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  • Announce to Every Caesar: God Is Not Dead

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    Announce to Every Caesar: God Is Not Dead

    Luke 23 – 24:1 -7

    William J. Barber II

    Greenleaf Christian Church, Goldsboro, North Carolina

    To say “Jesus died for my sins” is far too simple and simplistic. When speaking about the magnitude of what the crucifixion and the resurrection re­ ally mean, we become too casual. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one who believed in the cross and resurrection, took on the evil of Hitler and the evil of fascism. He was a Christian theologian, and he taught that just saying “Jesus died for my sins, and all I gotta do is just say that,” is a form of cheap grace. Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate, begotten of the Father, was born in poverty. He was bom in the midst of oppression. Bethlehem was the smallest of cities, and where he was raised, Nazareth, was considered a ghetto. No one expected anything good to come out of Nazareth. Jesus and his earthly family—Joseph, Mary, his brothers—were under the occupation of the Roman Empire and the rule of Caesar. Caesar and his governors did not entertain any challenge to their way of life. In fact, they had a phrase: “When in Rome, you’d better do as the Romans do.” Caesar put his face on his money. Caesar put his face on his buildings. Caesar put his gold on his buildings. And Caesar made sure his buildings were higher than other buildings. And Caesar demanded his way or the highway. Caesar had his own set of alternative facts. He told his own lies despite the truth. Caesar, if you worked for him, demanded loyalty to him and him alone, no contradiction. And if you did contradict him, he might fire you. Caesar commanded the military and the police force and would not hesitate to use them. Every now and then, he did it just to keep folk afraid. In a book that unpacks the world of first century Rome when Jesus was born, in Caesar’s world, only the wealthy thrived, and the wealthy ruled. In fact, that book, the Book of Acts, which is a history, says that the 99% lived under the rule of the 1% in Caesar’s Rome. In Caesar’s Rome, society was deeply stratified between the haves and the have-nots. In Caesar’s Rome, the political structure was filled with those who had money, and the rest were expected to sit on the side because in Caesar’s Rome, the ones who made the policies didn’t live the policies. In Caesar’s Rome, the criminal justice system profiled people and treated the poor differently than the wealthy. Caesar’s ethic was power—that’s what made you important. Who can you bully with your power? Who can you beat down with your power? Who can you lord over with your power? That’s why, in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is charged with sedition. That’s really his charge. He refused to bow down to Caesar. He didn’t pick up weapons; he did it non-violently. Caesar didn’t even want that. Jesus’ very existence chal­ lenged every ethic of Caesar. Jesus was a king, but he was born in an animal stall and not a palace, and that messed Caesar up. Jesus was raised among the poor and the working poor. Jesus was forced to pay taxes while Caesar

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    paid none, or, they never really got to check his returns anyway. Jesus fed the poor. Caesar let them down. Jesus healed the sick. Caesar didn’t care. Jesus called on religion to serve the cause of love and justice and the mercy of God. Caesar bought religion and paid off religious leaders to serve him and give him cover for his political brutality. Jesus moved in an ethic of love, service, and concern for all. Caesar moved in an ethic of manipulation, lust, disregard, and domination against anyone not in his circle. When, during Passover, Jesus entered Jerusalem—a city and a country under occupation—Caesar’s police force and military were there to put down any type of revolution. On his first day in Jerusalem, Jesus committed an act of civil disobedience—he turned over the tables in the temple. That forced Caesar’s people to say “Enough!” because he was stirring up the nation, and he was not honoring Caesar as his god. Jesus represents God’s spirit in conflict with Caesar’s spirit. If you don’t get that, you really don’t grasp this cross and resurrection. Jesus represents God’s saving way of love and worship and justice and mercy in conflict with the ethic of Caesar’s sinful way of hate and injustice and idolatry and mean­ ness and oppression. This is why Jesus knew the cross would be his penalty. This is why he knew he would have to suffer, and why that angel told those women at the tomb, “Don’t you remember what he said?” He said that he would have to suffer because Caesar said “I’m Lord. I’m divine. I and I alone can save you. I and I alone can make the world right.” And Jesus’ very existence and his ethic and his divinity and his authority challenged what Caesar said. Neither Caesar nor his cronies, the false priests, Pilate, or Herod could let this pass. No, my brothers and sisters: Jesus had to suffer. He told his disciples so. Why? Not only did he tell them he had to suffer, but he said if you’re going to follow me, you’re going to have to take up your cross and follow me. There’s no way to this kind of righteousness that bypasses suffering. I need to tell you that this morning, before I want to get to resurrection, but I want to backtrack a minute. You don’t experience this kind of resurrection unless you’ve known the fellowship of his suffering. I need to tell somebody the spirit of Caesar still lives. Caesar may be physically dead, but the spirit of Caesar still lives because oppression still lives, and hate still lives, and racism still lives, and meanness still lives, and injustice still lives. I know it lives. I see the evidence of Caesar’s spirit. Whenever you have people in power who will commit the sin of taking healthcare from the sick so that they can give tax cuts to the greedy, knowing that thousands will die unnecessarily, the spirit of Caesar still lives. When drug kingpins can get drugs despite all these satel­ lites we have that can see a dime from 10 miles in the sky, somebody knows what’s going on! Lord, have mercy, Jesus! And then when the little kingpins sell drugs in our community and kill our babies more than the Klan ever kills, Caesar’s spirit still lives. When greedy government leaders sin—oh yes, I’m saying that three letter word, sin—by divesting resources from poor com­ munities—jobs, infrastructure, support—and then those same leaders blame those same communities for the crime that’s there, that’s proof that the spirit of Caesar still lives. When people with power will commit the sin of making poor people pay taxes but will not ensure poor people have a living wage, the

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    spirit of Caesar still lives. I wish I had some help in here! Whenever persons sin by using their finite power to suppress the vote in ways based on race and class so that those of domination can win rather than have a democracy functioning right, and when they deny the God-given hu­ manity and the human rights of individuals and then stack the courts to protect themselves and their power and then put pornographic sums of money into the political structure in order to dominate it, I can tell you Caesar still lives. And then when they stack the courts so the court will not find them guilty of their unconstitutional acts, their sin, I tell you, Caesar still lives. When folk use the highest office in the land not to enforce justice but to take away and deny the image of God in our immigrant brothers and sisters, calling them aliens, calling them filth rather than human beings, when they will use that power sinfully to prosecute our brother and sister immigrants and snatch mothers and children from one another, I tell you the spirit of Caesar still lives. This week, I read that a member of the North Carolina Legislature said that Abraham Lincoln and Hitler were the same. Whenever you see this kind of sin, it’s called revisionist history. When you lie about the past in order to justify modern-day oppression, that’s proof that Caesar still lives. The only truth Caesar cares about is his own. When tyrants over there bomb children with chemical weapons, and tyrants over here weaponize water in Flint, and nine or ten other cities around America are poisoning children and families simply because they’re poor, they’re black, and they’re not well-connected, and they’re poor, and they’re white, and they’re not well-connected, Caesar still lives. Any time our society declares a person presidential when they drop bombs, that’s SIN. Any time our society forgets all the regressive and politically violent actions leaders are pushing that will bombard and hurt the lives of the least of these, Caesar still lives. And whenever some who claim allegiance to reli­ gion, allegiance to the religious community, or allegiance to Christ, and when they don’t say a word about these public sins that run counter to the deepest values of Christ, we are not seeing a battle between left-wing religion and right-wing religion, we are seeing sin—a battle between the spirit of Caesar and the spirit of God. We are seeing an attack on the very moral core of our deepest values —an attack on love and truth and justice. We are seeing a battle between right and wrong. We are seeing the spirit of Christ versus the spirit of Caesar, non-violence versus violence. And my brothers and sisters, when you dare, when the church dares to challenge these things, to challenge this sin, to challenge the spirit of Caesar, we too will suffer. Jurgen Moltmann, in his book The Crucified God, unpacked redemptive suffering. He said this: “The knowledge of the cross brings a conflict of inter­ est between God who has become man and man who wishes to become God. ” That’s where the battle lines are! He says, “God allows himself to be humiliated and crucified in the Son, in order to free the oppressors and the oppressed from oppression and to open up to them the situation of free, sympathetic human­ ity….God became man that dehumanized men might become true men. We

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    become true men in the community of the incarnate, the suffering and loving, the human God… .The God of freedom, the true God is… not recognized by his power and glory in the history of the world, but through his helplessness and his death on the scandal of the cross of Jesus.” And then I love what Moltmann says: “The problem of modern man is no longer so much how he can live with gods and demons, but how he can survive with the bomb, revolution, and the destruction of the balance of nature. He usurps more and more of nature and takes it under his control. His main problem is no longer the universal hnitude which he experiences in solidarity with all other creatures, but the humanity of his own world.”1 In other words, the way of Jesus challenges the inhumanity of the spirit of Caesar. And Jesus’ way calls us to recover our humanity in the way in which God would have us live. And the cross is what happens when Caesar sees his inhumane world being challenged. The Early Church understood this. The story is told that at age 86, Poly­ carp, the second-century bishop of Smyrna and disciple of the Apostle John, was brought to the Roman authorities who ordered him to confess Caesar is Lord. All they asked him to say is “Caesar is Lord.” They said just say this and you’ll be all right. Just a noun, a verb, and another noun: Caesar is Lord. That’s all, you say this, and we won’t bother you. That’s all, we won’t hurt you. That’s all, we won’t crucify you. Just say that, just say, “Caesar is Lord.” He was 86, an old man, retired, and he could have said, “Alright, I don’t have time for this. I’ll just say what they want me to say so they won’t bother me. ” But he said, “No.” And he was murdered because that’s exactly what Rome calls Caesar. They said Caesar Kyrios. Kyrios means Lord. And they expected folks to see Caesar and the systems of Rome as Lord. But New Testament Christians, those who follow Christ, understand it’s not just being polite when you say Jesus is Lord. When you say Jesus is Lord, you’re making a declaration against every other false god, every Caesar, ev­ ery other political system that would dare challenge the way of God. Jesus presented a challenge to the empire, and the empire struck back. They didn’t just kill him, they didn’t just isolate him, they crucified him. The closest thing we have to crucifixion is lynching. Watch the word: I didn’t say hanging. Hanging was what they did in the process when you went through a justice system and you were properly proven guilty and then they hung you. But lynching was a form of political assassination designed to make everybody else who was thinking about standing for freedom make a second guess. N.T. Wright says that crucifixion wasn’t just a way of getting rid of unde­ sirables; it was the maximum degradation.2 It was making sure that everybody who would not declare Caesar as Lord, especially those who dared to stand up against the system, were crucified in order to create fear. That’s why the only folk crucified were rebels and revolutionaries and insurrectionists. Jesus was arrested. He was profiled by the temple police. Ah, help me, God! He was taken before the Sanhedrin, and they brought him up on false charges. Lord have mercy! He was asked, “Are you King of the Jews?” And he was cruci­ fied because crucifixion served Rome’s interest. Crucifixion would make folk behave. They thought Jesus was a rebel, a revolutionary. He endangered the

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    peace that Caesar thought he had. He disturbed the peace. I don’t even know what folk mean when they say Jesus wasn’t political. You don’t know Jesus. He wasn’t political like Democrats or Republicans. He was political. He said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” In other words, my way of order and social life and real life is not the order of political au­ thoritarianism and manipulation. Jesus challenged the demands of Rome that everybody be like Rome. We called that the hegemony of the Roman Empire. Jesus said, I’m not going to go along to get along. Jesus challenged Caesar’s lordship; he challenged his rulership. Jesus was in direct opposition to the powers of the empire. He could not stand for it, he would not stand for it. And he said those who were following him would be anointed in such a way that they would stand up and say because Jesus is Lord, then hate can’t be a Lord, injustice can’t be a Lord, meanness can’t be a Lord. So Jesus was in direct contradiction to Caesar, and so he was killed by Rome, by Caesar’s authority, and he was not just killed, he was crucified because they wanted to make him a curse. They wanted to execute him in public. They wanted to make everybody stand down and believe you’d better do what Caesar says. But then Sunday comes. And the resurrection defies Caesar and Satan’s power. The resurrection comes, and it proves that no matter what Caesar can do, God is not dead. I was reading just last night… .1 got up late this morning and I went back into 1852 and read when Lrederick Douglass was giving a speech, and he was discouraged because it looked like the abolition movement was getting weaker and the slave system was getting stronger, and he was speaking but he didn’t have his “power over.” In his speech he didn’t have his “power over” as my grandmama called it. She didn’t say “power,” she said “power over,” wonder­ working “power over”—that’s what she called it. And Sojourner Truth was out there listening, and she could tell Lrederick wasn’t quite where he ought to be, he didn’t have his “power over,” and she stood up and said, “Lrederick! Is God dead?” Lrederick said that shook him down in his dungeon, but he stood up, and that stayed with him five years. And let me just say things didn’t get better immediately. Live years later, in 1857, the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott decision that a slave has no rights which a white man is bound to respect. Right after that decision, Lrederick Douglass preached a sermon like he knew the answer to Sojourner’s question—God is not dead! Let me read a little bit of what Lrederick said. After the Dred Scott deci­ sion, many said, “It’s over. The abolitionist movement is dead. If they can come north and even get Lrederick or Harriet [Tubman], it’s over.” But Lrederick Douglass preached out of this knowledge that God is still alive and said, “To many, the prospects of the struggle against slavery seem far from cheering. Eminent men, North and South, in Church and State, tell us that the omens are all against us. Emancipation, they tell us, is a wild, delusive idea; the price of human flesh was never higher than now; slavery was never more closely entwined about the hearts and affections of the southern people than now.” Everything seemed to be supportive of slavery. He said, “In one view the slaveholders have a decided advantage over all opposition…. [They have] the pen, the purse, and the sword, and are united against the simple truth

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    preached by humble men in obscure places.” “This is one view. It is, thank God, only one view; there is another, and a brighter view. David, you know, looked small and insignificant when going to meet Goliath, but he looked larger when he had slain his foe…. Oppression, organized as ours is, will appear invincible up to the very hour of its fall. Sir, let us look at the other side, and see if there are not some things to cheer our heart and nerve us up anew in the good work of emancipation.” Let’s just see if we can see that God is still alive. He said, “This great work, under God, has gone on, and gone on gloriously. Amid all changes, fluctuations, assaults, and adversities of every kind, it has remained firm in its purpose, steady in its aim, onward and upward, defying all opposition.” He said,

