [they are learning] remain as urgent

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    and timely as ever.” The experience of serving in our nation’s armed forces during WWII had a similar kind of effect on my theological hero, the late Rev. Dr. William Sloane Coffin. As he reflected in a sermon entitled “Why I Became a Minister,” Coffin claimed that the hellish experience of war, especially that war, the daily experience of seeing brutality up close and personal, of becoming immersed in, as he put it, “the sullied stream of human life,” is ultimately what made him ready for a religious experience. All of what he saw and did led him to begin asking the right kinds of questions—questions that helped him become more open to learn of a deeper reality. And yet, as he preached, it still took him a while, even after all of that to be open to the work of the church. “For one thing I hadn’t realized is that Christians are always the best argument against Christianity…”(he had a way with words). “I allowed myself to be put off by the churches….It offended my understanding of the Gospel to see the churches become protected and withdrawn islands of piety in a sea of social ills.”2 But, over time, due to the teaching of bright lights like Reinhold Niebuhr and James Muilenburg , Coffin discovered that even through all of those difficult, demanding, and often awful experiences, God had still managed to make his heart more tender and make it stronger. And as a result, Coffin felt drawn deeper and deeper into the vocation of ministry, into being one of God’s hard hats for hope. I believe Peter had a world-shaking, worldview changing experience like the bas­ ketball players just had, like Coffin had beginning with WWII. His experience started that day on the rooftop in Joppa and continued when he showed up in Ceasarea at the home of the Gentile soldier named Cornelius. For like Auschwitz is not the normal destination of a college basketball team and ministering within the Christian church was not how a young William Sloane Coffin pictured spending his one wild and pre­ cious life, that Gentile soldier’s home was not at all where Peter had ever expected to travel. It did not fit with the way he was raised. It did not make sense with all that he had been taught about how the world worked. He never would have conceived of making that kind of journey until he had that strange, strange vision. Listen to how he tried to explain it to the church leadership after the fact, when he found himself in trouble for following it. This passage is later in Acts 11: “I was praying and saw a vision,” he told them.

    The heavens opened and something like a large sheet came down, lowered to the ground by its four corners. When I looked inside it, I saw every kind of forbidden creature—camels, badgers, buzzards, bats, crocodiles, lizards, a pig—all the things on the “don’t eat” list in Leviticus 11, part of our holy law. And then I heard a voice that said, “Get up Peter: Kill and eat.” I knew it was God’s voice. I recognized it. But I just could not do what God was telling me to do. It went against everything I had heard before. It went against everything I was taught, against all the Torah I had memorized and applied to my life, against everything my parents had ever said about faithful living. And then God said, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” This happened three times and then the sheet went back into heaven.3

    That is roughly how Peter himself summed up that strange visual experience. But

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    then, as if that were not enough, after he had that startling vision—he came back to himself only to encounter strangers who had been sent by a soldier named Cornelius to take him, a leader in the Jewish Christian church, to Cornelius’s house, someone who was a Gentile, an outsider to the covenant. The whole thought of it made Peter’s knees shake and his stomach upset, and yet he went with them anyway. Now unfortunately, we did not have enough time to read the rest of the story to­ day, but know this—even until the very moment Peter walked into Cornelius’ house, he still felt incredibly uneasy and scared about what he was doing, so much so that some of the hist words out of his mouth to Cornelius and his family were words of judgment and fear: “You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile….” And yet, something suddenly clicked in Peter. For im­ mediately after he made that claim, the purpose of the vision became clearer. Stand­ ing there in Cornelius’s living room, surrounded by those he did not believe he was even supposed to be around, it was as if his heart grew more tender and stronger at the same time. His vision was not about food, he realized. His vision, his revelation, was about people. It was about those he could consider a part of the family. And with that new clarity in mind, Peter followed up his statement of distaste with the important Gospel word but. Barbara Brown Taylor thinks the whole gospel might swing on that word, that conjunction but. I was lost but now I’m found. I was blind but now I see. That one word means that “things can change. [That one word] means we do not always know everything there is to know. [That one word implies] God can still teach us something.”4 In the African American preaching tradition, we would add one more thing, though, to that one word. We would add the name of the Holy One so that the conjunction signaling change also might become a phrase of holy defiance. “But God” would be how we would put it, which is exactly what Peter said. “You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile. But God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.” No, “what God has made clean, who God has made clean through the self-giving inclusive love of Jesus Christ, I must never call profane.” I must never treat them in a way that makes them feel they are unclean. I must never forget their dignity as people created in God’s image. And then do you know what Peter did? He baptized all of them and said—welcome into the family. And he stayed with them for several days. What a huge worldview shift! Later, he went even a step further. When all of those other church leaders forced Peter to defend his actions, Peter just shouted out, “Who was I that I could hinder God?” Those words illustrate just how strong and how tender Peter’s heart had be­ come, how much he had really started to be famished and thirsty for righteousness, through that world-shaking, worldview changing experience. And Scripture says when they (the good church folk who were upset with him) heard him say that, they were silenced. I’d like to think, and Scripture bears some witness to it, that because of Peter’s courageous actions, some of his adversaries might have also had a completely unexpected, world-shaking, worldview changing experience too. One that made their hearts more tender and stronger at the same time. One that made them even more hungry and thirsty for what might be. An experience that made them change their understanding of what was faithful, that helped give them clarity that what we say about people really does affect the way we think of them and treat them. Today, as you know, is July 8th. I spent July 4th with my family down in Texas, but I

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    have to confess to you, celebration was not my focus. Now please hear me out before you decide you already know what I am going to say. I promise you I have been try­ ing hard to fight the temptation of viewing the Gospel through the lens of my politics in the hope that I can do a better job of viewing my politics through the lens of the Gospel. I would invite all of you to join me in that spiritual discipline. It’s harder than it sounds. But friends, as I fought that internal temptation, one thing that kept coming up time and time again in my soul was a deep grief over all the evidence that we, as a nation, are dangerously close to losing our dream of who we can be together. We might even use Coffin’s words that we are becoming both more immersed and more used to being immersed into a sullied stream of human life. Down there in Texas I would study and pray over this passage from Acts and then turn on the news to learn just how many migrant children have not yet been reunited with their families. And, as the PBS News Hour put it, many of those who have been reunited are so traumatized by their experience, they seem like different kids.5 And with that going across the screen, I kept looking to this passage from Acts and back up to the news dumfounded. What in us, in our national ethos, is making it okay to see these little ones as profane enough that we can treat them that way. I understand that we have to keep our borders safe and strong, but God has told us, Jesus people, what God has made clean, we must never call or treat as profane. Furthermore, and now I know our track record is spotty on this one, but as people who follow Jesus, we must stop making it okay for anyone to refer to another human being, who is also created in God’s image, in a derogatory way as an animal or as an infestation, or as somehow less than. If we let that become normal, we forget the lessons that Coach McKillop is trying to teach his basketball players about the critical necessity of advocating for and defending human dignity. And I hope you can hear this—that is not viewing the Gospel through the lens of anyone’s politics. That is viewing our politics through the lens of the Gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ. For the lens of the Gospel declares to us that all the name-calling, all the meanness, all the outright demonization of each other is antithetical to how we have been made and who we are called to be. Because what God has made clean, which we Presbyterian Christians typically believe means everyone, we must never call or treat as profane, as unclean, as less than. That is the Gospel truth. For Jesus went to great lengths to make sure that after he told us we are to love each other as siblings, that we knew that commandment meant everyone — “including those most unlike us, those who do not fit, those who upset us and make us uncomfortable.”6 Perhaps we need to start praying for some Peter-like visions these days. Visions that will shake us out of our stupor of normalized apathy. Visions that could possibly change our entire worldview as to who is worthy of being included. Visions that would open up enough space in us for God to make all of our hearts stronger and more tender, more compassionate, more loving—all at the same time. And in the meantime, I think I will send a note to Coach McKillop at Davidson College and ask him if his players would please write up what they learned on their trip to Auschwitz so we might learn from their surprising experience and remember again what it means to advocate for and defend the human dignity of all. And the danger that could come if we stop thinking that it matters. For in Christ, God was reconciling the world to God’s self. That is not fake news. That’s the Gospel truth.

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    So be of courage, Church. And step up.

    Notes 1 Bob McKillop, “Grade Point Perspective,” The Washington Post (July 3, 2018). 2 William Sloane Coffin, “Why I Became a Minister,” A sermon preached at Riverside Church NY on Oct. 5, 1986. 3 Barbara Brown Taylor, The Bread of Angels (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1997), 77. 4 Ibid, 78. 5 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/my-son-is-not-the-same-new-testimony-paints-bleak-pictureof – fami ly- separati on. 6 Walter Brueggemann, A Gospel of Hope (Louisville: WJKP, 2017), 86.

