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  • The witness of Carlyle Marney (1916-1978)

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    Protagonist Corner

    The Witness of Carlyle Mamey (1916-1978y

    Rush Otey Selwyn Avenue Presbyterian Church, Charlotte, North Carolina

    All flesh is grass, including preacher flesh, famous or not. Ask around the congregation and see who knows anything about your predecessor who filled the pulpit three or four decades ago. In his time Carlyle Marney was one of the great ones, not only in the United States, but also in ecumenical circles around the world. He served congregations in Kingsport, Tennessee, near Louisville and in Paducah, Kentucky, in Austin, Texas, and in Charlotte, North Carolina. Fourteen volumes of his theology and sermons were published. He taught preaching and/or ethics at places such as Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Duke Divinity School, Virginia Military Institute, and Princeton Theological Seminary (mostly in the summer programs there, but he once was offered the chair in homiletics and declined). He preached at Harvard, Yale, Chicago , Vanderbilt, Riverside Church, and Union Theological Seminary in New York, in Korea and Japan and around Europe, and in countless pulpits of small renown but of possibly great significance. Active in both the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches and a board member of The Christian Century, he also helped begin and lead numerous groups in the towns and cities where he was a minister. He received several honorary doctorate degrees and was especially proud of the ones from Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte (historically an African-American institution) and from the University of Glasgow in Scotland. When major health problems caused him to resign the pastorate at Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina , in 1967 he founded Interpreters’ House, an ecumenical center for renewal and study at Lake Junaluska, North Carolina. Interpreters’ House became well known for its program of integrating psychology, philosophy, theology, Biblical study, and the arts, and for reaching out especially to ministers who were burned out or burned by the struggles related to civil rights and the Vietnam War and the general upheavals in the Church during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Colleagues at Interpreters’ House included James Fowler, whose later work at Emory University on the stages of faith became a signal reference point for many. Marney ,s wide circle of friends included Lyndon B. Johnson, Sam Rayburn, Bill Moyers, William Sloane Coffin, George Buttrick, Karl Menninger, Clarence Jordan, Benjamin Mays, and countless children, laborers, teachers, professional people, artists, members of the military, and prisoners.2 John Carey points out that during the Paducah years, Marney came to formulate three vows regarding the ministry: “1)1 would never become economically victimized by a job. 2) I would never want anything a denomination could give me to the point of paying too much to get it. 3) I would follow new light into anyplace as soon as I knew it to be new light.” 3 Later on he added a fourth vow which he often repeated at Interpreters’ House: “I will never lie from the pulpit.” During the eleven Interpreters’ House years Marney increasingly became ecumenical and more critical of institutional religion (especially of Southern Baptists,

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    but sparing no one), and he more intentionally explored psychiatric, sociological, philosophical, and interfaith approaches to the human condition. He expanded his preaching and teaching assignments as well as his writing. His schedule in May and June of 1978 included preaching and leading seminars in Arkansas, Alabama, Oregon, Colorado, and North Carolina, in addition to the Interpreters’ House regimen. On July 3,1978, he collapsed while leaving his office to lead the Pastors’ School at Furman University and died immediately, less than a week shy of his sixty-second birthday. Marney’s preaching was utterly unique, closely related to his personality and charisma, and particularly to his deep voice, which someone compared to the voice God would surely have if He were from the South, only deeper! By nature inquisitive, Marney brought a passionate intellect to the preaching ministry. He believed that a preacher should be continually in process, becoming more and more familiar with the Christian tradition as well as with culture. (Here in his approach to preaching, he was more like Tillich than Barth.) During the 1970’s he would chide younger ministers to “keep on doing your homework—you’ll never make it as a guitar player or comedian.” At the time of his death, books on his desk included Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, a prayer book, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Augustine’s Letters, Robert Bailey’s The Minister and Grief, and a Greek New Testament. He once listed the authors who had most influenced him—Augustine, Rudolf Otto, MacNeil Dixon, William Temple, Dostoevsky, Unamuno, Berdyaev, Brunner, Kierkegaard, and John Baillie.4 He believed that an uneducated and unprepared minister was no more to be excused than a careless surgeon, an attorney who failed to write a timely brief, a mechanic who left out parts of an engine, a sanitation worker who spilled trash all over the yard, or a thief in the business world. Often he said that he listened for thirty hours a week and studied for twenty more, for the privilege of speaking for twenty minutes on Sunday.

    Race From his family of origin, who had been mostly Union supporters during the Civil War, Marney understood that Christ died and lives for all and not just for comfortable or Caucasian people. The image of God was in people from Creation, and, in the words of Irenaeus, in Christ God became like us so that we might become like Him. And so in Austin he sought paths toward reconciliation and desegregation. It is easy in 2011 to forget how apartheid was the entrenched norm in the 1950’s and 1960 ’s. Long before the Brown vs. Board ofEducation Supreme Court verdict rendered “separate but equal” schools unconstitutional, Marney had preached about civil rights as a Christian imperative. In Austin he met often with black ministers and friends in an obscure Mexican restaurant. With a few others he lobbied the Texas legislature when racist bills were being considered. John Carey relates,

    On one particularly tense occasion, with thirteen blatantly discriminatory bills pending on the floor of the legislature, Marney invited Congressman Brooks Hayes of Arkansas to come to Austin to speak against such legislation ; he also prevailed upon Price Daniel, then governor of Texas and a close personal friend, to introduce Hayes. Hayes spoke at a rally held at the First Baptist Church, and all thirteen bills were killed in the legislature.5

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    However, Marney was enough of a Niebuhrian regarding human self-interest and sin to never place ultimate hope in political reform, so he continued to labor for reform while always preaching the Cross and believing that the kingdom of God was always beyond human creativity. In Charlotte, Marney came to see the idolatrous economic power of the privileged culture in which he worked as the ideology which sometimes subtly and most often overtly supported racism. He sought out friendships with persons in the black community, particularly with faculty members at Johnson C. Smith University and with activists such as T. J. Reddy (who was bailed out of jail by Marney when Reddy and others had been arrested for allegedly burning a stable). Marney not only took public stands on such issues as desegregation of public accommodations, but also worked behind the scenes as a member of the Executive Committee of the Chamber of Commerce and as a member of the Council on Human Relations. Through members of Myers Park Baptist and others, he moved items such as redlining and the lack of affordable housing on to the public agenda. It took until 1964 for the restaurants and hotels of Charlotte to be desegregated, and this transition was largely peaceful because of the leadership of the Chamber of Commerce, who saw the economic risks of doing the wrong thing. In a sermon in 1965 Marney said, “Unless we make the plight of the Negro American the central concern of all Americans, there will be no social peace in this generation to come. A candid history of the South and its people would be unendurable for a Southerner to read. We could not face it. Shorn of its myths and legends we would repudiate it as not our own.6 ״ During this period Marney organized a regional, integrated conference on civil rights at Myers Park Baptist and on another occasion had also invited Clarence Jordan, founder of the inter-racial Koinonia Partners in Americus, Georgia, to Charlotte and was told by several prominent members of the congregation never to bring Clarence back. Not only was Jordan considered too radical on race, but his economic ideas about Christian socialism were construed as communism by the bankers who heard him. Whatever influence and victories Marney experienced on the racial front came in great measure from his ability to relate pastorally to his parishioners who disagreed vehemently with him. In the voluminous correspondence of the Marney papers, there are many examples of dialogue on sensitive matters which were never reconciled, but nevertheless a relationship endured, often by sheer willpower and commitment to the Church as Christ’s body and not simply a gathering of the like-minded. Civility in discourse was more prevalent than it is today. In 1960 Marney received a long letter from a well-known Charlotte physician who was struggling with integration of Memorial Hospital where he practiced. (The physician viewed himself as more humane and progressive than most in that he practiced at Memorial and not at the private Presbyterian Hospital.) He enumerataed the following:

