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On appearing before the authorities

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On Appearing before the Authorities

Jeremiah 5:14-17; 20:7-13; 23:29-32; Luke 21:9-19

Walter Brueggemann

Cincinnati, Ohio

I want to think with you, dear sisters and brothers who preach, about the words you dare not speak from the pulpit, and what that “not daring” does to our hearts. Because when you preach, every time you do it, it is done as you “appear before the authorities.”

I. As some of you will know, George Carlin has a list of seven words you cannot say on television. He is as hilarious about the list as he is obscene. All of his prohibited words refer to bodily or sexual functions, the kind that cause Junior High boys to giggle and blush. Carlin has a debate with himself about his list, because some of the words are hyphenated and so reiterate others on the list. But when he gets the list set, he can recite it in two nano-seconds. The reason Carlin cannot say these words on television is because the censors will not allow it, the censors being the guardians of establishment power to keep things nice and therefore safe. He cannot say these words because they remind us of bodily functions that we cannot control. We do not speak them because they remind us that we are bodies and therefore frail and therefore mortal and therefore about to die. Arnold Toynbee has said that death is “un-American,” an affront to everyone’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The censors prefer matters nice and safe. They prefer that people like us talk of spiritual matters and not such topics as the body or the body politic or the economics of the body politic. The list censored and disapproved concerns the smelly and unsavory so that we do better to deny the body.

II. Well, George Carlin is not the first to have such a list of things that could not be said in public. Already Jeremiah, in his frightened, jeopardized world, knew such a list of things not to be uttered in public in Jerusalem:

He could not say that the divine promise to David was sheer ideology. He could not say that God’s perpetual presence in the Jerusalem temple was a priestly hoax. He could not say that being chosen did not give Israel a pass on moral responsibility. He could not say that Nebuchadnezzar, the hated superpower, was a tool of God to bring it all down. He could not say that the Jerusalem network was under judgment and would not spared or sustained. He could not say that God’s eternity did not extend to the little human

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accomplishments that they loved too much with all their hearts. (Is that seven?)

He could not say these things, because he knew that saying them was inflammatory :

I am now making my words in your mouth a fire, And this people wood, and the fire shall devour them. I am going to bring upon you a nation from far away, 0 house of Israel, says the Lord. (Jeremiah 5:14-15)

He knew he had to say these words because there were so many false words that needed to be countered in Jerusalem:

Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces? See, therefore, I am against the prophets, says the Lord, who steal my words from one another [more than plagiarism!]. See, I am against the prophets, says the Lord, who use their own tongues and say, “Says the Lord.” See, I am against those who prophesy lying dreams, says the Lord, and who tell them, and who lead my people astray by their lies and their recklessness, when I did not send them or appoint them; so they do not profit this people at all, says the Lord. (Jeremiah 23:29-32)

It was too dangerous to say what had to be said. And he did not say it. And it tore his guts apart. He risked saying it, but at the last minute he did not. And then he gets sick for not saying it:

For whenever I speak, I must cry out, 1 must shout, “Violence and destruction!” For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. If I say, “I will not mention him, or speak anymore in his name,” then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot. (Jeremiah 20:8-9)

So finally he said it! He said it over and over! He was brought to trial for his words, because the “spiritual leaders,” the priests, wanted him silenced for saying the prohibited words on television, uttering the unutterable. In that trial he escaped by the skin of his teeth because of some tough old witnesses who supported him and who stood by him (26:17-19, 24). But he was regarded as a traitor who “weakened the hand of the soldiers,” that is, who “undermined the war effort” (38:4). It is no wonder that he cries out to God in pain and anguish: “You have seduced me.” You have given me an impossible assignment. He prays in honesty for vengeance against his adversaries. Because he had to say what he dared not say. And all hell came upon him.

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III. Well, George Carlin is not the last one to have such a list of the unsay able. There is, for example, you, you preachers who pray and brood and study and know. And then mostly must retreat to the “nice ״of denial. Or you preach your heart out, and the vestry or the session doubles the pain like a hammer, or a major donor stomps out in indignation. Or worse, you preach your heart out and the most you get is that someone reminds you that you forget the Lord’s Prayer…for God’s sake! I am led to this thought by the many preachers who have told me, almost in passing as though it were normal, that they could not speak about the Iraq war in their church or about immigration or about global warming. And I am, moreover, a member of a theological faculty that was not permitted to say something at the outset about the war because the institutional risks were too great! And my own daring preacher, on the Fourth of July Sunday, had a person walk out in a huff because he said something about U.S. arrogance and privilege. I have been thinking about a list of things, give or take, that a preacher cannot say. Or if said, is dismissed as a gal who never met a payroll:

Some could not say that the war is stupid, and we are expending our precious young on the folly of the National Security State.

Some could not say that present day capitalism has failed in its excessive greed that devours the poor and now reaches into the middle class.

Some could not say that the oil-spill is simply the token of Western technological hubris at its extreme.

Some could not say that we have forfeited our democracy to a secret government that runs over the Constitution and shreds civil rights in order to defend the intemperate wealth of the few.

Some could not say that the frantic rush to get a child to the next soccer practice and next dance class is membership in the rat race that cannot be won.

Some cannot say that the technological fixes violate the neighborly fruitfulness of the creation.

Some cannot say that the immigrants are indeed sisters and brothers who come under the welcome sign.

Some cannot say that our penchant for violence is toxic for the heart of our common life.

Some cannot say that the experiment in greedy entitlement has failed, and we will have to find other ways to maintain our hummers. (Is that seven?)

Some cannot say things because the cocoon of denial claims us all, and we would

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rather not risk so much. Well, maybe this is not quite your list. You can adjust. All I know is that there is a lot not being said, and we all know why. This is not a sermon about being prophetic or taking on the world or blowing the lid off the church in one loud binge. This is a pastoral reflection on what it does for us, alongside Jeremiah and George Carlin, to be silenced in ways that shrink and cramp our humanness. Such coerced silence is not benign. It makes us inordinately weary. It drives us to despair…or cynicism. It compels us to denial. It reduces us to managers and therapists and cheer leaders and entertainers and program directors. And all the while the word grinds at our guts because we know better. What we cannot say is that the body is fragile and smelly and cannot be made otherwise. What we cannot say is that the body politic now has a smell of death about it. What we cannot say is that evangelical faith is about bodily existence in the neighborhood, bodily since the creator called it “good, ״bodily since God freed the slaves from their pained bodily bondage, bodily since, as we say in the creed:

For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became truly human.

Or as we know it more anciently, “and was made man!” Became human, fragile, vulnerable, smelly, about to die. Became man! When about to die, as “man” or as body politic or as us, then Carlin’s “piss” or “fart” are not really objectionable or interesting, because such smelly regularity beyond our control belongs inescapably to our short-term creatureliness.

IV. Well, I thought it was worth reflecting on the fix we are in. The preacher in our society is given words that cannot be uttered. And if not uttered, the preacher grows cold, plays it safe, and perhaps needs to be loved more. And as I ponder this, I am aware that not once in my life, in my tenured life, have I been in the dangerous place that many of you occupy every week. You are like the apostles in the book of Acts, sure to be called before the authorities and examined for your testimony to see whether your words are safe and acceptable or as dangerous and inflammatory as those of George Carlin or Jeremiah. The authorities sit before you and conduct your trial. But then I came to this other text given me by C. S. Song, the great Korean theologian , who has indeed been before the authorities. In Luke 21, Jesus anticipates the coming debacle. You wonder how he knew about our coming debacle: “Not one stone will be left on another.” It sounds like an oil spill or an economic melt-down. They asked him, “When?” He said, “I do not know.” But then he says, before whatever time line in which it will occur: “But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. This will give you an opportunity to testify” (vv. 12-13). They will ask you to speak up. They will expect you to utter your truth. They will watch your words to see if any of your words are like those of George’s list or the list of Jeremiah. Then I thought, even if Luke is anticipating the Roman destruction

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of the Jerusalem temple, he is making connections to our time and place and danger. Now like then, the authorities are bewildered. They want some guidance or assurance for a dangerous time. So what do you have to tell us, Ms. Apostle, of the truth and nothing but? What have you got for us, Reverend? And then Jesus says —or Luke says, or the Jesus Seminar says—these most stunning words: 44So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict” (vv. 14-15). Don’t work it out logically and carefully or anxiously or with too much calculated caution, because that venue presses you beyond that. Trust the spirit of Jesus, he says, and receive wisdom that will admit you to new freedom. Imagine, on hard issues of the day before the Roman authorities, Jesus will be close at hand with a word. What he says is, “I will give you mouth.” And then he says two things to his followers. First, this truth-telling will get you into a lot of trouble: “You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name” (vv. 16-17). Second, you will be safe: “But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls” (vv. 18-19). Big trouble…and you will gain your soul, your identifiable center of vitality. You will get yourself back in the process of telling the truth before the authorities. You likely will find allies among tough old witnesses. But for sure, you will have yourself in all your vocational freedom. I do not give you advice. I give you only a text. I do know about the risk of the church budget and about the risk to one’s family (I am a PK!) and about being without tenure and the danger to one’s pension and medical coverage. Of course! But I also know about the diminishment of self through coerced silence and the loss of freedom and courage and vitality and energy and joy. I crave for you an edge of freedom that will let you witness to the full truth that was entrusted to you. Jeremiah discovered, through his anguish, that he had allies as he ran risks, that he was kept safe in ways he could not have imagined. He could not know that before he bore witness. I have thought about what it means for us to walk close to the gospel. There is no doubt that greater freedom for the word is needed among us. It is needed by those who need to hear. But it is also needed by those who are called to speak. This is a gospel time. This is a time when the old reliances have failed, when autonomous, arrogant ways of life, in many manifestations, have been shown to be empty. This is a moment to line out an alternative. We have that alternative, and it must be uttered for the sake of the body politic. The utterance is not only for the sake of the body politic. It is also for the sake of our souls. Imagine what it will be like to break out of fatigue and despair and resignation and gentle denial to be one’s self with the truth of the gospel. You do not need to be Jim Forbes, and I do not need to be Tony Campollo, with their bravado. We need only be ourselves with the word entrusted to us, with God’s word given us, with news that sets us free from heartburn or ulcers or anger with Jeremiah. The word we will be given in gospel freedom is not a nice word about a nice world. It is rather a true word about our bodies and our body politic, the bodies infused with God’s truth, but nonetheless temporary, passing, fragile, mortal. All of us in his gathering are in it together. So I thought, let us together hold this moment precious. Let us think about the truth entrusted to us, the truth of God, God

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from God, true God from true God, the word that “was made man,” suffered and died, and was indeed raised to new life and new freedom. It is not a wonder that Jeremiah, at the end of his struggle with speech and silence, finally, in verse 13, breaks out in doxology:

Sing to the Lord; Praise the Lord! For he has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evil doers. (20:13)

He comes to joy by breaking his silence. I do not urge you to say more than you can say. I do not urge you to run risks in dangerous places that you cannot run. I do not lay a guilt trip on you. Rather I invite you to take stock of the truth you have been given and to ponder what it would be like for you to move to greater freedom. Finger your head; check your hairs. Imagine them all counted and guarded and kept safe. Imagine the way the hairs on your head are safe and the way in which the freedom for your mouth is connected to the safety of our hairs. And then imagine, as your silence is broken, “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, free at last!”

December 31, 2013
‘And we are witnesses to these things…’: preaching the Easter texts

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“And we are witnesses to these things . .

Preaching the Easter Texts

Meda A. A. Stamper

Anstey United Reformed Church, Leicestershire, England

For a season of Sundays the lectionary dwells in the joy of Easter and invites us to consider what it might mean to live in that joy as post-resurrection people all the time. Easter should have a season. We devote a Wednesday (and indeed a preparatory Tuesday), six Sundays, and a week of holy days to preparing our hearts for the cross. But the resurrection may not always get the time it deserves and the time we need to take it in. In Britain where I live (and I suspect it is true everywhere), it is far easier for people to accept the way of the cross than it is for them to experience the full joy of the resurrection. No one doubts the reality of serious suffering; it is probably the greatest stumbling block to faith in this context. But abundant life isn’t so easy to grasp. And perhaps this was always so. “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile . ..,” Paul writes to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 15:17, a chapter we consider each year on Easter), who are struggling with the idea of resurrection. The lectionary gives us space to ponder what it means for us that he has been raised—not just to celebrate the empty tomb and the first appearances, but to think about what comes after that third day. How are we to live as post-resurrection people in the light of Easter? A season with these texts suggests that the surprising, transforming newness of God demonstrated in the resurrection will continue to work in us and through us and for us all along our way, that we are to be his witnesses, that we are intended to be people marked by God’s strange, death-defying doings, and that no matter what happens on the way of grace, we are to rejoice truly, madly, deeply. Newness does not mean ease. There are hints of hardship throughout the Easter texts, resistance from without and resistance from within, because God’s newness is so unexpected and often so challenging that even the faithful may not immediately embrace it. There are stories of disorientation and sorrow. There are floggings, angry mobs, prison cells. There is death. But these things do not win finally. Transformation, worship, awe, joy, praise, faithfulness, service, love: these win when God’s newness is in play. And these texts insist that God’s newness is always, always, relentlessly in play. Although this is a Luke year, we get very little Luke in this season, but in this and every Easter season, we get plenty of Luke’s sister book, Acts. This means that the Holy Spirit, who broods over Acts from the first, also hovers over this time, binding Easter to Pentecost. Two of the gospel texts from John join the theme as the Holy Spirit is breathed over Jesus’ own with the promise that this other Advocate will teach them and remind them, and us, of all that Jesus has told them. The Holy Spirit inspires the bold speech (something we see again and again in Acts and in this season, which begins with two speeches by Peter) that characterizes the way of witness to be taken by resurrection people participating in the advance of the word. This does not happen without suffering and conflict, but these do not hinder the expansion of the proclamation or dampen the hopes or weaken the resolve

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of the proclaimers. In the face of conflict, against all expectations, they rejoice, they sing, they pray, and they go out to speak the good news again and again. After death is undone on Easter, and Paul has proclaimed the resurrection to his Corinthian congregation, Revelation carries us over the next six Sundays on waves of worship through visions of transcendent newness. And Psalms of praise also give voice to the season’s rejoicing. John completes the contemplation of Easter life with lessons in love, unity, peace, and abundant, eternal life in the care of the shepherd, who dwells in God’s love before time, makes that love present in the world, and prepares his own to live in the same love and be witnesses to it, even and especially in the face of resistance. Over and over in the season’s texts God’s newness changes things, gives life, transforms our mourning into dancing. But God’s newness is not tame. It does not meet our expectations. It exceeds them. And in doing that, it also overturns them. It is as unsettling as it is ultimately beautiful. It is searing light before which angels fall in worship and humans, like Saul and us, fall down blind, until scales fall from our eyes, and we are able to see the beauty and peace and joy rising up before us like new heavens and a new earth. Still, like the disciples on Easter evening, who have already heard the good news, we may find ourselves cowering behind closed doors of one kind or another, even after we have been touched by newness and grace. But the Alpha and Omega, who can get through any doors, any fears, any doubts, breaks through and brings us back to life again and again. And the eternal blessing holds us fast. Easter needs a season to tell us this. The resurrection happened once for all in Jesus, but it happens in us over and over in large and small ways. So we have seven Sundays to soak in the awe and prepare ourselves to set sail with Paul and the others on the way to our vocation of testimony. We have seven Sundays to sit with God’s new thing, to watch it work its transforming wonder in the lives of the first believers , to rejoice with the Psalmists, and to sing with the myriads of myriads around the throne of God and of the Lamb. We have seven Sundays to consider how we will live as resurrection people in the world God loves, we who are witnesses to these things, we who have seen the Lord.

Easter Sunday Acts 10:34-43 or Isaiah 65:17-25; Psalm 118:1-2,14-24; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26 or Acts 10:34-43; John 20:1-18 or Luke 24:1-12 Easter Evening: Isaiah 25:6-9; Psalm 114; 1 Corinthians 5:6b-8; Luke 24:13-49

I have seen the Lord Alongside a rich choice of gospel texts for Easter Sunday, Acts 10:34-43 is suggested twice; if you don’t use it as a first reading, the lectionary tries again on the third. The lectionary really wants us to notice this good news, to make the connection between God’s biggest, most unexpected gift of newness in the resurrection of Jesus and God’s ongoing work of transformation in us. We are here in the midst of the giving of the Holy Spirit to the Gentiles and Peter’s vision-inspired, Spirit-led change of heart. Peter’s speech and the context out of which it emerges are marked by transformation, newness, and praise. Peter is surprised by

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grace. His expectations are utterly overturned, first in the vision of the unclean food and God’s instruction to eat, then in God’s work at the home of Cornelius. God’s newness prevails over human prejudice and certainty. “I truly understand that God shows no partiality,” says Peter (10:34). Pointing back to Jesus’ mission, death, and resurrection, grounded in the story of Israel, Peter tells the story of the church (10:4142 ): “Chosen by God as witnesses … who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead.” And then, while Peter is still speaking, God does God’s gracious work, and the Spirit surprises everyone. The Isaiah text continues the theme of newness, a newness so large that it can only be contained in new heavens and a new earth. “The former things shall not be remembered or come to mind” (65:17) when our hearts are full of God’s future, which starts now, morning by morning. This is cause for great rejoicing among God’s people and by God himself (65:19): “No more shall the sound of weeping be heard . . . .” All God’s people will live good, full lives and will be able to enjoy the fruits of their labors. The animals will live peaceably too. “They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain,” says the Lord (65:25). Paul joins the theme of life – new life in the individual but also new life for the world as God the Father and King reigns, and finally (15:26): “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” The Psalmist too takes up the song of life and witness, rejoicing in God’s goodness and enduring steadfast love (118:17): “I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord.” Finally we come to the gospel readings, the ultimate story of death destroyed, tears dried, grief interrupted forever, the unexpected glorious newness of Easter when even the identity of the first witnesses and proclaimers overturns expectations. In both of the Easter texts, John and Luke, women bear the good news. We aren’t told the reaction to Mary’s “I have seen the Lord!” in John’s account (20:18), but in the following scene, the disciples are huddled fearfully behind closed doors, and they do not immediately recognize Jesus even when he appears among them, and so we can assume that they haven’t grasped everything she said. Luke is explicit. When the women return with the news that Jesus has risen and tell the apostles, “These words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them” (24:11). The word translated idle tale is the basis for our word delirium. And who can blame any of them? No matter the messenger, that much newness isn’t easy to get our minds around. Quite aside from acceptance of the testimony of others, even those who see him themselves find it hard to grasp. Mary believes him to be the gardener (and possibly a body snatcher) until he calls her name. The Easter evening texts echo the themes of newness, unexpectedness, the strange, death-defying, eye-opening doings of God. Before this God, the Psalmist says, the mountains skip like rams and the hills like lambs. The sea flees. The earth trembles because it understands that this is a God who “turns the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a spring of water” (114:8). Just such a God is needed for the promises of Isaiah to be fulfilled. Of only such a God can it be said that “He will swallow up death forever,” as Isaiah proclaims (25:7), and “wipe away the tears from all faces” (25:8). In the evening gospel text, again, on the road to Emmaus, there is a delay in recognizing God’s Easter act. It is too much for any of us to take in fully all at once

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(which is why we need a season year after year for every year of the world). Even when he is standing there before them on the way, they, like Mary and the fearful group of followers in John, don’t immediately see him. In the inscrutable wisdom of God, Luke tells us that “their eyes were kept from recognizing him” (24:16) until he could open up the full truth for them in the speaking of the word (24:27) and the breaking of the bread (24:30). “Do this in remembrance of me,” Jesus had told them at the table (22:19). And the angels say the same to the women at the tomb (24:6): Remember. This remembrance is not just recall, but a form of presence. And now that earlier call to remembrance in the breaking of the bread meets this remembering along the way down the dusty road from death. The Easter God who opens eyes and swallows up death and wipes every tear delays their recognition, and in that delay we find our way to him now as they found it then. In the speaking of the word and the breaking of the bread, we meet him. Our eyes are opened. We hear him speak our names. Then we, like the women and the early bold proclaimers of Acts, become witnesses of these things too, clothed with power from on high. We join Peter and the household of Cornelius, surprised by the unexpectedness of grace, transformed by the strange work of the Spirit so that we too can tell the story of God’s big, bright, ever-new, death-defying life.

