Just another WordPress site

Author: Sara Palmer

  • Old Friends: the Advent texts

    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.

    Page 2

    Old Friends: The Advent Texts

    Bill Goettler,

    Yale Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut

    Old friends came by for a visit a few weeks ago, seminary friends with whom my wife Maria and I have, over the years, shared some of the most important moments of our lives. We hadn’t seen each other in some time, but we picked up right away, recalling old times together, all talking at once, laughing, somehow deeply relieved to be together again. In an instant, it was as if they had never left. You have friends like that, I’d guess, perhaps nearby, though given the transient nature of ministry, more likely far away. Friends whose stories you know, whose his­ tories are precious to you, whose current lives matter to you as much from a distance as if they still lived next door. Way back at the start of our friendship, we were just down the seminary hallway from one another. After that, a bit of travel was required in order to get together. Then, flights became necessary, and our visits grew less frequent. It doesn’t take long though, when getting together with friends like these; you find that you reestablish that old rhythm, enter again a level of trust and mutual under­ standing based on years of memories that brings back the intimacy that seasons and miles apart cannot erase. Soon family stories, work tales, personal revelations that we share with almost no one were pouring forth from each of us without reserve, with the comfortable familiarity of friends who’ve spent many hours in each other’s homes, in the home before this one, and the home before that. We shared fond memories of parents now gone, whose tables we’d once sat around long into the evening, daring to speak aloud our dreams for work and for life. We remembered holding each other’s fussy babies, now fully formed adults making their own ways in the world. Oh, there is nothing quite like the wonder of being together again with old friends. All of this comes to mind when I look around the corner and see the Advent texts approaching once more, like friends we haven’t spent time with in a little while. The Advent texts, those stories of prophecy and of hope, of fearsome preparation and im­ patient waiting, joy-filled stories that prepare the way for the birth that will transform what it means to be human, what it means to love and be loved, what it means, again, to believe. This year’s old friends include the prophet Isaiah promising the time when a little child will lead them,1 and Matthew’s Gospel warning us that we should keep awake, for we cannot know the day or the hour of God’s coming.2 I hist read the Joseph story, from that hist chapter in Matthew’s gospel, with a quivering voice while standing at the lectern of the Presbyterian Church in Allentown, Pennsylvania, about to turn eight years old. It was the Children’s Service, on the Sunday afternoon before Christmas, the same Fourth Advent Sunday when it comes up in the lectionary this year. I remember the terror of standing before that congrega­ tion, the fear of losing my place or mixing up my words. But I also remember, deep within me, the wonder that was about that place when I settled in and spoke aloud those wonderful words:

    An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of

    Page 3

    David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.”3

    It is among the texts that would define my young faith, and, if I am honest, still does. Years would pass before I’d understand how deeply connected those Gospel texts were to Paul, writing in another Advent text,

    You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of dark­ ness and put on the armor of light4

    Old friends, these texts, so dearly a part of my memory that I await the A cycle in the lectionary with joy, in the memory and comfort and certainty of being on familiar ground once more, sure of the history that we’ve shared, knowing something of the nuance of each word, excited to reconnect, relieved to be together again. Our seminary friends’ visit lasted for a couple of days. It wasn’t on the hist night, filled with laughter and wine and memories, but not so long after that when we began to realize that something was not quite the same. Was it my memory that was faulty, or were they a little different than they once had been? We are good enough friends that I mentioned this, and with gentle smiles, they suggested that we too had changed with the passing of years. How could it not be so, with the life experiences we each had celebrated and endured, and by the things we knew now that we hadn’t known then. The old stories were trustworthy; we had indeed endured the same endless semi­ nary lectures, and then used those notes, word for word, in our early years of parish ministry. Together we recalled the sketchy New York City car rental agency that had rented us the broken down truck we drove through many states for that hist move. It was still true that our babies had kept all of us awake in the too small vacation house that we’d rented by the sea. About all of those things, we were sure. But then, the world began to change, around us all. New questions began to emerge, some that we were well enough equipped to answer, others that required us to dig deeper, to consider new possibilities. We’d call one another, of course, and follow one another on social media. There were years when we’d exchange what we thought to be our better sermons, over email. But each passing year changes us, each birth, every death, the shifting political contexts in which we live our lives, the relationships that are new to us, and those that fall away. Some years our hopes rise, and we feel certain that God’s ways are unfolding before us, in the midst of creation’s wonder. And then there are the seasons when despots rule, and sojourners find no welcome, when we grieve the very human state in which we find ourselves. We talked of all of these things with those old friends visiting, and we realized together that while the old stories that we shared continued to be utterly dependable, the ways that each one of us had changed mattered at least as much. These visiting

    Page 4

    old friends were, at the same moment, new friends visiting. There was much left to discover, much to get to know in ways we had not known before. But how to do that? How do you hold on to what has been treasured, and without dismissing it, be open to all that is now being revealed? That is the preacher’s Advent question, I think, a question that is particularly important in times like these. There is such power, such wonder, such dependability in the ways that we have heard these familiar tales for our whole lives long. That sort of wonder was clear to me so many decades ago when I stood alone to read aloud from Matthew’s hist chapter about the newborn Emmanuel, God with us. The joy of such a trustworthy memory need not, must not, be discarded. But even the oldest of friends live, too, in the present moment. And they deserve to be heard, and explored, and revealed again, in the midst of the present day. When in Advent 1 we hear Paul addressing the Romans, “Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light,”5 and Isaiah proclaiming, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more,”5 we are fully entitled to the delight of encountering anew such familiar words. An old folk tune might come to mind, or a sermon once preached. But if we go no farther than singing that song or preaching that sermon, we have failed to honor what those old friends are bringing to us in this new day. Or in Advent 2, when Isaiah says, “He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and de­ cide with equity for the meek of the earth.”7 Or in Matthew’s Gospel in Advent 3,

    When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”8

    If you are anything like me, you hear two different things going on in each of these texts, and in all of them, when heard together. First, every word is familiar, a collection of the greatest hits of the biblical record. That part is profoundly comforting for us, and for all who will hear these stories read during the season of Advent. We have heard them and read them, taught them and loved them. They are the dearest of old friends. But then, something else is going on as well. No one would claim that this is an intentional collection of overtly political texts. And yet, in times like these, even the most pastoral preacher will have the hardest of times refusing to hear a message that seems unavoidable for the times in which we live. I am not suggesting getting on any bandwagons, not suggesting that the time has come for every preacher to find prophetic voice, particularly among a people and in a season where that voice might just be crying in the wilderness. But if we read these texts and consider the days in which we are living, we will find sitting before us a people who are anxious to hear what the biblical word is saying to us, not just in our precious memories, but in this very day.

    Page 5

    As you decide what to do with this collection of old voices asking us to wake from our sleep and put on the armor of light, to beat swords into plowshares, and to decide with equity for the meek of the earth, it will be difficult to consider those texts apart from the newspaper headlines of this present age. In the Advent 4 gospel text, the righteous man Joseph is determined to do only what the law requires of him, or at least allows. He will dismiss the pregnant woman quietly. He isn’t turning his back, really. He is just protecting what is his, his future, his well-being, and the well-being of his own offspring. Somebody has to watch the border, after all. But then something happens to him, in his slumber. Perhaps something happens to all of us when we become dreamers, something happens when we dare to listen to what just might be angelic voices. He considers the other side of the story. And we think again about those whose very presence seemed, well, inconvenient to us. What if the one, or the ones, who asked too much of us were found to be the bearers of amazing news? The one we would have turned away might just be the way that “God with us” is revealed. All of these texts of Advent will be read during that wondrous season between Thanksgiving and Christmas, a time of family visits, when congregations are often well attuned to the importance of the return of extended family members and of col­ lege students home for the holidays. Just as those visits with old friends make space for the telling of stories, they also invite reflection on our lives and the ways we have been changed, the ways we have been transformed, and been part of the transformation of others. Such a season invites us to consider the Advent texts with fresh eyes and consider anew how we who love this story and know it by heart might be changed again. The biblical texts of Advent invite us to open our hearts in the presence of these trustworthy companions we’ve known our whole lives long. And then, they ask us to listen as if we are hearing them as never before. That new welcome, that wide-eyed wonder, will finally be the point of this season, and of the days of Christmas that will soon follow. We must make ready.

    Notes 1 Isaiah 11:6, Advent 2 2 Matthew 24:42, Advent 1 3 Matthew 1:21-23, Advent 4 4 Romans 13:11012, Advent 1 5 Romans 13:12, Advent 1 6 Isaiah 2:4, Advent 1 7 Isaiah 11: 3-4, Advent 2 8 Matthew 11:2-6, Advent 3

  • Evangelistic Preaching: Bearing Witness to Beauty

    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.

    Page 26

    Evangelistic Preaching: Bearing Witness to Beauty

    Bryan Stone

    Boston University School of Theology, Boston, Massachusetts

    When telling the story of Pentecost in a pragmatic, consumer-oriented, and tech­ nocratic culture, it is tempting to begin at the end—“and that day about three thousand persons were added”—and then work backward with a type of evangelistic calculus that might trace the kind of homiletical strategies capable of producing those stagger­ ing results. Clearly there was something captivating and compelling in the preaching of Peter and the apostles on that day. The problem with that temptation, of course, is that we can’t craft or construct Pentecost any more than we can predict or secure the work of the Holy Spirit or calculate how our obedience might translate into effective­ ness in the hands of the Spirit. What we can do is seek to be faithful and transparent witnesses to the beauty of God’s activity in Christ by first allowing ourselves to be transformed by that beauty. The very possibility of Christian evangelism is always premised upon the activity of the Spirit in our lives and is both a “doing” and a “be it done unto me.” Thus it is that evangelistic witness in all its forms is, by its very nature, a “re­ sponse” that presupposes encounter and transformation. As Amos put it, “The lion has roared —who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken, who can but prophesy?” (3:8)2 Peter’s preaching on the day of Pentecost adopts the same logic. In explaining why it was that the apostles came stumbling out of the upper room telling of God’s power in the manifold native languages of those present, Peter told the crowds that it wasn’t because they were drunk. Rather, even though Jesus of Nazareth had been handed over and crucified: “This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are wit­ nesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you both see and hear” (2:32-3). Peter and the apostles had a story to tell, but that was only because they had first been made witnesses —not just “reporters”—by the power of the Spirit. To claim that bearing witness to beauty should be our aim and purpose in evan­ gelistic preaching rather than attempting to add to our numbers is admittedly to swim against the stream of competitive and outcomes oriented modes of thought and practice that govern much of our lives and thinking, both inside and outside the church. It is commonly held that evangelistic preaching is preaching that is powerful, persuasive, and effective. It directs the gospel message to the unconverted with a sense of urgency and is oriented toward moving them to a place of decision. Thus understood, it is carried out strategically, and measured by how well it achieves that end. Evangelistic preaching may at times lean more heavily on rational argument and apologetics while at other times it may rely more heavily on passion and emotion; but its primary aim and end, so the consensus goes, is decision—and ultimately conversion. At its worst, the end is severed altogether from the means so that evangelism becomes an exercise in doing “whatever works” to achieve that end. But once evangelists learn that they can secure results by any means necessary, there is no longer any good reason to practice evangelism well, virtuously—or, even better, beautifully. In thinking about evangelism as a practice, as James McClendon has said, “the perversion associated with evangelism is potentially the more demonic, becomes demonic just to the degree

    Page 27

    that in a crass way it succeeds.”2 But what if, by contrast, the logic of evangelism is not shaped by some end it seeks to produce or achieve but by the beauty to which it seeks faithfully to bear witness?

    Reconnecting Evangelism to Beauty Reconnecting evangelism to beauty is one of the crucial challenges of our time, and that is especially true when it comes to preaching. In a culture awash with violence, cruelty, and a politics-as-usual where “usual” has come to mean ugly and mean-spirited, we could stand a bit more beauty in our lives. Philosophers in contem­ plating reality have long talked about three transcendental properties of being that are in some sense convertible, or interchangeable: truth, goodness, and beauty. What is true is good and beautiful, what is good is true and beautiful, and what is beautiful is true and good. But in modernity, beauty is the more forgotten of these three, having been supplanted by an emphasis on reason and action, and severed from both. One can see this in contemporary preaching, which typically seeks to get people either to believe something or to act in some way. It is not hard to find preaching, in other words, that is oriented toward truth and goodness. But what of beauty? What would it mean to preach in a way that bears witness to beauty? One can only imagine what the future of faith in our culture might look like if it were offered as an invitation to celebrate and embrace beauty rather than a list of rules to follow or beliefs to be adopted. But the challenges here are formidable. The idea that beauty is transcendent has increasingly been discarded in modernity, and it is instead taken to be a matter of individual aesthetic preferences (“beauty is in the eye of the beholder”), an emotional response to sensory stimuli, or an arbitrary and socially imposed set of norms that have no basis in anything other than power. Per­ haps worst of all, beauty is reduced to sentimentality. This can readily be seen with Christian praise music (a slow moving target, to be sure) in the form of “Jesus-is-myboyfriend ” choruses or with Christian kitsch such as Precious Moments figurines, Thomas Kinkade paintings, or syrupy movies moralizing that God is not dead or that heaven is for real. But the problem with sentimentality is not that some art forms are cheap, derivative, or “kitsch” in comparison to “high” art, or that they produce emotional responses.3 The problem is that sentimentality distorts reality and sedates believers. Preaching that has become sentimental is preaching where the beauty of Christ is shorn of its costliness and the depth of its reach into the ugliness, sinfulness, and evil of the world. Beauty that has become sentimentality is not unlike what Bonhoeffer famously identified as “cheap grace . . . the grace we bestow on ourselves.” As Bonhoeffer put it, “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requir­ ing repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”4 Apostolic preaching on the day of Pentecost, by contrast, is about as far from these sentimental distortions as one can imagine, despite the emotional effervescence that accompanied the gift of the Spirit poured out in the upper room, and mistaken for drunkenness. The apostles claimed that the one who had been raised up by God from the dead was the very same one who had been crucified and killed. To be sure, they held that resurrection rather than crucifixion has the last word in human exis­ tence; hope is not swallowed up in tragedy. But the apostles’ hope was wide-eyed

