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  • Christ is all: an Easter sermon

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    Christ Is All: An Easter Sermon

    John 20:1-18

    David Bartlett

    Trinity Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia

    Listen, I know as well as you do that in John’s Gospel we do not know that the beloved disciple was John the Son of Zebedee. But tradition has had it so, and for this morning, the tradition will do.

    I. From the start there had been a race between them. Peter, the older fisherman had fished the lake so long he knew just where the schools of fish would hide, and at what season. All the young men wondered at the skill with which he would lower the net—just where he knew he could capture a mighty haul. No one could compete with him until this younger man, who had watched and watched and learned all Peter’s tricks, outdid his teacher on one early morning. The younger man pulled out not just one net full but two. Peter congratulated him, but underneath his breath he said: “You upstart; I’ll show you.” And the younger man said to Peter, “I learned it all from you.” But under his breath he muttered, “And now I’ve beaten you, old man. From now on, I’m the best.” And so it went. The two of them were noted for their skill and for their competition too. Sometimes Peter with his experience won the day, and sometimes the younger man with his ingenuity. But almost every day one or the other had the best catch on the lake. And the one who had the second best catch congratulated the winner , altogether unconvincingly. Then when Jesus called them both to follow him and they gave up their boats to fish for people, even then the competition only grew more polite, not less intense. Now it was not for fish or profit that they competed but for the favor of the Lord they loved. Who could do more for him? Who could win his praise? Even on that last evening when you would think that the time for all ambition was long gone, in quiet and polite ways, you could see John and Peter fight it out. Jesus, with supper under way, got up and took a basin and a towel and set out to wash the disciples’ feet. Peter, thinking he knew just what to say and eager to say it before John could say a word, protested loudly: “Lord, we are your servants, not your masters. You shall never wash my feet.” Jesus said, “Wrong answer, Peter. If you do not let me wash, you are no friend of mine.” Peter looked over at John. John was saying nothing, his sandals off, waiting rather smugly for Jesus to wash his feet. Peter thought: “John got it right by saying nothing, and I got it wrong by saying too much.” Then Peter said aloud, “Not just my feet, Lord, but my head and hands.” Jesus smiled and said: “The feet will be enough.” Peter thought the smile especially friendly. Maybe John hadn’t won after all. Except that when they sat down to dinner, Jesus called John to sit beside him, just as close as flesh to bone. And Peter felt his jealousy grow strong, and John felt

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    not just love but pride. So Peter tried again. “I’m going to die,” said Jesus. “I’ll die with you,” Peter said. “No sacrifice is too great for me.” Jesus looked right at Peter. “Tonight you will deny me three times,” he said. Peter could not believe it. He looked down at the table. He did not want to look at Jesus or at the beloved disciple, either one. Later when they arrested Jesus, Peter and John went after him, stealthily but steadily and watched as they took Jesus inside the high priest’s house. “We’re stuck out here,” said Peter. “I’m not,” said John. He went to the door and knocked. A servant came. “I know the high priest,” John said. “He’ll let me in.” The servant smiled and opened wide the door. Peter hurried forward, but the servant closed the door just as he got there. All Peter could see was John disappearing inside, shrugging his shoulders in pretend regret. “What could I do?” he seemed to say. So there was Peter. Perhaps he was thinking of John winning once again, John inside. Peter, outside, outfoxed, outplayed, outrun. So when the high priest’s servants asked him, “Do you know this Jesus?” three times Peter said, “I do not know him. I do not.” And now he was beyond competing, wrapped in shame, so that when morning came and they nailed Jesus to the cross, Peter stood far away, afraid, abashed. Peter stood far away and saw John standing there with Jesus’ mother, heard Jesus say to him, “You be a son to my mother. Mother, you be a mother to John.” And through his tears of shame and loss and jealousy, Peter thought, “Here, even at the end, John is the favorite. Even at the end.” Except, of course, what Peter could not know, or John, was that this was not the end. And Sunday Mary came to tell them: “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have laid him.” Then they ran, the two of them, racing as they had raced to catch the fish. Racing as they had raced to win Jesus’ favor or to stand beside him at his trial. Racing beyond all reason toward some ultimate disaster or unimaginable triumph—racing toward an empty tomb. And what is odd, as they told the story years later, what is odd is that somewhere in the middle of the race, the race just ended. John got there first, apparently. But after all these years of winning, he did not win. He stopped, stopped and stood aside, and let the older man enter first. And Peter, as he tells it, first at last, did not brag about being first at last but says: “Oh, yes, it’s true. I was the first one in the tomb, but John was the first to believe.” The first to know that what had happened was not the awful travesty of a stolen body but the awesome triumph of a risen Lord. Even though it is true that later they slipped back a bit toward competition, it was only just a bit. Because at the moment when time stood absolutely still, at the door of the empty tomb, at that moment the race between them stopped, and the competition stopped, and the jealousy was done. And for that moment, and through that moment for every moment yet to come, Christ was all and more than all.

    II. Now Mary Magdalene stood weeping after Peter and John had gone. Mary stood weeping, outside, the story says. Meaning of course she stood outside the empty

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    tomb, but perhaps meaning too that Mary had been outside all along, looking in on the inner circle but not quite part of it. The gospel we read this morning says nothing of the rumors—that Mary was an outsider because she had lived the life of a harlot. Of the rumor that Jesus had cast out from Mary seven demons, that she had been mentally and spiritually disturbed. Of that our gospel today says nothing. But Mary did stand outside, as those who are sinners or who feel like sinners often stand—outside. Looking at the signs of the faith, signs like an empty tomb, looking at them from afar. Looking at the inner circle of the faithful, looking at them from afar. Mary stood as those disturbed in mind or spirit often stand, outside. Looking at the apparent clarity and serenity of the officially sane and wondering whether they will ever find acceptance there. Whether Mary Magdalene had been a harlot or had been mentally disturbed, we do not know, but that she stood a little bit outside—that we know. We do know of course that Mary Magdalene was a woman, and perhaps it is not coincidence that as a woman, she felt she had to stand a little bit outside. Not rush right into the center of the mystery like John and Peter. It came to pass that the church, which followed not too many years beyond, decided that John and Peter and other men could enter right into the center of the mystery. Be ordained, for instance, say the words that turned the bread and wine into body and blood. While women, like Mary, were supposed to stand at the very edge of the mystery, but not to enter in. To take the blessing second hand. Outside. But we also know that only three days before, when all the men save only John had scattered or at least stood far away where no Roman soldier could spot them, then it was Mary Magdalene and Jesus1 mother and Mary the wife of Clopas who stood right there at the foot of the cross. In the time of need allowed, invited, right to the center. But when the need was gone, and it was only bafflement or joy, when Jesus was beyond suffering or human help, it all returned to life as usual. “The tomb is empty,” she tells them. “Thank you very much for the information,” say the very male voices. “Now we’ll just go inside the tomb and see what’s gong on. That’s it. Be a dear and stand back; see if you can get a glimpse through the door.” So she stands outside the central mystery—this possible harlot, this possible mental patient, this woman. She stands outside the central mystery, or so they think, until the central mystery comes right to her. “Woman,” he says, “Why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have taken him away, tell me where you have laid him.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” Mary. The first to see. Mary. The first to hear. Because even though it is true that the church later slipped back considerably, at that moment, when time stood absolutely still in the garden outside the empty tomb, at that moment, no one was outside and no one was inside. All were family. All were home. And for that moment and through that moment for every moment yet to come,

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    Christ was all and more than all. Beloved, hear the Easter message. You have been raised with Christ. Set your minds on what belongs to Christ, and not on old and earthly devices and desires.

    Whatever race you race with proud ambition Whatever prize you’ve won or hope to win, Whatever loss you nurse like some condition That festers underneath your jealous skin, The gospel chides and cheers you with this warning: Give up the race: obey a gentler call. All competition ends on Easter morning. From now on Christ is all and more than all.

    However far you feel from human favor, Cut off by guilt or by the sense you’re odd And different from your saner friends and neighbors, And certainly unworthy of their God. However you are hurt by false demeaning, Easter breaks down each fence and every wall. Inside and outside have no power or meaning. From now on Christ is all, and more than all.

    To Him be thanks and praise.

  • Protagonist corner

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    Protagonist Corner

    Cress Darwin

    Second ?resbyterian Church, Charleston, South Carolina

    The prelude is over. The flowers are glorious. You stride down the center aisle greeting folks as foe organ crescendos. The liturgist moves to foe right and you to foe left of foe pulpit literally bounding up foe stairs. The organ swells. You invite the congregation to stand, and they break out in joyous song—

    Holy Holy Hoi}’, Lord God Almighty … One in three persons, blessed Trinity. You proclaim, This is foe day the Lord has made. They respond, Let us bejoyful and be glad in it! You say, Please be seated!

    Now’s foe moment. Every moment of your life has led you here, right here, right now. You have foe winning ticket—you are to be foe bearer of mysteries of Cod! Wow! Tikes! S d ^ ^ a ^ c ^ ld ^ ^ b e itse e m in g ly u n d e rsie g e as attendance patterns change, but Sunday is foe day that preachers ponder and pray towards to bring a message that speaks to foe faithful and to those who may be wondering why and how they have found themselves here and are very likely wondering if, in fact, they are “rejoicing”

    In truth, any Sunday there are many folks in church who may ordinarily be found in foe park, at foe beach, at brunch, or just taking their one day oft to catch up on chores ٢٠much needed sleep. But on fois morning folks are here—up, scrubbed up, some dutiful, some doubtful and still, others thrilled and in anticipation! What is it that drives people who never darken the door to wander in at other times? New Year’s Resolution? The need for inclusion in prevailing cultural rites? More likely there is a yearning, an ache, an emptiness that ultimately can only be filled with and by Cod. And it’s your task (and privilege) to be foe instrument that points to a celestial spot—a point where one is positioned for God’s grace. 1 tell you all this because of foe Gospel. There is an opportunity on this holy day—this day set apart from the other six. I know it’s always a good day to proclaim foe saving grace of Jesus, but on Sunday we have a historical, traditional, structural leg up! How do we make the most of it? The real question is how does one mm fois random visit into an ongoing relationship ? How do we take foe mystery ofa risen Christ, which to some is foolishness, and make it relevant to their lives? What is it that you could say that would be used by the Holy Spirit of Cod to capture their interest, redefine their priorities, secure their hearts for Jesus? Relevance is a word that comes up again and again around foe halls of Second Presbyterian Church. Is foe church relevant? How can foe church be relevant? How

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    can a 200-year-old downtown church in the middle of historic Charleston, South Carolina, he toe agent of the dynamic, still creating Cod—toe agent of Cod’s love, toe advocate of God’s justice—the herald of God’s good news? For toe church to he relevant, toe message must he relevant. For toe message to be relevant, study and exegesis need to he laced with a dose of real life. Let me tell you a bit about my real life and toe path that led my wife and me to Second Fresbyterian Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Rebecca and I met in New York City. We lived there most of our adult lives, she as toe publisher of iconic magazines and I as a working actor, then as a television producer. Both of us worked in highly competitive fields, had full and rich lives, and moved in fairly social circles. We were newly married, had no children, and were making our way in our respective fields. An anchor for us in toose days was toe church—a community of diverse folks brought together at toe “crossroads of the world.” We experienced community. We had fun. We shared Jesus. We served toe community. Traveling downtown on Sunday mornings, we would pass cyclists, joggers, folks with strollers, tables full of people with a cup of coffee in one hand and the paper in toe other. Why were they given a pass? Cr were toey? What was it that we were on our way to that they had either rejected ٢٠simply had never experienced? You see, Rebecca and I had both grown up in toe church. 1 was a Southern Baptist from Texas who migrated to toe Episcopalians, and Rebecca was a Methodist from South Carolina. Though like many we had drifted away during our college and early career years, we felt called to become a part of something that would keep us grounded during our first years as a couple—a place that would be a haven for us from toe temptations of the fast life in New York City. You know, the songs about New York aren’t always written by romantics. The city is tough, but egalitarian. And most decisions about time and how it is spent are not casual. If you do this, you can’t do that. Obvious, right? But what drives toe choice? I came to believe that toe choices, toe important choices, were driven by that which was compelling. I had come there as an actor, and though I’d had a decent career (I was a “working” actor), I’d hit a plateau. What I had access to, I didn’t want to do; what I wanted to do, I didn’t have access to. I had developed what I now refer to as a healthy ﺊﺳ» ﻣﺢ ‘، مﺀﺀ . You know, toe occasional restless, irritable, discontented feeling ،hat’s toe spur that gets you off your bottom and moving into what’s next? In one of those moments of God’s ubi،^uitous serendipity, I met a fellow who knew television production and was well connected on toe West Coast. I could write and narrate and was well connected in New York. In a New York minute, we formed a production company and soon were meeting with an executive oftheA&E Network about producing episodes for their budding Biography series. I recall that first meeting and toe tough talk we encountered. We were told how difficult it was to get anything on toe air. It wasn’t just a choice between broadcast and cable; it had to do with toe larger choices people made about their use of time each day. So the choice to watch this instead of that was driven by something that couldn’t be manufactured or bottled. The choice was driven by whether this was better than that, more entertaining, more informative, more moving, of more value, ٢٠more compelling. There we go again. It had to be compelling. And in that conversation, he listed four elements that had to be present in order

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    to produce compelling television: 1. The resources to get it done. 2. The ability to do it. 3. An end user. 4. A project worth doing. Let’s take a look at this. What if you have something worth doing but you can’t fund it? Doesn’t work. What if you have a good project, toe financing for it is committed , but you don’t know how to get it done? Ain’t happening. What if you have a pile of cash, a good project, toe expertise to get it done, but no one buys it? No one wants it? There’s no market? $ ٠you see there are a slew of variables that must converge for a project to make it to “air.” ?erhaps it’s becoming more clear why I migrated from television producer to toe pulpit! Meanwhile, Rebecca was making her mark in toe magazine publishing world. From GQ to The ،;»׳ ٨٢ Yorker to Fortune, with lots of hard work and many miles of travel in between, Rebecca proved that she could sell, sell, sell. She was a creative marketer, a trusted salesperson, and a strong and empathetic manager and leader. She racked up many “firsts” and successes along toe way. But if you asked Rebecca how she succeeded, she would point to one of her first bosses and her mentor who taught her about consultative selling. The most important aspect of consultative selling is knowing your clients – sitting on their side of the desk. So often, toe typical salesperson is too quick to launch into toe spiel about how great toe product is without having laid any kind of foundation ٢٠ learned why ٢٠if the product may be relevant for the customer. Consultative selling involves first asking questions, doing research, discovering what your customer needs to accomplish through marketing, and figuring out how (and even if) the product you are selling can match the client’s needs. It’s a process, it takes creativity, and it takes time. Only then can toe truly successful salesperson come in with toe deal. You see, consultative selling is about being relevant, too. Sound familiar? ft’s really a lot like “there has to be an end user.” ?reaching to a secular crowd is not that different. Rather than being all geared up to talk about what one believes should be toe message of the day ٢٠what toe lectionary is suggesting, one needs to step back and consider toe crowd—toe believers, the seekers, those who have stumbled in. The question is, “What do they need to hear this day? What will be relevant for their lives? What will bridge this Sunday to Monday and through the week ahead?” In toe positioning prayer before toe sermon, we say things like “May these words not be my words or opinions, but toe words that You would have us hear… that would meet each of us at our point of need.. . Do we really mean it? It is so gratifying to stand at toe door of the church greeting long-time members and fresh new faces and to hear the words, “It felt like you were speaking direetly to me. How did you know that’s what I needed to hear today?” Of course, we can’t be all things to all people. There are always going to be those who cannot ٢٠will not receive that which is theirs no matter how it’s packaged, but we can still put toe tools of toe culture to use for God’s purpose. So how do we move from earnest proclamation to a “signed deal,” a transformed life? What from Rebecca’s and my previous lives can we offer toe preacher on the penultimate day of the year? This: toe savvy of toe marketplace methodology that

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    knows what drives our ehoiees, that reeognizes the opportunity, the chanee, the neeessit ^ to employ the tools of the culture to reach people as they are, where they are for the high ealling of who and whose they are. We have the resources: the witness of the saints over the millennia, the revelation of God’s Word revealed in scripture, informed and guided by the Holy Spirit. We have the ability to get it done, not by our own reckoning, but through the nurturing and affirmation of individuals, sessions, seminaries, and colleagues. We are eonfirmed by our calling that we have been equipped. There is a market—all, every single one of God’s created, for whom God yearns, and who yearns for God is the singular and collective target ٢٠end user. It is worthwhile. There is no greater privilege, no more important purpose, no more urgent need, no sweeter task than preaehing God’s justice, mercy, and love. “This is the da}’ the Lord has سﺀ .Let us rejoice and ﺀﺀglad in it!”