  • Measurements

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    Page 37

    Measurements

    Ephesians 3:14-21

    Mark Ramsey

    Macedonian Ministry, Atlanta, Georgia

    A baseball great in the middle of the last century, Mickey Mantle, lived a life marked by alcoholism and, as his life came to a premature end at age 63, he was painfully aware of opportunities squandered. In his final press conference, days after receiving a liver transplant in 1995, Mantle spoke with regret: “Although I’ve heard people say they’d like to have my heart … it has never been used,” he reflected. “God gave me everything, and I just . . . pffft!”1 God gives us a life of dimension. Ephesians urgently wants us to know about the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of God. But too often, too many of us want none of it. Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron gave a lecture recently where he asked, in regard to the times in which we are living, “How was it that so many people believed things that were untrue, even though we could document that they were false? How was it that websites created overnight could successfully disseminate falsehoods and crackpot conspiracy theories, suffering no consequences for deliberate deceit but instead gaining audience?” To answer, he points to Neil Postman’s 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. While the public worried most about an authori­ tarian world as envisioned by George Orwell in 1984, Postman believed a future as imagined by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was more likely. “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us,” he wrote. “Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.”2 We have been offered nothing less than the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of God, and our world—in its preoccupations and distractions, in its politics and discourse, in its conceits and prejudice—appears to want none of it. Our text from Ephesians 3 is a prayer that serves as a hinge between the descrip­ tions of what God has done by gathering up all things in Christ, breaking down the dividing wall of hostility and creating in Christ “one new humanity,” and the last three chapters, which instruct readers about what we are to do in response. The hinge is coming to know the full dimensions of the love of God—breadth, length, height, and depth. This love is not to be described, or lived, as a hypothetical. “It is easy enough to talk about God while remaining comfortable within the contemporary intellectual climate,” Christian Wiman has written. “Even people who would call themselves unbelievers often use it as a ready-made synonym for mystery.” But if nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors vagueness. If God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time-ravaged self.”3 The breadth of the love of God implies that we perceive the field for love’s vision too narrowly. A few months ago, Britain’s government acted to appoint a government official for loneliness. “For far too many people, loneliness is the sad reality of modern life,” Prime Minister May said in a statement. “I want to confront this challenge for our society and for all of us to take action to address the loneliness endured by the

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    elderly, by carers, by those who have lost loved ones — people who have no one to talk to or share their experiences with.”4 Currently in Japan, people who are short on relatives can hire a husband, a mother, a daughter, a grandson. Two years ago, Kaz Nishida, a Tokyo businessman in his six­ ties, started renting a part-time wife and daughter. His real wife had recently died. Six months before that, their daughter, who was twenty-two, had left home after an argument and never returned. “I thought I was a strong person,” Nishida said, “but when you end up alone, you feel very lonely.” He still went to work every day, and he had friends with whom he could go out for drinks or play golf. But at night he was completely alone. He thought he would feel better over time. Instead, he felt worse. Nishida contacted a family rental company and placed an order for a wife and a daughter to join him for dinner. The cost was about $370. The first meeting took place at a cafe. The wife asked Nishida for details about how she and the daughter should act. Nishida demonstrated the characteristic toss of the head with which his late wife had rearranged her hair and his daughter’s playful way of poking him in the ribs. Then the women started acting. The rental wife called him Kazu, just as his real wife had, and tossed her head to shake back her hair. The rental daughter playfully poked him in the ribs. An observer would have taken them for a real family.5 A study in this country last month named Millennials as the loneliest of all our massively lonely generations. The study warned that loneliness has proven worse for health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day.6 And no one wants to talk about this. There are distances—large and small— where we are not bridging painful gaps. The love of God is broad, so wide, as God envisions it, that pain —and those gaps —must not remain. The love of God also has.. .particular, startling length. Ephesians implores us to consider how far we will look to see the destination for God’s love. In the same week that ABC cancelled Roseanne Barr’s TV show after Barr sent a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, Harvard researchers published a study estimating that, far from the 64 estimated deaths caused by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, the actual number of deaths was closer to 6,000. In that one week in May, cable news gave almost nine hours to Roseanne Barr and less than 10 minutes to victims in Puerto Rico.7 The temptation is to assume that the love of God won’t go as far or as long as we hope against hope it will. Or, we are afraid that the love of God will disrupt, dis­ locate, dis-comfort us in its long reach toward others. Well it does, it can, and it will. But we have gotten adept at choosing where and with whom love can go the distance, and where we stop it short. It’s not unusual for the walls of kindergarten classrooms to be plastered with color­ ful posters. But a poster in a Somerville, Massachusetts, school this spring didn’t have anything to do with ABCs or washing hands. Handwritten in multicolored markers are words to go with the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” as kindergarteners there were taught to sing:

    Lockdown, Lockdown, Lock the door Shut the lights off, Say no more

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    Go behind the desk and hide Wait until it’s safe inside Lockdown, Lockdown it’s all done Now it’s time to have some fun!8

    There is no length to which the love of God will not reach. Take all our arguments and policies and postures in the air around us today, and let’s go stand in that class­ room—post-Parkland, post-Sandy Hook, post-Columbine—and then let us discern together how we live this love today. God’s love needs to go a long, long way—a longer, longer way—in our world. There s the breadth.. .and the length.. .then there is the height of the poem by U .S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith:

    Is God being or pure force? The wind Or what commands it? When our lives slow And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing After all we’re certain to lose, so alive — Faces radiant with panic.9

    Ephesians tells us it’s not enough to understand the dimensions of the love of God: that understanding drives us to our knees in awe and wonder. It is the mystery by which we worship the God of creation. “Mystery” Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “is the great embarrassment to the modern mind.” But we cannot live—or love—without mystery. The mystery that in Christ Jesus is now peace between God and those previ­ ously estranged from God; and peace between those hostile to one another. Ephesians does not believe this mystery can be discovered. It can only be received from God as we experience the vastness of God’s love. Trusting this vastness, let alone acting on it, finds us wrestling between life as we know it.. .and hope. During the first full year of the Civil War, upon her brother being drafted, Emily Dickinson wrote:

    At least to pray is left, is left. O Jesus! in the air I know not which thy chamber is,— I’m knocking everywhere. Thou stirrest earthquake in the South, And maelstrom in the sea; Say, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Hast thou no arm for me?10

    And just like that, we’ve moved in mystery from the height of the love of God to the depths. As a Game Warden Chaplain in Maine, Kate Braestrup finds herself responding to all manner of “outdoor tragedies.” Usually she is there to attend to those who are lost in the woods or victims of snowmobiling accidents. Mostly she is dealing with

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    victims of frailty or foolishness, but not long ago, she was summoned to the scene of a crime of violent malice. A few days before her call to the scene, a man was talking to his friend and an­ nounced that he and his estranged wife and children would soon be reunited. The friend didn’t think much of this, other than they were going to give things another try, and he let it pass. A day or two later, the man brought a shotgun to his ex-wife’s house and shot her. And he shot his daughter. And he shot his son. And then he turned the weapon on himself. As the first urgent calls for help went out, game wardens were closest, so they arrived and secured the crime scene. Kate Braestrup, the chaplain on duty, was called. When she arrived, there was already yellow crime scene tape all around this little red house. Everybody had some bit of information, but all of it together didn’t help them understand things. The murdered woman was the kindergarten teacher at the local school. A son of one of the paramedics was in 7th grade with the murdered daughter. One of the deputies’ kids was in the woman’s kindergarten classroom. She was the one who taught her child to tie her shoes. “She was wicked nice,” the deputy said. Finally, a van from the funeral home arrived, and two guys in shiny black suits got out, and the medical examiner came out to meet them. Kate Braestrup intercepted him and asked, “Dr. David, would it be ok if I said a blessing for each of the bodies as you bring them out, before we load them for transport?” She was prepared to explain this. She was ready to say that she was there to provide support and comfort to the family, but there was no family. They were all gone. Or, she was there to help support all the officers who were standing around with their faces so carefully blank, forestalling their own rage and grief, that they might bring justice. But what justice were they going to bring to this? The murderer murdered himself too. “Dr. David, I want to retrieve this moment from evil. I want to redeem it. I want to grab hold of it and pull it back, for all of us.. .and for God.” As it turned out, she didn’t need to explain any of this. They had worked together before, and he was used to her asking this, so he just said, “Absolutely, absolutely.” So, the first body bag was brought out and put on the gurney. And Dr. David said, “Alright everybody. Kate’s going to pray.” And with that, the deputies and paramed­ ics and all assembled folded their bloody gloved hands and bowed their heads. And Kate stepped forward to the gurney, and she asked, “This is the head end, right?” She raised her hand, prepared to place it on the head end of the body bag, when Dr. David said calmly, “You know, that’s the shooter.” One of the deputies told her later that he saw her hand stop, in the air, frozen above the body bag. And he told her, “I wondered what you were going to pray, because all I could think of was, ‘Sorry, you bastard – you’re on your own.’” And she had to admit it took everything in her not to snatch her hand away. And then she added: “So, had we found it? Had we found the threshold at which love stops?” God’s love, translated as it must be through our hands and through our voices. If not at this, then at what moment can we honestly say that love no longer makes its absolute, implacable, and holy demand— ‘’love one another.”11 Those last few inches of a hand ready to pray into such horror, those last few inches between intention and blessing in such brokenness—that is always the space where you and I decide if the love of God is as broad and as long and as high and as deep as we hope against hope that it is.

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    Our inches of decision may never be that dramatic. But if we measure God’s love—all of it—and close the distance with our hands and voices, that is exactly when—and exactly where— we may come to understand the power of the One work­ ing within us, the One who is able to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ever ask or ever imagine.

    Notes

    1 Peter Marty, “Entry Points,” Christian Century, March 28,2018.

    2 https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/wp/2018/02/19/washington-post-executive-editor-martin-barondelivers -reuters-memorial-lecture-at-the-university-of-oxford/?utm_term=.59a0ca46caed.

    3 Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss (New York, New Your: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013).

    4 Ceylan Yeginsu, “Britain Tackles Loneliness,” The New York Times, January 17, 2018.

    5 Elif Batuman, “Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry,” The New Yorker, April 30,2018.

    6 http://www.businessinsider.com/cigna-loneliness-study-americans-millennials-lonely-2018-5.

    7 https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/05/30/study-finds-5000-people-may-have-died-hurricanemaria -puerto-rico-cable-news-focused-roseanne/220335, accessed June 27, 2018.

    8 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/06/08/lockdown-lockdown-is-a-kindergarten -nursery-rhyme-at-massachusetts-school/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7d2308cd2cb3&wpisr c=nl_mix&wpmm=l, accessed June 8, 2018. 9 “The Weather in Space,” excerpted from Tracy K Smith, Life on Mars (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Gray wolf Press, 2011).

    10 Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems, 1924.