    Page 28

    and realistic—not in the sense that it was chastened, pragmatic, or restrained, but rather in the sense that it did not underestimate evil or view death with rose-colored glasses. Apostolic preaching, moreover, was incomprehensible apart from its call for conversion, a call that transitions immediately in the Acts narrative to individual and corporate transformation in the form of a community of shared goods, fellowship, generosity, and praise. The apostles had encountered divine beauty, but their response to it was not to paint it in pastels. They bore witness to it concretely in their lives and in their preaching, and in such a way as to stand as a visible, corporate, and embodied offer of that beauty to others. Jeremy Begbie has identified three strands of sentimentality in Christian art and worship, each of which distorts the capacity for bearing witness to divine beauty. I suggest that these can be applied to preaching as well. The first is when the preacher “misrepresents reality through evading or trivializing evil ” whether by projecting innocence onto the world (evasion) or overstating the goodness, progress, and ra­ tionality in the world (trivialization).5 The second is when preaching is emotionally self-indulgent, pandering to superficial emotional responses, whether more positively as with tenderness, compassion, and sympathy or more negatively as with outrage and anger. The sentimentalist, says Begbie, “cannot engage in depth with another’s pain as pain” and is instead more “concerned with the satisfaction gained in exercising their emotion.”6 The third strand of sentimentality follows from the first two: “the sentimentalist fails to take appropriate costly action. Because her emotional engage­ ment is not with reality X but a falsification of reality X and to a large extent for the pleasure of exercising the emotion, it cannot generate action that is appropriate to reality X.”7 To return to the three transcendentals, in the case of sentimentality, beauty is cut off from both truth and goodness. Just as there is false art—art that shades out discomfort, pain, or ugliness, plays to superficial emotions, and fails to enlist appropriate costly action—so likewise, there is false preaching. A good example of a preacher who understood this keenly is eighteenth century Anglican reformer John Wesley, who criticized preachers in his time for focusing wholly on the promises of the gospel while shading out Christ’s commands:

    The gospel Preachers, so called, corrupt their hearers; they vitiate their taste, so that they cannot relish sound doctrine; and spoil their appetite, so they cannot turn it to nourishment; they, as it were, feed them with sweetmeats, till the genuine wine of the kingdom seems quite insipid to them. They give them cordial upon cordial, which make them all life and spirit of the present …. As soon as that flow of spirits goes off, they are without life, without power, without any strength or vigour of soul; and it is extremely difficult to recover them, because they still cry out, ‘Cordials! Cordials!” of which they have had too much already, and have no taste for food which is convenient for them.8

    To borrow from musical terms, preaching that bears witness to beauty is not content only with harmonies, melodies, and consonance, but includes tension and dissonance. Historically, one can find an indifference, if not resistance, to beauty, especially

    Page 29

    in its sentimental and self-indulgent distortions, among Protestant reformers such as some Calvinists and Puritans, who sought to break with medieval and Catholic tradi­ tions, but often with the consequence that the category of beauty ended up greatly diminished along with a central role for the arts in ecclesial contexts. That was cer­ tainly not the case with Jonathan Edwards, who made beauty central to his concept of God. God’s beauty is the source of all creaturely beauty, taught Edwards, and the basis upon which we can talk about the very possibility of human virtue and love. In his Nature of True Virtue, he writes, “For as God is infinitely the greatest Being, so [God] is allowed to be infinitely the most beautiful and excellent: and all the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation, is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being who hath an infinite fulness of brightness and glory.”9 For the preacher who wishes to extol the beauty and grandeur of creation from the pulpit, Edwards might help us avoid some of beauty’s sentimental distortions by grounding it in the loving, Trinitarian nature of God. But that does not mean that in order to recover beauty, the theologian’s or the homiletician’s task is one of starting with abstract transcendental categories such as goodness, truth, or beauty and then demonstrating how God’s activity in Christ illustrates or embodies those categories. God is, to be sure, the infinite sovereign of the cosmos, but also the One who came alongside us in the form of an itinerant Galilean prophet who lived and laughed, prayed and taught, and suffered and died on a cross. Rather than begin with some transcendental quality of being or with the splendor of nature more generally, to bear witness to Christian beauty we begin with the extravagant and gratuitous overflowing of God’s love to the world in Christ, who is the measure of divine beauty. As Russell Reno puts it, “In Christ we are not overpowered by God as a sublime truth; we are romanced by God as pure beauty.”10 Or as Edwards would put it, according to Gerald R. McDermott, God “does not drive us by duty, but draws us by beauty, not by fear, but by irresistible attraction.”11 Admittedly, Edwards’ famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God may not be the best homiletic example of this principle. To open listeners to the beauty of God’s revelation in Christ, the preacher imagi­ natively paints a portrait of Christ’s life and work, and points to saints, both living and dead, whose lives constitute an invitation into this world of beauty. But Christian beauty that is fixed in Christ will always bear the marks of the cross, and so it will always be, in some sense, grotesque. That is not to say that the cross is really beauti­ ful if we would just understand it properly or that the crucifixion alone is the essence of the Christian gospel (the incarnation and resurrection are also essential). But the Christian story is one in which the cross is not simply eclipsed by the resurrection nor is the suffering, vulnerable, and non-violent pattern of Christ’s life set aside in favor of a “happy, happy, joy, joy” message that asks persons simply to look past evil, pain, or poverty toward a brighter horizon. Wherever the beauty of Christ is conveyed or portrayed in such a way as to mute the cries of those who experience pain and suffering in the world, then beauty has become sentimentality. It is a mask, and we have beauty without truth or goodness.12

    The Uselessness of Beauty When we encounter truth, we are obligated to believe it. When we encounter good­ ness, we are obligated to enact it. But to what are we obligated when we encounter beauty? A host of answers suggest themselves as responses to beauty: desire, pleasure,

    Page 30

    appreciation, praise, awe, wonder, meditation, replication, imitation, or sharing.13 Perhaps “consent” is a word that sums them all up, for in encountering true beauty, we are inclined in various ways toward an existential posture of “yes.” “Openness” may be an even better way of describing this posture in that it accentuates the un­ controllability and mystery of beauty, along with the variety of human responses to beauty.14 Beauty, after all can inspire both awe and terror, and the line between the two may at times prove exceptionally thin. So, for example, it is hard to turn away from gazing on the majesty and beauty of crashing ocean waves in a storm. But they can also punish, dwarf, and overpower. When Isaiah encountered the Holy One in the temple with all of the accompanying sights, sounds, and smells, he was utterly undone. “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5). Preachers might well ask, “What is the point of bearing witness to beauty? To what end and for what purpose?” Openness to beauty is, of course, an openness to transformation in ways we cannot predict ahead of time, and preaching that bears witness to beauty cannot easily chart for listeners what a faithful response to beauty might be. In this way, the recovery of beauty in preaching connects well with the Pentecost emphasis on the activity of the Spirit, which, as Jesus said, is like the wind in that it “blows where it chooses, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes” (John 3:8). The preacher hopes that her witness will be met by an openness on the part of her hearers, but she can never manufacture or secure that openness through “effective” witness. Indeed, the preacher who bears witness to beauty must herself adopt a posture of openness, refusing to package, contain, or oversimplify beauty, reducing it to what will prove attractive and appealing. This point may be precisely why so few preachers are interested in bearing witness to beauty and instead incline toward trying to get people to believe certain things or to act in certain ways. Beauty, though it is at the heart of Christian faith, is unruly and defies attempts to capture or contain it, or to use it as a means toward some pre-determined end. To put it simply, beauty doesn’t “work.” And so to preach in a way that bears witness to beauty may mean that we have to abandon a tendency to think our job is to secure results. As Alexander Schmemann says, “Beauty is never ‘necessary,’ ‘functional,’ or ‘useful.’ And when, expecting someone whom we love, we put a beautiful tablecloth on the table and decorate it with candles and flowers, we do all this not out of necessity, but out of love.”15 Much of what we are learning about how people come to faith in our time points to the fact that decisions and commitments are generally not the starting point in the journey to Christian faith.16 On the contrary, participation and belonging come first. Persons must be able to journey and to explore, to touch, taste, see, hear, and try on for themselves the life of faith. They must, moreover, experience a company of saints whose lives have been made witnesses to beauty by the Spirit. Through corporate practices of worship, preaching, service, study, peace-making, and justice-seeking, Christians on the journey are formed into a way of seeing and sensing that we might well be described as a Spirit-formed aesthetic sensibility. Coming to faith requires the church as “a school of attention,” a phrase that Timothy Gorringe uses to describe art, but which could well be used to describe the church.17 As Gorringe says, “All great art helps us to see, attend to, sense, the depth, mystery and glory of God’s creation.”

    Page 31

    So it is with the church as a communion of saints that has been made beautiful by the Spirit, despite its imperfections and sinfulness—indeed, precisely insofar as it remembers faithfully how to confess its sins and forgive those of others. In cultures that crave utility, efficiency, and outcomes, preaching is often ori­ ented toward securing results. Preaching must “help.” But if the goal and purpose of evangelism is to bear faithful witness rather than to secure results, then the emphasis can never fall on effective technique or the achievement of outcomes, but on virtu­ ous lives that bear witness to God’s beauty and are in fact made beautiful by the Spirit because of that witness. The point of bearing witness to beauty, moreover, is not because it works better than other strategies. Bearing witness to beauty is not a homiletic strategy. For when the logic of evangelism is the logic of witness rather than the logic of production and results, there is no other end we seek toward which witness is aimed. Faithful witness to beauty is its own end and aim. Accordingly, the logic of evangelism is the logic of witness as measured by clarity, embodiment, openness, and incarnation rather than the logic of production and accomplishment. All this does not mean that beauty never produces results or that the preacher who witnesses to beauty should not hope for transformation. As with the apostles and those who saw and heard them on the day of Pentecost, it is impossible to en­ counter beauty authentically without being transformed. But to treat the significance of Christ in rational and ethical terms only apart from its aesthetic dimensions is not only to truncate and short-change the gospel but to disconnect our preaching from the beauty through which faith comes alive. Preaching should be thoughtful and ac­ tion-inspiring, but it is also a means for connecting us with the source of all beauty and the creation of pathways through which we receive God’s glory and offer praise in return. In this way, preaching is a sacramental act in that it mediates a participation in divine beauty. Evangelistic preaching, then, is not just preaching that aspires to get people to believe something or to do something, but to experience and participate in something—namely, the beauty of God’s extravagant, gratuitous, and overflowing love in Christ.

    Notes 1 Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. 2 James William McClendon, Doctrine: Systematic Theology, Volume 2 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 439. 3 As Betty Spackman has pointed out, to understand Christian kitsch, one has to consider economic and class dimensions that do not allow us simply to dismiss it out of hand; on the contrary, kitsch often gives expression to profound truths and a sincere faith. Betty Spackman, A Profound Weakness: Christians and Kitsch (Carlisle: Piquant, 2005). This reference to Spackman noted in Jeremy Begbie, “Beauty, Sentimentality, and the Arts,” in Daniel J. Treier, Mark Husbands, and Roger Lundin, eds., The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 55-6. 4 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Disciple ship (New York: SCM Press, 1959), 44-5. 5 Begbie, 47. 6 Begbie, 51. 7 Begbie, 52. 8 John Wesley, “Letter to an Evangelical Layman” [December 20,1751] in Frank Baker, ed., The Works of John Wesley (Grand Rapids: Zondervan: 1987), 26:487-8. 9 Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2003), 14-15. 10 Russell R. Reno, “Return to Beauty: Review of The Beauty of the Infinite, by David Bentley Hart,”

    Page 32

    In Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity (September 2004), 51. 11 Gerald R. McDermott, “Surprised by Beauty: The Theology of Jonathan Edwards,” The Anglican Way. Accessed January 7, 2019, http://www.ad-ne.org/the-anglican-way/surprised-beauty-theologyjonathan -edwards/. 12 Begbie, 63-5. 13 All of these include moral dimensions, but aesthetic obligations cannot be reduced to moral obligations. On this point, see especially Alfred Archer and Lauren Ware, “Beyond the Call of Beauty: Everyday Aesthetic Demands under Patriarchy,” The Monist (2018), 114-27, doi: 10.1093/monist/onx029. 14 My thanks to Kaitlyn Martin Fox for suggesting this in the context of a feminist critique of logocentric (or, as Derrida put it, phallogocentric) theologies, which tend to impose a determinateness of meaning that constricts creativity and openness. 15 Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1965), 29. 16 Bryan Stone, Finding Faith Today (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018). 17 Timothy J. Gorringe, The Education of Desire (SCM Press, 2001), 2.

  • Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit

    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.

    Page 9

    Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit

    Will Willimon

    Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina

    If you are, by nature, spiritual, if you relish religious thoughts and like nothing better than being at church and sitting through a sermon, focusing upon higher mat­ ters, which is to say, if you are rich in spirit, then Jesus’ hist beatitude has nothing to say to you. Move on to the next beatitude. If you know where your next meal is coming from, if you are appreciated in your job, content with life, full of enthusiasm for your daily work, with kids who are chaste and obedient, sorry, there’s nothing here for you. If by chance you are a loser in the world’s eyes, frustrated, addicted, oppressed, hungry, ill-housed, and ill-futured, if you try hard to pay attention during the sermon but get nothing out of it, here’s some good news: Jesus begins his best sermon by blessing the poor in spirt, congratulating the spiritually impoverished, rejoicing with the pneumatically challenged. In my years embedded in the university, I met few honest-to-God atheists. Most of those who shunned my ministrations and fled religious services were best described as spiritually tone deaf rather than thoughtfully atheistic. They just didn’t get it. They listened to my sermons and looked upon our rites with that same blank stare with which I regard baseball. In the hist beatitude, Jesus blesses the spiritually tone deaf; that is, he blesses the poor in spirit. The hist beatitude says that the kingdom of heaven “is theirs.” “Theirs” is a genitive of possession. By placing “theirs,” in the Greek, at the beginning of the sub­ ordinate clause, surely the preacher means to emphasize that the kingdom of heaven is for them, the poor in spirit rather than for the spiritually rich. Tell me if I’m wrong in sensing a note of exclusion in this great announcement of kingdom inclusion. Jesus never promised forgiveness except for sinners, did not promise laughter except for the tearful, and offered his kingdom as a gift to the spiritually impoverished. In this beatitude Jesus confronts the difference between the fake world where riches and spiritual abundance are considered to be a mark of blessing and flips it on its head to the real world (i.e. the Kingdom of Heaven) where the poor are blessed. In his hist beatitude, Jesus draws a sharp distinction between our kingdoms and God’s kingdom. Here Jesus offers a portrayal of the true shape of the real world. As Bonhoeffer said, in this sermon, reality is defined by “the word of the very one who is Lord and law reality.”1 The poor, who are so often either forgotten or stand at the end of the line, are men­ tioned hi st. Jesus’ sermon is pure proclamation, announcement of the good news/bad news that the day of the vindication of the poor has begun and is fast approaching. Get ready for a great reversal. In Christ, the last get to be hist, the hist end up last. Welcome to the topsy-turvy realm of the crucified Messiah, the One who makes the poor to be rich and divests the rich of our stuff. His prodigal grace makes beggars of us all. These who are forgotten by the world are the hist to be remembered by God. Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus leaps to mind (Luke 16:19-31). Though a beatitude is hist of all a depiction of God, there are implications for