  • Lenten preaching in the United States

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    Lenten Preaching in the United States

    Samuel Wells

    St. Martin in the Fields, London, United Kingdom

    I recall hearing a story of a neighboring church, early in my ministry. The pastor had sat the ushers down and said, “If we’re going to grow, we really must be more visitor-friendly. We can’t, for example, show a parent the door when their infant child starts to cry. We must find ways of showing them they’re welcome.” A couple of weeks later precisely such a scenario transpired. A young woman found her baby was making a terrific noise and headed for the door. An usher stood in her way. “I need to leave,” she said. “You can’t,” he replied. She prevailed, but only after she made it clear she was prepared to use force. A ministry of welcome had quickly become one of imprisonment. A similar face-off takes place twice a year between theologically-subtle pastors and their enthusiastic but liturgically less-nuanced congregations. The first such season is Advent. “It’s Christmas!” blares every store and TV channel from September onwards. Understandably, members of the congregation are excited that the World, so often preoccupied with the flesh and the devil, has, for this season, chosen to embrace a Christian festival, albeit often under the misty haze of “the Holidays.” Armed with festive tree and somewhat kitsch crèche figures, willing congregation members struggle out from Thanksgiving indulgence and announce, “It’s Christmas!” “No it’s XXX not!” insists the self-respecting and (liturgically) perfectly-formed pastor. “What is it then?” “It’s Advent,” says the curmudgeonly pastor, wondering if anyone will ever learn. Thus begins the annual ritual by which the World and the laity celebrate Christmas, but the clergy stubbornly refuse to. The second such season of pre-festal tension is Lent. Clergy exercise their refined sensibilities by seeking and destroying Alleluias wherever they might casually appear and stamping out the beauty of the lily, should it come anywhere near the sanctuary. More than once I have sat in the planning meeting for the annual Good Friday ecumenical downtown walk of witness and witnessed the dumbfounded members of the Salvation Army fail to comprehend why the inclusion of the unspeakable words “Up from the grave he arose” during the hymn otherwise promisingly entitled “Low in the Grave He Lay” should provoke solemn Anglican brothers and sisters to threaten to withdraw from the whole enterprise. How many clergy have retired knowing that, if they did nothing else for the kingdom, at least they ensured that there were no inappropriate smiles for several weeks after Ash Wednesday. Like all liturgical seasons, Lent struggles to hold its own amid the rhythms of the secular year. In the US, the great alternative narrative of February and March is Spring Break, honored in suburban congregation and campus ministry since time began with one of the great sacred cows of American Christianity—the mission trip. In the UK, the Fourth Sunday in Lent, officially known as Refreshment Sunday, has, for at least 200 years, been earmarked as Mothering Sunday. Like the May equivalent in the US, this occasions an outpouring of cloying sentimentality, righteous insensitivity toward the childless, single, gay, and orphan, and egregious self-congratulation on the part of otherwise self-denying and unrewarded parents. (One of the greatest mercies of ministry on a college campus was that the Mothers’ Day weekend usually coincided

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    with Commencement – and thus provided me with an unavoidable prior commitment elsewhere.) But in different ways Spring Break and Mothering Sunday offer a let-up in the otherwise unrelenting moroseness of the Lenten season. In doing so they mark a buffer between the two great themes of Lent: the wilderness and the cross. Lent begins in earnest with discipline, discipline honed in the wilderness. Ash Wednesday and Lent 1 have all the good intentions and short shelf-life of New Year’s resolutions. The only remedy is to begin talking and thinking and praying about Lent some time before it actually begins. In a congregation whose model for growth (aka survival) is to be cheerful and welcoming, upbeat and back-slapping, and altogether a whole lot More Fun Than God, this presents something of a challenge. There’s a general sense in the mainline church that sin and repentance are just too, ahem, negative; and that, rather than Lent be about giving something up, it should rather be about taking something on. A quick glance at the waistlines and consumer goods of the average mainline churchgoer might lead one to suppose that a little giving up might not be such a bad idea; but nonetheless the sense that giving things up is “so yesterday” has taken hold. Either way (and surely Lent has to be about both) the conventional Ash Wednesday question, “What are you giving up for Lent?” tends to be met with the answer, “I haven’t decided yet.” The only way to avoid this is to set aside some time in the season between the end of Epiphany (at Candlemas) and the beginning of Lent to offer some suggestions, shared wisdom, and opportunity for discernment. The crucial scriptural source for preaching about discipline is Matthew 13:44-46: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.” Here is the central theme that runs through the two halves of Lent: God, who has everything and can have anything, sells everything and shapes all existence simply to have us. We are that pearl. The incarnation and cross are that selling and its consequence. The question for us is, having seen how willing God is prepared to sell to have us, how will we respond? How readily will we sell in order to have God? Is it possible to have God unless we are prepared to sell everything else? After all, it’s not clear that God is able to have us any other way – and perhaps not even then. That is the knife-edge on which salvation rests. So this is the focal theme of Lent, of both discipline and the cross: imitation of the shape of God’s life and the direction of God’s story. Without this, the conventional sermon on the temptation narratives that marks the First Sunday in Lent lapses into either moralism or the self-help manual. The Old Testament readings provide richer territory for the ground a Lent 1 sermon usually needs to cover. But many mainline preachers seldom stray from the gospel, and this has a tendency to lead into either the Scylla of exploring our personal temptations to multiply food, jump off temples, and rule the world, or the Charybdis of setting up our petty greed, lust, and pride as some kind of equivalent to God’s choice in Christ never to be except to be with us: two equally absurd, but frequently practiced, homiletic directions. The temptation narratives make sense in the light of the parables of the pearl and the treasure: Christ has to renounce many things, even otherwise good things like feeding the hungry and benevolently ruling the world, if he is to have the one thing God’s heart is set on. Likewise Lent is a time for setting things aside, even

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    good things, to desire only God. How many Lenten disciplines make it through to Holy Week? The pastor never discovers. The wise pastor knows not to dwell too much on the 40 days of Lent, lest the alert church member do the math and want to know why there are more than 40 days in Lent, and, if Sundays are supposed somehow still to be resurrection days when it comes to fasting, why then are we so stringent on those very days about alleluias and glorias and flowers in the sanctuary? And is the liturgical color for Maundy Thursday purple (for Lent), sackcloth (left over from the last vacation bible school), red (for Holy Week), or white (because it is one of the Great Days of the Christian year)? These are conversations from which the pastor finds it hard to become disentangled; the wise pastor resists the temptation to seem too learned on such subjects. However many or few Lenten disciplines are still upheld a few weeks into the season, the sermons on disciplines seldom survive the first weekend, or at most the second. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sermon on fasting or self-denial later than that. One positive consequence of this is that Lent has not become the great season of Christian self-help. The six habits of highly-effective disciples—self-examination , prayer, fasting, almsgiving, scripture-reading, and repairing broken relationships —are strongly, and rightly, associated with Lent. But they have never become what Stephen Covey’s mantra (be proactive, begin with the end in mind, put first things first, think win-win, seek first to understand, then to be understood, synergize, and sharpen the saw) meant to the business community of the 1990s or the person looking for a technique to turn around their own underachievement.1 Lurking Pelagianism was and remains the core Protestant suspicion of Catholic piety—yet that has never stopped Protestants having their own version of Pelagian impulses. Lent treads a fine line between an uncomplicated Augustinian conviction that our identity is profoundly perverted (“Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return….”) and a rather more Irenaean understanding that our chief problem is ignorance, sloth, and immaturity—and thus that a good bit of spiritual square-bashing would do us very well. It wouldn’t be hard for a congregation to take away a somewhat mixed message from the sermons and liturgy of the early weeks of Lent: the preacher does well to identify which of the two messages to make the main focus. Given that the rest of the world tends to stereotype the United States as an Irenaean culture—one that sees adversity as a problem waiting to be fixed, rather than a mystery to be lived with—it’s commendable that Lenten disciplines have seldom been customized into a self-help strategy. (Although perhaps such a strategy, and the appetite for it, accounts for the appeal of Rick Warren’s A Purpose Driven Life.) There’s no use castigating such a phenomenon (certainly not in the course of a sermon) as if Pelagius didn’t have a point—and Irenaeus an even better one. A gospel that simply exchanges humanity’s miserable sin via Christ’s unmerited grace for God’s unutterable glory misses out on the texture, goodness, variety, and depth of human life and experience. It also undersells the church and leaves the Holy Spirit little to do. The church is not just a hospital for sinners; it’s also a school for saints. Justification is half the gospel; sanctification is the other half. Sanctification is what these early weeks of Lent are about, and distinguishing sanctification from Pelagianism is at the heart of the preacher’s task. The point that must not be lost is that virtue fundamentally means power: a church whose members speak the truth, love one another, witness in the face of fear, and share their belongings constitutes

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    a social and political force like no other—a genuine light to the nations. The problem with mainline preaching in the early weeks of Lent is not so much that it is too Pelagian, but that it is too domestic, too pious, too focused on the personal journey into the wilderness and not sufficiently mindful of the social and political power of a community shaped by a common programme of virtue, a community looking to embody a shared set of practices, a community aware of the significance of common witness. Jesus went into the wilderness because that is where Israel had learned who it was, what it was made of, where its support came from, and where it was going. Jesus went into the wilderness as the embodiment of Israel to learn the same things about himself. The church marks Lent to discover in whose strength it stands. If there is ever to be a congregation retreat or weekend away, this surely is the right time in the liturgical year to do it. So that’s what the majority of Lent is about: sanctification—working out our salvation with fear and trembling. But towards Passiontide, Lent changes gear. It becomes less about what God in Christ gave up for us and for our salvation and more about what Jesus took up for our sake: namely, the cross. Yet if the first tendency of mainline preaching in Lent is to domesticate discipline, the second is never quite to get to the cross. This is for a number of reasons. Mainline Protestants are wedged between Catholics, who explore the cross in exhaustive detail, from every possible angle, one lingering station at a time, pausing lengthily each day of Holy Week and going without sleep from the mass of Maundy Thursday to the Easter Vigil; and evangelicals, for whom every day is justification day, the resurrection is little more than a validation of the cross, Christmas and indeed the gospels are no more than a prologue to Calvary, and there’s nothing especially to celebrate on Good Friday that differs from what is celebrated every time Christians gather to pray. (I perhaps exaggerate the two poles a little.) The point to grasp is this: the liturgical year assumes a prominent role for Holy Week. This is when the central drama of the Christian imagination is enacted and imbibed. If lay people were not going to be active participants in this drama on the days leading up to and including Good Friday, then the whole liturgical year would need to be reshaped—with a much greater emphasis on the cross at other times of year and certainly on the Sundays of Lent. Mainline churches find themselves with the bathwater of the Catholic liturgical year, yet without the baby of pious Holy Week devotion; and the result is, never quite getting to the cross. (In the UK the problem is exacerbated because the Easter weekend is always a public holiday on the Friday and Monday and almost always coincides with children’s school break and college vacation—so even the most regular churchgoer is sorely tempted to head out for a four-day sojourn far from the madding crowd.) It’s hard to lament this on a crowded Easter morning (the gathering of around 4,500 at Duke Chapel’s services each Easter Day—leaving aside the 2 300 gathered for Catholic mass—is an indelible mark on my memory of ministry in North Carolina); but there’s always a lingering sense of turning up for the gain without entering into the pain—which rather bears out H. Richard Niebuhr’s celebrated criticism of mainline religion and its early twentieth-century social gospel in the United States.2 The American mainline has been extraordinarily successful in folding the pattern of Sunday morning worship into the culture of the whole nation. The downside is that it is difficult to make any other time of the week meet the same purpose—even once a year, to mark the salvation of all creation.

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    What then is to be done? I have never understood the relatively recent Roman Catholic move to combine Passion and Palm Sunday into one on the Sunday before Easter. The Fifth Sunday of Lent—what used to be Passion Sunday—is in many ways the ideal day on which to set up Passiontide by preaching the cross on a broad canvas. The RCL readings for the day—notably John 11 — offer a suitable invitation to do so. At this stage Lent gets a second wind, somewhat akin to what tennis commentators call the “business end of the set,” when the score nears the tiebreak. This is a somewhat arbitrary day to preach on the doctrine of justification, but a very appropriate day to meditate upon Isaac Watts’ “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’5 or to consider the two natures of the crucified Lord. The most complex, and in many respects the most textured, Sunday of the liturgical year is Palm Sunday. Almost every Palm Sunday I can remember over my time as a pastor, I have approached Palm Sunday without great anticipation and left feeling moved and challenged and deeply satisfied—the service somehow exceeding the sum of its parts. At Duke Chapel, for the last four or five years I was there, an actor-pastor named McKennon Shea offered a single-voice enacted passion narrative, from Judas’ betrayal to the deposition, beginning with the clink of traducing coins and concluding with the thud of rock closing over the tomb. Each year he performed it there was more to perceive, more to discover, more to ponder. A year or two ago I was with a dozen laypeople at dinner and took the opportunity to say, “I wonder if you could tell us about one sermon that still rings in your imagination long after you heard it.” Members of the party reminisced about poignant words from childhood or challenging words from student days. But one person, even though she knew it didn’t “count,” chose Rev. Shea’s enacted gospel. “That shows me who Jesus is more than any sermon ever has,” she said. In a Lent that lasts longer than the concentration span of the average congregation , in a lay culture that finds it hard or uncongenial to focus its whole year around the triduum, in a spiritual climate that has come to regard the cross as a transitional object, Palm Sunday emerges as the pivotal day of the whole season. It’s a crowded day—palms for everybody, maybe a procession, possibly even a donkey, perhaps a passion narrative—and in many ways the most challenging Sunday of the year for the preacher. But the most promising, too. For it encompasses both the joy of Easter and the horror of Good Friday; both the grand stage of world history and the intimacy of the disciples’ failure; both the humanity of Jesus as king and the divinity of Jesus as Lord. Perhaps most significantly in the light of what we earlier saw as the tendency of mainline Christianity to domesticate discipline and spiritualize the cross, the triumphal entry into Jerusalem—the main focus of the Palm Sunday celebration—is a thoroughly public, political, visible occasion. As my dinner companion’s judgment demonstrates, if the Palm Sunday liturgy is conducted to its full potential, the role of the sermon is not quite so critical. (Of course this is true of every act of worship.) But as the power of the enacted passion makes clear, the heart of Lent—and most certainly of preaching in Lent—is to enable the listener to enter the story. The gospels are in narrative form for a reason. The preacher’s role is not to tell the story, but to bring to bear on the listener its telling moments, make the listener sense its compelling power and draw out its existential implications. Palm Sunday, as much as any moment in the liturgical year, is where justification and sanctification meet. Palm Sunday is the music played on a violin

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    string stretched between heaven and earth, where the truth of our horror meets the wonder of God’s glory. The members of the congregation may be able and willing to join the throng through Holy Week, or they may not; regardless, Palm Sunday, in liturgy and sermon, should give them a flavor of the whole week. One thing more remains to be said about preaching in Lent. The number 40 is, at root, derived from the number of years Israel spent in the wilderness after crossing the Red Sea. This is, perhaps, the definitive condition the preacher assumes in the listener: that is, “I know I’m supposed to be saved—but I don’t feel like it; and things aren’t turning out quite the way I hoped they would.” When people speak about their faith, they seldom highlight moments of ecstasy or certainty; much more often they identify moments in the wilderness when they discovered God was with them after all, or retrospective discoveries that they couldn’t have found or recognized the Promised Land had the wilderness not lain in their way. Of course the preacher wants to declare the leaving-behind of Egypt; of course the preacher wants to announce the joy of the Promised Land. But simply to do so risks losing touch with the faith experience of the congregation. If by contrast the preacher can make sense of the wilderness without cliché, banality, or superficial comfort, then the gospel has truly done its work. For this is preaching: to encapsulate the wilderness; to help the congregation find in it the way of the cross; to inspire the listener with the compelling story of Christ’s journey to Calvary, such that this wondrous story puts all other stories in the shade, and one’s own in perspective; and to move believers to let the Holy Spirit shape their lives around disciplines that reflect the way God’s life has been shaped around loving them. This is the Lenten journey: not hopelessly to seek discipline in the wilderness; not simply to slip from the wilderness to the cross; but in the wilderness to find the way of the cross, and from the hill of the cross to see the reason for discipline. Is there a genuine Christian route to discipline any other way?