    I, for one, will not despair of our cause… .This infamous decision of the Slaveholding wing of the Supreme Court maintains that slaves are within the contemplation of the Constitution of the United States, property; that slaves are property in the same sense that horses, sheep, and swine are property….You will readily ask me how I am affected by this devilish decision—this judicial incarnation of wolfishness? My answer is, and no thanks to the slaveholding wing of the Supreme Court, my hopes were never brighter than now. I have no fear that the National Conscience will be put to sleep by such an open, glaring, and scandalous tissue of lies as that decision is, and has been, over and over, shown to be. The Supreme Court of the United States is not the only power in this world. It is very great, but the Supreme Court of the Almighty is greater…. He may decide and decide again; but he cannot reverse the decision of the Most High…. Such a decision cannot stand. God will be true though every man be a liar.3

    I want you to know when we know that God is not dead, as James Cone said, “The cross and resurrection of Jesus stand at the center of the New Tes­ tament story….The cross-resurrection events mean that we now know that Jesus’ ministry with the poor and the wretched was God effecting the divine will to liberate the oppressed…. God becomes the victim in their place and thus transforms the condition of slavery into the battleground for the struggle of freedom. This is what Christ’s resurrection means. The oppressed are freed for struggle, for battle in the pursuit of humanity.”4 Caesar, the resurrection says, you did your worst, and you still missed. God is not dead. God will not let his creation be destroyed by the system of Caesar. And though killed by the sovereigns of his day, God raised Jesus from the dead. Christ’s resurrection is the disclosure that God is not defeated by oppression. So clap your neighbor high-five and say, “God is not defeated.” And that means if God is not defeated, neither are those who follow God. I wish I had a witness here! The resurrection means that God has granted to life possibilities that ex­ ceed what looks like is possible right now. The resurrection means that God is invincible over the powers of death. The resurrection overturns the ability of anybody to limit your possibilities and to limit where your human life can be

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    developed. Touch your neighbors and say, “Neighbor! Ain’t no chains holding me! God is not dead!” I feel something here! The resurrection said “Yes! ” to our liberation. The resurrection means that death is not the ultimate thing that anybody can do to us. If I’m over the fear of death, then I’ve risen to the newness of life. The structures of death don’t have the last word. I wish I had a witness here! The resurrection overcomes the power of SIN. The resurrection overcomes the power of death. The resurrection overcomes the power of oppression. The resurrection helps those who are struggling to find meaning in the midst of oppression. Tell your neighbors and say, “Neighbor! Oppression might be around me, but resurrection is in me!” Resurrection says no matter what you have to suffer, God has not forgotten about you. Tell your neighbors and say “Neighbor! Don’t have a pity party yet. God has not forgotten about you!” Turn to your neighbors and say, “Neighbors! Tell America don’t give up yet. God has not forgotten about us! ” I wish I had a witness here! But not only does it mean God has not forgotten about us; the second thing is that God has not finished the fight. And if God has not finished, then we can’t stop. Because Jesus got up from the dead, we’ve still got to fight injus­ tice. Because he got up, we’ve got to fight racism. Because he got up, we’ve got to fight oppression. Because he got up, we’ve got to fight against wrong. Tell your neighbor and say, “Neighbor! Please be patient with me. God is not through with us yet. ” I’m a soldier in the army of the Lord, and I’ve got the whole armor, the blood-stained banner because God is not finished. I don’t care what executive order the President signed. God is not finished. I don’t care how many bills Mr. Ryan passes. God is not finished. And somebody better tell America, your arms are too short to box with God. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, God can shake the earth. God can make it darker. God can split the temple and split the walls. Somebody ought to say, “God has not finished!” Well that’s one more thing the resurrection says, and that is that God has the final say. Tell every Caesar, “God is not dead! Jesus got up from the grave! ’’And that means that God has the final say. What happens if Caesar is trying to have the last word in your life? You tell that Caesar— ”God has the final say! ” Look at that Caesar and say “God is not dead! ” I don’t care what that Caesar’s name is: racism, classism, militarism, meanness, hate, wrong, oppression. God is not dead, and that means that God has the last word. Turn to your neighbors and say, “Neighbor! God has the last word.” You’d better stand up and give God praise. Don’t you believe the hype! Whose report will you believe? I will believe the report of the Lord. But I want you to know it’s not just political. It’s also personal. Not only the Caesars in the social arena, but those Caesars that come in your personal life. Cancer doesn’t have the last word. Sickness doesn’t have the last word. Depression doesn’t have the last word. Lupus doesn’t have the last word.

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    Heart attack doesn’t have the last word. Despair doesn’t have the last word. Hopelessness doesn’t have the last word. He lives! He lives! He lives! He lives! “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning” (Ps. 30:5). He lives! All things work together for the good, for them that have been called. He lives! He lives! He lives! He lives! He lives! And because he lives, devils can be defeated. Because he lives, Caesars can be overcome. Because he lives, hate can be handled. Because he lives, oppression can be channeled. Because he lives, joy can be restored. Because he lives, my body can be healed. Because he lives, my sin can be forgiven. Because he lives, life can come out of death. Because he lives, joy can come out of sorrow. Because he lives, strength can come out of weakness. Because he lives, ways can be made. Because he lives, doors can be opened. Because he lives, valleys can be crossed. I said, our risen savior, he lives. And I say to the world today, I know that he is living. Whatever men may say, I see his hand of mercy. I hear his word of cheer. He lives! He lives! He lives! He lives! He lives! Christ Jesus lives today! Say it! Slap your neighbor a high-five and say, “Neighbor, tell every Caesar, God is not dead! God is yet alive! And if God is alive, you ought to praise him! You ought to bless him! You ought to shout!” I’m through. I’ve got to go in my comer. But tell your neighbor, say, “Neighbor, I’ve got to shout for myself. I need you to look in your life and remember when you were dead, but Jesus got you up, kept you up, turned you around, planted your feet on solid ground. Say yes! Say yes! Say yes!”

    Notes 1 Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, 71, 301, 92. 2 See Wright quotation in Joe R. Jones, A Grammar of Christian Faith, 451. 3 Frederick Douglass, “Speech on the Dred Scott Decision,” May 14, 1857. 4 James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed, 73-74.

  • Fears Within and Without: Easter Preaching to the Fearful

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    Fears Within and Without:

    Easter Preaching to the Fearful

    Valerie Bridgeman

    Methodist Theological School in Ohio, Delaware, Ohio

    “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt1

    “Almost everyone is afraid of being afraid. ” Barbara Brown Taylor

    In May 2015, my last intimate love relationship ended badly and painfully. The details matter only to me, but the impact on my health was immediate. My auto­ immune disease flared to the point of threatening my life, leaving me many days in a fetal position, wracked with pain. The doctor initially misdiagnosed another symptom as cancer. My “hidden” diseases of hypertension and diabetes also became uncontrol­ lable. I was a ball of fear-filled pain and despair. I could not imagine continuing to live. So I started cleaning out my apartment in an effort to make my imagined impending death easier for my children. I gave away collectible art and keepsakes that had given me joy through the years. I made sure my will was in place and all my paperwork in order. I burned or threw away private letters that I had kept for years. I cleaned my closet and drawers down to what I thought would be the bare necessities. For a brief moment, I considered suicide. Suicidal thoughts were not regular or raging demons, but I could see how people, gripped by fear, might decide to take their lives. I ate and slept, exercised and prayed, and waited for death. My waiting was accompanied by dread—not of dying—but of dying alone. The season of my not dying was also the time I began to understand fear more fully. I became aware of all the things I did to distract myself from my emotions. I watched as others did the same. For me, it was binge watching on premium channels or playing board or card games by myself. My fear grew as I tried to avoid it. And, when I spoke about fear with others, we seemed all to be saying the same thing. We were all afraid of being afraid as much as we were of the pain or despair that was enveloping us. In fact, the fear magnified all struggles. Fear is an amplifier. I don’t know that our times are more fearful that any other eras. I have been reading history and biographies lately in order to put the twenty-hrst century in perspective. The elections in 2008 produced fear in one segment of the United States; the elections in 2016 produced fear in another sector. The political and economic worlds, what with the up-and-down of market forces, make us afraid. Sickness and chronic illnesses make us afraid. I remember the fear of Y2K, when predictions of the world being thrown into chaos because of the turn of the clock from 1999 to 2000 produced fear. Fear, it seems, has been the low grade fever that keeps company with us in society, and it seems, in other parts of the world. This reality is no less true in the church. It is in this context that preachers are asked to preach during Eastertide. How do we preach hope in the face of fear? How do we make the gospel truth of God’s resur­ recting power live in its wake? That is the challenge for preachers at Easter. Preach­ ers who take a text and boldly speak a vision of the resurrected One, past the hist ending of the book of Mark, must do so as an act of resistance to the fear. Preachers

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    proclaim a truth about God’s willingness to confront the grave and the fear of it with resurrection. This proclamation takes a boldness that may even scare the preacher who must speak regardless, “even if your voice shakes,” as Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, once declared.3 The lectionary offers us several texts on which to reflect on the resurrection, the point of Easter. None of these texts imagines the fear in which they would be heard in our times, as best I can tell. But I can imagine that those hist disciples knew fear. Their teacher was dead. Many of them would declare him risen on the word of some other disciple (e.g. the disciples on the road to Emmaus, Luke 24:13-27). Some male disciples would ponder the women disciples’ report that sounded like a fairy tale to them (Luke 24:11). Fear, no doubt, stalked them as well. But they spoke it. That is what we see in the Acts text that the lectionary gives us. The disciples were under duress and persecution, but Peter stood in the face of fear to preach that God made this resurrection life available to all. Acts 10 is a hopeful story, a testimony to speaking while shaking. Peter preaches that God does not show partiality, that the life Jesus promises in resurrection is not limited to one ethnic group or religious understanding. It is boundless and borderless. The sermon begins that way while recounting the story of Jesus’ encounter with death. Jesus’ struggle with death. Jesus’ overcoming of death. Peter says (10:42) that it is Jesus who “commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead.” The disciples were commanded to preach as personal witnesses to God’s work through and in the life of Jesus, and that it was the continuing witness from the prophets that they, too, were testifying about Jesus. I should tell you now that as an Old Testament/Hebrew Bible scholar, I often resist this Christian reading of the ancient texts. I have been shaped by the lectionary and the Christian version of the story, so to resist it is to be almost—if not emphati­ cally—heretical. It’s also why the Isaiah 65:17-25 pericope does not make sense to me as a lectionary text in this moment. That text is a promissory love song to ancient Israel, coming from under the burden of exile or the scrabble of having to remain in the land that had been plundered. Isaiah’s words speak to me, but not through a christological lens. And, I suppose that means that I really can’t see how what Isaiah says “fits” into this Easter story. But here it is, promising a “new heaven and a new earth,” not for Christians, but for our religious forebears. These promises do not forego struggle; they only suggest that struggle and pain, even, will have a purpose toward ancient Israel’s (and by extension, our) thriving. If we could hold on to such a vision as Easter people, it might not end our fear, but it might tamp it down enough for us to believe in the resurrection, as we claim. I feel the same way about the Psalm that is attached to Easter. I grew up in a small, country Baptist Church where portions of Psalm 118 were recited weekly. We only had to learn the “his mercy endureth forever” (always the King James Version in the church of my youth). The NRSV now translates that phrase as “his steadfast love endures forever.” Should I tell you that I miss the word “endureth,” mainly for nostalgic reasons only. But v. 17 seems especially out of place on Easter: “I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord.” Jesus did die, and if life follows it’s natural form, so will you and 1.1 know these words were sung in ancient times as a sign of confidence in God in the time of illness and war, but they are braggadocios

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    or blustering words, designed to speak of confidence in God’s ability to deliver the psalmist. But they are not befitting of Easter. Yes, I also know that the psalm bears v. 22, “the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.” This verse has been used in ways that might be described as anti-Semitic. Christians who are supersessionists apply it to Jesus as having been rejected by Jews and accepted by Christians. The Revised Common Lectionary follows this theological read of Christianity as “the New Israel,” and has been designed as such. It is the commitment to supersessionist thinking that has made it hard for me to write. It’s not even supposed to be the point of this article; the point is supposed to be “how do you preach Easter to a fearful people?” Or as Michael Coffey noted that after the November 2016 election we had “to fully prepare for what it means to preach resurrection in this time of empire gone awry and extreme disorientation. ”4 Not everyone shares this sentiment. There are plenty of people who believe that Trump is God’s man in the White House, and that we are to follow the mandates of Romans 13:1-7 and “obey all authority.” There are people who wonder why we have to make any mention of the geo-political climate in which we live, believing as they do that politics has nothing to do with the Bible, with the gospel. So writing about Easter and how to preach to a fearful people reminds me that people are fearful for different reasons in this system. Much has been made of the divide in the nation, how pronounced it is, how intractable it feels.5 But the point for me is that fear presses against all sides of the divides. Fear and despair trumps some of our joy and hope many days. Writing these words in Advent makes them especially poignant for me. I don’t imagine that fear and despair will dissipate by Easter. How, then, will the preacher push up and through that fear and despair to point to an inbreaking of life after despair, after death—or maybe life and joy in the midst of death and despair. That I believe is the real task of the preacher: to lead us to experience and know God’s resurrection in the midst of the stench of death and in the presence of gut-wrenching fear. Such preaching may seem improbable or fanciful to some, rather than what it is, i.e., a pointing to the “not yet” and soon to come of the final inbreaking of God, in which a New Heaven and New Earth is the promise (Isaiah 65:1, 2 Peter 3:13, and Rev. 21:1). This new reality is where righteousness lives and where we long for a world so radical from the one we know that the old one is passed away completely. Preachers point to such a hope, even as they acknowledge the gripping dread of fear around people. Let me offer this example. I am not a fan of the television series “The Walking Dead,” now in its ninth season on the AMC network. But every now and then I see an episode with friends. It is gruesome, scary, and improbable. The thing about the series that is compelling is that the walking dead keep coming for the living, desir­ ing to make them a part of their ranks, to eat or suck some of the life from them. But those who survive the end-of-world horror fight for the right to live. They fall in love, they take care of their children, and they fight off the walking dead. In this current season, the character Jesus is killed. There is no hint that he will be resurrected. But horror lovers are not bothered. It is the death and the suspense of death that whispers to those viewers. The Christian preacher has to resist this love for horror, the whisper of death. It is so easy to “descend into hell” with the crucified Jesus and never “ascend into heaven” with him, where, in the words of the Colossians writer, our lives are hidden