Second Sunday of Easter Acts 5:27-32; Psalm 118:14-29 or Psalm 150; Revelation 1:4-8; John 20:19-31

That you may have life We begin this Second Sunday of Easter with another resurrection proclamation, and again the context of the speech in Acts tells the story of the life out of which the testimony emerges. The speech is preceded by an arrest and a miraculous release, after which the apostles are directed by angels back to their teaching in the temple before we reach our passage. Then here we have the proclamation of Jesus exalted by God as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins, and the assurance of Peter and the apostles that the Holy Spirit joins them as witnesses to these things. This inspires murderous rage, held in check by Gamaliel, whose wise words ring through the ages, reminding generation after generation of proclaimers that the very ongoing presence of the story itself and people to keep telling it testifies to the powerful truth of its origins. That is how important the witnesses are, then and now. Then comes a flogging, but this flogging is not followed by discouragement or retreat, but by more proclamation, redoubled rejoicing. The Psalm for the day, wonderful 150,’ gives us language with which to recreate their praise because, as the apostles put it (5:32), and we might too, “We are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.” The gospel text offers us John’s account of the giving of the Spirit.2 Here, rather than being poured out and then received as fire and thunder with a cosmopolitan tent revival to follow, the Holy Spirit is given in a breath. Jesus’ broken body penetrates locked doors of fear and desperate grief, and the peace-giver breathes the Spirit on his fearful ones. Then we have the story of the one who wasn’t there, the one who voices the doubts

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of all the years, Thomas. Jesus comes back for the lost one, who is so marked by the suffering of his Lord that he cannot believe in his rising until he sees the wounds and can put it all together. The resurrection cannot make sense for him until it meets him in his grief. And Lord knows that there are plenty of us for whom this may be true. So Jesus turns from Thomas and pronounces a blessing on future Thomases who cannot touch his wounded side and scarred hands, a blessing on us, the ones who have not seen and yet will come to believe. The doubter opens up a space for our blessing. And of what does our blessing consist, we who are perhaps just as fearful and closed-in and doubt-marked as those first ones? It is life. That is the last word for this Second Sunday in Easter (20:31): “Life in his name.” Even as we wait for the one coming with the clouds of Revelation 1:4-8, our Alpha and Omega already breathes life over us in spite of everything. Peace and life and blessing. And we rejoice.

Third Sunday of Easter Acts 9:1-6, (7-20); Psalm 30; Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19

So that my soul may praise you and not be silent The Third Sunday of Easter starts with Saul breathing threats and murder, and then the light and the voice. It is a story of disorientation of the most profound kind: Saul (than whom, we might imagine, no one could be more sure of himself) is turned upside down and shaken. It is also a story of risk for Ananias, who must receive and bless the murderer. And then it is about transformation and, immediately, proclamation . That is where the eye-opening newness of Easter is meant to take us, to a willingness to risk and a passion to proclaim what we know about the risen Son. Saul falls to the ground as the elders will fall in worship in Revelation. But unlike them, he can see nothing. Ananias laying his hands on him tells him that he is to regain his sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit. Then something like scales falls from his eyes in a moment of resurrection recognition that is something like what we have seen before in the garden and in the breaking of the bread. And we know that this visual manifestation of release is accompanied by the promised spiritual one because immediately the persecutor begins to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is the Son of God” (9:20). The Holy Spirit inspires bold speech. Jesus’ resurrection presence in a life compels the one who sees it to tell the story. But even we, who are surely resurrection folk, struggle fully to take in that we are God’s people, recipients of his grace, and that the world is ever so loved. We cannot fully take it in, and yet we cannot prepare ourselves rightly to share it unless we do find a way to open our hearts and eyes and ears or allow them to be opened by the God who always stands at our door and knocks, and who sometimes just barges in and knocks us over with his powerful grace. The grace that left Saul blinded for three days, that left Jacob with a limp, and Zechariah mute, may also, if we are lucky, overwhelm us with the kind of awe that makes you fall down and worship with the angels and the living creatures and the elders, the myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands. We may need to be turned upside down at some point (or repeatedly) in order to find that place of praise. The Psalmist finds that mourning, death, weeping, all

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of the pain of this life, become precursors for praise. Joy comes with the morning — healing, restoration, life, all emerge from the most hopeless places — “so that my soul may praise you and not be silent” (30:12). In the gospel passage, seven of them have had a fruitless night on the sea when he appears unexpectedly. After the garden and the Spirit and the blessing, he stands on the shore. And even here, in the daybreak of the resurrection, they do not recognize him at once. Peter is still dealing with past failures by an earlier charcoal fire (18:18, the only other occurrence of the word in the New Testament). The resurrection, even for its first witnesses, has not fixed everything. It hasn’t fixed it for them or for us. It is just the beginning of God’s work of newness in our lives, unraveling our old fears with love and light — blinding light if necessary — whatever it takes to undo us, turn us around, bring us into an encounter so that he can make us fruitful (153 of them!) and feed us again his resurrection food, and we can learn to love as he loves and to be bold proclaimers of his good news, feeders and tenders of his sheep.

Fourth Sunday of Easter Acts 9:36-43; Psalm 23; Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:22-30

Yea, though I walk through the valley This Fourth Sunday of Easter begins with the death of a lovely disciple and then with the participation of Peter in God’s ongoing work of undoing death and drying tears.3 Peter, having just been instrumental in the healing of a paralytic in Lydda, is asked to come to Joppa when Tabitha dies. Like Elijah and Elisha before him, Peter prays, and God acts. In the episode before, similarly, Peter tells the paralytic (9:34), “Jesus Christ heals you . .. !” And in each case the act leads to belief in the Lord. The supreme life-giver chooses to work through human agents. That is part of the wonder of Acts. People who wouldn’t have believed they could do it (who certainly don’t seem all that promising when we meet them in the gospels) are empowered by the Holy Spirit to be God’s agents. It may seem awfully audacious to us, but it is the audacity of faith in the one who has raised Jesus from the dead. God chooses to dwell with us. In a quiet breath or a mighty wind, we are empowered by the Spirit to be instruments of life. And so we also end up being surprised because we are part of the unexpected. It doesn’t just happen to us and in us; we become instruments of it for God if we can permit ourselves the audacity to go when he calls or, if we are a different sort of person, quiet in ourselves the part that thinks we must or can do it on our own. Psalm 23 probably tells the story better than any other single passage in scripture, the whole life of faith en nuce, starting with the wholeness and safety and nurturing grace of green pastures and still waters. Then we follow on paths of righteousness, the rich ways of vocation, which probably don’t always look so green and still. These paths may be rocky and thorny or dark and muddy, or they may lead by breathtaking waterfalls and oceans, but wherever they lead, he is with us. And that is a good thing because we, all of us, come to that valley eventually. This is the place where famine and nakedness and sword abide, but it is also the place where ordinary grief and pain can take our breath away. Then the Psalm assures us, and our life of faith tells us, and the Easter season texts breathe the good news over

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us again and again, that no matter how dark it seems, the valley is not the end — not for Jesus or Peter or Tabitha or us. Beyond the valley are a table and an overflowing cup. The Revelation passage pulls it all together. Jesus, the Lamb of God, the one who went through the darkest valley of all — the once-for-all valley of God’s great love for the broken world — turns out to be our shepherd, this one who knows the way so well already. And there is more rejoicing, with a multitude that no one could count from every nation. Finally we reach John 10. Verses from this chapter accompany Psalm 23 every Easter season. This year we are in Jerusalem at a festival, which always signals conflict in John, always points to the valley. But the shepherd is undaunted, his rod and his staff our comfort (10:27-28): “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.” Then the key to all of it: Jesus and the Father, the great giver of life and newness, are one. And he is inviting us into the oneness with them. Then they try to stone Jesus. The pattern we see played out over and over in Acts starts with him – the life-giving, the bold speech, and then the resistance, which seems ultimately overcome in waves of prayer and praise. The way of the shepherd is not smooth, the paths of righteousness are not always gentle, and we all hit that valley some time. But all of it leads to life – abundant, eternal life – with goodness and mercy in hot pursuit and a home in God forever.

Fifth Sunday of Easter Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth We begin the Fifth Sunday with Part 2 of the story that began on Easter with Peter’s speech to the household at Caesarea. Now Peter is back in Jerusalem and under criticism not just for the baptism but even for having visited and eaten with uncircumcised men. The events that formed the context for the Easter speech are recounted again here by Peter: his vision, the three visitors, the journey to Caesarea, the descent of the Spirit, which happens as he is still speaking the words we heard on Easter, and then the baptism of the Gentile household. He concludes (11:17): “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” This is followed by silence, then acceptance and praise for this God who has done his life-giving thing in unexpected places for unexpected people yet again. This story is told repeatedly in Acts (as is the story of Paul’s conversion, repeated three times in addition to Barnabas’ telling of it). In the course of chapters 10 and 11, Cornelius’ half of the story is told three times, Peter’s twice. Then Peter refers back to the experience again in Acts 15 when the church is still grappling with the issue. And the lectionary gives us two chances on Easter and another one on this Fifth Sunday to engage with it. Resurrection life does not stop at the empty tomb. It touches our lives and our churches. God’s strange newness surprises us, reorients us, as it so completely reorients Paul and Peter and that first group of believers again and again. God breaks into our smallness with beautiful Easter grace and changes everything.

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The Psalm builds on the praise of the Jerusalem group with an eruption of praise by the whole created world – not just all living, creeping, flying, swimming things, but hail and fire, mountains and hills, sun and moon, fruit trees and all cedars. Then we come to Revelation’s ultimate vision of newness, the holy city descending as a bride and the new heavens and new earth, the end of death, the end of mourning and crying and pain, and the eternal presence of God, drying every tear from our eyes. And the Alpha and Omega of the Second Sunday appears again, giving the water of life. In the John text, Jesus, glorified, tells his followers how they are to be part of that newness, with his new commandment: Threefold love. As he has loved, we are to love because when we do this, everyone will know whose we are. Everyone will see the sheen of the newness of God on us. We seem to have come full circle with the return to the new heavens and the new earth and the wiping of tears of the Isaiah 65 Easter passage; the repetition and glad acceptance of the story of the Gentiles, God’s big new thing in the earliest church; and praise now extended to the whole created world. And the threefold love commandment has returned us to John 21 and the threefold love question to Peter. If we missed it there, we will not miss the message here that if we love him, we also love each other – we feed his sheep and tell the story. We are his witnesses. Like Peter and the first disciples, we love, we love, we love. If nothing else, it seems to be the end of the beginning, a fitting place to close the Easter season. But it is not. There are two more weeks of Easter, and the man from Macedonia beckons. We are called on further into this resurrection-charged life. There is no end for us as Easter people, only new beginnings.

Sixth Sunday of Easter Acts 16:9-15; Psalm 67; Revelation 21:10,22-22:5; John 14:23-29 or John 5:1-9

We set sail Our next Sunday with Acts begins with a vision in the night. The man from Macedonia pleads. God calls us to proclaim the good news, and we set sail. This is the first of four “we” passages in Acts. While much discussion of these passages has understandably focused on why the author has chosen to switch to the first person plural only in these few places, we as hearers and preachers of the word might especially consider the effect it has on us, particularly in the context of this resurrection season with Acts. And perhaps the effect it has is to draw us in so that we feel ourselves setting sail with them. We feel ourselves called to proclaim the good news in new places and in new ways. We feel ourselves constrained not to do other than follow the Spirit4 and compelled to participate in the bold speech and the bold acts of the first Christians. The immediacy of the passage invites us in, and so we journey with Paul and the others to Philippi. We meet Lydia at the place of prayer. She prevails upon us to stay with her. And we find ourselves nestled in the beginnings of the church family Paul dearly loved, his joy and crown, which will inspire his love song of a letter. We find our own hearts prepared perhaps to watch for our visions in the night, to listen for the voices that plead, to follow the God who calls us out. And we respond to the Psalmist’s call to all the nations, all peoples, all the ends of the earth, to be glad

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and sing and praise because if there is anything that Acts also teaches us to practice, it is praise. Then the Revelation text, which builds on the text for the Fifth Sunday with further description of the holy city in all its beautiful magnificence, invites us to bask in its glory. We notice that here, as in the Psalm and in the journeying of Paul, the nations play a part. The nations will walk in the holy city by the light of the glory of God and the lamp of the Lamb. The gates will never be shut, so that people will bring into it the glory and honor of the nations. And the tree of life along the banks of the crystal river flowing from the throne will produce its fruit each month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. The holy city is for everyone. From the gates of pearl and streets of gold, we turn to John 14. Here Jesus promises his own on their last night with him that he and the Father will come and make their home with them. The word translated home here is the same one traditionally translated mansions in 14:2. As there are many dwelling places in the Father’s house and a place is to be prepared for us, so the Father and Son make their dwelling place with us now. This promise of the abiding presence of God leads to a reiteration of the promise (already made in 14:16-17) of the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, to teach and remind Jesus’ own of all that he has told them. Then Jesus gives his peace, not as the world gives, and returns to the comfort of the first verse of the chapter (14:1,27: “Let not your hearts be troubled.”) and repeats the assurance that the Son will come back to his own. It is several ways of saying the same things: John’s “God-with-us.” The Holy Spirit abiding in us, the Father and Son making their dwelling places with us, the Son returning to us – all are expressions of presence. The shining city of Revelation 21-22 may be our magnificent vision of future hope, but we already have a holy city within us now, a peaceful place of wisdom and love. As we set sail with Paul and share in the bold speech of resurrection people, as we face beautifully disorienting transformation and holy, unsettling newness, we are not only together with one another (and all of the ones who’ve gone before) on the journey, we are also together with him. We have a home with the God who is at home with us. And that deep peace settles us. The light that is brighter than day warms us. We are not alone.

Seventh Sunday of Easter Acts 16:16-34; Psalm 97; Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21; John 17:20-265

Even so, come, Lord Jesus This Acts passage follows directly on the one for the Sixth Sunday, so we are still in Philippi as we begin this story of release (by exorcism from a spiritual imprisonment and by earthquake from a physical one), praise in adversity (Paul and Silas, flogged, imprisoned, and with their feet in stocks, hold a midnight prayer and hymn service for their fellow inmates), and transformation from death to life (as the jailer moves from thoughts of suicide to faith, baptism, hospitality, and much rejoicing). It is an appropriate summation of the resurrection life of the believer: released, rejoicing, transformed.6 This rejoicing that closes the Acts passage is echoed throughout the Psalm, with

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the whole earth rejoicing and all peoples beholding God’s glory. The Psalm is also dappled with righteousness: righteousness and justice are the foundations of God’s throne; the heavens proclaim his righteousness; light dawns for the righteous; and God is again proclaimed righteous by the Psalmist. In the Revelation text, the Alpha and Omega, who has appeared in the Second and Fifth Sundays, appears again. He is our beginning, our middle, and our end in this season and in all our lives as children of the resurrection God. There is also another reference to the tree of life and the city gates, drawing to a close this season of heavenly visions. Then we receive the repeated invitation to come to this one who is the bright and morning star, to live in this city, to take the water of life. And finally an assurance of his coming and an affirmation and hope that it should be so: Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Our final gospel text for the season draws together the love of the Father and Son before time with the lives of believers of every time and with the future of the world. The world does not yet know God (and knowing God and the Son is eternal life, 17:3), but the mutual indwelling of believers with their Father and Brother stands as testimony in the world. God’s resurrection life blessing us and binding us to him is also a blessing to the world — a living witness to God’s love for it too. Our Alpha and Omega makes his dwelling place with us. The home of God is among mortals. So we rejoice and we go. We continue the advance of the Word with our own bold speech. We experience in ourselves the life that undoes all that is broken or fearful or closed in us to make way for the new. And we share it. For the sake of the world God loves, we set sail.

Notes 1 Alongside Psalm 150, we are offered the possibility of a reprise of Psalm 118 and its rejoicing ( 118:23): “This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.” 2 John’s “sober Pentecost,” as I once heard Charles Cousar call it in a sermon. 3 This episode leaves Peter at the home of Simon the tanner, where Cornelius will be told to send for him. With Saul in place, the narrative is approaching the mission to the Gentiles. 4 The emphasis on the Spirit is especially clear in the verses that immediately precede these, in which Paul and his company are prevented by the Spirit from going in two other directions. 5 Ascension texts are alternates for this Sunday. These prepare for Pentecost in a straightforward way. I have opted instead to continue the focus on the Easter series as it comes to a glorious close this Sunday. 6 No one says it better than Paul himself writing to his people at Philippi in 4:4-7.