    Notes 1 Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: The Free Press, 2004), originally published in 1990. 2 “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 193.

  • The rape of Tamar

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    The Rape of Tamar

    Anne Apple

    Idlewild Presbyterian Church, Memphis, Tennessee

    2 Samuel 13:1-17 Some time passed. David’s son, Absalom, had a beautiful sister whose name was Tamar; and David’s son, Amnon, fell in love with her. Amnon was so tormented that he made himself ill because of his sister Tamar, for she was a virgin and it seemed impossible to Amnon to do anything to her. But Amnon had a friend whose name was Jonadab, the son of David’s brother, Shimeah; and Jonadab was a very crafty man. He said to him, “O son of the king, why are you so haggard morning after morning? Will you not tell me?” Amnon said to him, “I love Tamar, my brother Absalom’s sister.” Jonadab said to him, “Lie down on your bed, and pretend to be ill; and when your father comes to see you, say to him, ‘Let my sister Tamar come and give me something to eat, and prepare the food in my sight, so that I may see it and eat it from her hand.’” So Amnon lay down, and pretended to be ill; and when the king came to see him, Amnon said to the king, “Please let my sister Tamar come and make a couple of cakes in my sight, so that I may eat from her hand.” Then David sent home to Tamar, saying, “Go to your brother Amnon’s house, where he was lying down.” She took dough, kneaded it, made cakes in his sight, and baked the cakes. Then she took the pan and set them out before him, but he refused to eat. Amnon said, “Send out everyone from me.” So everyone went out from him. Then Amnon said to Tamar, “Bring the food into the chamber, so that I may eat from your hand.” So Tamar took the cakes she had made, and brought them into the chamber to Amnon her brother. But when she brought them near him to eat, he took hold of her, and said to her, “Come, lie with me, my sister.” She answered him, “No, my brother, do not force me; for such a thing is not done in Israel; do not do anything so vile! As for me, where could I carry my shame? And as for you, you would be as one of the scoundrels in Israel. Now therefore, I beg you, speak to the king; for he will not withhold me from you.” But he would not listen to her; and being stronger than she, he forced her, and lay with her. Then Amnon was seized with a very great loathing for her; indeed, his loathing was even greater than the lust he had felt for her. Amnon said to her, “Get out!” But she said to him, “No, my brother; for this wrong in sending me away is greater than the other that you did to me.” But he would not listen to her. He called the young man who served him and said, “Put this woman out of my presence, and bolt the door after her.”

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    “Bolt the door after her.” These words of Amnon identify one domestic violence perpetrator ,s way to silence a victim – lock her out. Maintain power and control. If only I don’t see her. If only I don’t smell her. If only I don’t hear her, then I’m free. Free from the damage I’ve done. “Bolt the door.” It’s also what we do in the church with hard texts. I wonder if this sermon series, “Passages I Love To Hate” might be the Spirit’s gift of a counterclockwise twist on the deadbolt, cracking open the door encouraging trust in God’s revelation – even and especially with the hard stories. Last week I was at Yale Divinity School with member, Don Monteith, and our Director of Music Ministry, Ted Gibboney. We were participating in a study about worship in a particular place. As we left Yale, I asked, “Who have your mentors been for a life of faith, and how have they shaped the ways you live out your vocation?” Don, who has had a lengthy career in nursing, shared a story of a particular nurse who said to her nursing students the first day of encountering the patient, “Before you go to enter a patient’s room, pause and say a little prayer, ‘Lord, help me to make a difference and to do no harm.’” The minute Don said it I knew it was a prayer for the church. It was a prayer I needed to hear. W hat if we ask God, “Lord, help us to make a difference and to do no harm.” How might that help us stand before difficult texts without fear and with courage to act with justice? Unmitigated violence is what happened in El Salvador to an entire community. Our heavy manual labor was finished on the El Salvador Mission Trip. We’d mixed cement, carted bricks, mortared joints, and hauled loads. We’d moved north into the mountains on the Honduran border and planned a visit to a community called Mozote. The night before, we’d worshipped. We celebrated the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, sang with one another the simple song “You are called child of God,” and offered blessings through some giggles. This day we were headed out as eco-tourists. On our way south out of the mountains , at an intersection next to a small concrete building, the van and bus stopped. There was some interaction with Sophia, and without explanation, an armed and uniformed policeman got into each of our vehicles. We were not threatened, but their entry had a sobering and silencing impact – the tenor of the ride to Mozote shifted a bit. When you’re partially responsible for a brood of youth, who over the course of a week become like your own, a protective “Mamacita” air emerges. We turned left past a shell of an adobe home and made our way slowly down a narrow dirt road that eventually opened out into a square, the gathering area of Mozote. The eastern edge of the gathering area had a few adobe buildings. The western edge was a newly constructed church with an archaic stone baptismal font out front and painted memorial murals on each sidewall. To the north was a memorial to the Mozote massacre. The focal point of the memorial was a metal silhouette of a family holding hands, set in front of a bricked rounded wall with inset pine plaques woodburned with names of massacre victims. In over 90-degree heat, with the armed guards flanking our group, and two young children selling us woven bracelets and dried sweet coconut, we huddled in front of the memorial and listened to the story of one of the few survivors of the massacre, Rufina Amaya Marquez.

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    During the Civil War in El Salvador, this particular place where we were standing was a killing field. From the east side of the square, forced into an adobe home, Rufina had watched as her husband was bound, shot, and decapitated. Rufina’s story is also a story of unmitigated violence unleashed on women. Soldiers marched small groups of young women and girls, some as young as 10, into the hills beyond the square. Quoting Rufina, “We could hear the women and girls being raped on the hills … and the soldiers talking and joking, saying how much they liked twelve-year-olds.”1 As I listened, I surveyed our mission trip group of Senior Highs, and as both mother and pastor, I thought, “My God, we would have been like those young women marched to the hills, laughed about by the soldiers, buried in mass graves set afire.” It made me wonder how scripture speaks into such violence and guides our thinking about God when we hear such atrocities. In Memphis, and through our connection to Idlewild Elementary School as an adopt a school, this week we know intimately the pain wrecked by domestic violence. In one afternoon, a police officer lost his life, two children lost their father, and a wife lost her husband because of domestic violence gone unchecked. A kindergarten teacher at our adopt a school, Betsy Warren, now greets each day as a widow, with the knowledge that her life is radically changed, forever altered, and marked by senseless violence that rippled out from domestic violence known as battering. The church has something to say about supporting the widows, which guides our responses when we move in with casseroles and condolences. But when it comes to domestic violence, as a church, I believe we need to be on the front lines – and we aren’t. As both a mother and a pastor, I long for the church to be a place that is real and authentic – where we don’t shy away from hard facts of human suffering, especially among women as victims of domestic violence. Every two minutes in the United States, a woman is sexually assaulted. In the time it takes for us to worship this morning, 30 women will have been assaulted. Of those statistics, 44 percent of the victims of sexual assault are under 18 years of age, and 80% are under 30 years old. Sexual assault includes sexual harassment, rape, battering, and child sexual abuse. Sexual assaults are the most underreported crimes, with 60% of cases going unreported. Two-thirds of all sexual assaults are committed by someone known to the victim, often occurring in the home, and 38% of rapists are either by a friend or acquaintance.2 One out of three women will be raped in her lifetime.3 We cannot be silent in the face of such statistics. In her book, The Cry of Tamar: Violence Against Women and the Church’s Response , Pamela Cooper-White says of this biblical text, “Tamar’s story, sadly, is still modem: • Tamar was sexually assaulted, not by a stranger, but by someone she knew. • The violation took place not in a dark alley or in a desolate park, but by a member of her own family in his home. • Tamar was exploited through one of her most vulnerable traits – her kindness and her upbringing to take care of another. • Tamar said no; her no was not respected.4 I look at this difficult text from Tamar’s point of view. There are three points that I call “If only” moments. By “if only,” I mean, had the responses of the individuals been different, Tamar would not have suffered as a silenced, desolate woman. “The

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    word for desolate, somema, is used to refer to land that is laid waste.”5 I stake my life on the good news that God does not intend that any one individual of God’s good creation be left as land that is laid waste. One, if only Jonadab had given different advice. What if Jonadab had redirected Amnon’s love? The love is later described as lust. What if we think about the quality of our friendships and the advice we share and receive? What if we examine the places, things, and people we lust over and ask our community to hold us accountable for responsible behavior? Lust is real, but acting out of lust on the bad advice of friends, at the expense of another, is often violent and always wrong. How are we making space for healthy friendships in the church? A study by the American Psychological Association suggests that children, before finishing elementary school, have witnessed an estimated eight thousand murders and one hundred thousand acts of violence, based on a 27 hours of television per week average.6 When we passively expose our children to violence or actively initiate them with video games that invite violence, we allow them to detach from the important blessing and value of each individual and the connectivity among humanity. Such passive exposure allows us to distance ourselves from being in healthy relationships and friendships, and allows us to objectify others and desensitize ourselves to violence . I know this most in two ways, when a pastor who used to be in our presbytery said to me, “Our troubles all began with you – when we began ordaining women.” He had been desensitized to a woman’s value as a pastor. But I also know this as a parent, in arguments in our home around video games. Our good friends own Mortal Kombat, the game where you can rip off an opponent’s neck and “turn off’ the blood, and our son loves to play it. Our son’s a great kid, but this game is not right for the ways it objectifies a victim and desensitizes violence. My second “if only” moment is ifonly Amnon had not pretended to be sick. What if Amnon had been honest? Historically women were considered property; David could have made a choice to end Amnon’s torment. We hear that plea from Tamar herself when she says to Amnon, “I pray you, speak to the king; for he will not withhold me from you.” What if we examine the places where we put on fronts, acting like something that we’re not? What if we ask our community and as a community we speak truth with one another when we see falsehood? How are we making space for authenticity in the church? And the third “if only” moment is if only Tamar’s voice had been heard, honored and respected. What ?/Amnon had heard Tamar? The text tells us that Tamar, after the rape, put ashes on her head, tore her clothes, laid her hand on her head, and went away from the bolted door, crying aloud. Surely someone heard her. Surely. What is it that after that point the biblical text silences Tamar?7 What if ix had been different? What if the community had heard Tamar’s cry and responded with justice? What if Tamar’s life story was a model of mid-rash we used for raising our daughters and our sons – talking openly and honestly about issues of sexuality – especially, that no j means no, in all instances – that forced sex is violence, never intimacy? How are we j as a church creating safe spaces to hear, honor, and respect the hard stories? How are we listening to voices long silenced? When you’ve been a victim of violence, when you’ve thought you had a voice, but then discover the pain of shame, sometimes covered by silence’s secrets, or maybe

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    the pain is buried so deep you don’t even know why your life rages – what will you say to the church? If only you had been there. I pray it isn’t so. In El Salvador, Rufina Amaya Marquez escaped through the night after having lost her family to indescribable violence. When she found herself away from the soldiers, she says, “I prayed to God … to save my life. After that, I open up the earth with my bare hands and in the bowl of earth, I weep my tears.” I see Tamar holding Rufina’s tears from the earliest of generations. I pray it is so. I pray, as the church, we don’t shy away from hard texts, but we listen to them, particularly the voices that seem to be absent, and that with a critical eye we ask what is to be learned here? How might we make a difference, and do no harm? If only, with God’s help, we will make it so. To the God of Tamar and Rahab, Rufina Amaya and Betsy Warren, to the God who demands justice for all victims of domestic violence and sexual assaults; to One God be all glory, now and forever.

    Notes 1 “The Truth of El Mozote,” The New Yorker, December 6,1993. 2 U.S. Department of Justice, 2005 National Crime Victimization Study, 2005. 3 Pamela Cooper-White, The Cry of Tamar: Violence Against Women and the Church’s Response (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1995), 80. 4 Cooper-White, 4. 5 P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., 2 Samuel: A New Translation with Introduction, Notes, and Commentary, The Anchor Bible Series (New York: Doubleday, 1984), 321. 6 Cooper-White, 21. 7 Absalom hears Tamar and seeks revenge on her behalf and names his daughter after Tamar. However, the text does not allow Tamar’s advocacy for herself for the “wrong” done to her.

  • For such a time as this

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    For Such a Time as This

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

    “ For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will 8 house willי rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for ( 4:14 such a time as this ?”(Esther

    For such a time as this . … ” “ The first time I preached on this famous line from the Book of Esther, I was a brand new pastor serving my first congregation, and the wind was ruffling through my hair. It was a heady season of social ferment and change. Richard Nixon was still in the White House presiding over the devastation in Vietnam, but opposition to the war was taking firm hold in popular opinion. Students had shut down Columbia University, yet again. The New York Times was publishing the Pentagon Papers. The secret taping system, eventual instrument of the president’s downfall, was already whirring away in the Oval Office. Hundreds of veterans had marched on the Capi – toi, dramatically throwing away their medals and battle decorations in disgust over the futile and divisive conflict. The most often-played songs on the radio featured a razor-blade-voiced Janis Joplin moaning, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” and an equally raspy Rod Stewart shouting, “Wake up Maggie, I think I got somethin’ to say to you.” A prairie populist and peace activist by the name of George McGovern was well on the way to winning the Democratic nomination for president, a nomination he would accept by proclaiming ,“We reject the view of those who say, ‘America, love it or leave it.’ We reply, ‘Let us change it so we can love it more .’” One could feel the nation rising up to transform itself. Five years earlier, it had been hippies and Yippies and dreamy eyed revolutionaries marching in the streets , attempting to conjure up the moral suasion of the Civil Rights movement. But now , regular citizens—moms and grandparents, grocery store clerks, and scout leaders—were making a difference, changing the landscape of American life, turning the 60s misty vision of flower power into a mainstream grounds well for peace. Hugh Sidey, writing in his column for Life magazine, said ,“It is almost as if there is some mammoth force that has risen up and is sweeping toward an end to this particular episode of pain and 1 ”. cross-purpose Riding on the crest of this “mammoth force,” I entered the pulpit one Sunday to face my little flock—schoolteachers and tradesmen, retired folk and widows, mechan – ics and shop clerks. With the Bible open to Esther 4 ,1 told them that these were no ordinary times and that they were no ordinary people. They were God’s people, and this was God’s kairos. God was turning the wheel of history right before our very eyes. Who knew, perhaps they, like Queen Esther, had been raised up by God for this very moment, summoned to this fulcrum in time to take decisive action, to join with God in the unraveling of the powers and principalities. “Perhaps you,” I told them, my voice rising, “yes you, have come into the kingdom for just such a time as ”! this

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    It was a homiletical version of “Wake up Maggie, I think I got somethin’ to say to you.” Looking back now on this sermonic fanfare for brass, I am surprised I didn’t think to have the choir hum the theme from The Man of La Mancha in the background as I preached. After the sermon, my congregation climbed into their Ford Falcons and drove home. As for the kairos, the record will bear witness. The war in Vietnam eventually whimpered out, of course, only to be replaced by equally ambiguous conflicts—the Persian Gulf War, Desert Storm, and the interventions in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Richard Nixon would resign in disgrace, and his successor Gerald Ford would be defeated by Jimmy Carter, who would eventually go on television to speak about an “invisible threat” to America. “The threat,” he said, “is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.”2 Not too many months after I preached my “for such a time as this” sermon, I left the parish to go to graduate school and to enter a life of teaching. The congregation moved on to new pastoral leadership, but it eventually declined in membership to the point that, exhausted and discouraged, they decided to close the church. The flock wandered away, some to other congregations, some to nothing. The building was sold and became an acting school. George McGovern, who died last fall, was demolished in his bid for the presidency, losing the electoral college tally by an astonishing 520 to 17. “You know,” he said later, “sometimes, when they say you’re ahead of your time, it’s just a polite way of saying you have a real bad sense of timing.”