    1 The ideal solution would be an entire wing of Memorial Hospital for negroes (with a separate entrance)…. This means segregation, but it also means equal facilities and professional care…. 2 If the above plan (wing) cannot be carried out, the next best solution is segregated wards…. 3 If complete integration has to be started, I believe that it will require

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    many years before the white public will accept it on a large scale basis. In other words, the effect would be to make Memorial a “city hospital ״with the “Myers Park people” choosing other hospitals…, and this will certainly run private patients away! . . . If I had my way, I would see to it that all negro doctors, nurses, etc. receive proper training and that proper facilities are provided for them and then I would be perfectly satisfied for the negro to be taken care of by their own race. Naturally, this is impossible at the present time, thus the rest of us are going to have to do our share. This is a long, rambling letter, but I did want you to know a little more in detail my feeling in the matter. I want you to know that I greatly apprecíate your letter of March 10th. I also want you to know how much you mean to my family and me. We are very happy that you are our pastor. With every good wish and kindest personal regards.7

    Marney’s reply acknowledged the distance between their positions, but closed as follows:

    I do love you for the candor and forthrightness that marks everything you say and do. Because this is true I have little concern as to whether we agree or not… .The grandest thing that comes out of these relationships is the personal element of relation which exists even where disagreement is the order of the day. Thank you for what you mean to me and mine.8

    The Environment/Creation Especially during the last five years of his life, Marney began to speak more directly to environmental issues. This is not surprising in that from childhood he had spent a great deal of time enjoying the natural world, and his forty-five acre farm near Lake Junalusaka had brought respite and delight and wonder for him and many others for twenty years. But in many ways Marney was again ahead of the times and prophetic. His stance was biblical, theological, and plaintive during a time when Americans were only beginning to experience gasoline shortages and to raise questions about nuclear wastes and air and water pollution and over-consumption of food. The first Earth Day celebration had been held only in April of 1970. (This essay was being written in 2010 when nightly reports of the Gulf Oil Spill disaster filled the news and in 2011 following the meltdown of the Japanese nuclear power reactors, and Marney’s positions seem as yet both needed and unheeded.) First, Marney observed that there is a difference between having a responsibility for creation and of worshipping nature. In The Recovery of the Person (Abingdon, 1963) he insisted:

    Nature knows no anthems, no hymns, no religious nature songs which see God in birds and bees and sunsets and trees: when did nature change? There have been fifteen hundred floods on the Yellow River in the crowded canyons of China in three thousand years. The Yangtze has destroyed millions in regular floods…. Two hundred fifty thousand died last year of volcanoes, storms, freak winds, and nature’s so-called acts of God. In what year did nature turn benevolent and begin to preserve for us the lie of

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    a God of love?… Reverence for life? Bah! What reverence can nature have for me—and even Schweitzer must destroy life to save for a while another form of life. Nature is a world of ant warfare, bee executions, wolf raids and omnivorous plants. If God is love, it seldom shows in nature.9

    God, revealed in Jesus Christ is Personal, is Love, is Jesus Christ Incarnate, and is not a plant, flower, mountain, river, sea, or star. In his last of many Bible conferences at Massanetta Springs in Virginia, and in one of his last sermons at Duke Chapel, Marney called humanity to responsible stewardship of Creation:

    Our energy crisis means no more or less than this: there is a wall around our garden. Creation has edges. Those predecessors of Columbus were right: one can literally sail off the edge of the Earth. A laboratory culture really can over-run the garden. Us bees really are killer-bees and we brown rats really do become cannibals, if crowded. The poor we do have always with us and we create the poor…. Any life-style that is Christian takes its rise not in our salvation but in Creation, for if, as the blessed Psalter puts it, “God belongs in the heavens,” it continues, “the Earth He has given to us ! ״But not, surely, to make it a swampy sewer, choked with the bones of the prematurely dead, strangled on the noisome, gaseous fumes of our iron horses breaking wind in their mad climb to the top of Athos, or Sinai, or to the Moon. I have posited swiftly, and now shall expand upon three propositions: “The Limits on Creation require an Ethic of Parsimony. The Nature of Covenant implies an Ethic of Responsibility. Incarnation is the mode for an Ethic of Identity.”10

    Within this sermon is the prayer which was included at Marney’s funeral by Marney ,s dear friend and associate pastor at Myers Park Baptist, Bob McLernon, and which has been published in several places. (On the internet, for the complete prayer, search for “Confession and Defense by Carlyle Marney” in www.christianethicstoday. com.) The conclusion bears repeating here, perhaps for a new generation of hearers :

    Hear now my intention with Grace as if it were fact. I do and have intended to be Responsible in Creation by Covenant and where I have defaulted do Thou forgive. Forgive Thou my vicarious responsibility for all the defection from The purpose of all Thy responsible creatures, and accept Thou this my admission of utter dependence upon Thy mercy. “Naked came I into the world” and how I am dressed at the conclusion makes no difference. A pair of jeans or a Glasgow robe, it makes no difference. Meantime, well, I mow, I cut wood for winter, I clean drainage ditches, I preach about what is happening and look to see what God will do for the earth. I watch out always for babies and little rabbits in front of my mower, and old folks nearby and black snakes worth preserving, and little puppies on the road, and the young-old who stutter and laugh and can’t hear, too. The cry of us all, “Come Lord Jesus, come.”

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    Death Marney throughout his ministry experienced and pointed unflinchingly to the tragic elements of human life, consummated in the death of all things. For him the Cross was usually more evident than Resurrection (which is a Hope, not a certainty), and God’s absence and silence were more prevalent than God’s presence and speaking. In this way he was a Christian existentialist, influenced by Kierkegaard, Unamuno, Camus, and indeed the imprisoned Bonhoeffer. Mamey’s Holy Week sermons have stood the test of time and are well worth visiting. The unpublished works of his last five years point to an increasing awareness of the fragile brevity of human life. He once said in a sermon on the Transfiguration, “Our universal grief is that we run out of time.” In December of 1976 Marney visited Davidson College (where I then served as campus minister) for several days. His lectures were on the relationship of faith and doubt. For him (as for Luther and Tillich) these were not opposites, but inextricable aspects of being fully human and of being Christian. During his final sermon, he alluded to the notion o f“deus absconditus,” a rather unorthodox theology developed by Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64) and others. But Marney did not translate absconditus as “hidden,” which is the most common rendering (see Psalms 10, 13, 30, 44, 88, 104). Rather, he queried, “What if God has already revealed enough, and now has absconded, fledV This question is profound and seemed to be posed to elicit a response which takes full account of human responsibility and the always mysterious, transcendent “wholly other” qualities of the divine. In Advent, here was clearly the fear and trembling of waiting. At the conclusion of the sermon, Marney departed from his prepared text and delivered an unforgettable, extemporaneous digression on Death as the crux of the faith/doubt relationship. Looking around the large and pensive congregation which was gathered in the well-lit chancel area and in the first rows of the darker sanctuary, he spoke slowly, “I have been quite near to dying several times, and I can say from those moments that Death itself may not be as bad as we usually fear. So, when the time comes for me, I hope to die well.” He paused. Then, came a final question, “And, if I don’t?” He shrugged his shoulders, a quizzical and even mischievous expression of nonchalance on his face, and sat down. During 1977 I took a sabbatical from ministry at Davidson and studied independently at Duke Divinity School with three exceptional professors, Stuart Henry in American Christianity, Tom Langford in Theology, and Marney in “Christian Anthropology .” Mamey had directed me in particular to Nicholas of Cusa and to Ernest Becker, the cultural anthropologist who had been teaching at Simon Fraser University in Canada at the time of his death in 1974 at age fifty. It was to consider all of that, and to culminate three weeks at Interpreters’ House, that I went to Marney’s home on Wolf Pen Mountain one November evening in 1977. The creek which ran over Marney’s driveway and had to be forded was flowing rapidly; a mist was settling in, and I recalled Nicholas: we discover God as the one who cannot be understood. Our mind catches a glimpse of God in shadow or in fog, in darkness. In the shadows by the central fireplace in the former apple barn book-lined study, Marney sat with his Irish setter, Robin. Academic matters did not seem to hold his interest for long. After about an hour, he referred to a passage from Nicholas of Cusa