    Page 10

    the contemporary church: 1. At the divinity school where I teach, we require our students to be in Spiritual Formation groups in order that these budding preachers may beef up their spirituality and become more competent in working the Floly Spirit to their personal advantage. In his hist beatitude, Jesus blesses none of that and goes on record as opposing all attempts at spiritual aggrandizement. Practices of spiritual enrichment, like our Spiritual Formation Groups, are made suspect by the hist beatitude. William James said that self-aggrandizing ambition takes many forms: material (money grubbing), social (honor and acclaim), and spiri­ tual. James suspects spiritual self-seeking to be the most deceitful. Spiritual upward mobility is often compensation for failing at other types of ambition, says James, and therefore liable to breed invidious comparison: “God I thank thee that I am not like other people” (Lk 18:11).2 Sharing James’s suspicion of spiritual self-seeking, I mistrust the an courant en­ thusiasm for “Christian practices,” the latest iteration of our history of eager beaver spiritual self-promotion. Even as Sabbath-keeping, contemplative prayer, and spiritual centering promise to purge our self-seeking, in these “spiritual practices” there’s more than a whiff of Barth’s despised “religion”—works of righteous asceticism designed for self-salvation, a cunning human attempt to avoid having to stand before God as the empty-handed beggars we are. Let none forget that Paul’s confession, “the good that I would do I cannot… .who will deliver me from this bondage to sin?” (Rom 7:20), was made after his Damascus Road vocation. By implication, to be able to confess to our own spiritual ineptitude, to look upon our spiritual accomplishments as “the filthy rags of righteousness” (Luther), is the beginning of spiritual wisdom. As Luther preached from his deathbed, “We are all beggars; this is true.” 2. Another implication of the hist beatitude for someone like me, who makes a good living running errands for the spiritually enriched, is the implied judgement in the hist beatitude. Good news for one group (the spiritually poor) is, by implication, bad news for another (the spiritually full). That’s the edge Luke put on this beatitude in his account of Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain. The hip side of blessing the poor is cursing the rich (Lk 6:27-36). The deeply poor tend to be desperate. The poor are those who know that they are helpless without God’s help. They are losers in a world that values only the winners. They’ve got no hope if the Son of God is not the one who preached the Sermon. If, as you preach the hist beatitude, there are those in your congregation who hear curse rather than blessing, this beatitude as judgment rather than beatitude, it’s probably a sign that your church hasn’t done a good enough job of evangelization. It’s the wretched of the earth who are able to hear this sermon gladly. If there are no desper­ ate in your congregation, then a great deal will be missed about the Beatitudes, and I am not a good enough biblical interpreter to make them credible. It’s hard to see how the poor can be blessed without judgment upon the rich. The preacher of The Sermon was full of spirit yet for us and our salvation poured out his spirit. The One who was conceived by the Holy Spirit (Matt 1:18), prompted to preach in the power of the Holy Spirit (Lk 4), for our sakes became kenotically emptied in spirit (Phil 2:6-11), crying out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mk 15:34), blesses the spiritually deficient. Nobody will ever be as poor as

    Page 11

    crucified Jesus, and yet all those who are poor may cling to his impoverishment as their hope. The poor find a place close to Jesus because he bypassed the rich and has come and stood with them in his poverty. Sadly, most of my ministry has been among the spiritually rich, spending much of my time around people who are good at being church, who eagerly lap up all things spiritual, and who pay the bills for me to lead them in their spiritual self-aggrandize­ ment. But Jesus blesses the spiritually inept. “For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). 3. By implication, the church does not honor the rich or owe them our respect, because in this sermon we have learned the truth about who God is and what God is up to in the world. As Stanley Hauerwas says, “The sermon, therefore, is not a list of requirements, but rather a description of the life of the people gathered by and around Jesus. To be saved is to be so gathered.”3 Most of us don’t want to be poor in spirit or anything else, much less to have to put up with them at the Lord’s Table, realizing that the world appears to be run by and to reward winners rather than losers. In one of his sermons on the Sermon on the Mount, Luther said that this hist beatitude slams “the greatest and most universal belief or religion on earth”—the world’s honoring of those who are great and successful. A former student, who now serves a little church in the mountains of North Carolina, noted the ravages of the materialism of some of his church members, the ceaseless treadmill of getting and grabbing for more stuff, even in his modestly afflu­ ent blue collar congregation, the way in which everything in the Trump Years teaches them that a high income is a sign of divine blessedness. “You are old,” he said to me, rather uncharitably. “Tell me, was there a time when the church questioned if material success is true success?” “I think that America elected Franklin Roosevelt in spite of his money. Alas, many voted for and defended Donald Trump because of his money.” No better time to begin a sermon with “Blessed are the poor in spirit, the kingdom of God is theirs.” Whoever the God of Donald Trump is (Stephen E. Strang, God and Donald Trump4), that God can’t be the one who self-revealed in the Sermon on the Mount. 4. The Chr istian faith is not spiritual, that is, not a technique for getting ourselves close to God, not a religion among other pathways up to God. The faith in and of the preacher of the Sermon is about allowing ourselves to be loved by the God we didn’t ask for, much less love, the God who blesses the poor in spirit. That’s why I regularly reread the novels of Dostoevsky in which some smart young thing is gradually, loss upon loss, brought down until he is sniveling like a baby, empty handed, pleading for divine mercy. I’m not saying that Jesus takes nobody except the broken, but sometimes it sure seems that way. And often, the next thing Jesus does is authorize the broken and empty to be the means of someone else’s salvation, Jesus doing some of his best work through those whom the world considers to be stupid, inept, refuse (1 Cor 1:27). 5. The beatitudes are blessings by Jesus, portrayals of what God is up to in the world, not prescriptions for human behavior or exhortations for us to obey. Thus the beatitudes are a challenge for church people who have been conditioned to think that the purpose of a sermon is to talk about them rather than to talk about God. The beatitudes depict who God is (the one who blesses the spiritually poor) and what God

    Page 12

    is up to in the world (preaching blessed good news to the poor). Yet the hist beatitude implies that those of us who profit from the world’s abun­ dance and who are trying to be Jesus’ disciples have a responsibility to the poor. If as the baptized, we presume to hitch on to what God is up to in the world, then we’ll have to connect with what God says to the poor. We cannot close our hearts to the poor and worship a Savior who begins his longest and best sermon by blessing the poor in spirit. At Duke, I colluded with an addictions psychiatrist who had a theory that people who suffer from addictions, particularly addiction to alcohol, tended to be “spiritu­ ally deficient.” He even developed, with another doctor, some sort of instrument to measure their spiritual quotient, asking questions like “How often do you pray?” and “Do you consider yourself to be religious?” He claimed to have found a strong correlation between addiction to alcohol and low spirituality. He and I sponsored a conference on “Spirituality and Addiction” that drew over a hundred doctors, nurses, and health care workers who heartily agreed with the thesis that there’s a connection between addiction and poverty of spirit. The psychiatrist theorized that people with a low spiritual quotient are unconsciously attempting to solve their spirit problem by imbibing spirits. They vainly try to gain access to the spiritual through chemical means. While I’ve got reservations, mostly theological, about the psychiatrist’s thesis, I did recall some of the alcoholics I’ve had in my churches. Many of the recovering alcoholics enjoyed an odd sort of respect and admiration by members of the congre­ gation. A woman in one of my churches was assaulted in the middle of the morning in her own backyard. I got her to a therapist who specializes in working with victims of sexual violence. A few weeks into her recovery, she told me, “As part of my re­ covery, my therapist wants me to tell my story to someone who is not a member of the family.” I immediately began thinking of women in the congregation to whom she might tell the terrible thing that had happened to her. “I want to tell Harry Jones,” she said, naming a sometimes recovering, often not recovering, alcoholic in the congregation who had been in and out of a half dozen jobs while I had been his pastor. “Harry Jones!” I exclaimed. “I thought you would pick another women to tell. Why Harry?” “Because he knows what it’s like to go to hell, to have been robbed of the little dignity you have. Harry’s got nothing, just like me, so I think he can help me.” Only among a community which answers to the one who opened a sermon with “Oh how fortunate, how lucky, how blessed are the poor in spirit!” could a loser like Harry be a blessing to someone in great need. I trusted my congregation! They conned me into believing that they were progres­ sive, enlightened people who were making moral progress. They told me that they were sure and certain in their faith, that they were getting their act together, that they were getting a handle on their drinking problems and their high cholesterol. And then one November, they snuck into a booth, and when nobody was looking, they voted for an adulterous, casino owning prevaricator to be president! I don’t think I’ll ever be able to trust them again to be truly well-formed, dedicated, theologically astute disciples. Don’t tell me they don’t need a God who begins a sermon with “I’ve got

    Page 13

    good news for you spiritual losers! ” What a challenging word is this beatitude to those of us who think that the purpose of preaching is to spiritually enrich the congregation, to correct their errors, to give them better biblical information, to provide good answers to their deepest questions, or (in “progressive” churches) to suggest deeper, more honest questions whereby they can stump God. If Jesus is in the business of blessing the spiritually poor, then perhaps the best sermons are those that mess up our questions and answers, befuddle us in our spiritual conceit, and leave us empty handed, spiritually speaking, naked before God. Luther said that Jesus didn’t intend for anybody actually to follow the dictates of the Sermon on the Mount like offering the other cheek to be slapped, forgiving and praying for our enemies. The function of Jesus’ call to perfection, theorized Luther, is to raise the spiritual bar so high than nobody could chin up to Jesus’ righteousness. We would learn the futility of our “filthy rags of righteousness ” and thereby be driven, empty handed, into the arms of a merciful God.5 Though I disagree with Luther’s characterization of the ethics commended in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, Luther makes a good point. If you happen to be feeling rather fat and fit, spiritually speaking, at the beginning of the Sermon, by the time Jesus gets to the end with his calls to forgive enemies and not to refuse those who beg from you, everybody looks spiritually poor. In this beatitude Jesus blesses those who fail to match what is needed to stand before God, those who know their failure. Those who are sure that they are righteous and spiritually full are the real sinners (Lk 18:13). The dispirited are blessed, and the inspired find themselves distant from who God really is (Matt 7:21-23). The poor before God are made rich in Christ; those who think they’re rich miss the kingdom. As Stanley Hauerwas says, “To be poor does not in itself make one a follower of Jesus, but it can put you in the vicinity of what it might mean to discover the kind of poverty that frees those who follow Jesus from enslavement to the world. ”6 The highlight of worship in the thousand Sundays I led worship in Duke Chapel was communion, the Eucharist, when the congregation came forward and held out their empty hands to receive the mystery of the Body and the Blood of Christ. Open, receptive, empty hands do not come naturally, particularly in this culture. What comes naturally is the tight-fisted grip, holding on to what you’ve got, zealously clinging to what you’ve accumulated as insurance against the incursions of God. That’s why the church must teach us how to be spiritually inept, open handed, and empty. I would whisper to my flock, as they came forward to receive the elements of the Eucharist, “I know you have your Master’s. You have an impressive list of achieve­ ments in your life, but in this moment, when you hold out your empty hands, you look needy, hungry, like a dependent little child, like you just can’t go on without being given a gift that you can’t earn, like you need a God who blesses the spiritually inept. ” Church as good as it gets, the blessedness of spiritual impoverishment.

    Notes 1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, translated by Reinhard Krause, Charles C West, and Douglas W Stott (Minneapolis, Fortress, 2005), 231. 2 William James, Psychology, Briefer Course (New York: Collier, 1962), 123.

    Page 14

    3 Stanley M. Hauerwas, Matthew, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press), 61. 4 Stephen E. Strang, God and Donald Trump (Lake Mary, Florida: Charisma Media, 2017). 5 Thus, Frederick Dale Bruner, Matthew l-12:The Christ Book, A Historical/theological Commentary, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2007), 137, says “I believe it is the purpose of every command in the Sermon on the Mount to drive us back to the first beatitude. ” 6 Hauerwas, Matthew, 64.

  • Preaching Jesus Christ Today

    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.

    Page 22

    Preaching Jesus Christ Today*

    John 11:38-44

    Annette Brownlee

    Wycliffe College, Toronto, Canada

    Lazarus is dead. His sisters are weeping. Friends and neighbors have come to their house with their casseroles and cakes. Every group of people has customs surround­ ing death. At the very least, these rituals of food and phone calls, texts and stopping by keep us busy. They give us something to do when the bottom falls out of our lives. That’s what’s going on after the death of Lazarus. The house is full, neighbors coming and going. John writes that in the middle of this, Mary quickly gets up and leaves her house. The crowd thinks she’s going to Lazarus’s tomb to weep over her dead brother, and they follow. But Mary surprises them. Instead, she goes out to meet Jesus, whose arrival has been delayed. “If you had been here, my brother would not have died,” she says to him (John 11:32). She’s crying, her neighbors and friends are crying, and so is Jesus. They all go together to see the tomb: Mary, Jesus, the crowd from her house, folks they pick up along the way, small children from the village. It’s a mixed group gathered around Lazarus’s tomb. John describes it for us. Some are moved by Jesus. “See how he loved him,” they say (v. 36). Some are, at best, skeptical. “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” (v. 37). Some probably have never heard of Jesus. It’s a mixed crowd, like any family or town, like any funeral crowd. Lazarus’s tomb is a cave with a stone laid in front of it. It’s a lot like the one that will shortly be Jesus’ own. By this time, Martha, Lazarus’s other sister, has joined the growing and weeping crowd at the tomb. “Take away the stone,” Jesus says to Martha. “It’s been four days, Jesus,” Martha says. “It will smell terrible” (11:39). In response to her protest, Jesus says something that seems out of place in this story of grief and loss, neighbors, stench, and tears. He says, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” (v. 40). If you believed, you would see the glory of God. Here? In a tomb with a four-day-old corpse, Jesus tells us we are going to see God’s glory? It’s not surprising, is it, that John tells us that some members of the crowd were skeptical. So here’s my question for us. Help me answer it. Where in this story do we see God’s glory? We talk about God’s glory all the time in church. The whole earth is full of his glory, we sing. Our psalm today names Jesus as the King of glory. Glory is something we can see or at least apprehend. It is the reality of God, of who God is for the world, made visible. His powerful love brings into existence what is not, brings new life out of our broken lives and world, and brings about his purposes for creation. His glory is this life-giving love made visible. So, back to my question: where in this story do we see this—God’s glory? And here’s a second question that is important to ask for those of us who try to

    * This sermon, previously published by Annette Brownlee in Preaching Jesus Christ Today, copyright 2018, contains copyrighted material and is used by permission of Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group (http://www.bakerpublishinggroup.com).