    11 Kate Braestrup, as told on The Moth Podcast, April 14, 2018.

  • On Hope and Advent Preaching

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    On Hope and Advent Preaching

    Joshua J. Whitfield

    St. Rita Catholic Community, Dallas, Texas

    Unsurprising Hope “What surprises me, says God, is hope. And I can’t get over it.” From Charles Peguy’s poem “The Portal to the Mystery of Hope,” here is what I think of when I think about hope: this idea that God finds it surprising. Faith is obvi­ ous, Peguy wrote, charity too. “But hope,” says God in his poem, “is something that surprises me. Even me.” Hope is personified by a little girl in the poem. Faith is a “loyal Wife,” charity a “Mother.” Hope, though, is a small child, “a little girl, nothing at all.” And that’s because although “Faith sees only what is,” hope “sees what will be,” and while “Charity loves only what is,” hope “loves what will be.” Hope, always insignificant at its beginning, is fragile, faintly established, concerned with what is barely discernable . Hope is a young girl in Peguy’s poem because it’s a virtue which at hist seems small and sometimes even pointless, at play, but which grows, survives, and endures, finding its reward, nonetheless, against all odds. Which is why hope surprises God, because it is “by far the greatest marvel of our grace.”1 Hope is also a theme of Advent, theologically, naturally. It’s a season, to quote the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in which the “ancient expectancy of the Messiah” is presented afresh to the hearts of believers, and which renews, in turn, our desire for Christ’s coming again in glory.2 It is a time, liturgically spoken and spiritually imbibed, focused upon what is at hist small, only barely seen and felt: the faint quivering of conscience, the penitential beginning of salvation, flickering light in darkness, the birth of a child, quiet love within loud hate. It is a familiar theme, a virtue we know, a word often used. Thoroughly biblical, hope belongs to the inhection of Christian faith, its grammar and vocabulary. Yet, hope is a word we often use without care. Detached and painted in kitsch pop art, rhymed and awkwardly htted into hymns and songs of varying quality, hope is one of those words, as Newman said, which can be made to mean nothing.3 Utterly overfamiliar, we talk a lot about hope, but we don’t much feel it, the cultural-linguistic framework of hope (to use Lindbeck’s terminology) having broken down.4 Hence, today it’s a word often associated with the hollowness of Christianity, another meaningless word from an assumed meaningless religion. Unlike the God of Peguy’s poem, we’re no longer surprised by hope. We’ve gotten over it, this forgotten marvel of grace. Which is what’s so challenging for preachers today, that hope has become a byword, signifying anything and nothing. How, when we’re no longer surprised by hope, apathetic and often unresponsive to words of faith and the traditional idioms of Christianity, are preachers to speak of authentic hope which comes from the love poured into hearts by the gift the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5)? By our Advent preach­ ing, how can we make real the hope that is biblical and not merely trite, which is the gift of the word of God, living and life-changing? That is, how do we preach genuine hope?

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    Dangerous Biblical Hope But what is hope, biblically? For preachers, it’s the hist question. Paul said we are saved in hope (Romans 8:24). Born of character, of endurance and suffering, hope is that ancient habit born of the election of the Hebrews, God’s “treasured possession” (Romans 5:3-4; Deuteronomy 7:6). Born of the promise made to Abraham that his descendants would outnumber the stars, hope is holding on to belief in God’s plan to redeem his own, a plan Paul called “irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). It is redemption in which, in Christ, Gentiles are included. In Jesus, God’s chosen servant—Matthew argued from Isaiah—all “Gentiles will hope” (Isaiah 42:4 LXX; Matthew 12:21). Christians, by faith and the indwelling Spirit, share in Christ’s destiny, his resurrection from the dead now made ours (Romans 8:11). No longer subject to the futility of fallen creation, Christians struggle to live no longer “according to the flesh but according to the spirit” (Romans 8:4, 20). Our union and destiny in Christ is the theological beginning of hope. It is the motive of all our prayer and work, all our spiritual sighing and groaning for ourselves and for the whole of creation (Ro­ mans 8:22, 26). To say hope is theological is to claim that it is hist about what God accomplishes in us, in the Church, that it belongs to the story of redemption. Hope names the habit of remaining faithful to that story, loving as Jesus taught, as we see it mystically and providentially unfold. It’s why the writer to the Hebrews called hope the “anchor of the soul,” pulling believers toward Christ, toward our pioneer high priest, to where he has gone already behind the veil (Hebrews 6:18-20). To preach hope, therefore, is hist to preach the story of Israel, Jesus, and the Church. From the moment God asked the man and woman hidden in the garden “Where are you?” to the promise made to Abraham and the opening wide of the arms of Jesus on the cross and to what John heard from the throne—“Behold, I make all things new”—hope, before anything else, is the story of what God has done for us since the beginning, the story of his love and our redemption (Genesis 3:9; Genesis 12:2-3; John 12:32; Revelation 21:5). Only then is it the habit of living within this unique story of grace, feeling it to be true and living every day as if it’s so, holding on to the story, remembering it’s a story which tells us as much as we tell it. Preaching hope during Advent, then, it’s wise to make use of the lectionary, mindful of its place within liturgical time. That’s because the readings appointed for the Sundays of Advent lead us to Christ not only liturgically and memorially but also interiorly. Take, for example, readings from Matthew’s Gospel appointed for Year A. Respectively, the message is to “stay awake” (Matthew 24:42), to repent and prepare for the coming of the Lord (Matthew 3:2-3), to rejoice in the signs of the kingdom without taking offense (Matthew 11:4-6), and to hear finally that “God is with us” (Matthew 1:23). Experienced as lectio continua, these passages not only recall the history of Jesus’ s hist coming, they also locate believers within the expectation of Christ’s other advents in their hearts and at the end of time. If s to experience what St. Bernard of Clairvaux called in his Advent sermons Christ’s “threefold coming” and “threefold renewal.”5 But how do we preach this well? How do we make biblical hope relevant in the right way? It’s important to acknowledge the danger involved in preaching hope, remembering the many corruptions and abuses practiced and permitted in Christian history in the name of corrupted hope. Simply put, we must remember how dangerous

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    hope can be when it becomes utopian. That is, when hope turns into mere dreaming of the future, of time or space beyond difficulty, violence, and suffering, then hope becomes problematic. And that’s because when we dream of paradise, we sometimes begin to see those who are not of the elect—those outside our group, outside our nation, outside our denomination, or simply outside our sense of morality—as enemies. We begin to dream about “us” without “them.” And sometimes we even begin to prac­ tice violence, or at least accept it, in order to achieve our selective heaven, without “them.” Thinking we’re in control of history, we think it’s our task to push it along, sometimes violently, toward our imagined destiny. Both Daniel and John dreamed of the son of man, for instance, but they also both dreamed of fire and destruction, the praises of God mingled with the smoke of the damned (Daniel 7:13; Revelation 1:13; Revelation 19:3). Exegesis aside, hermeneutically and historically such imagery has lent itself to innumerable abuses and unquantihable nonsense. To note just one example, from Kathryn Gin Lum’s book Damned Nation, on the idea and use of the concept of hell in nineteenth century America: missionary societies and preachers often inspired and terrified their flocks and supporters with urgent pleas to do whatever possible to save “heathen” from eternal damnation. One missionary preacher, Ira Condit, for example, warned his listeners that they “should realize this unavoidable conclusion, that the heathen are sinking to eternal misery as fast as the scythe of death mows them down… vast hosts that crowd the caverns of hell.”6 Dividing eternally “us” from “them,” it became a way of looking at the world which included not only the inhabitants of foreign lands but also backsliders, the immoral, and anyone who didn’t fit within conventional Protestant or Catholic life. In America, aside from whatever was once properly evangelical about the Great Awakening, such preaching spawned a broad moral taxonomy, making more than evangelical distinctions between “heathen” and “Christian,” the “saved” and the “damned,” all of it religiously coded othering. Which brings into focus racism and classicism, ethnic prejudice, hatred, and other evils. Much of it well known, violent and horrible, these are the open wounds of our original sin, of what Dr. King called “man’s inhumanity to man.”7 But, of course, it’s not just our more visible, egregious history which is the fruit of ruined hope, those crimes so spectacular and distant they’re safe for us to confess and disown. Much more is it the pathetic pettiness, the ignorant everyday othering of ordinary sinners which we must examine, confess, and amend. Mrs. Turpin, from Flannery O’Connor’s story, “Revelation,” is a good example. In her dreams she ranked different “classes of people.” African Americans were at the bottom, then “white trash,” and then homeowners, landowners, and finally those just above her own station, the truly rich. “If it’s one thing I am, it’s grateful,” Mrs. Turpin said. “When I think who all I could have been besides myself… ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is! ”’8 Such is the banal result of warped religious imagination, the ruined hope of the pathetic, like Mrs. Turpin. She illustrates the more ordinary danger involved in preaching hope, showing how it can go wrong, twisted by individual and collective pride. Imagining ourselves the elect, dreaming of some promised end, we ruin hope. Our violent history aside, this is more often what we see: pews full of the pathetic and self-righteous and judgmental, hope reduced to identity and pride. It’s why preach­ ers ought to be careful preaching hope when inspiring listeners to dream of a better world, beyond or renewed. Because it can inspire hate, but more often just pettiness.

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    Which, as much as anything else, has made hope a byword for many and the world that much more deaf to the Gospel.

    Thinking Little So, again, how do we preach hope well? How do we avoid various millennialist hazards so dangerous and pathetic? It is, of course, impossible to erase election and eschatology from theology, to reduce tensions between the “already” and the “not yet. ” To do that, ultimately, would be to follow the counsel of atheism, that if we only rid ourselves of ideas of heaven and hell, all those primitive dreams of God’s promises, and maybe God too, then finally we would discover the true remit of hope, the here and now. But that would eliminate hope, not change it for the better. And that’s because, for Christians, hope necessarily is about things “not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Its object, Thomas Aquinas put succinctly, is “a future good.”9 It is out of the question, if it’s to remain Christian, that theology and preaching should let go of that which is beyond, dreams of heaven and the proper fear of judgement and hell. Hope must, if it’s to remain a Christian virtue, yearn for its object, its promised end. But how do we keep it from souring, from becoming hate? By learning to “think little,” to put it the way Wendell Berry did, advice more profound than it may at hist seem.10 To think big, we must think small. It belongs to the paradox of hope, no less the other virtues too, that heaven and earth is so of­ ten found in little space. C. S. Lewis wrote that the supernatural is “as intimate as breathing.”11 This is wisdom at once moral and theological but also plainly human, that the particular mediates the universal, that the transcendent is intimate, that God is close. The nuptial bliss which blesses spouses, for example, is born only in intimacy. One doesn’t fall in love with an abstract wife or husband or with the idea of marriage; one falls in love with a particular spouse by means of some strange, unique love story. That’s how one experiences the transcendent blessings of marriage, intimately. To share the genuine happiness of marriage, one must “think little,” living faithfully the small everyday joys and virtues of married life. The same is true of our experience of God. To see Jesus is to see the Father (John 14:9). He is the image of the invisible God (Colossian 1:15). In him the Word became flesh (John 1:14). John leaned his head upon God’s breast; Mary Magdalene heard him whisper her name (John 13:23; 20:16). By means of incarnation, sacrament, and prayer, we “think little,” yet by it we encounter the divine infinite, the universal in the particular. To think about this ethically is to understand, as Aristotle taught, that virtue is best cultivated within the polis, that things like friendship “involves community.”12 That is, only among people with a particular narrative, with their own unique goods and commitments, is virtue possible. It’s why Aristotle put such store by things like apprenticeship, because ex­ cellence can only be measured within a set of practices unique to a particular craft, in turn intelligible only within a particular community.13 Spiritually, morally, ethically, the point is the same: virtue’s context is always particular and intimate. It is never abstract, never without roots or narrative. The framework of virtue is always, in some sense, small, never beyond limited human measure. Like politics, hope is local. But if s about more than thinking little or about remembering the cultural-linguis­ tic frame. Here, within intimacy, within limited measured space, between faces in