    The Peril of Ordinary Days The point of this reminiscence is not to spread gloom, or, as was alleged of President Carter, malaise, but simply to say that it is easier to preach “who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” when the “such a time” in question is perceived as ripe and full of promise, when the moral crisis is clear, when the call for decisive action comes with the sound of a trumpet. Recently, a young Christian activist, a practitioner and advocate of what has come to be called the “new Christian monasticism,” spoke at the seminary where I teach. The speaker, a pitch perfect blend of equal parts of a “Youth for Christ” evangelist, a Sojourners radical, and a John-Howard-Yoder-style proponent of the ethics of Jesus, spoke winsomely and persuasively for over an hour to a standing-room-only crowd in a large church on the campus. He touched on all the right issues – advocacy for the poor, health care for those on the margins, the need to resist “empire” in the name of Jesus. In the question-and-answer session that followed, someone asked, “How do you feel about speaking the truth while standing next to an American flag?” When the question was uttered, suddenly the attention of the audience was fastened on what had probably gone unnoticed by most up to that point: a furled and somewhat faded American flag tucked discretely into a comer of the sanctuary. The speaker hesitated a half beat and then said that he thought the flag shouldn’t be there, either that or the flags of every nation should be displayed in the church. Good answer. But abruptly someone in the middle of the darkened nave shouted, “Take it out! Take it out!” A ripple passed through the big crowd, and for a brief moment I wondered if we were

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    about to be treated to the sight of a wave of seminarians, active and retired pastors, and curious laity suddenly flinging aside cashmere sweaters and sport coats and bumrushing the chancel, dragging the flag to the front door, and tossing it unceremoniously into the street. We are eager for this moment to be the decisive moment, eager to be standing on the wild and windy mountain with the urgent challenge before us, so eager that, for a few seconds, some in the polite church crowd allowed themselves to see a dusty and neglected flag stashed in a sanctuary decades earlier as a moral challenge equivalent to the march from Selma to Montgomery. “This is the moment,” something deep inside whispered to our souls, “and who knows whether we have not come to the kingdom for such a moment as this?” Last October, TheNew York Review of Books, usually doggedly secular in outlook, published a long and admiring essay about two Christian martyrs, murdered for their faithful actions in the face of Hitler’s takeover of Germany: Dietrich Bonheoffer and his brother-in-law Hans von Dohananyi. The authors of the essay, Elisabeth Sifton (daughter of Reinhold Niebuhr) and Fritz Stem (a historian and emeritus professor at Columbia University), wrote, “To oppose such a regime [Nazism] was rare, and to do so in order to protect the sanctity of law and faith was rarer still. We are concerned here with two exceptional men who from the start of the Third Reich opposed the Nazi outrages.”3 They quoted Bonhoeffer in 1939, explaining to Reinhold Niebuhr why he must leave America to return to the dangers in Germany. The language is reminiscent of the Book of Esther:

    I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany….Christians in Germany are going to face the terrible alternatives of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose.4

    Sifton and Stem ended their essay with these stirring words:

    One truth we can affirm: Hitler had no greater, no more courageous, and more admirable enemies than Hans von Dohnanyi and Dietrich Bonhoeffer . Both men and those closest to them deserve to be remembered and honored. Dohnanyi summed up their work and spirit with apt simplicity when he said that they were “on the path that a decent person inevitably takes.” So few traveled that path – anywhere.5

    One can understand why the editors of The New York Review of Books found this essay timely and worthy of publication. In a season of national political paralysis, when the once throaty and hopeful cry “Change We Can Believe In!” seemed to be just one more slogan shipwrecked in the Sargasso Sea of futile causes, a time when Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum could write a book about places on the globe where the future is glowing with promise and call that book That Used to Be Us, a time when public integrity is in short supply and it is hard for our nation to see any promising way forward, small wonder the editors would find appealing

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    the story of people of real courage, people of conviction who acted decisively and bravely at a critical moment in history, people who chose for the good in a time when at least some people knew what the good was and were convinced that it was worth dying for. Who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this? What this is, at least in part, is a yearning for ecstasy, the excitement of being swept up out of the commonplace of our everyday lives and carried to a brave new mountain where our lives take on a drama and a significance they normally lack. In his poem “The Volunteer,” Herbert Asquith describes a simple clerk “who half his life had spent toiling at ledgers in a city grey, thinking that so his days would drift away with no lance broken in life’s tournament,” who loses his life fighting in World War I, and thus is gathered into one moment of English glory and “goes to join the men of Agincourt.”6 Civil War historian and President of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, underscores the capacity of war to generate this sought-for ecstasy:

    For all its ubiquity and its universality, war offers the attraction of the extraordinary —the escape from the gray everyday, from the humdrum into higher things. It is indeed striking how often the language of altitude is used by those describing the allure of war: it will lift, elevate, raise us toward the transcendent, and link us to the “sublime,” a word often repeated in nineteenth-century paeans to war. In the Civil War, civilians rushed to the battlefields when the fighting ceased—many to search for wounded kin, but others to experience a direct connection to what they described as a force beyond themselves and their accustomed lives.7

    Writing in the early 1970s, psychologist Rollo May described this hunger for ecstasy as it was found among World War II veterans. These young men, he said, had held routine jobs, such as “pouring gasoline into Buicks, Fords, and Chevrolets,” when swiftly the call to war had come, transforming their lives. May says,

    In France, they became heroes, the pride of the women; flowers were strewn in their paths, every honor thrust upon them. They were significant, possibly for the first time in their lives. Returning to this country, some could find only the same jobs pouring gasoline into Buicks, Chevrolets, and Fords, and those who found better jobs may have experienced a similar despair in the empty life of peacetime.8

    May quotes a French woman, a resistance worker during the war, who after the war lived a comfortable bourgeois life with her husband and son:

    My life is so unutterably boring nowaday s…. Anything is better than to have nothing at all happen day after day. You know that I do not love war or want it to return. But at least it made me feel alive, as I have not felt alive before or since.9

    May went on to argue that this post-war ennui and boredom led many in our soci­

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    ety to seek out near experiences to war, such as the saber-rattling of the old American Legion or the “search and destroy” tactics of the Commie-hunting of the early 1950s. He concludes:

    Everyone has a need for some sense of significance; and if we can’t make that possible, or even probable, in our society, then it will be obtained in destructive ways. The challenge before us is to find ways that people can achieve significance and recognition so that destructive violence will not be necessary.

    Much about May’s confidence that a sense of significance and recognition could sweep away tendencies toward destructive violence now seems hopelessly naïve, but this much remains: when life enters the doldrums, there springs up in the human heart a desire for ecstasy, a longing to be “outside of ourselves,” outside of the normal routine, a desire to hear the trumpet blow, to be summoned to something great, to know that this is the decisive moment and, who knows whether we have come into the kingdom for just such a time as this. But what if we are not in such a time? The wonderful Lutheran preacher of a previous generation, Edmund Steimle, once preached a fine sermon called “The Peril of Ordinary Days,” in which he claimed that faith’s deepest challenges are sometimes experienced not in life’s decisive turning points when the stakes are high and the call to courage is clear, but instead in the humdrum days when life seems to be in the doldrums and the path ahead seems to be an uneventful trek through a desert.

    My Soul Waits for the Lord… There is a growing recognition among the old mainline churches that something is badly broken. In the 1960s, critics like Pierre Berton and Gibson Winter could complain that congregations had become captive to a bourgeois suburban mentality. Berton spoke of “the comfortable pew” and Winter of “the suburban captivity of the churches.”10 Christian churches were seen as rich, fat, and complacent institutions of the establishment. Today, though, many Protestant congregations don’t seem smug; they seem mainly tired and dispirited. In many churches, the pews are emptier, the people grayer, the gospel muddied, the mission unclear. As the Book of Hebrews puts it, many of our churches have “drooping hands and weak knees.” We soldier on, but it is clear that the glory has departed, that God is breaking us down in order to build up something new. But what? The future is not clear. And because the future is not clear, the peril of these ordinary days is that we will attempt to force God’s hand, to transform a time when disciples are called to prayer, to repentance, and to patient obedience into a romantic time when we must ourselves heroically seize the wheel of history. After all, we tell ourselves, who knows if we have come to the kingdom for such a time as this? Particularly silly, it seems to me, is the current temptation to view with alarm that 20% of the American population now claims no religious affiliation – the so-called “nones” – and to go chasing after them with radically re-vamped approaches to worship and church life. If these “nones” desire an intense spirituality, as the polls seem to indicate, if they hunger for what Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly call the

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    experience of “whooshing up,”11 the ecstatic thrill that accompanies all transcendent moments, whether they be encountering the holy or watching Roger Fedderer play tennis, then why don’t we gerrymander worship to create such “whooshing up” experienees ? To paraphrase the woman from the French resistance, “Our life is so unutterably boring nowadays. …Anything is better than to have nothing at all happen day after day. At least it makes us feel alive, So why not?” Because the Christian faith, with its radical view of the incarnation, is betting its life on a different understanding of how we experience the holy than “whooshing up;” that’s why. Equally overreaching is the claim that if we knew how to look, we could see that what seems like a time of breaking down is actually a new Great Awakening, a massive and exciting shift in spirituality happening all around us, a new wave of alternative religiosity that summons us to flee from the prison house of “conventional Christianity.” It will take courage to leave our prayers and sermons and sacraments behind, we are told, but, hey, who knows whether we have not come into the kingdom for just such a time as this. As one advocate of the new awakening puts it,

    And the awakening? What will it look like? It entails waking up and seeing the world as it is, not as it was. Conventional, comforting Christianity has failed. It does not work. For the churches that insist on preaching it, the jig is up. We cannot go back, and we should not want to. Lot’s wife turned to a pillar of salt when she looked back to catch one last glimpse of the past as her family fled to an unknown future (Gen. 19: 26). Centuries later, Jesus reminded his followers, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9: 62) .12

    I believe, to the contrary, that we are instead in a season when we are called to say with the psalmist, “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.” We don’t like to find ourselves in such a time. We prefer to be in the fourth quarter with the score tied, the seconds ticking away, the game on the line, and we are taking the snap to throw the touchdown pass. How disappointing it must have been for the disciples to hear this word from the risen and ascending Christ: “Wait in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” Waiting on God is, perhaps, the hardest test of faith. As H. Richard Niebuhr once said, “It may be that the greatest moral problems of the individual or of a society arise when there is nothing to be done.” By “nothing to be done,” Niebuhr did not mean resignation, but hopeful waiting on God. Some people do nothing because they are defeatist or fatalistic, but, said Niebuhr, “There is yet another way of doing nothing. It appears to be highly impracticable because it rests on the well-nigh-obsolete faith that there is a God—a real God.” He went on to say,

    The inactivity of radical Christianity is not the inactivity of those who call evil good: it is the inaction of those who do not judge their neighbors because they cannot fool themselves into a sense of superior righteousness. It is not the inactivity of a resigned patience, but of a patience that is full of hope and is based on faith. It is not the inactivity of the non-combatant, for it knows that there are no non-combatants, that everyone is involved,

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    that China is being crucified (though the term is very inaccurate) by our sins and those of the whole world. It is not the inactivity of the merciless, for works of mercy must be performed though they are only palliates to ease present pain while the process of healing depends on deeper, more actual and urgent forces .But if there is no God, of if God is up in heaven and not in time itself, it is a very foolish inactivity.13

    For many American Christian congregations, ours is a time, like that of the boy Samuel, when “the word of God is rare and visions are not widespread.” But we serve a God of promise who will for us, as he did for the faithful in Samuel’s day, raise up a new prophetic word. There will come a time when the Lord will again appear at Shiloh and the word of God will flow in abundance. Until that time comes, we should “stay in the city until we are clothed with power.” It is not an easy wait, but this is time we have been given, and who knows whether we have not come into the kingdom for just such a time as this?

    Notes 1 Hugh Sidey, “The Presidency: Something Different This Spring,” Life (April 21,1971), 28. 2 President Jimmy Carter, “Crisis of Confidence,” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features /primary-resources/carter-crisis/. 3 Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stem, “The Tragedy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi,” The New York Review of Books (October 25,2012), 69. 4 Ibid., 70. See “The Death of a Martyr,” Christianity and Crisis (June 25,1945). 5 Ibid., 72. 6 Herbert Asquith, The Volunteer and Other Poems (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1916), 7. 7 Drew Gilpin Faust, “Telling War Stories,” NewRepublic 242/9 (June 30,2011), 22. 8 Rollo May, Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence (New York: Norton, 1972), 178. 9 Ibid., 179. 10 See Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew: A Critical Look at Christianity and the Religious Establishment in the New Age (New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1965); Gibson Winter, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches: An Analysis of Protestant Responsibility in the Expanding Metropolis (New York: Macmillan, 1962). 11 Herbert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New York: Free Press, 2011), 200 et passim. 12 Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening (New York: Harper Collins, 2012). 13 H. Richard Niebuhr, “The Grace of Doing Nothing,” The Christian Century (March 23,1932).