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    —“I behold Thee.. .and I know not what I see, for I see nothing visible” (The Vision of God)—and applied it to his own vocation and life: “Sometimes I look at it all and it’s nothing, nothing. Sometimes I wonder if any of it has been worth a tinker’s damn!” I was stunned into speechlessness by this melancholy, and for a long while, neither of us spoke. Night fell. To break the silence, I attempted to engage Marney in a discussion of Ernest Becker’s book, The Denial of Death, which had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1977, posthumously for Becker. Mamey’s appraisal of Becker was unabashedly respectful, if not reverential. “I wish I had done it myself,” he began. He was uncharacteristically reluctant to say anything critical—“I take my hat off to him.” Perhaps the winter chill, the darkness, his inner life and demons, my own and other griefs which he well knew and shared, all combined to form this unforgettable response to The Denial o f Death. Although more exuberant times followed even that same night, I shall recall Marney as he stirred the fire and in a torrent of words not unlike a Psalm, lamented and confessed, “There is never enough time. If I live to be a hundred, there will never be enough time to finish who I am, never enough time to love all those I love—Elizabeth, our children, grandchildren, and friends. Becker… the Hell of it is, he’s dead.” When I learned of Marney’s death, his words echoed poignantly, and were I to have chiseled an epitaph for him in July of 1978, it would have been, “There’s never enough time . . .the Hell of it is, he’s dead.” But by now I venture that would not have been enough, for it omitted the Alpha and Omega in whom Marney lived and moved and was, even in his depressions. Strangely, there is another passage from Nicholas of Cusa: “I give Thee thanks, my God . . .because Thou hast shown me that thou canst not be seen elsewhere than where impossibility meets and faces me. Thou hast inspired me . . .to do violence to myself because impossibility coincides with necessity, and I have learnt . . .the place where Thou art found unveiled.” One place where “unveiling” occurred is described in Marney’s own words in a personal note: “With a good fire, coffee, and a jug, it could be real Church.”

  • Material grace

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

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    Material Grace

    2 Corinthians 9:1-15

    Brian Blount

    Union Presbyterian Seminary, Richmond, Virginia

    There are times on the weekends with thousands of movies out there for the choosing, when my family and I simply cannot find something that we all want to watch. Our satellite television system must have 750 channels on it, and yet we are still dissatisfied with everything on it on a Friday night. So, in the days when there still were video stores, we would head off to the video store and walk around the aisles of movie after movie after movie like sheep without a shepherd, and after 30 minutes or so of this mindlessness, we would very often head back to the car empty handed. Every once in a while, though, we found a gift. Several years ago, our daughter found it. She came over to my wife and me with a DVD that had a man sitting with an empty expression on his face, staring forward into nothingness. Just sitting. Just staring. The title was Lars and the Real Girl. To understand what happened next, you have to understand a little something about me. Growing up, I had the gift of being able to tell whether food was going to taste good or bad simply by looking at the food. My mother mocked my gift, but time and time again, I could look at a vegetable dish, and, having pronounced it funny looking, I would know right away that it was also inedible. I also have this gift with the covers of DVDs. Without knowing anything about the movie, I can look at a DVD cover and immediately, instantly arrive at a reasonable, rational, even righteous conclusion. I told my daughter, “We don’t want to see that.” All of a sudden I was faced with a family mutiny. My wife and daughter refused to recognize my executive prerogative. My daughter protested until I did the unthinkable. I conceded. Right there in public, in the middle of the store, I, who have the power to determine whether I like vegetables and movies by the look of their packaging, took out my glasses and read what the thing was about. It sounded so odd that I couldn’t help but be intrigued. Well, it started out weird and slow. Lars mostly just sat around staring at stuff. He had no friends, refused to be in any relationships, and avoided his brother and sister-in-law who loved him by living out in the garage rather than in the house. One day, out of the blue, Lars tells his brother and sister-in-law that he has met someone and that they are engaged, and she needs to stay in the house with them because she and Lars, of course, are not yet married. Her name is Bianca. We see Lars’ brother and sister-in-law get so excited because Lars has made such a wonderful romantic contact. Of course Bianca can stay with them. Bianca, Lars explains, is from Brazil. Bianca, it turns out, is actually from a box. Bianca is a life-sized doll that Lars has ordered from the internet. It is at this point that the tag line for the movie makes sense. It says, “The search for true love begins outside the box.” Of course, in Lars’ case, they mean this literally. Well, you can imagine the shocked looks on the faces of Lars’ brother and sisterin -law as Lars sits there beside this doll and introduces her to them. In the oddest of

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    conversations, he talks to her and interacts with her as though she is real. Of course, they take Lars for medical assistance the very next day. The doctor explains that, quote, “Bianca is in town for a reason.” Lars is trying to cope with something broken in his life through this delusion. And the doctor suggests that since they won’t be able to convince him that Bianca is not real anyway, they should live out the delusion with him in hopes that they can find out why he needs her. Now you are wondering, I am sure, what in the world has this guy with a delusion about a life sized doll he ordered from the internet got to do with Paul’s belief that the Corinthians can create a stronger community if they share their resources with the poor believers who live in Jerusalem. You’ll remember from the scripture that Paul is trying to get the Corinthians to give to a collection he is raising to help the poor. He is trying to get a community that has been gifted by God with material things, money, to share some of that money with the poor. By doing this, Paul believes that he can help bring unity to the church. He wants to build community by having the wealthy Gentile Christians give some of their money to the poor Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. I thought of Lars and the Real Girl as I read and re-read this Pauline text precisely because the doctor was asking Lars’ brother and sister-in-law to give Lars their love and their patience even though on the surface, it looked like Lars was too mentally and spiritually poor to give them back anything in return. As it turned out, the entire town entered into the giving act. It was one of those small towns where everybody knows and looks out for everybody else. At first, people just laughed at Lars. But then, because he was one of them, because they were community, they did as Lars’ brother and sister-in-law did. They tried to help Lars by pretending that Bianca was real. And then something miraculous happened. Bianca became real. Not in a literal sense, but real enough to them. They started treating Bianca with respect because of Lars. They accepted her at church worship. At the Beauty Parlor they did her hair. At the hospital, they let Bianca sit with the sick children. At the local department store, they let Bianca have a part time job modeling clothes in the store window. Out of Lars’s illness and the town’s giving love, an image of love, grace-filled, a-caring-for-somebody-else-more-than-I-care־for-myself kind of love materialized. Their giving grace bore the fruit of true community. Though they begrudgingly gave themselves to playing along at first, they cheerfully did so by the movie’s end. It was that cheerful giving that helped Lars find his way back into community and health. They gave Lars their love, and Lars gave them a view of themselves that they, and those of us who watched their movie, could deeply appreciate. By loving Lars, they strengthened their community. The love they gave out came back to them a hundredfold . That, quite simply, is all Paul is saying about the cheerful giving that God loves. Cheerful giving of oneself and one’s resources is the kind of giving that creates community. That, I believe, is what we come together to celebrate this morning. A community that has been gifted by the inexpressible gift that is the Son of God in our midst. We allow that gift to materialize not only in worship, but in the way we share our gift with others. Compared to the Jewish Christians in Palestine, the Corinthians are rich. Paul wants the Corinthians to stop thinking about how much they must keep of what they have and start thinking of how much they must give of what they have. He wants them