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    in him (Col. 3:3). Fear will keep us in hell, if we have no way to break through the fog. The goal of Easter preaching, as Coffey reminds us, is “engendering a profound trust in God’s capacity to bring new life out of death, especially new life out of the death we must face now under empires of death, as we renounce them, resist them, and rejoice in the Gospel despite them, accompanied by our resurrected brother and Lord Jesus, the crucified one.” Jesus on “The Walking Dead” TV series may never come back. But we are commanded to believe against belief in a Jesus who is ever present with us, and is coming again. Pushing to a belief of such a Christ will of a necessity push against this fear. And yet, I confess, that if we are waiting for fear to dissipate, we might not live as resurrection people. Once, while walking on the Green Belt in Austin, Texas, my son who was very young at the time started quoting Psalm 23, the section about walking through the valley of the shadow of death. He added the word quickly. He had been running ahead of us, but night was descending, and he suddenly was afraid. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death quickly, I will fear no evil,” he said. He recited it mantra-like. He had hit upon something that has stuck with me more than 20 years later. Fear descends when we cannot see where we are going or know what the dark shadows harbor. This darkness is not evil; it is merely the coming and going of the 24-hour day. Night is as necessary as day. But we have been taught to fear it, to fear the unknown in all its forms. Easter preaching must recalibrate our expecta­ tions, even of the grave and the darkness. It must help us embrace the mystery and the fear that comes with it. Death is inevitable. Death is a part of life. Death may have lost its sting and the grave may have lost its victory, but true Easter preaching has to own up to the reality of death. It’s the only thing that will save us. On December 16,2017,1 wrote the follow­ ing on Facebook: “It is easy to be descriptive of the fear, the anger, the hopelessness people feel in this dystopian moment. But description is not prophetic. Describing is merely diagnostic. The goal in every sermon is to peep the presence, the power, the possibilities of the Divine in human history. Or, at least it should be.” Our words should be, I maintained, “graced with a compelling vision of what can be for the flourishing of all creation. I pray this in the name of the One who created and longs for us.” This statement, to me, is the heart of preaching the Easter mes­ sage as fears swirl. We cannot just describe what is going on in the world, thereby heightening the anxiety and fear people feel. I’m convinced that we don’t have to describe individual “sin” any more than we need to describe “systemic evil. ” We see it; we experience it. Preparing for Easter 2015, Guy Sayles wrote, “As Holy Week of 2015 approached, I heard the whispers of an insistent invitation: ‘Face as fully as you can the fact of your death and embrace joyfully the gift of your life.’ I knew that these two tasks were intricately intertwined, because we only begin to live, truly live, when we come to terms with the stark reality that our lives will end. ”b Battling cancer and facing his mortality in real ways, this truth of life-and-death in tandem actually provided the fod­ der for faith, his doubting faith. It was Brown Taylor who reminded me of the wonders of the darkness and how much I cherished it—even the fear it engendered—when I was a small girl in the countryside of Central Alabama. I have memories of climbing the antenna alongside the wall of my grandparents’ cinder-block house at night in order to see the stars in all their glory. It required the starkness against dark to see

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    their beauty. So, I learned to cherish the dark as much as the twinkling stars. That, I think, is what it means to preach in the midst of fear during Easter. We are called to embrace our fears so that they do not consume us. It is that embrace, I believe, that will help us hear and respond to the call to “fear not! ” Easter lets us live with contradictions, if we embrace them. While we celebrate the power of resurrection, we often also find ourselves by the bed of the dying. My mother died just a little over a month after Easter, in May 2002. Her impending death frightened me and steadied me at the same time. When my mother told us to do noth­ ing extraordinary to try to save her life, she often followed this command with, “I actually believe in the resurrection.” She was staring at death and proclaiming life. Once, in the dwindling days of her life, I visited her, and while I pushed her in the wheelchair for a walk, she told me she was tired and ready to go home. I instinctively knew that she did not mean back to the apartment she had shared with my father in an elder care unit in Atlanta. Nor was she longing to return to the house they had shared in Alabama when she was vibrant, healthy, and a school teacher. She longed for “a city called heaven,” a New Heaven and a New Earth. I did not expect such a statement from my mother, but it came with a welcomed relief. Serving as a hospice chaplain in Texas at the time, I knew in that moment that she had made peace with death and therefore embraced her life. It is the sweet enigma of Easter. It makes little sense and all the sense in the world. Know death intimately; let it’s fear grip you. Then, in the end, surrender to life. That is the gospel truth preachers must proclaim in every season of fear.

    Notes 1 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Only Thing We tfave to Fear Is Fear Itself’: FDR’s First Inaugural Ad­ dress,^’’.http: //historymatters. gmu.edu/d/5057/ 2 Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in The Dark (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2015), 4. 3 Maggie Kuhn & Women’s History Month, Presbyterian Historical Society: The National Archives of the PC(USA), https://www.history.pcusa.org/blog/maggie-kuhn-womens-history-month 4 Michael Coffey, “Renounce, Resist, Rejoice: Easter Preaching in the Age of Trump, Journal for Preachers, 41 no 3 (Easter 2018), 3-9. 5 Consider that famed journalist Bob Woodward has written an ode of sorts to our fear in his book, Fear: Trump in the White House (Simon and Schuster, 2018). 6 Guy Sayles, “Never Sure to Preach Again: Cancer and Easter Hope,” Journal for Preachers, 39 no 3 (Easter 2016): 22-16, 13.

  • Holiness

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    Holiness

    2 Peter 3:8-15a

    Peter W. Marty

    St. Paul Lutheran Church, Davenport, Iowa

    Pick your sport. Different professional athletes across the map have shown just how fast one can rise in talent, money, and fame, and how equally fast one can fall to the ravages of pride, injury, and poor decision. Few have fallen further and faster than Mickey Mantle, the New York Yankees’ great-often dubbed the best homerun switch hitter ever-who retired in 1969. Mantle enjoyed the glory years of the Yankees through their repeated World Series appearances. But regret, not glory, marked the downward spiral of his personal life once he retired from Major League Baseball at the age of 33. Mantle’s drinking and womanizing did a number on his family, not to mention his own well-being. He disappeared into the dark life of alcoholism during the 1980s, losing much of his purpose and meaning in life and describing it to friends as his own internal hell. When he finally entered Baylor Medical Center for a liver transplant in June 1995, doctors gave him just days to live if he didn’t have the transplant. A few weeks after his surgery, Mantle walked into a standing-room-only press conference at the hospital. It would prove to be his last public statement. Sadness and regret marked his words as he described the life he had squandered: “God gave me a great body and an ability to play baseball,” he said. “God gave me everything, and I just… pffft! … I’d like to say to the kids out there, if you’ re looking for a role model, this is a role model: don’t be like me. ” When a reporter asked Mantle if he had signed a donor card, he said, “Everything I’ve got is worn out… .Although I’ve heard people say they’d like to have my heart, it’s never been used. ’1 At the same press conference he spoke of his selfishness: “I want to start giving back, ” he told those gathered, “[because] all I’ve ever done is take. ”2 It turns out that that giving back wasn’t going to happen. Four weeks after speaking to the press, Mantle was dead from anemia, infection, and quite possibly a broken heart. It’s no fun to draw inspiration from someone else’s glaring disappointments. But Mantle’s self-destructive behavior and loss of meaning provide a wake-up call for anybody trying to give faithful shape to his or her life. If we want our life to add up to any measure of selfless significance, what will it take to arrive at such a point before it’s too late? Many biblical scholars believe that The Second Letter of Peter is really a kind of last will and testament from the author. As Peter saw his own life drawing to a close, and sensed that he might not get another chance to address his friends, he communi­ cated some final thoughts. He spoke with earnestness and seriousness, hoping others would take his convictions to heart. “The day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and all the elements will be dis­ solved with fire…. [And] since everything will be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons do you want to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness?”3 In other words, what would your lives look like if the Lord showed up unan­

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    nounced? In anticipation of that moment, what sort of persons do you want to be? Would there be any obvious evidence of holiness that others would notice? Peter delivers a vision of the end times. Like others around him, he had a him expecta­ tion of what would happen, and the picture he portrays is one of gigantic meltdown. Everything will be dissolved or eviscerated. We might think of that cataclysmic time as a sudden dissolution of everything we rely on or hnd valuable. Our cell phone, car keys, favorite chair, World Series ring, local government, bank account, photo albums, books, jewelry, email contact lists, and whatever else comes to mind-they’re all cast into oblivion. Every object that contributes to life’s pleasure or value would be gone. Melted down. Liquehed. In such a scenario of sudden evisceration, the central questions for those left stand­ ing would be: What exactly would your life look like? Who would you be? Would there even be a “you” worth getting to know, independent of everything to which you clung? The writer of Second Peter suggests these sorts of questions are not peculiar at all, but deeply spiritual in nature. The only way to address them realistically is to imagine a sudden and unexpected turn of events. The surprise turn of events described in scripture by Peter and others is hard for us to appreciate. As Mickey Mantle seems to have assumed for himself over the decades, most of us hgure we’ll have more time to make amends, more time to turn over a new leaf, more time to give back to others after living mostly in a taking mood. I, for one, don’t know anybody in our faith community who spends his or her days guessing, predicting, or worrying about when the Lord will return. That calculation doesn’t hgure into my imagination either. Most of us might as well sit in for the poor Jew described in the tale of the small Russian shtetl where the town council paid him one ruble per week. He was paid to sit at the town gate and be the hist to greet the Messiah and alert others to the Messiah’s arrival. The man’s out-of-town brother visited him one day only to be instantly puzzled as to why he took such a low-paying job. “Well, it’s true,” the poor man said. “The pay is indeed low. But it’s the steadiest job in the world.” We’ve learned not to expect the Lord to show up on our doorstep unannounced. Those of you who know you will be receiving phone calls or text messages tomor­ row- because it’s a typical day-are not expecting to receive one specihcally from the Lord. I’m quite sure of that. In fact, I wonder what sort of panic would set in if you were to receive a text message from the Lord that read, “I’m hve minutes away. ” After church last week I struck up a conversation with two members of our con­ gregation. These sisters, in their early seventies, had just moved into a new home on the outskirts of a nursing home complex. I said rather casually to them, and with all good intent, “I’ll have to drop in on you sometime so you can show me your new digs. ” With panic in their eyes and almost unison response, they stared at me and said, “Not today! Don’t come today! ” Well, I wasn’t thinking of visiting that day or on any day, for that matter, especially without prior notice. But my words brought a sudden flash of terror upon them as they imagined the condition of their house and the many half-unpacked boxes. If the Lord were to ring your doorbell today, what would the inside of your house convey to this guest? Would there be order or chaos? Would life inside seem cozy and peaceful or haphazard and disheveled? Or better yet, imagine the situation Peter

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    describes. If everything inside your house were melted down and mysteriously dis­ solved, what would be the shape of the relationships in that house? Assuming you have other people living with you, would the character and feel of the household be loving and caring or tense and argumentative? Or if you live by yourself, would the Lord be able to notice obvious signs of gratitude or evidence of an active prayer life? Would your public and private lives appear to this surprise guest as congruent? “Since all these things will be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons do you want to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness?” Holiness is one of the most beautiful words in the vocabulary of faith. We use it appropriately to describe the interior passion that has us living with and for God. If s the vitality of the Spirit or the exuberance of God dwelling richly within us in undiluted fashion. We use the word holiness inappropriately if we only mean by it to reduce life to certain behaviors resembling niceness or goodness. A misunderstanding of holiness puts God at our disposal and treats the impact of the divine as cosmetic. We become spectators, living at a safe distance from God, eager to be in charge of our own spirituality. “Holiness is the most attractive quality, the most intense experience we ever get out of sheer life,” says Eugene Peterson. “We hnd ourselves in on the operations of God,… not talking about them, not reading about them…. ‘Our God is consuming hre’ (Heb. 12:29), not hre to be played with. Holy, Holy, Holy is not Christian needle­ point.”4 The liturgy at Mickey Mantle’s funeral included a song he requested for the day: “Yesterday When I Was Young” by Roy Clark. If s a country music song that may not be typical funeral fare in many churches. But the words epitomize the disappointment Mantle held for himself and his sense of an unholy existence from which he saw no escape:

    I teased at life as if it were a foolish game, the way the evening breeze may tease a candle flame. The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned; I always built to last on weak and shifting sand… .1 ran so fast that time and youth at last ran out; I never stopped to think what life was all about… .There are so many songs in me that won’t be sung. I feel the bitter taste of tears upon my tongue. The time has come for me to pay for yesterday, when I was young.5

    In his letter about end times and with his encouragement that we live lives of holi­ ness and godliness, Peter has a more hopeful word than this depressing song. Death doesn’t involve our “paying for yesterday” or some “bitter taste of tears upon our tongue.” No, the news is far better. If anything, says Peter, the Lord’s patience with us is our salvation. We can wait all we want, which is part of the bargain of living holy and godly lives. But, we shouldn’t miss the Lord’s own patience with us. “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.”6 What a beautiful hope-one of comfort to everyone who wonders if his or her heart was ever adequately used.

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    Notes

    1 Jane Leavy, The Last Boy (HarperCollins, 2010), 374. 2 https://www.upi.corn/Archives/1995/07/ll/Mickey-Mantle-says-dont-be-like-me/1810805435200/. 3 2 Peter 3:10-11. 4 Eugene H. Peterson, The Jesus Way (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2007), 132. 5 https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/22807510/Shades+of+Country+%5BL%26D+Box%5D/Yesterday+W hen+I+Was+Young. 6 2 Peter 3:9.