  • Observations on inter-faith dialogue

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    Observations on Inter-faith Dialogue

    V. Bruce Rigdon

    Chicago, Illinois

    I have very much appreciated the opportunity to read W. Eugene Marsh’s essay entitled “Sharing the Gospel in a Religiously Diverse World.” Gene is a friend of many years for whom I continue to have both affection and deep respect. I think that his essay is a very good beginning for talking about the reasons for taking inter-faith dialogue seriously and some of the disciplines which it requires. If I have any criticism to offer, it would simply be that I do not think that the essay goes far enough. In these brief remarks I would like to concentrate on two things. First, that interfaith dialogue and relations are more important than ever before precisely because so much of the violence and terror in our time claims to be grounded in religious faith and ideology and reflects the bitter and long-standing conflicts among the world’s religions. Second, that the search to resolve such conflicts through dialogue and cooperation will inevitably require profound changes in each of these religious traditions and that includes our own Christian tradition as well. In his essay Gene doesn’t write about the fact that religion has been the cause and the source of incredible violence in human history. For all of the benefits that religions have sought to foster in and for their adherents, the violence which they have espoused and the amount of pain and suffering which they have often caused are incalculable. And there is considerable evidence to suggest that Christianity and its churches have historically been among the most aggressive and violent of all of the world’s religions. It is not necessary at this point to draw up a list of the churches’ involvement in acts of terror, violence, and injustice. From the Crusades to the Inquisition , from the Salem witch trials to the forced conversion of native peoples, one could make the case that violence and Christianity go together like hand and glove. What is it in Christian faith and church practice, one could well ask, what is it in the ethos of Christianity itself that has led the religion of Jesus to become such a source of violence? The world of the twenty-first century is a very dangerous place. Its first decade seems to suggest that it may become an even more violent century than the one that preceded it. What appears to be somewhat different is the prominence of the world’s religions as the causes and excuses for much of this violence. Whether Islamic terrorists, radical Jewish Zionists, Christian fundamentalists, or extremists in any of the other world religious communities, there appear to be growing numbers of presumably religious groups which interpret their holy texts and traditions in such narrow and literal terms that they are led to make an inevitable connection with violence as necessary religious acts. Many of those involved in the spread of this violence claim legitimacy for what they do on the basis of the teachings of one or another of the world religions. So whether or not our religious communities are in fact responsible for violence and destruction, we are all of us involved, whether as cause or as excuse for violence and death. In light of all of this, we can no longer afford to view inter-faith dialogue as simply a special interest or hobby for church elites or people with time on their hands. As Gene has so rightly pointed out, it is now for us and our children quite literally a matter of life and death. If we once viewed inter-religious dialogue as a conversa-

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    tion in which we compared and discussed what we do and don’t believe, it is such no longer. What is at stake is whether religion will become a blessing or a curse for human life in our time. We can seek together to build a lasting peace for the whole human family, or we can allow others to continue to build walls of separation and to plant and nurture seeds of suspicion, fear, hatred, and misunderstanding which will do untold damage to the efforts to foster and work for the transformation of this world which God loves. Let me say it quite bluntly. If we once believed that the mission of the church(es) was the evangelization of the world, that is, the conversion of every man, woman, and child on earth to a form of faith and life similar to our own, it is now evident, it seems to me, that the love of Christ constrains us to work with brothers and sisters of all religious communities to end violence, most especially religiously motivated violence and to struggle together to make every nation a place that is safe, a place of peace and well-being. This must begin with transforming the way that we understand and treat one another. At the very least it means that we must get to know “the others” by learning to listen to them, not for the purpose of besting them or converting them, but rather to come to understand something of who they really are and what experienees have powerfully shaped them. Our children will never learn the important skills and disciplines of dialogue, so necessary for peacemaking, if they do not experience us as people who are good listeners, even when we may not like what we hear. Gene does well to remind us that with our rapidly changing demographics, it is no longer necessary to cross oceans in order to share in a life of dialogue with people of other faiths. They are already becoming our neighbors and our fellow citizens. Our children and their children are already going to school and growing up together. The behaviors of our congregations will speak powerfully to our children about whether the meaning of life is to be discovered in confrontation and conflict or in dialogue and cooperation. They will see soon enough whether our religious talk about such things as “the Covenant” is in fact code for keeping people out who are not like us or gathering all of us into a blessed vision of diversity in community, the reign of God. A life of dialogue is in the end a profoundly theological and spiritual matter. Dialogue requires a special quality, a spirit of openness, of love toward the other. Theologically it affirms that God, who truly loves us all, may have something of importance to say to Christians and to our churches, something to teach us precisely through people of other faiths and through the gifts that God has given them. Among these gifts is that each of us as human beings is created in the image of God and that we are all of infinite value precisely because we are infinitely loved by God. This is, it seems to me, so important that I want to say a little more about it. As an undergraduate student many years ago, I spent my junior year abroad at the University of Hong Kong and Chung Chi College. This was the result of a special program of the Presbyterian Church designed to enable American students to study for a year in colleges and universities in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. For that year I was part of an almost entirely Chinese environment. I lived in a student hostel in which I was the only non-Chinese resident. My friends and classmates were all Chinese, my food and drink were Chinese, my studies were about things Chinese, and even the congregation where I worshipped prayed in Mandarin. It was one of the most significant experiences of my life. I learned many fascinating things about what it meant to be Chinese in the middle of the twentieth century. But perhaps

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    one of the most important things that I learned was that I myself would never be Chinese! I could appreciate many things about Chinese history and culture. I learned to enjoy Chinese cooking and to admire Chinese calligraphy and art. But what my Chinese friends had taught me precisely through their hospitality and welcome was to know and understand myself in quite a new way, a way that only our differences could have made clear to me. My appreciation of them became permanently part of my own identity. The differences between us continue to remind me of who I am. These new friends made me aware that much about who I am has to do with things over which I have little or no control, save how I respond to them. Yet these things have significantly shaped my life. That I am white, male, middle class, American , Protestant, and a member of the Rigdon family are all elements that have made me who and what I am. As a matter of fact, in the years after I returned to the U.S., many of these elements became issues of social revolution as well as matters of my personal identity. If the Chinese had given me a radically new perspective on what it meant to be an American, so African Americans forced me to begin to understand what it means to be white in America. They did that precisely by allowing me to see what it meant to be black in America. They did that by forcing me to understand who they were and what they were going through as the victims of massive injustice and discrimination in America. And so it also was with my identity as a male. It was women, including my own wife and daughter, who made me come to terms with my identity as a male by teaching me something of what it is like to live as women in a male-dominated, patriarchal society. More recently I have had to come to terms with the issues of sexual orientation as friends who are gay and lesbian have made me aware of their painful experiences of exclusion, rejection, and discrimination, especially by the church. My point is a very simple one. We inevitably learn who we are from others, especially those who in significant ways are different from ourselves. It is through coming to know and understand them, an experience which involves both pain and delight, that we learn not only who we are, but also what possibilities we have to change or transform the complex elements that together form our identities. Integral to this process is the discovery that we did not by ourselves create de novo all of these elements but rather received them as the result of our own histories, cultures, ethnic and racial backgrounds, countries of origin, families, and the religious communities into which we may have been born. We appropriately respond to some of these things with profound gratitude as gifts that we did not earn. These are realities which we want to affirm and preserve. They come from the generations before us. At the same time we have inherited things which are dark, ugly, and destructive. If we do not see them for what they are, if we do not call them by their right names, we are destined to become their victims. Our task and that of our generation is to find ways to reject them and transform them in the light of what is good, true, and beautiful. In inter-faith dialogue and active cooperation, the same sorts of th i ngs are demanded of us. We need to listen to each other critically, carefully, and compassionately. We must take the risk of speaking the truth to one another in love. In coming to know those of other religious communities and traditions, we have the possibility to come to know and understand ourselves in new ways. In some situations we will learn new gratitude and reaffirm what we have received, while in others we will be forced to

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    make critical judgments that call for us to find ways to change who we are and what we understand our faith to mean. The fact is that none of us remains the same when we experience real dialogue. We continue to be as distinct as when we entered the encounter. Christians remain Christians, Moslems remain Moslems, Jews remain Jews. But we are not the same Christians and the same Moslems and the same Jews as we were before. And thus we come to understand something about the meaning of unity in diversity! All of this has some very serious theological implications. It begins, as we have said, with the recognition that every person is created in God’s image and is valued and loved by God. That extends to the recognition that God has not chosen to be absent from the life and history of those who are neither Christians nor Jews. And that is why we need to listen to their stories and hear their testimonies. It is why we need to experience their cultures, their customs, and their rituals. We will certainly discover some common ground as human beings and as people of faith, but it is our differences which may well prove the most instructive. We will not end up with some syncretistic blending of our spiritual insights. But we may very well inspire one another to be more faithful Christians, Jews, Moslems, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, etc. whose understanding of God has become deeper because of our encounters with one another. I suppose that for many of us Christians the issue about dialogue with people of other faiths turns on how we understand who Jesus is. For some of us Jesus represents certainty and unchanging permanence. He is the builder and sustainer of the high walls of a fortress that offers the church safety, security, and an unchanging faith. But for others Jesus is the bridge-builder who encourages us to take the risk and cross to the other side where we may discover and encounter the other flocks about which the Lord spoke and who also belong to God. It will not be easy to challenge the religious communities and institutions in our world to be transformed into agents of non-violence ,justice, reconciliation, and peace. But that is what we as Christians are called to be about in the coming months and years. Our severely weakened national church structures and what is left of the ecumenical movement seem at this point hardly up to the task. But the great new opportunity and blessing is that this is a challenge that can be taken up by every congregation in every community across our land. May God give us the courage, imagination, and wisdom to undertake this urgent mission, and to do it together.

  • Following the four Gospels into Eastertide

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    Following the Four Gospels into Eastertide

    John B. Rogers

    Montreat, North Carolina

    Last year during the week after Easter, I met for Bible study with a group of ministers. Hoping our study might yield suggestions for preaching in the Sundays of Eastertide, we chose the endings of the four Gospels as our focus. The Gospels have in common, of course, lengthy accounts of Jesus’ Passion and Resurrection, each devoting the single largest block of material to that final week of Jesus’ life. All four understand the Resurrection to be the triumph of God’s redeeming purpose in Jesus Christ. However, it is instructive to notice how each of the evangelists, as he brings his Gospel to a close, draws the meaning of the Resurrection into focus and trains its light upon the life of faith and church and world. Preaching possibilities are legion.

    Mark 16:1-8 “He Goes Before You” The last sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace concludes with an ellipsis – three dots. The vast implications of that extraordinarily rich novel trail off into all the unfinished business of human life, the currents of time and human story running into the unknown future. Tolstoy saw no way to write “finis,” as if it had all come to an end. So also might it be with the last verse of Mark’s Gospel. In his commentary on Mark, Lamar Williamson begins the section on chapter 16 with this riddle: “When is an ending not the end? When a dead man rises from the tomb – and when a Gospel ends in the middle of a sentence.”1 The reference is to the Greek text of Mark 16:8 where the last word is not the adjective “afraid,” as our English translations suggest, but the conjunction for or because. It is possible, therefore, to end the sentence not with a period but with an ellipsis: “So [the women] went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone; they were afraid because . . . ”(Mark 16:8). No period. No “The End.” Mark brings his readers, with the women, to the open mouth of an empty tomb to stand trembling before the words of a white-robed messenger: “He has risen; he is not here … he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him . . . “(Mark 16:6-7). In this moment and with this announcement a line is drawn that marks the end of human possibility in determining our relationship to Jesus Christ. The empty tomb is not a human discovery, but a divine announcement. It is a sign that Someone Else is in control of things. Its purpose, as Karl Barth observed, “is to show that the Jesus who was crucified, who died and was buried, has been delivered from death, and therefore from the grave by the power of God — that He, the Living, is not to be sought among the dead.”2 That “not here” prohibits once for all every assumption that Jesus can be located by human action such as crucifixion and burial. The empty tomb is God’s prohibition against our putting Jesus anywhere: in a grave physically, a doctrine intellectually, an experience spiritually, and thus have him available. It stands as both symbol and fact that the initiative in dealing with Jesus belongs not to us, but to him. And yet, for all the necessity of the empty tomb as a reminder that the Resurrec­

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    tion brings us to the limit of human possibility, the content of Easter is not that the women learned that the tomb was empty. The gospel of the Resurrection is that when they had lost Jesus through death, he sought and found them as the risen Lord. And so, overcome with trembling and astonishment, they fled the tomb. Is this not, after all, the only way human beings can recognize and know the Resurrection – as a thing totally unexpected, utterly mysterious, beyond human capacity to grasp or understand, much less control? After all our possible explanations have been exhausted , and all the interpretations from our poor literalisms and pitiful rationalisms are in, is this not the only way we can take our place with those three women, namely, to know shuddering amazement? As James L. Mays observed, “They would see him in Galilee ! That was a possibility and a promise that changed the world Now he filled all their tomorrows. He was no longer in the past confined to memory, but at the edge of every present.”3 The Resurrection of Jesus is God’s seizing, God’s claiming of each and every and all life, of the whole of human existence, of the whole of time and nature and history. For life itself, and each life in particular, is now a life of which God in Christ threatens, offers, promises, intends to become the subject. “And they said nothing to anyone; they were afraid because . . . .” The meaning and promise of the Resurrection do, in fact, trail off into all the unfinished business of life where the problem is no longer that we cannot find Jesus Christ, but that we cannot escape him.

    John 21 : “Feed My Sheep ” John ends with a scene that Mark’s ending foreshadows – the risen Christ now awaiting the disciples in Galilee where they lived and worked. And so it happened. After a night of fishing that had not gone well, a figure on the shore called to them: “Any luck? No? Cast over there!” The result was a full net, and John’s excited shout, “It is the Lord!” It was just as they had been promised. What follows has captured the imagination of Christendom. The disciples join Jesus on the beach where he had prepared a breakfast of charcoal -broiled fish and bread. He “took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish” (21:13). The echo of sacramental language is intentional, recalling both the Last Supper and the place and power of the Eucharist in the early church. Moreover, the scene depicts what is sometimes called the sacrament of reconciliation or the sacrament of the second chance. Turning to Simon Peter, Jesus asks three times in succession, “Simon, do you love me?” Character is formed in accordance with whom and what we love; by that to which we commit life, energy, and loyalty; by what we do when we must make choices, arrive at decisions, and act. Painfully aware of his failures as disciple and friend, Peter can only call Christ to confirm what his own denials and abandonment gainsay. “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you !” And Christ answers not by repeated assurances, but by commands that promise Peter a future in his Lord’s service: “Feed and tend my sheep; and follow me.” Surely we have our own denials and betrayals that cause our prayers to echo that of Simon Peter: “You know and believe about me, O Lord, what I dare not claim for myself – that I do love you!” However imperfect our love of Christ, Christ’s knowledge and love of us offer us a future with him and encourage and sustain us in

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    the work that awaits. Earlier John reported Jesus ’ figurative reference to himself as “the good shepherd” (John 10: 1-30, cf. Ps. 23). Here again this rich metaphor depicts the risen Christ as the model shepherd. Having laid down his life for the sheep (10:11), even sheep outside the fold (10:16), he has taken up his life again and his shepherd’s identity. “My sheep,” he says. These words ring with reassurance of our value to him. The good shepherd knows his sheep, calls them by name, and holds them secure in his hand (10:3,28). Now Christ hands over the care of his own to Simon Peter and, by implication, to the disciples, and to pastors through whom he continues to shepherd his flock. A ministry of feeding and tending is wide-ranging. Encompassing basic physical needs of food, clothing, and shelter, it has decided social, economic, and political dimensions as well. In ajournai for preachers, however, might we agree that nothing can take priority over the proclamation and teaching of the gospel as food for the soul – the actuality of God’s grace, mercy, and steadfast love thrown around human life? John begins his Gospel by declaring that the Word who was in the beginning with God and who was God has become flesh in Jesus Christ — that in Jesus we have to do with God’s very self. “God does not, if Jesus is the Logos, first know himself as an essence,” writes Robert Jenson. God is not first of all an impersonal, abstract, unknowable “something,” but is with, for, and among us as a particular and specific “Someone” who knows us, and whom we can know.4 Electing to be God in this way, God draws us into the drama of the redemption of the world in Jesus Christ, underscoring the deepest truth about human existence and about every life. People still need words that witness to God in our midst as the essential environment of the human heart, assuring us, as Albert Outler expresses it, of “our existence from God, our life lived before God, and life upheld by God’s encompassing presence and omnipotent grace.”5 In this light we learn how God deals with the sin the world cannot turn off or throw off or redefine or explain away or escape. Just so are we more likely to grow into that faithfulness, forgiveness, and compassion which the world has such a hard time getting right. By contrast, a Christian witness, so-called, that is just one more bid by a person or group for power and the prerogative of telling everybody else what to think, how to behave, what to believe, how to talk, and how to vote is both overbearing and boring. My friend Tom Currie reminded me recently that the Christian faith is remarkably undictatorial; and when it becomes dictatorial, it is alarmingly un-Christian. In any case, better to wonder at the mystery of God’s grace than about another’s spiritual status or calling, as Peter discovered (21:21). John concludes with a wonderful exaggeration in verse 25. Before we disdain such hyperbole, we might follow Raymond Brown’s advice and consider Origen’s interpretation of this verse: “It is impossible to commit to writing all those particulars that belong to the glory of the Savior.” That, after all, is not far from Paul’s claim that in Christ “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (C01.2:3).6