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    relationship, genuine hope finally comes into view. Christian hope, which keeps hold of the eschaton, but unruined, is found in small spaces such as these: between people, in families, in the Church. Here is where authentic hope is practiced and discovered, where God acts within our acts and where we become pilgrims instead of planners, where hope remains a habit and not just another name for selfish desire. It is what Gabriel Marcel was getting at when he spoke of hope in terms of the “creative vow. ” Beginning his reflection intimately, that is, rooted in a phenomenol­ ogy of the subject, Marcel’s work gets to the very heart of hope. He begins with the simple claim that the human person is discoverable only in relation to other persons: “I establish myself as a person in so far as I really believe in the existence of others and allow this belief to influence my conduct.’14 Experienced hist in the womb and in a child’s experience of her own parents, in those intimate relations the self is hist discovered. And it is by continuing such relations responsibly, Marcel suggested, that we discover what hope really is. A child discovers herself in relation to her parents; her parents discover themselves, as parents, in relation to her. This, for Marcel, is the birth and growth of the ego, an experience replicated throughout a person’s life in various relations and which continuously sustains the self. Pure individualism, solipsism, Marcel believed, refused reality. And so, in healthy moral and psychologi­ cal life, each person owes to each what he called “availability” and “engagement,” that is, unmanipulated openness. This is the “creative vow,” to remain faithful and responsible to the relations, the people, in our lives that make us who we are. This, Marcel argued, is the act of hope itself: “the availability of the soul which has entered intimately enough into the experience of communion to accomplish in the teeth of will and knowledge the transcendent act—the act of establishing the vital regeneration of which this experience affords both the pledge and the hrst-fruits. ”1S Being faithful to the people in our lives, open to them but without manipulation, without coercion, is what hope is. And what makes it hope, and not just fidelity, is that it is a “transcendent act,” unforcefully open to a future only available as a gift, and not in isolation but in communion. This is why Marcel called hope creative and why Peguy lyricized hope as a small girl, because it is an act by which a person places oneself “at the disposal of something which, no doubt depends upon him for its existence, but which at the same time appears to him to be beyond what he is and what he judged himself capable of drawing directly and immediately from himself. ”16 Such is how to make one’s way to heaven, to anticipate the eschaton but without violence, by understanding that hope consists in “never hustling or being rough with another person, ” but in “placing our confidence in a certain process of growth and development. ”17 This is how one keeps election and eschatology within theology and preaching without ruining it, by remembering the peacefulness of hope. By under­ standing, as Marcel did, that hope is essentially fidelity in an unbroken relationship across time and space, the act of trusting others while at the same time trusting the narrative, remaining in communion and in faith no matter the changes and chances of this fleeting world.

    Preaching Intimate Hope So what does this mean for preachers at Advent? What does it mean for how we speak the Gospel’s message of hope? To return to the poet Charles Peguy: “What matters is to go simply in the simple procession of ordinary days.”18 That is, preach­

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    ing hope in Advent, as any time, isn’t so much about plying the faithful with dreams and visions but about helping them rediscover hope as faithfulness to others and to community, helping them to see that’s how God works. That is, we should preach intimate hope, remembering the primeval wisdom of it. From God whispering in Elijah’s ear to the intimacy of table fellowship between Jesus and his disciples (1 Kings 19:12; John 14:9); from Abba Moses’s saying that “your cell will teaching you everything” to Saint Benedict’s instinct that holiness is best worked out in the “enclosure of the monastery and stability in community,”19 real hope has always been a virtue lived within the limited confines of human relationships and community. And it’s from there we should preach, within these smaller, nearer places. Our task is to help listeners discover what Kathleen Norris called the “quotidian mysteries,” seeing that our “greatest spiritual blessings are likely to reveal themselves not in exotic settings but in everyday tasks and trials.”20 For Norris, this meant find­ ing strength and grace in the rhythms and repetition of prayer and in caring for her dying husband. Anne Lamott is another writer who describes beautifully the sort of hope worth preaching, exemplifying what Marcel meant by creative fidelity. Her faith journey, she writes at the start of her memoir Travel Mercies, was like stagger­ ing “from what seemed like one safe place to another,” like jumping from one lily pad to the next. Following less any sort of clear vision, Lamott’s journey is winding, unorthodox but beautiful. Faithful to friends, faithful to her son, open to strangers, her story shows what finding God in faithfulness to others, what thinking little, looks like. Her story shows how “when you need to feel the all-embracing nature of God, paradoxically you need to hang out in ordinariness, in daily ritual and comfort.”21 These are the sorts of stories and experiences preachers should discover and share. From the storehouses of our experiences, from our communities, we should mine for the hope that is close and real. Because it’s the hope which is genuine and tangible and which our listeners already know, but which we preachers are privileged to name. And because it’s the sort of preaching which prepares us to see, in a mystical way, our small infant God. It helps us to understand what Augustine meant, preach­ ing once at Christmas: “Here we have the infant Christ—let us grow with Him.”22 That is, preaching genuine hope helps us become people of hope, people loving and humble enough to see how God is at work today in our lives, in both light and shadow. It helps us become people able to see now, and not only in the fullness of time, “the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). Which is the preacher’s task.

    Notes 1 Charles Peguy, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 6-7. 2 Catechism of the Catholic Church (Washington DC: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2007), 524. 3 John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 28. 4 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1984), 33. 5 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons for Advent and the Christmas Season (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 2007), 33. See particularly Sermons 4-6. 6 Kathryn Gin Lum, Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 68. 7 Martin Luther King, Jr., A Knock at Midnight (New York: Warner Books), 167.

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    8 Flannery O’Connor, “Revelation,” The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 491. 9 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II 17.1. 10 The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2017), 48-58. 11 C. S. Lewis, Miracles (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001), 65. 12 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), 1159b. 13 Ibid., 1103a-1103b. 14 Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 22. 15 Ibid., 67. 16 Ibid., 25. 17 Ibid., 39-40. 18 The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, 117. 19 John Wortley, Give Me a Word: The Alphabetical Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2014), 195. The Rule of Benedict (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2016), 86. 20 Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life (London: Penguin, 2008), 190. 21 Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), 3, 167. 22 Augustine, Sermons for Christmas and Epiphany (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1952), Ser­ mon 14.2, 133.

  • An Impossible Impossibility

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    An Impossible Impossibility

    Joseph S. Harvard III

    Durham, North Carolina

    Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all of those who are speak­ ing Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language…?” Acts 2:7-8

    So hope for a great sea-change On the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore Is reachable from here. Believe in miracles And cures and healing wells. The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney

    Tom Long tells the story of a young girl about five years old who came to church on Pentecost with her parents. She was all dressed up for the occasion. When she came forward for “The Time with Children,” her parents were sitting on the second row. The pastor told the story of Pentecost with the fire, the speaking in tongues, the earthquake—it was dramatic. As the pastor was in the middle of this dramatic story, the young girl stood up, looking towards her parents, put her hands on her hips, and in a loud whisper said, “I don’t believe a word of it!” As Pentecost comes around again, are we like that young girl? Or maybe you have heard the story so often that it does not set off alarms. Since we have heard this old story so many times, it may be that “familiarity breeds contempt.” For those of us in mainline congregations, it seems like an unwelcome relative who comes around every year making too much noise and interrupting our orderly gathering, giving us the impression that he has been drinking before noon. The part of the story that is hardest for me is not the “fireworks”: the tongues, wind, and fire! The story of Pentecost tells us that these people from diverse cultures and speaking different languages understood each other! “And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?” (Acts 2:8). Indeed, how can this be possible? They had so many differences. It seems so foreign to us who have trouble understanding even our relatives or our neighbors, the people who are in the same pew in worship with us. We are waging war with words, and that has become the new norm. This “understanding each other” all sounds good, but it appears to be unrealistic and way beyond our reach. It is very difficult to believe this is possible, living as we do in a time when our differences are tearing us apart not only in our culture but also in our churches. The message being preached from the bully pulpit at high levels of power with a harsh and strident tone is driving a wedge between us. Is preaching from our pulpits a Pentecost message about a gift of understanding that builds community instead of walls absurd at such a time as this? Reinhold Niebuhr was a pastor, a teacher, and one of the most significant voices

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    in the last century to articulate the Christian faith. Niebuhr described the challenge of following Jesus who calls us to practice radical love with others as “the impossible possibility.” From a human point of view, it seems impossible to understand those who seem so different from us. But, thank God, we are not left to our own resources. Theologian Jurgen Moltmann, in his book The Spirit of Life, says that “the capacity to communicate, to be in communion with others is always a gift of God” (p. 219). Peter Gomes makes the same point this way: “Pentecost reminds us that the gift of understanding, that gift that transcends logic and diversity, is the gift of the spirit of unity: union with God …, with our sisters and brothers everywhere.” Gomes goes on to suggest that this “understanding of the other” does not take away our identity, our particularity, but rather, in our diversity we become more that we have been because as we understand each other, we grow into a larger community which expands us and our world. The crucial need for this gift of understanding that builds community was illus­ trated for me in an editorial by Thomas Friedman, the noted author and columnist in the New York Times. Friedman taught me a new word that I think is a helpful way to think about Pentecost and the Holy Spirit. The word is hyperconnectivity. “Sometime around the year 2000,” Friedman writes, “the world achieved a very high level of connectivity, virtually flattening the global economic playing field. This web of connectivity was built on the diffusion of personal computers, fiber-optic cable, the Internet and web servers. What this platform did was to make Boston and Beijing or Detroit and Damascus next-door neighbors. It brought some two billion people into a global conversation.” Friedman continues, “We went from a connected world to a ‘hyperconnected world.’ This deeper penetration of connectivity is built on smarter cellphones, wireless bandwidth, and social networks. This new platform for connectivity, being so cheap and mobile, is bringing another two billion people into the conversation from more and more remote areas.” Friedman observes, “There is no such thing as ‘local’ anymore.” There are enor­ mous social and political implications. Dictators can no longer isolate their regimes from the rest of the world and hide what they are doing to their own people by shut­ ting down the newspapers, expelling networks such as CNN and BBC, so long as people have smartphones. However, there is a major disconnect experience living in a world of hyperconnectivity. In a cover story of an issue of The Atlantic, the question is asked: “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” The author tells the story of a woman who was well-connected in social media. She was “friended” by a number of people. It seemed she had a lot of connections. But she died alone in her apartment, and her body was not found for some time. The author of the article goes on to say that the irony here is that “within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradic­ tion: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.”1 Back to Pentecost. The gift of Pentecost through the power of God’s Spirit was people speaking, listening, and hearing. The miracle of Pentecost was communication.