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    to share. He believes that by sharing, they will show the world that they are unified in faith with the poor Jerusalem Christians. They can demonstrate their gratitude for all that God has given them by giving to God’s less materially fortunate, and therefore show that they believe that even though they are Gentiles and those others are Jewish , even though they are separated by vast distances, they are still one community of faith, one body of Christ. But something has gone wrong. Paul is concerned about Macedonians coming with him on a visit to Corinth, so instead of coming with the Macedonians himself, he sends an advance team of co-workers ahead to prepare the way. Here’s the situation. Paul was trying to get Gentile Christians in every town he visited to give to his collection to help the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. In an effort to get the Gentile Christians in Macedonia to support the collection for the impoverished Christians in Jerusalem, Paul had bragged about how the believers in Corinth had pledged to raise a generous gift. And the good news is, the Macedonians, though they were nowhere near as wealthy as the Corinthians, had responded. As one of my former Ph.D. students wrote about this text, the Macedonian generosity caught Paul by surprise precisely because their generosity was ¿/«proportionate. They gave beyond their capability. Unlike the Corinthians, the Macedonians were not wealthy. The Macedonians did not have a lot themselves. They were themselves in material need. Most people give what they can afford to give. The Macedonians apparently gave what they could not afford to give. They were so overwhelmed by the grace of the gift of God’s son in their lives and what that gift meant, that crazy with celebratory fever, they gave with the same joy and generosity that they believed God had given to them. As my student went on to say, “Paul is impressed that these materially impoverished Christians, in the midst of grave distress, begged to be permitted to give from their already meager resources (8:4).” Who in the world would beg to give to others when they have major needs themselves? The Macedonians would! My student had a beautiful image to describe what was happening with the Macedonians . He likened them to a tree of grace that had been planted and nurtured by God. God had graced them with life, and they had taken on that grace so completely that they became rooted like a tree in that grace, and now, they were bearing grace fruit. The singer Madonna used to call herself “the Material Girl.” That was the title of a song she sang. We live, she sang, in a material world. Why not therefore be a material girl? Why not be someone who craved, stockpiled, and worshipped material treasures? Who would have thought that the preacher Paul and the pop singer Madonna would ever have anything in common! Madonna is a material girl. Amazingly, Paul wants the Corinthians, following the example of the Macedonians, to become Material Christians. That’s the song he is also singing. We live, he was singing, in a material world? But it is a world of material grace. God’s grace materialized in the form of God’s son. God’s grace materialized in the gift of blessed relationship with God. God’s grace materialized in our salvation. If this is truly a material grace world, why not crave, stockpile, and share material grace? Why not let the grace we feel materialize into a kind of concrete grace that we can share with others? Why not plant, nurture, grow, and share grace fruit with those who are starving from both spiritual and material hunger? Why not become grace fruit ourselves by how we live our lives, by how we use the resources with which our lives have been gifted? That

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    is the question Paul is asking the Corinthians. Paul is also asking mí! Cannot we, too, be grace fruit on God’s tree of communal life? Those who are grace fruit must not only celebrate what we have been given, but we must also cheerfully give that fruit in both spiritual and material ways to those who are in need. We are here this morning so that we can feed the hunger of God’s people in need. That is what cheerful giving is all about. It is willing, sacrificial, loving giving, like God giving to God’s people. No wonder Paul declares that God loves the cheerful giver. Do I have an image of the kind of giving Paul is talking about? I think I do. Let me share a story that went out as my president’s letter a few years ago in an issue of our seminary magazine FOCUS. It was just after the financial meltdown of Fall 2008. I wrote:

    This past June (2009), we were ending what would reasonably be called a very challenging academic year. The seminary, like all seminaries, colleges , and universities, was shaken by the economic quake that disrupted financial landscapes across the globe. Like many other institutional leaders, I prayed throughout the year for God’s strength and guidance. I will admit that as the year drew to its close, I offered up a few not so theologically appropriate prayers. I prayed for vacation! And, in my weaker moments, I prayed for a sign—just a little hint that as a community we were walking the path that God had set for us. After a few days without a celestial fireworks display, some theophany of voice speaking from a whirlwind, or any dream-like epiphany of astonishing proportions, I slung my backpack over my shoulder and walked over to my office like the right-thinking, reasonably -reformed New Testament scholar turned president who knows better than to go around seeking signs that I am—at least most of the time. After entering my office, I went through my daily routine. Turned on the computer. Hung up my jacket. Pulled out the work I had accomplished the night before. Sat down in my chair. Turned to face the work on my desk. And saw this note. My assistant had placed the note on my desk the day before. While I was out, I had had a visitor. Vismitha Taneti is her name. Vismitha is 5 years old. She had not visited by herself. She had come with her dad. And together they had left this note. Vismitha’s father is a student at the seminary, as is her mother. On the previous day, she had come with them to one of the conversations I had held with the community. I had alerted the community about some actions we were taking to respond to the financial circumstances we faced. Little children who accompany their parents to such gatherings very often occupy themselves with thoughts or activities that distance them from the adult conversations taking place around them. Vismitha, though, had been listening. Upon arrival back at their seminary apartment, she informed her parents that she wanted to help the seminary. So, she asked them if she could break open her piggy bank. After getting their permission, she did so. She counted out enough change to make a gift of $52.00. Vismitha’s dad did not want to leave $52.00 in pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters

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    on my desk, so he wrote the seminary a check. The check accompanied the note on my desk. That check was—in my mind at least—a sign of God at work. After sitting for almost ten minutes and staring into the space in front of my desk, I composed myself and then I composed a thank you letter to Vismitha. And then I thanked God for forgiving me for asking for a sign, and for giving me a sign anyway.