    Matthew 28:16-20: “I Am With You Always” At the end of the Gospel of Matthew, the eleven disciples are gathered with the risen Christ upon a mountain. Here we read, without any hint of disapproval, “When

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    they saw him they worshipped him; but some doubted” (Matt. 28:17). To these cherished friends, worshipping and doubting, Jesus issues a final claim, a final command, and a final promise. The claim: “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me” (Matt .28:18). “All authority” belongs to God who alone can confer it upon another without forfeiting it – the Lord to His Messiah, the Father to the Son. (See below Luke’s account of the Ascension to make the same point.) From the outset Matthew identifies Jesus as the one in whom God’s promises and God’s purpose are fulfilled. He is Messiah, the Son of David who will bring in God’s reign of justice and rule of grace (Matt. 1:1). He is the son of Abraham in whom all the families of the earth will be blessed (cf. Gen. 12:3). He will be called Emmanuel – “God with us.” That is, he will bear the very name of God – “I am the one who will be with you” (Exod. 3:14) – the promise of God’s effective presence with and for God’s people and God’s world. Matthew even reflects the Old Testament in his fascination with mountains as the setting for authoritative teaching and revelation. In reporting the Sermon on the Mount in chapters 5-7, Matthew says, in effect, that in Jesus Christ the Torah of God given to Moses on Mt. Sinai is set firmly, visibly, personally in the midst of human existence. Here is the word of God with us in person. In reporting the Transfiguration , Matthew locates it upon “a high mountain,” in keeping with the tradition (Matt. 17:1-8, cf. Mark 9:2-8; Luke 9:28-36). And so again at the end, Matthew has us meet the risen Christ upon the mountain where he announces: “All authority … has been given to me.” There follows Christ’s final command: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations … (Matt. 28:19a). “All nations” says this “son of Abraham” who bears and fulfills that ancient promise of universal blessing. “Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit . . .” (Matt. 28:19b). When a child is baptized “into the name of the Father,” she is given into God’s keeping. We might open a service of baptism with words from Isaiah of the Exile that are meant for each and every one of us: “Fear not for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, you are mine” (Isa. 43:1). When a person is baptized “in the name of the Son,” he is taken into Christ’s life, death, and resurrection , marked and claimed as Christ’s own, “hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). “Teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:20). The Christian life is marked by growth in grace. Devotion, gratitude, and obedience deepen as faith’s search for understanding is fed by able, willing teachers gifted in speaking carefully and faithfully about God and the gospel in ways that are reasoned and reasonable, true to scripture, and that convey an authentic sense of grace and mystery. All Christians are called to bear faithful witness to Jesus Christ as God with us. Pastors, however, are preeminently teachers ordained by a community of faith to speak with clarity and good sense about God and the importance of God’s reality and grace for an authentic human existence secured within God’s unfailing presence and reconciling love. Just so might the people of God, in word and deed, come to be what Paul described as “[Letters] of Christ… written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of the human heart” (II Cor. 3:3). Paul is talking about the visible word of our lives, lived in and by the power of the Word incarnate

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    working among and in us, who is “able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:20). Christ’s final command is undergirded by his final promise: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt.28:20). Matthew began his gospel with the story of the birth of Emmanuel – God with us (1:23). Later, he reported Jesus’ promise: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (18:20). Here at the end, the promise that is God’s own name and the name that is God’s promise are now on the lips of the risen Christ. Matthew sets forth the powerful assurance that the church worships and carries on its Lord’s commission to the close of the age in the presence and on the authority of the Son of God. This one in whom God is present with us in person, and through whom God exercises God’s gracious and redeeming rule, is our faithful companion in every moment of life and death and destiny.

    Luke 24:44-53; Acts 1:1-11: “And He Shall Reign Forever and Ever” Christ’s claim to “all authority” at the end of Matthew is given full dramatic expression by Luke. Luke’s Gospel ends, and a second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, begins with Christ’s appointment of the disciples as witnesses, the promise of the Holy Spirit to empower their mission, and the Ascension of the risen Christ into heaven. In the final verses of the gospel, Luke simply reports, “Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven” (24:50). Then, as if to review, the Ascension is described dramatically in Acts 1: 6-11, the only place in the New Testament where the event itself is reported. However, as with the Resurrection, the meaning and significance of the Ascension reverberate throughout the New Testament. Consider Phil. 2:9-11; Col. 1:15-18; Eph. 1:20-22; I Tim. 3:16. Revelation begins with John’s salutation: “Grace to you and peace from . . . Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth” (Rev. 1:4-5); and John later heard a heavenly Chorus sing, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever” (Rev. 11:15). The Ascension represents the coronation of Christ as King of Kings. In his Catechism for the Church of Geneva of 1545, John Calvin wrote that Christ’s Ascension to the right hand of God simply means the “regnum Christi” – that Jesus Christ reigns over heaven and earth. “The right hand of God,” Calvin said, “is a metaphor taken from princes, who are wont to place at their right hand those whom they make their viceregeants.”7 Commenting on Calvin’s catechetical instruction, Karl Barth wrote, “The expression ‘right hand of God’ does not designate a place, but a function, that of God’s lieutenant, the sovereign’s minister. Christ holds in his hands the power of God. He governs in God’s name … God’s power has become his. There is no divine almightiness without Jesus Christ. To declare that God governs the world amounts to saying that Jesus Christ governs the world.”8 The Ascension is God ’s “Amen !” to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ – the Father’s “Well done!” to his only begotten Son. We are to understand God’s sovereign rule not in terms of ruthless, impersonal power, but in terms of invincible grace and redeeming love as we know it in Jesus Christ.

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    It is no surprise that Luke’s gospel ends with this cosmic perspective. All along, he has emphasized the universal scope of Christ’s significance. He traces the genealogy of Jesus not just to Abraham and the beginning of salvation history (Matt. 1:2-17), but to Adam and the beginning of human existence (Luke 3:23-38). His gospel has often been called the gospel for the Gentiles because of the favorable references to Samaritans, the important place given women among the followers of Jesus, and the insistence that the good news is for Gentiles as well as Jews. Furthermore, in Acts Luke makes the Ascension the link to Pentecost and the gift of the Holy Spirit to people “from every nation under heaven” (Acts2:5). In Acts 2:9-11 Luke pictures humanity, scattered and estranged, brought together by the power of this mighty word of God in Christ who overcomes the curse of Babel; who, in fulfillment of the promise to Abraham, blesses “all the families of the earth”; who reconciles the world to God; and who demonstrates that the One by whom all things were created is the One in whom all things hold together. In his Ascension Christ belongs to the world, to the ages, to the cosmos as the risen and reigning Lord, and all belong to him! In this assurance and confidence, those early witnesses answered Christ’s command to take the gospel to all nations (Luke 24:17). This same conviction undergirds the church’s witness today: that, as Barth declared, “The power revealed in the reconciliation of the cross, in the forgiveness of sins, in the act of divine justice and mercy is identical with the power of Almighty God over the whole world … .”9 Jesus Christ is God’s sovereign decision not merely to offer us a deal or to increase our options, but to claim us as God’s own possession and to give us life. The deepest truth about each of us is that our lives are under the gracious sovereignty of Christ, whether or not we know or acknowledge it. “The difference between the church and the world is that in the church the Lord of the world is acknowledged and confessed, whereas in the world he is still ignored. But the same Lord rules over both.”10 No wonder the history of the Christian church, for all its blemishes and blights, for all the cowardice and failure of many of its number, is nonetheless a stirring drama of ignorance overcome by Christ who alone is the truth; of death undone by him who alone is the life; of evil defeated by him who alone is the righteousness of God; of tyranny overcome by him who alone is “the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death” (The Barmen Declaration 8:11). Thanks be to God that G. F. Handel set the meaning of the Ascension to earthly music for all time. Luke surely would have been among the first to stand for the Hallelujah Chorus. “The kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign forever and ever. King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Hallelujah!”

    Notes 1 Lamar Williamson, Jr., Mark Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Atlanta : John Knox Press, 1983), 283. 2 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics(Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1960), Vol. 3 Part 2 The Doctrine ofCreation , 453. 3 James L. Mays, “He Goes Before You,” As I See It Today, UnionTheological Seminary, 1978. 4 Robert W. Jenson, “What If It Were True? ” Reflections 4 (Princeton, Center of Theological Inquiry, Spring 2001), 14.

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    5 Albert C. Outler, “The Pastor as Theologian,” in The Pastor As Theologian, eds. Shelp and Sunderland (New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1988), 20. 6 Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John 13-21, The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 1130. 7 Karl Barth, The Faith of the Church: A Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed According to Calvin’s Catechism (NewYork: LivingAge Books, 1958), 109. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Barth, 111.

  • All the way home: four approaches to the same text

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    All the Way Home: Four Approaches to the Same Text

    Mark Ramsey Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, North Carolina

    Rabbi Edwin H. Friedman offered countless gifts to those of us who are involved in ministry with his insights about family systems and how they are at work in faith communities. In the book A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, Friedman writes:

    The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choicest words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech.1

    Having heard of congregations who had made a sermon series out of a single biblical text, my colleague and I decided to try a similar approach for Lent.We reviewed possibilities: a part of Romans 8 or Romans 12, the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and John 3 seemed to each hold possibilities. We kept returning to Luke 15 and three parables told in that chapter about the lost—lost sheep, lost coin, lost child. The final of these three, often called “Jesus’ masterpiece,” about the Prodigal Son/Elder Brother/Loving Parent seemed to fit best in our congregational context. It is no great insight to say that family dynamics are everywhere in church life, but especially mindful of Freidman’s insights, it seemed that this parable held the potential for a weeks-long church conversation. What surprised us was the depth of the conversations and capacity to go deeper and deeper into both the text and congregational needs over the course of several weeks. Using Freidman’s words, the text stirred up conversation of our motivation (or lack thereof) to change. The wisdom that “people can only hear you when they are moving toward you” took on renewed depth when we looked at the actions of all in the parable, particularly the parent. The sermon series led us into genuine, multi-dimensional conversations with congregants about the nature of parables, the different points of entry into this text, their own family systems, as well as new insights about their relationship with God. We found that after a couple of weeks of the series, folks were approaching us to talk about their own lives and faith experiences and where they found themselves in the parable. Even one of our elders who offered at the beginning that he would endure the series because he had “heard it and heard it and didn’t need to hear it again, let alone for four weeks” was joining the conversations. By the end of the four-week series on this one text, we couldn’t quite believe it, but we wished it could have continued for several more weeks. The opportunity to go deep into one text with a congregation over an extended time turned out to be a Lenten gift to all of us.

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    “Exposed” -1 Corinthians 1:18-25, Luke 15:1:19 For more than three years, the lake on Jack Mewboum’s ranch in central Texas held a secret at its murky bottom: a 1999 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. His grandson was the first one to notice the top of the car peeking out of the water. It wasn’t luck or even fate—it was drought. The water level in the seven-acre lake has dropped about five feet from a lack of rain. Stand at the lake’s edge today, and in any other year you would be standing nearly waist-deep in water. Mr. Mewboum called a local constable, and with the help of a diver and a tow truck, the vehicle was slowly dragged out. Inside, still buckled into the driver’s seat, were the remains of a young woman who had been missing since July 2008.The young woman’s family had reported her missing but had no inkling of what happened during the three-plus agonizing years. The rancher and the constable have found themselves calling a cruel thing like a drought a strange sort of blessing. “If it wouldn’t have been for the drought,” the constable said, “she’d probably still be in the car in that lake.” With this severe drought, objects of all kinds that had been submerged for years, decades, and even centuries are being revealed. Some of the discovered items are common debris like computer monitors, tires, and sunken boats—but also longsubmerged marble tombstones—whole cemeteries from the nineteenth century have become visible. At one lake north of Austin, where the water level has dropped 23 feet, fishermen found a human skull at the edge of the water last month. In East Texas, the drought has hurt Donna McWilliams as it has other Texans. She and her husband lost trees and sold off cattle because of a lack of hay, but it also helped her. She is the sister of the young women whose body was found in the car in the lake. Ms. Oliver’s relatives had mailed fliers with her picture to homeless shelters and clinics, always hoping, always wondering.“I guess ‘closure’ is the word,” said Ms. McWilliams, one of Ms. Oliver’s two sisters. “Now we don’t have to wonder anymore. I do think the drought is a negative, but if there’s anything that can happen good out of a drought, it’s this, and it’s a blessing.”2 In the fifteenth chapter of Luke’s gospel, Jesus tells three parables about being lost. Lost sheep, then lost coin, then lost people. People get lost—perilously lost—all the time. And when we, sooner or later, are caught in a drought, everything about our life is exposed. Do you and I have to get this lost in order to be exposed so that we finally turn around and find our way home? No, I’m pretty sure there are those of us here whose “far country” has not been all that far, just as I’m fairly confident that all of us lose our way. But however we are lost, whatever tricks or cover-ups we have used to navigate through life, all gets exposed. Once we are lost, there are really two questions: How did this happen? And… what now? How does it happen? It could be just our own ignorance or naïveté. A recent book, Dear Me: Letters to My 16-Year Old Self, tackles this question: What would you say to yourself if today you could write to the 16-year-old you? Well-known figures from J.K. Rowling to Hugh Jackman weigh in. From 70’s Rocker Alice Cooper: “Trashy girls are exciting for about five minutes … .Keep your eye out for a really good lookin’ church girl. Then you’ll have the best of both worlds. P.S. I think coffee might really catch on, maybe call it Starsomething ….” From Suze Roman: “Dear Suze in 1967,1 just wanted to write you this letter

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    because I think it is important for you to know that you really do not need to be as sad as you currently are. Think great thoughts but always relish small treasures. Now stop wasting time being sad. Do you hear me?” And from actor James Woods: “Be proud, but humble. Be strong, but caring. Listen more than you may be inclined to do. Talk less. And most importantly, call your brother on July 26, 2006 and tell him he must go to a different hospital. It is okay to fall, but not okay to stay on the ground. Cherish the dead you once loved so carelessly. They still live in your heart.”3 That last letter, especially, might have stung the younger brother of our parable. He wished his father was as good as dead. And he fell hard and fast.. .and didn’t know how to get up. Maybe he just was naïve to the perilous ways of the world. But, maybe he was trying to hide—hide from his family, hide from his past, hide from a future he did not want to enter? Sometimes we hide so well from everybody else that we end up hiding from ourselves, and then we cannot find our way out. That’s one of many ways that we experience fear. Fear can get us lost quick. Bruce Springsteen expresses this often, as when he sings:

    I got God on my side, and I’m just trying to survive. But what if what you do to survive kills the things you love? Fear’s a powerful thing. It can turn your heart black, you can trust. It’ll take your God-filled soul and fill it with devils and dust.4

    What the younger son was doing in that pig field to survive was killing him. So often we feel that we get lost by being on the move. But sometimes, we can become lost by standing still, by letting the fear paralyze us, by feeling trapped. C.S. Lewis once said: “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort, you will get neither comfort nor truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.”5 So when you find your life at a point where you are so lost: whether by ignorance or naiveté, whether by trying to hide or shaking with fear, whether trapped by your own bad choices or events that conspired against you, the question always is: What now? Luke says that the prodigal “came to himself.” That can be a long journey, especially when you are so lost, but he “came to himself’ and so could ask the question of his life: What now? There is a booming cottage industry these days on the art and technique of apology . Elizabeth Bernstein of The Wall Street Journal has noticed this phenomenon and reports: “Along with helping people reconnect with old flames, childhood friends, and even long-lost relatives, the Internet is giving rise to a newer phenomenon: the decades-late apology. “ The Web allows us to converse by email, a form of communication that often makes us braver and more impulsive—and occasionally even more thoughtful—about what we say. “There are even Web sites such as ThePublicApology. com and PerfectApology.com, dedicated to facilitating our quest for absolution.6 But the younger child’s situation in the middle of that pig field was not one of