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    The art of listening is not easy but essential to receive the gift of understanding. How often have you really listened to someone? It takes time and intentionality. Practicing the art of listening is an act of the will. Hugh T. Kerr, former editor of Theology Today, wrote an editorial a few years ago on communication. “Our failure to communicate,” Kerr wrote, “is not a failure of technique but of will. We don’t want to communicate. We’d rather shout one another down.” Think of the conflicts and arguments that we’ve been a part of over the years and how little communicating—speaking and hearing—was part of it. So here is the question: are we content with the status quo, to live with deep sus­ picion and animosity towards those who differ from us in the church and the world? Or are we open to believe that the gift of understanding is possible and let it shape our relationships? Can you believe that there is a reality in the world that counters the forces at work to exploit our differences and drive us further apart? Can we believe a force is at work to bring us together and to build the Beloved Community among us? This is what makes the impossible possible: in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God let that force loose in the world. That force is still at work, mak­ ing the miracle of understanding happen. It is the power of God’s love made known to us in Jesus Christ. Scripture tells us over and over that what seems impossible to us humans, God makes possible. God’s love works in our lives, enabling us to live together despite our differences. Accepting the gift of understanding starts with the radical belief that we are all created in God’s image. It is the belief that we are created not to live as isolated individuals. The Psalmist affirms this belief: “How good and pleasant it is when we live together in unity!” (Psalm 133:1). The beginning of understanding is to believe in the dignity and worth of “the other” as a child of God. Such an affirmation leads us to listen to others as children of God. Listening to another affirms the dignity of the other and shows that you respect that person. All of this sounds good in theory, but isn’t the realization of the gift of under­ standing an impossibility in our fractured world? In Durham, North Carolina, where I have lived for 40 years, I can bear witness to having seen understanding practiced in a radical fashion. I got to know two people who could not have been more differ­ ent. C.P. Ellis grew up in a poor white section of town and was a proud member of the KKK. Ann Atwater, a single mother from the poor black section of town, became active in the struggle for civil rights. Ellis and Atwater met on opposite sides of the public school integration issue. Their first encounters were charged with hatred and suspicion. As they began to listen to each other and hear about their separate struggles, they forged a friendship that remains a source of inspiration and hope. Ellis made it clear to his family that he wanted Ann Atwater to deliver his eulogy, which she did. Fortunately, their story is recorded in an excellent book, The Best of Enemies: Race and Redemption in the New South, which was made into a movie that was recently released. Let me share with you a personal experience. Several years ago, my presbytery was working on “peace and unity,” and we were asked us to sit down and talk with someone in our presbytery with whom we did not agree on some important issues. To be very honest with you, I was not looking forward to that experience, but with some fear and trepidation, I made an appointment with someone for whom I had re­

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    spect but I knew was on a different wavelength than I was on some important issues. We sat down to talk. We were honest with each other, honest about our differences, honest about our hopes for the church. We tried to listen to each other. I want to tell you something amazing happened. My point of view wasn’t changed. I don’t think his was, either. But we came to understand and appreciate each other so that by the end of the conversation, we were able to say to each other, “Surely, the Lord was in this place, and we didn’t know it.” Occasionally, you encounter someone who has the will to communicate in order to achieve understanding and build community. Joe Martin was a friend of mine from high school. He had an outstanding career, was very active in his church, and was a civic leader in Charlotte who helped to revitalize downtown and helped to make it a more tolerant and inclusive city. After he was diagnosed with ALS, he was honored for all he had contributed to the city. At a huge gathering to express the community’s appreciation, he suggested the best honor they could give him was for each one to make a commitment to have lunch regularly with someone who was different. This may sound like a small gesture, but I am told that a host of folks signed on and that it made a big difference in human relations in the city. I know a white congregation and black congregation that committed to spend time getting to know each other. Over twenty years, they shared in worship, study, and service. They worked together to build several homes with Habitat for Humanity. It was not an easy journey as they had to face some hard truths and develop trust. It enriched the lives of both congregations as they came to see their ability to understand each other as a gift from God. Walter Brueggemann, a noted scholar of Hebrew Scripture, says it is important for the church to note that Pentecost is not just a remembered event but an ongoing process by which the Spirit of God regularly rattles, bewilders, and turns the world upside down (Journal for Preachers, Pentecost 2010). And, I would add, it is the promise that God never abandons this world, never abandons the church, or you or me, for that matter; the promise that the Spirit of God will continue to stir, to energize, to comfort, to challenge our imaginations, our faith, our hope: that is the promise of Pentecost. I invite you to take it seriously as together, as a church, as individuals, we face the future. We do not know what is coming tomorrow, but we do know that God’s Spirit is with us to challenge us, to guide us, to give us hope. Pentecost is an affirmation that we worship and serve a God who is working to bring people together, a God who mends brokenness, who remakes and transforms separateness into one­ ness and wholeness. That is the promise of Pentecost, the promise of this miracle that people from different places will listen to each other and understand. Sure, it’s easier to shout and to talk about the stupidity of people who are different from us. But that is not what begins to build up a Beloved Community, a community that reflects God’s good future. During this Pentecost season, let us recommit ourselves to let the miracle of Pen­ tecost happen among us. It may be something as simple as beginning a conversation with someone with whom you have differences, maybe about things that matter to you in the church or in the world, in the political realm or in the theological realm. I know this is difficult. It may be something as simple as forming a group of people who differ and agree to listen to each other and to read Scripture together, to seek the mind of Christ. It may be inviting a mixed group of people to see the movie “The

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    Best of Enemies” and discussing it together. If you do it, you’ll be in the company of the Spirit of the Risen Lord who took the time to listen to a Samaritan woman whom others wanted to stone, who ate with the tax collector whom everyone else hated, who went to a whole assortment of human beings and touched them and ate with them and talked with them, a group of assorted human beings like you and me for whom he was willing to die. What the church and the world so desperately need now is for us to reclaim our birthright, the gift of understanding. It was given to us at Pentecost to bring us together as a community. Let us recommit to strive to understand each other, to let this seem­ ing impossibility of understanding each other in our diversity become a possibility through us. This can be a sign to the church and the world that there is hope for us to live together as children of God.

    Note 1. Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” The Atlantic, 309, no. 4 (May 2012): 60.

  • ‘Across a Crowded Room’

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    “Across a Crowded Room”

    1 Samuel 23:1-7, John 18:33-39

    Samantha Gonzalez-Block Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, North Carolina

    “Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger, You may see a stranger across a crowded room.”1

    I have always loved the musical South Pacific. How about you? Set in the Sec­ ond World War, it is the story of a group of naval officers and nurses stationed on an island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. There, romantic love and friendship blos­ som-transcending racial lines; but eventually relationships are challenged, even torn apart when racism rears its ugly head. South Pacific is a sermon in itself. Rogers and Hammerstein were putting this story to music back in the 1940s, amidst a deeply segregated America. This was a time when marriage across racial lines was still illegal in most states, Japanese Americans were being forced into internment camps, black and white folks drank from separate fountains, and “No Dogs or Jews allowed” were still signs you could see hanging outside local country clubs. Rogers and Hammerstein’s melodies served as mirrors, reflecting back the truth about who we are and the scars we bear from being entrenched in American systems of oppression. As you can imagine, when the show premiered in 1949, it received a wide range of reviews, everything from “this is the work of genius” to “this is the work of communism.” But no song in the show was more controversial than the tune “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” It is sung in the Second Act, just after an American named Nel­ lie is unable to accept as her own her fiance’s Polynesian children from a previous marriage. When confronted about her racism, she defends herself by saying, “I can’t help it. It’s born in me.” Her friend responds, “I do not believe these things are born in you. It happens after you’re born.”2 And then he sings: “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” This provocative song made theater-goers and even legislators so uncomfortable that there were campaigns to have the tune removed from the show entirely. Hammerstein re­ sponded to his critics by saying something akin to “We can’t remove the song from the show—it is the show.”3 What I love about the Bible is that it is like a musical we know by heart. Psalms and stories have been passed down through the generations, shared across tables, taught in classrooms, preached from pulpits—stories of freedom and struggle, and of a God whose love for us is boundless and unending. There are those passages that we know we can rely upon: the ones that offer us miraculous answers, direction, hope, the ones that teach of Christ’s sacrificial com­ passion and majesty, that bring us healing when we are most vulnerable, that offer strength when we think we can go no further. But every once in a while, we encounter passages that fill our bellies with discom­ fort, or cause our hearts to ache, or leave us wide-eyed with more questions than ever