  • Repentance: A Lenten Meditation

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    Repentance: A Lenten Meditation

    Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-9; I Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15

    Stanley Hauerwas

    Durham, North Carolina

    Theologians often make doubtful Christians. I do not mean they make other Chr istians doubt whether they are or want to be Christian. That may happen, but that is not what I mean by describing theologians as “doubtful Christians. ” The doubt I think that often characterizes the life of theologians is meant to describe how theo­ logians are often unsure if they are Christians. They are so not only because they are exposed to intellectual developments that seem to make many Christian convictions problematic. But the problem is deeper than such challenges to the faith. The problem is quite simple—theologians get paid to believe in God. I have made a good living by being a theologian. If I had ever quit believing, at least if I were a person of integrity, I would have had to hnd another job. But the very fact I have been paid for being a theologian cannot help but create in me questions about my identity as a Christian. The matter is complicated by the fact that most of us identihed as theologians in our day are more likely to be servants of the university ratherthanthe church. Theologians cannot help but wonder if we are Christians because we assume the objectivity characteristic of university disciplines demands a distance from what we assume is our subject. That distance is often called “objectivity,” which names a stance we are to take to show that we know we cannot teach what Christians believe as though what they believe might be true. At one time theologians were paid by universities to be or at least to pretend to be Christians. That has changed, but it is still the case that university theologians cannot help but entertain the thought that we are more likely to be playing at being a Christian rather than being one. Why am I imposing on you these pathetic anxieties from the world of theology? I do so because I suspect in some ways the kind of worry that may bedevil the theo­ logian; that is, we fear that more likely pretending to be a Christian rather than being one pervades many lives—not just those of the theologian. I think this is particularly true at a time like this, namely Lent. Lent is a time when we are to examine our lives in the hope that through such an examination, we will discover and repent of those sins, those impediments that stand in the way of our being disciples of a crucihed savior. We are able, obligated might be a better word, to undertake such an examination because, as we are told in I Peter, “Christ suffered for sins once and for all in order to bring us to God.” Yet it is hard to avoid the sense that we are playing at being sinful. We cannot help but think this is some kind of game. It is almost as if God wants us to be sinful because God is, or at least we are told God is, a God of forgiveness. So in order to help God be a forgiving God, we have to play at being sinners—at least during Lent it seems to give God something to do. For example, think about our Gospel for today. After John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God. He said, “The time is fulhlled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the good news.” We, of course, are quite glad that the kingdom has drawn near, but it is by no means clear

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    why the kingdom drawing near means we need to repent. Nor do we know what we have done or not done for which we should repent. We are not even sure we know what repentance looks like or entails. But this is Lent, so we are willing to try to come up with something. After all, we have some sense that we often do something we later regret, so we know we are not perfect. I should not have been as candid with Mrs. Smith as I was, but she can really get on my nerves. I know I am a bit selfish, but when everything comes out in the wash I do my bit for others. I know I should not lie, but if I had told the truth to X or Y, they would have been hurt. You can add to this unending list of our petty failings. After all, we confess we have sinned not only by what we have done but by what we have left undone. What we have left undone cannot help but cover a range of behaviors that are sufficient to make us sinners. That said, however, it remains the case that though we know we may be sinners, we have trouble taking that description of ourselves all that seriously. We know we are not perfect, but most of us think we are good enough. The truth is most of us are conventional people who lead good conventional lives. It is not at all clear to us that we are all that sinful, but as I suggested, we are willing to try to play being a sinner for God’s sake—at least at Lent. If we do not stand in need of forgiveness, God, as I suggested above, would have lost God’s day job. That we may have the haunting thought that we are only playing at being a sin­ ner, I suspect, involves the more general worry that in the world in which we now find ourselves, we are not at all sure if we know what it means to be a Christian. I suspect we are not even sure we know what being a Christian looks like. Surely to be a Christian means more than being a nice person who believes stuff about God. There is, after all, the Sermon on the Mount. But then that is one of the problems: we cannot imagine living out the demands of the Sermon. But because we cannot imagine living lives the Sermon seems to envisage, we cannot help but fear that we are only playing at being Christian. Something seems to have gone decisively wrong with our attempt to be a repen­ tant people. I think the problem is quite simple. The reason we find it hard to avoid a sense that we are playing at being sinful during Lent is itself a manifestation of our sinfulness. No sin is more basic than the presumption, a presumption schooled by our pride, that we can know on our own what it means to say that we are sinners. Too often I fear our attempt to examine ourselves to discover our sins turns out to be an invitation to narcissism. Barth rightly argued that we are only able to confess our sin on our way out of sin. I fear that too often the revival tradition of trying to make people feel guilty for their sins so they will ask for forgiveness makes sin an intelligible designation prior to grace. Barth’s way of putting the matter rightly assumes that the very presumption that we might be able to determine what our sins may be is a sin. That Jesus calls us to repent is his right alone because it is in his light that we can even know what our sins may be. We do not come to Jesus because our sins need to be forgiven. Rather we know we need to be forgiven because Jesus has come to us as the One alone capable of revealing who we are without that knowledge destroying us. Never forget, we, that is the laity, get to shout every Easter, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” The presumption that we now know better is just that presumption that reveals sin’s hold on us.

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    We tend to think of sin as something we do, but sin is more like a power that possesses us rather than something we do. Possession often expresses itself in the language of choice because to be possessed is to live in a manner that assumes we are our own best creator. To sin is not to do what may be generally thought to be wrong. To sin is to offend God. Sin, therefore, is not a generalized category to designate that we have done some­ thing for which we are later sorry. Sin is an offense against God who, as our Psalm indicates, is a Lord of compassion and love, and exactly because God is so, we have revolted. We only know we are sinners because we are hist loved by God. To con­ fess that we are sinners turns out to be a theological achievement because sin is not a general description that people can understand whether they are Christian or not. In short sin is not a naturally given category. That non-Christians use sin to describe some failing in their lives is a left-over from a past age when Christian speech was assumed a “given,” but that time is quickly disappearing. As Christians we believe that we must be taught to be sinners. That training comes by being confronted by the Son of God who, as Karl Barth has put it, “has accused us by turning and taking to Himself the accusation which is laid properly against us, against all men, against every man. He pronounced sentence on us by taking our place, by unreservedly allowing that God is in the right against Himself—Himself the bearer of our guilt. This is the humility of the act of God which has taken place for us in Jesus Christ. ” The good news is we do not get to be our own judge. We do not get to determine what our sins may be. The devil, the great tempter, would have us believe that we should want to be like that false god, the lord, who we assume to be self-sufficient, self-affirming, self-desiring, the supreme being, self-centered and rotating about himself. The problem, of course, is that is not the God who has come to us in Jesus Christ. That God, the God that has come to us in Christ, is sufficient to Himself, but that sufficiency is the love that has constituted the life of the Trinity from all eternity. Our sin quite simply is our refusal to be loved by such a God. What could possibly account for such a refusal? In a lovely book of prose poems entitled Tears of Silence, Jean Vanier writes:

    I fear the mysterious power of compassion compassion requires that I have found myself and no longer play the game of putting on a mask, a personage pretending to be appearing

    Compassion requires That I become myself accepting my poverty letting the Spirit breathe move live

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    love in me opening my being without fear to the delicate touch of God’s hand accepting that I am loved as I am with my fears and frailties with my intelligence and competencies with my heart and with my hopes free to be myself

    What a startling thought by Vanier. Could he possibly be right that we fear the mystery of compassion? I suspect he is right that we fear compassion because God is compassion “all the way down.” Accordingly we fear God because we fear knowing who we are. But God has overwhelmed our fear by compassion itself. The name of that compassion is Jesus. We have been made part of that compassion, the compassion that is Jesus, through the sharing of his body and blood. Accordingly, we have little use for our doubts about whether we are really Christians. So do not worry about whether you are really a Christian. You may think you are only pretending to be a Christian, but by God’s grace, God makes us what we pretend. This is Lent. Repent! Recognize that those self-centered worries about whether you are really a Christian do you or God no good. Rather use this time, this sacred time, to prepare to meet the Christ who for our sake “suffered for sins once and for all in order to bring you (and me) to God.”

  • Preaching the Beatitudes in the Age of Trump

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    Page 3

    Preaching the Beatitudes in the Age of Trump

    Mary Hinkle Shore Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd, Brevard, North Carolina

    A few weeks before the 2016 presidential election, Mark1 wore a black t-shirt to choir practice with the words “basket of deplorables” printed in white letters across the front. Most of the people who were going to vote for Donald Trump in our left­ leaning congregation were quiet about it, but this one came out of the closet wearing a t-shirt. He is not a mean-spirited person, certainly no more mean-spirited than I am. He volunteers in the church and in the community; he works with kids whom other people don’t have time for; he sings in the choir. He is one of us, if “us” means the group of Christians trying to be the church for the world at the Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Brevard, North Carolina. Charlie sleeps with a loaded handgun in his nightstand. He is a retiree living in a modest home on a quiet street that has seen no home invasions—ever. Yet he is vigilant. He comments to his pastor that if someone comes after him or his family, he does not intend to go down without a fight. And he reports that since he decided to keep the gun close, he sleeps much better. He volunteers in the congregation and with the local sheriff’s department. Often throughout the year, you will find him spending his Saturday mornings helping to control traffic so that participants in bike rides or road runs in our mountain town are safe. Julie is on the Religious Affairs Committee for our county’s chapter of the NA ACR On her Facebook feed, you can keep up with the marches and meetings she is part of. She is convening a group in the congregation to explore how we can be more involved in ministry on behalf of immigrants and refugees. She herself takes refuge in snark from time to time, and in raging at the television news. On the other hand, she sits down to talk with the guy in our congregation who sends rightwing emails to about a dozen of us regularly. Most of the rest of us just press the delete key. All of us make a confession of sin each Sunday and hear words of forgiveness. We share the peace of Christ with each other. Christ shares his body and blood with us. We and a couple hundred others make up a congregation with a vision statement that even the pastor struggles to quote exactly, but is something like “Following Jesus, we will love one another, serving all.” Following, loving, serving: that much we can remember. Americans regularly hear that our culture is getting more and more divided into enclaves of people who think alike. Social media logarithms direct “more of the same” to us so that we see less and less information that would challenge what we believe, especially what we believe about “the other.” And yet almost all of us who belong to a Christian congregation find ourselves in the same pew week after week with people that no logarithm would pair with us. All of us at Good Shepherd would say there are some “crazy others” in the congregation we attend, and while we may be stunned by each other from time to time, so far we are still together. Each week, just by worshipping together, we are resisting the temptation to believe that if we just voted Mark off the island, or Julie, we would offer a better witness to the Gospel. By loving each other—even on days when we need the scripted words

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    and actions of the liturgy to do so—we expose the biggest lie of our culture: that if only some of us were gone, our way of life would be secure again. The temptation of the present age is to believe that after just a little violence—the snarky joke, some deportations, the death penalty, or what the gun in the nightstand can do—we will be safe. The beatitudes clarify that our safety lies elsewhere. The beatitudes are blessings with which Jesus begins the sermon on the mount. As his sermon at the synagogue in Nazareth is Jesus’ inaugural address in Luke (cf. Luke 4:16-30), the sermon on the mount (Matthew 5-7) is the inaugural address of Jesus in Matthew. Jesus will issue many imperatives as he sits atop a mountain addressing his disciples with the crowd listening in, but he begins with blessings, not commands. (If I could say only one thing to preachers of the beatitudes, it would be, “Stop telling us to go out there and be meek, or pure in heart, or really good at mourning! Jesus is blessing people, not exhorting them.”) With the exception of “rejoice and be glad” in the final blessing, the beatitudes are entirely declarative statements. We know the blessing form from the Hebrew Bible.2 There, blessings may be directed toward God or toward human beings. The blessings directed toward humans may be offered either because of the person’s present circumstances or because of something that will come to them in the future. The beatitudes of the sermon on the mount are of this last type. The hist half of each verse names a group of people and calls them blessed. The second half of each verse adds a specific word about the future of these currently blessed ones. The formula is: “blessed are________ , for they will

    Jesus speaks blessing after blessing: nine in all, and after each one, he announces a promise, a little window on the age to come. Each blessing is offered here and now, even as it calls to mind a reality that is not yet. The hist and eighth promise are in the present tense, but even these (“theirs is the kingdom of heaven”) point to a not-yetfully -arrived place/time. In each case, the objects of blessing are said to be blessed in the present because something surprising and heartening—indeed, their heart’s desire—will be theirs in the future. How does Jesus know this? He cites no source for his authoritative words about the future. The beatitudes are similar in this way to his antitheses elsewhere in the sermon, “You have heard it said…, but I say to you…which are also offered without citation. Together with these antitheses, the beatitudes are likely part of the reason that when he finishes the sermon, “the crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes” (7:28-29). It will take the rest of Jesus’ ministry to clarify who Jesus is and how he can make promises about a future no one else can see yet. Part of what makes the beatitudes so arresting is the challenge of seeing this future as belonging to those to whom it is promised. Robert Smith points out that the surprise of the beatitudes is not in the second half of each, but in the hist. “All the reasonably good and religious people of that day looked for the kingdom of God, and they knew by heart the promise of psalms and prophets about inheriting the land, seeing God, and being children of God. ”3 The surprise is that these promises were for the fundamentally insecure by standards of the day, that is, people who lacked social standing, political power, and spiritual virtuosity.4 Reading through the descriptors of the blessed ones helps to make this point. The blessed are:

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    • Poor in spirit • Mourning • Meek • Hungering and thirsting for righteousness • Merciful • Pure in heart • Peacemakers • Persecuted • Slandered Is this not a list of nice folks who can expect to finish last? We read down the list and wonder whether the blessing of God is not a consolation prize awarded to those who are too kind for politics, too passive for business, and too sensitive for ministry. “Losers, all of them,” might be the tweet. But about such people, Jesus says that they are blessed because they will: • Have the kingdom of heaven • Be comforted • Inherit the land (earth) • Be satisfied • Obtain mercy • See God • Be daughters and sons of God • Have the kingdom of heaven • Have a great reward Jesus begins the formation of his disciples this way. He announces this future for these blessed ones. Why? To answer that question, we might ask, “When does it help to know the end of a story at its beginning?” Answer: when the story is going to get very scary in the middle. Jesus puts this future before the disciples—and Matthew puts it before his readers—so that they (we) have these promises when comfort, land, righteousness, mercy, God’s reign, and the capacity to see, know, and be known by God are threatened. And they will be. If, in the scariest parts of the story, we are to reject trying to get safe by violence, hatred of enemies, laying up treasures on earth, public displays of generosity, and worry, we must know something about the nature of our God and our destination.5 Those who take to heart the imperatives of the sermon on the mount will find themselves in situations where they need to know over and over again that they are, finally, held in the love and justice of God. When we know that this is the end of the story, our imagination and our lives change. Jesus’ promises have the effect of pulling the future they describe into the present “ahead of time. ” The best explanation I know for how a promise changes things before it is fulfilled comes from a thirty year-old article by homiletics professor Richard Lischer, “Preaching and the Rhetoric of Promise. ”6 Lischer begins by saying that a promise cannot be detached from the one speaking it, and then he explains with a story: If I am out of work and on relief, and the owner of the local grocery store promises me a job in two weeks, whether or not I now adopt a stance of hope in the world depends on the character of the one who promises. Does he have a history of faithful actions from which I can abstract the quality of faithfulness and ascribe it to him? Are there testimonies to his faithful­

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    ness? If so, my life has already changed. It changes with the issuance of the promise (73).