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    needing a better technique to apologize. His life was utterly broken. He was in every way lost. He needed to get home—and not just in a geographic sense—and he wasn’t sure how to manage that. Besides—and this comes as no surprise to you—forgiveness is a complicated, messy, confusing business! According to a recent survey, most Americans have a desire for more forgiveness in their lives, but they are more critical when choosing whom to forgive. Sixty-two percent of American adults said they need more forgiveness in their personal lives, and 94 percent wanted to see more forgiveness in the country. (That’s interesting—apparently I’m to think you need more forgiveness than I do….) “Americans express a near-universal desire for a more loving and unified world.” Researchers found that even though the U.S. is composed of people who are usually forgiving, a majority of Americans also believe that forgiveness is conditional: sixty percent said, “Forgiving someone would first depend on the offender apologizing and making changes.”7 The text tells us that the hungry prodigal “came to himself.” He remembered who he really was, and immediately he also remembered his home. These two things always happen at the same time. When we are spent, out of resources, and confused and exposed, the Holy Spirit reminds us of our true identity; we remember who we really are. Everyone in this parable is, at one point or another, in a panic. Things are not as they thought they would be. Life is not fitting together. But the panic is not rooted in trips or inheritance or squandered opportunities or fatted calves. The root of the panic is the temporary forgetting that we are all the beloved of God. When we forget that, we are lost, no matter how close to home we may be. In a recent sermon on this text, Craig Barnes observed: “If you hang around pigs long enough, you get confused and start to act like a pig. But you are not a pig. You do not have to grab at life. Life has already been given to you. But you do have to return “home” in order to enjoy it. The prodigal has no mystical experience. He just looks up from a life he does not enjoy, and then he remembers his home. Then he comes to himself. There is no place else for him to go, so he starts down the road for home.”8 The prodigal heads for home, using the travel time to rehearse his lines when he arrives: “I’ll say, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.” He does that so he will have a plan—we all want to have a plan, to be prepared. The prodigal’s plan is to be a hired hand. He is not planning on being forgiven and restored as a son. Maybe that is because he thinks he does not deserve such grace. Or, maybe it is because he does not want it. As long as he is a hired hand, he is still responsible for his own life. He will work for wages. He could get his act together, maybe save a little, and then leave again. As a hired hand, if he does not like his wages, he could complain or pull the other hired hands together and form a union. It is just a job, but he will get a better deal with the father than he had with the pigs. But his “plan” will not work. When it comes to the grace of God, there is no deal to be made. There is just grace. It simply flows out of the heart of God—ready or not. So maybe we repent in stages. First we turn away from the distant country and come home because we are in trouble. Early on we try to make deals with God. “If you just get me out of this mess, I will____________(fill in the blank)… .I’ll do this for you, God.” But eventually, we come to realize that God will receive us only as a

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    beloved child. No one enters the Kingdom of God as a hired hand.9 It was a famine, not a drought, but in that lost, far country everything the younger son had used to get by in life was exposed. Every fake thing, every false pretense, every frail strategy and weak plan for living life on his own terms was laid bare as the utter failure it was. And that turned out to be one of the two best days of his life. As Richard Rohr says, “God’s one-of-a-kind job description is that God actually uses our problems to lead us back to who we truly are made to become. God is the perfect Recycler, and in the economy of grace, nothing is wasted, not even our worst sins and our most stupid mistakes .”10 That’s a truth that the “prodigal son” learned in a very hard way. It’s a truth that would make a worthy letter for us to write to our 16-year-old selves, our 36-year-old selves, our 66-year-old selves, our 96-year-old selves.. .and every day in between. God’s one-of-a-kind job description is that God actually uses our problems to lead us back to who we truly are made to become. In the economy of grace, nothing is wasted, not even our worst sins and our most stupid mistakes. God is the perfect recycler. God will always lead us home—and embrace us, and rejoice!

    Notes 1 Edwin H. Freidman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (New York: Seabury Books, 2007). 2 Manny Fernandez, “As Drought Levels Drop, Texas Drought Reveals Secrets of the Deep,” The New York Times, November 30,2011. 3 “Dear Me: 8 celebrities’ letters to themselves,” The Week, December 2,2011. 4 Bruce Springsteen, “Devils and Dust,” Sony, 2005. 5 Cited in “Verse and Voice,” SojoMail/Sojoumers.org, February 24,2012. 6 Elizabeth Bernstein, “Who’s Sorry Now? Nearly Everyone,” The Wall Street Journal, January 12, 2010. 7 “Craving Forgiveness, but Choosy in Giving It,” Christian Century, November 30,2010. 8 Craig Barnes, “The Memory of the Father’s House,” preached at Shady side Presbyterian Church, Pittsburgh, March 20,2011. 9 Ibid. 10 Fr. Richard Rohr, “Shadowland,” Daily Meditation for March 8,2012.

  • Introduction to Lenten texts

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    Introduction to Lenten Texts

    First Sunday in Lent, Luke 4:1-13

    Heather G. Shortlidge

    First Presbyterian Church of Annapolis, Annapolis, Maryland

    Alongside his cousin John, Jesus is bom, named, and circumcised. Before the birth announcements can even be mailed, the shepherds and angels are having a field day. Simeon decides he has seen the Lord. And Anna belts out an anthem confirming what everyone else has been saying—this child is the one. In no time flat, the celebrated infant morphs into an impulsive tween who decides to hang back at the temple without so much as a nod to his parents. A few years later, on the slippery banks of the Jordan River, he joins the crowd getting dunked. As he rises from the chilly waters, the heavens croon their confirmation. No paternity test needed. This guy belongs to God. As he glides into his third decade ,Jesus rapidly gets down to business. But before he even exegetes his first text, the Spirit whisks him off for six harrowing weeks of Clinical Pastoral Education. Day after day, he is coaxed into all kinds of distressing scenarios, challenged to articulate and defend his faith, and depleted of any moral certitude that had been accumulated over the years. With the days and nights not his own, there was zero time to think about food. Slimmed down and ravenous, Jesus staggers out, ready to gnaw on the first thing he sees. Assuming the verbatims and gut-wrenching analysis are safely behind him, Jesus begins to let his guard down. He dreams of a real meal, one with robust wine and warm, crusty loaves of bread. He pictures the familiar faces of his family and friends gathered around the table and the toasts that will be made in honor of sticking it out and making it through. A rock skids to a stop a few feet in front of his dusty feet, shattering all such lovely thoughts. “Since you are God’s Son and all,” the Devil sneers, “why not turn this stone into something edible?” In one fell swoop, however, Jesus quiets the rumblings of his stomach and the heckling of his jealous colleague. “It takes more than bread to really live,” he shoots back, unleashing a little Deuteronomy on the world. Unwilling to back down, the Devil switches tactics. This time, he pilots Jesus to the moon and seduces him with a beautiful blue view of the earth and all her continents . “They’re all yours to do with what you please,” charms the Devil. “I can turn these worlds over to whomever I wish. Follow me and it will all be yours.” Despite his bedraggled body and near empty soul, Jesus refuses to take the bait. “In case you didn’t hear me the first time, let me say it again—worship the Lord your God and only the Lord your God.” Unused to his sweet deals being met with such fierce resistance, the Devil tries one more time. He hauls Jesus up the dizzying steps of the bell tower at the Washington National Cathedral. Three hundred feet above the ground, the Devil dares, “Jump. If you really are who you say you are, the angels will swoop down to save you.” Without missing a beat, Jesus gazes out at the city and snaps, “For one last time, let me remind you what Deuteronomy says—don’t mess around with God. If you want to play games, you best find somebody else.”

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    Perhaps the Devil had reached his saturation point—he’d had enough of the Deuteronomy quotes for one day. Or perhaps he was taking time to regroup—holed up with his debate prep team and an array of biblical scholars, refining his strategy for getting underneath Jesus’ skin. We haven’t heard the last from him. Throwing in the towel today does not mean that he won’t be back tomorrow. As the season of Lent begins, do we know who we stand for? Who we pledge our allegiance to? When attractive enticements are floated in front of our noses, do we take the bait, or do we push more Deuteronomy into our hearts?

    Second Sunday in Lent, Luke 13:31-35 No wonder the Pharisees are about to have a panic attack. Jesus has just elaborated on his eschatology, and it doesn’t seem to include the spiritual but not religious. “Many of you,” Jesus explains, “will assume that an invitation to the heavenly banquet is already in the mail. But God’s guest list has no mention of the ones who prefer to dabble around the edges.” Busting apart their views on who is in and who is out, Jesus creates a cauldron of anxiety that bubbles over into this week’s Gospel lesson. Dripping with angst, the Pharisees race over to warn Jesus that Herod is hot on his tail. “Red alert. Run for your life,” they caution. Like the fretful church member who has a tendency to raise the temperature in whatever room he or she occupies, these Pharisees reek of worry. In order to escape Herod’s clutches, Jesus must start moving now. Rather than disarming them with his best non-anxious presence, Jesus ups the ante by dismissing the agitated envoy with a message of his own. “Tell that fox I’ve no time for him right now. Today and tomorrow I’m busy chasing away demons and healing the sick. And even if I weren’t completely booked for the next three days, nothing bad ever comes to a prophet outside the gates of Jerusalem.” Scoffing at their angst, Jesus proclaimed that no one outside the city gates would care enough to lift a finger. But inside Jerusalem, the mouthpieces of God had better watch their backs. Murdering prophets was what Jerusalem did best. In one breath, Jesus is bad-mouthing Jerusalem, but in the next he’s bewailing the ancient metropolis. The city has a long litany of shortcomings, including the abuse of God’s messengers and the well-known assassination of prophets. But Jesus saves his deepest grief for Jerusalem’s cold shoulder. When God tries to shelter them under her wings, the city casually shrugs off the advance. “No thanks,” says Jerusalem. “We don’t need a mother hen who constantly pecks.” “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” Jesus cries. “The place where prophets meet their end and those sent to speak their minds are silenced.” “It’s not the way I wanted things,” he continues like a burdened parent who cannot save a sinking child. “I have wanted to embrace you, but you chose to stiffen your backs and resist my grip.” How often do we resist that divine grip, turning away from the everlasting arms that stand ready to embrace? How often do we have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the kingdom of God?

    Third Sunday in Lent, Luke 13:1-9 Jesus isn’t letting anyone off the hook this week. He hasn’t come to bring polite smiles and lukewarm handshakes. He’s not doing what he’s doing to make those dressed in their Sunday best feel like it was worth putting on their pantyhose and neck

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    ties. Make no mistake. If you’re looking for a savior who will exchange pleasantries with your 86-year-old grandmother without mentioning healthcare, immigration, or the economy, then Jesus is not your man. Immediately prior to this week’s gospel lesson, Jesus is on fire—jamming a finger in the face of anyone nearby. He’s not ready to make nice. Jesus has come to upset the apple cart and force a decision. It’s this decision that continues to baffle his followers. They long for a checklist , and Jesus keeps giving them a life plan. They crave ten straightforward steps to heaven, and instead Jesus hands them a sketch for extensive cardiac rehab. People want a real time GPS to guide them along, and Jesus says stop being best friends with Siri and start becoming best friends with me. A grieving group of people arrive, shoving the newspaper under Jesus’ nose, wailing over the headline “Six Worshippers Gunned down in Sikh Temple.” “How could someone do this?” they howl. “Why would anyone do this?” Roiling with emotion , the group marches up to Jesus and demands a response. Like any boiling-over parishioner who storms into the pastor’s office, they want Jesus to be as distraught as they are. They want him to blow his top just as they have blown theirs. But rather than add fuel to their already roaring fire, Jesus tries to put it out by sticking them with a question: “Do you think those murdered Wisconsin Sikh’s had sinned more than all the other American worshippers on that Sunday morning? Do you think that they somehow had ticked off God and deserved what was coming to them?” Donning his teacher hat, Jesus is attempting to do a little remedial tutoring in theology here. Too often, his followers believed in a very simple equation when it came to salvation. Do the right thing and blessings will come your way, but do the wrong thing and you’re guaranteed a curse. Unfortunately, Harold Kushner had not yet penned his infamous book. If a person was struggling, they must have somehow screwed up. Jesus meets this misguided thinking with an unequivocal no. “No, no, no!” Jesus says, shooting down their twisted theology. “The Sikhs in Oak Creek had not offended God. The six worshippers did not deserve to be killed. The loss of life that morning was not orchestrated by an irate God who was hungry for revenge.” As their emotions cooled, Jesus decided to take advantage of the teachable moment . Besides rearranging their theodicy, Jesus throws in a lesson about turning around. “Unless you turn to God, unless you spin yourself around and come face to face with the Lord, then you, too, will die.” Rather than get caught up in the evil of white supremacy or the lack of adequate gun laws, Jesus listens to their angst and then challenges it. “We can’t control ticked off white men who fear turbans. We can’t even begin to understand the rage of a tattooed Neo-Nazi. Yet what we can cultivate, what we can manage—is ourselves. Rather than picking apart Wade Michael Page, what do our insides look like? Are we pointed towards the holy?” Lest his listeners still need some convincing, Jesus rips through the scar tissue of another gaping wound. “What about the 2,900 people in New York City, the ones crushed and killed when the twin towers collapsed and fell on them; do you think they were worse citizens than all the other New Yorker’s that morning?” “No, no, no,” Jesus drives home. “From the executives at Cantor Fitzgerald to the line cooks at Windows on the World, God did not have it out for them. There’s no ecclesiastical spread sheet of the worst offenders.” Jesus strongly disputes, “Not at all.” Amidst the emotions that are running high, Jesus says, “Let me tell you a story.” As if they were a classroom full of rowdy kindergartners, Jesus quiets them down by

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    spinning a narrative about a fruitless fig tree. When the story was finished, one person left wondering about his estranged family and what part he played in cutting loved ones off. A father left deep in thought about his second son who collected a “late bloomer” label whenever evaluated. One person left untangling the reasons she was stuck in one place, simply taking up space. And yet another person departed from the story circle in awe—believing that this Jesus guy was really onto something.

    Fourth Sunday in Lent, Luke 15:1-3; llb-32 It didn’t take Jesus long to establish a following. There wasn’t anyone in the temple telling it like Jesus did. As his entourage swelled, so did the disagreements. The sheep herders who barely knew the definition of a bath always offended the more well-to-do. The garish make-up and provocative clothing of the prostitutes compelled the married women to cling tightly to their children as well as their husbands. Associates concerned for Jesus’ safety engaged in heated arguments with followers who believed the more the merrier. Important officials grumbled about having to wait in line. Why couldn’t they set up a VIP area in order to avoid all the riff-raff? However, it was the rectors and the vicars, the reverends and the ministers, the preachers and the pastors who were especially displeased by the quality of the company . “He greets sinners—the same ones we’ve been trying to whip into shape for years. Not only does he talk to them, but he approves of them!” they growl. “We’ve studied Greek and Hebrew, endured ordination exams, and given our entire lives over to God’s work. If he’s going to be best buds with anyone, it should be us—not the people who can’t pass a criminal background check.” It was the griping clergy who inspired what Jesus said next. There was once a family with two children. The younger child was restless and hungry for adventure. She felt stifled living underneath her brother’s shadow and was eager to explore the world. “Mom and Dad, I’ve decided that I don’t want to go to college. Instead of sending me off for four years of a liberal arts education, I would like you to simply give me the $200,000 right now.” Interestingly enough, the parents agreed to her proposal. Perhaps they didn’t want to hold their daughter back. Or maybe they knew that any counter argument, no matter how well thought out, would be wasted breath. Who knows how many nights they stayed up weighing the pros and cons of letting their daughter go. In the end, they gave their second child what she asked for—2,000 crisp one hundred dollar bills. And off she went. For awhile, she was frolicking through Europe, falling in love with French Burgandy’s and then eating her way through Italy. Fifteen pounds later and tired of waking up hung over, she traipsed over to Africa, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro , befriending a few Maasai warriors, tracking down lions, elephants, and black rhinos on a private safari. After devouring the African continent, she explored the Galapagos Islands and geared up for a short expedition to the Arctic. Along the way, she invested in some jewels to bedazzle her fingers and earlobes. And of course, when a private jet could not be arranged, she insisted on flying first class. The young woman found herself in Bali, sipping a fruity cocktail and soaking up the sun, when a stem looking waiter shattered her bliss. Her credit card was no longer working, and her hotel tab needed settling. After swallowing her panic, she convinced the hotelier to not call the cops. Rather than involve the local authorities, she volunteered her services as a hotel maid until her expenses could be paid off.