    Page 23

    respond to God’s love as we go about our days: what are we supposed to do with what we see? Back to the story. After telling Martha that if she believes, she will see God’s glory, Jesus prays to his Father. It’s an odd prayer, don’t you think? Because Jesus doesn’t pray for dead Lazarus. He doesn’t pray for his heartbroken sisters. He doesn’t even pray for himself. Instead he prays on behalf of the folks who seem the least in need of prayer: the crowd, the whole motley group who have left their cas­ seroles and cakes in Mary’s house and followed her and Jesus to Lazarus’s tomb. Listen to what Jesus prays: “Father, I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me” (11:42). He prays for them and then responds to the situation that has brought them to this tomb, Lazarus’s death. You know what Jesus does. With a loud voice he cries, “Lazarus, come out!” (11:43). What happens? The stone has been rolled away, and in response to Jesus’s voice, Lazarus, who had died, comes out. He is in his burial clothes, which are strips of cloth bound around his hands, face, and feet. Then Jesus does this: with Lazarus standing in front of him, bound in his burial clothes, Jesus turns to the crowd. He turns to the gathered crowd of family, believers, skeptics, and everyone else—that is, those on whose behalf he has just prayed. He turns to them and says, “Unbind him, and let him go” (v. 44). There is something odd about Jesus calling to Lazarus in a loud voice, isn’t there? “Lazarus, come out!” Can dead men hear? Could Lazarus hear Jesus’s voice any more than the dry bones of Israel could hear Ezekiel preaching to them? Is this where we see God’s glory? Yes, certainly. God’s Word creates life out of nothing, just as God spoke into the formless void and brought about the heavens and earth out of nothing. Here that same Word made flesh speaks into the tomb of the dead Lazarus. Out of nothing, out of death itself, God brings life. Isn’t this who Jesus is—the resurrected one for all of us? How could this be anything other than God’s glory seen in Jesus? Now, there is more to the story, another detail so obvious that we move right past it. When Lazarus comes out from the tomb, where does he stand? Luke tells us he stands before the one who has called to him, Jesus. He stands before the one to whom the Father always listens. He stands, given new life, before the one the Father sent. But this is not all, is it? He stands before the crowd, which has followed Mary from her house to the tomb. The crowd includes family, onlookers, believers, skeptics, the neighborhood kids, and everyone in between, the crowd Jesus has just prayed for and has instructed to unbind Lazarus — Lazarus stands before them as well. Laza­ rus stands in front of everyone gathered around his tomb who has seen the glory of God. So can you see what’s going on? The new life Jesus gives Lazarus is not just for him, grateful as he might be. Or for his sisters. Or even for those who believe in Jesus. It is for everyone there. Sisters, skeptics, neighbors, and kids see in Lazarus the promise Jesus makes to us. The promise is this: after our deaths, we will stand, like Lazarus, before the one the Father has sent, Jesus Christ. Because through his own death, Jesus has made death a servant of life. This promise is our hope. It is the hope of God’s people across time, made first to Israel, and from Israel to the church, and from the church to all nations. It is the hope that carries us through the burial of our dead. We proclaim this as we bury them: “I know that my Redeemer liveth and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though this body be destroyed, yet I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold, who is a friend and not a stranger.”1

    Page 24

    So is this it as well? God’s glory? How could it not be? Seeing God face-to-face and realizing he is a friend and no stranger. Yes, our recognition of Christ as friend will certainly be glorious. Ah, but the story of Lazarus gives us an even fuller picture of what God’s glory will look like. And it helps us answer the second question I asked: when we see God’s glory—now —what are we supposed to do with it? How do we respond? How many of us have asked the following question to someone who (we hope) can give us an answer? When we die, will we see our loved ones? Will I see my wife? My brother who died as a child? Will I get to see my best friend? Today, here, Jesus answers that question. Lazarus stands before Jesus, who is his friend and not a stranger (Job 19:27). But he stands there also with the crowd that brought cakes and casseroles to Mary’s house and then followed her to his tomb. With the ones who witnessed the whole thing. With the ones Jesus tells to unbind Lazarus from his burial clothes. With the ones Jesus prays for. At the resurrection of the dead, will we see our loved ones? Jesus’ answer is yes, yes indeed—and not only your loved ones but your loved ones and those not so easy to love. Here is the fullness of God’s glory for us to apprehend. When we stand before God after our deaths, we will not stand alone. We will stand with the risen and ascended Christ. We will stand with our loved ones. And not only with our loved ones. Isn’t this, as Paul says in Ephesians 2, what Jesus came, lived, died, and rose for? To draw all people to himself? Isn’t this why, through his death, he broke down the dividing walls of hostility between peoples, made friends of strangers, neighbors of those who had been far off? Isn’t this what the Father sent him for, so that all things —all things in heaven and earth—may be made one in him? So it’s not surprising that when Lazarus stands before the one who has given him new life, a crowd gathers around him. Those he loves are there, to be sure; but as we heard, not only them. You see, right here—as Lazarus stands in front of Jesus, surrounded by the others —God points us to the place we are to look to see God’s glory. That place includes where we stand now and not only with our loved ones. Where we stand with neighbors, skeptics, kids, with those who share our faith, with those who scoff at it, and with those who have never heard of Jesus. I realize now that I once saw God’s glory in the strangest place: in an old, half-blind dog. I had parishioners in a long-standing Bible study who found it almost impossible to love each other. They’d known each other for years. One was a cranky, opinionated elderly woman who had been a nurse, and the others were an equally opinionated, somewhat inflexible couple, both doctors. They were at odds on everything: politics, the church, health care —all of which came out in the Bible study. Toward the end of her life, the elderly woman grew too weak to care for her dog. Her daughter couldn’t take him. She was distraught. This couple, who had sparred with her for so long, took her dog. They cared for it for the rest of its life. Each time I saw that dog, well-fed and groomed—each time I saw how happy that dog made them—I think I saw God’s glory. Why? Remember the promise Jesus makes to Martha when she tells him her brother is dead? “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” This couple knew they were bound to this difficult woman in Christ. They knew that death didn’t get them off the hook. We didn’t do so well with getting along, they told me, but here they were, still bound to this difficult woman through her old, half-blind dog. And loving him. That is what glory looks like, I think. Now, if I can see God’s glory in such a small act, imagine what is possible. Right

    Page 25

    here. As we stand now— not after our deaths—as we stand now with those we will stand with eternally. With those we find difficult to love. With those the world finds expendable. We don’t stand with them because it’s the right thing to do—that won’t get us very far. We stand with them because, with Mary and Martha, we believe Jesus is the resurrected one and he has bound us together, which means we are stuck with each other, now and after our deaths. Isn’t this why Christ has given us his life, so we have the strength and grace to stand with others, instead of ignoring them or running away? We stand and, joined to Christ, are not pushed over or knocked aside. What about those who live around our church, on this corner? Do they see God’s glory through us? What about our kids? They’re always watching. And our colleagues and friends? God’s glory? None of them will use that term. But we know what it is and where to look to see it. So if God gives us the eyes to recognize who will be standing with us when we see Jesus face-to-face—and there is going to be a crowd—don’t you think God wants us to begin to get to know them now? And love them now? In Christ we are already bound to them eternally. Believe it, he says to us, as he said to Martha. Believe it and begin to get to know them now. Stand with them now and you will be witnesses to my glory.

    Note 1 Book of Common Prayer, “Burial of the Dead: Rite II” (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1962), 491; cf. Job 19:25-26.

  • Good News to the Poor

    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.

    Page 31

    Good News to the Poor

    Peter Bynum Mount Pleasant Presbyterian Church, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina

    14Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. 15He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone. 16When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read,17and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: 18“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, 19to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 20And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Luke 4:14-21

    When I hi st began to tell people that I was leaving my law practice to go to semi­ nary, people started coming to me wanting to have all kinds of conversations. One that I remember very well was with a friend from Charlotte who pulled me aside and wanted to talk about a particular verse from scripture. It was Jesus’ teaching that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”1 He wanted to know what I thought it meant. It was clear this verse had been eating at him for a while, and I knew why. He was a very wealthy man, and this verse didn’t seem like very good news to him. To be honest, I don’t remember what I said to him. I probably hemmed and hawed about how money is not an evil in itself, but that it tends to do things to people. Looking back, I doubt I gave him much comfort. One of my main limitations was that scripture really doesn’t give us a whole lot of comfort on the disparity between the rich and the poor. The Gospel of Luke is particularly direct on this issue.2 God’s special concern for the poor is signaled right from the beginning, as Mary ponders the birth of Christ in Luke 1. “My soul magni­ fies the Lord,” she says, “and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant… .He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”3 The point is also clear in the Beatitudes of Jesus, which are included in the gospels of both Matthew and Luke. In Matthew, for example, Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”4 But in Luke’s version, Jesus says, “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”5 In Matthew, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”6 In Luke, “Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.”7 In short, whereas Matthew’s gospel tends to spiritualize or generalize poverty

    Page 32

    and hunger, Luke makes them completely and utterly literal. The Lukan Jesus is not talking about spiritual poverty; he is talking about people who have no money. The Lukan Jesus is not talking about spiritual hunger or emotional malaise; he is talking about people who haven’t eaten a good meal in a week, people who are physically hungry. And note that while Matthew’s Jesus seems to be talking about the poor or hungry in spirit as if they were not there (“theirs” is the kingdom of heaven, “they” will be satisfied), in Luke Jesus is talking directly to the people who are suffering. “Blessed are you… yours is the kingdom of heaven… you will be satisfied.” This stuff can be challenging for us to hear, because we are not poor. We just aren’t. There may be one or two exceptions, but I would say the vast majority of us—dare I even say 99% of us—are not poor. We might feel poor sometimes, but we are not literally poor. The median household income here in Mount Pleasant is about 56 percent higher than in the rest of the country.8 But beyond that, the truth is that even the poorest people in the U.S. and other developed countries “are, by global standards, extraordinarily rich.”9 Our perception of this fact seems to be clouded. According to a recent study, the average U.S. resident estimates that the median income around the world is about $20,000 a year. The true figure is about a tenth of that. The average income across the globe is only about $2,100 per year.1″ In the same way, most Americans assume that they are in the top 37 percent of wage earners around the world. The truth is that the vast majority of Americans are easily in the top 10 percent.11 We are among the elite. We are not poor. I am beginning to feel like my friend was really on to something. Maybe we all need to be a little more nervous about camels and needles’ eyes and the fact that the bar of faith could be a little higher for us, given the blessings of money and privilege that have been so graciously bestowed upon us. This seems especially true in light of what Jesus says in this morning’s passage from the fourth chapter of Luke. Welcomed home as a boy from the old village who has grown up and is making good, Jesus stands up in the synagogue and is given the scroll of Isaiah’s prophecy. He is given license to choose the text, and he turns to the section we now know as Isaiah 58-61. He reads selectively from those verses, saying, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to pro­ claim release to the captives and. recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressedgo free, 19to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” It would be hard to overstate the importance of this choice. These words from Isaiah are the mission statement of Jesus.12 How does he come? He comes with the power of the Holy Spirit, which has anointed him. Why has he come? He has come “to bring good news to the poor.” Not the poor in spirit, not the metaphorically poor, but The Poor. The people who are held captive by economic systems that oppress. I wish I had more time to catalog the many ways that the gospel of Luke contin­ ues to make this point. Luke is the only evangelist to include the story of the poor man Lazarus who gets stepped over and ignored every day by the rich man in purple linen. In the end, when Lazarus dies and his earthly pain is over, he is carried away by angels to join Abraham in heaven. When the rich man dies, he is left to languish in punishment and torment.13 Luke is also the only evangelist to include the teaching of Jesus that “from everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.”14

    Page 33

    Third grade was a long time ago, but I can still remember what happened in Mrs. Womack’s class when it was time to go to lunch. Mrs. Womack would go over to her desk and open her drawer to pull out a stack of white, laminated note cards. They were the free lunch tickets. Every day, she would hand them out to the same kids, and most of them were African American. I remember Bertha, whose desk was near mine, always got one. She would get her ticket and then line up right in front of me, and then our class would walk in our single hie line down the polished wood hallways of Cone Elementary School to lunch. I carried my metal “Welcome Back Kotter” lunch box with me, and Bertha carried with her the white, laminated symbol of her poverty—a poverty that she was born into—a poverty that she had done nothing to deserve, a problem that she could do nothing to solve. Matthew Dicks, an elementary school teacher turned novelist, was a lot like Bertha.15 He didn’t really know he was “poor” until he got to Mrs. Laverne’s fourth grade class and he was the only kid who got free lunch. Matthew says that once he figured out he was the poor kid in class, his top priority became hiding that fact. “All you want to do when you’re poor like that,” he said, “is to not let anyone else know. So you develop strategies to hide your [poverty] from the people around you. ” So when the Boy Scouts went camping, for example, he took newspaper with him. His sleeping bag was not heavy enough for winter camping, but he knew that home­ less people would sometimes stuff their clothing with newspaper to increase the insulation. He told the other Scouts that he just wanted to read the sports pages. Then, when they went to sleep, he would roll the paper into balls and stuff them into his bag to keep warm. “It wasn’t so bad, ” he said. “I viewed poverty as an adventure. It was a challenge. It was constantly trying to figure out a way to get through and succeed. ” And then one day Matthew and his friend Peter were riding bicycles back to Matthew’s house after school. They liked to race on their bikes, and those races were always close and competitive. But That day was different, because Peter had just got­ ten a new 10-speed bike. Matthew still had his old, rusty, iron Huffy that probably weighed about 60 pounds. As the two friends raced home, Peter quickly pulled ahead. Within 30 seconds, Peter had a 50-yard lead. Matthew dug in and starting pedaling harder—harder than he ever had before. His heart was pounding out of his chest. But it didn’t seem to matter. He just could not catch up. And Matthew couldn’t help but notice that Peter didn’t really seem to be trying all that hard. He was beating him handily, and barely breaking a sweat. “Up until that point, ” Matthew said, “I had had this idealized version of life, where effort, intelligence, and creativity and hard work will always overcome whatever material lacking you might have, whatever money you’ re lacking. But as I watched Peter go away, I realized that my problem was money. I was never going to own a 10-speed bike, and I was never going to catch Peter again. And I cried the whole ride home.” The Spirit has anointed me, Jesus says, to bring good news to the poor… to seek out those who are trapped by circumstances beyond their control, and to do the work that is necessary to set them free. We say we are “a missional church,” and it is true that we do some wonderful work for others in Christ’s name. We really do. But when Jesus opened the scroll and read his missional statement in Nazareth, he gave us a question that every disciple must ask of him or herself: Am I good news for the poor?

    Page 34

    Is my life good news to people who are hungry or homeless? Am I really paying at­ tention to the circumstances that condemn people to poverty and policies that hold them there? Am I being honest with myself and others about the advantages that I have had, advantages that start out as Welcome Back Kotter lunchboxes and 10-speed bikes, but multiply later into college educations, free access to markets and jobs, the ability to get a loan on a handshake. To be a disciple of Christ is to be sensitive to the ways that some of God’s people are being unfairly treated and oppressed, and bold in following Jesus into the work of setting them free, to not only speak good news to the poor, but to be good news to the poor. “What do you think?” my nervous friend wanted to know. “Is it really impossible for a rich person to enter into the kingdom of God?” No, it is not impossible. Jesus himself says that while we cannot imagine how a camel can go through the eye of a needle, “what is impossible for mortals is possible for God.” At the same time, Christ is very clear about his mission, and he leaves little room for us to talk ourselves around the core challenge of that mission. Christ is hrmly on the side of those who do not hold worldly power, who do not have worldly wealth, who are held captive by unjust circumstances they cannot control. To join with Christ is to join with them. May God give us the desire, the will, and the courage to be good news to the poor.