    Does Lischer’s would-be grocery worker have a job yet? Technically, no. He will have a job in two weeks; even so, this afternoon he twirls his wife around the kitchen when he arrives home. Tonight he sleeps without the usual interval in the wee hours spent staring at the ceiling, awake. Next week, he makes sure he has something in which to pack his lunch to work each day. The day before the job starts, he lays out his work clothes. His life has already changed. All of these observable actions flow from a promise made by a trustworthy grocery store owner. The beatitudes are promises. Jesus speaks them with authority. Of course, in the narrative of the Gospel, most of the revelation of his character that will make his promises trustworthy and therefore life-changing for those to whom they are addressed has not happened yet. It will. Throughout his life and in his death, Jesus reveals how he can bless and promise as he does at the beginning of his ministry. Preaching the beatitudes during Lent naturally lends itself to observations about how Jesus himself inhabits the ways of life that he pronounces blessings upon. • “Blessed are those who mourn, “Jesus says (5:4). When he receives the news of John’s death, “he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself” (14:13), and while only Luke notes that Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, in Matthew also he laments, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! ” (23:37). • “Blessed are the meek (Greek: pratis),” Jesus says (5:5). He uses the same word to describe himself: “I am gentle ipraiis) and lowly of heart ” (11:29), and as he rides into Jerusalem, Matthew comments that the circumstances of his journey “took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying, ‘ Tell the daughter of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you, humble ipraiis), and mounted on a donkey…’ ” (21:4-5). • “Blessed are the merciful,” Jesus says (5:7). Four healing stories in Matthew begin with people addressing Jesus, “Son of David, have mercy… (cf. 9:27, 15:22, 17:15, and 20:30). ” In every case, Jesus heals those who need it. • “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus says (5:9), and even though in this Gospel, he also says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (10:34), when a sword actually appears in the story, he rebukes the one who wields it. “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the scriptures be fulfilled, which say it must happen in this way?” (27:52-54). • “Blessed are those persecuted for righteousness’ sake,” Jesus says (5:10) and “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely” (5:11). In his trial and passion, he endures beatings, false witnesses, ridicule, and state-sanctioned death even though he is innocent. Jesus will himself need to know the end of the story through the middle. Even then, his only word from the cross in Matthew is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (27:46). It turns out Jesus is wrong about that. God has not forsaken him, and as the Fa­

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    ther raises the Son from the dead, the promises hist spoken in the beatitudes come true: You will be comforted. You will inherit the earth. You will receive mercy. You will be called a son of God. Yours is the kingdom of heaven. Your reward is great in heaven. Even in Lent, we preach on the Easter side of resurrection. As David Bartlett observes, “It is Jesus who pronounced those blessings on the mountain; it is the Risen Lord who authoritatively continues to bless by his instruction and his presence.”7 Within the gospels and the rest of the New Testament, as well as the life and liturgy of the congregation, there are testimonies to the Risen Lord’s faithfulness. His risen life, shared with the world in the person of the Spirit, is the means by which those promises on the mountain have the power to change the story in which we live.

    :|: :]: :|:

    I have a hunch that the goal of political rhetoric in the current age is to keep its hearers fearful. On the surface, it looks like the goal of political rhetoric in the current age is to keep everyone angry, but underneath anger is almost always fear. We are afraid of many things: some of us fear that there is no longer a meaningful distinction between truth and falsehood; some fear that our “American way of life” is about to be lost. We fear the other, the bully, the loser, the rich, the poor. We are afraid of getting old, getting cancer, being irrelevant, being in the minority. We are afraid of dying. All this fear makes us hunger and thirst for security. • We take our shoes off at the airport and step into body scanners, comforted by “screening.” • We approve laws said to ensure that non-citizens will not vote in local elections, even though boards of elections data refutes the claim that non-citizens are even try­ ing to vote in our elections. • Calls for metal detectors in our schools vie with calls for guns in our schools—all to keep our children safe. • The need for security justifies violence, even the “pre-emptive strike,” as prudent. Locally and nationally, in small ways and in ways that cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives, we aim to get safe. When fear triggers a fight response, we risk becoming exactly what we oppose. At the invitation of a peace-loving friend who is active in politics and dismayed at the current national political scene, I attended a rock-painting class at a local art space. Lor two hours, a group of eight or nine women sat around a drop cloth covered table painting mandalas and other “dot art” on small rocks. It was close work, but acces­ sible to a variety of talent levels, and the end products were beautiful. As the evening wound down, my friend said, “This has been great! Lor two hours, I didn’t feel like shooting anybody. ” Her comment illustrates the risk of being hooked up to the daily IV drip of rage from anyone, national figures included. Eager to oppose the policies represented by such violent rhetoric, we nonetheless get amped up on it. We may even become what we hate. The Beatitudes take us in a different direction. The blessings with which Jesus begins the sermon on the mount proclaim present and. eternal security to a group of people who have neither political power nor spiritual virtuosity. Lrom that place of ultimate safety, followers of Jesus are free to risk living in the ways Jesus describes in the rest of the sermon. We may risk sleeping without a firearm nearby, loving those

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    who call us deplorable, praying for our persecutors, not saying “You fool!” at the television (cf. Matthew 5:22), and greeting with joy the powerful resistance that our actions will call forth from the rulers of this age. As we risk such a way of life, fol­ lowers of Jesus embody something like an “alternative universe” right in the middle of one that is characterized by the reign of the mean-spirited, the proliferation of fake news, and the dehumanization and exploitation of the disenfranchised. Ahead of time, followers of Jesus inhabit what in Matthew Jesus calls the kingdom of heaven. Will it make a difference? Jesus promises that lives lived this way change their surroundings as a city set on a hill changes the landscape of which it is a part. Like a lamp set on a lampstand, the community blessed as the beatitudes describe will give light to all the house.

    Notes 1 I have changed the names of my parishioners but not the details of their stories. 2 Dale C. Allison, Jr., The Sermon on the Mount: Inspiring the Moral Imagination (NewYork: Herder & Herder), 41, reviews these different forms and offers examples. Amy Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds., The Jewish Annotated New Testament, second edition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 18, documents the way that the beatitudes in Matthew recall various texts from the Psalms, Isaiah, and Proverbs. 3 Robert H. Smith, Matthew (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1989), 80. 4 Robert H. Smith, “Blessed Are the Poor in (Holy) Spirit? (Matthew 5:3),” Word & World 18/4 (1998): 389-396) argues that “poor in spirit” refers to those who lack the capacity for dramatic deeds of power (cf. Matthew 7:21-23). Allison, Sermon on the Mount, hears “poor in spirit” as “those who acknowledge their spiritual need” (45). 5 I allude here to Richard Lischer, “The Sermon on the Mount as Radical Pastoral Care,” Interpreta­ tion 41/2 (1987): 157-169. He writes, “Our only hope of living as the community of the Sermon is to acknowledge that we do not retaliate, hate, curse, lust, divorce, swear, brag, preen, worry, or backbite because it is not in the nature of our God or our destination that we should be such people. When we as individuals fail in these instances, we do not snatch up cheap forgiveness, but we do remember that the ekklesia is larger than the sum of our individual failures and that it is pointed in a direction that will carry us away from them” (163). 6 “Preaching and the Rhetoric of Promise,” Word & World 8/1 (1988): 66-79. 7 David Bartlett, “The Beatitudes,” Journal for Preachers 40/2 (Lent 2017): 19.

  • Preaching Easter in the Age of Twitter

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    Preaching Easter in the Age of Twitter

    Mark Ramsey

    Macedonian Ministry, Atlanta, Georgia, and

    Derek Starr Redwine

    Fairmount Presbyterian Church, Cleveland Fleights, Ohio

    “More than 70 percent of Americans identify as Christian,” a recent New York Times article stated, “but you wouldn’t know it from listening to them. An over­ whelming majority of people say that they don’t feel comfortable speaking about faith, most of the time.”1 The author, Jonathan Merritt, commissioned a survey by the Barna Group about patterns (or lack thereof) of spiritual conversation among Ameri­ can adults. Included in the results: “More than one-fifth of respondents admit they have not had a spiritual conversation at all in the past year. Six in 10 say they had a spiritual conversation only on rare occasions—either ‘once or twice’ (29 percent) or

    ‘ several times’ (29 percent) in the past year. Seven percent of Americans say they talk about spiritual matters regularly.”2 As Merritt summarizes, “Here’s the real shocker: Practicing Christians who attend church regularly aren’t faring much better. A mere 13 percent had a spiritual conversation around once a week.”3 In this spiritually fraught landscape, does Twitter—and all it represents—help or hurt? Imagine that it is Easter morning in Anytown USA, and disciples of all ages and stages settle in for yet another Easter sermon. Some are sitting expectantly, more than a few are bored, some are annoyed, several are uneasy in an unfamiliar space, several are just tired, but most—even if tentatively on their own terms—are ready to participate in a conversation framed within the walls of sacred space. Of course, in the age of Twitter, another conversation—a bigger conversation—is also happening on Easter morning that is not limited by walls or boundaries; it is a digital conversa­ tion, an egalitarian conversation where every voice, every perspective, is given equal weight and attention, and the way into this conversation is via a smartphone, which is likely in everyone’s hand, even on Easter. Make no mistake about it, whether it is a Boomer playing Candy Crush, or a Gen-Xer going over a to-do list, or a Millennial posting on Pinterest, or a young member of Gen-Y jumping from app to app, nearly all on Easter will listen to the sermon with phone nearby, ready to either engage more deeply or escape more quickly the sermon they are about to hear. In one congregation, sitting right up front—not her choice in the crowded sanctuary—a recent college grad who grew up in church sits with her parents and her sister as she begins an invis­ ible, digital conversation in real time with a larger community of worshippers who are connected not by geography, but by mutual connection. To the extent to which spiritual conversations are happening today, some take place in this way that was unimaginable just a few years ago. In time, she is soon joined by several others, not all worshipping in the same room or the same church:

    Sue Smith @suedoc23 About to hear my 25th Easter sermon. Hoping for a fresh take. #eastersermon

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    John Wilson @jw2010 You at the church? @suedoc23 #easter2018

    Of course. With the fam. It’s Easter. WYA? @jw2010

    John Wilson @jw2010 Back right corner. Reading all the Easter memorials. I can’t stand the smell of lilies. You? #lillyhate #insertsin2018? @suedoc23

    Sue Smith @suedoc23 Not favorite smell. Front pew. Got here late. Kid sister took 4VR! #easter #makinganentrance #whynotroses

    John Wilson @jw2010 You hear this preacher before? #eastersermon @ suedoc23

    Sue Smith @suedoc23 “Yeah. She’s good. IMO @jw2010 #eastersermon

    John Wilson @jw2010 TBH, never understood resurrection @suedoc23 #nowwhat

    Sue Smith @suedoc23 SMH. Me either. Not sure if I believe it. Maybe she’ll enlighten me. #hope #eastersermon @jw2010

    Jen Walsh @spiritnoreligion2017 Don’t count on it. @suedoc23 @jw2010 #eastersermon

    Sue Smith® suedoc23 @spiritnoreligion2017 You here?

    Jen Walsh @spiritnoreligion2017 Nope. Went to sunrise service. #alreadydone #easterbrunch @suedoc23 @jw2010

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    Good move. @spiritnoreligion2017

    Jen Walsh @spiritnoreligion2017 She telling story about the butterfly? #newlife @suedoc23 @jw2010 #eastersermon

    John Wilson @jw2010 Not yet. Anyone out there hearing an Easter sermon in 280 characters? #eastersermon #brevity @spiritnoreligion2017 @suedoc23

    Sue Smith @suedoc23 I bet it would be good. #brevity @jw2010

    Hank Williams @notthathank2011 Our preachers are doing a partner sermon. That count? #twoisbetterthanone #eastersermon

    Carol Lead @ seminary222 Jesus. Born. Lived. Loved. Taught. Served. Challenged. Died. Rose again. Reign. Story is yours too. Born to: Live. Love. Teach. Serve. Challenge. Die. Rise again. Reign. #eastersermon #brevity #gospel

    John Wilson @jw2010

    . @ suedoc23 Why is everyone laughing?

    Sue Smith @suedoc23 Don’t know. Missed it. Distracted. Kid next to me is playing fortnight. #fortnight @ spiritnoreligion2017

    Jen Walsh @spiritnoreligion2017 Love fortnight. Whose your favorite character? @suedoc23 #easter

    Mention Twitter, in this case a stand-in for the larger digital world, and you face a house, or a congregation, or generations, divided. Just one sample of “Pros and Cons of Twitter” yields an ever-flowing stream of opinions: Pros: easy to use… share ideas and access to news.. .#hashtag power… predict

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    the future based on what people post and when… self-promotion (conjured as a good thing in this case). Cons: time waste… 280-character limit… everyone is watching… time-sensitive/ tweets easily overlooked… criticism… too much/boring tweets… fake news worries. Rather than spending pages debating what digital life does and doesn’t do well, here is another question: What are some of the imperatives about how we communicate as preachers in the digital world? What do we know—and what do we know that we don’t know—about how to communicate in this context? For this is the context in which our congregants are being marinated most every day. There are at least four lessons that Twitter can teach us about preaching Easter, and they all intersect in how the Easter message is heard today in a world like ours. Say what you will about Twitter and the digital age, there are learnings here about simplicity, about what it takes to break through the mundane of everyday life, about what a less carefully modulated form of speech does and doesn’t offer a reading of Easter, and about the specific need of people in all seasons and walks of life to have a word they know by heart and can repeat in any moment. The movie Groundhog Day is about a self-absorbed man, played by Bill Murray, forced to live the same day over and over. When Groundhog Day’s director, Harold Ramis, died a few years ago, actor Stephen Tobolosky, who appeared in the movie, remembered:

    When we were at the end of the hist week of shooting, Harold shot a huge scene when Bill Murray realizes time has stopped and he is living in a world with no consequences. Bill Murray spray-paints his room at the inn. He cuts his hair into a mohawk. He chainsaws the place in two, knowing that in the morning, all will be back to normal. It was difficult and expensive to shoot that scene: It took three days. Everything that was destroyed had to be rebuilt. Paint had to be cleaned off of walls. The set had to be restored for different camera shots. Bill’s mohawk toupee cost thousands to make. Harold shot the scene, looked at it, and threw it away. He replaced it with simplicity itself. Bill is about to go to sleep. He breaks a pencil and puts the two pieces on his nightstand. Cut to Sonny and Cher on the radio. Bill wakes up. The pencil is whole. When I saw this in a packed theater, the audience gasped. Harold had the courage to tell the story his way.4

    How many of our Easter sermons are some version of the Groundhog Day script? Rhetorical pyrotechnics and paragraph upon paragraph of trying to recreate the im­ portance and magnitude of the moment. With Twitter, there is literally no space for such lavish exposition. That rhetorical constraint can, with different intentions or focus, lead to coarse words and shallow gestures. Or, Twitter can be the simplicity of the broken pencil, saying everything in one OMG. Our preaching task on Easter should not be-and cannot be-an attempt to recreate Easter in any size, scope, or impact. Our role as preachers is to act as witnesses to what God has done. We tell what we have seen and heard, not just early one morning in the hist century, but more importantly, in our lives and the lives of our congrega­ tions and our world today. An Easter sermon does not need to aspire to be a rhetorical Passion Play. Digital life-its look, its fonts, its use, its intuition-thrives in simplicity.