December 31, 2013
Preaching Pentecost to the ‘nones’

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Preaching Pentecost to the “Nones ״

Cheryl Johns

Pentecostal Theological Seminary, Cleveland, Tennessee

I don’t know about you, but I am somewhat confused regarding the religious-non religious landscape in the United States. In the recent Gallup study documented in the book God is Alive and Well: The Future o f Religion in America, Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport makes the case that religion is as alive and powerful as it’s ever been in America. In fact, the Gallup research projects that religion may be more significant in the years ahead. Perhaps, they note, “we may be on the cusp of a religious renaissance.”1 On the other hand, The Pew Forum on Religion’s recent study notes that the number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow rapidly. One-fifth of the U.S. public and nearly one-third of adults under the age of thirty are religiously unaffiliated today. That number reflects the highest percentage ever in the Pew Research Center polling. So, what are we to make of these findings? Furthermore, how do we know what we are dealing with in terms of the church’s ministry of preaching? Do we preach in order to convince a non-religious audience of the truth of the gospel? Or, do we get on the cusp of the wave of the new religious renaissance and ride it forward? I am confused, but here is what I think is happening. Religion as we have known it in previous generations is dying, but this death does not represent a sharp rise in the style of the “New Atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The Pew Research indicates that those who describe themselves as “atheist” or “agnostic ” have grown less than five percent over the last five years. There is no return to the “secular city.” On the other hand, the number of “nones,” or those who are religiously unaffiliated, has risen nearly twenty percent. Although the Gallup poll projects a rise in religious interest, it does note that “increasingly, Americans don’t have a religious identity, or they identify with broad religious labels rather than with specific denominations.”2 We are seeing the rise of the “nones” or the “religiously non-affiliated,” while at the same time seeing a continued interest in religion. To the question “Is religion dead or alive?” we would answer “yes.” We are well enough into the era of post-modernity where people are more open to various forms of spirituality. These forms may not in any way resemble organized religion. The Pew research found that many of the forty-six million unaffiliated adults are in some way religious or spiritual. Two-thirds (sixty-eight percent) of them indicate belief in God. More than one-third of the “nones” classify themselves as “spiritual,” but not “religious.” In terms of organized religion, notes Diana Butler Bass, “Everyone is in the same situation: a religious bear market. Indeed, the first decade of the twenty-first century could rightly be called the Great Religious Recession.” On the other hand, Butler’s research points to the emergence of “a spiritual awakening, a period of sustained religious and political transformation during which our ways of seeing the world, understanding ourselves, and expressing faith are being…4born again.”’3 There is a “volatile expression of God’s Spirit through mystery, wonder and awe.” We are

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moving from ‘6being a religion about God to being an experience of God.4 ״We are moving from the “what” to the “how” of faith. Her projections align themselves closely with those of Harvey Cox, who, in his book The Future of Faith makes the point that we are undergoing a transformation regarding human experience of the divine. We are moving from an era that Cox characterizes as the 44Age of Belief,” in which there was an emphasis on creeds and doctrine, to an “Age of the Spirit” that is characterized as non-dogmatic, non-institutional , and non-hierarchical.5 Whatever is happening on the American religious landscape, we can truthfully say that in the coming decades, spirituality will be on the rise, and it may be that the season of Pentecost is a grand opportunity to relate to those people whom we would call the “nones.” In terms of the liturgical year, in the old days, the Age of Belief, Christmas and Easter were times when people returned to the churches. Now we see less and less of that as people are finding spirituality elsewhere. But it could be that Pentecost will become the “outreach” Sunday of the future. If the “nones “come to church at all, they might come to celebrate a festival that is, in many ways, the ultimate “spiritual but not religious feast.”

The Feast of Pentecost as the Feast for the “Nones” “How,” you may ask, “does a holy day that celebrates the birth of the church attract those who do not even identify with the church?” Pentecost is not a celebration of the birth of the church in the sense that we see institutions today. But it is the beginning of a whole new order of human spirituality. That is something the “nones” can celebrate. Preaching Pentecost would mean that the traditional ways of celebrating the feast that included a sermon on the Holy Spirit (the 44what”) would need to shift to a more dynamic model of celebrating a festival that invites people into the mysterious and wonder-filled world of the Spirit (the “how”). Pentecost Sunday has the potential to be a gifted space where people can find church to be a place of awe, mystery, and wonder. But in order for that to happen, to borrow a phrase from Brian McLaren, “everything must change.”

How Can My Life be Enchanted? I believe that Pentecost can be preached to the “nones” by addressing a critical 44how” question that many of us, including the “nones,” are asking, namely, 4‘How can my life be re-enchanted?” Many people hunger to be wonder struck, to be awed by that which is larger, divine, and mystical. However, being wonder stuck today is no easy task. Most of us living in the modern world suffer from an acute case of what may be called Enchantment Deficit Disorder (EDD). The symptoms of EDD include a loss of a sense of wonder, a skepticism of anything that smacks of the supernatural or the miraculous. On the other hand, EDD has left many people searching for the wonderful, the holy, and the genuinely spiritual. Enchantment Deficit Disorder is a by-product of the rise of modernity in the Western world. The disease was part of the trade-off we made in an era that was rushing forward in scientific progress. To paraphrase Max Weber from a lecture he delivered in 1918 at Munich University, 44If you want to be part of the modern world, grow up and bear the burden of disenchantment.”6 During the Enlightenment, people did just that. The highest praise given to a modern was that he or she was “rational,”

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or “scientific. ״The worse criticism given was that a person was “spiritual but of no earthly good,” or that the person was “superstitious.” And, heaven forbid that people would let emotion enter into so-called “objective reality.״ Christians, in particular Protestant Christians, were part of the modern project of disenchantment. They worked hard to harmonize faith with this era by making faith a rational and scientific enterprise. Christianity during this period of the “Age of Belief’ emphasized the rational “truths ״of the faith. Moreover, many Christian scholars worked to make Christianity a “scientifically” valid belief. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the EDD virus had so infected the Protestant faith that there were few remnants of mystery remaining. We were people who were “religious, but not spiritual.” During this heyday of modernity, the season of Pentecost was problematic. Many preachers just did not know what to do on Pentecost Sunday. Here was a feast that upset the whole modern project! Being what James Forbes calls “Holy Spirit shy,” many made attempts to talk about Pentecost without being accused of being overly supernatural or spiritual. Given the biblical texts surrounding Pentecost, they had their work cut out for them. But now, during this period of “The Great Religious Recession,” we have the opportunity to re-visit the Feast of Pentecost as offering a way forward into a new era of Christian spirituality. The religious “nones” are described as open and hungry for personal spiritual experiences. They long for enchantment. Think of the popularity of The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Vampire Diaries, and you will get an idea of how deep runs the hunger for enchantment. Pentecost is the feast of enchantment that meets this deep hunger. In this feast there is enchanted Word, enchanted space and time, enchanted community, and enchanted creation.

Pentecost Offers an Enchanted Word. Preaching during the Age of Belief was more about sharing ideas and beliefs. Such preaching was based upon what Edward Farley called the “bridge paradigm,” linking the truth found in the Bible to the lives of hearers. The Bible used in the bridge paradigm of preaching was dis-enchanted. It was an objectified text that was the victim of the great divorce between the presence of God and the Word of God. In this divorce, the Bible became a text without any “subject-hood” or power of real presence. Preaching out of such a text meant that one traversed the world of ideas and beliefs and stayed away from the mysterious realm of the Spirit. Now in the “Age of the Spirit,” preaching the Word needs to have a deeper sacramental character. Preaching an enchanted Word does not mean that we revert to some pre-modern literalism or view the Bible as a magical book, but it does call for us to re-vision the ontology of Scripture. Just what is holy Scripture if it is not a scientific document or a historical artifact? John Webster’s identification of Scripture as a sanctified vessel whose existence is grounded in the Triune life of God helps us move toward an enchanted text .7 This understanding of the text requires a robust pneumatology, with the Holy Spirit serving as the self-presence of God.8 Preaching such a Word means encountering in Scripture what Karl Barth described as “the world that is God.” This world joins together the Word of God and the Presence of God. Preaching this Word is to actively participate in God’s offering God-self to humanity.

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If we look at Peter’s sermon on the day of Pentecost, we see a prototype for the joining of God’s presence and God’s Word. There was not only the wind that came and blew upon those in the Upper Room, but there was the wind in the words spoken by Peter. As Walter Brueggemann notes regarding the nature of the Spirit to the text, “(I)t is the wind in the words that comes over us, not one more grudging echo of us, but a word from out beyond, and the world begins again, 4very good’ indeed.”9 This holy Wind “destroys and makes new.”10 The word spoken on the Day of Pentecost “cut to the heart,” destroying previous categories of belief. But this word also created a new world and a new people. I believe that today’s “nones” are hungry for a Word that comes from beyond the trenches of the culture wars and the rhetoric of the left and right. People are hungry for a Word that breathes new life. This Word is found in the feast of Pentecost.

Pentecost offers the possibility of Enchanted Space and Time The “nones” long for the “thin places” where the veil between this world and the world of the Spirit becomes nearly transparent. Their hunger sends them to visit ancient holy sites where in ages past prayers were chanted and sung. Some of the “nones” walk ancient pilgrimage paths seeking a separate peace or a space inhabited by relics of the past. Such longing is met in the feast of Pentecost. This feast brings about a mysterious and awesome dimension of worship that is a merger of the earthly and celestial celebration of God’s presence. Pentecost is an eschatological festival in the truest sense of the word, effecting transformation that began in the work of Christ. It represents the entrance of the future into the present and the joining of the tongues from the present into the language of the coming order. Furthermore, it represents the incarnation of the life of the triune God into the life of human community. Pentecost is thus a visitation by the Spirit, bringing about a co-mingling of heaven and earth. “The Pentecost Church stands in the present as the very future of the world,” notes Daniela Augustine, “exemplifying the mystery of the Trinitarian communal life in the community of the saints as the ultimate calling and destiny of all creation.”11 This future-present event sacramentalizes time and space in which the church’s liturgy becomes the charismatic dwelling place for the invisible celestial realm to be made “present, transparent and visible.”12 Many of the “nones”are searching for sacramental space. The space of their day to day lives has been flooded with the spectacle of pornography and violence. They all hunger for the mystical, for embodied and tangible structures of grace. Disembodied religion that is starkly verbal and rational has no way to meet the needs of those who desire fleshly touch that is holy, who desire to eat bread that nourishes, who long to be bathed in water that cleanses and comforts with the warmth of oil poured out for healing. Pentecost provides a sacramental space wherein matter and Spirit co-mingle. Bodies are filled with divine presence, and human tongues speak of the mysteries of God. In this space invisible grace is transformed into visible manifestations that say clearly “God is present.” People are wonder-stuck with the glory of God being manifest in the midst of common people. Worship becomes a liminial space, a place set between heaven and earth, not here nor there, but here and there.

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Pen tecost Offers the Gift of Enchanted Community The Pew Forum’s study on religion noted that the religiously unaffiliated attach much less importance to belonging to a community of people with shared values and beliefs than Americans overall. Twenty-eight percent of the unaffiliated say this is very important to them, compared with forty-nine percent of all adults. What do these numbers mean for us in our preaching, teaching, and pastoral ministry? I believe that these statistics point out that we cannot assume “community as usual ״will be attractive to the 44nones.” Church has become synonymous with groups with shared values and beliefs. We gather around shared centers of value, be those centers a particular doctrine about God or lifestyle interests. But it seems that the 44nones” are choosing not to gather around our centers of value and power. The i4nones” will not attend 44women’s groups” or feel the need to be part of 44the men’s fellowship breakfast.” They don’t feel the need to attend a worship service where there are people of like-minded beliefs. On the other hand, all humans have a deep desire to be part of vibrant and authentic human community. They long to be where they are not commodified objects, but valued as beings of dignity and worth. In an age in which there are more human slaves than ever, it is safe to say that the human being has become another object of the industrialist capitalist society. It seems that we cannot escape this repressive message that the 44other” is not of value. Pentecost offers a new order of human community. It is the community that is God. 44God in the Spirit of God,” notes Peter Hodgson, 44is God existing in community .”13 It is the Holy Spirit who, as our way to God, offers to humanity the gift of this Divine Life. At Pentecost, the deep mystery of the Trinitarian life of God was offered to humanity as a new order of existence. This order of existence provides an alternative to Babel. The spirit of Babel is one that we can all identify with today. It is the spirit of the homogenous city, that ‘4empire of illusion”14 that attempts to convince us we are better off in a homogenizing consumer culture. This imperial project was cut short by God’s deconstruction of human language. In many ways, Babel is reversed at Pentecost. In the language of the Spirit, humanity is once again united. However, as Augustine points out, there is continuity between the two events in God’s 44prophetic deconstruction of every imperial consciousness that is inherently homogenizing and violently marginalizing of those who are other and different.”15 Pentecost is thus a uniting and community building festival, but it is also a festival of deconstruction of the 44homogenizing shortcuts of empire.”16 The fires of Pentecost do not create a warm soup of human community. Rather, they burn away that which cannot stand in the new order of creation. Those who heard Peter’s sermon on the Day of Pentecost were 44cut to the heart” by his words of judgment. Yet his sermon was not only one of judgment against those who rejected Christ; he spoke words of promise that pointed to a new, inclusive community that includes the possibility of ‘4all flesh,” slaves and free, sons and daughters, young and old. The offering of divine hospitality present at Pentecost continues to unfold. As preachers we can offer this radical call as both judgment and promise. To a world ‘4traumatized in its global compression and exhausted political imagination,” we can offer a hope for the future of 44cosmopolitan hospitality—the future of humanity in the likeness of God.”17 To the world that desires to flatten us into cut-out images

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and shrink our souls into nothingness, we preach words of prophetic judgment. This world is not the final word. New tongues are being spoken.

Pentecost and the Enchantment of Nature The “nones” may be closed to religion, but they seem open to the natural world. The Pew Research noted that more than half (58 percent) say they often feel a deep connection to nature and the earth. The feast of Pentecost offers a way toward bringing that connection into the realm of the spiritual. From the beginning this feast has been an enchanted feast of nature. Celebrated fifty days after Easter, Pentecost is symbolically and historically related to the Jewish harvest festival of Shavuot or Feast of Weeks. From its inception, this festival brought together the world of nature and the world of the supernatural visitation of God. It commemorated the events of Sinai, especially the giving of the Law, but it also celebrated the harvesting of the wheat. This festival was a day when people could bring the first fruits to the temple, with a processional in which baskets of grain would be loaded on oxen whose horns were gilded and laced with garlands of flowers. These oxen would lead the procession to Jerusalem, accompanied by music and festive parade. The Eastern churches have kept the harvest theme of Pentecost better than those of us in the west. Christians in Eastern Europe refer to Pentecost as the “green holiday ״ and so decorate their houses and churches with greenery. In some places processions are made to the fields, where crops are blessed. This celebration often goes hand in hand with the extraordinary service of Kneeling Prayer on Pentecost Sunday. In the Orthodox tradition of Pentecost, there is a remarkable gestalt of nature and grace, history and creation, prayers and harvest. The bringing together of the “green” and the “red” on the Day of Pentecost points to the beauty of the natural order as already inhabited by God moving ever toward its final consummation when all the cosmos will be filled with the glory of God. The icon of Pentecost portrays this expectation. It depicts the tongues of fire that descended on the Apostles. However, the central figure of the icon is the mythical figure of Cosmos. On one hand Cosmos is depicted as both dignified and beautiful. He is wearing a crown and regal robes. On the other hand, he is aged, and his crown is tarnished. The icon depicts Cosmos as moving out of the darkness that surrounds him toward the rays of the light of Pentecost. In the icon’s depiction of the cosmos there is a sense that creation is beautiful, containing glory and dignity, yet broken and in need of restoration. The Pentecost icon points to its full sanctification and healing. The author of the book of Romans expresses this already/not yet tension found in creation, noting it will “be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). Using maternal imagery the author continues, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now” (8:22). Writing post-Pentecost, the author continues, “And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (8:23). In the icon of Pentecost and in the letter to the Romans, there is both visitation of the “first fruits” (note the harvest imagery), but also a sense in incompletion. The beautiful land has not yet arrived fully. All together—the cosmos, redeemed human

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ity, and the Spirit of God —groan for the day of freedom from decay. On the Day of Pentecost the book of Joel is evoked in the preaching of Peter. On the day when Israel celebrated its grain harvest, Peter calls forth a memory of a time when the Feast of Weeks would have been a time of mourning, not a time of joy. The book of Joel begins with a lament for the wasted and devastated land. This lament surveys the destruction. ‘4Surely, joy withers away among the people,” notes the prophet (1:12). Following the lament there is the call to repentance. This call ushers in a response from God in the form of promise: “I am sending you grains, wine, and oil, and you will be satisfied; and I will no more make you a mockery among the nations2:18-19) .) ״Following the promise of restoration, the earth is addressed directly with words of healing of the soil, the plants, and the animals (2:21-24). Following these words, the prophet speaks regarding the people. They, like the earth, will be filled with the new rains. All flesh will receive the Spirit (2:28-29). If we understand nature, in the words of James K.A. Smith, as being “primed” for the Spirit’s manifestations,18 then we can view the groaning of creation not merely as desire for that which it has not already tasted, but the longing to be completely filled. We as humans are primed for that visitation, but moreover, the natural world itself desires to be fully indwelled by the Spirit. Celebrating Pentecost today calls for us to integrate the creation into our worship. This celebration would demand that we go beyond our bringing the color green into our liturgical vestments. It would mean that we take seriously an enchanted worldview in which we see the creation as places of the Spirit’s habitation. The Spirit in creation is not a move into pantheism. Rather, it means that we see all of life as vivified by the Spirit of God. John Calvin’s words that “it is the Spirit who, everywhere diffused, sustains all things, causes them to grow, and quickens them in heaven and earth,”19 have meaning for us today in our attempt to re-enchant nature. Furthermore, we do not often see Pentecost as a season of lament; however, it may well be the feast that offers opportunity to grieve over the destruction of the earth’s natural resources. As in the era of the prophet Joel, the earth is being devastated and the land mourns. Creation itself groans. It is the victim of horrific abuses of mountain top removal and other attempts to extract its resources without regard to the future. Would not the outpouring of the Spirit today result in sighs too deep for words? Preaching Pentecost as a green festival would move people from lament to repentance to hopeful and faith-filled practices of earth-keeping. Such preaching would call forth love and respect for the creation. It would invite people to care for the “new poor” —the earth itself. In the tradition of the Midrash, Mount Sinai bloomed with flowers in anticipation of the giving of the Torah. This description paints an image of an enchanted space where God’s Word and God’s creation co-exist in a beautiful synergy. So too, our Pentecost services can be a place where the Word of the Lord is spoken and flowers bloom. Such an enchanted space would evoke wonder, fear, and awe, not only for the “nones,” but for us all who long to be enchanted.

Concluding Thoughts on our Annual Opportunity to Burn The Burning Man Festival which is held annually in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada attracts nearly 50,000 people to its week-long celebration of the human spirit and the creative powers inherent in humanity. Based upon principles such as radi-

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cal inclusion, gifting, Burning Man is a festival that symbolizes some of the longing present in the religious “nones.” Perhaps we could learn a bit from this festival. Are we holding our festivals that celebrate radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, and nature? Each year, with the festival of Pentecost, we are given opportunity to lay aside institutional traits that the “nones” find challenging and create new forms of life. We should know, however, that Pentecost festival offers so much more than Burning Man. At the end of Burning Man festival, they “burn the Man,” (the tall wooden structure of a human). Everyone leaves the desert, driving back to their lives as computer analysts, stock brokers, or teachers. In the Festival of Pentecost we hear gifted Word, participate in sacred time and space, and find the natural world enchanted with the Spirit of God. Furthermore, we become enchanted beings who live in the delight of the Divine triune life. That is an enchantment we can take into eternity.

Notes 1 The Gallup Blog, “God is Alive and Well: The Future of Religion in America,” Tuesday, December 4, 2012. See also, G od Is Alive and Well: The Future o f Religion in America 2 “The Gallup Blog, “God Is Alive and Well: The Future of Religion in America,” Tuesday, December 3,2012. 3 Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End o f Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening (New York: HarperOne, 2012), 5. 4 Butler Bass, 110. 5 Harvey Cox, The Future o f Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2009). 6 Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), 155. 7 John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 8 John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 48. 9 Walter Brueggemann, The Book That Breathes New Life: Scriptural Authority and Biblical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 34. 10 Ibid. 11 Daniela Augustine, Pentecost, Hospitality, and Transfiguration: Toward a Spirit-inspired Vision of Social Transformation (Cleveland, Tennessee: CPT Press, 2012), 29. 12 Augustine, 36. 13 Peter Hodgson, Winds o f the Spirit: A Constructive Christian Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster /John Knox Press, 1994), 296. 14 See Chris Hodge, Empire o f Illusion: The Rise o f the Age o f Spectacle (New York: Nation Books, 2009). 15 Augustine, Pentecost, Hospitality, and Transfiguration, 30. 16 Ibid., 31. 17 Ibid., 67. 18 James K.A. Smith, “Is the Universe Open to Surprise? Pentecostal Ontology and the Spirit of Naturalism ,” a plenary paper presented at the thirty-seventh annual meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Duke University, March 2008. 19 Calvin, Institutes, 1.13.14.