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    before. What do we do with difficult passages, passages that make us uncomfortable, passages that have been used to denigrate, even harm? Sometimes it feels easier to read through such texts as quickly as possible, or to skip over them entirely, or when no one is looking, cough loudly and rip the pages out. For how can hurtful texts ever be reflections of God’s good news? This morning’s passage is one that I did not want to face. I confess I looked at all of the other “Christ the King” lectionary options, longing to preach on anything but this. This is a text that makes me feel uncomfortable, one that hurts, one I wish could be taken out. Pilate is eager to wash his hands clean of Jesus’s charge and guilty verdict, and so throughout the trial he again and again places blame on “the Jews. ” The Jews. Today, as a synagogue in Pennsylvania still feels the absence of murdered loved ones, and a sprayed swastika is being scrubbed off a public sign in Black Mountain, it is hard to face a text like this. But maybe that is why the Spirit is calling us to do so. Perhaps on this Christ the King Sunday, this text is meant to serve as our mirror, reflecting back an imperfect image of ourselves, but one hungry for Christ’s glorious truth and world-shaping direction. Are you king of “the Jews”? When Jesus stands trial before Pilate, Pilate’s hist question out the gate is about Jesus’ lordship: his lordship over a community that Pilate has been taught to believe is inferior, and one the Roman Empire wants to maintain its power over—no matter what. When John writes the words “the Jews,” it feels like he is describing a faceless angry crowd—a group of bullies out for blood, who bear no resemblance to Jesus or his disciples. But we know that Jesus and his friends lived and died as Jews, and the Gospel writers were Jews writing for a predominantly Jewish audience. So, what’s going on here? Let’s not forget that the Gospel of John wasn’t written down until nearly sixty years after Jesus’ death. At the time, the world was shifting. Tensions were brewing within the Jewish community. A number of Jews were Jesus followers, while others were still awaiting the Messiah. Now, we know all too well that families are complicated. And the Jewish fam­ ily of faith was no different. They were struggling to live and worship in harmony, moving further and further apart because of their differences. It was an agonizing divide, brother pitted against brother, sister against sister. The Gospel of John was not written with an anti-Semitic heart, but rather from a place of grief. Jesus followers felt no longer welcome in their community of faith. And so, in an attempt to speak into their pain, John makes a distinction between those who follow Jesus and those who do not. ‘The Jews” became synonymous with “the other,” and in today’s passage, all are lumped together as Christ’s adversaries and accusers. “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. ” In Pilate’s second statement he seems eager to wash his hands free from guilt. He blames not only the chief priests, but the entire Jewish nation: “The Jews” are the ones who have brought you to trial, “the Jews” are the ones who will demand crucifixion.

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    Again, this passage calls for our community to read these words with a critical eye. The Jewish people as a whole were living as second-class citizens under the Ro­ man Empire. They had virtually no power to demand anything, to condemn anyone. Theologian Mary Boys writes that even if a crowd of Jewish locals were present the day Jesus was sentenced to the cross, they never would have had the authority to demand his crucifixion (or anyone else’s for that matter).4 The Gospel writer knew this truth and yet wrote the words down anyway. But surely John never could have imagined the dangerous impact this would have on history. By seemingly blaming the Jewish nation for Jesus’ s death, countless genera­ tions of Christians would be carefully taught to believe that the Jewish people are un-trustworthy, crooked, dangerous, “Christ killers.” All of this, spurring centuries of racism, segregation, violence and genocide. So, why do texts like this one remain a part of our Bible? If they’ve caused so much hurt and pain, why not cut these pas­ sages out? The truth is, we cannot afford to ignore what is most troubling. Theologian Amy Jill Levine writes that to do so “erases the memories of both the victims of those texts and those who have struggled against them.”5 When our instinct is to distance ourselves, or to turn a blind eye, facing this passage serves as a reminder that Christ calls us to engage more fully with urgency and boldness. We must face what is challenging, ask the hard questions, wrestle with discomfort—even in ourselves—in order to make way for God’s truth to be carefully taught and embraced. Please close your eyes. Imagine the curtain goes up and we find ourselves in today’s scene: Jesus is stand­ ing before Pilot in a hot, stuffy room. Pilot is asking question after question. Jesus is responding with calm and care. Just outside the window a crowd is gathered. There is shouting and crying and lots of conversation. Confusion and tension and worry fill the air. Where are you in this scene? What role do you choose to play? Are you one of the crowd, seeking answers down below? Are you Jesus, offering compassion in the face of terrible judgement? Or are you willing to step into Pilot’s shoes, standing face to face with Jesus? The truth is, as much as we do not want to see it, there are times when we take on this unsettling role. Who do we find ourselves quick to judge these days? Who do we treat as “the other”? Who are the ones we call “the Jews”? Please open your eyes. Pilate’s final question to Jesus is: What is truth? It is the most critical question of all, and yet Pilate never waits for a reply. Pilate cannot even see the answer standing right before him. For too long, his vision has been crowded by all that he has been taught to believe and hate and control. He is not willing to look closely at holy truth standing before him and open himself up to the possibility of transformation. This makes me think back to South Pacific, to the song many people so badly wanted to see eliminated from the show. What truths about themselves were they too afraid to face? And what could a song like this teach us about our need for Christ, for this unlikely King?

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    “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear, You’ve got to be taught from year to year, It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear You’ve got to be carefully taught. You’ve got to be taught to be afraid Of people whose eyes are oddly made, And people whose skin is a different shade, You’ve got to be carefully taught. You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late, Before you are six or seven or eight, To hate all the people your relatives hate, You’ve got to be carefully taught!6

    In a world where we are taught to hate, Christ comes teaching a new lesson about inhnite love and grace. Christ comes as a different kind of King who does not sit high on a throne, but accompanies the vulnerable. Christ comes as the embodiment of holy truth— truth as revelation, as a stimulant for justice, truth that demands equity and dismantles systems of oppression, truth that celebrates difference and offers radical compassion for all. Our passage today calls for us to look in the mirror and question the ways we are limited by our contexts, by what we have been carefii l ly taught through the years .When we recognize what crowds our vision, we are able to see Christ standing before us, and open ourselves up to living anew. May we have the courage to be this vulnerable with our God, and with one another; and may we have the faith to embrace Christ’s wondrous, world-changing truth.

    Notes 1. Oscar Hammerstein & Richard Rogers, “Some Enchanted Evening,” South Pacific. Columbia Masterworks , 1949. 2. Oscar Hammerstein & Joshua Logan, South Pacific, Williamson Music Inc., 1949. 3 James A. Michener, The World Is My Home: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1992), 294295 . 4. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, “The Thing I Never Want to Hear Again on Good Friday,” The Huffineton Post, April 17, 2014. 5. Amy Jill Levine, “Holy Week and The Hatred of the Jews: Avoiding Anti-Judaism at Easter,” ABC Religion and Ethic, April 2, 2015.

  • Suffered under Stormy Daniels: Purity of Heart in the Age of Donald Trump

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    Suffered under Stormy Daniels:

    Purity of Heart in the Age of Donald Trump

    Thomas G. Long

    Cambridge, Maryland

    It seems almost quaint now, in this blustery season of Stormy Daniels disclosures, Access Hollywood tapes, and Michael Cohen revelations, to recall Jimmy Carter’s 1976 confession to an interviewer from Playboy magazine, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust,” Carter said. “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” Time magazine later quipped, with wry sarcasm, that this interview “was pos­ sibly not the best call of President Carter’s tenure.”1 The interview appeared only days before voters went to the polls that fall, in what was shaping up to be a tight race between Carter and then-President Gerald Ford. Many of the voters, biblically oblivious, were unaware that “adultery in my heart” is Bible-speak, not domestic policy, and therefore they simply blanked out the “in my heart” part. What they heard was the Democratic candidate for president of the LInited States, on the eve of the election, inexplicably committing political suicide by confessing that he was a serial adulterer. Carter’s campaign went into freefall. He promptly dropped fifteen points in the polls before frantic aides could get out the counter-message that Carter was speaking only metaphorically, folks, only metaphorically. But what Carter was really doing, of course, was rifhng on the words of Jesus in Matthew, “You have heard that it was said, ‘ You shall not commit adultery. ’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:27-28). Probably nearly every Baptist in Plains, Georgia, knew exactly what their neighbor, Jimmy Carter, meant by “adultery in his heart,” even if his words left many others across the nation baffled and alarmed. He was merely articulating standard Christian anthropology, namely, “There is no one who is righteous, not one” (Rom. 3:10), and even when we human beings presume that we are being righteous, “all our so-called righteous deeds are, as Isaiah put it, “filthy rags” (Is. 64:6, KJV). Even a ninety-year-old Sunday School teacher, who hasn’t come within a hundred miles of making an idol, bearing false witness, murdering a neighbor, or coveting her neighbor’s house or donkey, and who has never stolen a thing, not even a postage stamp or a paper clip, is still a sinner and, therefore, has broken all of the ten commandments in her heart. The idea that otherwise quite respectable people are ready to admit in all honesty that, when it comes around to the heart, the beast still rages and creates a problem when it comes to the sixth commandment. We are thrown up hard against the words of Jesus: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Matt. 5:8). And who is pure in heart? Well, evidently no one, not even one. Jimmy Carter was not only making a personal confession, but he was also making a universal declaration: we are all transgressors in our hearts. So how are we to understand this difficult beatitude, especially now that the lusts Jimmy Carter kept on a leash in his heart are no longer confined to the inner chambers of the heart but are running free in the highest levels of leadership in our land? A good place to begin is with Matthew’s own understanding of the human heart.