    Notes 1 Luke 18:25. 2 R. Allen Culpepper, “The Gospel of Luke,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible: Luke – John (Volume 9) Leander E. Keck, ed. (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1996), 105. 3 Luke 1:46-53. 4 Matthew 5:3. 5 Luke 6:20b. 6 Matthew 5:6. 7 Luke 6:21. 8 U.S. Census data, 2013-2017 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates. 9 Gautam Nair, “Most Americans vastly underestimate how rich they are compared with the rest of the world. Does it matter?” www.washingtonpost.com, August 23, 2018. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Earnest Hess, “Homiletical Perspective” on Luke 4:14-21, in Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 1, David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, Editors (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 287. 13 Luke 16:19-31. 14 Luke 12:48. 15 Matthew Dicks’s story comes from https://player.themoth.org/#/?actionType=ADD_AND_ PLAY&storyId=4280.

  • ‘By Grace We Have Been Saved’

    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.

    Page 41

    “By Grace We Have Been Saved”

    Ephesians 2:1-11

    Nibs Stroupe

    Decatur, Georgia

    My first real engagement with today’s passage in Ephesians was in our hi st church in Norfolk, where we led a Bible study on this passage. I remember groaning at this passage, which seemed to reflect the same old violent, white Southern theology that I grew up with: “I am dead in my trespasses”— I am terrible, and God is violently angry at me and wants to kill me, but Jesus Christ took the punishment for me instead, and I am saved.” I also wondered about the “primitive” nature of this passage. Who in the world is “the prince of the power of the air”? The devil? Someone else? The hist part of today’s passage does sound like it comes right out of Southern white Christianity, so bound to an angry God and to violence and domination. It gets to death right off: “You were dead through your trespasses and sins.” For the hist 3 verses of today’s passage, the author of Ephesians pounds on the Gentiles, using phrases like “trespasses and sin,” “disobedient,” “passions of the flesh,” “children of wrath,” “power of the prince of the air. ” Then in verse 4, the author shifts. Hav­ ing beaten us down into the hies of hell, we are lifted back up, through God’s great love: “By grace you have been saved. ” Even though we are captive to death, God is rescuing us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, even as we seem to be under control of the power of the prince of the air. I want to look at this passage today to unpack its meaning for us. I want to look hi st at the nature of our captivity under the “power of the prince of the air. ” In using this phrase, the author of Ephesians is likely thinking of a personality, a being like the devil, but that is a difficult concept for modern ears. Whether we believe in the devil or not, though, we must not lose sight of the wisdom that is here in this metaphor. I grew up being “schooled” in sin, learning that the important sins and trespasses were personal and individual: anxiety, lust, greed, envy, sloth—and that these could be conquered and defeated by trusting in God and by strengthening my will. “Buck up, Nibs, and get your willpower going and growing!” But as I grew to be a young adult, I began to discover a deeper level of sin in my life, a much more difficult level. It was tough enough to deal with my “personal” sins, but now I began to discover a more profound and troubling level of sin: sexism and materialism and racism and homophobia and domination, to name just a few. My discovery of this deep level of sinfulness led to a whole new level of struggle in my heart and mind, and I began to reconsider the sophistication of this phrase, “the power of the prince of the air.’’The author of Ephesians recognizes our caught-ness, our captivity to the very powers that make us hurt ourselves and hurt others and hurt God. I learned that I had grown up in a river of racism and sexism and materialism and homophobia and militarism. And the sophistication of the phrase “power of the prince of the air” is that it recognizes that the magnetic pull of these forces comes through those whom we love and trust. I learned all of these forces not just from “bad” people, but from really decent people who were trying to teach me how to live, indeed how to survive. This idea of the

    Page 42

    “prince of the ail” recognizes that we breathe this stuff into our perceptual apparatus and into our imaginations. But we have to breathe in order to live, so this idea of the “power of the prince of the air” reminds us that the life-sustaining air brings us life and death. The Supper Club just finished discussing Jim Grimsley’s book. How I Shed My Skin. It is a white man’s memoir about his childhood in the segregated South.

    In particular, I was raised to keep black people in their place, and to see to it that they stayed there. My purpose here and now is to examine how good people perpetuated this in the raising of their children and in the living of their lives in my part of the South. Or, to be more personal, my purpose here is to examine how, as a child, I learned bias against black people from the good white people around me. For there is no one else from whom I could have taken this lesson.1

    In his book, he indicates that there was no particular time when he took classes in white supremacy or male domination. He simply “breathed” it in under the power of the prince of the air. Long before we know it, long before we have any idea about it, we allow the fallen powers of the world to define us and to define others. From early on, we learn that girls and women are mainly bodies for men. From early on, we learn that the purpose of men is to dominate. From early on, we learn that white people are superior; all others are inferior. From early on, we learn that money is what brings us life. From early on, we learn that guns and violence bring peace and security. From early on, we learn that gay and lesbian people are abnormal and even abhorrent. And as I discovered how much I believed in white supremacy and male domina­ tion and the centrality of money and the redemptive power of violence, I began to see a bit of movement in my relationship to this passage in Ephesians. While I recognize that I had these powers—“the power of the prince of the air”—deeply embedded in me, I thought like a lot of white liberals do, that I could shuck them off much as I used to shuck corn on our back porch to get the leaves off. Then just like the ear of corn, the real me, the gleaming one, would shine forth. But I also had to remember that in shucking the corn, I would often find a corn worm that had burrowed its way deep into the corn itself, and that part of the corn had to be cut off or even the entire ear of corn thrown away. It was only in coming to be pastor at Oakhurst that I began to discover how deeply race and racism has affected and infected my life, and then I began to “get it,” to understand the meaning of the hist verses of today’s passage, of “the power of the prince of the air.” It has also helped me to comprehend the idea of “children of wrath.” In 2010, we saw the rise of the Tea Party, the voice of mostly white people who spoke up in anger and wrath. We are seeing that voice rise again in response to Donald Trump’s candidacy. There is a deep, visceral reaction as the categories of power are challenged just a little bit: a black president, women’s leadership, immigration, healthcare for more people, a movement towards equity for gay and lesbian people. These steps to expand leadership and share power outside the circle of white men has led to a deep feeling of wrath. In this movement, I’ve begun to “feel” this passage in Ephesians with its emphasis on being dead, on being children of wrath. And it is scary.

    Page 43

    But I’ve also had to remember that this passage doesn’t end at verse 3. It makes a dramatic shift in verses 4-5: “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved.” Just as I’ve been forced by this passage to reconsider the nature of sin, I’ve also been motivated to reconsider the nature of God—because I grew up with an angry, violent God, a white male god ready and even eager to use violence to keep order, the God who preferred to kill his own Son rather than to allow the power of love to redeem and liberate me and all other humans who were lost in captivity. And so, as I re-read this letter to the Ephesians, I rediscovered an alternate view of God here, a God not centered on wrath and violence and death, but rather a God presented to us in the Beloved. When we looked at the beginning of Ephesians, the author refers to Jesus Christ as “the Beloved.” “He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.” It is the only time in the Bible that this word Beloved is used for Jesus Christ. This passage in Ephesians emphasizes over and over again the love of God. We are being asked to switch from the angry, punishing, violent God to the Beloved, who is rich in mercy. The author of Ephesians reminds us that God doesn’t intend for us to remain under the control of “the power of the prince of the air”: that God doesn’t intend for us to remain in the morass of captivity. God intends for us to move towards liberation and love. The author states that “God is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which God loved us.” The Greek word used for “rich” here means very, very rich so we can imagine the depth of God’s mercy for us. The word mercy comes from an Old Testament word hesed, which means “lovingkindness.” It means the same kind of commitment that a mother has for a child whom she loves. The author of Ephesians asserts that God is not only bending towards us in Jesus Christ, but that God is also moving into our lives, seeking us out, calling to us, longing for us to live our lives based in love and not in fear and anxiety and captivity and domination. The author emphasizes that we are asked to hear this great news, and he describes our response as “by grace you have been saved by faith.” Here he emphasizes that our lives are a gift, that our ability to love is a gift, and that we are asked to believe that we are loved. By saved, he is not talking so much about getting into heaven when we die but rather re-orienting our lives from being centered on fear and death and meaninglessness to being centered on gratitude and love and justice. As our author puts it in verse 4, “God made us come alive in Christ.” I remember many moments in my own life where I discovered how captured I am to the powers—and in these moments, I felt a great gift of release, of liberation, as I began to re-discover my own humanity and the humanity of others. I began to come alive, just a little bit. “By grace you have been saved by faith” is a phrase that our author uses four times in one way or another in this passage. The emphasis on our faith at the end of the phrase is not so much an action on our part as it is a re-orientation, a decision to try to believe that God loves us, that we are loved, and that we, too, are asked to live in love. The author of Ephesians emphasizes that we are mired in captivity, deeper than we had ever imagined. But the author also stresses that the Beloved is offering us love and liberation and a way out. We are asked to hear about this offer, to seek to

    Page 44

    believe it, and to seek to live it out. The rest of this letter to the Ephesians is a guide to shifting our lives from wrath and captivity to love and liberation, and as we all know, it is no easy journey. As the momma put it to her son in Langston Hughes’s powerful poem “Mother to Son,” “Well, son, I’ll tell you, life for me ain’t been no crystal stair—it’s had tacks in it and splinters and boards torn up.”2 It ain’t no crystal stair, but let’s try it out a bit this week and in the weeks to come. Get up each day and seek to start in gratitude for the day and for our lives. For what are we grateful? If we are not grateful, what is preventing us? Anxiety, resentment, depression, injustice, violence? And let us seek to find the voice of the Beloved to move into our blockage, to help us move from anxiety and wrath to love and mercy and gratitude. “By grace you have been saved through faith.” The Beloved wants us to find the power of love. May we hear Her voice and know that power.

    Notes This sermon is from the book Deeper Waters: Sermons for a New Vision by Nibs Stroupe, edited by Collin Cornell, and published by WipfandStock, in 2017. It is reprinted with their permission. The book is available from WipfandStock at https: //wipfandstock.com/deeper-waters.html. 1 Jim Grimsley, How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2015), 74-75. 2 Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Knopf, 2004), 30.

  • Love: What Are You Waiting For?

    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.

    Page 23

    Love: What Are You Waiting For?

    Luke 1:26-38

    Jessica Renee Patchett

    Central Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia

    One Sunday evening, I joined the Covenant youth group for some holiday fun. We made glittery ornaments, ate too much sugar, and compared notes about which ugly sweater we’d wear to the annual party. After a while, we broke into groups, and our contemporary worship director gave us a challenge: Write a new song for Advent using a popular tune and our own lyrics. I’m pretty sure I was more excited than the youth about this, because I do this sort of thing all the time in my own head (and no, I won’t sing one of my originals for you). We broke into groups, and our group received the Advent theme of love. We settled on a tune— “All You Need Is Love,” by the Beatles, obviously. Then I asked the youth in my group, “OK, so what is love?” ‘Unconditional,” someone said. “OK,” I said. “What does unconditional love look like?” Lots of silence. A few people turned to Google. One said, “Siri, show me love!” I said, “OK, how about parents waiting in a carpool line?” “Oh yeah!” they said. “I don’t know how my mom doesn’t go crazy.” “Alright what else,” I asked? More silence. So I asked again, “How about taking friends a bowl of soup when they’ re sick?” “Huh.” they said. ‘That would be a really nice thing to do. Do people do that?” Apparently, our kids aren’t the only ones a bit confused about the love-language of soup-giving. Alexandra Solomon is one of Northwestern LIniversity’s most popular professors, a licensed clinical therapist, and a researcher in the areas of marriage, family, sex, and relationships. One afternoon she was with graduate students in talk therapy group and engaged her students in a conversation that went much like this:

    Dr. Solomon said, “OK, tell me, if we’ve been spending a lot of time together and I get sick, are you bringing me soup?” Every single person in the group said no. So, Dr. Solomon asked, “Why not?” One student responded, “Well, as an individual, you’ re supposed to have so much together before you can get into those kinds of relationships with other people where you’ re taking care of them.” “Huh,” Dr. Solomon said. “So, what do you have to have together before you’ re ready to take someone soup? You all have degrees and loans and jobs and pay rent. What are you waiting for?” One man said, “Growing up, there’s immense pressure from parents and other authority figures to focus on the self. It’s hard to find time for relationships when the baseball team practices at 6:30, school starts at 8:15, drama rehearsal is at 4:15, the soup kitchen starts serving at 6, and, oh yeah, your screenplay needs completion.” One woman agreed, saying she finds this attitude that love and relation­ ships are secondary to academic and professional success hard to shake. “Before, it was, well, I need to finish school. But next, I’ll need to get a

    Page 24

    practice going. Then, it’ll be I need to do this and this, and then I’ll think about love. But by 30, we wake up and are like, ‘What is love? What’s it like to be in a loving relationship outside your family?’ ”

    Dr. Solomon hears this all the time, particularly among affluent young adults. They’ re simply unpracticed and unsure, practically speaking, about what goes into adult relationships, not just romantic ones but friendships too. Last week, as George W. Bush eulogized his father, a remarkably hard task for anyone, he expressed gratitude for his father teaching him about such things. He remembered something his father had said at his inauguration:

    We cannot hope to leave our children only a bigger car, a bigger bank ac­ count. We must give them a sense of what it means to be a loyal friend, a loving parent, a citizen who leaves his home and neighborhood and town better than he found it. What do we want the men and women who work with us to say when we are no longer there? That we were more driven to succeed than anyone around us? Or that we stopped to ask if a sick child had gotten better and stayed a moment there to trade a word of friendship.