December 31, 2013
Preaching Advent hope

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Preaching Advent Hope

Joseph Phelps

Hi§hland Baptist Church, Louisville, Kentucky

Is Advent Passe? The cynical proclaimer might infer that “Preaching Advent Hope” refers to our hope that our churches will tolerate a week or two of authentic Advent proclamation and hymnody before a congregational mutiny demands the more expected Christmas cheer, for such is the fate of many preachers during Advent. We preachers have a reason for insisting on Advent before Christmas, other than simply to play the role of disciplinarians. (“Eat your vegetables before dessert.”) 1 ؛is the hard, unwelcome responsibility of the church to be utterly out of sync with its culture, to insist on a unique season of focus and renewal, and just at the peak holiday season. But it’s tough. Advent tones of longing, waiting, lamenting, and asking can’t hold a Christmas candle to the fa-la-la-la-la that bursts onto the scene between Halloween and Thanksgiving. It is counter-cultural to delay the carols for four weeks of reflections about what we mortals most desperately need. It ،-‘؛tu feel downright un-American to wait in darkness during the pre-Christmas frenzy ٢٠to preach that our deepest longings will not be satisfied with gifts purchased at the mall ٢٠online. Let’s not forget the internal tension within our hymnals, many of which contain far more singable, familiar Christmas carols than Advent hymns. Nor can we overlook the choir’s seasonal cantata. John the Baptist may show up in Handel’s Messiah, but only as a warm-up act. Most choral works during Advent “spill the beans” too quickly and move us into Christmas prematurely. A crowning blow against Advent is that after Christmas the vast majority of our congregations are over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house, including many pastors (which is why the Sunday after Christmas is wryly referred to as “National Associate Pastors Week”). Few of the faithful are present to mark the twelve days of Christmas, so it’s squeeze it in before Christmas ٢٠forget it. What to do? Some churches split the difference, holding out for Advent-ish services in the first two weeks, then yielding weeks three and four to Christmas. Others just give in and start singing about Baby Jesus even before the leftover Thanksgiving turkey is gone. So why does the Christian calendar retain this anachronistic Advent custom of posing questions of waiting and watching in a culture that prefers well-wishing and whimsy? Why the charade? We know the punch line already. Every child knows what’s wrapped up in the tiny box atop the creche’s manger. Why pretend as if we are looking and waiting for something that arrived 2 ,0 0 هyears ago? Is Advent simply, at best, an exercise in liturgical deferred gratification? Or is it, at worst, ٤١ form of theological sadism?

Advent as Primal Hope and Warning The church has historically insisted on Advent before Christmas in order to bear witness to the inconvenient truth that the most significant act of defiance to be mustered in the face of life’s confusion and destruction is for a people to be shaped,

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again, by the primal h©pe that there is m©re in this life. Or as Marcus B©rg would write, “More.” We need Advent because we need to be reoriented into the hope that is foundational to all that faith is predicated on: God. Advent refuses to analyze or explain God’s existence. Instead, Advent makes the hold pronouncement that, though darkness surrounds us, the God of Torah and prophets is not done. Advent plays the long game. It waits, like spectators at a close ballgame, for the next breakthrough, the next movement, the next flurry of action on the scene. Its words of longing, impatience, and pleading reveal our undergirding conviction that there is God, and this God is not relegated to the confines of history. As we Advent-wait, we do what we can to insure our eyes and ears are attuned to what might come, in order to avoid missing the Arrival and feeling left at the altar, so to speak. Like hunters in a deer blind, we have an expected stretch of waiting on our hands before The Arrival, time that can be employed to review the possibilities, to ask about prior sightings, to double-check our readiness, to examine whether we are standing in the best place to glimpse The Coming. For we have been warned repeatedly that it is entirely possible for the Holy One to arrive and for those who presume they are waiting faithfully to miss the arrival entirely.

But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. ¥ ٧٠also must be ready, for the $ ٧٠of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. (Luke 12: 39-40)

Or the fate of the foolish bridesmaids:

Butatmidnighttherewasashout,“Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.” Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish said to the wise, “Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.” But the wise replied, ‘،No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.” And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, “Lord, lord, open to us.” But he replied, “Truly 1 tell }’OU, I do not know you.” Keep uwake therefore, for you know neither the day ٢٠٧the hour. (Matthew 25: 6-13)

Or the warning implicit in the instructions to the sent-out disciples:

Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.” But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, “Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.” (Luke 10: 8-11)

These passages encourage vigilance and vision; their intent is not to discourage

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or demean or even to primarily eause distress. They are calls to awareness, “Be ready and willing to watch outside your preseribed God-box,” these passages invite. “Cast your gaze far but also near; make it wide-angle but also telescopic. Look with your eyes, but also listen with your ears. Be open to surprise (“God’s other name,” as lohn Claypool used to say). And have patience and endurance.”

Advent as Birthright The faithful church must doggedly retain Advent as our opening season, like Naboth refusing to yield his homeland to Ahab’s political and financial pressure. For without Advent, we forfeit our foundational birthright as a people who wait in hope for One who comes and acts and does among us what we cannot act or do for ourselves. The faithful church knows its need to reboot itself each year with Advent, to reset its hoping spirit, to insure that our waiting has not deteriorated into doddering or doodling. We must not, like Nero, fiddle while our Rome bums. We must not miss The Coming, for we are today’s poets and prophets, called to announce to our oblivious and preoccupied culture what we detect happening in our very midst. We’re not naive. We recognize how often Advent is overlooked or obliterated. S teenfocertut^rtistF eterB m eggel’s painting, NumberingatBethlehem,depictsu wide-angle scene of a Flemish village as it would have appeared in his day, complete with a church spire. The villagers are busy: skating on foe frozen pond, talking over foe fence, slaughtering a pig, (queuing up to pay taxes at foe inn. Amidst foe hubbub, one barely notices a woman heavy with child, riding on a donkey toward foe inn, her carpenter husband walking alongside with a saw hanging from his belt. Here is a poignant, Advent moment. The Holy Family is coming into foe midst of foe people. That they overlook foe moment is not because foe people are bad ٢٠blind; rather, it is because their eyes and ears are not attuned to foe Advent hope that foe Holy might come among them and transform their priorities and pleasures. Advent preaching needs an air of waiting for that which has not yet appeared, or that which appeared in foe past but has been too long in returning. As such it hints of impatience, but foe dominant theme is more of an active expectation, a yearning hopefulness, a deep-seated conviction that it’s not time to give up or go home yet. Advent preaching announces: Something is coming, something more, a wild card will be thrown, like in Uno, that will reverse foe course of how things are heading now, something that will feed our deepest hungers and bring joy to our most profound griefs. Something sacred, beyond our control and frame. It’s been here before; it will show up again. Any time. Maybe now. ?reaching Advent hope transcends optimism or wishful thinking because it is grounded in the coming of God in history, in foe narrative that has become “foe story we find ourselves in,” as Brian McLaren’s book title suggests. This Advent posture doesn’t speak with the cocky certainty of foe gambler who has counted foe cards and knows what’s coming next. Rather, Advent hope emanates from a deep-seated confidence that the Holy One whose appearance has been experienced and recorded by God’s people in foe past will continue to appear in foe fullness of time, even if followers of the dominant narrative are incapable of seeing it is so.

Challenges to Advent Hope As WalterBrueggemann has observed throughouthis career, the alternative, sacred

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experiences © ٢God’s pe©ple are c©nstantly called ini© question by the adherents t© the dominant narrative. The challenge t© believing in God is constant—often subtle, s©met؛mes ©vert. It picks away at any hope that there is s©mething more at ^ork in creation or in the history of humanity. This containment and belittling of a real God-based hope is found in the comers of our adoration ©؛technology, our militarysponsored security, our addiction to guns, our materialism, our competition on athletic and academic fields 01′ play, even within the church, the group presumably dedicated to promoting God—as it seeks acceptance within the larger culture by jettisoning its birthright of hope in God. fogrett^ly,aninsecm echurch’3tem pttoengenderhope in God is as convincing as the printing of the phrase “In God We Trust” on the very currency upon which our culture actually places its hopes. Outsiders see through the charade. Hope becomes like Santa Claus and reindeer, an icon of bygone days, often without any awareness by those who show up each tt’eek to be addressed by scriptures and sermons about hope. The result can be a recitation of “what God did” without any hopeful expectation that the narratives upon which we ground ourselves convey “what God is doing” and “what God will do.” It’s not that we are bad people ٢٠disbelieving people; we are, however, hope-less people. Hope wasn’t abandoned; it was misplaced by distracted people who are constantly bombarded by invitations to place their hope in other, more tangible, tactile, technological wonders. We are, as was the audience of Isaiah, “like sheep that have gone astray, we have turned everyone to his own way” (Isaiah 53:6). But we are not dumb sheep. We intuit that hope is paired with change (as Sarah ?alin noted during the 2012 presidential campaign, “How’s that hope-y, change-y thing workin’ for ya?”). There will be new orders, new arrangements, new priorities, which is fine, as long as that change happens “out there,” not “in here.” We are fine with a hope which implies that others will be changed, likely being conformed to our carefully crafted values and vision. But what if, as Advent texts suggest, the change includes us,even originates in us? What if the change is far more interiorthan exterior, how we see rather than what is seen? As someone has noted, “?eople don’t dislike change; they dislike being changed.”

Preaching مإﺀ؛ Hope So preaching Advent hope to begin a new year within the Christian story is not only chronologically correct, it is culturally compulsory for the faithful preacher. It demands that the preacher first experience, then proclaim the promise that the One “who began a good work in you will bring it to completion” (?hilippians 1:6). The faithful preacher helps the congregation recogni/e that their lives have become hope-less (not hopeless!), both individually and collectively. Granted, there will be exceptions in every worshiping community (thanks be to God), but those exceptions will tolerate and appreciate the naming ofthe hope-lessness that pervades our culture, and perhaps our churches. The rest of the congregation needs to hear the word of hope: God is not done. On the other hand, this call to rekindle our hope may surprise ٢٠offend some parishioners. They triay assume that their attendance during Advent places them several steps in front of those who will only show up for the Christmas Eve services, and certainly far ahead of those who have fallen completely into the Christmas

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orgy of materialism on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. It does not occur to them that they might go about the rituals of Advent—the wreath, the Christmon tree, the absence of the alelluiahs—without ever addressing the primal need for the reestablishment of Advent hope, that God is not done, as the foundation for all that will follow in the year, and more importantly, all that might reinterpret the various challenges that comprise their individual lives and the corporate lives of their church and culture. Well-preached Advent hope may surprise some. It is entirely possible that many who hear an Advent sermon can’t name an experience of God acting in their lives. They live without hope because they’ve not been trained to look for and name the acting of God in their lives nor to hope for God in the future. So Advent preaching will help the congregation see the gracious presence of God where we failed to notice ٢٠name God before. It also unearths our deeper longing for reconciliation, healing, justice, in a word: salvation, that was buried beneath the lesser tasks of the short run ،hat demand our attention—from the politics of the day, to the economy (micro and macro), to ^!؛migration, racism, campaign finance reform, all the way to whether to renovate the church’s children’s wing at this time). Advent preaching remains in the center ofthe text, not wandering off to peripheral issues of lesser importance, but honing the hope of a future reshaped by the presence and potency of God. Faithful preaching exhorts the congregation toward a renewed vision of where God leads us, toward possibilities that seem a pipe-dream ifconsidered in isolation. In community and in covenant with God, however, they begin to form something new among us. One hears the hope in the prophets:

In days to come the mountain ofthe Lord’s house shall be established as the highest ofthe mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may ^valk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word ofthe Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not hft up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. 0 house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light ofthe Lord! (Isaiah 2: 2-5)

Despite Judah’s leaders’ failure to lead wisely and courageously; despite the empty rituals that characterized Israel’s worship; despite acting on its own, living by its own values, falling to its own anxieties, creating its own alliance, there remains the vision of restoration and realignment that is only possible with God. Though we turned away God, God returns to us to finish the work of creation. God is not done; reality cannot be defined simply by the context we find ourselves in.

Transforming Hope Hope’s power came to life in the aftermath ofthe bombing at this year’s Boston Marathon. How ought we feel, much less respond to, such a vile act? What do we

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do with our outrage and our sense of abhorrenee at this ungodly disregard for life’s sanetity? Should we be afraid ٠۴ every stranger, every erowd? Should we exact revenge ? Where do we even stand emotionally? Does “Love your enemies” apply to this situation? Is it even possible to engage the mindset that so disapproves ٠۴ the world as it is interpreted that itjustifies conceiving and carrying out such intentional destruction and grief? We recognize that there is a battle being fought, though the boundaries, the enemy, and the reason for the conflict are vague and amorphous. We are on a side, though our role and our weapons for defense and offense are unclear. We preach of faith, hope, and love. Written on a page these words look limp in the face of words like bombs, terror, and death. And yet when activated, they carry their own punch. Faith names the active presence of life’s sacredness that continually gives birth to powerful possibilities. Hope plays the long-game and is not dependent on winning every skirmish in the battle. It reminds us that we are part ٠۴ a whole that will continue long after our work is done. Love is heaven’s lightening in a bottle, ft illuminates the atrocity, exposes the evil, and tike the sun, it activates life. It reminds us we cannot be content simply to “get those bastards who did this,” but compels us to apply love’s lightening to every dark place that breeds the germs ٠۴ hate and fear. This is sacred work. It begins in Advent as faith calls forth hope in God that makes love possible.

December 31, 2013
Apocalyptic Christmas

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Apocalyptic Christmas

Joshua Rice

Mount Paran North Church of God, Marietta, Georgia

I have tended to view my role as a preacher to take the familiar and to make it unfamiliar in order that it might he re-familiarized in a fresher, perhaps even what might be considered a more biblical, manner for the hearer. Nowhere is this challenge greater than in the accepted texts of Advent. This is not a challenge of originality, much less novelty. The goal of preaching is not to tread new ground, but old. ¥et the Christmas story does pose a particular pitfall. The ground of these texts may have gotten so rutted by constant treading that we fail to aid our congregations in looking up from that ground in order to discover the apocalypse that Christmas hails, the advent not just of a baby, but of a new world, blazing beyond our ruts. © ,٢even more dangerously, might we tend to remain in our ruts in order to avoid the advent of such a new world altogether? None of these are new challenges for the preacher. Indeed, we meet them headon , 52 times per year. But the intensive, embedded nature of the Christmas season within our western cultures may provide a unique opportunity to ¡(turney beyond our conventional roles as exegetes, counselors, and historians. I want to propose that approaching these texts and their relationship to our own society, as cultural anthropologists ma} ׳represent a fruitful method for unlocking new impact. For if, as I suggest, Advent is an apocalyptic event, definitively breaking from the old world to invite us into the new, the tools of cultural anthropology can assist us in perceiving the inner-workings of these worlds. I hope that such perception will then ،ill us with the courage that is all too often lacking in staid Advent preaching, the audacity “to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then a little more.’’1

Christmas and Cultural Anthropology The Advent texts are a cultural anthropologist’s dream. In the libraries of ancient literature, there is perhaps no more famous (or easily accessible) crossroads of the clashing of cultures, the richness of symbols, the diverse layers of human traditions stretching into the Hebrew, Roman, and Hellenistic worlds. Then, of course, there are the alternate lives that these texts have breathed in and through the consciousness, the liturgies, the political,familial,and social dynamics throughout Christian history. Interestingly, when we put on our cultural anthropologist’s “hat,” we not only cast light upon these historical and contemporary realities, but we also find that the vital shift we seek to make as preachers, from familiarity to apocalypse, is mirrored in the discipline of cultural anthropology itself. At the turn of the twentieth century, the discipline of cultural anthropology was restfully entrenched in structural-functionalism as the accepted lens for viewing human societies. The structural-functionalist view, now typically called functionalism , operated like an anthropological camera, providing a comprehensive snapshot of a given society. Such snapshots depicted an achieved equilibrium in which the various components of culture mysteriously worked together to achieve balance.2 In the functionalist viewpoint, culture itself takes on the role of independent organism into which persons, institutions, and symbols fit. Thus, and in general, the “ideal”

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societies tip toward static convention and the continnity of societal institutions. Then, in the heyday of functionalist momentum, the world went to war. The Great Depression ravaged complacentcapitalism. From the supposedlyChristianized southeastern United States, civil unrest began to stir. Cultural anthropologists took notice of the fact that equilibrium didn’t seem to be the glue that it was once, and they looked for other lenses. The most readily available—conflict theory—proved to be the silver bullet for dethroning functionalism, ?opularly associated with Karl Marx, conflict theory considers the glue holding together a given culture to be not a shared system of consistent values, norms, and structure, but an ongoing battle between inconsistent values, norms, and structures. While conflict theory held great allure, even romance, it largely exhausted itself by feeding on fee same raw material as functionalism, unconsciously sharing its presuppositions about fee centrality of institutions and the ftinctionality of conflict. ¥et out of this logjam a new discipline emerged, rife wife possibility for fee preacher. Symbolic theorists,the most famous being fee “Sociology ofKnowledge,” called into question fee manner in which fee former theories invested human cultures wife an independent distance from fee persons within them. Wife an emphatic recognition that people operate on fee basis of the symbols that they attach to reality, symbolic theory seeks to map out these symbols as fee primary means by which society is ordered, ?eter Berger famously considered this “symbolic universe” to be fee highest level of organization whereby symbols form their own systems of meaning as they embrace and account for institutional order.’ This symbolic universe holds knowledge itself captive, which in turn legitimates a society’s institutions. When a society’s symbols —its body of shared assumptions – come into question, fee symbolic universe begins to break down, and a different symbolic universe must be sought. Is this trajectory of the study of cultural anthropology—from functionalism to symbolism—not also fee continuum that we Advent preachers inhabit? Surely we preachers have known fee safe world of functionalism at points in our lectionary. Functionalism is King Solomon’s cultural lens, where fee Proverbs always come true despiteoutrageousconscriptionrates.Functionalismis the lens oftheDeuteronomists, a lens of predictable prose that must be added to Job’s untamed poetry in order to achieve equilibrium. Functionalism is often fee lens of our parishioners who expect, even demand, some divine blessing to offset suffering. Such a world does not reach outside itself for answers. Answers are fairly easy to come by in fee functionalist “world without end,” and Apocalypse is impossible. The symbolic lens, however, is more complex, more able to listen to diverse voices. The symbolic lens understands that fee culture is not on a quest for balance, but for meaning. As full-fledged practitioners of the symbolic lens, twenty-first century persons are on a manhunt for meaning, a manhunt that we Christians claim is met in Jesus Christ But we do not believe that such a claim can make sense in fee old symbolic universe. That world has been trashed by fee apocalypse of Christmas, replaced by God’s re-ordered world. The most significant difference this distinction makes for fee preacher is this: the preacher of the functionalist world arises on Christmas morning to welcome Jesus into our conventional world. But the preacher ofthe apocalypse is welcomed by the Advent texts into God’s «،? ٧١world and must struggle with an unconventional set of symbols, categories, and value in order to adjust. What is at stake, of course, is not

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just the meaning of Christinas. The meaning of Christianity itself is on the line.

