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  • Good news to bad: sexuality

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    Good News to Bad: Sexuality

    Romans 1:18

    – 2:11; John 13:33-35

    Ellen Fewler Skidmore

    Forest F^^e Frehyterian Church, Columbia South Carolina;

    Union Fresbyterian Seminary, Richmond, Virginia

    There is an ancient tale told of a pagan tribe of warriors who were converted as a group to Cristianity. As 1 heard the story, the Franks, like other tribes who were converted to the Christian faith, waded into a river to be baptized en masse. The warriors knew, at some level, that this baptism would make them followers of a new king, Jesus. They also understood that this Jesus was a Frince of Feace, an ironic statement of faith given the warring ways ofthe Franks. But the story has it that when the Frankish warriors came to be baptized in toe waters ofthe Rhine River, they were careful to hold their swords above their heads and out of the waters of baptism, not to save them from rust but to keep them from Jesus, toe Prince of Peace. One of the greatest challenges to becoming a Disciple of Jesus is our desire to hold things above the waters ofbaptism. The truth is that there is nothing that may be kept free ofthe lordship of Jesus Christ: not money, not power, not our wills, and not our sexuality. And it is to this daunting topic that we turn our attention today as we focus on how Christians are to be good news people in a world full of Bad News. As I have worked through this sermon series, I have realized myself, how very easy it is to identify Bad News. In my own lists and notes, toe list of Bad News often outnumbers the Good News two to one or more. As regards sexuality, there is no shortage of bad news. And, just like last week, when we dealt with the wealthy and toe poor, there are many places where Christians of good conscience do not agree. And before I begin, I want to tell you my hopes for this sermon. First, my goal is to encourage us all to think about the issue of sexuality within toe framework of Bad News/Good News and under the guidance of Scripture. I am not going to attempt to lay down all of toe rules and tell you what you must believe, to the first place, that wouldn’t work, and in the second place, I don’t have all toe answers. So, I am not going to mil against toe sexual mores of our culture at large. I am more interested today in how those of us who call ourselves Disciples of Jesus try to hold our sexuality above toe waters of baptism, and I want to challenge us all to think about what it means to submit our sexuality to toe Fordship of Jesus Christ. Having said that, I think there is a lot of Bad News on which we can agree: * I assume that we can agree that it is bad news that toe sitcoms that show up on TV and most of toe music on toe popular radio stations depict sexual promiscuity as normal and acceptable. I think that as people of faith, we can agree that sexual promiscuity is bad news and hurts us all. Adultery, forbidden by toe 10 Commandments, falls into the category of Bad News, a form of promiscuity that destroys people and families. * I assume that we can agree that sexual addictions and pornography are bad news. * I assume that as people of faith, we can agree that the sex trade, alive and well in this state and country, is bad news. And that any time sexuality is used to dominate,

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    sell, destroy, or display power is bad news. ٠ The belief that sexuality is somehow bad, dirty, or sinful is also something that people of faith have to eall bad news. Seripture teaehes us that God ereated us as sexual beings, and everything that God created is good. Sexuality is a good gift from God, and attempts to make it bad news is bad news. Now, beyond that there is a lot of disagreement in the church over what is bad news. And most of the disagreement comes when we begin to talk about the issue of homosexuality – which appears to be one of the major topics of conversation in our culture. For some Christians, the bad news is that there are people who are gay, lesbian , bisexual, ٢٠transgender—GLBT. For others, the bad news is that GLBT people are not fully included and affirmed in the life of the church. I trust that we would all agree that the horribly high levels of suicide among LGBT teenagers is Bad News. But agreement on the bad news and the good news when it comes to homosexuality is much more elusive. 1 will tell you this, as I listen to you, 1 have observed that there is not widespread agreement in this congregation about what is good news and what is bad news as regards this topic. Members of this congregation hold a wide variety of opinions on this topic. And let me remind you that the issue of good news and bad news as regards sexuality and homosexuality is not a faceless issue that does not affect us. When we talk about the good news and bad news on the issue of sexuality and homosexuality, we are talking about our children, our Grandchildren, our parents, our brothers and sisters, and our friends. And if you disagree with or are angry with me for something 1 say today, 1 want you to come and talk to me. 1 promise to listen. But before you come to talk to me, talk to your family and friends, because 1 promise you that Good News and Bad News as regards sexuality is not a simple or monolithic position. ٠٠not presume that your Christian family and friends will agree with you. But do make an effort to ask, listen, and understand the different opinions within your own circles. 1 am not troubled by a variety of opinions on this topic. God can handle a variety of opinions, and as in other matters of faith, it is not required that we all believe the same thing. What is required is that we cling to Christ more tightly than we cling to our opinions and that we seek to submit every part of our lives to Christ. When we do that, I am confident that over time God will bring us to toe unanimity that grows from truth. And while Christ is dragging us to where God wants us to be, our job is to follow toe command of Christ to love one another. Christ commanded us to live in such love that toe world will see our love before toey see our disagreement. Having said that, Christians of good conscience «١٢^١ have to agree to disagree on issues of sexuality and especially homosexuality until God makes truth clear. And while we are in toe process of discernment, there are some behaviors and beliefs that are off toe table or out ofhounds for those of us who have submitted our whole selves to the waters of baptism if we want to be Good News people. First, Christians, finding ourselves in an increasingly secular culture, may not allow all of toe sexuality education our children receive to come only from school ٢٠culture. While schools do toe best they can and walk a fine line trying to give our children basic scientific information, we as a church and we as Disciples of Christ have a responsibility to talk with our children about sexuality and to teach toe morals and values that grow from our faith. It is good news that our congregation has begun

    Lent 2015

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    ، هoffer faith based sexuality education for our children. Disciples make sure that their children know that sexuality is a good gift from God. If you need help doing that, do not ignore the resources offered in our congregation. They are good news. Second, in order to be good news people, Christians may not engage in hate speech in the name of Jesus when it comes to the GLBT community. If you think that homosexuality is bad news, then you are bound by the example of Christ to love the members of that community. If your foith leads you to believe that homosexuality is sin, remember that Christ didn’t make the sinners mad. They were moved by his compassion. Christ made the religious authorities, who liked to draw lines and make lists of who was included and excluded, furious. And if, on the other hand, you think that homosexual persons who live lives of faith and grace and service are good news, then we need you to actively express the love of Christ to them, so that we can offer an antidote to the hate speech that spews from so many comers of the Christian family. Love them – drat is good news. I think that one thing that will help us in this pursuit to love as Christ commands is to avoid broad stereotypical language. Just as last week I cautioned you against unhelpful stereotypical statements about the wealthy and the poor, so this week also I want to rule out of bounds statements like “The homosexual lifestyle is destroying the fabric our community.” In the first place, there is no such thing as one homosexual lifestyle. Of course there are homosexuals who live a life outside fee bounds of submission to Christ. But there have also always been faithful, Christ-confessing homosexual persons who haveserved faithfully within thechurch.Idon’twantanyone making statements about fee “Heterosexual lifestyle” and using Hugh Hefner as fee example! Again, Good News is always contextual, and Jesus offen addressed good news to individual needs. We are to fellow Christ’s example if we want to be a good news people. Finally, I think it is critical that we as faithful Christians take a long, hard look again at Scripture for guidance on issues of sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular. As I have done before during this sermon series, I have included a long list of scriptures feat I think help us think faithfully about fee issues of sexuality. There are seven mentions ©؛homosexuality in Scripture. Jesus says nothing about it. And, there are good Christian scholars who disagree about what these seven passages mean and how to apply them to our current lives of faith. One of those scripture is fee passage from Romans 1 and 2 that I read today. In Romans, Paul is writing to a Christian community who lives in fee midst of a culture that offers them no support and many distractions. And in Chapter 1, he begins to teach fee Roman Christians about fee dangers of idolatry. Those who follow Christ are to hold to truth and to worship God alone. Idolaters refuse to honor God or to give thanks to God, but instead, “they exchanged fee glory of fee immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being ٢٠birds ٢٠four-footed animals ٢٠reptiles” (1:21-23). It is easy for us to dismiss this warning because we don’t worship statues of reptiles. But be careful—we do give honor and thanks to human beings (especially those who are wealthy, sports icons, ٢٠movie stars), and we do give honor and gloty to beautiful, big houses and fancy cars. We do worship our own pleasure and desires. Idolatty is giving honor, thanks, and glory to something or someone other than God. Putting something other than God at fee center of our lives is Idolatty no matter what fee object of worship looks like.

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    And then, ?aul lays out a long deseription of what people who practice idolatry اآ0ا( like. And the list is unsettling. It seems that when we worship other gods and worship our own pleasure, we pursue sexual pleasure no matter the cost, we are filled with wickedness, evil, malice, envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, gossip, slander, insolence, pride, rebelliousness towards our parents, foolishness, faithlessness , ruthlessness, and we encourage such evil in others, ?aul paints a fearful picture of what happens over time to those who worship either themselves ٢٠other things instead of the true God. ?aul is talking about the Roman culture of promiscuity and idolatry that existed side by side with the early Christian community. I can almost hear the early Christians chanting, “Yeah! That’s right! Those Roman idolaters are going to bum in hell.” And then Paul pulls a switch on the early Christians and on us. He turns the spotlight on Christians themselves. Paul writes, “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things” (2:1). Just when the early church was about to reach a fever pitch of condemnation for those outside their foith community, Paul pulls the cover off of the truth and reminds us all that idolatry is not something that is reserved for those who do not believe. In fact, all of us struggle with foe desire to pursue our own pleasure before all else. All of us struggle to free ourselves of envy, malice, gossip, and rebelliousness. The issue here that Paul is addressing is not homosexuality, per se. There are expressions of sexuality (both heterosexual and homosexual) that are idolatrous. He is using those as examples of what grows from idolatry. But, Paul is addressing idolatry, worshipping something other than God and foe truth we have come to know in Christ. And he leaves us no room for condemning foe culture at large and those outside foe bounds of the sanctuary, because he reminds us that God knows our hearts and knows our thoughts. We all struggle wifo wanting to hold parts of ourselves and parts of our lives above foe water of baptism. The only antidote to idolatry is submission to Christ as Lord and Savior. Out of that submission grows humility, grace, and foe ability to love. As Jesus said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn 13:35).

    I^nt2015

  • Challenge and invitation: preaching Lent today

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

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    Challenge and Invitation: Preaching Lent Today

    Kimberly Wagner

    Graduate Divisi©n of Religion, Emory University

    The Dirt and the Divine: Lenten Aspirations When you step off the boat onto the Isle oflona, an Inner Hebrides island off the west coast of Scotland, you immediately perceive it is a “thin place” Though only four miles long and one mile wide, this island has been a place of pilgrimage, refuge, and religious devotion and drama since its first recorded history in the sixth century. For those who visit today, there is a sense of both peace and faith-filled expectancy. As you walk from the arrival dock to the Abbey Church and Cloisters, the centerpiece of the island and the Iona Community, you wind through the ruins of a Nunnery, and you sense the ghosts of the faithfol who sought (and found?) God’s presence in this place; you journey down the rocky street that has been traveled by Scotland’s kings and monastic scribes; and your eyes feast upon the lush landscape and high crosses that seem to dot the island as if declaring this place as God’s land. A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to stay in the Abbey Church cloisters and participate as a part of the Iona Community. When I arrived at the Abbey Church, a sense of calm and anticipation filled my soul. I felt immediately as if I were “home,” and yet I hoped that God would meet me on that island in the ways I so desperately needed. After we took in the glorious stone structure that would be our place of residence and devotion for the next week, our hosts invited us into the cloisters. I expected to begin our time with prayer ٢٠worship ٢٠at least an opportunity to bond as a community. Instead, they sat us down in the Refectory on the rough-hewn benches and handed out group assignments and chores for the week. My group’s responsibility was to clean dishes and chop vegetables every moming for the daily meals. Starting the next morning, it became routine after breakfast to clear the tables and begin to scrub all the dishes by hand. Every morning I found myself elbow-deep, literally, in the large porridge pot that never seemed to get clean. After the overwhelming pile of dishes were done and all the water mopped up off the floor, the vegetables demanded our attention—bushels and bushels of vegetables to be cleaned, chopped, and prepared every day. For some reason, toe giant bushels of carrots regularly ended up on my workstation. By Wednesday I swore that if I never saw a carrot again, I would die a happy woman. Straight from toe garden on toe mainland, toe carrots were caked with dirt from toe ground and dust from the journey across toe sound. They re،ptired intense scrubbing before toey could be peeled or chopped so that dirt didn’t find its way into our soups, stews, and casseroles. Even in toe middle of these messy jobs, I did my best to live into toe Iona ideal that every work is worship. But to be honest, I wasn’t toe “ideal” Iona resident when it came to engaging my chores with joy. Moreover, every morning without fail, our chores were interrupted. Amidst our daily cleaning, peeling, and chopping, the 9:00 a.m. bell would ring in the Abbey church, calling all to prayer. Upon hearing its tolls and feeling its vibration in toe kitchen adjacent to the bell tower, we would stop whatever we were doing and all go to Morning Frayer. With carrot debris and soapy water covering my apron, with hands wrinkled from cleaning the porridge pot and nail beds soiled with dirt from

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    the vegetables, أwould take my plaee lu the ehoir stalls and join with the rest of the community, declaring these lofty words:

    Leader: The world belongs to God, ALL: The earth and all its people, f^ader: How ׳good it is, how wonderful, ALL: To live together in unity. Leader: Love and faith come together, ALL: Justice and peace join hands. Leader: If Christ’s disciples keep silent ALL: These stones would shout aloud Leader: Open our lips, © God, ALL: And our mouths shall proclaim your praise.1

    In the middle of the dirt and grime of vegetables, in the midst of the scrubbing, chopping,andmundaneactivitiesofsustaininghuman community,we were summoned to participate in the transcendent work of worship. We prayed and sang and heard God’s word read and proclaimed. We declared great truths and often felt the spirit at work among us. And, when Morning Prayer ended, we returned to the unfinished work that awaited us, poised on the cutting boards, reminding us that our earthy tasks were not yet complete, and perhaps they might be God’s work too. This is the wonderful and mysterious dialectic we encounter in the Christian life, but most especially at Lent. Lent, at its best, invites us to venture into a deeper exploration of both the earthiness of our humanity and tire transcendent wonder of God. In seeking to deepen our own spiritual lives and relationship with God, we are asked to poise ourselves on both the brink of God’s future and the edge of our present. In the words of Or. Don Saliers, “The church’s Lenten journey is a double journey: into the mystery of God’s unfathomable grace and into the depths of our humanity. Both are required.”؛ Since the fourth century, Lent has been a unique time set aside in the life of the church. In its earlier iterations (and continuing in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions today), the forty days before Easter were devoted to the preparation of those who were to be baptized at Easter Vigil. Soon enough, the practices of those preparing for baptism were extended beyond the catechumenate class, and the Lenten season became a time for personal examination and faithful renewal for the already-baptized as well.^ With an emphasis on fasting, prayers, confession, study, and service (almsgiving), the church sought to make Lent a time of both deep attention to human need and imperfection as well as a time of reinvigorating one’s faith in a gracious and powerful God, that would culminate on Easter with baptisms and the “hallelujahs!” of resurrection. Lent (coming from the Anglo-Saxon word lencten, meaning “spring”) was intended to be a time of revivification of both personal faith and a season that called for new energy within the life of the church. As preachers and pastors caring for congregations today, we long for Lent to be a springtime of the soul. We want the Lenten season to be a time of great spiritual awakening not just for the faithftil in the pews but also for tire Church as a whole. And we seek to renew that religious fervor through Lenten Bible studies, prayer groups, ٢٠unique worship services. We mark people with ashes and oil, hand them

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    palm leaves, and even hnsh thei·“ ־hallelujahs,” all in the effort to push them towards stronger awareness and growth in their spiritual lives. We long for our parishioners (and those beyond our church walls) to engage in the “double journey,” to {لآﺎﺗﺎﻧ their own imperfeet humanity while glimpsing God’s graee-filled divinity. However, sometimes our e’؛forts seem in vain. The truth is, we as people in the twenty-first eentury struggle to fully engage both halves of this “double journey” in great part because of the social and cultural forces at play within us and within the communities we serve.