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    This can be a gift to those who have to walk into the pulpit on Easter. As preachers, we cannot assume that the Easter message will be received as unambiguously good news. Late in his life, the celebrated preacher Edmund Steimle was preparing a sermon for the day before Easter. The text from Lamentations reads: “God’s mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning.” As he explored this passage, Steimle quipped, “At my age, this promise of newness every morn­ ing is at best a mixed blessing. I have come to the point in life when I really don’t want anything new in the morning. I want my slippers right beneath my bed where I left them the night before; I want my orange juice and bran flakes for breakfast, as normal. In my advanced years, I can do without a lot of newness, especially in the morning. ”s Life offers us well worn, packed down paths. Our own may not be the path of greatest depth or nurture, but it is the path we know. Easter overturns all that. Because we like things the way we like them, most of us are on guard against disruption. The very abrupt nature of many tweets—and much digital communication—while often used in harmful ways, can also be used in service of “roughing up what is smooth” so that it can be heard anew. G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “Our spiritual and psy­ chological task is to look at things familiar until they become unfamiliar again.” To speak an unfamiliar word into a familiar terrain is an important approach to Easter preaching, especially in days like ours. Easter preaching in the digital age is swimming against a strong current: both the trend to sensationalize and trivialize the hardest parts of life and death all at once, and a need for things so simple that complex narratives of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead are hard to proclaim to impatient ears. Truly there are some messages best left to much more than 280 characters. Easter has a context, and that context is Good Friday. As Fred Craddock once memorably and simply reminded us, you can’t have a resurrection if nobody is dead. A challenge of Easter preaching is to hold the dual truths of Christian faith—Good Friday and Easter—in a way that does not sensational­ ize or trivialize. And we have to do it on a Sunday where people have conscientiously made it to worship, perhaps for the hist time in a while, but also have family, kids, trips, bonnets and brunch on their minds as well. The Easter narrative in each of the gospels can clash with carefully displayed lilies and rows of brass players brought in for the occasion. In Flannery O’Connor’s story A Good Man Is Har’d to Find, her character, “The Misfit,” is a horrible and notorious outlaw who has terrorized and murdered a fam­ ily after they had an auto accident on a lonely rural road. The Misfit is now holding hostage the grandmother. She is grief stricken and afraid for her own life, and she cries out, “Jesus….Jesus!” The Misfit answers, “Jesus was the only one who ever raised the dead, and he shouldn’t have done it. He’s thrown everything off balance. If he did what he said, then there’s nothing for you to do but throw everything away and follow him. And, if he didn’t—then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you’ve got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him.”6 Gruesome as it is, The Misfit tells the truth. If Chr ist is not risen, then Easter faith is a horrible hoax, and nothing makes much sense in our world where things fall apart. The often-asymmetrical communica­ tion of tweets—from “odd people at odd hours and odd directions,” as one critic has said—may be an ally in the challenge of Easter preaching today.

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    Forty years ago, the late writer John Updike wrote a poem “Seven Stanzas for Easter, ” which says in part:

    Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door.

    The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache, not a stone in a story, but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day.

    And if we will have an angel at the tomb, make it a real angel, weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen spun on a definite loom.

    Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.7

    Above all, Easter needs to give each of us—and all of us together—not remon­ strance but a word of hope and life and vitality and power that we can know and repeat by heart. We don’t need just to fill Easter sermons with “faded credulity” or inspiring stories of good people trying to make the world a better place. That is not a word to know and repeat by heart in a world with so many forces working against Easter hope. In any time of despair, stress, injustice, and heartbreak, we need a word of hope to carry within us. We need the gospel in its fullness and in its simplicity. In 1994, in the opening round of soccer’s World Cup, the United States team faced Colombia, who was heavily favored to win the cup that year. But Colombia suffered a shocking hrst-game loss to Romania. This meant that they had to defeat the United States in the next game. In the hist half, in a scoreless tie against the US, Colombia suffered another devastating blow. Colombian defender Andres Escobar, trying to dehect a ball out of bounds, instead accidentally kicked the ball into his own goal. It gave the US a 1-0 lead, and Colombia never recovered. They lost the match and were out of the World Cup. Andres Escobar, the player who scored against his own team, was their star player, their captain, and a person of quiet demeanor and exquisite play. After the game, Escobar was naturally devastated. What was difficult for Escobar, however, soon became tragic. Drug traffickers had bet lots of money on Colombia to win the World Cup, and Escobar’s blunder had robbed them of their money. So, days after returning to Colombia, Escobar was shot and killed by a drug

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    cartel. His death rocked the country. Thousands lined the street for his funeral, with Escobar’s grieving family in the front row. How does one go on, in the face of such a senseless killing? Shortly after Colom­ bia lost, but before he was shot, Escobar had written a letter to his country, published in a national newspaper. Andres Escobar was known as a person who believed that soccer fields could be places of forgiveness in a land that was soaked with blood and violence. In his letter, trying to put the game into perspective, Andres Escobar had written, “Let us please maintain respect. My warmest regards to everyone. It’s been a most amazing and rare experience. We’ll see each other again soon, because life doesn’t end here.” After his murder, Escobar’s fiance was consumed with anger. She wanted justice, she wanted revenge, but she said that Andres’s words—“life doesn’t end here”—at­ tached themselves to her heart. Life doesn’t end here. “Eventually,” she said, “life leads to Andres’s words. No matter how difficult, we must stand back up. Life doesn’t end here.”8 However we preach Easter in the age of Twitter, in whatever setting we find our­ selves, we need to cut through the mundanity and triviality by which we too often find ourselves surrounded and offer the Easter proclamation full-throated, unambiguous, without qualification or hesitation. Every one of us—in pulpit and pew—needs an Easter word we can know by heart and repeat in the hardest times. But memorization is not in vogue these days. A favorite of ours, Seth Godin expresses it this way:

    How not to teach someone to be a baseball fan: Starting with the Negro leagues and the early barnstorming teams, assign students to memorize facts and figures about each player. Have a test. Rank the class on who did well on the hist two tests and allow these students to memorize even more statistics about baseball players. Sometime in the future, do a held trip and go to a baseball game. Make sure no one has a good time. … Obviously, there are plenty of kids (and adults) who know far more about baseball than anyone could imagine knowing. And none of them learned it this way.9

    Yes, memorization in the Google universe is questionable. Why put our time toward that? But, in the Age of Twitter, people are memorizing something—LOL, OMG, IMHO, WYA, SMH, #almost anything. The reasons to be skeptical of rote memoriza­ tion are legion. Until the bleakness of a life needs an imposing word of hope. Until the feeling of Good Friday surrounds us to the point of choking. Then—again—we need an Easter word that we can know and repeat by heart. It is a word that disrupts our attempts at keeping life carefully composed. It is a word that will not be tamed by the expected or the mundane. No other word will do—this word of simplicity and power, this word of hope and holy presence: Christ is Risen. Shout Hosanna !

    Notes 1 Jonathan Merritt, “It’s Getting Harder to Talk About God,” The New York Times, October 13, 2018. 2 Barna Group, Spiritual Conversations in the Digital Age, 2018. 3 Jonathan Merritt, op cit. 4 “Stephen Tobolosky remembers Groundhog Day Director Harold Ramis,” www.slate.com, February

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    28, 2014. 5 “Growing Old and Wise on Easter” by Thomas G. Long, Journal for Preachers, Easter 2001. 6 Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971, pp. 67-68. 7 https://genius.com/John-updike-seven-stanzas-at-easter-annotated, accessed October 28, 2018. 8 https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/mar/25/world-cup-moments-andres-escobar-death , accessed May 4, 2018. 9 https://medium.eom/@thisissethsblog/stop-stealing-dreams-4116c7dbff7b, accessed November 29, 2018.

  • ‘Stay with Me!’: Being with Jesus Then and Now

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    Page 3

    “Stay with Me!”: Being with Jesus Then and Now

    Martha Jane Petersen

    Black Mountain, North Carolina

    More than thirty years ago, I sat with several hundred persons in the vast tent­ like structure that formed the worship space for the Taize Community in southern France. All of those present had traveled from far distances as I had: from European, American, and African countries, and even from the Far and Middle East. We were drawn by Taize’s unique form of worship along with the ecumenical nature of the Community, which bridged Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox faiths as evi­ denced in our singing. We sang chants and songs in French, German, Spanish, Italian, English, Latin, Greek, Russian, and a few others unknown to me. By the end of the week, most of us knew all the songs by heart, in each language sung. One caught my attention in its brevity: Bleibet hier undwctchet mit mir- wctchet und betet, wctchet und betet. In German, the song referenced words from the Mark and Matthew accounts of Jesus in Gethsemane as he asked his followers, “Stay with me, remain here with me, watch and pray/’1 With no other words, the song made me realize the acute physical and emotional need for Jesus to experience companionship from his disciples during his critical hour. Such companionship did not occur, however, in isolation as a one-time need. Mark 3:14 drops a clue about Jesus’ human need to be in the presence of others: “Jesus ap­ pointed twelve… to be with him, and to be sent out to proclaim the message.” (Italics mine). Additionally, the account of Jesus’ last night in Matthew 26 repeats the word meta -“with.” Jesus wanted to share the Passover supper with them. He spoke of the betrayer dipping his hand in the dish with him and drinking wine in the new kingdom with his disciples. These repeated words picture a man desiring deep fellowship with those he had chosen, whom he called “friends” ( John 15:14-15). Did Jesus really need supporters and friends around him? After all, John 2:25 states that Jesus “would not entrust himself to [others] because he knew all people and… knew what was in everyone.” He trusted no one because of their clamoring for more “signs which he did.” Here, John’s words singularly give the impression that, alone, Jesus’ divine powers would enable him to accomplish his mission, with no need for others to support him. The Synoptics, however, paint a different picture. Matthew’s gospel begins and ends with striking meta phrases. In 1:23 we find Immanuel: “God with us,” and in 28:20: “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Indeed, the incarnational presence of Jesus with his followers serves as bookends for Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus as one determined to accompany/be present to/ have fellowship with those who believe and follow him, during his lifetime and beyond. In the scene set in Gethsemane’s olive garden, where Jesus often prayed, the Gospel of Mark depicts a Jesus in great need. “He took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be greatly distressed and agitated, and he said to them ‘I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here and keep awake’” (14:34). Douglas Hare points to the REB translation here: “My heart is ready to break with grief.”2 Hebrews

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    elaborates further: “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death… ” (5:7). Both Mark and Matthew add, “He threw himself [prostrated himself] on the ground,” an act suggesting the extremity of both his desire to submit to the Almighty yet a desperate pleading to avoid death if at all possible. Along with his grief, distress, and fear, Jesus needed someone to accompany him into the terror of tortured death. Peter, James, and John were the privileged three to walk into Gethsemane with him. They had seen him raise the dead, heal the sick, and be transfigured before their astonished eyes on the mountain. He asked these three to “remain” with him, which in Greek, meno, can mean “abide, to continue to be present to, to remain or stay.” Meno implies remaining in place even in the midst of hardship. Jesus desired those closest to him to endure the coming storm with him. Instead, he was abandoned by the three sitting in the garden with him. In his ministry he had ex­ perienced opposition, betrayal, misunderstanding, but perhaps the worst of distresses to befall him happened when his three leading disciples offered him nothing. Jesus “probably suffered as much from his friends as from his enemies. ”3The thr ee disciples sat near Jesus physically but tuned out his needs three times. They were “not there” for him even after he had pleaded with them, “Stay with me!” Apparently their own need to remedy their exhaustion by sleeping overcame any intentions to be available to Jesus. Perhaps they knew or intuited what was about to befall Jesus since he had predicted his death time after time. Perhaps fear drove them to dismiss Jesus’ plea; they did not want to face the calamity soon coming to him, for it may come also to them. Jesus also told the three to “watch,” translated in the NRSV as “keep awake.” Be alert, to what is around you and what will come upon us. Be alert in regards to what I am enduring. Instead of succumbing to sleepiness and fatigue, extend yourselves to see and understand what is happening. Even though they are in no way alert or awake, Jesus amazingly does not scold them. Being present to another person constitutes a challenge for us North Americans. It’s all too easy, however, to offer solutions to problems for a suffering friend. Parker Palmer, noted Quaker teacher, lecturer, and writer, tells of a time in his life when he suffered deep depression. He was bombarded with suggestions from friends and fam­ ily on what to do about it. One friend, however, offered nothing but his presence. He came every day at 4:00 to massage Parker’s feet in silence, day in and day out for a few months. This deep communion, quiet companionship, and caring “made a huge difference.”4 People in crisis usually need someone nearby, not necessarily to do anything, not even to speak, but to give of themselves even in silence. Being attentive is often silent, which challenges us. Empathic presence embodies deep listening. Instead, we squirm, we become distracted, our thoughts wander, we harbor opinions and solutions in our minds, we try with effort to seal our lips against the ready reply to another’s dilemma. Our presence must direct our attention solely on the other person, not ourselves. It may consist of a momentary laying down our lives for the sake of another. Too often we hold back our presence even in our charitable efforts: to the homeless (we offer food at a shelter but not our companionship); to the physically disabled (we invite a group into our Sunday worship but do not sit with them); and the mentally ill (at a group home we provide refreshments for a party but remain aloof). We tend

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    to throw our bones and run. Lay persons aligning themselves with Franciscans in charitable actions must agree to move beyond “checkbook charity.” They must be personally present where they help and in what they do. John V. Taylor, notable Angli­ can mission co-worker in southern Africa some years ago, advises the Christian must align himself with the African foundational practice of presence, “the Christian… who stands in the world in the name of Christ has nothing to offer unless [he] offers to be really and totally present… .The failure of so many ‘professional’ Christians has been that they are ‘not all there. ’ ”s Taize not only embodies presence toward all strangers who come to worship with the community, but also beyond to far-flung places around the globe. Every year, about a tenth of the brothers go into the world’s slums to live in solidarity with the poor and the outcast. I was amazed to learn that they go not to offer material assistance or suggested solutions to the problems at hand.