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    Heart (kardia) is a crucial term for Matthew, one he uses fifteen times in his Gospel. Jesus is “humble in heart” (11:29), and the preaching of the kingdom is sowing the Word “in the heart (13:19). The greatest commandment is “to love the Lord your God with all your heart… ” (22:37). But people can lose their heartfelt love of God; thus, Jesus attacks the hypocrisy of his religious opponents by quoting Isaiah, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (15:8). Jesus tells the disciples that the reason he speaks in parables is because “this people’s heart has grown dull” and they no longer “understand with their heart” (13:15), again alluding to Isaiah. If love for God springs from the heart, so too does evil. If a person speaks vilely or performs wicked deeds, these words and deeds spring “out of the heart” (15:18-19). Mark Allan Powell is helpful when he flies over Matthew at 35,000 feet and summarizes how he understands Matthew to be using the word heart. “Here, and elsewhere in the Bible,” Powell says, “kardia seems simply to represent ‘the true self,’ what one really is, apart from pretense. Thus, to ‘understand with the heart’ (13:15) means to understand truly, to ‘forgive from the heart’ (18:35) means to forgive truly, and so on.”2 So far, so good, but if we leave the matter here, namely that “heart” in Matthew is roughly equivalent to what we mean today when we speak of “our true selves,” we are still in a quandary when we hear that sixth beatitude. “Blessed are those who are pure in their true selves, pure in who they truly are apart from pretense” is no less challenging than the original “blessed are the pure in heart,” because whether we are Baptists in Plains or existentialists in Paris or Copenhagen, we are all pain­ fully aware that our “true selves” are sharply conflicted. The most saintly people we know may well have noble ideals, lofty goals, sterling character traits, admirable achievements, and merciful deeds emanating from their “true selves,” but also lurk­ ing in the dark recesses of those “true selves” are the little liars, thieves, idolaters, blasphemers, adulterers, and murderers, ready to spring at a moment’s notice to trash the commandments, if not in concrete action at least in secret desires. That is why Jimmy Carter’s truth-telling about the desires of his heart, to those who understood the religious framework out of which he spoke, came across not as a scandal but as candid and honest speech. This is why Paul’s words strike us all with the ring of truth: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do…. I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand” (Rom. 8:19, 21). So, if “purity of heart” means being unblemished in our “true selves,” then it is, frankly, an impossibility. But in the age of Trump, we want people who are pure in heart so dearly we cannot quite bring ourselves to let it go. We desperately cling to the notion that striving for “purity of heart,” that coming close to “purity of the true self,” is something politicians and others should desire and try to attain, and we do so as a defense against the impurity that assaults our sensibilities every day. Even when we admit that “purity of heart” is theoretically impossible for humans to reach, we still want it to rest in our imaginations as an encouraging and uplifting ideal. In our cultural moment, when the President is inflicting wounds on our social body that seem impossible to heal, when the political process vomits up a scandal a week, when priests by the hundreds, maybe the thousands, have made victims of innocent children, and when vicious tweets, bald-faced lies issued by the thousands, unbridled greed, moral corruption, cynical and narcissistic power ploys, and other

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    forms of raw sewage spew from the White House, the Supreme Court, the Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency, the church, and scores of sycophantic talk radio hosts, it is appealing to imagine that somewhere “over the rainbow bluebirds fly” and that there is a place we could go, a place where “purity of heart” is still honored, still preserved in amber as a possibility, a kind of spiritual Canada to which we can flee as refugees, if only in our dreams. But Luther, who was obviously no stranger to cultural corruption, throws up a stop sign to any attempts to find “purity of heart” in flight from the moral decay all around us. He thought that any notion that we need to retreat from even the worst of societal breakdown, from the horrific moral wreckage that is our sad inheritance today, to escape to a cleaner place, a less messy world, a brighter plateau to find “purity of heart” was a mistake made by sophists and misguided monks. Such people, said Luther, “have no experience” and “have imagined that having a pure heart means for a [person] to run away from human society into a corner, a monastery, or a desert, neither thinking about the world nor concerning [themselves] with worldly affairs and business, but amusing [themselves] only with heavenly thoughts. ’3 If “purity of heart” is not to be found somewhere over the rainbow, then where is it? “Then what is a pure heart? In what does it consist?” Luther went on to ask. Well, it’s not what we think it is. In fact, trying to contemplate purity on our own steam, ponder “purity of heart” out of the repertoire of our own spiritual instincts, is to look, argued Luther, in precisely the wrong direction. He imagines a monk in the monastery sitting in deep contemplation, and trying to purify himself, pushing away all concerns of the world, allowing only ideas he has about the nature of God to fill his mind. That monk, said Luther, with his customary scatological wit, “is actually sitting—if you will pardon the expression—in the dung, not up to his knees but up to his ears.” Why? Because this monk “is proceeding on his own ideas without the Word of God, and that is sheer deception and delusion, as scripture testifies every­ where. ”4 Lest that sound merely pious, we should quickly point out that Luther is making a quite sophisticated counter argument to conventional ideas about “purity of heart. ” Luther is arguing that to be “pure in heart” is not to possess some static virtue; it is instead a process of constantly contemplating that which we do not possess, but can desire, namely the Word of God. “What is meant,” said Luther, “by a ‘pure heart’ is this: one that is watching and pondering what God says and replacing its own ideas with the word of God. That alone is pure before God, yes purity itself, which purifies everything that it includes and touches.”5 So, to be “pure in heart” is not a moral achievement, but a direction toward which we are traveling, toward which we guide our “true selves.” To be “pure in heart” is not what we are; it is what is happening to us when we give ourselves to the Spirit of God who seeks to claim and reshape us. It is not sanctity, but sanctification. God is the only true purity, and it is not in our power to acquire purity, but only to receive it as a divine gift. That is why “Blessed are the pure in heart” cannot stand alone but must be linked to “for they will see God. ” “For they will see God” is set in the future, not the calendar future but the eschatological future. As New Testament scholar John Meier said,

    Clearly, the beatitudes of Jesus are eschatological to the core. Human

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    happiness is no longer defined by a wisdom limited to a human future. The mourners, the meek, the merciful are declared happy non’…because they are certain that they will find consolation, inheritance, and mercy on the last day, when God sets things right. The future triumph of God, not the present misery of humanity, determines what true happiness is, however covert its operation in this present age.6

    It is in the ultimate consummation of all things that the pure in heart will see God. Seeing God is not so much a reward, as if Jesus were saying, “If you are pure in heart, then God will allow you to see God’s face.” Seeing God, rather, is the goal, the omega point, of a good and true life, a life that can be described as “pure in heart.” Imagine a man in his late twenties who has been raised by adoptive parents. He was loved and well-cared for by his adoptive family, but he also knows that his biological mother surrendered him for adoption not because she did not love him but because she was young, alone, impoverished, and desperate. She knew she could not care for him adequately in her circumstances, so she allowed him to be adopted by others in a heartbreaking act of sacrifice. His adoption, therefore, was an act of love in two ways. His new parents embraced him in their family as an act of love, and his biological mother, believing that he would be better off in a family of stability and means, also loved him by letting him go. But now, as a young adult he desires to find his biological mother, to see her, to know who she is, to express his love for her even though he has been distant from her all these years, to let her know that in a deep way he belongs to her, and to wrap his arms around her in gratitude. So, he goes on a quest to locate her. Every hour of his day is occupied with thoughts of her, every ounce of energy spent in seeking her out, every moment he has in his mind the image of how he imagines her to be. He goes about his everyday life, going to work, attending to the tasks at hand, but his whole life leans forward toward that day when he will see his mother. His focus on trying to be in the presence of his biological mother is an analogy to what Jesus means in the sixth beatitude. When everything about our true selves leans forward toward finding God, toward being in the presence and embrace of God, that is what is meant by purity of heart. It is not a location; it is a direction. It is not a place of moral achievement; it is desire toward which all that we are is focused. In his Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, Spren Kierkegaard sees purity of heart in a woman making an altar cloth:

    When a woman makes an altar cloth, so far as she is able, she makes every flower as lovely as the graceful flowers of the held, as far as she is able, every star as sparkling as the glistening stars of the night. She with­ holds nothing, but uses the most precious things she possesses. She sells off every other claim upon her life that she may purchase the most uninter­ rupted and favorable time of the day and night for her one and only, for her beloved work.7

    When the altar cloth is finished and put to sacred use, says Kierkegaard, the woman would be distressed if someone looked at it and said, “What a wonderful and talented artist made this cloth.” The purpose of the altar cloth was not to draw atten­

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    tion to her or her skill, but to the God for whom it was crafted. Her work on the cloth “was the highest happiness of all for the needlewoman to do everything in order to accomplish what was hers to do.”8 She was not desiring praise for her talents as an artist; she was desiring to use her life to fashion something that would be acceptable in the eyes of God. This is what it means to have “purity of heart.” Back to Jimmy Carter’s confession that he committed adultery in his heart. What we hear now is not some tawdry locker room talk, but instead a humble man trying to weave the honest experiences of his life into an altar cloth. “Take my life, broken and unfinished” he was saying, to us and especially to God, “and let it be consecrated Lord to Thee. Take my real self, my honest, ethically introspective self, fashion it into an offering, and let me walk unashamed into your presence. ” Ted Gup of The New Republic contrasted Jimmy Carter’s admission of “adultery in my heart” to Donald Trump’s boastful comments on the Access Hollywood tape, including, “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” The long-ago admission by Carter that he lusted in his heart can now be seen for what it was—not just that he felt the lure of temptation, but that he did not have to be ashamed of such impulses. It told us we were dealing with someone who was introspective, honest, and humble. In retrospect, the gaffe leant a meaningful insight into the candidate’s character, and in its strange way, was ennobling. His words were even brave…. Trump’s comments, on the other hand, contradict his very humanity. They were cravenly and intended only for the like-minded group of satyrs, namely Access Hol­ lywood host Billy Bush and crew, gathered on the bus. The moment Trump stepped off the bus to greet actress Arianne Zucker, he put on his charming face, a study in deceit and hypocrisy. LInlike Carter’s words, Trump’s suggest a man incapable of looking inward, of feeling shame, humility, or love. That such a purposefully divisive hgure could represent the best hopes of tens of millions of Americans, even as he revolts and alienates tens of millions of others, speaks to the yawning chasm that divides the nation politically and culturally. What comes to mind is the question that once brought down another demagogue, Joe McCarthy, more than 60 years ago: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”9 So, “blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” Blessed are those who are focused on God’s Word and God’s promises, because they know, even amidst the strife and turmoil of a corrupt government, that God has not abandoned us. They know that even amidst the pollution and corruption of Donald Trump and all the tin pot dictators who preceded him, that the risen Christ is alive and working still for righteousness and justice. They go about the tasks placed into our hands these days, working toward a more just society against all odds. As they work, they feel them­ selves being shaped into persons of integrity, being made saints, if you will. They are leaning forward toward God’s Word, which is truth and can be trusted. Because they are conhdent that one day they will come face-to-face with the God who triumphs over all wrong, they can sing with conhdence the old hymn:

    Tho’ the cause of evil prosper, Yet the truth alone is strong;

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    Tho’ her portion be the scaffold, And upon the throne be wrong; Yet that scaffold sways the future, And, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, Keeping watch above His own.10

    Notes 1 “Did He Just Say That? Jimmy Carter,” in “Top 10 Unfortunate Political One-Liners,” Time (online), http: //content, time.com/time/ specials/packages/article/0,28804,1859513_1859526_1859518,00.html 2 Mark Allan Powell, “Matthew’s Beatitudes: Reversals and Rewards of the Kingdom,” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 58/3 (July, 1996), 472. 3 Jaroslav Pelikan, editor, Luther’s Works, Vol 21: The Sermon on the Mount and the Magnificat (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2007), 34. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 John P. Meier, “Matthew 5:3-12,” Interpretation, 44/3 (Jul 1990), 283. 7 Spren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing (New York: Harper, 1964), 13. 8 Ibid. 9 Ted Gup, “On the Subject of Lust, Donald Trump Is No Jimmy Carter,” The New Republic, October 10, 2016, https://newrepiiblic.com/article/137682/siibject-liist-donald-triimp-no-jimmy-carter 10 James Russell Lowell, “Once to Every Man and Nation,” public domain.