    The Challenges ofPreaching Lent Today: Secularization, Reflection, Compartmentalization, and Post-Modernism Secularizationhas become more thanabuzzword;itisacultural transformation that has a direct impact on our congregants and their relationship to fai؛h. Secularization is often caricatured asadecrease in religious devotion,belief,or practice.However,this is not necessarily the case. In A SecularAge, Charles Taylor describes secularization as a move from a transcendent frame to an immanent frame, a move from ordering our lives dependent upon a supernatural plan ٢٠being to ordering our lives based on that which is natural and observable in the world.* Even religious devotion and practices get shaved down to fit this immanent frame where instrumental reason is valued and “time is pervasively secular.”5 Living in this natural, reason-driven, immanent frame, the world becomes disenchanted and there is a loss of the transcendent. It is not that religious belief ٢٠practice is eliminated or invalidated; it is that religion has been consigned to the private sphere. Religious claims no longer function to “provide a coherent, meaningful, and explanatory narrative about the world.”5 Instead, people look toward immediate, material stories—science, technology, or reason—to explain their experiences. However, secularization cannot merely be defined as a narrative of decline, for with it has come gifts such as democratization of power and scientific advancements that have changed ٢٧٠world for the better. Nonetheless, secularization poses a challenge to the Lenten preacher. Lue to this gradual yet powerful force, people in the pews today (and maybe even the preachers themselves) struggle to find a transcendent God in a disenchanted world. We have become constricted and contained by our material, immanent frame. We struggle to find meaning and power in stories about a God beyond the corporeal limits of our lives and our world. This loss has not gone without notice. As Charles Taylor describes, we have a sense that something is missing, that there is a “lack of weight, gravity, thickness, substance…a deeper resonance… which we feel should be there. ٩Even with this sense of loss, twenty-first century persons struggle to claim considerations of God as something of significance and see the transcendent at work in the material substanceofour world. What about the other half of our Lenten journey? © ٢٧journey into ٢٧٠own humanity? Unfortunately, we struggle on that front as well. Both © ٢٧unreflective culture and ٢٧٠propensity for compartmentalization constrain us from being able to consider fully the truths of our human condition. First, we are a remarkably unreflective society. We struggle to slow down and consider our world and our lives. In a society where time is money and money is important, where it is more comfortable to do than to be, where busy-ness is a sign of status and significance (or at least offers that illusion), there is little value placed in foe public eye on taking pause and

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    reflecting on the state of our Jives and world. While pockets ofresistance (the church, perhaps, being one ٠۴ them) offer space to be, to reflect, and to remember, the values of our culture do not nurture such practices. Second, our culture has also grown to value the skill of com^rtmentalization. We are able to arrange not only our society into different spheres (family, economic, political, religious, etc.),8 but also our individual lives have been broken apart and scattered into separate spheres. We have learned to separate our work “selves” from our family “selves” from our romantic “selves” from even our church “selves.” We present different parts of our personalities in different locations and among different groupings of people. As the church continues to be relegated to its own private social sphere, so the faithful often create a “religious self’ that is separate from the rest of their lives. £specially among mainline ?rotestant congregations, this “religious self’ has often been molded to be an ideal representation of what people think the church wants them to be, causing congregants to leave many of their struggles and imperfections in the car to be picked up at the end of worship. As a result, the church as a whole struggles to dig honestly into the truth about humanity. Because of the pressure to portray some kind of ideal self and the separation of the “religious self’ from the rest of our identities and lives, it is difficult for us, as preachers and parishioners,to be truthful about ourown brokenness and the brokenness of our world. Both our unreflective ways and compartmentalizations of identity lead to a failure to take seriously our full humanity—both our gifts and our shortcomings as individuals and as a society. As a result of secularization, our unreflective culture, and ompartmentalization, the Lenten “double journey” seems an almost impossible task to engage. We struggle to reach beyond the immanent frame and encounter the transcendent wonder of God while at the same time we struggle to take seriously the brokenness and hurting of our humanity. So,the practices ofLent—prayer, confession, fasting, and almsgiving—are reduced to clichéd New Years resolutions. Instead of genuine acts of devotion that lead to deeper self-examination and/or worship of God, we give up candy, fast from a TV program, or abstain from soda for forty days—all habits we should be avoiding anyway and which we will probably resume after (if not before) Lent is over. We have substituted shallow practices in place of authentic ones because the “double journey” ofLent asks us to enter into spaces that are neither comfortable nor natural for the twenty-first century citizen. As if to add insult to preaching injury, all these factors are then wrapped up in the complicated forces of postmodernism. In seeking to define the elusive concept of postmodernism, David Lose offers its central question: “When it comes to postmodernism , the primary question is epistemological: Bow do we know for certain whether anything is true?”® ?ostmodemism presents a direct challenge to foe traditional model of preaching biblical doctrine as ultimate truth and then asking congregants to apply that universal truth to their lives, ?ostmodern citizens are skeptical about whether we can declare any truth as universal ٢٠objectively true for all people, places, and times. No longer can preachers effectively offer general truths that will be received as ubiquitously applicable to a diverse, postmodern congregation. There is a distrust of any kind of objective certainty and those who purport to have it. As Barbara Brown Taylor offers, “The days are long gone when most preachers can stand up in pulpits and name people’s sin for them. They do not have that authority anymore.” ®؛In foe

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    postmodern landscape, the preacher no longer has been granted the authority, nor the right, to stand and offer unshakable principles for righteous living. $ ٠then, how can we preach to a people about the truth ٢٠God and the truth about our humanity in this Lenten season?

    A Trail Guide’s Invitation While postmodernism poses a challenge to preachers, it may also open opportunities and a key to preaching Lent, ?ostmoderns are not suspicious of truth itself, but challenge the concept of a fixed Truth beyond review and revision. A postmodern parishioner wants to explore,construct, and build meaning out of“penultimate” truths toat^alwaysopenforalterationduetonew information,experiences,orunderstandings .“ This should not be seen as a threat, but as a gift to foe church and to foe Lenten preacher. As discussed above, Lent is a journey—a double journey—an invitation to deep exploration ofboth our own humanity and the power and presence of God. Lent invites disciples to construct, review, and revise what they know about themselves and God through a deep engagement with foe kanten texts and practices. The kanten preacher, then, may not stand as a proclaimer of universal biblical truths, but instead offer invitation to enter this unique forty-day journey. The preacher has foe opportunity to invite foe seeking faithful (and seeking doubters) into foe Lenten texts, allowing the stories of faith to shape their own story. Preaching invitation is about welcoming and encouraging questions from foe pulpit without feeling foe need to offer concrete, indisputable answers. Preaching invitation resists the temptation oddactic/instructive preaching in which preachers essentially seek to eommunieate biblical information or Christian doctrine. Likewise, it is to resist the temptation to be ethical exhorters, calling for a standard of moral and social uprightness that is dictated by some biblical text. Both teaching and exhorting are valuable, but foere is time enough for those tasks in foe pulpit. What if, for foe forty days of Lem, we preach invitation? What if we invite ٢٧٠congregations to wrestle and question and journey with us? But,to what should we invite our congregations this Lent? We havealready named foe challenges that seek to disrupt our “double journey” posed by secularization, our unreflective culture, and compartmentalization. To challenge all these forces at once would be futile and would guarantee a preacher’s frustration. I would suggest that we begin in foe immanent frame of our own lives, but challenge our tendencies of unreflective living and eompartmentalization. We should invite our parishioners to honesty—about ourselves, our lives, and our world. An invitation to honesty asks people to stop and be, to take time to authentically ask and answer questions about their own existence, to be honest about their own joys, gifts, doubts, and places of brokenness. This is an invitation not only to reflection and deep questioning, but it also encourages parishioners to bring foeir whole selves to these questions, allowing the light of faithful reflection to shine into every corner of their compartmentalized identities. This year’s lectionary Lenten texts invite fois kind ٢٠honesty, offering psalms of confessions and stories about what it means to live in covenant community. These texts help us to remember our identities claimed in baptism and challenge us with prophetic words of conviction and summons. Each of the lectionary Lenten texts invites honesty from foe congregation about how we are living as people of faith in this world. Suchhonesty is not easy and demands great courage on the part ofthe congregation

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    and deep understanding on the part of the preacher. Lent’s journey into our humanity invites us to ٠٥longer shy away from those places ٠۴ doubt and brokenness in our lives and our world. It asks us to take seriously toe pains ٠۴ ٢٥٠own existence and the realities of terrorism, war, illness, divorce, grief, and shame. We are retired to face toe brokenness within us as well as toe broken societies in which we participate. As a result, toe preacher must take care to create a space in which this journey may be taken faithfully and safely. Instead of playing toe role of biblical teacher ٢٠ethical exhorter ٢٠holy herald, perhaps the challenges of preaching this Lent invite toe preacher into toe role of a trail guide. A tow years ago, one of my best friends from high school, Anna, finally fulfilled her lito-long dream of becoming a certified professional frail guide. Training since her senior year of high school, she now works for two different companies leading to^ng,canoeing,caving,andctimbingex^dit^ all over toe western United States and throughout South America. When asked why she wants to be a trail guide, her answer is toe same every time: “Because, a frail becomes new every time you invite new feet upon it. There are never two hikes that are to« same ” The best frail guides, she explains, are those who welcome all kinds of people onto toe trail, recognizing that toe trail will never be experienced toe same way twice. Each person brings their own gifts and struggles (plus toe weather always adds a certain level ٠۴ unpredictability). But, toe guide cannot enter blind. He needs to have some knowledge ٠۴ toe trail. She has to know which paths to take, toe locations of sinkholes ٢٠dangerous ledges, ٢٠where toe river is most narrow, offering toe safest place to cross. Great guides know boto toe beauty and toe challenges of toe frail for themselves, while acknowledging that with each new journey, they must be prepared to experience toe trail anew. The gifted guide truly journeys with toe adventurers, suffering through toe same rain ٢٠snowstorms, encountering toe same unexpected wildlife, and even sitting together when one adventurer becomes paralyzed by fear or struggles to forge ahead. A great guide is not simply an encyclopedia of information nor a signpost merely pointing toe right way to go, but a follow journeycr, a friend ٨٠toe trail ff toe preacher is to serve as trail guide, toe preacher must boto prepare for toe joumey and walk witootoersontoeir^tenjoum should have a sense of the risks, pitfalls, and contours of toe u؛nten frail before they can invite and escort fellow travelers, ?reachers must be wilting to encounter their own doubts and brokenness in order to authentically invite others to toe journey with them. Preachers must be willing to dig into their own humanity and be vulnerable in facing their personal wounds and toe wounds of toe world, ©toy after this hard work can toe trail guide preacher invite others ٨٠toe journey. Not merely pointing toe way like a signpost, but traveling alongside their parishioners, preachers must be willing to “plunge back into toe depths of human existence, where the words [of brokenness and faith] were first conceived and where they may once again be filled with power.”“ Preachers must name and describe encounters with their own brokenness so honestly and transparently that listeners can identify places of brokenness in toeir own lives and feel courage to be honest about them as well. In challenging toe patterns ٠۴ ٢٥٠unreflective culture and compartmentalization, the frail guide preacher invites the congregation into at least one half of the fo؛nten journey—to recognize boto toe gifts ofhumanity and, even more honestly, our human

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    brokenness and imperfection as individuals and a society. But when we travel this journey well, those spaces of doubt and brokenness can open fissures for transcendent hope. In our honesty about our human condition, we break open not only the myths we have created within our own lives, but also the myth of the secular story. As we recognize the way our human reason and exertions have failed us, we recognize the way “the secular story has fallen short, providing a too-limited view of human life/’ In that moment, preachers have the opportunity “to offer hearers hope rooted in toe audacious c^m softhe biblical story. ..reclaimingmuchofourordinary lives as arenas in which we can experience toe ongoing work of God to love and bless toe world.”^ Like Jesus and his disciples, we walk together in honesty towards toe crosses of our existence؛ we take toe long journey through Lem towards Jerusalem. But, we hope and we pray and we trust that toe journey that winds its way to toe crosses of our lives will be pierced through, when all is said and done, with resurrection hope.

    Notes 1 ‘Opening Respenses, The Murning Serviee,” The Iona Worship Book, (Glasgow, Scotland: The Wild Goose ?ublications, 2003), 15. 2 Don Saliers, “Keeping Time in Lent,” American Organist Magazine 47, no. 3 (March 2013): 12. 3 For more information on the origins of Lenten observances, see Faul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson, The Origins of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons in Early Christianity (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Fress,20م3ل1־89,(ﻟﻞ 4 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007),21. 5 Charles Taylor, 542. 6 David j. Lose, Preaching at the Crossroads: How the World—and Our Preaching—is Changing 7 Charles Taylor, 307. 8 For an expanded discussion on the differentiation of social spheres see Max Weber. See especially Max Weber, “Science as Vocation,” in From Max Weher: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Geerth and c. Wright Mills (New ¥ork: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129-156. 9 Lose, 7. (italics original) 10 Barbara Brown Taylor, Speaking ofSin: The Lost Language ofSalvation (Boston, Massachusetts: Cowley Publications, 2000), 4. 11 For a lengthier discussion of this idea of a postmodern concept of truth, see Lose, 20-24. 12 Barbara Brown Taylor, 60. 13 Lose, 7.

    Journal/or Preachers

  • No end to it

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    No End to It

    Hosea 1:1-9, 3:1-5,11:1-9

    Mark Ramsey Graee Covenant Presbyterian Church, Ashevitte, North Carolina

    When eomedian Tig Notaro was in sixth grade, she took this musie class covering everything from Beethoven to The Who. She described what happened in that class on This American Life:

    It was so mnch fun. I was a huge Beatles and Rolling Stones fan. And at the end of every class, the teacher would let one kid play their favorite song for the whole class to hear. I always brought in Beatles and Rolling Stones albums. The coolest kid in our entire school, JD, came up to me after school one day and said, “If I bring in my dad’s Rolling Stones’ album, will you tell me a cool song to play?” I said, “Absolutely. No doubt.”

    Next day, he brought in the Rolling Stones album Let It Bleed. I looked it over. I said, “This song—play this one.” And I pointed at “You Can’t Always Cet What You Want.” He said, “Are you sure?” I couldn’t be more positive. This is the coolest song that you could possibly play. So the teacher asked if anyone had a song. JD raised his hand. She called him up to the front. He pointed out that song. And at that point, this is what the entire classroom heard:

    (Note: At this point in the sermon, our choir began singing the opening lines ofthe Stones’song, sounding like the London Bach Choir «٠the original recording “/ saw her today at the reception.”)

    Nofaro continued: “JD was furious! He’s looking at me like, what is this?And I’m frantically signing no, no, no! This is an amazing song! It gets better! But, the song continued….”

    (Note: Again the choir behind }ne sings: “You can’t always get what you want. But ifyou try sometime, you find you get what you need.’’)

    And then the bell rang. Nobody got to hear any more of that song-the rock n roll part…And the coolest kid in school just marched down there, grabbed his record, and turned to me and said, “Thanks a lot,” and then just bolted out o^he classroom. I was like, no! It gets better! But I guess, I guess you can’t always get what you want.1

    That makes me think about grace. We talk about grace so much—grace almost becomes like a theological teddy bear. Soft, cuddly, unrprestioning. Crace is not a theological teddy bear. You don’t believe that? Behold the story of Hosea and his wife Comer, recorded in painful detail in our text today.

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    Fred Buechner describes the scene scmething like this: Gomer was always good company—a little loud, but great at a part}’ and always good for a laugh, a little less than choosy about men and booze. Then the prophet Hosea came along wearing a sandwich board that read “The End Is at Hand” on one side and “Watch Out” on the other. The first time he asked her to marry him, she thought he was kidding. The second time Gomer knew he was serious, but thought he was crazy. The third time she said yes. He wasn’t exactly a swinger, but he had a kind face, and he was generous , and he wasn’t all that much crazier than everybody else. Besides, any fool could see he loved her. Give or take a little, she even loved him back for a while, and they had three children whom Hosea named with Strang names like Not-pitied-for-Godwill -no-Ionger-pity-Israel-now-that-it’s-gone-to-the-dogs, so that ever} ׳time the roll was called at school, Hosea would be scoring a prophetic bull’s-eye in absentia. But everybody could see the marriage wasn’t going to last. While Hosea was off hitting the sawdust trail, Gomer took to hitting as many night spots as she could squeeze into a night. He swore that he was through with her for keeps, but he wasn’t. When he finally found her, she was lying passed out in a highly specialized establishment located above an adult bookstore, and he had to pay the management plenty to let her out of her contract. She’d lost her front teeth and picked up some scars you had to see to believe, but Hosea had her back again and that seemed to be all that mattered. He changed his sandwich board from “The End Is Near” to “God Is love” on one side and “There’s no end to it” on the other, and when he stood on the street comer belting out:

    How can I give you up, هEphraim! How can I hand you over, هIsrael! For I am God and not mortal, The Holy One in your midst…,

    nobody can say how many converts he made. But one thing that’s for sure is that, including Gomer’s, there was seldom a dry eye in the housed The penetrating and persistent ways of grace often send us into exile from the life we know, only to finally bring us home to life with God. Grace is decidedly not a theological teddy bear. Three centuries ago in the village ot’Olne} ,׳England, a new priest came to town. The townsfolk were fascinated both with his style of preaching and his checkered past as a slave trader. In those days clergy frequently wrote original verses for congregational singing, ()ne of these compositions was titled “Faith’s Review and Expectation.” It was a plaintive little poem, and it didn’t stand out and was soon forgotten. But foe song survived foe priest, whose name was John Henry Newton.^ “Amazing Grace” crossed foe Atlantic, and when we sing it in a few minutes, notice especially foe beginning ofthe second verse: “Twas Grace that taught my heart to fear and grace my fears relieved….” That is grace? Grace teaches our heart to fear? In a culture whose mantra often is “no one is really at foult,” grace punctures foe illusion that it’s all comfort and no repentance. As Sam Wells has said, “If it’s not sin—it can’t be forgiven.” Why is it that grace often first stings before it comforts? How is it that grace evokes fear before foe joy? Richard Rohr knows what he’s talking about: “In foe

    Jourtialfor Preachers

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    first half ©f life it is all ab©ut me. How can 1 be safe? How can I make money? How can I look attractive? In the realm of faith: How can I think well of myself and go to heaven? How can I be on moral high ground? These are all ego questions. They are not the questions of the soul.”* Only grace moves us to trust not in our own wiles, but in the power of God to change us. That movement is hard, but it leads us to joy. The fear of God’s grace is that our security and control and status quo—will be reduced to nothing. That can feel like very bad news for us before it emerges as decidedly good news. And it leads to all the risk taking that love and devotion expect. Thinking of Hosea and Gomer, and grace, I recall a story Nadia Bolz-Weber tells about how God’s grace is found in the small and the surprising and even the profane:

    I think back to two days after ?1 was found dead. See, ?j grew up in a nice Catholic family in Iowa. Not really sure how they got a darkly sardonic, filthy minded comic genius for a son but that’s another story for another time. Two days after ?J’s death, a group offriends,comics,and recovering alcoholics undertook a mission of graceful compassion. They entered foe home of our dead friend and they cleared out all foe pornography. £very ?layboy and ¥HS tape. All ofit. They wanted to spare these good folks any more pain than they were already dealing with. That to me is foe in-breaking of foe Grace of God on earth, that we might clear ont foe pornography from our dead friends’ homes before their grieving parents come to settle their son’s affairs.5

    It’s small, it’s surprising, and it’s a little profane, but it’s foe real thing. Hosea, along with Gomer, would wholeheartedly recognize that as grace. What Hosea learned, first in his exile of pain and then in his exile when grace spun his world around, is that we can take exactly none of our “conventional wisdom” into our encounter with grace. None of our rules apply! ¥ou just have to hold onto radical love for dear life and a wild ride as grace changes us heart and soul. Finally, it will dawn on us that if truly our sin costs us a lot, God coming to us and healing us costs God everything.؛ At foe turning pointofC.S. Lewis’ beloved The Lion, the Witch, andthe Wardrobe, several significant characters encourage each other with reports that Aslan, foe great lion and true ruler of oppressed Narnia, has reappeared to fight foe evil witch. Their words of encouragement to each other are as potent as they are succinct: “Aslan is on the move.”^ Into every stuck, cautious, timid, fearful life, the words that can sting are also foe words of hfo: God’s grace is on foe move—in your life and in the life of foe world! Anne Lamott once tookherthen two-year-old son to Lake Tahoe W’here they rented a condominium by foe lake. That area around Reno is such a hotbed of gambling that all foe rooms are equipped with those curtains that block out all light so you can stay up all night in the casinos and then sleep all morning. One afternoon she put foe baby in his playpen in one of foose rooms, in foe pitch dark, and went to do some work. A few minutes later she heard her baby knocking on foe door from inside foe room, and she got up, knowing he’d crawled out of his playpen. But when she got to foe

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    door, she found he’d locked it. He had somehow managed to push the little button on the doorknob. He was calling to her, “Mommy, Mommy,” and Anne was saying to him, “Jiggle the door knob, darling,” and of course he couldn’t even see the knob to know what she was talking about. After a moment, it became clear to him that his mother could not open the door, and panic set in. He began sobbing. So his mother ran around like crazy trying everything possible, making calls, jiggling the lock, leaving messages for help. And there, in this dark, locked room was this terrified little child. Finally she did the only thing she could, which was to slide her fingers underneath the door, where there were a few centimeters of space. She kept telling him over and over to bend down and find her fingers. And somehow he did. So they stayed like that for a really long time—connected, on the floor, him holding her fingers in the dark, slowly feeling connected, feeling her love, feeling her presence and her care. 1 think grace ultimately may well feel to you or me like being a two-year-old. ..in the dark, and God is our mother and 1 am not old enough to speak cogent phrases yet, even in the midst of such panic. She could break down the door if that struck her as being the best way, but instead, by grace, I can just hold onto her fingers underneath the door. * How can that be enough? With grace it is always enough. How can we know it is enough? The punch line JD never heard in the Stones’ song is the very gift of God that teaches our heart to fear and is the grace that also relieves all our fears. From God, always: we get what we need. We need grace to live and to love, to form relationships, to move us off some paths and on to others, to help us look to tomorrow in hope, and to help us forgive all our yesterdays. Grace is the sweet song God sings to us across generations and through all ٢٧٠locked doors, lifting us up and moving us onward.

    (Note: A small ensemble gathered to sing “Tomorrow Will Be Kinder” by The Secret Sisters – a song known at least to a younger segment of the congregation as a song from “The Hunger Games.” It begins:

    Black clouds are behind me, I now can see ahead, Often I wonder why I try hoping for an end. Sorrow weighs my shoulders down, and trouble haunts my mind. But I know the present will not last, and tomorrow will be kinder.)؟ (See it at: https//www.youtube.con^watch?v=3rsD40rsMFw)

    Grace is the sweet song God sings to us. It meets us in our tears as it envelopes us in love. It meets us in our control and our pride, and it strips us down. It meets us in our distraction and holds up a mirror and forces us into sclf-rccognifion. Grace comes into all broken places, and it begins to love us back to wholeness. And grace always forms and reforms us, and the sweet song of grace brings us home. The grace of God always, always, always gives us what we need.

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    Notes

    لAs recounted,“Act Three/Start Me up ” from episode 518 of This American Life. 2 Frederick Buechner, Peculiar Treasures (New ¥ork: HarperCollins, 1984). 3 Matthew Myer Boulton, “Reflections on the Lectionary,” Christian Century, March 22,2011. 4 Richard Rohr, “The First Half of Life,” Daily Meditation, March 7,2014. 5 http://sojo.net/blogs/2011/07/25/spotting-kingdom-god־after-tragedy־death, accessed July 18,2014. 6 From the sermon “What L· Sin?” preached at Duke Chapel by Sam Wells on February 10,2008. 7 Da¥id Lose, Feasting on the Word, Year c. Volume 3. 8 Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions (Random House: Toronto, 1993), 88-89. 9 “Tomorrow Will Be Kinder” from The Hunger Cames, Laura Rogers/The Secret Sisters.

  • Preaching after Easter: in grateful memory of Charles Cousar

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    Preaching after Easter

    In grateful memory ofCharles Cousar

    David Bartlett

    Trinity ?resbyterian Church,Atlanta, Georgia

    During the years thatltaught at Yale Divinity School,Ihadaregular arrangement with ?ilgrim Congregational Church in the Fair Haven area of our town. For years Filgrim was pastored on a half time basis by divinity school students, and for three of those students over almost ten years, I was the designated substitute preacher. Like so many preachers, the pastors appropriately always wanted to preach on Easter Sunday, and like so many preachers, they also wanted to take the next Sunday off. So we reversed the usual pattern where seminary students always preach toe Sunday after Easter, and I preached that sermon. We will return to that fairly narrow construction ofthe tide I was assigned for this essay—how do you preach and what do you preach on toe first Sunday after Easter. I want, however, to start with looking at two ways of considering my assigned title from somewhat broader perspectives. First we need to note that of course we always preach after Easter. Were it not after Easter, we would not preach at all. ft is not only that Sunday is our day of worship , the Lord’s Day, because ft falls on the third day after Friday, on toe first day of the week, ft is also that were it not for that first Easter, we would have no church and nothing to preach about. Apart from Easter, it is unlikely that anyone would have remembered Jesus any more fully than we remember other purported Messiahs from toe turn of toe centuries . At best toe Good Friday narrative would be as memorable as Socrates and toe hemlock, but since in fact none ofjesus’ disciples came close to Plato as a memoirist, it seems unlikely that we would have even that. Easter is toe presupposition of our conviction that Jesus was and is God among us, and despite all those genuine Christians who think we would be better off with just toe sermon on toe Mount and no ^ b ^ a tic a lly spectacular events on Easter, I am quite sure that without toe faith in those spectacular events, no one would have bothered to pass toe Sermon on the Mount along, generation to generation. And Matthew, who wrete our favorite version of those teachings, did so under toe firm conviction that toe teacher was and is with us, till the end of the age—an entirely Easter based conviction. So in toe growth of the Christian faith, Christmas is after Easter. Lent is after Easter. Good Friday is only good because we celebrate it in the Easter conviction that Jesus is Lord. Lenten piety that pretends to wonder “Can we ever be forgiven?” and Good Friday preaching that pretends that it’s all over for us and God are just playing a kind of silly game of make-believe. That does not mean that we haven’t much to repent and even much to mourn, but not as those who have no hope.

    II. A further way to ponder toe ways in which we preach after Easter is to remind ourselves that we can only preach because of our faith in Easter. Bultmann and some

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    of his discipies sometimes seem to claim that Christ is risen only in our ^eaehing. I want to claim rather that he is risen also in our preaching. On the third day to he sure, but also every day that one of us stands up and dares to proclaim our interpretation of the word. I know I am preaching to the preachers (rather harder, incidentally, than preaching to the choir), and I know the title of this journal. So I remind us of what we already know, that we are never really adequate to the task and the call and the gift of preaching. What the risen Lord said to ?aul, anxious about his own inadequacies, is still the word for us: “My grace is sufficient for you and my power is made perfect in weakness” We remember that it is the risen Lord who says that. This is not an assurance based on the reminder that Jesus was a great teacher and an exemplary martyr. This is an assurance based on the assurance that the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ is with us all, not least when we get up to preach. Because he is risen. George Herbert wrote a magnificent poem on the plight and the hope which a preacher brings to the pulpit every time—every Easter and every Sunday after Easter .

    Holiness on the head, Light and perfection on the breast. Harmonious bells below, raising the dead To lead them unto life and rest. Thus are true Aarons dressed.

    ?rofaneness in my head, Defects and darkness in my breast, A noise of passions ringing me for dead Unto a place where is no rest. ?oor priest thus am I dressed.

    Only another head I have, another heart and breast, another music, making live not dead, without whom I could have no rest: In him I am well dressed.

    Christ is my only head, My alone only heart and breast, My only music, striking me even dead؛ That to the old man I may rest, And be in him new dressed.

    So holy in my head, ?erfect and light in my dear breast, My doctrine tuned by Christ, (who is not dead. But lives in me while I do rest) Come people; Aaron’s dressed.

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    The claim that Christ lives in our preaching while we do rest is the durance that keeps preachers going after Easter.

    III. With this confidence in mind, we cometo lo o k i^ a th e ^ w ^ ta m e n t lectionary textsfor Eastertide.John 20:19-23 is the briehut powerful story o ^ s u s ’^pearance to the disciples on toe evening of the first Easter. When our toxt talks about toe “fear of the Jews,” it can unfortunately reinforce toe ways in which we separate ourselves from our Jewish neighbors in ways that can move quickly toward toe hateful. John’s gospel was almost surely written by a Jew for Jews who believed in Jesus as Messiah. It was certainly written about a Jew. Erom time to time when I preach from the Gospel ofJohn, I start by saying a few words about toe problems raised by John’s feuds with his fellow Jews, toe language he uses that can too easily translate into deeply unchristian claims of Christian superiority . But if we want to avoid preaching on “fear ofthe Jews,” we want to acknowledge toe value of preaching about fear. Gf course all of us deal with personal fears on a regular basis, but in this text, the fear seems to be a fear based on toe assumption that toe crucified Jesus has been finally and entirely defeated and that we are without hope in the world. I am not alone in noticing that in toe United States, specially since September 11, 2001, we are often driven by fear. It finally struck me just recently that it takes two to make a terrorist. There is toe person who does something destructive or threatening, and there is toe person who is terrified. If we are to fight a war on terror, perhaps we need to begin with toe terror in ourselves—terror that concedes cherished rights and enduring principles because we are afraid. And what we are afraid of is that Christ is not risen ؛that God is not Lord ؛ that history has somehow slipped out of God’s hands, taking us along. It does not take too much imagination to see how in our ontemporary political discourse we are eager to follow the example of toe tefofied disciples and lock the doors. The fortress country locked against immigrants, toe fortress church locked against toe threats of secularism, the fortress soul locked against toe possibility and the promise that Jesus keeps appearing just on our side of every locked door. What he says of course is “?eace,” “Shalom.” That isatraditional Jewish greeting in toe first century as now, but it also has toe deeper meaning of peace, well being, confidence. The gift of God that drives away fears ؛the key to unlocking our doors. Jesus shows them his wounds, reminding us that toe risen Lord is always toe crucified Lord. Resurrection does not eliminate atonement ؛resurrection affirms and completes atonement. When Jesus gives the power of forgiveness to the disciples, he gives toe same power to us. The community that forgives sins is the embodiment of toe shalom that Christ brings. The community that forgives sins casts out fear. It is a community that lives with open doors, that lives in the light of Easter. John 20:24-31 is toe familiar story ofThomas. Sometimes the story seems almost too familiar. What can we say about it this year? Of course many of toe most important stories are toe familiar stories. Of course we tell of Jesus’ birth and crucifixion and empty tomb time and time again. There is no harm in thinking again this year about Thomas and saying toe things that we have said before. Christ did not condemn

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    the doubter but blessed him. Thomas is a foreshadowing of so man) ־׳of us on all the Sundays after Easter. We are all invited to share in the blessing of hearing about the great miraele that Thomas saw. But perhaps there are a few less familiar insights to help our preaehing. Beeause we are thinking about preaching after Easter, notice that the Gospel sets our story on the first Sunday after Easter. We can guess that in John’s church, already the first day is resurrection day—both the first Easter and the first Sunday after Easter and every Sunday after that. John’s gospel reminds us that on the day we gather, Christ is present too. Some years ago I noticed that this pericope is not only a story about doubting Thomas; it is a story about disappointed Thomas. He was away on the great day of the first resurrection appearances, and he feels his own loss. Try reading the text with slightly different italics than usual. “Unless / see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails, and my hand in his side, 1 will not believe.” He is disappointed. ¥ears ago 1 attended a Billy Graham rally with members of my church, including one woman who had always seemed to me an absolute model of confident piety. Billy Graham preached as he was wont to do about knowing Jesus as our personal savior and having an experience of the living Lord. Afterwards, driving home, the woman who was so regular in her service to the church confessed, “J’ve been a Christian as long as 1 can remember, but 1 don’t think I’ve ever met the living Lord ٢٠had Jesus in my heart.” 1 know the language is peculiarly Baptist, but the sentiment is ecumenical: she was disappointed. With my friend in mind, I have tried to preach Thomas for those who are disappointed , ft is not that they don’t believe resurrection is possible; it is that they are always left out of those resurrection appearances. 1 ask how Christ can be present in ways that are perhaps not so traditionally individual, but more communal. I ask whether there are more quiet assurances than the greatevangelist’s stress onaparticular personal experience. 1 hold out hope that though we now see in a mirror darkly, one day we shall see face to face and know even as we are known. ?erhaps most important, in this sermon as in almost every sermon on Thomas, I move to the final blessing. “Thomas, have you believed because you have seen? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” In the Gospel of John, the first disciples are the eyewitnesses, and all the rest of us are ear-witnesses. We come to believe not so much because of what we have seen as because of what we have heard. By the time we get to the Sunday after Easter, our congregation is pretty much back to those who without trumpets ٢٠lilies have heard the Gospel week after week. Tike all of us, they may be disappointed from time to time, but they keep showing up. John tells us what we need to tell them on the Sunday after Easter. (Maybe what we need to tell ourselves.) “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have eome—or are coming—or are hoping—to believe.”

    IV During the Sundays after Easter, we notice that the Revised Common Lectiouary omits readings from the Old Testament and includes readings from the Book of Acts. As is so often the case with the lectionary, we notice the difference between lectionary time and canonical time. In the canon the story of Rentecost comes before Acts 3,4,

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    8, or 10 and is the presupposition that illumines and shapes those other stories. In the lectionary we get to Aets 3,4,8, and 10 before the Holy Spirit deseends in Jerusalem, o ^ u r s e just as Easter is the presupposition of every sermon aboutJesus, the first ?enteeost is the presupposition of every story about the ehureh. However, it may be helpful if you are preaehing Acts to point out how the narrative unfolds in Luke’s work in contrast to how it unfolds in foe lectionary readings. Alfred Loisy saidfamouslythat،،Jesus preached the Kingdomandgotthechurch.” Loisy clearly assumed that this was a major disappointment, but for Luke and Acts, the church is a parable of the Kingdom—a foreshadowing and indeed a kind of emhodiment of foe fullness of what God intends for creation.

    The Acts textfor the second Sunday ofEaster. Acts4:32-35,understandably concludes before the frightening cautionary tale of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5:1-11 but i^^licab ly omits foe exemplary tale of Barnabas, whose practice, like his nickname, should provide nouragem ent for our congregations. The assigned text itself inevitably casts foe shadow of Marx over foe practice of foe apostles—from each according to his or her capacity, to each according to his or her need. Whether this represents a normative early Christian practice or a little blip on foe march toward a more entrepreneurial economy, the text rightly reminds us that foe Easter life claims all of us, even our wealth, for the sake of the Risen Lord and his Kingdom. The church becomes the parable and the prophet of that claim.

    The Acts textfor the third Sunday ofEaster is Acts 3:12-19. As is too often foe case, foe suggested lection removes ?eter’s speech from its context. He is responding to the crowd’s excitement at the healing of the crippled beggar. The sermon is an example of the theme of ?enteeost preaching? ؛eter speaks what Pentecost declares, “God’s deeds of power” (See Acts 2:11). Peter’s speech itself makes entirely clear the link between God’s mighty act in raising Jesus from the dead and the mighty act of foe healing that has just taken place. While many of us are cautious about claiming ^ysical healings or even religious reorientations as signs of God’s transcendent power. Acts is entirely clear. Christ is risen. In part Christ is risen into foe church. And when church heals or restores, it is witness to the gift of resurrection.