    When [the] brothers live among the poorest of the poor, that presence is never a revival of the process which involves coming from the Northern hemisphere and bringing our own imported solutions, no matter how valu­ able they may be…. If we go to these places, it is in order to live a presence with no ulterior motives… .We support local young people who are taking initiatives inspired by their own culture and their own genius.6

    They witness how their presence can encourage stamina, courage, and ingenuity to overcome formidable challenges. In perusing the Gospels for examples of those who decidedly stay with Jesus, we find accounts of his chosen disciples following him in close community: observing his healings, listening to Jesus’ teachings, questioning him, being themselves empowered to preach and heal, yet misunderstanding him over and over. Women also stayed with Jesus along the way, “providing for him out of their means” (Luke 8:2), many of whom remained with Jesus as he died on the cross, with Mary Magdalene mentioned in all four gospels. Even the thief on the cross beside Jesus offered consolation as he asked to be remembered in Jesus’ kingdom (Luke 12:42). A singular Biblical cameo of one who offered presence to Jesus and who stayed with him we find in the story of the Bethany sisters, Martha and Mary in Luke 10: 38-42. Jesus apparently knew the sisters and would find refreshment and rest when he visited them. This time, however, he journeyed toward Jerusalem to die. From the beginning, Martha extends hospitality to Jesus and welcomes him into her home (which was unusual for a woman to possess). As hospitable hostess she sets about to serve her guest, a traditional female role in that time and place. Right away, she seems to be an in-charge person. Mary also serves Jesus as she sits, enrapt in his words. Perhaps she intuited his oncoming suffering and death, and intentionally stayed with him. She is quickly in­ troduced into the story as Martha’s sister, but in vivid contrast to her. Beginning after the transfiguration in chapter 9 (with its injunction “listen to him” in verse 35), Jesus used the opportunities in his journey to teach along the way and engaged in teaching Mary while she gave him her attention. Mary’s sitting at the feet of a teacher totally overturned the accepted role of women in her environment. Perhaps it is Mary’s defi­ ance of “a woman’s place” that upsets Martha who also felt burdened with the meal

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    preparation. Surprisingly, instead of going to Mary to ask for help, she goes to her guest to intervene, complaining of doing the work “all…by myself.” Not only that, but she accuses Jesus of being insensitive to her plight with “Don’t you care” that I am in this predicament? So it seems that Jesus, too, is the source of her frustration as she goes further. She instructs him on how to alleviate her plight: “Tell her to help me.” The gospel writer interprets Martha’s actions as “distracted by her many tasks,” and Jesus adds his assessment, “You are worried and distracted (also “anxious and troubled” in the RSV) by many things.” But Mary, in giving Jesus her full attention, is commended. She has chosen “the better part, which shall not be taken away from her,” inferring I believe that Martha’s animosity toward her will not un-do her sister’s act of presence. In spite of many renditions of the convoluted text in verse 42, it remains that what Mary has chosen, Jesus praises. The word chosen I believe is instructive. Mary acted counter-culturally , in the face of a sister’s and culture’s scorn. Mary chose to remain seated in spite of work to be done, which, from some points of view, might be construed as selfish. Perhaps our inclination today would be to jump up to lend a hand! Martha, too, chose to serve but was so overburdened with her choice that she became angry and out of sorts. In spite of her expected role as hostess, she chose to indulge herself with a disgruntled attitude. Could she have chosen instead to lay down her cooking spoon to sit for a little while at Jesus’ feet along with Mary? That’s a hard choice to make when there is work to be done. Fred Craddock throws in his opinion colorfully:

    If we censure Martha too harshly, she may abandon serving altogether, and if we commend Mary too profusely, she may sit there forever. There is a time to go and do; there is a time to listen and reflect. Knowing which and when is a matter of spiritual discernment. If we were to ask Jesus which example applies to us, the Samaritan [in the preceding narrative] or Mary, his answer would probably be Yes.7

    Even though it appears that Jesus rebukes Martha’s attempt to serve him, and even though the church at one time determined that Jesus therefore approved the contemplative life (Mary’s) over against the active life (Martha’s), we can neverthe­ less glean some insight about being present in the midst of busyness. Today, you and I may come away with differing ideas regarding the Martha-Mary story for us. We might think a simpler meal is needed. Or we need to listen to Jesus more and be at­ tentive to him. Or no matter what we do, a good attitude may be more important than our serving. Looking deeper, the story may help us examine when to go and do, and when to listen and reflect, which involves discernment as Craddock suggests. Living in a Martha world as we do, we tend to involve ourselves more with doing for rather than being with. As followers of Christ, whether clergy or laity, we are commissioned to serve and to do charitable acts for others. Of course. I don’t know about you, but my plate overflows day after day with Serving and Doing. With that, though, I often become worried and distracted as Martha, full of stress and dis-ease. Taking time to sit with Jesus to offer my presence may seem just one more thing for my to-do list. Could I possibly erect a shield against distractions and Martha-like vexations in order to rivet my attention on Jesus? Perhaps finding

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    a quiet place far from the fray may enable any of us intentionally to be with Jesus. Wendell Berry, in the midst of his many chores as farmer, tells how he lets work and concerns go, hinting of sabbaths in his collection of poems by that name:

    I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water. My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle.8

    In reading the passion narrative of this week, as I walk into Gethsemane with Jesus, will I hear his cry Stay with me; abide with me? Holy Week may enable me to hear his penetrative plea on a more personal level, as I try to encourage my tasks to lie in their places. How is it possible to respond and what would my response look like?

    Notes 1 Jacques Berthier, “Bleibeet Hier,” Chants de Taize (Taize, France 71250: Ateliers dePresses de Taize, 1991), 6. 2 Douglas P. Hare, Matthew, Interpretation (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1993), 301. 3 Ibid. 4 Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 63-64. 5 John V. Taylor, The Primal Vision: Christian Presence and African Religions (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1969), 189. 6 Brother Roger, The Taize Experience (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1990), 31. 7 Fred B. Craddock, Luke, Interpretation (Louisville, John Knox Press, 1990), 152. 8 Wendell Berry, Sabbaths (San Francisco: North Point Press), 1087.

  • The Power and Purpose of the Resurrection

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    The Power and Purpose of the Resurrection

    1 Corinthians 15:3-10

    Marvin A. McMickle Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, Rochester, New York

    When the New Testament writers presented their proof to support the claim that Jesus had been raised from the dead, they built their argument around one clear as­ sertion that was repeated over and over again: “We have seen the Lord. ” This was the message hist declared by Mary Magdalene when she and her sisters in sorrow went to the tomb expecting to anoint the dead body of Jesus according to the Jewish rituals of that time. Instead, she encountered Jesus in the garden where the tomb was located. At hi st she thought he was the gardener, but when he spoke to her, she knew it was Jesus who had been raised from the dead. She rushed back to the apostles and became the hi st witness of the resurrection when she declared, “I have seen the Lord” (John 20:18). The message of the early church was a consistent testimony: Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified and buried, has been raised from the dead, and has been seen by his followers. The apostle Paul sums up that testimony in this passage in I Corinthians 15: 5-8 when he says, “He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. After that he ap­ peared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time… .Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born (NIV). Those early Christians did not focus on the empty tomb in that garden in Jerusa­ lem. They did not dwell on the fact that the giant stone that had sealed Jesus inside the tomb had been rolled away. Just because the tomb was empty did not mean that Jesus had been raised from the dead. In fact, when Mary first saw the empty tomb, she thought that someone had simply taken the dead body of Jesus away to another location. The early Christian community was not formed around the news of a missing corpse. The message was not that the body of Jesus was simply missing. An empty tomb may tell us where Jesus was not to be found, but it did not address where Jesus actually was. An empty tomb and a missing body is not the heart of Easter faith! Faith was not bom and fear was not shattered until Jesus who was in the tomb suddenly appeared to his disciples. Faith was bom when a doubting Thomas was al­ lowed to touch the wounds in the body of Jesus. Faith was bom when travelers on the road to Emmaus suddenly discovered that they were in the physical presence of the risen Ford. Faith was bom on the road to Damascus when Saul of Tarsus encountered the living Ford whose message he had been trying to stamp out. Faith strong enough to endure the fiery trials that would soon fall upon the Christian community was not rooted in a dead Jesus or an empty tomb. Only one thing fueled the faith of those first believers, and that was their consistent testimony: “We have seen the Ford!” The same must hold true for Christians today. We must live with the same cer­ tainty found in the Easter hymn that proclaims, “I serve a risen savior who is in the world today.”1 I have been to two locations in Jerusalem where tradition suggests Jesus had been buried. One is in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher inside the walls of Jerusalem, and the other one is a cave on the outskirts of the city. I knew perfectly

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    well, two thousand years later, that the body of Jesus was not in either of those loca­ tions. I also knew that his body had not returned to dust like the remains of the Ark of the Covenant in the Indiana Jones movie. I believed then and I believe now that Jesus was raised from the dead. While I cannot say that I have seen the Lord, I can say that I have encountered his spirit and his presence all through my life. I can say that the living Lord has been with me in sickness and sorrow. I can say that the risen savior has shown up in church services and in private devotions. I may not have seen his face or touched the wounds in his body, but I can sing with the hymn that says,

    I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses, And the voice I hear falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses. And he walks with me and he talks with me, And he tells me I am His own. And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.2

    The apostle Paul underscores the importance of the resurrection of Jesus when he writes later in this same chapter, “If Christ has not been raised from the dead, our preaching is useless and so is your faith/’ Thus, the resurrection of Jesus is as central to our faith as Christians today as it was for the early church two thousand years ago. There are several reasons why Easter and the resurrection of Jesus should be claimed and cherished by every Christian. The first reason for the importance of Easter and the resurrection of Jesus is that it clarifies the reason for our worship as Christians. The phrase “the Lord’s Day” has a special meaning for the church. Among the Jewish worshippers of the first century CE, there was another day for worship and another reason for doing so. They honored the Sabbath Day which was the last day of the week, and they did so to remember the God of creation who, according to the Genesis 1 narrative, made the world in six days and rested on the seventh day. I celebrate the creator aspects of God’s power and purpose. I marvel at the beauty of the earth, and I often tremble at the awesome power of nature. I have lived all of my life in places that experience all four weather seasons of the year. I delight in the spring rains as much as I do in the wintry snow. I delight as much in the summer sun as I do in the cool air of autumn. However, none of that touches at the root of my faith as a Christian. I do not simply pray to the God of creation. I rejoice in the God of resurrection by whose power sins are forgiven, death’s power is shattered, and the grace we need for daily living is assured. If Christ is raised from the dead, then God can surely meet any and all of our needs in this life. Therefore, we gather to worship on the first day of the week, because as John 20:1 says, “Early on the first day of the week while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb.” We worship when we do and why we do because it was on the first day of the week that God raised Jesus from the dead. The second reason why the resurrection is important is as much political as it is theological. The resurrection is God’s stamp of approval on the life and teachings of Jesus. The resurrection was God saying YES to everything Jesus said and did. To read the crucifixion story is to realize that at its heart, that event was about people saying NO to the message that Jesus came to bring. Those who plotted his arrest and conducted his trials were saying NO to Jesus. Those who mocked him and placed a

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    crown of thorns upon his head were saying NO to Jesus. Those who cried out “cru­ cify him’’ and those who actually drove the nails into his body were all saying NO to Jesus. Jesus had come to offer love and forgiveness, to become in his own body the Lamb of God that would take away the sins of the world. But on the cross of Calvary, the power structure of that world pronounced their sentence on the man and his message with one great word of rejection: NO. The words of John 1:11 carry a special poignancy: “He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him/’ Now comes the good news of the gospel. Caiaphas and Pilate and all their suc­ cessors of earthly power do not have the last word. Political leaders may say no to the values lifted up by Christ. They may seek to subvert the teachings of Jesus: the value of every human life, the equality of all persons, the need to care for the poor and the oppressed, the futility of warfare, the destructive power of hatred and bigotry, and the challenge to show mercy and kindness in a world that is awash with bitterness and division. The resurrection is nothing less than God’s endorsement of all these things that the world seeks to reject or resist. Shall I love my neighbor as I love myself? YES. Shall we turn away from sexism, racism, homophobia, nationalism, xenophobia, and ethnic rivalries? YES. The resurrection of Jesus serves as a punctuation mark, an exclamation point that the message of Jesus is true. Jesus came preaching a message of repentance of sin, of love for our enemies, and of devotion to God as our highest allegiance. In Luke 4 he not only declared that he was the long-awaited Messiah of Israel, but he also preached that the love of God was not limited only to Israel, but extended to a Syro-Phoenician widow and a Syrian leper. God does not love one country or one culture above all others. God who created the whole earth loves all the nations and people of the earth. God is not interested in making Israel or America great again. God’s agenda is not “God Bless America.” God’s favorite hymn says, “He’s got the whole world in His hands.” That is the message to which the world said NO when Jesus was crucified. That is also the message to which God said YES when God raised Jesus from the dead. How sad it is to acknowledge that the truth about the message of Jesus does not need to be held up only before our secular and political leaders in this country, but to many of our conservative Christian brothers and sisters as well. Being against a handful of social issues is not what it means to be a Christian. The message of Jesus is not defined by one’s views on marriage equality, or a woman’s right to make repro­ ductive choices, or stacking the US Supreme Court and many of the Federal District Courts with judges that will rule in opposition to many of the things that the majority of citizens in this country clearly support. How sad that many of the voices saying NO on matters ranging from women in ministry, to immigration policies that show compassion for refugees fleeing danger in their home countries, to prison reform, funding for childcare, easier access to affordable and accessible health care, and voting rights for all qualified citizens are the voices of some Christians who seem to want blessings and benefits for themselves that they are unwilling to afford to others. Now as in the days of the early church, there are contrasting views about what it means to be a Christian. We may wonder, as did Pontius Pilate, about what is the truth. Let there be no doubt about it: God has raised up the truth from the grave where wicked men had sent him in order to blot out his message from the earth. The grave could not hold

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    him. Death could no longer detain him. Christ is risen. As Phillips Brooks wrote,

    Tomb, thou shalt not hold Him longer, Death is strong, but Life is stronger, Stronger than the dark, the light, Stronger than the wrong, the right. Faith and Hope triumphant say Christ will rise on Easter Day.3

    There is a third and final reason why Christians should cling to the power and purpose of the resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection answers a question as old as time that was captured in the words of Job 14:14 when he asked, “If someone dies, will they live again?” It is obvious by his question that up to that point in human history, no one known to Job had been able to answer his query. No assurance came from the Laws of Moses, or the Psalms of David, or the Wisdom of Solomon. David did hint in Psalm 90:9-10 about how long our earthly life might last when he said, “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.” What Job wondered was what happens after “we fly away.” There is an answer to Job’s question. It came when John was being held captive on the Isle of Patmos. In Revelation 1:14-18 John said he saw someone. “The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow. His eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. His tongue was like a two-edged sword. His eyes burned like coals of fire. His face was like the shining of the sun. When he spoke he said, ‘I am the first and the last. I am the living One. I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever. And I hold the keys of Death and Hades. ’” Someone tell Job that the answer to his question is Yes. King Jesus has the keys to the prison cell of death. God flung open that door on Easter when Jesus was raised from the dead. We all have to pass through the prison-like place called death, but by God’s grace, our sentence is not everlasting. He who raised up the daughter of Jairus (Mark 5:41-42) will likewise raise up all those who have called upon and trusted in His name. He who called Lazarus by name and bid him come forth from the grave (John 11:43) will likewise call our names and bid us join Him in a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens (II Corinthians 5:1). The earliest Christian hymn found in I Thessalonians 4 invites us not to grieve over death like those who have no hope. It proclaims, “For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, /And so we believe that God will bring with Jesus /Those who have fallen asleep in Him.” I remember the first time my son took an airplane flight without his parents go­ ing along. He was flying from Cleveland, Ohio, to Atlanta, Georgia, to visit with his grandmother and that part of our family. My wife and I were more than a little anxious about him taking such a long flight by himself. This was in the days before the added security we now deal with at airports, so we were able to walk with our son to the gate and onto the plane to strap him in and kiss him goodbye. When that was done, we stood by the window and watched while the plane taxied down the runway and took off. We gazed into the sky until the plane was finally lost in the distant clouds. My wife and I turned to each other and said, “There he goes.”