The Symbolic Universe(s) ofChristmas The Advent texts represent a warzone of symbolie universes. On the one side stand the onventional imperial powers. By enaeting the conventions of tribute, census, worship, and authority, conventions depicted and echoed in the Advent texts, the Caesars mediated a powerful symbolic universe. This symbolic universe was entrenched and seemingly u^uestioned. “All went to their own towns to be registered,” passive in the face of the Rome’s functionalist precision. This precision included Rome’s program to dissemtnate not just its authority, but its symbolic ideology into every facet of Hebrew life. ٧١ ^١١Carter describes this ideology as the claim that “Rome exercised sovereignty over the world, that Rome and the emperor manifested the presence of the gods, that fee emperor and imperial officials werc agents of the gods, and that Rome manifested fee gods’ blessings in constituting acietal well-being.”* Jewish persons duringthetimeofthebirthofChrist needed only to look upon fee golden eagles affixed to Herod’s temple in Jerusalem to be reminded that they werc far from immune from Rome’s symbols, even at fee epicenter of their sacred space. The battle between symbolic universes is easily illustrated in Josephus’ wrenching story of Herod’s last days, in which the rumor of his impending death sparked a group of Torah students to tear down the golden eagles, enthuriastically supported by fee Jerusalem crowds. Unfortunately for them, Herod was not quite dead and ordered them burned alive.^ Advent arrives within fee very teeth of Rome’s totalitarian symbolic universe that attempted to co-opt the city of Jerusalem. It arrives in conflict wife Herod, Rome’s henchman. Is this not why God must show up in podunk Bethlehem among shepherds and innkeepers and teenage girls, those most schooled in “the arts of resistance?” Is this not why fee stars that conventionally hailed the birth of the Caesars now realign to hover above fee manger? Is this not fee meaning of fee Magnificat, the song of Zechariah, fee prophecy of Simeon? “He has brought down fee powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.” Jesus is born, and an apocalypse has occurred. A new symbolic universe, a new world entirely, has supplanted fee old!

Christmas as Comfort Unfortunately, our society, hell-bent on comfort at all costs, is in no mood for a new Christmas world. Like the largely passive citizenry of ancient occupied Palestine , we remain immune to fee apocalyptic edge of Advent. As a result, preaching Advent hope so easily devolves into a message of comfort that is compatible wife our culture’s symbolic universe. This conformist message capitulates to fee individualism , materialism, timelessness, and boundaries of empire. “Just remember, fee true spirit of Christmas is in your heart,” Santa Claus says at fee ideological climax of The Polar Express. Such hyper-individualism is fee ^nfetimate message of comfort to a society that believes in autonomy over authority, with fee self as fee moral, autonomous center.^ It transforms Advent from an event to a feeling completely owned by one’s personal tastes. “Christmas is a time for giving,” the commercials will tell us, and preachers, following suit, neuter our A gination of fee birth of Christ from an apocalypse into a tidy Christmas present, ft is so much more palatable that way, a chaser to our society’s

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sedative of materialism. D etrim ent store ehains massage their way into our eonseiousness by stripping away biblieal language. In Manhattan last year, I was shoeked to see an entire advertising campaign utilizing the stark word “Believe.” Believe in what? This dearth of history should call us preachers to toe Christmas symbols that emerge first from the material: a stone manger, a serious tax burden on the poor, a messianic minority report in toe shadow of a despotic ruler. “Happy holidays,” toe greeter at toe Wal-Mart says on cue, and preachers decry some sort of nostalgic loss, solidifying conventional boundaries between insider Christians and outsider “secularists” This is little more than the nationalism of empire, toe attempt to resurrect Constantine’s dead bones. These examples are attempts to welcome the Christ child into our functionalist world. They say to Jesus, in essence, “We are comfortable with our world and are happy that you have come to help us better succeed within it.” Bven biblical scholarship has gotten in on toe act with prominent writers morphing toe infancy narratives into “parabolic overture” in support of a nonmiraculous, liberal Protestant Jesus.^ Thankfully, we need not resign our preaching to this functionalist world.

Christmas as Apocalypse The infancy kreatives provide the preacher with toe raw materials for a new symbolic universe that begins to construct God’s new world. The Advent texts, therefore, are apocalyptic, not comforting in nature. This is in line with what we know about toe apocalyptic genre within the canon itself. John Collins lists the Scriptural functions of ^o^lypticism . They include providing “support in toe face of persecution, reassurance in toe face of culture shock or social powerlessness, reorientation in the face of national trauma, consolation for the fate of humanity.” Rather than any sort of flight from concrete reality, Collins asserts that a ^ ^ y ^ ic is m “is a way of coping with reality by providing a meaningful framework within which human beings can make decisions and take action.”® The function of apocalyptic thought then is well-suited both to the historical context of the infancy narratives as well as toe violent clash of conceptual systems illuminated by symbolic theory. In toe discordant space created in this clash, toe preacher can invite toe hearer to reconsider our social construction of reality by reminding the hearer that through the incarnation, God physically lays claim to toe world in order to redeem it and to invite us to inhabit it anew. What might this habitation look tike? How does the Christmas story lead us into God’s new world? I will propose three ways. First, the apocalyptic message of Christmas mocks toe “therapeutic, technological, consumer militarism that permeates every dimension of our common life”9 “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree,” and such a decree was no joke. Augustus, “toe august/revered one,” remains widely recognized as one of the most successful empire-builders in human history. His first-person funerary inscription brags of unprecedented taxes raised, armies conquered, peace secured, and honors lavished.ص Much of this success was achieved via the powerof symbol. As many co^entators have 0ﻂﺴﺜﻫ ,the Caesars held power through mediating a particular “symbolic universe” which infiltrated all aspects of their administrative agenda, comprising language, achitecture, coinage, entertainment, and literature.11 Against such a backdrop, it is hard to shake Frederick Buechner’s startling Christmas contrast:

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Insofar as [Auguslus] Is remembered at all, most people remember him mainly beeause at some point during his reign, in a rundown section of one of the more obscure imperial provinces, out behind a cheesy motel among cowflops and moldy hay, a child was bom to a pair ofupcountry rubes you could have sold the Brooklyn Bridge to without even trying.12

In the Christmas texts, a new set of symbols replaces golden eagle, laurel wreath, throne, scepter, triumphal procession. Christmas power is found in ostracism, illcgitimacy , swaddling clothes, and, perhaps above all, singing. Second, the apocalyptic message of Christmas creates a new class of insiders. The fact that taxation is at the center of Luke’s story has a symbolic meaning that can be illuminated by historical inquiry. Marcus Borg has argued extensively that the virtual caste system represented in the Israel of the gospels is true to what we know from other sources and that the stratification can best be explained by the tithe system.13 As Rome ratcheted up the tribute requirements, utilizing a highly successful network of tax gatherers, a clean line separated the devout from the dirty. Those who could no longer pay the tithe were relegated to the margins of religious society, evidenced in the caste of am ha-aretz, the “people of the land.” The later Mishnah includes rabbinic calls for the am ha-aretz to be gutted like fish.’^ Into this milieu arrives the universality of the Christmas message. Simeon proclaims the reach of this divine bombshell: “a light for revelation to the nations, and for glory to your people Israel.” In the Advent texts, this blessing extends especially to the outsiders: to Mary, unexpectedly pregnant; to Joseph, disobeying the Torah yet still named a “righteous one,” to shepherds, whom ?hilo notes, “are held mean and inglorious…most of all in the eyes of kings.”15 ^© ٧١a king of the grand reversal is born, a king of wondrously open commensallty. Does not this king convict us of the comfortable borders that we patrol? Third,the apocalyptic message ofChristmas combats timeless individualism with ancient story. Part of an effective symbolic universe is the role of story. The symbolic story of Rome was no exception to this rule. *“The birthday of the divine Augustus was the beginning for the world of the gospel,” the province of Asia decreed, shortly before foe birth of Jesus.16 Thus inaugurated foe story of the first century Empire, a story of Rome’s golden age hailed by the stars that f atefully appeared each time a new Caesar was bom. Hear the Advent texts laugh: Rome’s stories aren’told enough. They are novelties, new and light-hearted inventions. Like a family Christmas tree filled with ornaments transformed into family heirlooms by time, Advent texts invite us to plant our hearing of Christmas in older stories. “Don’t just read,” Matthew begs. “Pick up each ornament, each element of the story. It is an invitation to an older story.” Matthew speaks of this invitation in foe terms of foe fulfillment, foe ultimate reflection, of Scripture. Amidst all foe wrangling over whether ٢٠not Matthew1:23 ׳mistranslates Isaiah 7:14. we often miss foe point. “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through foe prophet!” Matthew has reframed history. It is such a short leap from foe Christmas story to foe foil-blown apocalyptic worldview of Paul. “? ٢٠foe present form of this world is passing away….”

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Choosing God’s Symbolic Universe One ©f most repulsive stories that has awakened something in the Ameriean consciousness is the story of three women, held captive for a decade in a home in suburban Cleveland, Ohio. I do not want to downplay this atrocity, but given the fact that over one million slaves remain in captivity around the world, perhaps this story struck such a nerve not because it is shocking, but because it represents a greater sense. This sense is the observation of artist James Turrell, “The world is not one we receive but one we create.” ؟؛It is the sense that the world we have socially constructed from the symbolic universe we have ingested is little more than myth, lie, locked cage. Jesus does not need to be invited into such a world. Such a world does not need to be comforted, but rather revealed for what it is. Such a world is in need of an apocalyptic unveiling that we may break free into God’s new world. Whatever Christmas looked like, Mary “was safely delivered ofa son,” to use the Queen’s English. Let our preaching not re-create this into another sweet scene. ? ٢٠ those with courage, this birth was a foretaste of something bigger, a new symbolic universe that protests the old. God’s new symbolic universe was safely delivered in the apocalyptic travail of the splitting away of the old universe. May we preachers choose the right universe.

Notes . لJames Baldwin, “As Much Truth As One Can Bear,” in The Cross ofRedemption: Uncollected Writ ־ ings, ed. Randall Kenan (New York: ?antheon, 2010), 28. 2. The resolution of any discrepancy, whether in ¥alues, acti¥ity or cognition, is believed to be both needful and desirable as well as the ordinary thrust of ‘normal’ human behavior.” Bruce Malina, “Normative Dissonance and Christian Origins,” in Social-Scientific Criticism ofthe New Testament and its Social World, ed. John H. Blliott (Decatur, GA: Scholars ?ress, 1986), 40-42. 3. Beter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction ofReality: A Treatise in the Sociology ofKnowledge (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966). 4. Warren Carter, “James c. Scott and New Testament Studies: A Response to Allen Callahan, William Herzog, and Richard Horsley,” in Hidden Transcripts and the Arts ofResistance: Applying the Work of James c. Scott to Jesus and Paul, ed. Richard Horsley (Atlanta: SBL, 2004.), 92. 5. Josephus, Antiquities, 17.6.3-4. 6. See Richard Sennett ,Authority (New York: Knopf, 1980), 84-121. 7. Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach about Jesus’s Birth (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 34-35. 8. John j. Collins, “Apocalypses and Apocalypticism,” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 287. 9. Walter Brueggemann,M a ta te to Difference:An Invitation to the Contemporary Church (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 192. 10. See Res gestae divi August¿ (Cambridge: Harvard University Fress), 1924. 11. See Joshua Rice, Paul and Patronage: The Dynamics of Power in 1 Corinthians (Eugene, Ore.: Fickwick,2013),45. 12. Frederiek Bueehner, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s ofFaith (San Francisco: Harper, 2004),54. 13. Marcus j. Borg, Jesus A New Cisión: Spirit, Culture, and the Life ofDiscipleship (San Francisco: Harper, 1987), 84-87. 14. A’Haron Oppenheimer, The Am Ha-aretz: A Study in the Social History ofthe Jewish People in the Hellenistic-Roman Period (Eeiden: Brill, 1997), 176. 15. Fhilo, On Husbandry, 61 ٠ 16. OG/5,458. 17. Richard Eacayo, “Frince of Light: How Artist James Turrell Conquered the Heavens” Time (July 1,2013): 42.

December 31, 2013
Miscarriage

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Miscarriage

John 4:5-42

Ingrid C.A. Rasmussen

Augustana Lutheran Church, West St. Paul, Minnesota

As my father gently reminds me, I am now in the middle of my childbearing years. And, while I might feign protest, I know that he is right. The truth of his words is evidenced in the lives of those close to me; increasingly, my peers are consciously choosing to pursue pregnancy and parenthood. For a few, conception and childbirth come easily. Many others, however, find pregnancy illusive and impossible to corral —here one moment and gone the next. Their quiet stories and deep pain have both heightened my awareness of miscarried pregnancies and prompted me to begin thinking about this lived reality theologically. Studies reveal that my friends who have suffered the unexpected and unwanted end to pregnancy are not alone; approximately fifteen percent of all clinically recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage. While these numbers suggest that miscarriage touches many in our faith communities, it has never been mentioned in the congregations with which I have worshipped and worked. Hoping to address miscarriage in the context of the church, last year I listened for occasions within the lectionary that might speak a gospel word to the bodily loss that many congregants face, too often in silent isolation. The opportunity arose when I heard the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman in John 4. Often heard and preached during the season of Lent as a story of sin, condemnation, repentance, and penitential belief, I was struck by the elements of the story that are absent if indeed these are the pillars of the narrative’s theological framework. For example, Jesus never asks the woman to change her current living situation, and the woman never verbally repents for her actions. Instead, at the end of their dialogue filled with irony, double-meanings, misunderstanding, and understanding, the woman runs away in awe and excitement to tell her fellow villagers about the man Jesus, testifying that “he told me everything I ever did” (John 4:39 NIV). Different from what we may have been taught, therefore, these words suggest that the narrative’s power resides in Jesus’ intimate knowledge of the Samaritan woman’s story that he revealed that day by the well. For the Samaritan woman, Jesus’ entrance into the crevice of her life that remained silenced under the weight of social and religious unacceptability was life-changing good news. This reading of John 4 makes the bold claim that, in some cases, making public that which is either allowed or forced to remain private has the power to prompt or encourage belief. Perhaps for the sake of the gospel, we too might carefully begin to uncover and name those places into which we as the church have been hesitant to enter. To this end, this sermon seeks to name miscarriage in the liturgical lives that we share.

+++ Many people I know like the liturgical season of Lent. Contrary to what the actions of religious people might suggest, I think our appreciation for this portion of the church year extends beyond what it can do for our waistlines or our piety. I think that

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people appreciate Lent because they see, hear, and feel the church operating differently during this season. In the shadow of the cross, our sanctuaries are dimly lit and our paraments plain. We are given permission to use gritty language during worship in order to name life’s sober realities. And, as the church, we even choose to spread dirt across the forehead of persons who approach the altar on Ash Wednesday and wash the earth-stained feet of our neighbors on Maundy Thursday. Lent is one season in the church year in which we feel little need to give easy answers to life’s greatest, and often-painful, mysteries. Instead, during Lent, we choose simply to uncover and name the private crevices of our lives that often remain shrouded in secrecy. Poets and musicians have a name for this process of uncovering and naming; they call it elegy. Elegy, a word we do not often throw around in the church, describes a poem or a song of mourning that reflects on the death of someone or on sorrow more generally. Elegy can speak to something common to the human experience—like the passing of time—or something strange or mysterious, such as the unexpected end to a relationship. Elegy gives words to the sober realities in our lives, which may be why so many of us are drawn to elegiac works like poetry or country music, depending on the level of refinement of our literary and musical tastes. It is because musicians and poets dare to enter life’s private crevices that beg to be named that we listen and, ultimately, choose to sing along with them. Though Lent allows the church to go into shadowy places in the lives of God’s people, there are still many into which we hesitate to enter. If history is any judge, miscarriage—the premature and often undesired end to pregnancy—is one such place. Perhaps miscarriage feels too personal, like something that ought to be left to intimate partners, family, and close friends. Maybe because it often occurs during the first trimester of pregnancy, we are unaware of its painful presence in the lives of our congregants. Or, perhaps, the absence of any explicit references to it in the lectionary keeps us from preaching and speaking about it; the texts that drive our conversations don’t provide us with an easy entrance into the discussion. Whatever our reasons, I suggest that we carefully uncover it and name it today with the help of the Samaritan woman’s story on this the third Sunday in Lent. The scripture reading for today always finds its lectionary home in the season of Lent. The season’s emphasis on repentance, coupled with the passage’s longstanding interpretive history, makes it easy for preachers to treat the Samaritan woman as the typecast sinner—the one whose incorrigible sins were revealed by a righteous Jesus that day by the well. But, today, I want to propose a different interpretation of this passage that locates it within the Lenten tradition of uncovering and naming that we have already identified. In John chapter 4, Jesus and his disciples are passing through Samaria on their way to Galilee. Jesus, tired out, stops by the well while his disciples go into town to fetch some food. A Samaritan woman approaches him, and thus begins their ironic dialogue about living water—one of the longest in the New Testament. Throughout their conversation, the gospel writer makes it clear to the reader that the woman doesn’t fully understand what Jesus is saying to her. For instance, when Jesus tells the woman that if she knew who he was, she would ask him for a drink, and he would give her living water, she naively replies: “Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water?” (John 4:10-11). The conversation continues this way—with the reader feeling either superior to or frustrated by

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the woman who never quite gets the message. Lest we think this is a characteristic attributable only to the Samaritan woman, the disciples display the same confusion just verses later. But, then, in the passage’s first moment of clarity, we hear Jesus call the woman out—or so translators have led us to believe and interpreters have told us. In verse 16, Jesus says, “Go, call your husband and come back.” The woman answers him, saying, “I have no husband.” To this Jesus responds, “You are right when you say that you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have said is quite true” (John 4:18). For generations, interpreters have claimed that Jesus’ words are evidence of the woman’s immorality. But, if we are honest readers, we need to remember that in the ancient world, women had little control over their own lives. New Testament scholar Gail O’Day writes that “there are many possible reasons for [the Samaritan woman’s] marital history other than her moral laxity. Perhaps the woman, like Tamar in Genesis 38, is trapped in the custom of levrite marriage, and the last male in the family line has refused to marry her.”1 Whatever the reasons that stand behind her past and present relationships, we can assume that the options available to the Samaritan woman to keep her family housed, clothed, and fed would have been limited to say the least. If we consider the woman’s powerlessness in her situation, then, the tone of Jesus’ words changes. Rather than hearing Jesus pronounce an indictment, as most interpreters would have us do, we hear Jesus simply uncovering and naming the sober realities of the Samaritan woman’s life. She has had five husbands; and, now, most likely for the sake of survival, she is forced to live outside of social and religious boundaries with a man who is not her husband. To the woman’s reality, Jesus does not speak words of condemnation or offer easy answers. He simply chooses to validate her words and her experience, saying, “What you have said is quite true” (John 4:18). This reading of the gospel text is supported by the fact that Jesus never asks the Samaritan woman to leave her living situation, and the woman never offers words of repentance for her actions. Instead, the text reminds us that it is because Jesus told the woman everything that she had ever done, that she came to believe (John 4:39). In the patriarchal world of the first century, it may have been just as appropriate for the Fourth Evangelist to say that Jesus told the woman everything that had ever happened to her, over which she had little or no control. Contrary to what we may have been taught, therefore, the power of this narrative need not reside in Jesus’ abrupt disclosure of the woman’s sin and her penitential belief. Instead, if we assume that the woman lived under the cover of social and religious silence, then it is Jesus’ gracious act of uncovering and naming her reality that brings about her first moment of clarity and belief. It is Jesus’ recognition of the Samaritan woman’s experiences that causes her first to declare Jesus to be a prophet and later to bear witness to him to the entire city (John 4:19; 39-42). For the Samaritan woman, I Jesus’ entrance into the private crevice of her life was good news. In this season of Lent, we seek to bear witness to the gospel as we carefully uncover and name miscarriage in this liturgical space. Despite our fears that it is too personal, our unawareness of its painful presence in our community, or its absence in the texts that shape our conversations, today we recognize miscarriage as a painful reality that

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has too long been shrouded by the church’s silence. Many women and men who have grieved the unexpected end to a pregnancy have been forced to face their feelings of powerlessness, sorrow, betrayal, hopelessness, fear, fragility, emptiness, and anger in quiet isolation. They have waited for a word from the Christian community, which to our shame, has too rarely been spoken. In her elegy on miscarriage, theologian Serene Jones articulates her own silent waiting, saying:

Throughout my own miscarriages, I had wanted and waited for something religious to happen—for a divine presence to enter into the space of my grieving and give me comfort, for the touch of a savior who might open me to the boundless stretch of grace, for the voices of a community that could remind me of life’s precious persistence in the midst of such loss.2

Today, in our dim Lenten sanctuary, we grieve that we are unable to control, in many ways, what happens to our lives and our bodies. We mourn the ways that our own bodies sometimes betray our hopes. And, we lament the ways that our communities have often failed to meet us in our deepest sadness. In our sorrow, we do not rush to easy answers to one of life’s greatest and most painful mysteries. But, instead, we agree to speak this elegy of miscarriage together at the foot of the cross. Once there, and after we have allowed time for the community to uncover, to weep, to name, to yell, and to be silent, we will turn and remind our neighbor that God promises to enter into our space of grieving and comfort us. We will tell each other that the gospel assures us that the Savior touches us and opens us to the boundless stretch of grace. And, as members of Christ’s community, we will remind each other of life’s persistence, even as we stand in the shadow of the Lenten cross. And, as we do, we, like the Samaritan woman, will hear Jesus graciously validating our words, saying, “What you have said is quite true.”