    The Acts textfor thefourth Sunday ofEaster is Acts 8:26-40. The story of Philip’s baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch is one in a series of stories ofhowthe power ofthe resurrection ^reads,starting with the firtw it^ se s at Easter, then Jews of every tongue at Pentecost, then the eunuch, perhaps a Gentile whose interest in Judaism has brought him to Jerusalem, and finally, as we shall see on foe fifth Sunday after Easter, the power ofEaster extends to touch the Gentiles as well. As a professor of homiletics, I am pleased by the fact that when Philip evangelizes foe eunuch, he starts by explaining a biblical text. This passage, which includes word and baptism, provides a nice balance to foe story ofthe road to Emmaus in Luke 24, which includes word and meal. More than any other Gospel writer, Luke asks what it means for Christ to be present in foe life of the church and says (among other things) what the magisterial reformers said: the risen Christ is present when the Gospel is

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    preached and the sacraments celebrated. Luke does not write about resurrection and then church; he writes about resurrection into Church. That is not all that resurrection means for Luke, but it is an inescapable implication of his two volume narrative.

    For thefifth Sunday ofEaster; the textfrom Acts is Acts 10:44-48. These versions are the conclusion to the remarkable story in Acts 10 where ?eter is persuaded that toe good news of the risen Lord is intended for Gentiles as well as for Jews. In these verses toe Holy Spirit validates that claim, descending upon Jews and Gentiles alike. It is of course entirely right to think that Acts 10 is about inclusion, but Luke always preaches inclusion for toe sake of the Gospel. It is not just that we all come together; it is that we all come together under toe power of the Spirit and in praise ofthe risen Lord. So we do not inclusively proclaim toe goodness of inclusion; we inclusively ^oclaim the power of toe God who raised Jesus from toe dead.

    The text for the sixth Sunday after Easter prepares us for Pentecost, just a week away. We have already noted that Resurrection and ?entecost arc both ^esuppositions for the texts from Acts assigned for toe preceding weeks, so in an odd way, as far as Acts is concerned, we are ending at toe beginning. The reading. Acts 1:15-17 and 21-26, somewhat strangely omits the sad story ofthe fate of Judas. The omission of these verses, along with the decision not to include toe story of Ananias and Sapphira in the readings for toe Second Sunday ofEaster almost makes it seem as if those who design our lectionary want to keep our readings child friendly, or soothingly untroubling . Omitting judgment from Luke’s narrative can make it inaccurately seem that God no longer insists that unfaithful actions have fateful consequences. Luke would be amazed. In toe choosing ofMatthias,however, we have a concrete instance of what I claim Luke is about. The resurrection witnesses must continue because toe resurrection continues. The way we bear witness to the ongoing resurrection is, of all things, to get our church structure right. Resurrection faith is always more than loyalty to Christ’s church. But it is never less than that. Neither the church nor the loyalty is optional.

    .٧ Finally, part of what we are pondering in this essay is not just what toe preacher preaches after Easter, but how the preacher is able to preach after Easter. Despite all our attempts to celebrate every Sunday as toe Lord’s day and every Lord’s day as resurrection, we preachers inevitably feel a kind of letdown after Easter or after any service and sermon that seems miraculously to show forth the Risen Lord. Inevitably, before we know it, it’s Monday morning again, and there are only six days before we are supposed to do it again. Maybe we can let church be a promise not only for our people,butfor us. Maybe we can remember that this is not just the community where we minister, but toe community where we receive ministry. This emphatically does not mean that toe sermon is the place to turn yourself into a client and your congregation into therapists or that onfessional preaching is a matter of confessing my ennui rather than Christ’s triumph . But we need to find toe ways and toe comers of our church life where we are

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    supported and sustained and know the power of the risen Lord. In my own present pastoral experienee, I have been astounded to discover that a small group 1 reiuetantly agreed to lead has beeome an essential manifestation of the Body of Christ in my own life 1 think we need to be open to that kind of Easter surprise, maybe even expect it, certainly keep an eye open for it. If it is just too hard to find that in your own congregation , sneak over to Saint Anne’s to take the eucharist some morning or catch the choir concert at the church across town. Let clergy groups be part of church for their members or take a Sunday sabbatical and go to Friends Meeting and sit there and don’t say a thing. I think you will discover that Christ is risen indeed.

  • Selling hope short

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    Selling Hope Short

    Hebrews 4:12-16, Mark 10:17-22

    Kristy Färber Grace c©¥enant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, North Carolina

    Imagine for a moment that you were sitting in the crowd that day. Maybe you w ere out to hear the new teacher in town or to see what all the commotion was about. Maybe you were there hoping to hear a word of good news, or you came out that day because you heard about the man who heals, and you were hoping he could do something for your pain. Maybe you were one of Jesus’ closest disciples, ready to travel with him as he makes his way to Jerusalem, which is where our text starts off. Jesus, packed up, walking out of town, and as he starts walking away from the people still crowded around, a man runs up to him, out of breath, hoping to catch him in time. There is a sense of desperation in his voice and in his demeanor. And when he finally catches up with Jesus, he kneels. “Good teacher,” he says, with great respect and a sense of hope, “what must 1 do to inherit eternal life?” This is not someone asking a philosophical question. And he isn’t like one of the Pharisees trying to catch Jesus in a trap. Something is happening in this man that is deep and eager and anxious. Everywhere else in Mark, when someone kneels before Jesus, they do so because they are requesting some sort of physical healing. Except for this man. “¥ou know the commandments – do not murder, steal, commit adulter} ,׳bear false witness….” “Yes, yes, all of this I do….” Not an arrogant statement, but the humble response of a man who, very faithfully, lives his life by God’s law. But then Jesus tells him that the only other thing he can do is give away his money and follow. And with that, the man went away. Imagine what it would have been like to watch him walk away. Imagine what it would have been like if you had been in the crowd watching the man, who almost knocked you over trying to get to Jesus,just. ..walk away. This man is the only person in all of the gospels who had a personal encounter with Jesus and turned away, and he turned away full of sorrow. We are people who want happy endings; more than that we want clear, neat endings. And we often, mistakenly, try to resolve our endings by asking the same question as this wealthy man, “What must I do?” Tony,ayoung man in Durham,North Carolina,was released from prisonjust a few days before his twenty-first birthday after serving five years.1 Before being released, Tony enrolled in a faith based re-entry program. The day he was released, Tony met his team, a group from a local Baptist church who were committed to being a support system for him. The group ate together and spent time together. The team encouraged Tony as he applied for jobs. They helped him navigate his healthcare and finances. The violent crime rate in Durham was high, and Tony knew he needed support to make a change in his life. Be had friends still in prison, and friends who had been buried way too young. Tony wanted a different ending. His team was iucrcdlblc. Over time they grew very close. The members of the Watts Street Baptist Church Reconciliation and Re-entry Faith Team began to know Tony as a friend while seeing

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    more elearly the racial injustice in their city. And Tony found a group of church folks who loved him and supported him just as he was. The team remained in a deep relationship with Tony for nine years, until foe day he was killed, a victim of gun violence. Five hundred people attended his foneral, across race and class, across affiliation and prison time, across religious tradition and academic recognition. And the funeral turned into a three-hour vigil. One of the many people who came up to foe microphone to talk about Tony’s life and legacy was a man well known in Durham’s culture of violence. Before opening his mouth, he scanned the crowd, looking for faces that he knew, and said, “No retribution. If we’re going to honor Tony, we will not shoot each other. We’re not going to do violence in his name.”^ This comment was highlighted after the fact, a sign of a violent death finding meaning . And, of course, it was great.that many resolved not to respond to Tony’s death wifo violence, but even if guns didn’t go off that night, ٢٠even that week, this nod to peace was purchased at an unspeakable, horrific price. For those of us always asking, “What more can I do,” we have to wonder, “Was there any more that Tony could have done?” Our stories, our lives, are not plotted out in advance. They are not neat, and they are not simple. Every local on the Facific Beach Boardwalk in San Diego recognizes foe 70-year-old man who spends his days rollerblading up and down foe boardwalk.3 Always alone, this man skates listening to his music, sometimes laughing, sometimes closing his eyes while taking in foe air. At times he waves to foe people going by, and other times he slows his skating down to a stroll and appears lost in thought. Every day his face radiates joy. He skates all day, and sometimes he skates into foe night. And then he repeats. If you ask foe locals about Slomo, as they call him, some may guess that he was a musician ٢٠an actor ٢٠maybe a veteran. Some believe he’s homeless. Others wonder if he has some type of mental illness. Nobody knows his story, but everyone is willing to give him a high five as he skates by in slow motion. Nobody would guess that twenty years earlier, this man was a ladder climbing, self-involved, cynical, arrogant wealthy neurologist who suddenly realized that he didn’t like his life. In his early 50’s, Dr. John Kitchin decided to reinvent himself, to experience life rather than work himself into oblivion. And he realized he had no desire for anything more than his basic needs and foe chance to skate, which had been foe only spiritual part of his life. So Dr. John Kitchin quit his job and traded in all of his possessions for a studio apartment and a really nice pair of roller blades. For 15 years he has lived his new life, skating on foe boardwalk all day, religiously, ft leaves one to wonder, is this all such a gifted man has left to do? ٢٧٠stories, our lives, are not plotted out in advance. Rarely logical, foey can take us by surprise. When Sam Wells was working as a priest for foe Church of England, he went to see a woman in her 90’s who had not set foot in a church in more than seventy years, and she wanted to ask some questions as she considered returning to the church.* Heading out to meet wifo her. Wells thought to himself, “Ah,this familiar story. A young person grows up in foe church, but when she becomes a young adult, she decides to get outside and smell a different air. It took this woman longer than most, but she figured it was time to give church a second chance and, how happy will she be to learn that foe church has been waiting patiently for her all this time.”

    Lent 2015

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    Once they got through with the pleasantry conversation. Wells got to the point and asked, “What was it that led you away from the church for seventy-five years?” She answered, “It was when my husband, and 1 wanted to get married. We were in love, and the rector wouldn’t marry us.” Wells was intrigued. (It sounded like a romance story with a twist.) “Was there something wrong? Had your husband been married before, ٠٢ were you too young to be married?” “No,” she said calmly, and Wells recognized for tire first time that she seemed to be holding back anger. “The rector looked at my hand. As a young girl, I worked in the mill, and I was in an accident when I was sixteen.” She held up her left hand. “The rector said that since 1 didn’t have a finger to put the wedding ring on, he couldn’t marry us.” Wells was horrified. The color drained from his face. Suddenly her 75 years away from church seemed as if it might not have been long enough. This kind of stuff happens . And it forces us to ask what more we could have done. Our stories, our lives, are not plotted out in advance. They are rarely easy and they can take us by surprise. What happened to the wealthy man who walked away from Jesus? He left in sorrow. He departed, sending himself into exile. What was his ending? Did he eventually return? Or spend the rest of his life in grief? Did he try to earn his way back in God’s grace? The interesting thing about preaching this text to you all is that you are here, at least for today. ¥ ٥٠are in toe crowd right now, still listening for Jesus. At the same time, 1 know that th e re are those of us each Sunday, laying low, wondering if Jesus would ever receive us back if we walked away. We cannot be sure of the motivations of this man in this story. We’ll never know toe depth of his needs, which we can only assume by his urgency as he ran toward Jesus. And we’ll never know toe thoughts in his mind as he walked away, grieving. But we do knocv the character of God. And God doesn’t let people s؛t in sorrow indefinitely. God does not leave people exiled forever. In this series on exile, as we have looked at stories throughout scripture, we have seen that God never leaves ^ o p le abandoned. From Adam and Eve in their shame to Hosea and Gomer in their painful love, from toe woman at toe well, isolated by her own life, to Leah and Rachel, exiled within toeir own family system, God never gives up on people indefinitely. And you cannot tell me that this wealthy man has put himself further than toe reach of God. This man’s story, like so many others, leaves toe conclusion up in the air. We don’t know what happens tomorrow. Each of the stories Ijust shared with you has a different kind of ending. A young man, leaving behind a 1لﺀث of violence, dies tragically from a gunshot wound. A middle-aged doctor reinvents himself, leaving behind one life for a drastically different one. And a woman in her last years of life decides whether to give toe church another chance against all odds. All of our stories have turns. All of our stories, on some days, have no good conclusion. And in all of our stories, we face toe daunting call to follow Jesus. Some days we choose to follow. And some days we walk away sorrowful. “What must I do?” The man in our story asked toe wrong question, just like we often ask, “What should I do?” or “What could we have done?” He did not trust that Jesus was toe hope he was desperate for. He longed for something that Jesus had, but he couldn’t give up toe notion that it was all in his control. That was his sin, trying

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    make it ©n his © .١١٧١That was his si©, believing his fundamental ending was in his ©wn hands © ٢٧endings are n©t in our hands; they are in G©d’s hands. That is what Adam and Eve, Leah and Rachel, ?eter, Mary, Martha, ?aul, Hosea and Gomer, Jonah, the woman at the well, the rieh young ruler, you, and 1 come to ^now. © ٢٧endings are not in our hands; they are in God’s hand. What if you had been in that crowd that day, watehing the person who came to Jesus with sueh urgency walk away full of sorrow? © ٢٧world is filled with.. ·US.. ·trying to write our own endings and failing. We are a people who need strength and power that is not ٢٧٠own. “ ٢٧٠doing it” is not going to eut it. And the only place we can go is to God, who can give us what we can never do for ourselves. Trusting that this is true, the only response 1 can think of is for us to pray. $ ٠let us pray. (The prayer is led by three people, interspersed with the hymn “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me.”)

    God of love, you created time and space and eternity, and your knowledge and wisdom exceed anything we can imagine. And, to be honest, God, we are often a bit jealous of your knowledge. We are prone to the vain venture of trying to be you, and sometimes we wish we knew everything. Still and yet, in this moment of worship, in this moment of reverence of a particular sort, in this moment when we are together before you singing hymns and anthems old and new, hearing ancient texts and fresh truth, and praying honest and hopeful prayers, in this moment of worship, we are glad you are who you are and that we are your children.5 (Sing verse one of “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me.”)

    Godofall broken places, in the vast wonder of your creation, we know—you know -how scarred and broken it is here and there-Yon know the heart of each individual, scarred and broken here and there. You know the good that we have done and shall yet do and the passions within many for just and right causes, scarred and broken here and there. God, we forever try to cast our own endings to our stories, scarred and broken, here and there. Lead us, © God, to gratefully receive your story of life and hope for our lives and for the life of the world, scarred and broken as it is, here and there. (Sing verse two of “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me”)

    God of promise, you know the memory of hope and the hope of memory, the faith of the ages in things not seen, and the loves we have each known, scarred and broken here and there. Help all of us—in spite of ٢٠because of the questions we ask, to experience the love of Christ Jesus, scarred and broken and redeemed giving meaning and hope to us again and again and again here and there in ٢٧٠beginnings and in ٢٧٠endings. We give you thanks. (Sing verse three of “1 Want Jesus to Walk with Me”)

    Amen.

    Lem 2015

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    Notes 1 Samuel Wells and Marcia A. Owen, Living Without Enemies: Being Present in the Midst ofViolence (InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois, 2011). 2 Gretchen E Ziegenhals, The Christian Century, Commentary on 1 Corinthians 9:16-23. 3 Josh Izenberg, “Slomo,” Short documentary from New York Times on April 1,2014. 4 Sam Wells, “What’s Really Rilling the Church,” The Christian Century, July 11,2013. 5 Prayer based on “A Pastoral Prayer for Easter” from James S. Lowry, Prayers for the Lord’s Day: Hopefor the Exiles (Louisville, KY: Geneva Press, 2002), 37-39.

  • Whose Work?: Whose Healing?: Mark 7:31-37

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    Whose Work? Whose Healing?