    A sign of God’s material grace in the cheerful gift of a little girl. That is Paul’s point to the Corinthians. And to us. You can be a sign of God’s material grace because you are the indescribable gift. You can be! Recognize what you have been given, the gift of Christ, the gift of this wonderful community of faith that is your spiritual family, the gift of each other. Celebrate what you have been given by giving some of what you have to God’s church and God’s people in need. Give to someone else the fruit that has been given to you, the spiritual fruit and the material fruit. Be material!! No one in here has to ask a Christian to be spiritual. Paul knows this about the Corinthians. Not only are they spiritual, but they are too spiritual. They are so spiritual that they are like ghosts, spirits, floating all over the church, all through Corinth, and, they hope, all over heaven, not touching, not doing, not changing anything. The Corinthians are so spiritual you can hardly see them, certainly can’t feel them. The Corinthians don’t like bodily stuff. Bodily stuff is messy, has an odor of decay to it, is limiting, is locked into the world of the flesh. They want to fly around in the clouds of converted, carefree Christianity. Body is ethical and moral and having to help others and do for others and do for God. The Corinthians want to be free of the body so they don’t have to worry about right doing and right living and certainly not right sharing. Because, for the Corinthians, spiritual means, “I don’t care how many resources I do have and I certainly don’t care how many resources you don’t have.” Being spiritual means I am content with what I have, and I am also content with what you do not have. Can you see why Paul is annoyed, why he wants these Corinthians to Get Material? He wants them to get messed up in the messiness of other folk’s lives. He wants them to give some of what they have to people who have nothing. He wants them to stop floating around talking about heaven and get down in the hellish dirt with people who are being drowned by desperation and despair. He wants them to put some material flesh on those spiritual beliefs and get weighed down into the troubles of the world so they’ll want to give of themselves to make some changes in that world. He wants them to Get Material. I think we Christians today are too much like the Corinthians. We have and we love a spiritual faith. Don’t get political; we’re spiritual. Don’t get material; we’re spiritual. Don’t get dirty; we’re spiritual. We have a spiritual fixation. Like the Corinthians we want to be free of the weight of the world, come into church and leave the world behind and worship God and think about salvation and not be weighed down with all the struggles of life out there. We want to be like … beer. Every beer has a commercial these days about being great tasting and less filling. You can’t watch a football game without seeing one of those commercials. Coors light. Miller light. Bud light. There’s also Christian light. You can’t go into a church without seeing

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    a whole gaggle of Light Christians. Frothy, sudsy, got good heads on them, always go down smooth. They worship well, they pray well, but there’s no weight, no substance to them. Nothing weighing them down. That’s because they are not material enough. Paul’s challenge: It’s time for all the spiritual people to get material! It’s good to be spiritual, but a truly spiritual people is also a material people, a people who not only get salvation, but, having gotten that gift, give that gift of salvation back to somebody else. And you give salvation back the way God did, by giving up the high, spiritual life and dropping down into the material world of the incarnation. God got material. So can—so must—we. That’s Paul’s point! The most spiritual reality of all—God—became material in Jesus and became for us material grace. That’s all Paul is asking of the Corinthians. And of us. It’s good to be spiritual. But we are also called to Get Material. Spiritual Christians think about the poor and the starving in the world. Material Christians find a way to give food and resources to change their lives. Spiritual Christians lament when they read in the papers about people who have lost everything in floods or hurricanes or tornadoes. Material Christians get down on their hands and knees in the mud to rebuild with them. Spiritual Christians give of themselves to mission endeavors in the hot zones of life like urban ministries of food pantries or tutoring services by dropping volunteers off when they go in and picking volunteers up when they come out. Material Christians get out of the car and go into the shelters and closets and classrooms and give their time and talent. Spiritual Christians fret about the church budget and hope the pastor finds a way to get folk to make stronger pledges. Material Christians pull out their checkbooks and give to the church before they give to themselves because they have pledged themselves to the causes to which the church has committed itself. You know what Paul is concerned about. Spiritual Christians are believing, trusting, loving, go-to-church-every-Sunday Christians, but they are light Christians, floating all over God’s creation not touching much except the pew they park on. Material Christians are weighed down with the issues of God’s world and God’s people, and they give their time, their talents, their love, and, yes, their money to position the church to power the changes that can transform both soul and body. Be material. Do material Grace. That is what stewardship is all about. Stewardship is about moving from saying grace to doing grace. It’s about celebrating the spiritual by getting material. That is how you not only celebrate having the indescribable gift of Christ; it is how you become an indescribable gift for others. The indescribable gift? It’s you. It’s us. This community is a tree of life for God’s world, and each of you is material grace fruit on that tree, and you ripen in here in community, and you drop off in here with your tithes, your offerings, your time, and your talents. You drop off out there into the world with your gifts of time and talent and, yes, your money to share the indescribable gift of God’s life and your own lives to those who need what you have, all that you have to give. We are material grace fruit. Feed God’s people.

  • On being a gay pastor: a pilgrimage of inclusion of LGBTQ people

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    On Being a Gay Pastor:

    A Pilgrimage of Inclusion of LGBTQ People

    Brett Webb-Mitchell

    North Carolina Central University, Durham, North Carolina

    Like many of my classmates at Princeton Theological Seminary, and later among my students at Duke Divinity School, there was the constant buzz around the question of “vocation” or “calling,” as we endlessly parsed the Latin word vocare. Like all seminarians I remember praying about my calling, agreeing wholeheartedly with Frederick Buechner that a “calling” is best defined as the work a person needs to do and the world needs to be done.1 After a wide-variety of experiences in and out of the Church, the call became more or less clear, though my call did not fill any preconceived niche. I was not called to be in a tall-steeple church pulpit, nor necessarily always in academia. The calling was to be a scholar-activist, in the guise of a preacher-teacherguide . I often work on, and walk around, the margins of the Church and academia rather than in the heart of either institution. My focus has been broad, focusing on the place and presence of people with disabilities in faith communities, along with research and writings in the area of Christian religious education as pilgrimage. My life as a writer, pastor, and professor embraces all these interests, feeding my body, heart, and spirit. There was more to my calling than these professional avenues. I have the habit of using my life stories as fodder for articles, sermons, and lectures. However, unlike a great many students, preachers, and professors, I was not able to pour my entire life into the enterprise of studying, doing research, teaching, or preaching. The reality of the difference in who I am came to light as I filled out the official Presbyterian Church (USA) “Personal Information Form” (PIF). The form itself informed me that I was not like the rest of my colleagues who are professional clergy: while I could fill out parts about my family like being a dad with two children, there was no place in which I could mark “Partner” as my spouse for medical benefits with the Board of Pensions (our insurance and retirement coverage). To do so would reveal I was gay, which was suicidal professionally. Up to this year (2011), after nine years of graduate education, having served seven churches as interim pastor and having taught Christian education at a prestigious Divinity School for over a decade, I could be censured or defrocked from my denomination, losing all financial benefits along with the honorific title, “The Reverend.” Here’s where a miracle took place: Even though I was outed involuntarily at my previous place of employment and wrote a book On Being a Gay Parent (New York: Seabury Press, 2007), with the knowledge of my supervisor, a.k.a., Presbyter Executive and Committee on Ministry, I was called to be the interim senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Henderson, North Carolina (an hour’s drive north of Raleigh), for fourteen months (2008-2009). The circumstances around my call were rocky at first, because I did not divulge the complete story about my family. I thought that would be the sure kiss of death to this position. After all, straight clergy do not have to share stories of their family either, so why should I? Again, I was involuntarily outed by someone else on the church staff. But the Holy Spirit’s presence was evident