Notes 1 Gail O’Day, The Gospel of John, The New Interpreter’s Bible 9 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), 567. 2 Serene Jones, “Rupture,” in Hope Deferred: Heart Healing Reflections on Reproductive Loss, ed. by Nadine Frantz and Mary T. Stimming (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2005), 49.

December 31, 2013
Unexpected: an Easter sermon

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Unexpected: An Easter Sermon

John 20:1-18

Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

One cold January afternoon in 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 out of LaGuardia Airport in New York headed to Charlotte landed instead in the waters of the Hudson River after losing power from a bird strike. I’m sure you remember that event, and the survival of everyone on board which instantly made a hero of the pilot, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. You likely don’t remember Ric Elias from that day. Elias was sitting in seat 1-D. He said as that eerily silent plane glided rapidly toward the Hudson , his mind was filled with thoughts about his life, his work, his family. He said he thought about all the people he wanted to reach out to, all the fences he wanted to mend, but couldn’t. He said in that moment, he was sad about how often his priorities had gotten skewed. He regretted the time he had wasted on things that did not matter. He had ranked people with less importance than they deserved. He said that that day, as the plane dropped toward the river, he knew he was going to die, and he was not afraid. But he was sad, because he had missed so much of life. He said, “I was given the gift of two miracles that day. The first was I survived. The second … I was given the gift to see into the future and to come back and live differently.”1 Listening to Elias tell his story, I thought of a wonderful prayer that observant Jews sometimes use on the Sabbath. It begins, “Days pass and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.” This year it is a prayer that frames my approach to the Easter Gospel. It seems to me that Easter, at its heart, is a day full of miracles. But not everyone notices. All of this magnificent music, all of the bold Easter affirmations of faith, all the confident words, they all testify to something miraculous. But miracles are not always easy to recognize. For a lot of people, Easter is a hard day. For all of its hope and promise and festivity , Easter is simply challenging for some. Oh, they get decked out in some new spring clothes, and they come to church, because they’ve always come to church on Easter. But the day has lost something of the magic and wonder it may have held for them when they were younger. And the reason is precisely because it seems to be all brightness and light and alleluias, and frankly, that’s not where they live. They would like to be there, but there’s a problem. Their lives are more shadows than light. They are weighed down by great grief that lies heavy on the heart or by unsettling fears, large and small or by nagging feelings of guilt, recalling something done or left undone or by a corrosive bitterness that eats away at their hearts or by debilitating doubts that stand out in such stark contrast to the confident hymns and the sturdy prayers of Easter Sunday. So, if Easter is to find a place in their hearts, it will have to do so over against some pretty stiff opposition. It will have to contend with the shadows that obscure the dazzling light this morning heralds. Such shadows, of course, are not the sole province of the post-modern mind. Indeed, they have accompanied God’s people in their approach to every Easter dawn, including the first. I recently reread the resurrection accounts in all four Gospels, and

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what struck me was just how lacking in confidence and certainty they all began. A pastor-friend says, “The wonder of the resurrection stories in the Scriptures is that ”. resistance to coining to terms with the risen Christ … יthey reveal the disciples Eventually people found their voices and began to sing their alleluias, but not that first day. If there was music that first Easter, it was mostly muted, meditative, with only a few staccato bursts as hints of excitement . Marilynne Robinson, the author of Gilead and Home, reflecting on the Easter accounts from a writer’s point of view, said she was struck by the “angle of vision ” of the Gospel narratives. She said ,

The accounts of the resurrection famously differ from one Gospel to the next , and this fact enhances the interest of an element they [all] share, [which is ] the skepticism of the earliest witnesses. Mary Magdalene, when she finds the tomb empty, simply assumes someone has carried the body away …. Others of his followers do not recognize him when he is among them, in large part because they believe he is, in the way of mortals, dead and gone . In every case the angle of vision is a skepticism based on the expectation that with Jesus’ death things will have taken their ordinary course. In other words, this-worldliness is foregrounded, even while the events themselves are nothing less than the grandest of [miracles ] ?

The skepticism of the disciples is rooted, I think, in their expectations and their inability to come to terms with the wildly unexpected thing that has happened. “Days pass and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.” The problem in the case of Easter, says Barbara Brown Taylor, is that its Good News is so odd, so un – natural. The Easter notion of resurrection also is made more difficult to comprehend by the fact that we live in the northern hemisphere, where Easter always occurs in the spring. And spring is so “entirely natural,” she says :

Buy a daffodil bulb in the winter and it looks like nothing in your hands – a small onion, maybe, with its thin skin and scraggly roots. If you have had any experience with bulbs, however, that does not worry you. You know all you have to do is wait. Come springtime it will escape the earth and explode with color, a yellow butterfly of a blossom shedding its cocoon . As miraculous as it is, it is entirely natural . Resurrection, on the other hand, is entirely unnatural. When a human being goes into the ground, that is that. You do not wait around for the person to reappear so you can pick up where you left off – not this side of the grave, anyway. You say good-bye. You pay your respects and you go on with your life as best you can, knowing that the only place springtime happens in a cemetery is on the graves, not in them . That is all Mary was doing that morning – paying her respects, going to his tomb to convince herself it was all true. It was still dark, but even from a distance she knew something was wrong. She could smell damp earth, cold rock from inside. Someone had moved the stone! Afraid he would become a saint, afraid his tomb would become a shrine, someone , had taken him away – God knew where – to a steep cliff, to the town dump

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His body was all she had left and now it too was gone.4

It was so unexpected. But it was nothing compared to what happened when she returned to the tomb with Simon Peter and the other disciple. Peter and the other disciple peer into the tomb, where they see the linen wrappings. Peter even sees the cloth that has wrapped Jesus’ thorn-pierced head. Then they leave to go back to town, once again leaving Mary Magdalene weeping at the tomb. She, too, then walks to the empty tomb and peers in, and this time she sees two angelic figures who ask her why she is weeping. She tells them she is weeping because “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Now in the other Gospels, the angelic figures (a young man in Mark, an angel in Matthew, angels in Luke) serve the function of interpreting the significance of the empty tomb. They announce the central theme of the teaching of the early church: “Do not be afraid; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. But go, tell the disciples that he is going ahead of you to Galilee. There you will see him.” But here in John’s Gospel the angels announce nothing; they merely ask Mary why she is weeping.5 Then another unexpected thing happens. She hears something behind her and turns around to see someone standing there. John tells the reader right away that it is Jesus, but because such an appearance was unnatural and so unexpected, Mary does not recognize him. New Testament scholar Gail O’Day says,

Since the reader knows that the gardener is Jesus, there is no suspense to this story. Its power derives not from the reader’s dawning recognition of Jesus, but from the reader’s waiting to see what will lead to Mary’s recognition of Jesus. [And that] moment of recognition comes when Jesus calls Mary by name. [He says, “Mary.”] In that moment, the empty tomb becomes more than the abstract truth of God’s power over death. In that moment, the empty tomb becomes the concrete reality of the presence of the risen Lord.6

He calls her by name. This is the same Jesus who said earlier that the good shepherd calls his sheep by name. The Good Shepherd speaks, and suddenly the cloud of grief and limited expectation parts, and Mary responds, “Rabbouni” (my teacher). In hearing her name spoken, Mary’s faith is formed. The empty tomb had not brought her to faith. “The empty tomb did not even hint resurrection for her,” Fred Craddock says, “it only saddened her with the assumption that Jesus’ body had been stolen. So far from faith is she that the appearance of two angels does not break her sorrow. Even the voice of Jesus does not at first stir faith in her. In fact, when she first saw him, she did not recognize him. She certainly was not looking for a miracle here. Only when he spoke her name… did she believe.”7 And in that moment, a new expectation was created. Jesus was back. That new possibility suggested that things might return to normal once again. Even then, though, Jesus did the unexpected. As Mary Magdalene turned toward him, he said, “Do not hold on to me.” No matter how much she and the other disciples may have wanted life back the way it had been with Jesus before Friday, Jesus made it clear that he would be relating to them differently from then on. “Do not hold on to me,”

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he admonished her, “because I have not yet ascended to the Father.” Barbara Brown Taylor notes:

It was a peculiar thing for him to say since there is no evidence she was holding on to him in any way. Unless it was what she called him – my Teacher – the old name she used to call him. Maybe he could hear it in her voice, how she wanted him back the way he was so they could go back to the way they were, back to the old life where everything was familiar and not frightening like it was now. “Rabbouni!” she called him, but that was his Friday name, and here it was Sunday – an entirely new day in an entirely new life.8

And there was something else there in his words, also unexpected. Not only was he not back with them in the way they might have wanted or hoped or expected. Now, once again he was facing forward, and he wanted Mary Magdalene and the disciples to face forward, too, to live and lean into the new world of resurrection, and to follow as he pointed them into the future God had in store for them. Once resurrection takes hold, there is no going back, and the future is rich with possibility. Christ is no longer behind us, but ahead of us…unexpectedly still ahead of us. He is everywhere to be encountered, if only we have eyes to see, which is nothing less than miraculous. Perhaps if we lean hard into that remarkable possibility, we won’t let “the days pass and the years vanish ״and be “sightless among miracles,” but, like the man whose life was changed by Flight 1549’s remarkable landing in the Hudson, having caught a glimpse of the future, we will be moved to live differently, with eyes wide open to whatever surprises Christ has in store. It is in that fervent hope for you and for me that I begin the old refrain once again: Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. And if that’s true, as I believe it is, it would be wise to expect the unexpected.

Notes 1 Ric Elias, “Three things I learned while my plane crashed,” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, filmed March 2011, posted April 22, 2011.1 am grateful to Tom Are, Jr., and his sermon, “Standing Tall in a Shaky World,” preached April 24, 2011, at Village Presbyterian Church, Prairie Village, Kansas, for pointing me to the presentation. 2 O. Benjamin Sparks, The Presbyterian Outlook (March 31,2005): 8. 3 Marilynne Robinson, “Living the Word: Easter Sunday,” Christian Century 129 (April 4, 2012): 22 . 4 Barbara Brown Taylor, Home by Another Way (Cambridge: Cowley Publications, 1999), 109-110. 5 R. Alan Culpepper, The Gospel and Letters of John (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), 241. 6 Gail R. O’Day, “Homiletical Perspective: John 20:1-18,” Feasting on the Word, YearB, Vol. 2, (Louisville : Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 379,381. 7 Fred B. Craddock, John: Knox Preaching Guides (Atlanta: John Knox, 1982), 141-142. 8 Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Unnatural Truth,” 111.

December 31, 2013
Preaching Job’s God

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Preaching Job ’s God

Samuel E. Balentine

Union Presbyterian Seminary, Richmond, Virginia

In 1955, three years before the premier of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play J.B., Archibald MacLeish preached a sermon at the First Church of Christ, Farmington, Connecticut. The title of the sermon was “The Book of Job.” MacLeish begins with these words: “To preach is to speak with something more than one’s own voice —something that only ordination can give, that only the relation of minister to congregation can make possible.”1 MacLeish immediately goes on to say that he is not a preacher, not even a religious person in any ordinary sense; he is a poet whose art requires him to think about the meaning of life, in other words, about the things that concern religion. And yet, I find it instructive that MacLeish chose first the format of a sermon, not a play, to talk about Job’s God. He frames the whence and whether of his thoughts as follows:

How can we believe in our lives unless we can believe in God, and how can we believe in God unless we can believe in the justice of God, and how can we believe in the justice of God in a world in which the innocent perish in vast meaningless massacres, and brutal and dishonest men foul all the lovely things?

And then these words, now more directly focused on the Book of Job:

Job’s sufferings are unjustified. They are unjustified in any human meaning of the word justice. And yet they are God’s work—a work that could not be done without the will of God…. If the universe is unjust, if God permits our destruction without cause, how are we to believe in life? And if we cannot believe in life, how are we to live?2

Surely there are many sermon topics to be mined in the Book of Job, but I suspect most of us would agree to some extent with MacLeish: sooner or later we have to figure out how to preach about Job’s God. How can we believe in life if we cannot believe in God? And if we cannot believe in life—or God—then how are we to live? The Prologue and Epilogue of Job (Job 1-2 + 42:7-17) reads like a set piece.3 Its flat prose, strategically guided by an omniscient narrator, seems focused on a single, but virtually unswallowable, message: suffering pays. “Blameless” and “upright” persons, persons who “fear God” and “turn away from evil” with complete integrity, may lose everything; their children’s lives may be snuffed out “for no reason”; but if they persist in humility, then they will be doubly rewarded in the end. The ending might well have been scripted by Walt Disney. In the Disney version of life, the world is just fine as it is; all injustice is temporary; all suffering makes sense; and when questions arise, consolation is always preferable to truth. The connections between what is and what ought to be remain essentially untroubled; they may tremble momentarily,

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but in the end they kiss and make up. From a contemporary perspective, the Czech novelist Milan Kundera describes this Walt Disney reading of life as kitsch, crudely, but perhaps effectively defined as the “absolute denial of shit.”4 Presumably, ancient sensibilities were somewhat similar. The history of transmission of the Book of Job suggests that the Prologue-Epilogue version of the story was not adequate for its readers. Thus, the final form of the book splices the prose framework with a lengthy poetic debate between Job and his friends (Job 4-27,32-37) and between Job and God (Job 38-42). It seems that the “airs-well-that-ends-well” conclusion, which affirms a world in which divine providence always works, is hardly ever sufficient. In William Kennedy’s recent novel, Change’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, Daniel Quinn is a newspaperman caught between the objectivity required by his profession and the cynicism his real life imposes. Perhaps he speaks for all readers , ancient and modem, when he concludes that “the simple declarative sentence is an illusion.”5 The only “dialogue” between Job and God occurs in Job 38:1-42:6. God dominates the dialogue (123 verses are allotted to God; nine verses to Job). If preachers want to take the pulse of the conversation between the God who afflicts Job “for no reason” and the Job who insists on asking God, “Why?” the fraught dialogue that emerges from this interchange is the first place to begin. The structure of the dialogue is easy to discern. There are two divine speeches and two responses from Job. God’s first response (Job 38:1-40:2) begins with a series of seemingly impossible questions addressed to Job: “Where were you?” “Can you?” “Have you?” “Do you know?” Multiple interpretations are possible, but for this occasion I cite the assessment of John Holbert, who speaks directly to the issues we are addressing here:

God preaches a poor sermon, not because of poor content but because of poor style. God simply does not take with any seriousness the receptive position of the divine audience. Like too many modem preachers, God does not pay careful enough attention to the context and audience of the address, and consequently it falls on unwilling ears.6

Mark Twain’s essay, “Thoughts of God,” adds stinging commentary:

It is plain that there is one moral law for heaven and another for the earth. The pulpit assures us that wherever we see suffering and sorrow which we can relieve and do not do it, we sin, heavily. There was never yet a case of suffering or sorrow, which God could not relieve. Does He sin, then? If He is the source of Morals he does – certainly nothing can be plainer than that, you will admit. Surely the Source of Law cannot violate law and stand unsmirched; surely the judge upon the bench cannot forbid crime and then revel in it himself unreproached. Nevertheless we have this curious spectacle: daily the trained parrot in the pulpit gravely delivers himself of these ironies, which he has acquired at second-hand and adopted without examination, to a trained congregation which accepts them without examination, and neither the speaker nor the hearer laughs at himself…?