    Ma٣k7:31-37

    Thomas G. Long Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

    The Text Sermons preached from the Gospel of Mark these days tend to be far too timid. By this, I do not mean that preachers avoid prophetic and justice themes, navigating instead closer to the safe riverbanks of the personal and spiritual-though this is probably true, as well. What I mean is that we preachers often sand away the most radical aspect of Mark’s Gospel, namely that Mark presents Jesus as a divine warrior (I am aware that “warrior” language is out of vogue, but this is right on my point.) doing battle with the powers of death that hold humanity captive and in thrall. Almost unaware of what we are doing, many of US who preach on Mark perform a subtle downshifting from Mark’s vision, namely, what God is doing, performing, and enacting to redeem the world through Jesus, to our own vision of our responsibilities and potential, namely what we are doing (or supposed to be doing) in the world as ethical and righteous folk. In short, in our sermons Mark’s theology frequently gets reduced to our ethics. Ironically, some students of Mark want to argue just the opposite: that Mark’s Gospel is indeed all about our ethics. For them, the starting point is the widely-accepted probability that the original manuscript of Mark ended at Mark 16:8, which means that Mark concludes with a strange non-ending, one that depicts the women at the cemetery on Easter morning fleeing from the tomb in terror, amazement, and silence. If Mark ends that way, then it is clear that Mark’s Gospel, the earliest Gospel, includes no post-resurrection accounts. This odd fact gets treated in turn as prima facie evidence that Mark is not concerned about the theological idea of the resurrection. ؛After all, goes the argument, since Mark omits the post-resurrection narratives, he must want to direct our gaze away from the resurrection itself, with all its fussing about the empty tomb and the character of the risen Christ, and toward the this-earthly Jesus who taught and healed and broke the rules of pious religious people. This Jesus, they say, is a mentor, a sagelike teacher and role model for US as we go about doing our own teaching, healing, enacting justice, and shattering a few pious conventions ourselves. This argument gets further entwined into a larger argument that Mark, the original Gospel, points us toward a Christianity more concerned with faithful living than correct believing, with orthopraxis and not with orthodoxy. Aside from the fact that this view of ourselves as ready followers of Jesus’ wise

    self-congratulatory, it is also untme to the Gospel of Mark. As recent studies of that Gospel have shown, Mark is designed as an exercise in re-reading (or, perhaps truer to its own setting, re-hearing).2 What this means is that Mark is constmcted as an endless loop, one that always sends readers and hearers hurtling out the enigmatic back door and around again to the front door of the Gospel for another go at comprehension . Mark does not expect his readers fully to understand what is happening

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    when they experience the Gospel the first time through. In fact, the disciples, who are stand-ins for the readers of the Gospel, are consistent in their half-awareness and misunderstanding of Jesus. Only when readers and hearers have made it to the end of the story can they return to the beginning and possibly recognize what was hidden from their eyes the first time through. So, when the white-robed figure outside the empty tomb tells the women, “Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you” (Mark 16:7), everyone-James, John, Peter, and the readers and hearers-everyone is sent back to Galilee, back to the beginning of Mark, back to square one. Now that you’ve been to the cross, now that you’ve seen the empty tomb, and now that you’ve heard the declaration, “He has been raised!”, now go back and re-visit the whole Gospel. This time through, you will see it with new eyes. This time it is the risen one who heals the leper, casts out the demon, and tells the parable of the seeds. Now it is the eschatological and risen Christ who tells the dead little girl to “be raised” and who calls Peter “Satan,” not because he muffs some fine point about Jesus’ mission, but because, we now see, he is on the wrong side of the apocalyptic battle between God and the powers of death that is raging all around him. Understood this way, far from any notion that Mark is disinterested in the resurrection , it can now be seen that the resurrection and the power of the risen Christ are indeed his main interests. Far from the idea that there are no post-resurrection appearances in Mark, it is now clear that every single story in Mark’s Gospel is a post-resurrection appearance. What God was doing on the vast cosmic level through the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, namely defeating the old serpent of evil and death, we can now see God was also doing on the local level as Jesus proclaimed the gospel, rebuked the sea, cleansed the leper, and raised the little girl. This brings US to the following story in Mark, one that appears in the lectionary in the long march through Markan lections in the Sundays post-Pentecost:

    Mark 7:31-37 31Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. 33 He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” 35And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. 3٥Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. 3؟They were astounded beyond measure, saying, “He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”

    A domesticated view of Mark’s Gospel will pound down this incident into a morality play. It becomes an example story of how the sage Jesus handles an ethical dilemma that people in all societies face every day, namely, how to respond to the presence of a person with a disability, as represented by the man who was deaf and mute. In contrast to the way this unfortunate man’s own society treated him, pushing him to the margins, Jesus separates the man from that environment in order to focus

    Journal jor Preachers

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    his full attention upon him and to provide for him compassionate healing. A sermon on this text can spend some time at the beginning speaking with insight and conviction about the barriers our society constmcts for people with disabilities and then issue a call for our own compassion and redress, modeled after Jesus’ own action. To approach the sermon this way might make for a good sermon, but, for all the attention to justice issues, still a timid sermon, and not one faithful to the Markan text. In Mark, the man who is deaf and mute is not a symbol for those marginalized by society. He is instead a symbol of every human being when humanity is seen from an apocalyptic perspective. What he cannot hear and what he, therefore, cannot speak, is the gospel, and the reason he cannot hear and speak the gospel is not that he is blocked by some mere social barrier that needs dismantling. That may well be a good goal, but it will come way down the road. What he needs now is not bland chiding about inclusivity; what he needs is an exorcism. He needs to be liberated from the power of death. A domesticated reading of this text washes out all the strange bits-the spitting, the tongue touching, the placing of fingers in ears, and the command “Ephphatha” shouted into thechaos-assedimentleftoverfrom the obsolete first-centutymythological cosmos. But from a Markan point of view, these strange elements are at the heart of the story. They are signs that Jesus is not just doing a good deed for the man but instead making apocalyptic warfare on the reign of death that holds sway over him and over US all. For Mark, all humanity is caught up in something like the “Stockholm Syndrome,” named after the hostages in a Stockholm bank robbery who, after their release, defended their captors, identified with them, and showed affection for them. We human beings, in Mark’s view, are not simply captive to sin and death but enthralled by our captors, ready to identify with them and to defend them. Therefore, any notion that we can be made whole through education or self-enlightenment is hopeless. The powers that hold US under their sway must be defeated. Thus, preaching Mark in our culture is, as they say, a tough putt. How to make sense in a secularized, individualistic, optimistic culture of the reality that we are actually prisoners of war, utterly in need of God’s liberating force in Christ? I confess that the task seems immensely daunting, but I must also confess that it also seems urgently necessary. The sermon below is my stammering attempt to preach a Markan text faithful to this apocalyptic perspective. The fact that the text appears in the lectionary in 2015 on Labor Day weekend seems to me to offer an additional possibility: namely the prospect of making it clear that in this story it is God’s labor that takes the fore, not ours.

    The Sermon Forty years ago, what has turned out to be one of the most celebrated jazz recordings of all time was made. Involving just two musicians, the incomparable Duke Ellington on piano and the virtuoso Ray Brown on the upright bass, the original vinyl disc has become a rare and prized collector’s item for jazz enthusiasts. The reason for this is not simply the excellence of the musicians and the sublime music, impressive as those are, but the unusual way the album was recorded. The studio was set up like a living room to encourage an informal, impromptu mood. Brown stood with his bass next to Ellington’s piano, and the microphones were placed close to the musicians, in fact very close, so close that if you listen carefully you can hear…well, everything.

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    As one jazz fan put it, “Ray Brown is right there across the living room fighting with the bass to get out every note. You hear grunts and fret board buzz. You can hear Duke moving around in his chair and even breathing.”3 In other words, what makes this recording remarkable is not only that you hear the music but also that you hear the music being made. In an interesting way, so it is with the Gospel of Mark. It is as if the writer of Mark is recording the music of the gospel as performed by Jesus, and he puts the microphones close to the action, perhaps too close for some dainty tastes. If you listen carefully you can hear…well, In Mark, we don’t get a tidy Jesus. We get a sweaty, embodied, guttural Jesus. We hear the brute physicality of the gospel being performed. We hear him groan and grunt as he works. When he confronts his opponents, we don’t merely read his words ؛we hear the anger rise in his throat. He doesn’t just dialog with the Pharisees ؛he sighs deeply as he speaks. When he prays at Gethsemane, beneath the prayer we can hear the unmistakable rustling of distress and agitation, and on the cross Jesus does not go quietly, but with a loud cry and a violent expelling of breath. In Mark,wedon’tjust hear the gospel ؛we hear the gospel being made. The reason for this, I think, is that Mark does not think of Jesus as a debonair sage, rolling around the hills of Galilee uttering witticisms and sweet spiritual truths. In Mark, Jesus does not beckon US to better living through inclusivity, niceness, commitment to diversity, or any of the other virtues we self-righteously believe we already possess. He comes instead to do battle with those forces of death that still hold US in thrall, still hold US helplessly and hopelessly captive.In Mark,Jesus has cometo do combat,combatwith the evil that tyrannizes the whole creation, battle with the old snake that has coiled itself around humanity. The Jesus of Mark doesn’t come to give US wise advice for happiness, as if we could and would follow wise advice if it were only offered to US ؛ he comes as a liberator to storm the prison walls of hell, to break US loose from the shackles that bind US, and to set US free. It would be fair to say, I think, that almost every story in the Gospel of Mark is both an exorcism story and a resurrection story. Even when Jesus is teaching and healing and feeding and telling parables, he is taking on the demonic forces, wrestling them to the ground, casting them out of creation. This is hard, sweaty work, and in Mark’s Gospel we not only hear the gospel, we hear the grunts and groans of Jesus making the gospel. Here’s a case in point: when Jesus and the disciples are crossing the Sea of Galilee and a violent storm whips up threatening to swamp the boat, Jesus doesn’t merely “still the storm,” as we sometimes describe it. This is not a Weather Channel special ؛ this is not merely a meteorological disturbance ؛this is a theological disturbance. This storm is the unruly, random, and malicious chaos in creation whipped to an evil fury. So, Jesus screams into the howling winds, rebuking it-that’s the word Mark uses-rebuking it, “Shalom!” In other words he is not calming the storm ؛he’s casting the demonic out of it-to be literal, he is denouncing the hell out of it. Or again, when Peter misunderstands what Jesus has to say about the cross, Jesus does not gently touch his cheek and say, “Well, Peter, the cross is hard to understand, I know. But you will.. .maybe another year of seminary, and you’ll get it.” No, Jesus sees where Peter’s resistance is coming from, sees the old snake coiled around him, and once again we can hear the sound of rebuke-that word again, rebuke—rising in

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    Jesus’ throat, “You get out of my way, Satan. You’re not on God’s side here.” You can hear the sound of gospel being made here. Jesus is about out there doing God’s work, breaking the power of death and liberating creation, and this is very hard work. We can hear Jesus grunt and groan as he strains to break loose the stubbornly rusted bolt of a captive creation. Sometimes in Mark the work almost seems too much, even for Jesus. Mark says he went to Nazareth and ran into a wall of hostility and unbelief, and Mark goes on to say, “He could do no deed of power there.” At least for that day, the mst was too thick, the bolt too clenched, and Jesus planted his legs, put his back into it, groaned in exertion, but the bolt would not give. Which brings US to the story of the healing of the deaf man with a speech impediment . Now, one way for US to receive this story is as a typical story of healing. We have a man who has adisability; Jesus heals the disability; the community is overjoyed by this, a joy that exceeds all bounds. To receive the story this way would allow US to feel sorry for the man (he has a disability), to feel good for the man (he gets healed), to feel joy over Jesus’ deep compassion, and maybe even to be inspired to do works of compassion ourselves. If that were the way we received this story, it wouldn’t be terrible-but it wouldn’t be Mark. Because in Mark the stakes are higher. In Mark, this man does not have a disability that sets him apart from the rest of us who don’t happen to have that disability. In Mark, this man is deaf in the same way that all of US are deaf. He doesn’t have a “disability”; he has the human condition . Because, theologically, what he can’t hear is not the sound of his wife’s voice or his children playing or the psalms being chanted in the synagogue. Theologically, what he cannot hear is the one thing that Mark wants US all to hear from the mouth of Jesus: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:14). He can’t hear the gospel, and because he can’t hear the gospel, he can’t speak the gospel. He’s deaf and mute in the ways we are all deaf and mute. Take me, for example. I know what the gospel has to say about consumerism. I know that the gospel tells us that consumerism is not just about shopping or possessions, but that it is idolatry, a power that holds US in its thrall and grip, and defeats US with lies about meaning and hope and joy. I know what the gospel says about consumerism. But when I am in Best Buy, there is a moment when that 84-inch, ultra high-def TV speaks to my heart, saying, “I believe I can give you some joy and make your life full.” I know what the gospel says about consumerism-I just can’t hear it. I also know what the gospel says about trouble. It says, when the winds are strong and the waves are high, fear not. The embodied, incarnate shalom of God is right here with us. I know what the gospel says about trouble. But when I see my neighbors upside down in their mortgages and losing their houses, when I worry that the economy will collapse again and even more painfully, when I see my beloved church being battered apart by the winds of suspicion and the waves of hate, something wells up in me that cries out, “Lord don’t you care that we are perishing?” I know what the gospel says about trouble. I just can’t hear it. And I know what the gospel says about hope. I know that Jesus stood outside the tomb, having conquered sin and death and said, “Do not be afraid.” But when I look into the face of my aging father, or I look into the mirror, or I think about my wife and children and grandchildren, I know that all of my loving relationships are

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    so vulnerable, something deep inside me trembles, and I am afraid. I know what the gospel says about hope. I just can’t hear it. And I also know what it would take for me to hear the gospel. I know what it would take…; it would take a miracle. And so, when they brought to Jesus the man who couldn’t hear the gospel, Jesus sighed inside. This was hard work. Jesus did not touch him gently. He thrust his fingers into his ears, spat, touched his tongue, and shouted into the raging chaos, “Ephphatha!”—Be opened!” It would take a miracle, a mighty act of God, for me to hear the gospel, for any of US to hear the gospel. That is what it would take, and this is what we get. For many people, perhaps the least favorite hymn in the book is c. Austin Miles’ nineteenth-century pious classic “In the Garden.” Personally, I share their antipathy. This hymn has saccharine, sentimental lyrics and is usually sung to a banal la-la-la tune. Other than that it’s all right, I suppose. I have sung it many times, of course, but I’ve just never been able to hear much gospel in it. This is partly because of liturgical taste and partly because my ears are stopped up. I realized the stopped up part when I read what liturgical scholar Tex Sample wrote about it:

    I remember once in class I was making fon of the song “In the Garden.” Not only did I parody its lyrics as hopelessly individualistic, privatistic, and full of escapist spirituality, but I launched into singing it in a nasal voice with affront forethought. I was on a roll until after the class when a thirty-five-year-old woman approached me and told this story: “Tex, my father started screwing me when I was eleven and he kept it up until I was sixteen and found the strength somehow to stop it. After every one of those ordeals I would go outside and sing that song to myself: I go to the garden alone while the dew is still on the roses, and he walks with me and talks with me and he tells me that I am his own. Without that song I don’t know how I could have survived. Tex, don’t you ever ever make fun of that song in my presence again.”.

    “I come to the garden alone…and the voice I hear falling on my ear…tells me I am His own.” How is it possible that a girl being molested by her father could hear the gospel that she belongs body and soul to Jesus Christ her Lord and that she is treasured by God? It would take a miracle. Holding on to faith and hope in this kind of world is hard work. But the one who is working hardest of all is the risen Christ, who stands among US every day and shouts into the chaos, “Be openedl’fopening our ears so that we can hear the gospel and touching our tongues so that we can speak that truth.

    Notes 1. See, for example, Robin R. Meyers, Saving Jesusfrom the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus (New York: Ha^er Collins, 2009), 85. 2. One of the best and clearest presentations of the “re-reading” view of Mark is Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, “Echoes and Foreshadowings in Mark 4-8 : Reading and Rereading,” Journal ofBiblical Literature , 112/2 (Summer, 1993), 211-230. 3. See Thomas G. Long, “Living by the Word,” The Christian Century, 126/17 (August 25/2009), 21. 4. Tex Sample, Ministry in an Oral Culture (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994), 78-79.

  • Preaching resurrection

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    Preaching Resurrection

    Thomas w. Currie Union ?resbyterian Seminary, Charlotte Campus, Charlotte, North Carolina

    Although the chureh is at the present time hardly to be distinguished from a dead or at best a sick man, there is no reason for despair, for the Lord raises up his own suddenly, as he waked the dead from the grave. This we must clearly remember, lest, when the church fails to shine forth, we conclude too quickly that her light has died utterly away. But the church in the world is so preserved that she rises suddenly from the dead. Her very preservation through the days is due to a succession of such miracles. Let us cling to the remembrance that she is not without her resurrection, ٢ ٠ rather, not without her many resurrections. (John tlvin,Commentary on Micah 4:6, as cited by Karl Barth in his essay, “The Need and Promise of Christian Preaching”1)

    As has often been noted, there is no account in the New Testament of Jesus’ resurrection. What we have are stories of the risen Lord appearing to his disciples. There is simply no telling the story of’Laster apart from the community of faith thaf the risen Lord engenders. Whether it is the terrified women fleeing the empty tomb or the despairing disciples encountering a stranger on the road to Emmaus ٢ ٠a painful conversation about feeding Jesus’ sheep, the Easter story astonishes in no small part because it has so little to do with Jesus alone and so much to do with those whom the risen Lord insists on pulling into this mysterious event. This fact ought to serve as a clue for the way we think about Easter and proclaim its message today. As the Calvin quote implies, whatever else we are as the church, we are a “resurrection people,” a community whose dying and rising, as made clear in baptism, constitutes our primary identity. The church lives in and from this dying and rising, the scariness of which the women in Mark’s Gospel rightly recognize and the joy of which pervades even the disciples’ disbelief (cf. Lk.24:41). Yet receiving and entering into the death and resurrection ofJesus is about more than terror and joy. What is created in this event is a community that is sensing for the first time its liberation from the hard labor ofsaving its own life. Self-preservation is the currency in which the wages of sin are paid. In being raised from the dead, the risen Lord radically deflates that currency. For, if death does not have the last word, what are we to do with our fear of death, with all our strategies of self-preservation, all our contrivances for avoiding foe inevitable, all our witting and unwitting tributes to this final tyrant? “He is risen!” can only mean that Jesus’ words to be not anxious, far from being at foe periphery are, rather, at foe core ofhis gospel message. Which oddly enough makes death rather useful. Being raised from foe dead is foe way God shapes a people, as Israel learned in foe Wilderness, as foe church has had to discover again and again. This way is so hard and so counter to our own selfpreserving inclinations that foe onty way we can see this miracle is, as Paul noted, through another, through foe gift of being baptized into Christ’s death, indeed, of being buried and raised wifo him (Rom. 6:3,4). What saves these words from being merely pious rhetoric is Paul’s insistence that there is no resurrection that is not a