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    the night that I met with the Session of the Church to talk about who I am and who we are as Christians in the body of Christ. It was during this time that a handful of Elders unexpectedly shared stories of loved ones who are lesbian or gay, and I shared openly about my pilgrimage of coming out. And with that discussion, followed by prayer, the deal was sealed: I became the interim pastor of the Church, much to the surprise of all who had gathered in that room. While the Church members were, by and large, willing and able to get their mind and heart around the truth that I was an awesome preacher who preached the Gospel, who happened to be gay, the same could not be said by the townspeople of Henderson, many of whom were church-going people. The hyper-bigotry, fangs of prejudice, the sheer disgust, and the underlying fear of those of us who are different from the “rest”—whoever the rest may be—was breathtaking in its viciousness. In an unofficial town blog, known simply as “Home in Henderson,” the people of the town and surrounding county were able to write thoughts and feelings about the new interim pastor at First Presbyterian Church. I was impressed by the vitriol and deep-seated hate and shame that covered my computer screen when I first glanced at the blog site in my church office. The bloggers’ words made me feel a twinge of shame, and I regret getting hooked by this feeling so easily. I became the “Homo in Henderson.” One person wrote that my being in the pulpit was “astounding, and that people should take their children and run,” while another followed suit: “If I belonged to that church and had children, I would be out the door.” The theme of my lusting after men went on for months. Some people claimed that many dead Presbyterians were probably rolling over in their graves. Through reading the blogs, I learned how people understand the authority of Scripture, as some cited long passages of Scripture that have nothing to do with a modern understanding of sexuality, ending it with this declarative statement: “If the homosexual community chooses to practice homosexuality in privacy, that is their choice…, but they will be deemed unfit for the kingdom of heaven.” Things subsided for a while, until a copperhead snake bit me in my backyard. A blogger wrote: “Sources are reporting that the openly gay minister of the First Presbyterian Church was bitten by a water moccasin yesterday. The minister has been released from the hospital and is in good condition. The snake remains in critical condition on life support…. I am praying for the snake. Upon my leaving the church after it called its new installed pastor, there was this last comment on Home in Henderson: “Thank GOODNESS this church has a new minister. Could not believe they ever brought the other one into that church. What in the world were they thinking? Hopefully, this one is different.” When I left the church, the membership had increased, and the quality of faith among the members had matured as we discussed the issues of the day, buoyed by God’s grace. The congregation practiced some rituals they had not tried before; the church finances were maintained in this age of recession. The church was on the vanguard of social action in hosting a Spanish-speaking Wednesday night gathering of children, in inviting an African American civil rights leader for a yearly lecture event, and in becoming one of a handful of congregations who had welcomed an out-gay pastor. What I was intrigued with in reading and re-reading the long list of blogs was one of the quips made early in my tenure at the church: like most churches, First Presbyterian Church had a sign that was changed weekly in front of the church, an­

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    nouncing the sermon title and upcoming events of the Church. With tongue in cheek, the bigoted blogger wrote that the sign in front of the Church should read, “The closet is open! Come on in!” While the psychology of coming out of closets has been central to many LGBTQ people for decades, with much written on the sociological and psychological act of LGBTQ people coming out of our closet of fear and shame, declaring our freedom to be who we were created to be, the metaphor is also highly applicable to the life of churches. In the Church as the body of Christ, there are those who live in their own closet of fear and shame over a host of issues. In many ways, a church is an assemblage of closets where culturally constructed categories keep people imprisoned. For example, while some congregants hide in closets of homophobia, other parishioners hide in closets where only racists dare dwell. Meanwhile, there are some faith communities themselves that find they are in an all-encompassing closet as they struggle with the hidden secret of sexual indiscretion practiced by a clergyperson. Still other gatherings of God’s people wrestle with the Holy in closets on issues of class warfare or discrimination against people with disabilities. Many erect closets in which they hide their encrusted, ancient prejudices based upon ethnicity or hide dangerous political ambitions. What releases a person from suffocating closets is not us, for the closet doors are either nailed shut or locked from inside and outside. Instead, it is often Christ’s Spirit among us today which, by grace, breaks us out of our self-created closets and leads us on a pilgrimage of wholeness. Hearkening back to the day when the disciples were in hiding after Jesus’ resurrection, we read that “it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews” (John 20). For those who have lived life in a fiercely well-made closet, this image is all too familiar. We are paralyzed by fear of others who, if they find out our sexual orientation, would exclude us from our respective community of faith, our jobs, our homes, and would separate our families. We who live in closets are master builders with overly elaborate locks, with signs that say “No Trespassing!” which society buttresses with glue, nails, bolts, and more boards while we hunker down. What does the resurrected Christ do with our locked, windowless closets? Just what Christ did with the sequestered group of disciples: he simply walks through locked doors, thick walls, and shuttered windows, stands among them and us, and says, “Peace be with you.” This is the power of resurrection and resurrected lives: there are no barriers between the resurrected Christ and us. The Spirit can enter wherever and whenever the Holy chooses. Living the resurrected life is realizing, in the deepest and darkest parts of our human existence, that there are no more closets or doors that can be locked to keep the Spirit out of any part of our lives. Today, with a wink and a nod, the Spirit is moving and breaking open closets and merrily confusing denominational politics across the Church as well as in other communities of faith. For example, the denominations of the United Church of Christ (UCC), Disciples of Christ, the Episcopal Church, the Moravian Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), and now the Presbyterian Church (USA), have witnessed the Holy Spirit move among churches in relationship to people who are LGBTQ. The people of God appear to be maturing in welcoming people who are LGBTQ as more of us share our life stories. New relationships are being established between LGBTQ and straight people. Old prejudices are quickly falling to the way­

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    side as Scripture is reinterpreted in light of modern theories of sexuality and biblical scholarship. A refreshing spirit of welcome and acceptance seems to be blowing within faith communities as LGBTQ people are taken in not only as members, but as ordained religious leaders, whether as Ministers of the Word and Sacrament or as priests and bishops. Children, parents, grandparents, and extended family members of LGBTQ people are now received warmly. While there is empirical and anecdotal evidence of increasing inclusion of outLGBTQ people as religious leaders in terms of the polity of our respective denominations , there is a great deal of work that will need to be done in terms of welcome and level of acceptance among individuals and churches. In many ways, we are at a rudimentary or basic orientation level of getting to know one another as people are grappling with why, how, and when communities of faith slowly learn to adjust and adapt to what the Spirit is doing with us or in spite of us. It will take several generations of growth before people who are LGBTQ and straight treat one another not as the suspicious, unknowable “other” or wary adversaries, but as sisters and brothers of the faith, equals in the purview of the countenance of God. Such growth toward full acceptance will need to be directed and led by religious leaders and grassroots efforts as we conscientiously attempt to overcome old prejudices in practicing acceptance of each other as created in the image of God. After all, the Spirit is doing something new today, in our midst, nudging faith communities to be the broader and more inclusive living body of Christ. It is our obligation to follow the Spirit, for we are on a path of wholeness, being taught by the Holy the way of transformed lives, LGBT and straight alike. To provide some reference points on this pilgrimage of growth, there are at least four milestones communities of faith may touch upon as they strive toward their destination of being and becoming Christ’s inclusive body. The first issue church members will wrestle with is hospitality. Many LGBTQ people who grew up in a community of faith experienced not welcome, but subtle or overt exclusion not only from their families but also from a church or synagogue when they came out. Some LGBTQ people were denied participation in Church sacraments simply because of their sexual orientation. Even children of gays and lesbians have been treated as outcasts by churches. Still other LGBTQ people hide in closets because they’ve experienced shame, fear, and hatred by many people and leaders in faith communities. By hiding in closets, many gay and lesbian clergy have risen successfully in churches and other ecclesial offices but are always burdened by living a lie. Questions are raised: “Why be part of an organization in which one is treated as a second class citizen? Is there a covert caste system within the body of Christ, in which only straight people are fully members?” Simply moving across the portal of a church’s building becomes an obstacle in which LGBTQ people have experienced an imaginary barrier that says—through the gestures of a faith community—“Gays not welcomed.” Hospitality is a fundamental moral practice for communal life. Theologian Christine Pohl writes that hospitality is “necessary to human well-being and essential to the protection of vulnerable strangers.”2 One of the first places that people either experience welcome or feel excluded is at the threshold or portal by which one enters a holy space. The portal or threshold of a sanctuary, or a holy space where people are gathered in the name of God, literally or figuratively, is highly important in faith communities historically and biblically. Martin and Micah Marty stress the