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Job had asked whether there was justice in this world; can seven sons and three daughters be killed “for no reason” and there be no outrage in heaven, no outcry on earth (cf,16:18-19)? God’s first response evades the question with a sheer assertion of reality. An unfathomable cosmic design provides the foundation for a seemingly amoral symbiosis of order and chaos. There are stars and thunder, mud and ice, lionesses feeding cubs with maternal care and careless ostriches leaving their eggs in the dirt. The warhorse lusts for battle, while vultures wait to feed on human corpses. This speech about cosmic design reveals the Creator’s pride; whereas Genesis merely reports that God’s creation is “very good,” the Voice from the Whirlwind speaks of creation’s beauty and wonder. But of justice, God says not a word. To Job’s questions about the moral order that ought to be in the world, God responds by declaring simply the way the world is. To be charitable, such a response may not be kitsch exactly, but one cannot help but wonder if God has not missed the point. Like Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, God seems to be saying that what is is what ought to be, that this is indeed the best of all possible worlds. An earthquake in Lisbon may leave innocent bodies strewn everywhere, but, as Pangloss would say, “[A]ll is for the best. For if there’s a volcano at Lisbon, it couldn’t be anywhere else. For it’s impossible for things not to be where they are. For all is well.”8 All is for the best? All is well? As Holbert notes, even God seems to be “disappointed in God’s own performance in the first speech….Job cannot, will not, hear such things [God’s parade of wonders] in such a way. And so, God speaks again, because God must speak again.”9 God’s second response to Job (40:6-41:34) addresses, at long last, Job’s questions about justice. At the start of the speech, the rhetoric is much the same as in the first. God summons Job to a dialogue—“I will question you, you declare to me” (40:7; cf.38:3)—a dialogue that once again appears to begin with impossible questions. Here, however, God follows these questions with a series of imperatives to Job that seem genuinely to invite a response, an engagement that goes beyond the silence to which Job had retreated after God’s first speech (40:4-5). The summons is for Job to understand and to enact, if he can, the very justice he demands from God. If Job can pursue justice with godlike power (v.9a, “an arm like God”), words (v.9b, “thunder with a voice like [God’s]”), if he has the courage to live into the majesty, dignity, and glory of having been created as God’s near-equal (v.10; cf. Job 7:17 and Ps 8:4-5), and if Job can respond with righteous anger when the wicked presume they can abuse others without penalty (vv.11-13), then God will acknowledge that Job’s quest for justice is both principled and effective. As if to provide a concrete illustration of what such creaturely nobility looks like, God directs Job’s attention to Behemoth and Leviathan, two liminal creatures whose attributes place them somewhere between mere earthly creatures and supernatural figures that belong to the world of myth and legend.10 Behemoth, “the first of the great acts of God,” is a creature of extraordinary strength and power (40:16-18); when confronted by aggression and violence, it stands its ground and trusts in its own God-given resources. To be sure, God can best Behemoth, if necessary, but no earthly creature can dictate its movements or frighten it into submission. “Look at Behemoth,” God says to Job, “which I made just as I made you” (40:13). When Job looks at Behemoth, he should learn something about himself. Leviathan functions as a similar model for Job. No one can domesticate this

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creature by forcing it into a covenant of “soft words” (41:3-4). Instead, when it opens its mouth, it sends forth fire and light, smoke and flames, phenomena elsewhere associated not only with the strong and compelling presence of ancient Near Eastern deities but also with YHWH. It is speech that demands respect, not disregard. If Job is looking for an exemplar of what it means “to look on all who are proud and bring them low” (40:12), he need look no farther than Leviathan, a creature that “surveys everything that is lofty” and rules like a “king over all who are proud” (41:34). Job responds to God’s second speech by saying that he now “sees” more about God, and presumably more about the requisite of “justice” in God’s design for the world, than he did before (42:5). Preachers may find it useful to hit the “pause” button at this point, suspending consideration of Job’s enigmatic last words in 42:6, in order to create space for reflection on what God’s second “sermon” adds to this story. To seed this reflection, let me begin by returning to Archibald MacLeish’s 1955 sermon: “How can we believe in our lives unless we can believe in God, and how can we believe in God unless we can believe in the justice of God?” MacLeish answers his own ruminations by arguing that God needs Job’s loyalty, Job’s inextinguishable love, in order to be God. Without Job’s love, precisely in the face of innocent suffering , “God does not exist as God, only as creator, and love is the one thing not even God Himself can command.” MacLeish explicates as follows:

It is for this reason that God, at the end of the poem, answers Job not in the language of justice but in the language of beauty and power and glory, signifying that it is not because He is just but because He is God that he deserves His creature’s adoration….

The principal concern, then, according to MacLeish is love, not justice:

To speak of “justice” is to demand something for ourselves and to ask something of life, to require that we be treated according to our dues. But love, as Saint Paul told the Corinthians, does not “seek her own” (1 Cor. 13:5). Love creates even God, for how else have we come to Him, any of us, but through love?11

MacLeish’s humanistic reading of Job has been widely criticized, perhaps rightly so. It is the case that MacLeish seems to account only for God’s first speech, God’s reiteration of realism, but not for God’s second speech, which is certainly a summons to consider whether and to what extent realism must be leavened with justice. Even so, MacLeish is not the only interpreter to propose that God’s creation cannot be all that God expects and desires without the contributions of human beings. Throughout this presentation, I have been working along the edges of Susan Neiman’s search for “moral clarity” in the Book of Job, what she refers to as the conjunction between God’s “is” and Job’s “ought.”12 “Am I wrong,” God asks Job, “because you are right?” Neiman suggests that we should not interpret this as necessarily an either-or question. By reminding Job of the reality of the world, God affirms that the world is full of forces we cannot tame, which means that life itself is a gift. And if life itself is a gift, then the more Job participates in it, through grace and struggle, then the more he shows his thanks to God. Telling it like it is is a good

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and necessary thing; God is “right,” not wrong, to reiterate realism. But Job is also “right” to insist that “the moral order that comes from human reason needs to be in the world as well.”13 In other words, both God and Job are right; both speak truth: “One tells it like it is, one tells it like it should be.”14 Neiman unfolds the consequences of such a discernment in this way:

If Job speaks truth, as God admits, the truth may be this one: There is no moral order in the world as it is, and there ought to be some. If God speaks truth, as Job admits, it may be to say that creating moral order in the world is just what we’re meant to give back to it. If there’s going to be reason in the world, it is we who have to put it there. The book of Job’s most important message is that morality is neither a divine category nor one reflected in nature; morality is—ought to be—human .15

Moral simplicity, like kitsch, is easy to come by. It requires nothing more than simplistic assertions about the world and God, like those the friends espouse, which are painfully uninformed by experience, like the “trained parrot[s] in the pulpit” of whom Mark Twain writes, who “gravely deliver [themselves] of ironies, which they have acquired second-hand and adopted without examination.” Neither the friends nor “trained parrots” can speak “what is right” about God (42:7, 8), because they trust in the inertia of dogma; what they offer in response to the gift of the complexity of life is a “form of ingratitude.”16 Moral clarity, on the other hand, is always difficult to obtain. It requires making complex distinctions between knotty ethical problems. It means working to make sense of things that are nonsensical; it means seeing things we do not want to see, knowing things we do not want to acknowledge. And it almost always means deciding on a course of action without ever knowing fully if it is right. In sum, “human attempts to construct moral order are always precarious” precisely because they are human attempts. As Neiman puts it, “Moments of moral clarity are rare in life, and they are exceedingly precious. They usually follow upon hours – years – of moral confusion; they seldom arrive all at once or definitively; and they are never accompanied by a lifetime guarantee.”17 Job did not need God to persuade him that as a mere mortal he is but a small cog in the vast machinery of the cosmos. He is but one person, his sufferings, however horrendous, however unjust, are the experiences of one person. Even so, negotiating the world with the frail and always flawed moral reasoning of a mere human is all that Job can do. It is precisely what God has created him to do. “What are human beings, that you make so much of them?” (Job 7:17), Job asks. Before God spoke, the question conveyed lament, the deadening conviction that human beings are no more than targets for the exercise of raw, divine power. After God spoke, and especially after God directed Job’s attention to Behemoth and Leviathan, Job undergoes a cognitive shift, “not a change of heart, but a change of mind. He ‘sees’ God freshly and understands something about the divine nature” that he had not known before.18 The text is mute on exactly what Job saw in the whirlwind, but like Job, preachers are summoned to gird up their loins and “declare” what they have learned from immersion in this text.

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Two primary lessons may be suggested: 1) relationship with God is not “an automated interaction with a unidimensional deity obsessed with conformity and obedience. God is more complex, complicated, and inscrutable than humans can imagine;” 2) Job’s fidelity to God is not blind and uninformed; it is driven by a longing for moral clarity, by an irrepressible yearning to know and understand “things too wonderful” (,nipla’ot; Job 42:3), things beyond complete human comprehension but not beyond the human aspiration to perform (cf. Deut 30:11-20). As William Scott Green puts it, “Job’s insistence on God’s justice yields unremitting demand for explanation that forces the deity to speak, to reveal himself in unexpected ways. Job draws God into a conversation about the divine self and makes cognition into a religious act.”19 Preaching Job’s God is a summons to preach as adults, not as children, as those who understand that the way the world is is always and necessarily leavened with real-life experience that causes us to yearn and strive for what ought to be, with God and when necessary against God. Real grown-ups, like Job, will insist that we stand ready to call any of our teachers, including God, into question.20 As Nieman puts it, “If the alternative is inertia, outrage against injustice may keep [us] alive.”21

Notes 1 Archibald MacLeish, “The Book of Job,” (Farmington, Conn: First Church of Christ, 1955), reprinted as “ God Has Need of Man,” in N. Glatzer, The Dimensions of Job: A Study and Selected Readings (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 278. Subsequent references are to the edition of the sermon in Glatzer. 2 Ibid., 283. 3 For exegetical details here and throughout this essay, see Samuel E. Balentine, Job (Macon, Georgia: Smyth and Helwys Bible Commentary, 2006). 4 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I am indebted to Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 422-437, for this way of framing the issue. 5 William Kennedy, Chango,s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (New York: Viking Press, 2011). 6 John Holbert, Preaching Job (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 1999), 131. 7 Mark Twain, “Thoughts on God,” The Oxford Book of Essays. Chosen and edited by J. Gross (Oxford: OUP, 1991), 268-269. 8 Voltaire, Candide, trans. L. Blair (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 30; cf. Nieman, Moral Clarity, 425. 9 John C. Holbert, Preaching Job (St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press, 1999), 132. 10 C. Newsom, “The Book of Job,” NIB, V01.4 (1996), 615; idem, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 248. 11 MacLeish, “The Book of Job,” 285. 12 Neiman, Moral Clarity. 13 Ibid., 427. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 429,430. 16 Ibid., 431. 17 Ibid., 433. 18 William S. Green, “Stretching the Covenant: Job and Judaism,” Review and Expositor 99 (2002), 575. 19 Ibid., 576. This entire paragraph, even when not quoting directly, is informed by Green’s cogent assessment of the whirlwind speeches. 20 Neiman, Moral Clarity, 437. 21 Ibid., 431.

December 31, 2013
Rembrandt at Easter

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Rembrandt at Easter

John N. Akers

Montreat, North Carolina

If you wander through any of the great museums exhibiting Rembrandt ’s art today, you can be forgiven if you aren’t surprised by their variety: elegant portraits, drawings and etchings of everyday life, dramatic paintings of historical events, sweeping landscapes, well-known scenes from the Bible, and so forth. What else would you expect from one of history’s greatest artists? If you had wandered into Rembrandt’s Amsterdam workshop some 350 years ago, however, you might have been somewhat puzzled. Much, of course, would have been familiar to you (at least if you were in the habit of visiting the studios of other artists). In one comer near a window, the artist might be seen, palette and brush in hand, concentrating on his latest painting (and quite possibly ignoring you). A few recent works might have adorned one wall; against another a large stack of paintings (apparently unsold) gathering dust; in the far comer a dozen or so just-printed etchings hanging from a thin cord so their ink could dry. But if you had taken time to examine this hoard, two things might have puzzled you. The first would have been the large number of self-portraits from the artist’s hand, showing the artist dressed in a wide variety of costumes and expressing a wide range of emotions. No wonder they are gathering dust, you might have thought; why would anyone pay to have Rembrandt’s portrait on their wall instead of their own? Something else almost certainly would have puzzled you, however. Many of the works were religious, portraying various scenes from the Bible. And again you would have concluded it was no wonder they too were gathering dust, for in seventeenth century Holland (and in other Protestant countries) few people were interested in having religiously-themed art on their walls. Why had the artist wasted his time and talents on such unmarketable material?

The Reformation, Art, and Rembrandt The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century not only ushered in significant changes in Europe’s religious life, but influenced almost every other aspect of its culture. One of the most vivid examples is the transformation that took place in the visual arts. Post-Reformation artists (unlike their predecessors) no longer felt they had to limit themselves to religious themes, but began exploring a wide range of subjects. For centuries the chief patron of the arts had been the Roman Catholic Church; art often was seen as the handmaiden of Catholic teaching and worship. This isn’t to say that great art was never produced during this period, for it definitely was. But for most artists, the Church’s patronage was essential, and that meant they concentrated on themes the Church deemed important – Madonna and child, the last judgment, the crucifixion, etc. In general, however, the churches of the Reformation downplayed the role of the visual arts in worship, and artists in Protestant regions no longer could look to the Church for patronage. Instead they had to seek support elsewhere, often from

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the aristocracy or the burgeoning mercantile class. As one scholar notes, “Thus for the first time in history, painters assumed the independent but precarious position in society that they now occupy.”1 This meant artists in Protestant regions now were free to draw their inspiration from almost anywhere : ancient Greek or Roman myths, dramatic landscapes, incidents from everyday life, and so forth. And this is precisely what happened. Religious art faded into the background, replaced by works on virtually every subject imaginable . Of the hundreds of artists who flourished during this so-called “Golden Age” of Baroque painting, none is better known – and deservedly so – than Rembrandt van Rijn. Born in the Dutch city of Leiden in 1606, Rembrandt’s parents (although of modest means) apparently were impressed enough with his intellectual abilities to enroll him in the city’s prestigious Latin School, the curriculum of which included classical languages and literature, as well as Bible and Christian doctrine. At the age of fourteen he graduated and was enrolled in Leiden University. University life (and a probable career afterward in law or governmental service) must not have appealed to him, for he left after only a few months to become an artist. He first apprenticed himself to an established local painter, then moved to Amsterdam to study under a well-known Dutch master, returning to Leiden while not yet 20 to open his own studio. The venture was apparently successful, but in 1631 he returned to Amsterdam, where his marriage to the cousin of a prominent art dealer brought him into contact with numerous potential clients. Soon he became known for his impressive skills as a portrait painter, and his financial success and social position were assured. The times could not have been better for someone in his position, for Holland was rapidly assuming its place as the foremost trading nation in Europe. As the Seventeenth Century progressed, hundreds of Dutch sailing ships (at least half of Europe’s trading fleet) crisscrossed most of the known world, bringing great wealth to its citizens and lucrative commissions to its artists, particularly those (like Rembrandt) specializing in portraits.

Rembrandt’s Biblical Art It is, however, Rembrandt’s religious art that concerns us here. In spite of the uncertain market for religious art, Rembrandt – alone of his contemporaries – persisted in producing a large volume of paintings, etchings, and drawings based on the Bible. Willem Visser ‘t Hooft has calculated that almost one-fourth of his paintings and etchings and over one-third of his drawings were derived from the Bible.2 Some were commissioned by the Dutch royal family, but for the most part, Rembrandt seems to have done them for his own satisfaction. Many probably ended up being auctioned for almost nothing when Rembrandt – notoriously inept in financial matters – was forced into bankruptcy. While we think of Rembrandt mainly as a painter, in his own day he achieved equal fame for his etchings, which could be reproduced in quantity and usually were small enough to fit within the limited space of most Dutch houses. (Etching is a painstaking process in which a metal plate is covered with resin; the artist uses a sharp metal point to cut through the resin to the underlying metal. The plate is then immersed in acid to etch the design into the metal, and the plate can then be inked

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to produce multiple copies.) Rembrandt’s etchings ranged through almost the whole Bible and are remarkable in their detail and insight; one art historian terms him “the greatest etcher in the history of art.”3 In his most famous etching, the so-called Hundred Guilder Print, Rembrandt surveyed the whole of Jesus’ ministry in Matthew 19; he is said to have worked on it for ten years. Why did Rembrandt devote so much time and energy to works derived from the Bible – especially since there was so little market for them? We can only guess; he left no diaries or journals, and few letters survive. But what is clear is that the Bible was important to him – so important that it determined a major part of his artistic output. What was the source of his fascination with the Bible? One historian suggests it may have been his mother, but then somewhat unsympathetically adds, “Rembrandt’s persistence in painting, drawing, and etching certain events in the Bible is one of the most individual obstinacies of his headstrong genius.”4 Undoubtedly closer to the mark is Visser ‘t Hooft’s assessment: “Rembrandt is the only great painter not only of the Netherlands but also of the whole world to deserve the name of a biblical painter, for he roams through the Bible from beginning to end, and gives us what he discovers …. One thing is certain: he lived with his Bible. He was in truth ‘homo unius libri’ [a man of one book].”5 When he died only one book was listed in his estate’s inventory: a Bible. In his early years Rembrandt probably saw the Bible mainly as a sourcebook from which he could draw fresh ideas (much as a newly-minted preacher might scour it for next week’s sermon). As time passed, however, Rembrandt found himself assailed by personal tragedy (including the deaths of his first wife and three of their four children), and his biblical works began reflecting a more profound understanding of the Bible’s message. The goal of every serious artist is to cause us (or even force us) to see the world in ways we have not seen it before. To do this involves not only great technical skill, but the ability to observe his or her subject in great depth. Rembrandt’s mature biblical works do exactly that. “As Rembrandt grew older his spirituality deepened and he no longer saw the Bible merely as a source for dramatic narrative…. [He] became more and more concerned with the inner reactions of the individuals he portrayed.”6 John Durham concludes that eventually Rembrandt “read the Bible as a book about himself. He saw himself in its stories, and he saw those stories as real, the narrative accounts of real persons whose experiences were not that different from his own.”7

Trial, Death, and Resurrection In the course of his career Rembrandt explored virtually the entire Bible in his art (although he avoided some subjects popular in medieval art, such as the last judgment or the parable of the rich man and Lazarus). Some passages were favorites: he pictured the flight to Egypt nine times, the parable of the Good Samaritan fifteen times, and the story of Abraham thirty-one times. Among his most moving works, however, are those related to Jesus’ final days on earth: His trial, death, and resurrection. What can we learn from them? What insights might we gain from Rembrandt into events that have been central to the Christian faith throughout its history, and remain so today? Through his art, I suggest, Rembrandt points us to three great truths concerning

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those events.