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    resurrection from the dead. The church has always wanted something less miraculous. We would like a resurrection that would be more like Cf-improvement, a resurcection that would not be so messy, so intrusive, so threatening. For that matter we would like a church that did not have to depend upon a accession of miracles, whether manna in the Wilderness or bread and wine at the table, for its own life. Yet the church’s life, as Calvin makes clear, is nothing ifit is not a miracle, as miraculous in its own way as the resurrection itself. Andjust as the resurrection was a resurrection from the dead, so the miracie of the church involves a lot of dying. Indeed, dying, as a witness to the Easter victory, is the service that death is allowed to render under the reign ofthe risen Eord. We come to see the gift of Easter injust this way, a gift that cannot be received in any cheaper manner. Death, as George Herbert knew, is the dust God blows into our eyes whose powder enables us to see.* There are some things that only death can teach us. It is that strange “learning experience” without which we cannot discern the dimensions ofthe risen Lord’s sovereignty. To be sure, the gospel never proclaims the virtues ofdying, the blessings of death. The kind of dying that is rendered serviceable here is not a despairing act of defiance , a self-chosen martyrdom that seeks in the end to have its own way. A suicidal church, even a noble and generous one, is only a witness to itself, not to the risen Lord. Resignation is not faithfolness anymore than despair is hope. No, death remains toe “last enemy” and an enemy against which we are powerless, butjust so it is an enemy which has something to teach us, and in light of Jesus Christ’s victory over death, it is not to be feared. Indeed, one can properly view the true threat and true mystery of death only in light of Jesus’ victory on the cross.That is why, though Faul does not flinch in talking about death and even more about the resurrection from the dead, he can finally do so only by singing: “Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, 0 death, is your victory? Where, 0 death, is your sting?” (I Cor. 15:54, 55). ?reaching resurrection cannot be undertaken then apart from the cross, apart from the dirty, ugly fact of Jesus’ death. That is where the victory is won. On the cross. Easter is merely (!) the revelation ofthe Victor. The risen Lord identifies himself to his disciples by his wounds. They se^e to indicate that it is toe Crucified who has won this victory. Death, for all its power, has no power over him. So what does this mean for our preaching, our life together as those who have been pulled into this story by this same risen Lord? The Easter texts almost without exception indicate that the risen Lord found the disciples in a state of fear and anxiety. In any case, the women in Mark’s Gospel were terrified at toe message emanating from the empty tomb. The disciples on the road to Emmaus were in despair before having their hearts singed by the one who fed them with word and sacrament. The women in M ^hew ’s Gospel fled from the tomb with “fear and great joy,” an oxymoronic mixture of emotions that the Easter message continues to evoke. And in toe Fourth Gospel, Mary Magdalene, Thomas, and Feter all find the risen Lord a difficult figure at best, whose overcoming of their fear, resentment, and shame astonishes, even as they find themselves drawn into a more mysterious world of witness and service. “Fear ”آ سmay be the gospel’s most persistent message from beginning to end, but it is never an easy message to hear, and it is an even more difficult message to speak. The words are all too susceptible to bromidic reduction. The fears of these

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    disciples were not nothing. A triumphant crowd did not go to the empty tomb, but a few apprehensi¥e women, and they were charged wife what must have seemed an impossible message from an unbelievable source. The pilgrims to Emmaus had witnessed the recent events in Jerusalem and saw all too clearly fee power of death’s own certainties. They had reason to despair. Mary, as fee gospel song only too eagerly c^ebrates, was in fee garden alone, and Thomas’ doubts grew out ofhis own separation from the others. Fears grow in fee night. Fears grow in isolation. Fears grow in fee face of death, whose power to render us ultimately lonely is fearful indeed. The “Fear not” of fee Easter message is not a declaration that there is no reason to fear or that our fears are illusions which we can ignore or wish away. It is not even a message that tells us that death has no ^w eL ·^,these £ ﻣﺲlories take the disciples’ fears very seriously. Their fears werc rooted in fee acknowledged power of death to render us all isolated and alone. That is fee fearful world in which death seems to role. The reason we are told to “Fear not” is not that there is no reason to fear, but that amidst our fears, amidst our running away in terror, our walking in discouragement and isolation, there is one who has broken through the imprisoning bonds of death, one whose fellowship has overcome that deep loneliness that death intends for all of human life, one whose risen life is always a life together. In fee Christian Year, it is Fentecost that is often called the “birthday of fee church,” but in troth, it is fee risen Lord who in his post-resurrection appearances mysteriously gathers the isolated and afraid and draws them into his fellowship and sends them into his service. The roots of the church are to be found here in the words “He is risen. He is risen indeed!” In fee largely affluent West, we find ourselves living in a strangely lonely culture, a world in which death seems to make more sense than rcrorrection from fee dead, a world where we have gotten used to our loneliness and have resigned ourselves to a general sense of hopelessness. It is not that hard.This way is broad, not nareow. There are comforts. Cur anger and resentments can be given full expression in fee realm of death in the numerous ways we contrive to separate ourselves from each other. In a lonely world, it somehow makes sense to do that, ^curing ourselves with the comforting truths we allow to be told to us by those wife whom we already agree. So we divide and grow smaller and more righteous, oblivious to fee gift of our life together made possible in the life of fee risen Lord. Resigned to fee realm of death, we not only lose hope and joy, but worse, we miss fee gift of Easter’s bracing reality and find ourselves falling for fee illusions that death is more than happy to purvey, fee chief of which is that we need not bother ourselves wife it, need not consider it, or even speak of it. So does our fear of death render us silent and teaches us to think about pleasanter matters. Modernity is in many ways founded on this denial of death. Strange that Easter should be so impertinent in this matter, blurting out its news of fee crucified Lord—“crucified, dead, and buried” as fee creed so unhesitatingly puts it—who is risen, who in being raised from fee dead, displaces death, making death serve him in the true reality of his gracious role. This world is suspicious, and rightly so, of religious or political exhortations to a hope that is not rooted in this resurrection from fee dead. Such exhortations have grown tired.That is why on Eater es^ci^ly,the churc^therthan growing anxious about its future or pretending to some strategy or program or therapy that will provide content to its hope, does better to celebrate the resurrection life that the risen Lord has drawn us into through fee eschatological community he has created. The church

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    is its^f constitutive of the gospel’s story. It is not the whole story by any means, nor is it toe center of the story. But toe story of toe risen Lord cannot be told without it, and to a culture eager to celebrate its own religious virtuosity as well as its private resentments, the church can rightly be seen as the way the gospel cuts most incisively into our world today. It is toe church that is the risen Lord’s surprising Easter gift to us, the strange way he insists on giving himself to our world, seeding hope not through disembodied exhortations or programs of well-endowed foundations, but through his own hfe-engendered communities of faith whose witness to him breathes resurrection hope into this world, “?racticing resurrection”^ means, surprisingly then, to be the church and to be happily so, that is, to be that joyful people who, trembling in toe face of this risen Lord, bear witness to his presence in the world and celebrate that presence through their own life together. The primary calling of the church is simply to be a sign of this resurrection life, to be a witness against death and its many surrogates in our world. Here what is appropriate is joy. Here what it means to preach the resurrection is to sing. Here what Easter has to give us is a neighborhood ofhope, a communion of the saints. There is a kind of love for the church that is idolatrous, whether it be clothed in the prayers of piety or robed in the vestment of eccl^astical authority. But there is also a kind of silly arrogance that despises toe church and seeks a faith uncluttered with in^itutional baggage or ecclesial commitments, ft is true that the Holy Spirit gives no guarantee of denominational stability or even future witness. As Calvin might remind us, the church has known and continues to know many resurrections, and therefore many deaths. But the stories that rehearse the resurrection a^arances of Jesus do not direct us to an un-ecclesial life. Rather they tell us of Jesus’ gathering his own, breathing his Spirit upon them, feeding them with word and ^crament, and sending them into his world “to make disciples,” that is, to bear witness to the living Lord whose life is un-lonely and whose gospel directs us to toe community he calls into being and sends into his service. That community is not to be despised anymore than it is to be worshipped, ft is toe gift of his own body. And as that gift, it can only be received in gratitude and in love, as constitutive of toe gospel itself, the ^oclamation of which cannot be undertaken without it.

    Notes lKarlBarth,“The Need andPromiseofChristian Prea.chingfTheWordofGodandtheWordofMan,trms. Douglas Horton (?ilgrim ?ress, 1928), 134-135, eiting John Caftin’s Commentary on Micah 4:6. 2 George Herbert’s, “Ungratefulness,” George Herbert: The Complet English Poems (London: ?enguin Books, 2004), 75, in whieh praising God for redeeming us from the grave, the poet notes that the gift of God’s triune life is hidden from us “till death blow the dust into our eyes: for by that powder you will make us see.” 3 Wendell Berr/s,“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (Berkeley California: Counterpoint Fress, 1999), 89.

  • A parable universe

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    A Parable Universe

    Anna Carter Florence

    Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

    Last year during Lent, I started thinking in parables. I don’t mean Jesus’ parables in seripture, which ! love, by the way. I mean the parables that just hit me when 1 wasn’t looking for them and certainly wasn’t expecting them. I guess that’s appropriate, since the word parable literally means “thrown alongside.” As in ,boom: now you don’t see it,now you do. One minute you’re humming along, everything’s normal, and then, without warning, you just collide with some flash of insight, and you know for sure that the kingdom of God has come near and you just saw a piece of it. You don’t know why. You don’t know how. You’re just glad you happened to be paying attention in the moment it broke. Here are some that came to me last spring as Lent slowly unfurled its way toward Easter. (My friend gave me permission to share them with you.)

    The kingdom of God . . . is like a group of nurses and orderlies who sing spirituals to the woman who is being transported back to her room in the middle of the night after brain surgery and then who stay by her bed until she falls back to sleep, quietly singing, “1 give myself away… .1 give myself away, so you can use me.. .The next day, they come back to her room, and they teach her the song so she can sing it, too, which she does.

    The kingdom ofGod …is like meeting a sassy young saleswoman at the wig shop in Toco Hills, who tenderly guides your friend to a private comer, opens up the boxes, and helps her pick out her first wig for when her hair begins to fall out from the chemo and radiation —and you can’t believe it, because the wig’s name is “Center Stage” by Raquel Welch—and when you have finished laughing, you see that this young saleswoman has a ministry: to transform that shop into a holy ground of hope.

    The kingdom ofGod …is like a husband who organizes a quiet little ceremony three weeks after foe surgery, so they can make a ritual of the moment when he puts foe ring back on her finger after it was taken off in foe hospital-the only time it has left her finger in 30 years. And so foe friends gather, and a passel of clergy stand round, and foe couple sits down on foe couch and takes hands and looks into one another’s eyes saying, “I take you, yet again, to be my spouse, and I promise to love you and support you no matter what comes to you until death do us part,”-and they smile, and foe friends cry, and foe dog barks, and then they all go to foe kitchen for a simple feast

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    of $oup and bread and wine, because it is true: the kingdom of God has come near, and people who sat in the darkness of a diagnosis have seen a great light.

    Those were some of the parables that hew up to me last spring. Like I said, !wasn’t expecting them. But it got me thinking. It made me wonder if maybe living in a parallel universe might be the perfect environment for a parable universe. Because that’s how it felt with my friend, like we’d been plunged into this free fall of space with no gravity, very few tethers, and way too many asteroids streaking around: a parallel universe. In other words, your average day as a preacher. Where any second, you and the ones in your orbit might be broken or obliterated from falling debris, or at least, that’s how it feels, and you are required to watch this brokenness happen and then say profound things about it. Aparable universe. What would it be like, 1 wondered, if my students and ! could live in a place like that for a semester? What if we simply assumed that parables were all around us, and our job was to walk around looking for them? And since parables are really sermons in miniature, what would happen , 1 wondered, if I asked my students to go somewhere unexpected, every week, and to come back with a parable they had witnessed? So that’s what we did. We got out from behind our desks and our i?hones and our comfortable campus and went into the path of freefalling asteroids, where the wild things are, and the parables ،؟re waiting to be noticed, ?erhaps because it was Lent, it seemed to us that the parables were in bloom everywhere we looked, as if God were saying to us, “Keep alert: my way of reversal is on the move! It’s coming!” We started gathering them, and before you knew it, the gathering became a habit, and the habit led to sermons, and our parable universe, which was only supposed to be a classroom exercise, turned into a way of living and speaking, all the way to Baster. It made a difference in our classroom, which is why I am sharing this story with you. I wonder if it might make a difference for you, too, in your preaching this Lent. What if you invited your congregation to join you in living in a parable universe? What if you all agreed to go out into the world and look for the parables that are waiting to be noticed and blooming everywhere? Would it deepen your Lenten journey to practice this way of God’s reversal in your everyday living and speaking? I noticed that for my students, living in a parable universe helped them change the subject from themselves to God, who is, after all, the subject of all our preaching. They began the semester with the same expectations students have every year, asking, “What is this secret knowledge that you, the teacher, will surely be disclosing to me about how one becomes a preacher of power and might?” And I said the same thing I say every year, “There is no secret knowledge; a preacher is just a person who pays attention to the realm of God breaking in everywhere, and then who looks for words to describe it!” But I also added a layer. This spring, I told them, you are going to learn to see the world in parables, which you already do: The kingdom ofGod .. .is like a sower who went out

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    to sow. And, I told them, you are going to learn to speak, perhaps, in some quirky, sassy parables: The kingdom of God . . .is like a sassy saleswoman in a wig shop in Toco Hills. And most important, I said, you are going to let the biblieal text be your nearest and dearest partner in showing you how to do these things, because it does; it always does.

    2. As a case in point, let us take a text from Matthew 4:12-25. 1 am glad to tell you, it includes Jesus’ first sermon. And it’s a simple one: “Repent, for toe kingdom ofGod has come near!” Okay, that’s it! ?retty typical for ة first sermon, in my experience, in that toe preacher has a lot of fervor and passion , but not a lot of illustrative substance, and, as new preachers always do, he has even modeled himself after his preaching mentor—in this case, John toe Baptizer. Jesus’ first sermon is classic John toe Baptizer stuff, but it’s not his own yet. This is totally normal; this is a stage new preachers have to pass through, and 1 notice Matthew’s discretion in refraining from telling us how Jesus’ first sermon was received. In a few verses, there will be crowds following him, gathering for Jesus as there were for John, but n o t yet, not here. There is something even Jesus has to learn, which is that in order to be a preacher, you have to see the world around you and speak to toe people who are in that world, in their language. You have to see where they are sitting in deep darkness. Jesus goes for a walk by toe sea. I’ve always found it interesting and instructive that when Jesus gets ready to go out in toe world to do what God has sent him to do, he doesn’t stay at home among toe people and professionals he knows. Csusi^arpenterfromNazareth. Think how easy it would have been to go to toe Nazarene Carpenter’s Guild and say, “Guys; 1 need some disciples. Follow me, guys, and I will give you a hammer and nails and make you build the house of God’s kingdom, which has come near!” That was his language. Those were his images. But maybe, just maybe, you notice the kingdom of God best when you leave your own backyard and your own town for a time, which is why we send toe youth group on mission trips and toe children to summer camp, and why toe adults sometimes need to go to toe other side of town to see more clearly what is right before them. So Jesus leaves Nazareth, his hometown, and makes his way to toe big city, to Capernaum, in Galilee by toe sea. It must have been like moving to toe big city, wito all toe new apartment stuff that comes when you leave home for toe first time. And instead of hanging out on carpenter row in Capernaum, which might have been the logical thing to do, Jesus just begins to walk toe streets; and because this is a fishing town, to walk down by toe water, because that is where life happens in a fishing town. And he sees, as we walks, how a sea town functions. To see toe fishermen, casting and mending their nets. To listen to toe cries of toe sea birds and toe slap slap of toe oars against toe boat, and toe chatter of bartering for your supper at toe end of toe day, when toe fish have been caught and it’s time to sell. All new sounds for him. And I wonder if it gave him some new parables.

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    The kingdom of God … is like a fisherman who sits all night in the boat with his brother, on the hope that a fish will rise.

    Or this: The kingdom of God …is like a fisherman who sits all day on the beaeh with his brother, mending a net, because before you can cast it, you have to mend it, you have to take care of what is tom.

    Or this: The kingdom of God . . . is like a fisherman who casts his nets all day on one side of the boat and catches nothing, and then as he’s finally heading home, out of the blue, making one last tired cast, he suddenly pulls up a net full offish, one hundred and fifty-three of them, and though there are so many, the net isn’t tom at all.

    Or this one: The kingdom of God . . . is like a boat on the Sea of Galilee during a storm, when the wind blows and the waves toss, and the fishermen begin to pray in the words of 107th ?salm: “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; they have seen the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.”

    Or this: The kingdom of God …is like a fisherman selling his catch at the end of the day, hoping he’s going to get enough to keep his own family in oil and flour, yet always saving the last two fish for the widow who waits for him at the back of the line, because that is what we do: we care for the least of these, even when we are at our least.

    I think those are the kinds of parables that may have come to Jesus as he walked along the Sea of Galilee. Because the next thing you know, he is speaking to ?eter and Andrew in their own language. And you know what he says, “Follow me, and 1 will make you fish for people.” 1 have to be careful with my students on this one. “Fishing for people” is what many of them think preaching is; it’s what they signed up for. And the problem is they’re mostly city kids, and their images offishing are largely what you find on the internet if you google “images of fishing”: people on boats holding up enormous fish they’ve just caught, as they grin for the camera. Big fishcaughtwithbighooks. Crook your finger and put it in your cheek. Thatis not an awesome metaphor for preaching or for the Christian life, in my view: “follow me, and I’ll show you how to hook all the new members you want! I will show you how to figure out what the youth group is biting on! How to bait your education programs so you can reel in new young families, and how to position your nets for the really big fish who will look good on your wall!” See what I mean? Not so appetizing or even appropriate, especially for the fish. Every metaphor has its limits – an “is” and an “is not” – and for good reason, because metaphors are supposed to spark your imagination, not hook and sink you fast. And if you don’t know much about fishing, if all you think it’s about is a deep sea charter boat and taxidermy displays, you’re going to get to the limits of this metaphor much sooner.