    It seems that President Bush had a sense thirty years ago that our society was strug­ gling with where modern love fits into our market-driven lives. But I wonder if we don’t put the stuff of love and relationships behind other things on our to-do lists not just because we’ re so driven to succeed, but because work and professional pursuits carry less risk than cultivating the relationships of love we long to enjoy. It’s not hard to see that one of our deepest, most primal fears, one that begins in our cribs, is that when we cry out into the world for love, we won’t receive care in return. It starts early and it really doesn’t go away. One of you here at Covenant who’s just a few years older than I am confessed the truth of it to me one day when you said, “God made babies cute so people would want to take care of them. God made a big mistake when he didn’t make us elderly people cute too.” For the record, I don’t think beauty is only found in the young, but I get it. All of us have felt unlovely or have feared being left alone. We wonder if we’ve done something that makes us unloveable. We’ve stood at the edge of a chasm of pain after someone has hurt us and wondered how long we’ 11 have to wait for things to be good again. Others of us have lost a dear one through death or divorce, and we’ re literally just cut off from a past life that can’t be rebuilt. It’s not exactly the stuff of Mariah Carey Christmas love songs, but in fact, this gets right at the heart of the Christmas story, because these are exactly the kinds of places in our lives where God’s love is just waiting to be born anew. Consider the story we read today about Mary, whom we know as the mother of Jesus. We meet her at a time in her life that was the very definition of the Facebook status “It’s com­ plicated.” She was betrothed to a man named Joseph, which means that she was promised in marriage to him as a young bride, but she hadn’t left her parents’ home to go and live with him yet. Mary lived in a very small town called Nazareth, where most people in the community were probably kin to each other. In the ancient world, it might have been a bit like Tar Heel town in Bladen County. Population 100. Half an hour drive to

    Page 25

    Fayetteville. Home to an enormous pig processing plant. Unemployment at 25%. I don’t know how the people of Tar Fleel town see their home, but I am pretty sure that people from Charlotte don’t see it as enviable. The same was true of Nazareth. Josephus, a hrst-century Jewish historian from the Galilee, writes of 45 towns in the region and never mentions Nazareth. The Talmud, the collected writings from Jew­ ish rabbis in the ancient world, mentions 63 towns in Galilee, but never mentions Nazareth. A town that did get a lot of mention near to Nazareth was Sepphoris, the finan­ cial and cultural capital of the region in Jesus’ time. Sepphoris had great schools, a bustling market, beautiful villas with mosaic floors, and jobs. It was where many of us who worship at Covenant might have lived. Sepphoris was likely where the people of Nazareth went to find service work. They’d walk an hour for manual labor or housekeeping in the beautiful villas and schools, and then walk an hour back to their hillside homes. By the way, when I say hillside homes, I don’t mean mountain houses on stilts. I mean many of the people of Nazareth lived in caves because they were affordable housing. They didn’t require purchased or processed materials to build. Of course, many people in the world still live in caves. Some because their families have lived subsistence lifestyles since the beginning of time. Others, such as families I’ve met from outside of Jerusalem and Kabul, once had beautiful homes built over genera­ tions of farming and selling the fruits of their labor. But in the last century, occupying armies have destroyed their homes and made it unsafe to work their land, and they had nowhere to go but underground. They were cut off. That was part of Mary’s family history. In fact, her town’s name bears the evidence of it. In Hebrew, the root word netzer means branch or shoot. Have you ever seen a stump of a tree that has been cut down, but out of the side, a little twig has started to grow? That’s a netzer. It’s the thing that grows out of a stump into a new tree. The people who settled in those hillside caves that Mary lived in but we would not envy didn’t name their town “The way-out, good-for-nothing-but-a-pig-processing-plant town.” They named their town, “Netzer, nasareth, the shoot,” as in the words of Isaiah,

    A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.

    Mary was a proud netzerean: yes, a girl who grew up in a cave; yes, a teenage bride betrothed to a local man likely her elder; yes, almost certainly illiterate with no formal education; yes, a member of the anawim, those others called “the poor.” But Mary was also one who knew that good things came out of Nazareth, things like loving parents and kind neighbors, people who walked humbly with their God and watched for good things to grow out of even old cut off stumps.

    Page 26

    This model of faith was so compelling that in some circles, early Christians were called Nazarenes because they followed the man Jesus of Nazareth. Some of those early Christians made their way to southern India and invited others to join them. And when I visited Kerala, in southern India, I met Christians who told me they were part of this group, the Nasrani. Why make such a big deal of where Jesus came from and who Mary was? Well, isn’t it interesting that the central figure of our faith, the one we call teacher, savior, lord, was taught the ways of the world by an illiterate mother who slept each night on the floor of a cave? When God was considering who might be a good provider, parent, and guardian for her son, apparently money, security, education, though all fine things, weren’t the core criteria. It wasn’t a risk-free, squeaky-clean life with a clear-cut way for love to be born into her life. It was a nasrani, a nazarene, one who trusted that even out of a cut off stump of a life, with God, love could be born anew and even flourish. It seems that in our society, where we struggle with where love fits in with market priorities, we may need more of this trust, this faith that love can make a home in any life. This fall, I got connected with the Galilee Center here in Charlotte. If you visited the Alternative Gift Market last week, you may have seen knitted hats and bags at their table. They connected me with a family who had moved to Charlotte in recent months through the UN refugee resettlement program. This was a family of eight lives in a three-bedroom apartment across town, and I spent time with the Mom and her six girls every Thursday evening. One night at sunset, when the mom went to her bedroom to pray, the girls closed ranks on me like we were at a sleepover and the parents had finally gone to bed. They showed me a bin of plastic bottles someone had brought them and asked me what to do with them. I considered telling them it was just unnecessary petroleum in a world of climate change, but they were teenagers desperate to fit into their new schools, so I told them about conditioner and how to use it. They asked me about my diet, because they had noticed that American women were skinny and must not eat very much. I said, didn’t they notice that I ate whatever their mother put in front of me? But then came the kicker. They said, “When we go to school wearing our head coverings and girls notice that we are the people who pray five times a day, they don’t like us. They don’t want to talk to us and be our friends.” Then they just looked at me, as if to say, “What’s wrong with your people?” I said, “I’m really sorry. That must be so frustrating. I know you want to have friends at school. You are smart, beautiful, fun, kind, and anyone would be lucky to have you as friends. Keep trying?” They said, “Yes. We will keep trying.” But I know and you know how hard it is to keep trying when you reach out into the world hoping to make a connection of friendship and love and people don’t reach back in kind. You feel cut off. When I left them that evening, the girls were studying math I never learned, speaking in four languages, communicating with relatives around the world, snug­ gling with their baby sisters, and taking breaks from their studies to practice English with their mother—a woman whom no one else had ever taught to read. These girls had a faith like Mary’s that love and vitality could be reborn in their crowded new home here in Charlotte. So, I prayed that when they would touch their foreheads to the ground, the love of God would be reborn in their hearts, so that they

    Page 27

    would know that they are loved for who they are. And I prayed that when they walk into their schools, the love of God would be reborn in the hearts and minds of those they meet, so that they could receive the friendship and kindness and care they were so desperately waiting for. In this Advent season, we look to God’s saving grace for all of us who wait for a fuller experience of love in our lives: for those of us who can’t compete, and those who have no practice in the ways of love and relationships, for those who have tried and failed, for those who have been cut off from the love they knew, and particularly for the meek of the earth who bear the brunt of our not only messy, but often violent human life and long to see the fruits of love flourish in their lives again. And we can trust that the love of God will be reborn into all of our lives. For we remember that love was reborn into the life of a young illiterate woman. Love was reborn into the life of a woman who, like her son, grew up like a netzer, a young shoot, like a root out of dry ground. She had no form or majesty that we should look at her, nothing in her appearance that we should desire to be like her. Or rather, there was nothing in her appearance that we should desire to be like her until Gabriel said, “Hey Mary, God loves you beyond measure, will be kind to you, and has a very important role for you in the history of the world.” And after that, when people have seen the face of Mary, we have seen the face of God. We’ve thought, what an enviable person of faith, a model for having the courage to make all other concerns secondary to the task of loving those whom God has given us to love. The invitation of Christmas, when we celebrate the incarnation of God in hu­ man form, is to see the face of God in every human form—in those we have seen as lovely and those we have thought to be unlovely, perhaps even ourselves. It’s a time when we remember that God holds us all in equal significance, each of us loved and graced no more or less than anyone else. We don’t have to be perfect to be deserving of love. We don’t have to have it all together or know exactly how to do it to give love well. We can be who we are, because complicated, work-in-progress people and places aren’t where love goes to die. They’re precisely where God’s love goes to be reborn. So, I’d like to share an Advent invitation with you from my LIptown Bible Study group — the challenge they offered themselves after reading the story of Mary this week. It’s easy to go through the motions of the season, they said. To do all the holiday things and expect the same things to happen. But Mary allowed something wildly unexpected and disruptive to captivate her. She made time to listen, to be in awe, and to wonder about what God might be up to in her life. “Perhaps,” my Bible study friends said, “we should take time to do precisely these things each day.” Perhaps those of us who have a relative degree of privilege and self-sufficiency (which all of us in that room did) should allow ourselves to be overshadowed, overtaken, and transfigured by an opportunity to love selflessly. So, whether it’s welcoming someone far from home, teaching someone to read, asking for forgiveness, reminding someone she’s lovely, or taking a sick neighbor a bowl of soup, let love be born in you in a new way. And I imagine that someone in this weary world will rejoice and say, “Oh! This is just the gift of love I’ve been waiting for.”

  • Words from Faithful & Fractured, Bookended wth an Essay on Preaching Easter

    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.

    Page 39

    Words from Faithful & Fractured, Bookended with

    an Essay on Preaching Easter

    Jason Byassee

    Vancouver School of Theology, Vancouver, Canada

    Dear Preacher, You are preparing to preach Easter once again. This is the reason you got into ministry: you were convinced that God raises the dead, and you wanted to be part of the raising. You knew it would be hard, that people could be mean, that the money would be minimal, but you also knew Jesus asks us to bear a difficult cross. You were up for it. You still are. So why is preparing to preach Easter such a slog sometimes? It might be that you have preached it so many times you’ re out of stuff. Easter is a whole season of nearly two months’ worth of weeks, and if s hard to be up for that every year. I remember an older mentor complaining about hitting the woman at the well text in the lectionary for the 8th time in her career. She was out of stories about Samaritans and Jews and salvation and living water. How much more so when Easter seasons get to stacking up over the decades? What’s worse is you may feel guilty about all of this. Easter is the heart of Chris­ tian faith. So why does it invite an annual eye roll? The church folks can’t know this. Maybe even spouses and close clergy colleagues can’t know it. To confess “Easter bores me” would be like denying climate science or walking out on a marriage: you only do it if you’ re serious, and ready for serious rejection. If I have described you well, dear reader and gentle preacher, then my colleague Rae Jean Proeschold-Bell and I wrote Faithful & Fractured just for you. It is a book for clergy and for anyone who cares about clergy. It presents the best research we have to date on the status of clergy health. Rae Jean and other scientific-types did the research. I write around their work, patching in with anecdotes and personal experi­ ences. Normally the latter is all we have on clergy health (“Wow, my colleagues look even worse than I do!”). But the plural of anecdote is not data. Now we have data. Rae Jean and friends studied the health of Methodist ministers in North Carolina over several years and compared it to North Carolinians generally (not a healthy bunch, that). The bad news hist: we are in worse health than the average North Carolinian. And that, fair friends, is hard to do. My state is known for a lot of things: slavery, tobacco, illicit pot, barbeque, diabetes. We watch a lot of basketball, but it’s not clear we keep on playing it. Anyway we’ re not a particularly healthy state. And Methodist ministers are worse off health-wise than their neighbors. We eat worse, exercise less, have higher blood pressure, higher stress, rounder bellies, the works. The anecdotes tell a truth. We’ re bad off. And we live longer than the average North Carolinian. Put that in your pipe and smoke it (metaphorically, please). Rae Jean and scientist friends don’t trust this finding. They say it will level off. There is no way for people to be unhealthier and live longer at the same time. Ministers used to be healthier than populations generally, as far as we can tell with limited data.

    Page 40

    We were well educated, had good access to health care, and died less often in accidents and had less venereal disease. Being boring has its benefits. But that was before the onset of cheap, easy-to-acquire calories and more sedentary lifestyles generally, air conditioning, and driving as the only form of transport. Where I’m from, in the US South, folks used to know how to work a long day in a held or garden. They had calloused hands, bad backs and knees, but when they sat down to eat, they’d earned the calories in that fried chicken. Now we still eat that way without the work. This is not a good combination. Plus, as a pastor, every gathering has food. And if you skip somebody’s contribution to the potluck, we fear they’ 11 notice and feel hurt. Plus we don’t allow ourselves many outlets. We don’t drink or chew or go with girls who do, the old saying goes, so we eat. Too much. And yet we live longer. I like to say that’s because the church is so healthy for you; spending as much time in it as we clergy do offsets the terrible health effects of our industry. Because joining a church is really, really good for you. If you can convince a 21-year-old to join a church, that person will live, on average, seven years longer. Find me something else she or he can do to produce that sort of outcome! Rae Jean and others are cautious about that sort of number. They can’t be sure whether folks who are natural joiners aren’t the ones who join churches and so see the “benefit” they would have seen had they joined Kiwanis or a Kung-Fu club. Spending our lives with other people is good for us. It makes us happier, healthier, more fulfilled. Plus, if you go down with a heart attack, you’re more likely to be with other people or be noticed as missing and found on the floor, not-dead-yet. Researchers are good at explaining away anomalies so as to avoid magical thinking. That’s their job. As a preacher of Easter, my job is magical thinking. We think a dead rabbi got out of a grave on the way to leading all creation out of a grave. So it doesn’t surprise me at all that church is good for you, seven years good for you even. (It pleases me that this is like 1 /10th of a natural life span. Tithe and you’ll get a tithe of your life back!) In the gospel, health and salvation are indelibly linked. Jesus is a hrst-century Jewish faith healer and exorcist before he is anything else. His healings are signs of the outbreaking of God’s kingdom. The eucharist was spoken of in the ancient church as the “medicine of immortality” from very early days. There is a reason the most emotionally moving parts of our liturgy have to do with prayers for healing: anoint­ ing with oil, prayers for the sick, the works. We all love someone who is ill. We are all going to die ourselves. There is no way off this train. To know that Christ is on it with us, and indeed will undo death and raise the dead, is a hope so spectacular we hardly dare believe it most of the time. It is appropriate to struggle to find words to preach on Easter. It is God we’ re talking about. There are entirely too many cheap words about God afoot in our world. Struggle away: it is a worthwhile fight against shoddiness, shabbiness, glib toothy happy-faced Christianity. We follow a man on a cross, carrying a cross of our own. But that is not the final word. Not ever. One key image in our book comes from St. Irenaeus in the ancient church. He speaks of the glory of God as a human being “fully alive.” He is thinking hist of Jesus Christ, the most fully alive one, the source of life itself. But then derivatively he is thinking of those joined to Christ in baptism and becoming like him in holi­ ness. Jesus Christ is “the life that really is life,” in one of scripture’s most delightful phrases (1 Tim. 6:19). So why do so many of Christ’s servants among the clergy carry themselves as if in a way of death, rather than life? There are complex reasons for