  • We Are Debtors

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

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    We Are Debtors

    Dan Lewis

    First Presbyterian Church, Wilmington, North Carolina

    So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh— for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. Romans 8: 12-17

    It’s not often that a pastor misses Pentecost Sunday, but sometimes it can’t be helped. It was a long-planned hiking trip with my family that did it one year. Our destination was Peru, the ancient ruins at Machu Picchu, long considered the famous lost city of the Incas. The city was discovered, or rediscovered actually, around 1911, by a larger-than-life American explorer named Hiram Bingham. He paid a young Peruvian boy a meager tip, so the story goes, to lead him across the raging Urubamba River and over the steep slopes of the lower Andes to the ruins hidden away in the jungle. The stonework of Machu Picchu is absolutely amazing—thousands upon thou­ sands of stones, some weighing in excess of 50 tons. These were set in place by the Incan builders without the use of any modern equipment, even wheels. The stones were so carefully chiseled, some of them, especially in the holiest places, for Machu Picchu was a city of worship. The use of mortar was not necessary. They fit together so close you couldn’t slide a blade between them. Historians say the Spanish never made it this far into the mountains when they came to conquer the Incas in the middle of the 16th Century. And that’s a good thing, probably, because if they had, they likely would have destroyed Machu Picchu as they destroyed so many other Incan sites around the country. They would have knocked over those ancient stones and crushed those mountain temples in the same way they’d crushed the Incan people themselves. They had superior weapons, after all. Had they made it in that far, the Spanish probably would have built a church right there on top of Machu Picchu. I thought about all this as I walked among the ruins of the city. It was Pentecost Sunday when we finally made it there, so I knew the congregation was at that very moment listening to the story of the coming of the Holy Spirit to the Church, how it blew in like a wind upon the first disciples and gave them that amazing ability to speak to one another across their great divides of language and culture and history. I thought about this as I watched a Peruvian woman, a tour guide with that distinctive Andean look (and who knows, she might have been a direct descendant of the ones who first built Machu Picchu). I watched her speak German to a group of tourists.

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    Amazing! Yes, but not only amazing. I felt something else as well. Something hard to de­ scribe. I felt, well, small. I can’t say why exactly, but I think it had something to do not only with the beauty and vastness of that city but also the weight of the history behind it. I felt that in a very personal way. Here I was, not a Spaniard, granted, but a person of European descent, an Ameri­ can Christian, from a place where we have our own long history of displacing and disrupting native peoples. It felt strange to me to be there, knowing how privileged I am in my own life, knowing that the relative comfort that I live in is the result not only of the hard work and determination of my ancestors – that’s true, to an extent, but it is the result also of my ancestors’ stealing things from other people. Stealing labor, stealing rights, stealing the land itself. It probably didn’t help this feeling that for the past few days I’d been waited on, hand and foot, by native Peruvian porters and cooks and guides, each one with that distinctive indigenous look. I thought about the injustice of it all as I watched them speed past me on the mountain trail, to go ahead and set up camp for me, carrying on their backs everything I could possibly need to be comfortable, three times the weight I had on my back, and doing it all in worn out sandals, some of them. How’d it get to be this way? I wondered. And what does it all mean for me, for us, for the church, and for the world? I suppose that’s why this one line from the scripture catches my eye:44We are debtors,” Paul says. We are debtors. What does he mean by that, do you think? He wrote it to the church in Rome, we know, perhaps to address some specific things going on with the people there, but also to lay out a kind of comprehensive explanation of how the gospel of Jesus Christ relates to traditional Jewish ideas like sin and judgment, righteousness and the Law. What Paul wrote was for that time and place, first and foremost, but it also seems like the kind of thing God would intend for all of us to hear, in every time and place. We are debtors, people. We owe something to someone else, you and me. We’re in arrears, in hock, on the tab. It’s like the scripture that says, 44Here’s a land on which you have not labored, cities you have not built, vineyards and olive yards you did not plant. All this is here for you, but it’s been bought and paid for by another. We are debtors.” He means that in a spiritual sense, of course. But I believe that every spiritual truth is borne out in time and history. That’s what makes truths true. So yes, we owe God our very existence. Yes, it was God who first breathed life into our bodies and Spirit into our lives. Yes, but our indebtedness is tangible too. It involves real people and places and histories. We really are living a good life, most of us, that isn’t ours by rights. We really are debtors. But the question is: What do we do with our indebtedness? With the spiritual and the historical sense of it. What does it mean for us, this knowledge that we owe so much for our lives? It seems to me there may be helpful and unhelpful ways of dealing with our indebtedness. I couldn’t help but think of that in relation to one of our recent skirmishes in the never-ending culture wars. Recall how the National Football League decided to deal with players who wanted to use their position and power to protest certain things, to draw attention to the racial and social injustices that still plague this great country. Do you remember what the NFL owners decided?

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    They said to the players, “No, you may not do this. If you don’t stand for the national anthem, you’ll be fined by the league.” Now, I understand that this is a complex and convoluted issue, multilayered and deeply emotional for so many Americans, a thing about which people of good conscience might disagree. But still, it seems to me the whole thing might be called a dreadful case of misunderstanding, specifically of misunderstanding our indebted­ ness. What I mean is, where in the world did we get the idea that patriotism and protest are mutually exclusive? Given the history of our country, it seems a funny thing to believe, doesn’t it? We were born protestors, as a nation, from the time we began throwing English tea into Boston Harbor long ago. And as yet another Memorial Day passes, with our nation still engaged in military conflict around the globe, one wonders whether there is any better tribute to those who have died in military service than to keep on striving for the high ideals upon which the country was built. We owe them so much, don’t we? The servicemen and servicewomen. We are profoundly in their debt. And yet, if we think we honor them, or somehow repay that debt by silencing our fellow citizens, we are sorely mistaken, don’t you think? We have misunderstood the very nature of our indebtedness and what it asks of us, on a spiritual as much as a political level. One way to think of it is to ask this question: Would we have our brothers and sisters, our sons and daughters, dying for freedoms we don’t even bother to use? No. This is a misunderstanding of indebtedness and what it means for us. And it’s not unlike the original one, in many ways. Paul, it seems, was trying to hammer home this one point, again and again and again, for the people of God: you cannot repay your debt to God through slavish obedience or mindless observance of tradition. At best you will just spin your wheels in trying. At worst you will do great harm to others. It’s impossible to pay your debt for several reasons. First off, you’re not that righteous, as it turns out! No one is righteous, as Paul says elsewhere, no, not one. But more to the point, your debt is not owed to tradition. Nor is it owed to history or custom or culture, or any of those things we spend so much time honoring. Your debt is to God, people. That is who you owe! And God is not contained somewhere in a box or even a book. God is not tucked away safely in the annuls of history. No, God is alive—God is alive in the world today! I hope you will hear this as the profoundly good news it is. We are not debtors to the flesh, to use Paul’s term, but we are debtors to God’s own Spirit! God’s own Spirit, which was poured out upon the church, the whole church, in all its beautiful and terrible diversity, at Pentecost. All the sinners, from all the various times and places, are bound together as one, by the very breath of God. And it is this same breath, this same Spirit, the scripture says, that cries out from within our lungs, as we realize who we are, whose we are. We belong to God. That is the proclamation of baptism, is it not? We are God’s children. We are permitted to call on God as we would a Father or a Mother, without hesitation, without judgment, and without fear. And what can that mean, then, for our indebtedness to God, except that it can never be repaid, ever? Who can repay a parent, after all? None of us could ever do that. So instead God pushes us away from the obsession with repayment and toward the gift of freedom, real freedom, the freedom of a child who is not perfect but per­

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    fectly loved. That’s real freedom, isn’t it? Freedom from the debt, yes, but freedom to act in the world as well. Freedom to speak, freedom to live, freedom to love one another and to give to one another as freely as we have received. That’s real gospel freedom. See, when the spirit of fear in us is gone, there is no more reason to hurt and harass one another. Why bother stealing things when you’re already heir to the riches of the kingdom? Why bother silencing others or excluding others, when you already have your own place at the table, confirmed, guaranteed, bought and paid for completely. Do you believe that? I hope you do. You have a place close to the heart of God. Now, as Fve said, I hope this sounds like good news to you, like real and meaning­ ful freedom in a world too often defined by various forms of slavery. We are given something better in our baptism, people of God. God gives us God’s own Spirit so that we might live a life unencumbered by guilt and untainted by fear. What can this mean for you specifically? I couldn’t say. I don’t know what shape this freedom might take for you in your life, how you might be called to live out your own deep gratitude to God. I don’t know. But ask God to show you, and I believe God will. I do know that for us, as a church, it means everything, this good news. It informs every ministry we undertake, every moment of worship, every mission. We want to share with the world the goodness and freedom of God’s great love in Jesus Christ. And we’ll keep on doing that until God finally builds for us and for the world that other city, the one mentioned in the closing pages of the scriptures, where mourning and crying and pain are gone, and the city comes down from the heavens like a bride, adorned. And the city has no temple, the scripture says, for its temple is the Lord God and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon, for the glory of God is its light. And all the nations will walk by that light. And the gates of that city, the scripture says, will never be shut.