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    But n©tice, Jesus isn’t speaking to eity kids from Atlanta, Ne’s talking to fisherman. And he has sat and watehed where they sit, in their darkness. And no one sits in darkness like a fisherman. No one waits like a fisherman, for the light to ehange, ؛ ٢٠ the fide to change; ؛ ٢٠ the moment when the dawn comes, which is, as the writer Norman Maclean says, the moment when everything is luminous and nothing is clear. Jesus is talking to fishermen, and he’s been paying attention. And so he speaks in their metaphors. Ne lets them know he has seen who they are and what they do and how they live and move and have their being. And so his second sermon is much different than his first. Instead ٠؛repent, he says/،>//،?w. Instead “ ٠؛the kingdom ٠؛God has come near,” he shows them how it has come near and that they’ve been seeing pieces ٠؛it. And that they have the language to do exactly what he is doing: to speak ٠؛ how we fish ؛ ٢٠ people. “I wifi make you do,” Jesus says, “what you already know how to do, and I will transform your verbs ؛ ٢٠ the kingdom of God.” A parable universe. I wonder if it was inevitable, what followed, that Jesus would speak to everyone as the scripture says, in parables. I wonder if getting out from behind your desk and your i?hone and your doctrine and your carpenters’ guild, leaving your nets and looking ؛ ٢٠ asteroids, simply leads to that universe. Maybe it does. Because everything Jesus says from then on has the ring of a man who is paying very close attention. Ne sees those holy collisions everywhere. And he helps us see them. Imagine this. An afternoon when Jesus is hanging out with farmers, listening to them talk about the weather ٢٠the crops ٢٠the new ploughs ٢٠their bizarre neighbor who never sows his seed properly, but just throws it every which way, so ٠؛course he loses most ٠؛it to the birds or the thorns ٢٠the hard ground, ^ a t a ه؛1ﻢﻫ؛ farmer he is. And Jesus pipes up, “You know, the kingdom of God is like that: a sower who went out to sow. And some ٠؛ his seed fell on the path, and some ٠؛it fell among thorns, and some ٠؛it was scorched by the sun, but some of it fell into good soil, and it grew bigger than anyone expected: a hundredfold. If you’ve got ears to hear that one, listen

    ©٢ another afternoon, talking to shepherds, hearing them complain about the new fellow, rather dim, embarrassingly tender-hearted, who recently committed the cardinal sin ٠؛all shepherds, which is to leave the fiock untended while he went looking for one stray lamb; can you believe the idiocy? I don’t know how his parents can even walk into the ١ ^^ ٥١ .And Jesus chiming in, “But there’s something beautiful in that, guys. The kingdom ٠؛good sense may be the one where you leave the few to protect the most. But the kingdom of God is like a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to search ؛ ٢٠ one that’s lost, and when he finds it, he doesn’t apologize; he rejoices! If you have ears to hear, ears that aren’t full of wool that is, hear!” Or some night at dinner, when his elegant host begins gossiping about another ?harisee in town, a man who was foolish enough to spoil his younger son and then take him back after he’d dishonored the family, which anyone could have predicted, given the fact that the boy had never been disciplined a day in his life; ofcourse he was headed ؛ ٢٠ trouble and dissolute living. And Jesus listens quietly, and then speaks up: “In the realm ٠؛Nerod, we are pun­

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    ished for our sins. In the realm of Caesar, we are punished despite our sins. But in the realm of Cod, there are many foolish ?harisees who are ready to forgive beyond all that we ean imagine. Let me tell you a story. There was a man who had two sons.” Or Jesus in Bethany, watching his friend Martha knead mountains of dough as she prepares the bread for tonight’s dinner: sixteen around the table, sinee all the diseiples are in town too, and you know those men can eat like oxen; swine, too: just sayin’. So she’s stressed, covered in flour, slapping loaf after loaf onto the coals, and Jesus says, smiling, “Martha, Martha; do you know the kingdom of Cod is just like you, right now, a woman who took a measure of leaven and hid it in a mountain of flour until it leavened every inch of that bread? Oh, we ،؟re going to feast tonight. And it’s going to be a taste of the heavenly banquet!” We could go on and on. You start living in the parable universe, and everything is a story. Bverything is a segue to the realm of God, breaking in right here in the kitchen and the house and the field and the pasture, right where we live and breathe and having our being, where Jesus is waiting to show us that grace happens, y’all. It happens every day. And when you see something, say something; that’s what being a disciple is about: when you see something, say something! Name it and proclaim it and share it every which way. Grace happens when the unlikeliest things crash into each other and break open into new meaning. Aparable universe is about ordinary things. Because every parable Jesus ever told begins with the words, “The kingdom of GOD is like a man, just an ordinary man. The realm of GOD is like a woman, just an ordinary woman. But they saw the world in an extraordinary way,” as if Jesus is reminding us that what makes for an extraordinary life is distinguishing between realms. Who you gonna serve: the kingdom of Herod, or the Kingdom of Heaven? The realm of Caesar, or the realm of God? That makes every parable a segue. The kingdom of Herod may be like a man who disowns his failure of a son, but the kingdom of GOD is like a man who ٢٧٨$ to meet that son when he returns home. The realm of Caesar may be like an army that sacrifices the few to protect the many, but the realm of GOD is like a shepherd who left the whole flock to find the one that was lost. Wherever you are, wherever you preach, this is Jesus’ call to you. Because the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. And the people who sat in darkness: on them light has shined. On you light has shined. And you have seen it. So go tell it.

    Joumalfor Preachers

  • The stones would burst into cheers: Easter worship for all the senses

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    The Stones Would Burst into Cheers:

    Easter Worship for All the Senses

    Donna Giver-Johnston Community Presbyterian Church of Ben Avon, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

    Introduction It was Easter morning my first Easter as the Pastor of Oak Grove Presbyterian Church in Retreat, New Jersey. Beingjust a few years out ofseminary in my first solopastorate , I was excited to proclaim, “Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!” When I arrived at toe church, I greeted a young girl and her mother making coffee and setting up Easter treats. I knelt down next to toe little girl and said, “It’s Easter, and I’m so excited. Today we celebrate that Jesus is no longer dead, but alive!” She asked, “Where is Jesus?” And I explained, “He is here in our hearts,” patting her little chest. She looked down at my hand on her heart, toen looked up at me suspiciously and said, “But, I want to see Jesus. Where can I see Jesus today?” People have been looking for Jesus since toe very first Easter, when, according to toe Gospel of Mark, Mary Magdalene, Mary toe mother of James, and Salome went to toe tomb, and upon entering saw a man dressed in a white robe, who said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you arc looking for Jesus ofNazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Took, toerc is toe place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”1 As with toe first eye-witnesses on that first Resurrection Sunday, we are called to tell toe story that Jesus has been raised from the dead, and we are promised that we will see him. But how? Preaching is one w ay -b u t not toe only w a y -to toll toe resurrection story. Easter is not meant to be cognitively grasped, for who can understand toe breadth of God’s mercy stretched oto on a cross ٠٢ toe depth of God’s love buried in a grave ٠٢ toe strength of God’s promise that rose from toe dead and lives forever? Easter is not to be analyzed-for toe cross is foolishness. Homiletician William Willimon claims, “A resurrected Christ is pure movement, elusive, evasive.”^ In toe ending of Mark’s Gospel, toe resurrected Christ is so elusive and evasive that toe women are speechless: “So they went oto and fled from toe tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”3 In his writings ٠٥ the surprise ending of Mark’s Gospel, New Testament Scholar Donald Juel described toe Easter story as a great mystery which cannot be I’ully and rationally understood-in fact, that is toe point: “It is only fitting that just as toe tomb will not contain Jesus, neither can Mark’s story. Jesus is not bound by its ending .” As God is at work finishing toe story, Jesus lives on; but, Juel claimed, “In toe meantime there is only toe Word, toe bread, toe wine, and toe promise that you will see him.’* Easter is toe promise that we will see toe risen Christ—made possible through toe words and symbols of worship. Words are powerful; they have toe capacity to carry messages of hope in the midst of despair and life in toe face of death. As theologian Leanne Van Dyk asserts, “The sermon is toe word of God, in a sense, because it makes God ‘audible’ in much toe same way that sacraments make God ‘visible.’”5

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    The liturgy e©nveys meaning through its words but just as powerfully through bodily aetions, ؛liturgical symbols,7 and worship places8—what liturgical scholar Gordon Lathrop calls “holy people,” “holy things,” and “holy ground.”9 Symbols are not simply visual aids; they evoke a greater meaning. And it is during a liturgical rite that the power of the symbol is released and recognized. In The Use ofSymbols in Worship, Christopher Irvine describes this phenomenon: “Wheu used in the context of worship, symbols mediate and bring to expression God’s redeeming engagement with the world and elicit our response. Liturgical symbols are not simply one element among many in the panoply of worship, but a key mode in which the interaction between the triune God and his people actually occurs.”10 Symbols have the power to allow people to get glimpses of God and to experience the elusive risen Christ in their midst. On Easter Sunday, we pastors strive to craft worship that reflects the presence of the risen Christ-keeping alive the promise that “you will see him.” In the Word read and proclaimed, the pastor declares the truth of Easter that Christ is alive and among us today. But, the resurrection of Christ is not limited to the sermon; it also must be proclaimed in the bread, the wine, and throughout the liturgy. When Jesus entered into Jerusalem, his disciples praised him with these words: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” Some Pharisees ordered them to stop and be quiet. Jesus replied, “If they kept quiet, the stones along the road would burst into cheers!”11 This is the promise o fE aster-that the good news ofthe Christ’s resurrection is proclaimed in word, in symbols, and throughout worship. No matter what we do, the symbols will speak. As worship leaders, if we are creative and thoughtflrl, we can ensure that the symbols— like the stones-burst into cheers: Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia! Like that dramatic morning in the tomb with the angel, Easter is a story to be experienced with all of our senses.17 One way to make sure that the stones and symbols “cheer out” is to engage all ٠۴ our senses-sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. To craft a multi-sensory liturgy is to make the resurrection worship a powerfirl experience . To encourage and inspire you in your Easter worship plannlug, here are some ideas from pastors who have creatively and boldly crafted worship to let the stones burst into cheers: Christ is risen! Christ is risen today! Alleluia!

    Sight Like toe little girl I met looking for Jesus, people of all ages come to worship on Easter Sunday hoping to see Jesus, ٠٢ at least to experience his presence. We need symbols that proclaim toe power ٠۴ the resurrection and toe presence of the risen Christ in our midst, including Light, Liturgical Art, and toe Cross.

    Light At toe end of the Maundy Thursday orTenebrae service, all candles would have been extinguished and removed from toe worship space, creating a deep darkness. The Rev. Catherine ?urves, pastor of Bellevue ?resbyterian Church in ?ennsylvania, uses toe symbol ٠۴ light in a candle to transition between Good Friday and Easter:

    Gne thing that we do is not at all new, but it’s a powerful symbol. On Good Friday, after reading toe passion as toe sanctuary gradually darkens with

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    the e^in§uishing ofeandles, we extinguish the Christ Candle itself. 1 say, “It is finished,” and carry the extinguished candle out of the church. On Easter Sunday, worship begins at the back of the church with the lighting of the Christ Candle with certain spoken and sung responses; then it is carried back into the church during the processional hymn.

    To make the contrast even sharper, Easter worship can begin in darkness-to represent the pre-dawn hours in the darkness ofthe tomb. The Easter Vigil is historically the first service of Easter, held any time after sunset on Saturday ٠٢ before sunrise on Easter morning, when the light contrasts more sharply with the surrounding darkness. The Easter Vigil Service ofLight begins as people gather around a contained bonfire ( ٢٠if indoors, a large paschal candle can be used to represent the new fire).’? أrom this blazing new fire, the ?aschal Candle is lit and held high, with the words: “The light of Christ rises in glory, overcoming the darkness of sin and death.” The ancient chant is sung: “The light of Christ. Thanks be to God.” Then, worshipers are invited to light their candles from the Paschal candle and follow into the dark church.14 The light brightens the darkness of the room (tomb), boldly proclaiming that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. It is in the darkness that the Easter message shines most brightly. The light cheers out: Christ is risen! Alleluia!

    Liturgical Art It has been said, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” and for good reason. Pictures can communicate powerfully, sometimes more than words can say. Consider using images in worship to proclaim “Christ is risen!” Invite an artist in your congregation to participate in worship. The Rev. Susan Rothenberg, pastor ofEmsworth Presbyterian Church in Pennsylvania, reflects: “Gne year, we had an artist in our congregation do a painting during Palm/Passion Sunday worship and used that painting as our bulletin cover for Easter Sunday.” At Second Presbyterian Church in Nashville,Tennessee, I watched in amazement as an artist “painted” the sermon on “The Tord is my Shepherd.” It remained in the chancel throughout worship, continuing to proclaim the good news. Imagine how powerful it would be to have someone paint a picture during an Easter sermon that colorfully proclaims, “Christ is risen! Alleluia!”’

    Cross The most powerful symbol of Easter Sunday is the empty cross. It speaks a powerful message, as described by Rae Evensen in “The Cross in Easter”:

    The foolish, self-risking, love ofthe cross, this earthly mess into which God enters, tells us much about whom it is we worship. It tells us that God is madly in love with us. That though we arc just clay and breath, though we live in darkness most of our days, we are beckoned into God’s future summoned toward resurrection hope.15

    The empty cross boldly proclaims that death did not have foe last word; God did—and that word is a word of amazing grace and eternal love. $ ,٠by all means,

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    sing “Lift High the Cross.” But don’t just sing it; do it. Lift high the eross during the processional and recessional. Let the resurrection cross burst into cheers: “Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Allelnia!”

    Sound On Easter morning, the pastor repeatedly proclaims, “Christ is risen!” And the people respond, “Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!” As this acclamation of faith is repeated throughout the worship service, people not only sa} ׳׳the words themselves, but they also hear the entire church together expressing unity and faith and joy. The Rev. Nancy Reinert, pastor of First Fresbyterian Church of Caledonia, New York, crafts liturgy creatively, focusing on how foe Resurrection sounds to joyful worshipers:

    My challenge is trying to help foe congregation celebrate the true joy of Resurrection with as many senses as possible. One way we have done that well is by inviting everyone to bring (or pick up on the way into worship) bells—dinner bells, cow bells, sheep bells, jingle bells—that we ring every time we say ٠٢ hear foe word “Alleluia” during our Alleluia-filled liturgy. 1 am always surprised at how foe congregation stays with it through the service. It’s not dancing in foe aisles, but it’s a joyful response! Music is an essential element in making a joyful response to the good news of the resurrection of Jesus. Consider starting with a hymn and then craft foe liturgy around it. Hymns are the sung theology of the church; they tell foe story of our faith in song. Be sure to involve the music staff early in the planning, so they have ample time to secure music and musicians and to practice and rehearse. Nothing says Alleluia like a trumpet: brass and bells make Easter more joyful! Also consider musical responses, so that on Easter morning, a chorus of voices can proclaim “Alleluia!” and sound through foe rafters. Alleluias should be in our ears and in our mouths throughout foe entire worship service, making it possible for people to hear the cheers of the powerful message: Jesus Christ is risen today! Alleluia!

    Touch The message of Easter is that God raised Jesus ffom foe dead. The theology of Easter is reflected in foe Sacrament of Baptism. Historically, Easter was foe day that converts were baptized and joined foe church, ft makes good theological sense to baptize on Easter Sunday, for just as we arc buried with Christ in death, so we are raised with Christ to newness oflife. If not the baptism of one person, then foe baptismal covenant can be renewed by everyone.* ؟The touch ٢٠feel of water is a tangible reminder of the grace of God that washes clean our sin-sick souls and reminds us of foe promises of our faith, foe faith in which we baptize. On Ash Wednesday, foe ashes touched on our foreheads mark us as dust. Now, on Easter Sunday, we feel foe water on our foreheads wash away foe mark of sin and death wifo a mark of grace and life, foe seal that reminds us that we belong to God. As we were reconciled wifo God in baptism, we can be reconciled wifo our neighbors in the passing of the peace; as we touch foe hands of those around us, we share foe joy of Easter. As foe Alleluias burst forth—in words, song, and in music

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    (bells!)—we should let people get their bodies into the act and tee، the joy of Easter . In order to allow people to touch and feel Easter, ?astors have to th in k outside the books of worship and let the joy of Easter fill the room in ways that are palpable and tangible and touchable, ?astor Susan Rothenberg ended a summer worship service by playing the popular song “Happy” by ?harrell Williams. Then she had children throw out beach balls which were tossed around the church. Imagine doing something similar with balloons or confetti during Easter worship. This could surely be used at Easter to help people touch and feel and pass onto to their neighbors—the joy of the Resurrection—٠٨ their skin and deep down into their soul. Through touch, people ^ o f o u n d ly ^ r ie ^ h e f e e lo ^ e s u r a c tio n : Christ is risen! Indeed!