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    importance of thresholds of our lives so that “the innocent (may) cross and enter our lives, (yet) strong enough to bar the beguilers God rightly frames the door to our souls and our lives as promised, and friend and neighbor freely cross its threshold.3 ״For the ancient Israelites, the act of hospitality was essential because of their precarious existence. For example, the story of Sodom is not about the contemporary myth that it was destroyed because of the “sin of homosexuality,” but about the importance of hospitality to and between friend and stranger alike. The act of welcoming a stranger was a primary motif among them because the people of Israel themselves were often the strangers in the wilderness. The protection God provided the Israelites in the wilderness established a covenant with God that in turn provided a model for integrating the outsider, the pilgrim into Israel’s communal life. Hospitality was associated with God, covenant, and blessing. In the New Testament, Christ himself was never a homeowner and was always the stranger, the pilgrim on the road of life, dependent upon the hospitality of others. He was the epitome of being the stranger when he moved among the disciples running off to Emmaus after his crucifixion. It was in the breaking of bread—a primary act of Eucharistie hospitality—that the clueless disciples were suddenly aware of who was in their midst (Luke 24). Later, Paul insisted upon the centrality of hospitality in which he urged all believers to “welcome one another” as Christ welcomes us (Romans 15:7). And the Benedictine order places hospitality as a primary virtue of their communities, which is an example for other communities of faith throughout time, welcoming strangers for they are Christ, showing the stranger “every courtesy, especially to servants of God and pilgrims ”4 Hospitality will need to be practiced both by people who are LGBTQ and by those who are straight as they gather together anew, welcoming the Christ in each other. In worship, hospitality may be practiced in the simple act of extending the peace of Christ after confession or celebration of the Eucharist with broken bread and cups of wine. Welcome may be discovered at a potluck soiree or in the gathering in a prayer circle. It will be in the relationships between one another that there will be a glimpse of how the mystical, wonderful body of Christ and the gift of grace bind us together. Coming out of isolating closets into the warm embrace of the Holy, present in the life of others regardless of one’s sexual orientation, will feel like cool water upon a thirsty tongue. In extending hospitality there emerges a second move that will take place as a community heals and comes together in resolving and healing old wounds. In the process of coming out within a congregation, LGBTQ and straight people alike, we will be scandalized and afraid of what has gone on in the name of the Christ: people were excluded, made to feel “less than” others. Some have been pushed to the edge of society, people shunned far away and far apart. The reality of this ostracism people experienced “in the name of God,” either overtly or covertly. In order for LGBTQ people and straight people to fully embrace the other as God embraces us all, there will need to be a simple acknowledgement and confession that like Jesus at times, “I was a stranger, and you did not welcome me” (Matthew 25:43). For example, I was not aware of what hatred, based simply upon who I am, felt like until I came out of the closet. I can now appreciate what a person who is African American experiences in a predominantly white culture, or a woman in a largely masculine world, being looked down upon simply because of who one is, rather than because of what one has done or is doing. Simply put, there were and are times that the Church is instructed

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    not by Scripture per se, but is complicit with the powers that are around the Church, creating barriers between people who are LGBTQ and straight. In order to move to full, unfettered acceptance, in order for an authentic experience of welcome and acceptance to come to the fore in congregations, there will need to be a time of confession, perhaps in worship, before there is a sense of acceptance and resolution among all. After all, grace instructs us that there cannot be the sweet sense of redemption without embracing the awkward pain of confession. In the history of the Presbyterian Church (USA), there is a host of written confessions that have been composed in light of the Church’s acknowledging its complicity with the systematic sin that has kept the body of Christ less than unified, which is its original purpose: one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one birth. This mammoth task of confession and redemption will be ongoing because generations of believers—LGBTQ and straight alike—were taught an antiquated understanding of “biblically based” human sexuality , followed by curious, if not harmful, interpretations of Scripture that kept LGBTQ people as second-class citizens in faith communities, e.g., Scripture references from Leviticus, Romans, and 1 Corinthians in terms of sexual acts. Not only have biblical scholars, theologians, historians, and preachers promoted a skewed understanding of sexuality, but many LGBTQ people placed themselves in closets of shame based on these interpretations, fortified by our families feeling humiliated as part of an LGBTQ person’s life. Hospitality, confession, and redemption will lead to the third move, which is inelusion . Inclusion will involve reorientation and re-configuration—psychologically, socially, and spiritually—of all people, LGBTQ and straight alike. Inclusion is a cocreative process of integration, in which we are guided by the inclusive nature of the realm of God’s love. This realm is captured with words used as broad brushstrokes in the story of the Great Banquet Feast (Luke 14:15-24) in which Jesus reminds us that everyone has a place at the festive table of Godly love. For LGBTQ and straight people alike, such good news will call for a re-orientation of communal living as we begin to be among the people of God, re-imagining or re-claiming our co-equal place as God’s beloved, which is an affirmation of our baptismal vows. Inclusion literally means “to shut in” or “enclose.”5 In other words, in the enclosure of God’s realm of love, manifest in the body of Christ, people who are LGBTQ and straight are called to gather together in worshiping God, becoming accustomed to life with one another as God’s beloved. What will inclusion look and sound like? To begin, there will be changes in who is leading worship. For example, my daughter has been given a vision of women in leadership in church worship by seeing countless women in the pulpit on Sunday morning. Likewise, many LGBTQ people will also go through a re-orientation process as they see and hear other LGBTQ people leading worship. Or LGBTQ people and straight families will meet new patterns of relationships as women and men bring their partners or spouses, depending upon the agreed upon configuration. Many of us with partners have not felt free to bring our spouses, let alone our children, to worship for fear that our loved ones will receive the hurt and hate we’ve received in the past. Finally, those who are marginalized preach from their unique vantage point as outsiders, providing a one-of-a-kind interpretation of Scripture in light of their community ’s struggle against strong opposition. As people of various ethnicities, along with women, have preached out of a deep conversation between one’s experience as

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    a community of outsiders and sacred texts, the same will hold true for people who are LGBTQ and their message on any given Sunday. There is no doubt that it will take a generation or two for people to become accustomed to what will feel like the novelty of open LGBTQ people as part of the daily, weekly congregational life. Last, what sustains and becomes our reward on this pilgrimage is love. In moving beyond social exclusion based on sexual orientation and consciously reaching out to others different from us in terms of sexual orientation or gender, we will discover and be nurtured by love in genuine friendships. As Richard Rohr reminds us, such friendship is a practical decision to lay down our life for the other, whoever the other may be, as Christ did for all of us. In doing so, we discover that love is patient, not jealous, endures all things, does not take offense, and waits, believes, hopes, and forgives.6 In practicing such love, we consciously put aside hurtful rhetoric of the past as we also practice a love that brings forth justice among and for the good of all. Love then gives us permission to be free to welcome one another into each other’s good company as we confess the error of our ways and accept one another as God’s good creation, simply living out the promises made at our baptisms, engaged in the Eucharistic practices of unity. Moving beyond politics of discrimination toward affirmation about who and whose we are as members of Christ’s body, we realize we are on a pilgrimage toward God’s holy realm, accompanied by the Spirit. Granted, we are but at the starting line in our pilgrimage toward full and fuller acceptance as LGBTQ people who are called to be preachers, teachers, and leaders, as well as members, in all communities of faith. Like all pilgrims before and around us, we need to get on the road and pick up the map that will get us moving on a new walk of faith, following an unknown path accompanied by the Spirit. In time, all closet doors may be open as all of God’s people learn to walk and move in their own way, at their own pace, in the light of God’s grace.