    Page 41

    this that we delve into in the book. But one theological reason is that the life “that is really life” is not here yet in full. Death still reigns. Disease still intervenes. We tell stories of miracles and pray for more of them in our midst, but we don’t hold our breaths. And ministers show the “groaning” of this world in our bodies a bit more than our neighbors do (Ro. 8:22). There are versions of Christianity afoot that suggest enough belief will make for favor both financially and physically, as if God were a Pez dispenser and all you have to do is believe hard enough to make God do what you want. The Bible tells another story. God creates the world glorious and beautiful. Hu­ manity breaks the only rule we have ten minutes into our existence. And God gets busy restoring what we ruin right away. Christians can explain every ray of goodness in our world: God never ceases being good; creation never stops being wonderful, even if marred. And we can explain every ounce of sadness in our world: these are groans on the way to the new creation God promises. Christian faith has to be up front and honest about both the way the world is and the way God will one day make it. So preachers need to engage in what Otis Moss III calls “blue note preaching”: it can sing the blues over the hash we make of the world. Its music allows us to feel deeply the sorrow of the ones singing and playing and being described in the music. And then we can find joy along with the blue notes, positive emotion alongside the negative. As one blues musician said, “I took the energy I usually use to mope, and I wrote a song instead.” The gospel is not that there is no cross; it is that there is a resurrection after that cross.1 One suggestion to explore in Easter preaching is leaving a bit of the darkness in the story intact. Easter is a brilliant light, but not all darkness is irradiated yet. There is no light in this world without just a touch of darkness in it; just as there is no dark­ ness yet without at least a “thread of grace.”2 Some folks only come to church on special occasions like Easter, much to the frustration and chagrin of us professional religious-types (though I begrudge Chreasters less than those who turn up only for fake holy days like Mother’s Day and July 4). If the only thing folks hear from us on Easter is about the light, we’ve missed the story. What darkness remains? What tombs are still filled? (hint: most of ours, excepting Jesus’ alone). In the logic of Faithful & Fractured, even the healthiest ministers and people die young sometimes; even the coarsest in self-care sometimes push through well past the Bible’s hoped-for “70 years, 80 if we are strong.” Another angle would be to preach on friendship. Jesus spends the last chunk of the Gospel of John opining on the subject, in the presence of friends who will soon abandon, deny, or betray him.3 One of the few times Jesus mentions a person’s name in the gospel of John is his famous address of Mary in the resurrection story of John 20. His mother gets no name. The writer of the gospel gets no name. Mary does. The friend searching frantically for a dead body hears instead her name spoken again in a voice she had thought forever silenced. There is a darkness in every human friend­ ship. I think daily of friendships I lament having lost. Yet there is light in that friend­ ship exists at all, as a sign of God’s goodness. Friendship restored even after death is an audacious hope of the resurrection gospel. Most audacious of all is the claim that Jesus calls us friends. God will not have slaves or subjects. God will only have partners, “equals” even, companions, friends. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

    Page 42

    In Faithful & Fractured one of our key recommendations to those who love pas­ tors is to see to the quality of their friendships. Are they spending time with people who have loved them for years? Do you praise them and their work when their friends turn up for worship? Are they properly resourced to hnd time away with friends for retreat, pilgrimage, study, and prayer? I don’t just mean vacation. I mean the sort of friendship about which Jesus speaks in John 13-17 and then demonstrates with his resurrection. Friends are those who call something better out of us than we thought possible, with whom we love a common good, without whom we are diminished. As a pastor I hnd friendships with fellow clergy across the world the most sustaining good in my life besides my immediate family. The church needs to see those friend­ ships as integral to their pastor’s health, to celebrate them, ask about them, see to their flourishing. Your pastors will be as happy as their friendships are healthy, and vice-versa. A hnal suggestion for a fresh approach to Easter is this: focus on the food. “Breakfast is ready, ” according to the raised Jesus, cooking on the beach for the hshing disciples.4 Jesus eats again with disciples who had abandoned and betrayed and restores table fellowship that they, and death, had fractured. Ever since, Christians have gathered at table to feast with and on the resurrected Lord. This is as embodied as faith can get. It is also as strange as faith can get. We eat together and, in Augustine’s matchless image, the normal process of eating is reversed. Normally we eat, digest, and the food becomes part of our body. In the eucharist, we eat and the food, digests us, and we become part of the body of Christ. No one can explain that. It is the meat of our faith. Pastors are in poor health partly because we eat poorly. But we preside over a table that is God’s own paradigm for food, and so for life. At this table all have enough. Those at the lower places are brought higher, and those who elbow their way to the seats of honor are escorted lower. No one pays. All is provided. And Christ himself is host, guest, food, feaster. It is no new observation that Jesus of Nazareth eats his way through the gospels. Try opening any two pages of the gospels where Jesus is not eating—it is hard to do. His miracles often involve food. So do his controversies. His teaching involves food. So does his betrayal. His resurrection involves food. So, Augustine thinks, does his crucihxion. “I thirst,” he says from his cross—because he longs to drink up those present and make them all part of his body with us. St. John Vianney is reported to have said that if we really understood the eucharist, we would die with joy. For through a body as fractured as this, we have a wholeness as resplendent as this. It is delicious. Every minister has a favorite presiding story, if you’ 11 indulge me mine. One year we had a new sunrise Easter service to which almost no one came. I did my standard: berate myself, consider leaving ministry, heap opprobrium on my head, and forget about it and move on. But by then the machinery of the church was already in motion, and the service was planned again the next year. I muttered on my way to church in the dark, “This is a busy day. Why am I here this early? No one else will be here. ” To my shock, surprise, and delight, the chapel was full. Where we’d had 2-3 the year before, we had 150 this time. I preached through barely contained glee, kicking myself for having kicked myself, and then pivoted to the table. I lifted the cloth and beheld there a loaf of bread barely the size of a dinner roll. It was the right amount

    Page 43

    of bread for last year’s crowd, but most certainly not for this year. Ok, I thought, tear off as small pieces as possible and maybe everyone will have a bite. I did. “The body of Christ, broken for you. The body of Christ, broken for you. The body of Christ, broken for you.” People I loved came forward, ate, smiled, prayed, and returned to their seats to be digested by Jesus. I looked down when I was done, and I swear there was still bread left over. It wasn’t a miracle of a metaphysical variety, I’m sure. But there is something in those stories of Jesus taking, blessing, breaking, and giving away. There is something in the stories he was reared on of there being not enough oil to burn in the temple, and then, miraculously, there being enough. We show this anew with every eucharist in fact: there is always enough of Jesus for all of us, worldwide, through time, until he comes. Clergy are in poor health, indeed. But there is good news even here. Rae Jean’s research suggests we feel depression and stress at higher rates than our peers. But we also experience j oy at a greater clip than our peers. Rae Jean thinks the depression h gure works this way: clergy are those kids who feel the depths at a more profound level. Some of us find our way into the church, where we find meaning, consolation, and grace, and so we stay, and lead others. The church doesn’t make us depressed—rather we’re depressive sorts who find healing among Christ’s people, and linger to offer it to others. We also report higher levels of joy than those in many other professions. We feel life in a greater spectrum of colors than others. That’s a deal worth making. That is not the best of good news, of course. Jesus’ resurrection is that, in all its resplendent, unimaginable beauty, worthy of a thousand more sermons and then a thousand times that. As long as we are given the health to do so.

    Notes 1 I take some of the wording here from Faithful & Fractured (Grand Rapids: Baker, 20f8), f08. 2 I take the line from Mary Doria Russell, who draws on a story from the rabbis (Ballantine, 2005). 3 I owe this observation to Victor Lee Austin’s forthcoming book Up With Friendship (Baker Aca­ demic). 4 In Eugene Peterson’s translation of John 21:12.

  • Let These Bones Live

    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.

    Page 18

    Let These Bones Live

    Ezekiel 37:1-14

    Lisa L. Thompson

    LInion Theological Seminary, New York, New York

    Listen. Do you hear that voice? It’s repeating:

    I’m sorry. I can’t breathe. No really, I cannot breathe. Hear me with my last breath. I am suffocating. Poison is Tiling my lungs. My airway is closing off. My lungs can’t expand. The walls of my soul are caving in. I can’t make it from here to there. I can’t move— not by crawling on all fours and not even if I inch on my elbows. Did you hear me? I can’t move. I don’t have anything left within me. Please don’t drag me. My vertebrae are crushed. My ligaments are dislodged. I can’t breathe. I can’t move. I just have to lie right here.

    When the pain of the soul-suffocating and death-dealing despair lands on the flesh of this creation, the only thing that can be heard is: “We cannot breathe. They cannot breathe. In labor pangs creation groans, fading breath moans, and we ourselves in­ wardly and outwardly plead for the redemption of these bodies. We can’t breathe.” It seems we aren’t the only ones struggling for air. The bones of the house of Israel cry out—We can’t breathe. We find ourselves yet again in one of these strange pas­ sages in the book of Ezekiel. Living creatures with wings and wheels within wheels exist. There are time warps between valleys and caves and movement between being silent and speaking. Tornado-like whirlwinds sweep up people and place them intact within virtual realities. In virtual reality, there is a valley of dry bones with strange things happening. But then, the whirlwind rushes in, delivering us back to real-time. And now, in real time, not virtual reality, the bones are speaking. The created of God are saying “Our bones are dried up. Our hope is lost; we are cut off completely” (37:11). It is dry and desolate here; we are exiled from any possibility of life. We can’t breathe. You can only say hope is lost if you have known the seeds of belief. You can only say we have been cut off if you know what it means to feel in sync and connected. You only know death because you feel the absence of life. The bones lament what they have once known to be in-part, no longer being at all. They scream, “We can’t breathe!” We’ re often told that if you can speak, you can breathe. But sometimes it sure feels like your last breath, and we pray to God it is not. To say “I can’t breathe ” is not always about the complete absence of air, but more about the quantity and quality of air. To say, “I can’t breathe” is to say that what I’m getting and feeling right now isn’t all that it could be. These are not the deep breaths of life-giving air. Life-giving air is generated beyond the four corners of the earth in the cosmos, filtered thru the leaves of the branches of the highest sycamore tree. No instead, this air feels tainted with broken dreams, painful setbacks, discord, and the absence of harmonic rhythms. This air is tainted with a looming death penalty and no chance of parole. The air is polluted as we imitate life here instead of being alive over there on sustaining soil.

    Page 19

    The chains clank together as lands are stolen while bodies in search of life are sold and bartered as goods between borders. They are bartered across the borders of New York and Canada, Texas and Mexico, across Ohio and the Pennsylvania Turnpike clear to Atlanta, and over the ocean. The air is tainted with cries of “Crucify him, crucify him” and “Save yourself.” Believe me when I say we can’t breathe. This isn’t what it means to be fully alive. Here in this place, we witness an imitation of living. It ain’t living at all. It’s like walking around the valley, lingering behind the mortal but taking a step closer to peer in on what’s happening. And suddenly you realize there is a noise, a rattling, and the bones come together, bone to bone. You look again, and there is connective tissue on them, and flesh has come upon them, and skin has covered them; but there is no breath in them. You squint and realize they are not yet alive (37:7-8). They are still cut off from an expanding spirit of life that has its beginning and end in God. Right here, in this valley, bone is on bone rubbing and grinding together in teeth-gritting undeniable agony— rattling. It doesn’t seem to matter how they got there or why they are there. Their history in this moment needs not be named, it only matters that they can’t breathe. They are where they are. They are where they are without the ability to inhale deeply the life-giving breath that bears witness to God; the life-giving breath promised to them; the promise of which they are reminded and that echoes even as they are surrounded by the valley. God declares, “I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves… you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; you shall know that I, the LORD, have spoken and will act… ” (37:12-14). The promise of life means that the created of God are to be placed on sustaining soil with the freedom to have gardens, host dinner parties, be in community, have access to what keeps life healthy, lungs filled and sustained, while children run free of separation from their parents and violence in their neighborhoods. The promise of life means having uninterrupted access to water without the threat of thick sludge-like substances and invisible fumes tainting liquid oxygen. In the valley, the promise is life. The promise is not the imitation of life. The full spirit that traverses the universe thru space and time comes to take up habitation amongst and in brittle bones. Nothing is lost, nothing can be discarded, nothing is too contaminated, all the bones shall live. This is the grandiose, strange, and full promise the mere human is entrusted to proclaim—commanded to proclaim and invited to pursue. Nothing less. Nothing short of it. This is a large promise that frightens us; it sometimes frightens me. What if I’m wrong? How can I say with confidence that life will come? How can I declare life and say that death is not the final word, when we have seen death? We know death. We are charged to declare this large promise. Because as people of faith just as much as we know that we have witnessed death, we know, that we know that we know, the possibility of life resuscitated by the spirit of a living God. And this is the possibility we are called to pursue relentlessly. There is a wonderful line at the end of August Wilson’s play How I Learned what I Learned. In this play he offers an autobiographical glimpse of his time in what’s known as the Hill district of Pittsburgh. Near the very end of the production, he turns to the audience and says, “How do you know what you know? You don’t, until you do.” Here, in the valley of the book of Ezekiel, this mere human being has just had

    Page 20

    an “until you do” moment. At the beginning of the passage God asks, “Mortal, can these bones live?” This is an invitation, an invitation to participate in a God-given exchange, “Come play with me. Come make life with me.” Instead of a resounding “Yes! I will come play and create with you,” the human messenger offers a different, less zealous, less certain response— “Only you know God” (37:3). It feels like our own hesitation and timidity at moments when we’re faced with what we perceive as the lofty and tall order of trying to conjure life in the midst of despair and death. I imagine it as our sometimes shrinking back, and not without reason. We shrink back because of all the things we have seen and lived and all the contradictions in our midst. We do not want to be disappointed or disappoint yet again. This isn’t the hist message Ezekiel has had to carry, and to be frank, some of the other messages had nothing to do with living. As Ezekiel is creeping back into the shadows of hesitation, God says, “I’m not going to let you off the hook that easily. I’m going to show you. I’m going to tell you, and you will speak. Preach to the bones and say to them….” The Lord says, “I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live” (37:4-5). And sure enough, if we wander into the valley to peep over the shoulders of the mortal and peer a little closer, he begins calling the four winds from the corners of the earth. And then, the winds come into the bones, mighty and rushing, but not destroying. The bones lived. They stood on their feet, all of them vast in numbers (37:9-10). Nothing is lost. Not the pain, not the suffering, not the tears, not the sleepless nights. Not the days when life was not the way it should be. Nothing is lost. As the bones begin to live, I have to imagine that without a shadow of a doubt, Ezekiel knows that he knows that he knows. He cannot deny it. He’s seen the glimpse of not the imitation of life, but the full presence of life that bears witness to who God is. Even if we want to back off and shrink back in humility and embrace our human limitations, God will not let us off the hook. Once we feel the mighty rushing wind, the gentle breeze, or the life-giving air that infiltrates our nostrils and fills our lungs with glimpses of possibility, we cannot let it go. It cannot be undone. Once taxis stop making drop offs at airports and bodies show up to protect bodies from deportation and advocate for freedom, the wind begins to gather us up. Once bodies fill the streets to declare the sanctity of life, the breeze begins to blow. When we offer shelter to those who have been denied sanctuary, the trees begin to rustle. Small whirlwinds break in where bit by bit we make our way to all bellies being sati­ ated and filled. This is what keeps us hoping for the full wind, chasing after it, and stirs our memories for the imaginings of life anew—until it fades again. “I can’t breathe. We can’t breathe.” When these thoughts and words echo and resound from the depths of bone on bone and collapsing lungs filling our midst, it is the call for the imitation life to be stirred once again by the bold promise God offers. “I can’t breathe” begs for the whirlwind coming from beyond the cosmos being filtered through the leaves on the highest branch of the tallest sycamore tree. “We can’t breathe” begs for us to be swept away into the valley with an audacity to proclaim life— be it to our own dry bones, the bones of others, or the bones of stale but death-dealing institutions. In this valley God turns to us saying, “Mortal, will you let these bones live? You can help create life? Say what you know that you know that you know. Speak life. Pursue life. Call in my life-giving spirit.” God reminds us that resurrection is not

    Page 21

    only a far off thought, out there in the by and by, or stories from long ago, but that resurrection is continual and needs to happen today right where we sit, so that flesh is given the chance to live once again. Life has its beginning and end in God. The presence of life bears witness to God. By life we know God, and by God we know what it means to be filled and carried by a life-giving, ever yielding, and producing spirit. This spirit is the breath that compels us to live more. The spirit of resurrection calls us to resuscitate life and call it back in the valleys of our world. The valley awaits the message of truth and hope only the prophet and the prophet in each us can bring. Will you let these bones live? Chase hope down. Call the breath from the cosmos so that we may live. Dance as protest to death. Sing familiar melodies in strange lands until life is ushered in. Let these bones live! The breath has come and we must live. Oh, mortal, these bones shall live!