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    What gave us reassurance was that down in Atlanta we knew that his grandmother was sitting by a gate in the airport in that city. She was watching the board that an­ nounced when flights would be arriving. And at just the right moment, we knew that she would start casting her eyes to the sky and watch while the plane that carried her grandson broke through the clouds. We could imagine that she would be saying, “Here he comes,” as the plane landed and taxied to the gate where she was waiting. That was our hope on that day: from “there he goes” to “here he comes.” So will it be for us because of the power of the resurrection of Jesus. Our earthly friends will say, “There they go,” but our risen Savior in glory will shout, “Here they come.” All of this is the power and purpose of the resurrection of Jesus. Hallelujah. Christ arose.

    Notes 1 Alfred H. Ackley, “He Lives,” African American Heritage Hymnal (GIA Publications: Chicago, IL, 2001), 275. 2 Austin Miles, “In the Garden,” African American Heritage Hymnal (GIA Publications: Chicago, IL, 2001), 494. 3 Phillips Brooks, “An Easter Carol, poemhunter.com.

  • Hold the Baby

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    Page 28

    Hold the Baby

    Amy Starr Redwine

    First Presbyterian Church, Richmond, Virginia

    A recent newspaper article asks, “What would happen if you peeled back the layers of a masterpiece by one of art history’s greatest painters?” The answer: “Dead bodies might suddenly appear.” New technologies have enabled art historians to look beneath the surface of cen­ turies-old paintings and see what the artist-or someone else who sought to improve on the original-thought needed to be changed. A project known as “Inside Bruegel” has applied this technology to the artwork of sixteenth century Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel. In several of Bruegel’s paintings, in the layers just underneath the surface, researchers discovered graphic depictions of dead bodies, often right alongside the detailed living people Bruegel so memorably captures. Historians believe that it wasn’t Bruegel who painted over these corpses, but oth­ ers who later decided that such graphic depictions of the dead had no place alongside the living.1 This discovery suggests that Pieter Bruegel and the writer of the gospel of Luke would have gotten along well. For neither of them is willing to sugar-coat the realities -the often unpleasant, difficult realities-that are part and parcel of what it means to be human. Many of the details of the Christmas story come from the gospel of Luke. It is Luke who has the newly-pregnant Mary sing a subversive song about how God will fill up the hungry and send the rich away empty. It is Luke who tells us this young unmarried peasant couple had to travel far from home with Mary nine months preg­ nant. It is Luke who offers us the only details we have of the birth itself. It is Luke who says that the hist people to hear the news of God incarnate come to earth were not kings or rulers but lowly shepherds. Like Luke’s gospel, Bruegel’s paintings are filled with details of ordinary people and events. In his painting “The Census at Bethlehem,” he depicts the scene from Luke when people from near and far come to Bethlehem to be registered. Bruegel reimagines this story as a contemporary event taking place in a wintry Flemish vil­ lage. A group of people gather at the entrance to a building on one side of the paint­ ing, while elsewhere a pig is being slaughtered, children play in the snow, a leper is begging, and others are going about their business. You could so easily miss the young, pregnant woman on a donkey being led by a man whose face is hidden, but whose body looks weary and worried as he leads the donkey and his wife toward the crowd. If you didn’t know to look for them, you wouldn’t even notice they were there. The writer of Luke would surely have approved. Of the four gospels, Luke’s is written for the most ordinary of us, including-maybe even especially-all those who have been pushed aside and marginalized: the young, the poor, the refugee, the laborer. Luke wants to make sure we know that this baby, who is nothing less than Emmanuel, God-with-us, came not for some but for all. Luke wants us to know, there are no extras in this story. Everyone belongs.2

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    Like Bruegel’s paintings, Luke’s story is full of details that pull us close: the sight and sound and smell of the animals and the angels and the woman giving birth, the bands of cloth used to wrap the baby up, the weight of that baby in his mother’s arms. Luke, more than the other gospel writers, wants us to get up close and personal with this infant Jesus. Luke wants us to hold, the baby. A colleague of mine performed his hist infant baptism before he had children of his own, so he didn’t have much practice holding babies. When he took the baby from its mother’s arms, he broke the number-one rule of baby-holding-support the baby’s head-and the baby’s head fell backwards as the congregation collectively gasped. The baby was fine, but my poor friend was never allowed to forget that baptism. Even if you remember to support the head, holding a baby changes you somehow. It’s humbling, for one thing, to realize that this is how we all started, totally helpless, utterly dependent, impossibly fragile. If the baby you’re holding is yours, it’s nothing short of terrifying, for holding that baby drives home the inescapable reality that you are responsible for this tiny being’s life. Jesus asks something of us that all the other demands of the season do not. It’s easy enough to enjoy all the trappings of Christmas-the food, the presents, the parties, the decorations, the music-but the truth is, we can enjoy all of that without getting too close. But if we come close enough to actually hold the baby, we see Christmas for what it really is, even though it makes our heads spin: the God of the universe contained in a tiny, fragile, human-flesh package as finite and mortal as you and me. Holding the baby requires us to show up, not with arms full of everything we have gathered and made and bought for others, but empty-handed, ready and willing to receive what God has gathered and made and bought for us. Holding the baby means we come with humility and vulnerability, admitting that we don’t have it all figured out, that there are situations and there is suffering we cannot think or buy or talk our way out of. Holding the baby asks us to admit our need for God, no matter how many layers we have buried it under. Holding the baby also invites us to look beneath the surface of Christmas and find God even there, on the darker side of the holidays-right alongside the loneliness, the family conflict, the financial anxiety, the grief, the fear that after Christmas Day our problems and the world’s problems will all still be with us. Luke invites us to hold the baby and remember that if we come close enough, we can find God everywhere, with every person, in every situation. The birth of this baby-God in flesh so human that it too can and will die-means that God is found not just where there is beauty and hope and new life, but even, and especially, where there is suffering and injustice and despair and death. Frederick Buechner once wrote,

    We have tried to make [Christmas] habitable. We have roofed it in and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in itself is indeed… all it’s cracked up to be, then even at best our efforts are misleading. The Word become flesh. LUtimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is

    Advent 2019

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    not tame. It is not touching. It is not beautiful. It is uninhabitable tenor. It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space, time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this: “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God… who for us and for our salvation,” as the Nicene Creed puts it, “came down from heaven.” Came down.

    Buechner concludes: “Only then do we dare uncover our eyes and see what we can see. It is the Resurrection and the Life she holds in her arms. It is the bitterness of death he takes at her breast.”3 May you hnd the courage to put down all that you’re holding, come a few steps closer, and hold the baby. As you gaze upon his fragile human face, may you know the promise he brings: that the God who sent Jesus to be with us as one of us holds you-even you-close in God’s arms. God gazes upon your fragile human face with the love and awe and wonder of a mother and father gazing upon the beloved face of their newborn child.

    Notes 1 Nina Siegel, “Peeling Back the Paint to Discover Bruegel’s Secrets,” The New York Times, November 23,2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/ll/23/arts/design/bruegel-kunsthistorisches-museum-technology -layers.html 2 Thomas Are, “Christmas at Luke’s House,” December 16, 2018, Dayl.org: http://dayl.org/8310thomas_are _jr__christmas_at_lukes_house. 3 Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter’s Dictionary (San Francisco, CA: Harper Col­ lins, 1988), 30-31.

  • Kleptomania Homiletica

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    Kleptomania Homiletica

    Matthew 5:42

    Will Willimon

    Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina

    Jesus said it, I believe it, that settles it. That’s why this poor preacher gets by only with a little help from my generous friends. A few years ago I got a call from a reporter in the Northeast. “What is your posi­ tion on preachers plagiarizing the work of other preachers?” she asked. “Oh, I guess Craig Barnes has been whining about my lifting some of his material,” I said, with contempt. “No. This week a prominent pastor in the city will be removed from his pulpit because he’s been caught downloading some of your sermons from Duke Chapel. Repreaching. Word for word. The laity discovered it. In fact, a layperson has been secretly handing out copies of your sermons to other laity on the last two Sundays. They sit there in the service and follow along. Caught him red handed. Don’t you think the preacher should have at least changed the titles?” she asked. Sometimes I despise laity. Stephen Colbert employs something like thirty writers to help him come up with a nightly ten-minute monologue on Trump. It’s nuts to think that I, much less any preacher who went to a seminary not as good as mine, can come up with a weekly sermon on Jesus, solo. An accountant can be solitary, keeping her eyes on her own work, refusing to ask for help, and do double entry bookkeeping just fine. But no preacher can afford to work alone. If you are going to define and then condemn sermonic plagiarism, then you must come up with a definition of stealing that’s so broad and charitable as to be mean­ ingless. Source critics tell us that Luke and Matthew routinely ripped off Mark. The Bible is better for it. What if Matthew had not said to Mark, “Let me see your gospel. I think I can work this up into something mighty fine,” or Mark had refused Matthew with, “Hey, I came up with this stuff on my own. It’s my intellectual property”? I define “heresy” as the arrogant attempt to be theologically original, breaking free of the resources of the communio sanctorum, refusing dependency on the “great company of preachers” (Psalm 68:11), going rogue. “Loved your sermon!” a woman gushed as she emerged from Duke Chapel af­ ter service one Sunday. “Loved it when Tom Long preached it here in April, 1991. Shouldn’t you at least have transposed some of the details?” Laity! For years I’ve written for Pulpit Resource, filling it with material to help pastors get going on next Sunday’s sermon. “Aren’t you worried that some unscrupulous pastors may simply preach your sermons verbatim from Pulpit Resource?” critics ask. I wish. As long as they do it with a Southern accent. Better my sermons than Adam Hamilton’s, I say. Jean Valjean stole bread only to feed his starving children. Me too. Kleptomania, the inability to refrain from stealing, “is usually done for reasons other than personal

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    use or financial gain,” says the DSM. Stealing isn’t really stealing if it’s done unself­ ishly for the good of my neighbor. I’ve never taken anything from any preacher that was not done in service to my listeners. My sermonic borrowing is an indication of how much I love my people. Sure, Ephesians says, “Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands.” Cite that passage to rebuke me and I will insist that you quote the rest of the verse: “So that he may have something to share with anyone in need” (Ephesians 4:28). I took Tom Long’s story of a group of men standing under an oak tree at his home church in Georgia, moved all of them to a larger church and a dogwood in South Carolina, and nobody was the worse for it. I doubt Tom preached that story to more than a couple of hundred; I’ve shared it with two thousand Baptists in Canada, and they ate it up. I’m sure Tom would be flattered that his work did good all the way up in Canada. It’s not stealing if you can improve on what you took. As I’ve always said, “Don’t just borrow sermon material, steal it.” Picky you respond, “Hey, Picasso said that, not you. To quote more accurately, the great artist actually said this to his fellow artists, ‘Good artists copy; great artists steal.’” Well, it turns out that Picasso stole that from T. S. Eliot who said, “Good poets borrow, great poets steal,… Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better….” Take that, all you fastidious OCD’s who are always demanding attribution. You say, “Hey, that’s a story from David Buttrick.” I’ll say, “I have no idea how that got in my bag.” Stanley Hauerwas said, “If you think you’ve had an original thought, it means that you forgot where you read it.” Or maybe Oscar Wilde said that. Benjamin Franklin? Who cares? Hey, how do you know that I didn’t say it? Walter Brueggemann had a great story about a woman in a wheelchair and his meaningful conversation with her. All I did was take Walt’s seat in that hospital room, have her retell the story to me, repackage her touching vignette, retell it with a Southern accent, connect it with a text from Genesis rather than the Psalms, and work it up into a more moving illustration than Walt’s. And who was the worse for it? Just trying to help Walt obey Matthew 5:42. When possible, if you are going to snatch something from a fellow preacher, it’s usually good to ask in advance, but not always. I apologized for preaching an illustration of Jana Childers, and she generously said, “I don’t care. I don’t need it anymore.” Then Jana spoiled it by saying, “I don’t even believe that any more. It’s a sappy story anyway. Take it; it’s yours.” “Do you mind if I borrow that little thing about the addict and the priest for my sermon on Good Friday?” I asked Nadia Bolz-Weber, “At my age I ’ m having increased difficulty kicking butt in the pulpit, and you are so good at it.” “Sure, older adult,” Nadia said, “happy to have your sermons benefit from my workouts at Crossfit.” Wait. You say that my story last Sunday about the little boy needing a dollar wasn’t something that could have happened to me because I’ve never even been to Buffalo? Oh well. Next time I use that story I’ll give proper attribution: “Here’s what the Lord would have done in Buffalo on a snowy Sunday morning if Betty Achtemier had taken me with her to Buffalo….”

    Pentecost 2019

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    Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo met with Bill Clinton years ago to help him repent. The only reason that I wasn’t there was I wasn’t asked. I’m sure it was an oversight. Desperate for a good contrition story for a Maundy Thursday sermon, I thought it only right for me to say what I would have said if Bill had been smart enough to invite me. “So like I said to Bill, Bill old buddy, you can’t ….” They loved it. Footnotes, impossible in sermons and attribution (“As I read in a recent book by the Right Reverend Bishop N. T. Wright last week….”), can come across as pompous and presumptuous. Though occasionally I will give credit by saying to the congrega­ tion, “All you bean counters, don’t bother to Google this story to find its true origin. It’s from an April 1990 sermon by Fred Craddock. I recount Fred’s story today, as if it were my own, as my humble homage to a great preacher.” Some years ago somebody published a collection of women’s sermons. After a long preface that argued forcefully that women preach in a way that is quite special, very perceptive, even unavailable to men, the book’s first sermon was one that a woman on the West Coast had purloined from me! A sermon on John 3 that I had preached a few years before at Duke Chapel. Should I be flattered or incensed? When I complained to Stanley Hauerwas, he replied, “By God you do preach like a woman! Besides, you’ve got too long an incriminating paper trail to be indignant that a fellow preacher snitched from you.” I know it’s good to take sermon illustrations from your own life, but let’s face it, my life hasn’t been that interesting. People make way too much out of creativity and personal insight. I’m always grateful when, in the middle of my sermon preparation on a tough text, I stumble across a fellow preacher who can help me with the heavy lifting. If a preacher is vain enough to put stuff out on the web or to publish it, it’s fair game. I paid $19.95 for a book of your sermons. Now they’re mine. So go ahead all you possessive, miserly preachers, lock it down, smack a © on it; you won’t keep out this professional purloiner from poaching your preachments (Matthew 24:43). In the dead of night some Saturday, I’ll creep in with a ski mask, crowbar, and flashlight and take your precious metaphor and make it my own. The ski mask and flashlight I stole from a speech by poet Billy Collins.