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    After a few days of scrubbing vomit out of trashed hotel rooms, she broke down in tears, remembering her simple bedroom at home, her decent parents, and even her annoying brother. What was she doing scraping bodily fluids off bedspreads when half a world away, she had a family who loved her? Hopping on the next flight out, the daughter nervously rehearsed the script in her head. “Mom and Dad, I’ve screwed up. Royally. I don’t even deserve to be called your daughter anymore. I’ll do anything if I can come home again.” When the taxi pulled down the driveway, her parents looked at one another and knew. Their second child had returned. With their hearts beating a mile a minute, they raced out the door and embraced their head-strong daughter. With her tail between her legs, the daughter started into her pitch, shamefully admitting that she was less than scum. But her parents would have none of it. Before she even began begging for forgiveness , they started calling all the neighbors and in-town relatives. Quick—she needs a change of clothes. A new pair of shoes. Her hair and nails done. In a few hours, we’ll have a feast. There will even be an open bar. Everyone is invited. We’re going to have a wonderful time. Our daughter is home. Our daughter is home! Meanwhile, the son had been out getting the oil changed and picking up the dry cleaning during the spectacular homecoming. When he returned to the house, there wasn’t a single space to park. Cars lined both sides of the driveway and even the lane leading up to their house. Music blared as people he had never seen before swarmed both the front yard and the back. “What the hell is going on?” he demanded to the first sober person he could find. “Your sister came home,” they laughed. “Your parents invited everyone in town to a barbeque to celebrate. But hey, isn’t she the one who pissed away a bunch of money rather than getting a degree?” “Unbelievablesputtered the older brother. He climbed back into his car and sped away from the festivities. He called his mother’s cell phone and started screaming, “How many years have I stayed home, taking care of you and Dad, never giving you one moment of grief. How many years?” Before his mother had a chance to respond, the irate brother continued his tirade. “You’ve never thrown a party for me and my friends. Yet the daughter who throws away your money on safaris and sex shows up and you go all out with a feast?!” His parents tried to reason with their disgruntled son. They tried to explain that he could have any of their assets at any time. They assured him of their love for him. But now was the time to celebrate. His sister had returned. Just yesterday she was lost, so very lost. But today, she’d found her way home.

    Fifth Sunday in Lent, John 12:1-8 For four straight days, Mary had been wringing out tears. They had tried everything —even calling on Jesus to see if he could disrupt the looming powers of death. Unwilling to rearrange his schedule, however, Jesus never made it in time. Lazarus succumbed to his illness, leaving behind two exceedingly bereft sisters. When Jesus finally does arrive for a pastoral visit, Martha comes out swinging. “My dear brother has been dead for 96 hours. And now you show up? Really?” Jesus redeems himself by practicing the resurrection arts on their brother. When called, a wrapped cadaver stumbles out of the tomb. Underneath the enveloped corpse is a living, breathing Lazarus. Tears of sorrow are rapidly replaced with sobs of disbelief and joy. By the end of it all, Mary and Martha have done triple loops on the

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    emotional roller coaster. With red-ringed eyes and a drippy nose, Mary greets Jesus at the front door and welcomes him home. Now that her brother is alive and well, all is right with the world. Once someone has stared death in the eye and defeated it, nothing else really matters. Mary pecks him on the cheek, takes his coat, and ushers him into the kitchen where their dinner awaits. With exquisite care, Martha dishes out steaming bowls of broth. She slices the roast and saves the choice pieces for their guest. She never misses an opportunity to top off their wine glasses or heap more potatoes on their plates. Whenever someone rises from the table, she dutifully folds their napkin or replaces it with a fresh one. Butter, salt and pepper, and dessert spoons are all where they,re supposed to be. Perhaps the modem day Martha Stewart took her cues from this Martha of Bethany. Between the third and fourth course, however, Mary interrupts the meal with a surprising bottle of Channel No. 5. This was no knock-off bottle she had acquired at some half priced market. This was two ounces of the most classic fragrance in the world. Looking intensely at their guest of honor, Mary lowers herself onto the floor and slips off Jesus’ sandals. By now, no one is lifting a fork. All eyes are on Mary and the bare feet before her. Twisting off the cap, she slowly and deliberately daubs each of his toes. She slides her fingers underneath his arches, pressing her palms into each one of his calluses. She lingers over each metatarsal bone, kneading her pricey perfume across the top of each foot. Her massage becomes more vigorous as she douses his creaky ankles. In awe of what’s unfolding before them and uncertain of a proper response, no one says anything. Perhaps the other dinner guests were hoping that Mary would continue around the table—that perhaps they, too, could substitute dessert for a little reflexology . But Judas can’t stand the silence. “That perfume could have fed a ton of hungry people. Aren’t we in the business of helping others before helping ourselves?” His question snaps the room back to reality. A few eyebrows are raised. Some nod their heads in agreement. The world doesn’t need another massage parlor. What the world needs is food for hungry bellies and safe places for people to spend the night. Posh perfume means nothing to a poor person—unless he or she can sell it for profit. But Jesus doesn’t buy into this austerity plan. “Leave her alone,” he warns. “One of these days, I won’t be around. One of these days, I will be gone.” Mary poured out everything she had for Jesus while Judas secretly hoarded what could have been shared. Mary did not hesitate or glance at Jesus for approval before she tipped over her fragrant gift, bathing his feet in pure luxury. All the while, Judas was crunching numbers in his head, advocating for what was practical and cost-effective. Every once in awhile, we throw our cares to the wind and our entire selves into something like Mary did that night. But just as often, we channel Judas, cringing at excess and righteously clucking our tongues at waste. Somewhere along the line, we’ve come to believe the myth that says we must be one or the other—Mary, the extravagant donor, or Judas, the conniving investor. Many of us walk around with bottles of Chanel No 5 weighing down our vestments, searching for feet to massage while remembering the mouths that need to be fed. We fear being labeled excessive, and yet we loathe appearing stingy.

  • The weirdly real ending of Mark

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    The Weirdly Real Ending of Mark

    Mark 16:1-20

    Lillian Daniel First Congregational Church United Church of Christ, Glen Ellyn, Illinois

    We have spent our one-hundred-fiftieth year as a congregation spending a year with Jesus, doing a year-long sermon series working our way through the gospel of Mark, and now we come to its ending, an ending so abrupt, so disturbing, so seemingly unfitting, that in the second century, they added another ending to make the story make more sense. But the passage you heard this morning, those words are really how the gospel ends. The ending goes like this: Three women come to the tomb, and there they find it empty. Instead of finding Jesus’ dead body, they find a man dressed in white who gives them this extraordinary information: “Jesus the Nazarene, the One they nailed on the cross, has raised up; he’s here no longer. You can see for yourselves that the place is empty. Now—on your way. Tell his disciples and Peter that he is going on ahead of you to Galilee. You’ll see him there, exactly as he said.” Well that part of the story, we are all familiar with. When we picture the Easter story, we picture this moment of revelation. But what do you remember next? Rushing to tell the good news, a grand celebration, eventually a chance for the disciples to see Jesus once again in his resurrected body? Sure that all happens in the other three gospels, but not this one. In this one, after getting the good news, it says that the women “got out as fast as they could, beside themselves, their heads swimming. Stunned, they said nothing to anyone.” The end. Stunned, they said nothing to anyone? The end? Are you kidding me? If that’s the end, how did we get two thousand years of Christian history? You can see why after just about a hundred years of Christianity, the folks reading this gospel and comparing it to the other three began to suspect that perhaps the original scroll it has been written down on had become frayed and damaged at the end. You can see how they came to suspect that there had been more lines to the story that had been lost. And so in the second century, they decided to tidy things up, and added eleven more verses, anything to erase that dreadfully anticlimactic ending in which the women are frightened rather than joyful, silent rather than ready to spread the good news. Stunned, they said nothing to anyone. It can’t end there. If you look in your Bibles at home, those extra verses 9-20 often get noted with a footnote, explaining that scholars know they were added much later, but many people don’t notice the footnote. They buy the false ending where Jesus has a few important conversations with the disciples about who is saved and who is damned, and makes some comments about who can cast out demons and who can not, and right before ascending to heaven, tells the disciples to go out and baptize everybody, but all that was added on in the second century. The real ending, the one that was written when the gospel stories were finally and for the first time written down, around the year 70, about thirty-seven years after the events actually happened, the real and earliest ending goes like this: “Stunned, the women said nothing to anyone.” The end.

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    I like this ending. I love all the questions it leaves unanswered. I like Jesus better before he gives the marching orders to get everyone baptized so that they can be saved. I don’t think he really said that. I don’t think he was thinking about the future sacraments of the church in his resurrected days. I believe the other gospel stories of those resurrection days, when he showed up and asked his friends, “Do you have anything to eat?” That’s more like it. Returning from the dead, he wanted to see and reassure the people he loved, and that happened days later. I also like it that the women in this story don’t have the answers. It makes sense to me that they would be afraid. We have two thousand years of church teaching and Easter services to make all this seem like good news. But to the women, it wouldn’t necessarily be. If the body was gone, their first thought would have probably been the most plausible explanation, that it had been stolen. They wouldn’t have assumed the man in white was an angel, as we do now when we read it. They would have more likely assumed he was a grave robber, a hater of Jesus, a member of the wealthy religious establishment that hated Jesus, and hated his hoodie wearing followers. Why would they believe this stranger? But let’s say they did believe him. What then? That would also be a legitimate reason to be afraid. After Jesus’ crucifixion, Peter betrayed him, and we can assume the rest of them may have as well. They probably scattered off into hiding. If Jesus has been raised, what mood was he going to be in. Would he be glad to see them or angry with them for their faithlessness? Would he be there with open arms or ready to bang some heads? That image of an angry Jesus seems weird to us because we’ve experienced the joy of Easter love, the promise of eternal life all wrapped up in an Easter basket with a chocolate bunny on top. But the news that Jesus was still alive, was once again alive, after being killed, that could be scary news. No wonder the women were stunned and told no one. And the original writers of the gospel, the earliest gospel to be written down, many decades before the rest, had the wisdom to let that strange, unexpected ending be the ending. Stunned, the women told no one. No heroics, no last minute instructions from Jesus to baptize everyone, just some frightened tongue-tied people. Three women who were obviously Congregationalists, obviously members of this church. They knew Jesus and loved him; they just sure as heck weren’t going to tell anybody about it. Congregationalists to the core. Jesus is risen. Ok, now let’s go home and watch PBS. Heaven forbid we talk about it. That would be scary. Why is it scary to some people to proclaim the good news that Christ is risen? Well, one reason it is scary is that so many people do it badly, and we don’t want to join them. Rather than making that sound like good news, it comes out as judgment. Christ has risen. So get on board or bum in hell. Well, if that’s the good news, I’ll take the bad news. Reminds me why one wise preacher said, “I like Jesus. I just don’t like most of his friends.” So in the real ending, the women are afraid to talk about it. They get to be imperfeet ; they don’t have to have all the answers. They get to be like us, uneasy, frightened, unsure of what to say. They have questions, doubts, reservations. And those get to have the last word. Later generations add all the answers, put words in their mouths and into Jesus’, but the amazing fact remains that the earliest ending of the earliest gospel ends with

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    mystery and silence. It is one reason why I love the gospel of Mark and wanted to study it together as a church in our one-hundredth-fiftieth year. It is the shortest, the simplest and the earliest one, the closest to the ground gospel, the no frills version. A year with Jesus, the condensed version. So what did we learn about Jesus in this year? He cared about two things passionately . Healing. Healing of bodies, of minds and of spirits. In reading nothing but Mark all year long, we had to face the fact that Jesus was a bit of a one note johnny. One healing story after another. As a preacher there were times this year when I wanted to throw in the towel. Not another healing story, not another person with a disease interrupting Jesus just when he is about to say something important. Can’t I dip into another part of the Bible for something else? One healing story after another. Jesus cared about people, about healing, about how they were doing in the most ordinary aspects of their lives. But what else was revealed was a distinct personality for Jesus in the gospel of Mark. In this early gospel, Jesus was not nice. Mark’s Jesus is a distinctly hot tempered guy. He asks sarcastic questions, he spends a lot of time angry, and even when he’s healing people, you can feel his impatience. He is not nice. He is good, he is brave, he is compassionate and deeply feeling, but he would never pass the small talk test at a cocktail party in the suburbs. After a year spent with Mark’s Jesus can you imagine him standing on a back deck making chit chat at a neighborhood mixer? “So Jesus how long have you lived in the Western suburbs?” “You have turned my house into a den of thieves! You are a lazy dog. My betrayer has arrived.” “Ok then, but you gotta love the school system out here, right?” To which Jesus responds, “It’s going to be brother killing brother, father killing child, children killing parents. There’s no telling who will hate you because of me.” “Right, so Jesus are you a golfer?” No wonder Mark ends with fear on the part of the women. They didn’t know what he would do next. It is the church and the culture in cahoots that have domesticated Jesus and dressed him up in an Easter bonnet. It is scripture, and the serious intellectual study of scripture, that unbinds him from the pastel colored ribbons of a babified sentimental faith. There is so much that is trivial and superficial in the culture in which we live, culture driven by the relentless obsession with the self, a never-ending stream of words about ourselves texted and tweeted into oblivion, generations who have never had a thought they did not press “send” on, a world in which our personal tastes and preferences are given divine status, and God reduced to personal preference in a made up your own religion kind of world. So many want to reduce Jesus to that, to the lowest common denominator, a wish granter, question answering, order barking genie who wants you to think about spring time. Yet, that must always be held in tension with the old quip of the 19th century Anglican Dean William Inge: “Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.” If each age invents Jesus, he will shrink to the limitations of the age. Left to our own devices, we will merely be left to all our own vices. The Jesus of scripture is so much more interesting than anything we could invent for ourselves. There’s the passionate Jesus who cared about justice, an angry Jesus who cared about the 99%, a critical Jesus who cared nothing for social status

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    or geneology, a quick tempered Jesus who was impatient with hypocrites, a compassionate Jesus who couldn’t stand to walk by a person in pain without trying to help, a resurrected Jesus who left us with more questions than answers, an articulate Jesus whose followers didn’t know what to say and were allowed to end the story with their uncertainty, by a community that was perhaps more comfortable with mystery than we are. This was my hope and vision for our church in its 150th year and our year with Jesus, that in the end we would simply get to know him better, as he was as he was described by the people who knew him earliest and knew him best. To get to know Jesus. It is for that reason that church matters, that we willingly place ourselves and our questions into a tradition that is bigger than we are, a cloud of witnesses not 150 years old, but thousands and thousands, going back to the Jewish forebears and those who came before them, ending with the God who set all of creation in motion. It is here that in the middle we acknowledge, here that, no, it is not all about you. In the spiritual but not religious shallows of American culture, we dare to dive into this sliver of truth called the church and dive deeply, committing to depth in a culture that says you can do it all yourself, committing to study scripture seriously in a culture that says, “Why not write your own cute little book?” In the fundamentalist shallows of American Christianity, we dare to be a beacon of light to open-minded people of faith, getting to know Jesus as he really was by actually sticking with and studying a gospel rather than having him spoon fed to you. This is the depth I aspire to for our church for our next one hundred and fifty Easters. To be able to picture a real and complex Jesus when together we say, “Christ is risen.” He is risen indeed.