  • Blessed Are the Peacemakers

    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.

    Page 29

    Blessed Are the Peacemakers

    Matthew 5:9

    Sam Wells

    St Martin-in-the Fields, London, LInited Kingdom

    St Martin-in-the-Fields has two patron saints, and we might as well acknowledge it. The hist is St Martin. You might imagine the other one is the Fields—but you’d be wrong. The unofficial second patron is the man with whom the renaissance of St Martin’s is most associated, who served as vicar 1914-26, and who began the home­ less ministry and the radio broadcasts with the BBC. His name was Dick Sheppard. Both of our patrons were involved in wars but died as pacifists. Both were celebrated men whose deeds became the stuff of myth and legend. Both are most famous for their actions in relation to the poor. Together they epitomise all that’s good but also all that’s unresolved in the identity and mission of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Let’s start with St Martin. He was a man of great courage: when he came to be­ lieve that he could no longer be both a soldier and a Christian, he refused to fight and was imprisoned accordingly. He even planned to go unarmed into the heat of battle, but the cessation of hostilities led to his being released. He was a man of great piety: he founded monasteries and spread the faith to friend and stranger. He was a man of great prophetic witness: emperors would refuse to see him because he was forever demanding mercy for prisoners that the emperors didn’t want released. His action in dividing his cloak and sharing half with a beggar remains an inspiring image of how to care for oneself and for the needy at the same time. He was widely influential: the people who cared for fragments of his famous cloak were called cappellani, known in French as chaplains; and the small temporary buildings that housed those fragments were known as capelli, or chapels. He became the patron saint of France. Let’s now turn to Dick Sheppard. His commitment to the poor predated his time at St Martin’s: he’d served at Oxford House in Bethnal Green for two periods. He’d been a chaplain at the front and was instrumental in establishing the annual Albert Hall Festival of Remembrance. He was the hist great religious broadcaster, his preaching drew huge crowds, he founded the Christmas Appeal, his ever-open door brought solace to the destitute, he made St Martin-in-the-Fields a household name, and he had the courage to campaign for an end to war in the face of deep cynicism and hostility. Over 100,000 people hied past his coffin as it lay in state at St Martin’s. On the day of his funeral at St PauFs Cathedral, the pavements of Central London were thronged with mourners. The feminist Vera Brittain wrote, ‘To all who cared about spiritual values, the shock of Dick Sheppard’s death to his country was comparable to the blow dealt to India a decade later by the death of Gandhi. ” What’s not to like about Martin of Tours and Dick Sheppard? Well the problem with Martin is his whole legacy is focused on that one moment, his sharing his cloak with a beggar who in his dream that night was revealed to be Jesus. While this leg­ end is inspiring, it encourages a culture where discipleship is a matter of dramatic, spontaneous, unrepeated acts of charity. It’s like turning a whole institution into a catchy 30-second YouTube video. It means we talk in idealised terms of an ever-open door, when the truth is we’ve never had an ever-open door; and while the slogan is

    Page 30

    compelling, the reality would be tyrannical and unsustainable. It means we hold one another to unattainable goals and feel outwardly deceitful and inwardly guilty for not meeting them. As for Dick Sheppard, he was a whirlwind of energy and infectious practical action… except when he wasn’t. His was a boom-and-bust ministry of passion and exhaustion, of aspiration and asthma attacks, of frantic events and crushing fatigue. If we follow this model, we suggest peace in the world can come only at the cost of peace in our own soul. We assume a distant God whose heart can only be bought by the sacrificial offering of our own breakdowns. The last hundred years of ministry at St Martin-in-the-Fields have often looked all too much like Dick Sheppard’s life: faithful, frantic, and fragile. So this is the question for us as a community one hundred years after the institu­ tion as vicar of Dick Sheppard, around 800 years after our foundation as a church, and nearly 1700 years after the birth of St Martin: how do we embody the gospel, how do we turn our heritage and identity into mission and ministry, without substituting the grand gestures for the small fidelities and without trying to appease God with the sacrament of our own exhaustion? Jesus looked out over Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and said, “If you, even you, had only recognised the things that make for peace! ” But what were those things? That’s the question we’re trying to answer at St Martin’s. Having highlighted the warnings that lie in our two patrons, I want to see what we can learn from them. Let’s start with Martin. After he was done with being a soldier and an abbot, Martin became a bishop. Today Tours is a provincial town in the west of France. But in Martin’s day, its diocese included places as far away as Chartres, Paris, Autun, and Vienne. It covered a huge area. Martin visited each church once a year by donkey, by boat, or on foot. He organised a parish system. He’s remembered for his grand gesture with the cloak and his renunciation of war, but a lot of his time went into administra­ tion and communications. This is a challenging lesson for St Martin-in-the-Fields. We’re proud of the record of the great things that have been done here, and we want to do lots more of them. We ’re delighted that other institutions and churches visit and want to learn from what we do. But to make a sustainable community where we don’t become overstretched and exhausted or broke and broken means paying careful attention to every detail of our administration, premises, staff, finance, management, and governance—all the unflashy and unfashionable things. We ’ve made becoming an exemplary organisation one of our three goals for the next few years because we’ve realised that we have as much to offer the wider church in how we do things as in what we do. St Martin is famous for giving his cloak to a beggar. But in the story, he actually gives half his cloak to a beggar. That’s a rather more sustainable form of charity. John Wesley said, “Consider yourself the hist among the poor you are called to serve. ” It’s a very helpful philosophy. Jesus calls us to love others as we love ourselves. That means loving ourselves. One of the biggest challenges at St Martin-in-the-Fields is matching together many people’s welcome but nonetheless unrealistic wishes and projections for us to be a miraculous organisation that does nothing but sacrificial good works, with a more pragmatic estimation of what running an institution actually requires. One literary critic points out that in a romance, no one ever enquires who pays for the hero’s accommodation. We’re not living in a romance. We want to be a

    Page 31

    great organisation—but not at the expense of being a good one. The attention to detail St Martin gave to administration is something we all need to imitate when it comes to making peace. There’s only one way to make peace, and that’s to put more energy and attention into the details of peace than the war-makers put into waging war. How could it ever be any different? Peace isn’t achieved with a spliff of cannabis, a finger V sign, and a “Make love not war” tie-dyed T-shirt. It takes years of practice. One practitioner, Ched Myers, speaks of four ways to be a peacemaker. The hist is peacebuilding. This is about negotiation, which he describes as “the ideal form of conflict transformation. ” You negotiate all the time in domestic, neigh­ bourhood, and workplace settings. To build peace you need to be aware of and be able to articulate your own interests. You need to get into the habit of listening to those with whom you’ re in tension. You need to become adept at finding common ground. And you need to be willing to see compromise as an achievement and not a failure. But peacebuilding isn’t the answer to every kind of conflict. Its chief limitation is that it assumes an equality of power. Peacebuilding doesn’t work if your adversary has huge phalanxes of economic, military, or social power behind them. It only works if you can meet them face to face on level terms. Hence the second approach, which is peacemaking. When there isn’t enough trust to sit down face to face, it’s time for mediation. If the balance of power between the parties is starkly uneven and felt adversely to be so, it may be time for facilitated dialogue. Of course that depends on the parties being willing to enter such a process. In peacemaking the work is still primarily done by the parties in conflict. The process is about the adversaries arriving at their own points of convergence rather than look­ ing to the third party to make any judgement. But sometimes the parties are unwilling or unable to meet with one another. This situation calls for peacekeeping. Arbitration is required. A third party is appointed as an adjudicator, listens to the perspectives of each adversary, and makes a definitive judgement. This is how the Western legal system works. United Nations peacekeep­ ing forces and Truth and Reconciliation commissions work to this model. However there’s a fourth approach which Myers calls peacewaging. This refers to situations where the conflict is in full swing, there’s no question of turning to third parties, and there’s every expectation that the party with the greater force will prevail. Here Myers draws on the distinctions made by the Brazilian Catholic archbishop between three kinds of violence. Violence # 1 is structural poverty—radical inequal­ ity in land ownership, corporations driving indigenous peoples out in order to log their rainforests, racism, arms sales that shored up a dictatorship, police harassment, linguistic suppression, and so on. Violence # 2 is furious response to such conditions. Introjected rage includes teen suicide, addictions, eating disorders, depression. Pro­ jected rage includes attacking those near at hand—domestic violence, petty crime, bar fights, school shootings—or those perpetrating injustice. If conscientisation has taken place, this may issue as organised protest or guerrilla warfare. Structural vio­ lence does not justify reactive violence, but it does make it inevitable. Those who have no knowledge or comprehension of # 1 are likely to have little sympathy or tolerance for # 2. Violence # 3 is the swift, severe, and final governmental reaction to “the rage of the marginalised, the antisocial, or the subversive. ” Such coercion often appears to those cushioned from injustice as necessary to uphold law and order. The

    Page 32

    result of # 3 is invariably to intensify the misery of # 1. Peacewaging means adopting thoughtful tactics ranging from passive non-cooperation (including boycotts, strikes, and refusal of orders) to active resistance (such as sit-ins, nonviolent sabotage, and civil disobedience). The point of such nonviolent struggle is to unmask injustice, impede continuing oppression, and exert moral pressure on the adversary to negoti­ ate social and political change. Now you see what I mean by saying you have to go into peace in more detail than those who go to war. Jesus didn’t just show up in Jerusalem and get into a panic when he realised Pilate, Herod, and Caiaphas were in charge. He knew exactly what he was doing. His donkey derby and turning the tables were precisely the kinds of gestures Myers is talking about—gestures that unmasked power and displayed an alternative kingdom. The result is that his cross is everywhere today while the Roman Empire is long gone. That’s what it means to walk in the steps of St Martin. Turning to Dick Sheppard, we’d all like to believe that what made St Martin-inthe -Fields famous was the beauty of its architecture, its location on Trafalgar Square, its truly amazing congregation, and its reputation for social care. But the truth is what made St Martin’s famous was broadcasting. In the 1920s and 1930s people didn’t have TVs, let alone computers. They gathered reverently around their wireless sets. Dick Sheppard and St Martin’s were famous because they were on the radio all the time. By 1951 a third of the entire population was listening to evening services broadcast from St Martin’s. This brought many opportunities, not least the chance to turn the Academy of St Martin in the Fields into an overnight success from its founding in 1958. But it also brought two challenges which are still with us. One is, if you’re going to be on the radio or TV all the time, you’ve got to have something to say. What is it St Martin’s has got to say? It can’t be simply that the rich should be less rich, the poor should be less poor, and the government should do something about it. The challenge of broadcasting is that St Martin’s must articulate where in its common life, where in its presence with the poor, and where in its striving for sustainable ministry it has come face to face with God and what it has seen. And the second challenge of broadcasting is that if people hear you all the time putting the world to rights, they’re going to look back at you sooner or later and see if your own practice matches up to your principles. Which brings us back to the quality of our common life, being a community that lives forgiveness and anticipates the life everlasting, that strives to be not afraid and embodies both the humanity and the divinity of Christ. And the final lesson of both Dick Sheppard and St Martin is this. Dick Sheppard was stirred by the words of the great preacher and pastor of the Riverside church in New York, Harry Emerson Fosdick. These are the words of Fosdick that transformed Sheppard after his experience of life in the First World War treches to the most promi­ nent British peace campaigner of the twentieth century: “I renounce war. I renounce war because of what it does to our own men…. I renounce war because of what it compels us to do to our enemies…. I renounce war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in place of democracy, for the starvation that stalks after it. I renounce war and never again, directly or indirectly, will I sanction or support another. ” Sheppard sought to unite the whole country behind that last sentence: “I renounce war and never again, directly or indirectly, will I sanction or support another. ” He spent what

    Page 33

    proved to be his last five years sweating blood in an effort to inspire the nation to follow him. His greatest moment was when he took up the challenge of running for the Rectorship of Glasgow University—a contest in which one of the three other candidates was Winston Churchill. The arch pacifist took on the arch militarist and romped home by 538 votes to 281. Seeing Sheppard’s rhetorical power, the Dean of St Paul’s Walter Matthews said that Sheppard was the “stuff of which Fiihrers and dictators are made”—and yet a servant of Christ. Yet a week later he was dead at 57 of a heart attack. His lesson is this: working for peace is harder than working for war. Sheppard faced indifference, ridicule, and hostility. But what gave his efforts credibility was not only that he’d been in the trenches of World War One himself; it was that at St Martin’s, he had shaped and fostered a community in the paths that lead to peace. Whatever we do here at St Martin’s, in Tuesday-lunchtime, concert-ushering, or Sunday-afternoon curry-sharing, in Sunday-evening stewarding or Saturday-night cafe-staffing, in Tuesday night sustainability-group-participating or Monday-morn­ ing fire-alarm-testing, because we believe that together we are walking the paths that lead to peace—peace of mind and heart and soul, peace for the world and the whole creation, peace for the poor and the rich, peace for friend and for stranger, peace for the disabled and the physically free, peace for the believer and the non-believer. If s a rare institution that can make peace look more interesting than war, but that’s what we’ re about here together. That’s why I’ve stressed the internal workings and practices of our organisation, because that’s the hidden detail of peace that makes it strong enough to withstand war. Later in our service we’ 11 hear the spiritual “Down by the Riverside.” Its refrain concludes with the words “I ain’t going to study war no more. ” So much of the world is studying for war right now, in Yemen, in Congo, in Syria and Iraq. We feel powerless, but we’ re not. St Martin and Dick Sheppard showed us what we must do. We must create and join and foster communities of sustainable support and trust and vision and hope like St Martin-in-the-Fields, communities that inspire others and include all and make visible what God has done in Jesus. And so when people ask why you come to St Martin’s, why you serve at St Martin’s, why you work at St Martin’s, we have a simple answer for them: “I want to work for peace. I ain’t going to study war no more.”