    Smell The sense of smell is more precise than seeing ٠٢ hearing. Because the sense of smell is linked to memory, a particular smell can call up memories and powerful responses almost instantaneously. The smells of Easter include lilies and tulips and fresh ،lowers that smell like spring and represent new life. Consider the arrangement of the flowers—how many and where they will be placed to allow the smell to fill the Sanctuary. ¥ ٧٠might farther evoke the power of liturgical symbols by arranging the flowers around the font ٠٢ under the Lord’s Table ٠٢ under and around the cross. In two churches I have served, we had a lily parade. During the ?rocessional, the children bring in the flowers, each child carrying one flower pot. It is a beautiful and precious sight to behold and a fragrant smell to enjoy. The flowers transform the Sanctuary from an empty chancel to an extraordinary aromatic garden! In sight and in smell, the flowers proclaim new life and cheer out great joy! Invite people to bring flowers to church—fresh cut from their gardens. They can hold them in the pews ٠٢ put them in containers at the doors. Either way, the fresh-cut spring flowers will fill the air with a boupuet of sweet fragrance. During the recessional , invite people to fallow outside to the front lawn of the church to transform the cross. What was once a wooden cross used on Good Friday to receive sins now becomes a resurrection cross. Covered with flowers, it is a symbol of new lifa, faithfully and fragrantly bursting into cheers: Christ is risen! Alleluia!

    Taste Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me.” As we gather around the Lord’s Table to share communion, we enjoy a foretaste ofthe heavenly banquet we anticipate celebrating someday in glory with all the saints. On the road to Emmaus, when the resurrected Jesus broke bread, their eyes were opened and they recognized him. And so we come to the Table with eyes wide open, hoping to taste and see that the Lord is good. Consider having bread baking as people arrive, so they smell the aromas. On the Table, have the bread uncovered, so people can see and smell and anticipate the Sacrament of Communion. Before any words are spoken, the powerful smell and sight ofthe bread proclaim, “This is my body given for you.” They cheer out, “Taste and See that the Lord is good.” People will be ready and anxious to eome to the Table even before they are called. On Easter, the sacrament of Communion is not marked with a solemn tone; rather we come to the Lord’s Table singing “This is the feast of victory for our God! A1-

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    leluia!” And at this feast, loaves abound. Pastor ،؟usan Rothenberg makes sure that people ،;an really taste and see the goodness of God during Easter Communion: “At Easter, 1 provide large, delieious loaves of freshly baked challah bread to symbolize the “feasting” aspeet of the day. And 1 encourage folks to take large pieces of bread during eommunion.” Even a taste of the bread of heaven and a sip of the cup of salvation proclaim, “Christ is risen indeed!”

    Multi-Sensory Easter Experience Christ rose from the dead! This is good news of great joy for all the people! And yet, often our Easter worship is far too sedate. The joy of Easter is not just for the ?entecostals. Even more traditional main-line churches can experience Easter with all of the senses, so that Easter is embodied and celebrated. The Rev. Tiffany Nicely Holleck, who serves St. Peter’s Lutheran church on Cape Cod, attends to all of the senses in their Easter celebration.17 Pastor Holleck constructed an “Alleluia” trunk, in which the “Alleluias” were buried before Ash Wednesday. No “Alleluias” were spoken or sung throughout Lent. On Easter morning, the trunk was opened, and long streamers of gold, white and yellow ribbons were taken out to symbolize the release of the “Alleluias.” A powerful way to engage all of the senses in the Easter celebration is through a drama like this one performed at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church on Easter Sunday:

    At opening of worship, bell is rung three times. Three girls carrying bowls of fragrant spices move from doors of sanctuary to altar rail, where the Alleluia trunk is open. Mary M: Who will roll away the stone for us? M aryJ: That stone ؛ةcovering the whole entrance to the tomb. Salome: There is no way we can move it. They arrive at the trunk. An angel dressed in white stands next to the trunk. Angel i : Do not be al’ra،؛l. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth. Angel 2: He was crucified and he died. But now he has been raised. He is not here! Angel 3: Look, (points at the ، اﺀ;/رtrunk) there is the place they laid him. But go, tell the disciples and Peter that Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you. Three girls look into trunk and at each other. They grab streamers and ««٢ down the ¡’ente¡■ aisle. Angel 3: Christ is risen! Congregation: He is risen indeed! Alleluia! Angel 1: Christ is risen! Congregation: He is risen indeed! Alleluia! Angel 2: Christ is risen! Congregation: He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

    To engage the congregation in feeling the joy of Easter, the girls distribute the Alleluiaribbonstoeveryone.Throughoutworship,thecongregation waves the stream-

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    ers eaeh time they say or hear “Alleluia.” Through multi-sensory dramas like this one, congregations can experience the resurrection bursting into cheers in powerful ways. Easter worship that engages all of the senses is not to be done haphazardly, but faithfully. As the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber, Lutheran ?astor of the Nouse for All Sinners and Saints in Denver says, “1 really feel strongly that you have to be deeply rooted in tradition in order to innovate with integrity.” And so from a solid foundation of the theology of Easter, we seek to create new ways for people to encounter the living Christ. For Pastor Bolz-Weber, innovating with integrity has changed her Easter worship service to be a multi-sensory experience:

    So, for example, we celebrate the Easter vigil, where you start with a new tire and you light it and you have this paschal candle and you parade in chanting, and we have these baptisms and we have the Eucharist and it’s like amazing. And then we end it. When it’s done, we have a huge dance party, and we feel like nothing says he is risen like a chocolate fountain in foe baptismal font, right? (laughter)18 Like foe surpriseendingofthe Gospel ofMark,pastorswholeadan Easter worship that engages all foe senses may be joyfully surprised at foe people’s responses in foe end, whieh may include chanting, dancing, and laughing. Alleluia!

    Conclusion Every Sunday, as we gather for worship, Anne Lamott boldly and rightly proclaims , “We are, by the gracious love of God, tricked into coming back to life.”19 In an Easter service, foe message of God’s victory over death is proclaimed and “bursts into cheers” in foe sight of foe empty cross, foe sounds of foe glorious music, foe touch of the baptismal water, foe smell of foe lilies, and the taste of foe communion bread. A worship service tilled with the sights and sounds and smells and touches and tastes of resurrection will surely bring us back to life. And for that we joyfully respond: Alleluia!

    Notes اMichael David Coogan et al.. The New Oxford Annotated Bible:ال ،׳،’ ا ‘Revised Standard Version: إاآأ׳اأ the Apocrypha: An Ecumenical Study Bible, Fttll> ׳rev. 4th ed. (Oxford, England; New York: Oxford University Press,2010), Mark 16:6-7. 2 William Willimon, “Preaching as Demonstration for Resurrection,” Journalfor ׳ ‘ﻟﻢ ׳:، ا־إ ׳،־/ س م .Easter, 2014. 3 Coogan et al.. The New Oxford AnnotatedBible: New Revised Standard Version: With the Apocrypha: An Ecumenical Study Bible. Mark 16:8. 4 Donald H. Juel, Mark, Augsburg Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 235 ,(ا) . ووا 5 Eeanne Van Dyk ,A More Profound Alleluia: Theology and Worship in Harmony, Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies Series (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2005), 73. 6 Kimberly Bracken Long, The Worshiping Body: The Art ofLeading Worship, 1st ed. (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 32. 7 Gordon Lathrop, I¡()¡}’ People: A Liturgical Ecclesiology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999); — — —,Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993); — — — .Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). 8 Jeanne Halaren Kilde, Sacred Power, Sacred Space: An Introduction ؛٠Christian Architecture and

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    Worship (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University ?ress, 2008),.إل 9Lathrop,Holy People: ALiturgicalEcclesiology’, — — — ,HolyThings:ALiturgicalTheology — — —, Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology. lOChristopher Irvine and SocietyforPromotingChristianKnowledge(GreatBritain),77í£Í/,s£0/5ym¿?0/،s in Worship, Alcuin Liturgy Guides (London: Soeiety for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2007), 18. 11 New Living Translation, Luke 19:40. 12 Kathy Black, AHealing Homiletic: Preaching andDisability (Nashville,TNiAbingdon Press,1996). Note: for those who eannot see or hear, providing a multi-sensory experienee of Easter is essential. 13 Think about a safe place for your bonfire to be. And be sure to ask authorities if clearances are necessary and to follow local ordinances. Nothing could be worse than to have your joyous service interrupted by the local police! 14 The basic structure of this service is described in The United Methodist Book of Worship, 369-376, and The Book of Common Worship ofthe Presbyterian Church, 297-314. 15 Kae Evensen in “The Cross in Easter.” workingpreaeher.org. May 7,2008. 16Pre^yterian Church (U.S.A.), Ministry Unit on Theology andWorship, and Cumberland Presbyterian Church,#<9(?/:6>/C0mm0A2W9r5/np (Louisville,Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 199^Reaffirmation of the Baptismal Covenant for a Congregation, 464. 17Holleckrecommends the Iona/WildGoose Resource Group materials asawayto inspire creativity. Partieularly helpful in Easter worship planning is the Stages on the Way: Worship Resourcesfor Lem, Holy Week, and Easter. 18 Nadia Bolz-Weber, Interview with Krista Tippett, On Being with Krista Tippett. http://www.onbeing. org/program/transcript/nadia-bolz-weber-seeing-the-underside-and-seeing-god-tattoos-tradition-and-

    19 Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999).

  • Grace upon grace

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    Grace upon Grace

    John 1:1-18

    Agnes w. Norfleet

    Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania

    My family enjoyed a vacation after Christmas in the Bine Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. On New Year’s Day we did what a lot ٠۴ people do in our lidie community and climbed Montreat’s Lookout Mountain. It’s a popular hike because it is not too long (Bven a young child can make the climb with a little help.), but after you navigate that last steep turn, you are rewarded with stunning views from the top. I have loved that mountain since ١ was a child and have climbed it in every season-in the spring when the ferns on the wooded floor begin to unfurl, in the summer when deep greens blanket the rolling hills in a serene peace, and in the fall when the hardwoods of those oldest mountains in the world are stunning in their colors. But through the years, I have discovered it is the winter hikes I like the best, because in winter you can see through the trees to a multi-layered beauty of those mountain contours. You see the skyline meet the treetops; and except for the oeeasional evergreen, you see the bare branches ٠۴ individual trees reaching toward the others like old friends. You see roof tops that are invisible in summer and the Blue Ridge Rarkway far across the valley. This New Year’s Day was so clear we could see all the way to Mount Mitchell, the tallest mountain east of the Mississippi River, and we could see other roads we have walked, winding their way up and across a distant ground to other far off peaks. From one vantage point we could see many layers of beauty and reality. Likewise, the gospel of John opens with a multi-layered vista. With echoes of Genesis, the opening verses tease our imaginations to look back to the beginning of the story of God and God’s people. In the beginning was the Word, and to look forward toward what is being revealed in the person ٠۴ Jesus Christ-light, power, glory, truth, grace upon grace. If any literata prologue opens a story by establishing the setting and giving the essential background details as it prepares the reader for the plot about to unfold, then John’s prologue is saying that all we know about God from our long history of salvation is culminating in the person ٠۴ Jesus Christ. Christ is God’s love overflowing, grace upon grace. The story is told about the Scottish poet and novelist, Robert Louis Stevenson, that when he was a little boy, more than a century ago, he was sitting one night by a window in his room, watching a lamplighter light the street lights below. Asked what he was doing, Stevenson said, “I am watching a man poke holes in the darkness.” With some ٠۴ the most e lu e n t language in all of scripture, John’s gospel opens by poking holes in the unfathomable mystery of God. One biblical scholar notes, “Within these verses there is a statement and restatement of the same message. I .ike the motion of a wave running up the seashore, each section carries the same message farther.”1 Another scholar likens the prologue to a musical overture that “offers bits ٠۴ the melodies or motifs to be more fully developed later…a theological framework for understanding Jesus in his relationship to God and us.”^ You can tell, no one metaphor is big enough to contain what is being revealed.

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    We believe these layers of meaning that compose the beginning of John’s gospel are fragments of an early Christian hymn which sings its central message; in Jesus Christ, the great God of all creation took up residence in our midst. The God who people had long believed is for us, has chosen in Christ to be with us. God’s grace is embodied in the here and now, in our own human history. Now grace is one of those Christian catchwords that we all understand to a point, and yet, not one of us fully comprehends it. 1 looked up the word grace in the dictionary to see how it’s defined in a few words, and 1 found almost half a column of definition: beauty, good will, favor, a sense of what is right and proper, mercy, clemency, gratitude, thanks, attractive, a short prayer, granting a delay, a title of respect. The eleventh definition says, “In theology-the unmerited love and favor of God toward humankind.” Among all those uses, the theological definition is hardest to grasp, especially that “unmerited” part for folks like us who are so accustomed to earning what we make, working, achieving, and trying to get what we think we deserve. Gne of foe great Christian thinkers of foe last century, ?aul Tillich, described grace narratively and much more clearly than foe dictionary when he wrote,

    Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life which we loved or from which we were estranged….It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when foe old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying, y،>،، are accepted. You are accepted, Tillich concluded. Simply accept thefact that you ، ٢٠ ؛accepted! When that happens to « ﺀwe experience grace.3

    This gospel says that in Christ we have received not just grace, but grace upon grace! Our acceptance is based upon a long history of God’s favor to others, upon foe grace that was already present through foe God of creation, when foe light was separated from foe darkness and foe seas from foe dry land. Upon foe grace that was already present through foe God of Abraham and Sarah and their faithful and wayward descendents. upon foe grace that was there when foe prophets preached and foe psalmists lamented and rejoiced. Upon all of the grace that came before, grace came in foe flesh of Jesus, and it came closer than ever before. Grace upon grace. We will never fully understand it. All we can do is try, from time to time, to let foe beauty and foe mystery of it settle in. All we can do is let go of foe things to which we cling so tightly, so that we can be open to receive it overflowing from foe hands of God. Nelson M andela’s death befere Christm as rem inded foe world of a time when hope seemed particularly alive and foe future appeared brighter, when South Africa’s struggle for freedom began to dismantle foe legalized oppression of Apartheid. During that time, frill Moyers produced a documentary on foe hymn “Amazing Grace,” its history and significance. The film includes a scene from London’s Wembley Stadium, where various musical groups, mostly rock bands, had gathered together in celebration

    Advent 201 A

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    of the changes in South Africa, when the government-sanctioned walls of segregation finally came tumbling down. For twelve hours groups like Guns ‘n Roses played loudly over a huge crowd through banks of speakers, riling up fans. The crowd would yell for more curtain calls, and the rock groups would oblige. The concert promoters had chosen the highly acclaimed opera singer Jessye Norman as the closing act. The film cuts back and forth between scenes of the unruly crowd in foe stadium and Jessye Norman being interviewed about foe significance of “Amazing Grace.” Written by a slave trader who was converted from brutal cruelty to join foe fight against slavery, it was foe perfect song to end fois concert, and finally foe time comes for her to sing. A single circle of light follows Jessye Norman, this majestic African American woman wearing a flowing African caftan, as she strolls onstage. No backup band, no musical instruments, just Jessye. The crowd stirs, restless. Few seem to recognize foe opera diva. A voice yells for more Guns ،n Roses. Gthers take up foe cry. Chaos seems on foe brink. Then, alone, a cappella, Jessye Norman begins to sing very slowly: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like

    And a remarkable thing happened in Wembley Stadium that night. Seventy thousand raucous fans fell silent before her aria of grace. By foe time Norman reached the second verse, “Twas grace thattaughtmyhearttofearandgracemyfearsrelieved…,” she had foe crowd in her hands. By foe time she reached foe third verse, “Tis grace that brought me safe thusfar, ﻣﺤﺲgrace /ﻣﺤﻪﺀ ،’/ ١٧ me home,” several thousand fans were singing, digging back into nearly lost memories for words they heard long ago. Jessye Norman later confessed she had no idea what power had descended on Wembley Stadium that nightri But I think we know. The world hungers and thirsts for grace, the unmerited love and favor of God, and when we recognize it, the world falls silent before it. ؟Many of us reach foe end of one year and foe beginning of another and look back with some fondness and a little sorrow. There are a lot of things we wish we had done or not done, many things for which we are profoundly grateful, and things we regret we had to come up against. We look ahead, we make our resolutions, and we pray that fois ٢٠that will change – in our lives, in foe world ؛and we hope for foe best. But apart from anything of our own doing ٢٠design, apart from anything we can achieve, apart from any response we make, we are^ach of us-like a little child being baptized. We cannot understand God,s grace fitlly, anymore than foe dictionary اﻟﻪﺀadequately define it. But we can look back, and we can look forward and trust it comes as pure gift: in Jesus Christ we have received grace upon grace. In him, as in no other, we are accepted, loved, forgiven, protected, and companioned by God. Grace upon grace indeed.

    Notes 1 Francis ]. Moloney, S.D.B., Theاس /م/ ﺀرﺑﻤﻤﺚﺀ ,Sacra Pagina Series, vol. 4 (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgieal Press, 1998), 2. 2 Robert Redmon’s “Theological Persjx؛ctive,” Feasting o n ،/ ?،؛Word, Year c, .١٠٧1, edited by David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville: Westminster John Knox 2009), 140. 3 Paul Tillieh, “You Are Aceepted.” The ﺀاا’اسofFoundation (0ﻫﺴﺎ :^SCM Press, 1949), 162. 4 Philip Yancey, What’s So Amazing About .’م®’،׳ ( ٢٠Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997), 281. 5 Yancey, 282.