The Humility of the Incarnation The first great truth we grasp from Rembrandt’s portrayal of Jesus’ final days is the humility of the incarnation. Repeatedly Rembrandt – like artists before him – returned to the Bible’s account of Jesus’ birth. The announcement to Mary, Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, the visit of the shepherds, the adoration of the magi, the presentation in the temple, the flight to Egypt, the childhood in Nazareth – in each of these Rembrandt not only sought to bring the very human drama of Jesus’ birth to life, but to underline that here something utterly unique has taken place: God has become a man. Unlike many of his predecessors, however, Rembrandt did not idealize Jesus’ birth or bestow bright halos on Mary and the babe; he was content to use light in more subtle ways, while making it clear that this infant was both human and divine. The same was true in Rembrandt’s numerous portrayals of Jesus’ public ministry; in them we glimpse both Jesus’ humanity and divinity. Through his art Rembrandt repeatedly confronts his viewers with the truth expressed in the ancient Nicene Creed: He who was “God of God; Light of Light; Very God of Very God” now had become “incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.” Rembrandt would have agreed with theologian Thomas Torrance’s assertion that “everything in Christianity centers on the incarnation of the Son of God, an invasion of God among men and women in time.”8 But what of Jesus’ final days? The struggles in Gethsemane, the arrest, Peter’s denial, Judas’ betrayal, the scorn of the authorities, the mockery of the soldiers, Pilate’s cowardice before the crowds, Jesus’ collapse on the way to Calvary – each these Rembrandt vividly portrayed in all of their raw brutality – and in them Jesus’ divine nature is virtually hidden. The artist seems to be asking his viewers a profound question: How could God allow His Son to submit to such unrelenting humiliation? Doesn’t the weakness of those final days negate Jesus’ divinity? Rembrandt’s answer would have been a resounding “No” – because at the heart of those final events is a mystery we will never fully understand: the humility of the Incarnation. In reality those final days do not negate the truth of the Incarnation, but affirm it. While Rembrandt expresses this humility in every work picturing Jesus ’ last days, perhaps none presents it more vividly than his print of Pilate’s presentation of Jesus to the crowd. (See the selected bibliography for suggestions about websites and books where works mentioned in this article can be viewed.) Because of technical limitations Rembrandt was forced to rework the scene’s metal plate several times. In its original version, his emphasis was on the raucous crowd, almost overwhelming the picture. In its final version, however, Rembrandt omitted most of the crowd; now our attention is almost solely on the prisoner, his hands bound, standing silently on the platform beside Pilate. In A. Hyatt Mayor’s words, in this final version the artist “suddenly puts opera glasses to our eyes, pulls us, now forcibly involved, into the central drama”9 Here, indeed, is the humility of the Incarnation: Jesus fully took upon Himself our humanity, in all of its suffering and alienation. In the words of the Apostle Paul, this One who was God nevertheless “made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant… and became obedient to death – even death on a cross!”10 In Visser ‘t Hooft’s words, through his portrayal of Jesus’ final days, Rembrandt shows us that

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the mystery of Christ’s incarnation “does not consist in the glorification of man, but in the complete abasement of God.” ״God has stooped this low for our salvation. The Centrality of the Cross The second great truth Rembrandt would have us grasp from Jesus5 final days is the centrality of the cross. Centuries before Rembrandt, Christ’s suffering on the cross had become a common theme in religious art. Rather than a passive crucifix, however, Rembrandt repeatedly presents us with the stark reality of the event itself. In multiple etchings and paintings we see soldiers standing guard, grieving disciples, mocking onlookers, arrogant officials. Regardless of their exact composition, almost always Rembrandt set these scenes against a backdrop of darkness, symbolizing the horror of what was taking place. Two paintings in particular picture this, part of a series of paintings on Christ’s Passion commissioned by Prince Frederick Henry of Orange. The first, The Raising of the Cross, depicts a group of men (including a helmeted Roman soldier) straining to lift the cross – to which Jesus has already been nailed – into a vertical position. Nearby is a spade, used to dig the hole into which the base of the cross will be set and ready to fill the hole and make the cross secure. In the shadows are groups of huddled onlookers, while supervising the scene is a haughty, richly-dressed official. The second painting, entitled Descent from the Cross, portrays events several hours later, after Jesus’ death. Gone are the mockers and soldiers; only Jesus’ disciples remain, including several struggling to lower the limp body from the cross into a white shroud. Standing by the cross is another richly-dressed individual – not the haughty official of the first painting, but Joseph of Arimathea, waiting to escort the body to his own tomb. What adds to the impact of these two paintings is that the artist has painted himself into both scenes. In the first, Rembrandt strains with the others to lift the cross into position. In the second, he stands on a ladder, gently helping to ease the lifeless body of Christ to the ground. In this way Rembrandt identifies himself as one of those who caused Jesus to be crucified, and identifies himself also as one who would be His disciple. This self-identity with Jesus in His crucifixion had been highlighted in a contemporary Dutch poem Rembrandt almost surely knew:

No, it was not the Jews who crucified, Nor who betrayed you in the judgment place, Nor who, Lord Jesus, spat in your face,

I am the one, O Lord, who brought you there, I am the heavy cross you had to bear,

It was my sin, alas, it was for me.12

Rembrandt had no interest in trying to sort out the various theories of the atonement . For him it was enough to know that the cross must always be central, for through Christ’s death, our salvation has been won.

The Victory of the Resurrection Few artists have attempted to picture the actual moment of Jesus’ resurrection;

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who can possibly portray an event that runs counter to every category of human experience ? Rembrandt was no exception; he attempted to portray it once early in his career and then seems to have given up. But Rembrandt knew that Jesus’ resurrection was at the heart of the Gospel narrative , and repeatedly he drew attention to its reality through his portrayals of Jesus’ resurrection appearances. In one painting Jesus appears near the empty tomb to Mary Magdalene, who assumes Him to be the gardener (and with good reason since Rembrandt puts a spade in His hand). Another painting recreates the moment when Jesus reveals His wounds to doubting Thomas. A dramatic etching of a post-resurrection appearance to His disciples vividly catches their stunned incredulity – and worship. But one post-resurrection event in particular repeatedly captured Rembrandt’s imagination; he returned to it no less than eighteen times. It is Jesus’ encounter with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35). Among the most moving of his attempts to portray this is a painting from 1648, now in The Louvre, showing the moment when Jesus breaks bread with the two men and is recognized by them as the Risen Lord. On the road they shared their despair over His death; He in turn expounded the Old Testament’s prophecies concerning the Messiah’s sacrificial death and resurrection. Now as He breaks bread with them, their eyes are opened, and they realize Jesus is no longer dead, but alive. Out of defeat has come victory. Why did Rembrandt focus on this particular post-resurrection appearance? We can only guess – but almost certainly one reason was because he saw Jesus not only as One who had been raised from the dead, but whose presence is constantly with us if we, like those men from Emmaus, will only welcome Him into our lives.

At the End On October4,1669, Rembrandt died; four days later he was buried in the churchyard of Amsterdam’s Westerkerk. In his studio an unfinished painting remained, perhaps still on his easel. It too recounted an incident from the Bible that had often fascinated him: the recognition of the infant Jesus as the Messiah by the aged Simeon (Luke 2:25-35). In the painting Mary hovers in the background, but the focus is on Simeon. Carefully he cradles the infant in his stiff, arthritic hands. His eyes are almost closed, and his mouth is slightly open as he quietly intones his words of praise: “Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you now dismiss your servant in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation… .”13 As his death approached, this was Rembrandt’s hope, just as it has been the Church’s hope through the ages — and still is ours today.

Notes 1 Robert Wallace, The World of Rembrandt, 1606 -1669 (New York: Time-Life Library of Art, 1968), 22. 2 Willem A. Visser ’t Hooft, Rembrandt and the Gospel (New York: Meridian Books, Inc.), 20 3 Wallace, 41. 4 A. Hyatt Mayor, Rembrandt and the Bible (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1979), 5. 5 Visser’t Hooft, 22, 30. 6 Wallace, 40,112. 7 John I. Durham, The Biblical Rembrandt: Human Painter in a Landscape of Faith (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2004), 64-65. 8 Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (IVP Academic, Downers Grove, Illinois, 2008), 8.

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9 Mayor, 36. 10 Philippians 2:7,8. 11 Visser’t Hooft, 115. 12 Quoted in Shelley Perlove and Larry Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 288. Cf. the medieval hymn attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux and still in many hymnals, O Sacred Head, Now Wounded. 13 Luke 2:29-30. Selected Bibliography Various websites include images of many of Rembrandt’s major works, including www.rembrandtpainting .net and www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/rembrandt/. The article on Rembrandt in www.wikipedia.org also includes a number of images. Numerous books survey Rembrandt’s life and work. The following focus especially on Rembrandt as a biblical artist.

Durham, John. The Biblical Rembrandt: Human Painter in a Landscape of Faith. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2004. Mayor, A. Hyatt. Rembrandt and the Bible. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1979. Perlove, Shelley and Larry Silver. Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Visser’t Hooft, Willem. Rembrandt and the Gospel. New York: Meridian Books Inc., 1960. Wallace, Robert. The World of Rembrandt, 1606 – 1669. New York: Time-Life Library of Art, 1968.

December 31, 2013
Clean up your act

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Clean Up Your Act

Joanna M. Adams

First Fresbyterian Church,Atlanta, Georgia

InAtlanta,the phenomenon ofmega-ehurches which average thousands ofpeople in attendance on Sundays continues apace. These churches are intentional about welcome and hospitality. They employ the latest technology in communicating with people. In one instance, the preacher of the day is beamed in, via video image, taped from another church service in another location the week before. The lights go down, and, hologram-like, he glides in from the darkness with a Bible in his hand to deliver the ^m>rning message. The massive worship auditoriums around town are more likely to be filled with cushioned theater style seats than hard wooden pews, but such is not always toe case. Ire c e n tl^ o rto i^ d with 00 ئshowroom that has been refitted for worship. The seats there are close-together, hard-bottom, uncomfortable folding chairs, which didn’t matter very much, because for a good portion of toe service, we were on our fret singing and paying. (Fersonal revelation : I am pretty sure I won toe Ms. Methuselah prize for being toe oldest person in attendance.) I cannot help being struck by the contrast between our emerging twenty-first century worship and proclamation styles and toe rou^-them-up-good approach John toe Baptist took when he appeared on the scene in Judea, quoting toe Hebrew Bible withavengeance n d peaching agospel of repentance. John never glided anywhere. He liked shaking people up, and he didn’t give a hoot whom he pleased. Wild man that he was, he wore clothing of camel’s hair. He ate a diet of locusts and honey, signaling a deliberate choice he had made to stand over against toe conventional appetites of his day. Then, as now, nobody much had a hankering for bugs as a daily diet. Filled with fire and vinegar, his sermons showed a marked absence of sweetness and reassurance. To John, the good news was that God’s kingdom was coming, but its arrival would not be for the faint of heart. In contemporary terms, it wouldn’t be like Santa’s sleigh landing on your roof with a sack full of toys for you, no matter what you had done or not done in toe naughty or nice department. “Even now,” he said, “toe ax is lying at toe root ofthe trees ؛every tree therefore that doesn’t bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into toe fire.” Gne of John’s favorite ways of addressing his congregation was to call them a “brood of vipers.” Now, I ask you: Is that any way to win friends, influence people, and get toe seats filled on Sunday morning? But here is toe odd thing: people kept coming to hear him—great crowds of them. Matthew goes to great lengths to tell us that they came from Judea and from Jerusalem and from “all toe region along toe Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sin.” Thirty years ago toe renowned psychiatrist Karl Menninger wrote a book entitled Whatever Became ofSin? Behind Dr. Menninger’s title lay toe assumption that something had happened to sin, that toe concept as it had been understood by western religious tradition for 200 years was disappearing—indeed, had already disappeared —fro ^ h e ra d e m mind, leaving our culture without an adequate v o ^ to ary to u se in

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speaking ofthe inevitable brokenness ofthe human condition, His contention was that because they lacked a way to acknowledge their own sinful condition, many people had fallen into blame, blaming everyone and everything but themselves for what was wrong with their lives and with the world. At the same time, . ٢٥Menninger said a great many people were walking around with a vague depression that they could not seem to shake. Modernity has taught us many lessons, but none has it communicated to us more clearly than this one: that we are to see every deed, even the most deviant criminal act, as a psychological phenomenon ٢٠as a sociological phenomenon ٢٠as the result of economic conditions ٢٠as the result of a biological response to environmental ٢٠ genetic factors. The result is that we live in a time in which there has been an almost universal silencing of any talk about sin.1 Could it be that people come to church not only to be affirmed and encouraged, but also to be burned with the fire of truth and made whole again by the life-giving power of repentance? Why did so many put their faces in the furnace of John’s consuming fire? 1 think it was because the people sensed his respect for them, a respect manifested in his willingness to tell them nothing less thau the truth. Hlsjob was to prepare the way for the coming reign of God in the person of Christ Jesus, and he knew that in order for the people to be able to receive their salvation, they had work to do. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Now is the time to face up to the gap between who you think you are and who you actually are. It is not an easy thing to do. Do you remember the old story about the incident at the traffic light? The light had turned green, and the car that was closest to the green light didn’t move. The driver behind the first car blew her horn. The fellow in the first car remained oblivious to the green light. The second driver blew her hom again. The car still didn’t move. The second driver sat on her horn, so to speak, along with pounding the steering wheel and saying a few words that couldn’t be heard outside the car window but were clearly full of feeling. Finally, the fellow in the first car came to and drove off, just as the light changed from yellow back to red. The woman beat her hom again in frustration, and when she finished, she heard something knocking on her window. She looked up and saw that it was a police officer. Much to her dismay, he said to her, “Alright lady, get out of the car.” She did. He handcuffed her, took her to the police station, fingerprinted her, and put her in a cell. Hours passed. Finally, she was taken back to the booking desk where the officer who had arrested her was waiting. “Lady, I am so sorry about the mistake,” he said, “but I pulled up behind you when you were blowing your hom and cursing, and as 1 was sitting there, 1 noticed those bumper stickers on your car. One side said, ‘What would Jesus do?’ And on the other side of your rear bumper is that sticker that reads, ‘Follow me to Sunday School,’ and then there was that Christian fish emblem on the trunk, and so 1 was sure you had stolen the car!” There is, at times, a gap between the person we think we are and the person we actually are. “Pay attention to the gap,” John the Baptist says. Now is the time for you to get serious about living a life that is more reflective of the purposes of God. How do you do it? ¥ ٧٠do it by means of repentance. Repentance is not a word we hear every day, but it is a very good word. In Greek, it means “to change.” It indicates a change of mind, a change of direction. As someone wise said, “No amount

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of exertion will ever help a runner who is headed in the w٢on جdireetion.” To repent is to §et faced in the right way, to look toward hope, to look toward possibility, to look toward transformation. Redemption—that is God’s doing. But getting yourself positioned for redemption, that is your doing. Repentance is a number one agenda item in Advent along with hope, hope based on the promise that whatever there is about us that needs transformation, it ean be ehanged through God’s graee and love. 1 know that it is hard to hear that redemption is needed. If you want someone to tell you that you are okay and that I am okay and that even if we are not okay, it’s really okay, then John the Baptist is not the man for you. But if you yeam for a fresh start, if you want God to create a clean heart within your own human spirit, then John is just the one for you. I think our biggest problem is that it is very hard to keep our lives very neat and tidy when we actually have to live them day by day. Everyday life is messy. Family relationships, personal ethics, larger commitments to truth, justice, and recon،;؛l؛- ation: they are all subject to sin. Again and again, we have to turn away from our self-delusions and toward the Source of our salvation. Again and again, we have to remember that being the recipients of God’s saving grace does not mean that we have no responsibility for ourselves and the shape of human society. What we do matters to God. No one except the masochistic-minded wants to be scolded ٢٠fussed at by the preacher, and yet, I wonder if our weekly tipping of the hat to our intractable sinful condition by means of a routine prayer of confession is enough to get at what truly ails us. I worry that we have lost a profoundly important aspect of the Christian life when we have lost sight of our radical dependence on God’sjustifying righteousness, as revealed most unsparingly in the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. In tire 1980’s, I had the privilege of serving on the committee that drafted “The Brief Statement ofFaith” for our Presbyterian denomination. By far, the most controversial part ofthat Confession, which is now a part of our Book ofConfessions, was the line that reads, “We deserve God’s condemnation.” Gne unhappy Presbyterian suggested that the line read, “We deserve to be evaluated by God.” Another offered this: “Some people deserve God’s condemnation.” Ah, the challenge of admitting our need to clean up and shape up. I remember the mother of a grown son telling me that her son had been accepted into graduate school at Columbia University and had gotten his first apartment in New York City. He invited his parents to come visit him. They complimented him on how great his apartment looked, how neat and tidy it was. “Thank you,” he said. “The trouble is that I get it afi cleaned up, and three or four weeks later, I have to do it all over again.” Life is messy. Over and over, we acknowledge the mess, reset our course, and let God take charge of what is beyond our capacity to repair. I wonder if we are not today experiencing a particularly damaging epidemic of self-righteousness. There is a lot of halo polishing going on, as well as an eagerness to label whole categories of people, as opposed to one’s own self, as sinners. Many who claim to follow Christ have forgotten his admonition to look at the beam in your own eye before you start beating up on everyone else. “Let those who are without sin cast the first stone,” he said. (John 8:7) I just can’t see how judgmentalism serves toe purposes of God very well. What

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got John the Baptist going more than anything were the leaders of the religious establishment who ،;ame out to he baptized in the River Jordan. They were the ones he told off the most vigorously. Why? Beeause they were loeked into the sin of smugness, and smugness has never borne any fruit except more smugness. He told them they needed to get a grip on their own sense of self- satisfaction. The One who was coming could make them whole, even the Zealots, even the Sadducees, but he couldn’t get to them if their own goodness was taking up all the room. Or, as the great old Calvinist doctrine would have put it – pride is the enemy of hope. First comes the courage to name the truth, which is usually easier said than done. In the months that have passed since the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the death ، ’١١Tray von Martin, it has become clear that matters of race remain one of the most fraught areas of American life; yet, when was the last time you heard anyone admit to the sin of racism? Recently, Sojourners magazine reprinted a piece written by Fditor Jim Wallis in 1987. How scorchingly true his words sound today:

In spiritual and Biblical terms, racism is a perverse sin that cuts to the core of the Gospel message. Put simply, racism negates the reason for which Christ died—the reconciling work of the cross… .There is only one remedy for such a sin and that is repentance, which, if genuine, will always bear fruit in concrete forms of conversion, changed behavior, and reparation. While the United States may have changed in regard to some of its racial attitudes and allowed some ofits black citizens into the middle class, white America has yet to recognize the extent of its racism. ..much less to repent of its racial sins?

If we ever move forward as a society today without the pernicious reality of racism, it will be because we have admitted there is a problem, rather than claiming in a puffy-chested way that we have become a post-racial society. Only when we have repented of past denial can we turn in the direction of righting long-standing wrongs and living with genuine respect for one another. Denial might be the longest river in Egypt, but it is also the great massive stone that seals us off ffom the future God wants to give. On the first Saturday in Advent a few years ago, I wem by the church to get a book I had left on my desk. I heard sounds in the sanctuary, so I walked down the hall to see what was going on. 1 came upon the sight of several ladies, each standing on a different ladder while stuffing shiny green magnolia leaves into the window sills. They brought to mind the thought that Advent is all about getting ready. It is about creating an environment in which God can build a new world and a new you and a new me. None of us is ever going to be perfect, but we can clean up our act and get ready for God to come among us in the form of Mary’s baby, the world’s best hope, our merciful Savior. Hear the voice of the one crying in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord.” Get up out of your hard wooden pew. Get up out of your cushioned seat and pray, “Lord, bring your winnowing hook my way.” I have no way of knowing the nature of the mess you might have brought with you to church. We all come exactly as we are. Perhaps you did something long ago about which you are still ashamed. Perhaps your burden has to do with what you

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wished y©□ had done and did not do. I do not know the natnre of your regret, and you do not know mine, but I do know that there is no burden too heavy for God, no ego too grand for God, no trough of regret too low for God. I do know that there is absolutely nothing about you ٢٠about me that is beyond God’s eapaeity to redeem. Friends, fear not John the Baptist or his message of repentance, for therein lies the path to your salvation.

Notes t Ronald Goetz, “Sin-Talk in out W’orld.” The Christian Century, May 1-23,1990, – 2 4. ؟ 2 !؛ ١٨ Wallis. “America’s Original Sin,” Sojourners (November 1987).

December 31, 2013