    Notes 1 Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). 2 Christine Pohl, Making Room (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 17. 3 Martin Marty and Micah Marty, cited in Lonni Collins Pratt and Fr. Daniel Homan, Benedict’s Way (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2000), 65. 4 Anthony Mesel and M.L. del Mastro, The Rule of St. Benedict (New York: Image Book, 1975), 8990 . 5 Brett Webb-Mitchell, Beyond Accessibility (New York: Church Publishing, 2010), 18. 6 Richard Rohr, Radical Grace (Cincinnati: St. Anthony Press, 1995), 368.

  • Preaching the texts of ordinary time

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    Preaching the Texts of Ordinary Time

    Marilyn Turner Hedgpeth

    First Presbyterian Church, Durham, NC

    Ordinary People, a novel-turned-movie by Judith Guest (1976), tells the story of an ordinary family coping with the pain of the accidental loss of one of its family members – a son, who dies during a boating accident on Lake Michigan. A younger brother struggles with survivor guilt; a mother strives for suburban perfection to quell the emotional chaos within herself; a father rethinks what he had assumed was selfmade success, as little more than random luck. In short, it is a story of how ordinary people live, grieve, and continue to live in the aftermath of losing a beloved member of their once-tight family unit. Since we spend a majority of the liturgical year in Ordinary Time, most of it encompassing the six months from Trinity Sunday in June, until the First Sunday in Advent in December, I thought it might be a refreshing pedagogy to hear the voices of some ordinary people exploring the gospel texts, most of them from Mark’s Gospel, as they relate to the ordinary lives and struggles of a doctor, a widow, a teacher of the law, a personal body guard, and a student. For I think there is always something dignified, noble, and moving when ordinary, regular people reflect the gospel as members of the larger, organic human community. As Mark begins his account, “the beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1), our intertwined stories about our lives and Jesus’ life lean towards the gospel/good news of the Kingdom of God now being close at hand, regardless of how difficult that might be to believe. Ordinary people in Jesus’ days and ordinary people now form a community when we listen and watch for God’s good news reflected in each other’s lives and dreams, as affirmed by the following poem:

    I am yes. I am Yes to you, to a you for me, to a you for me. People are a dialogue, I say, if not their words would touch nothing like waves in the cosmos picked up by no radio like messages to the uninhabited planets, or a bellowing in the lunar void or a telephone call to an empty house. (A person alone does not exist.) Ernesto Cardenal, from Cosmic Canticle, published 1989

    Mark’s Gospel roots Jesus very succinctly in the ordinary. Mark drops the fullygrown Jesus into a people trying to be faithful during a Jewish uprising against Rome, the pending destruction of Jerusalem, and their ensuing dispersion (CE 66-72). Mark “immediately” drops the adult Jesus at the feet of the very earthy character, John the Baptist, more richly described than any other secondary character in Mark’s Gospel,

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    as sandal-slinging, locust-eating, and camel-hair clad. Mark’s John evokes images of dirt under fingernails, of unkept facial hair, and of breath that prepares the way for the word to be made flesh. John is a prophet, not ordinary in his calling, but perhaps ordinary in his complete acceptance of his own unembellished humanity. So, when the young man, Jesus, wanders onto the desert scene in Mark 1:9, we are prepared for the physical body of Christ to share those attributes of humanity which are our daily concern – cleanliness, hair, feet, food, clothes, conversation, calling, vocation, location , forgiveness, hope. Jesus will meet ordinary people: menstruating women and myopic men, crowds he’d probably like to pepper spray, egotistical teachers, gamey children, and penniless widows. He meets them where they are and addresses their very real concerns, and the Kingdom of God will take root on earth, in a people who must deal daily with suffering by a God/man who comes to bring triumph through suffering. Because healings, exorcisms, and miracles account for almost a third of Mark’s Gospel; because thirteen healing stories (four concering women) are told in Mark; and because sickness is part of what makes us genuinely ordinary and human, I spoke first with a doctor, an obstretician-gynocologist, concerning her take on the healings performed by Jesus. In Ordinary 13 (Mark 5: 21-43) two women present with debilitating illnesses: Jairas’ daughter, who is mortally ill and a woman who is running out of resources to alleviate her twelve-year battle with menstrual problems. My friend says that she is “amazed that they even talk about this in the Bible, something so personal, quiet, something that makes one ritually unclean and pulls one away from the community. There would have been nothing anyone could have done in that period of time to mitigate her suffering,” she notes. “There would have been no hysterectomies, no adequate medicines; nothing short of a huge miracle would have helped her. And this woman’s desperation is huge: she’s untreatable, she can’t be with anyone, she’s like a leper, cut off from the community.” She comments that the way that Jesus heals her is to hear her truth, her pain. “Where she feels totally excluded, Jesus calls her daughter and accepts her as a member of a larger family,” she says. As an aside, my friend laughs and suggests that maybe the woman hits menopause when she touches Jesus, and the life-long bleeding comes to a sudden halt! She also imagines the frustration of Jairas, who in triage fashion, has life-anddeath need of Jesus, but who must tolerate the untimely interruption of this unclean woman imposing herself upon Jesus as they rush to aid his dying child. In Ordinary 23 (Mark 7: 24-37), Jesus makes a house-call to the home of an immigrant woman whose daughter “has an evil spirit.” This woman, like Jairas, also falls at Jesus’ feet and begs on behalf of her child. In the following pericope, people bring a man to Jesus who is deaf and dumb, and they beg for healing, too. My doctor friend notes that parents are frequently agents of healing, and usually genuinely concerned about the welfare of a child. Friends, however, can have different motives for requesting help. Perhaps the friends who bring the deaf and dumb man to Jesus just want to see what Jesus can do. “Perhaps they want to see this guy in action for themselves – to test his true abilities,” she says. It’s not only the sick who are touched by Jesus, she notes. This Syrophoenician mother is affirmed by Jesus for her valid retort to his off-putting comment, and her daughter is healed. And the friends of the deaf and dumb man are likewise affirmed and given what they perhaps seek: the razzie dazzle miracle, the excitement that overwhelms them, and the potential for

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    even more miracles by this healer, Jesus. In reviewing the healing by others using Jesus’ name in Ordinary 26 (Mark 9: 38-50), my physician friend refers to this phenomena as “downstream information,” and notes that it is perfectly valid and happens all the time. “If I give a patient advice about getting proper exercise, taking vitamins, and changing her diet, and she relays this information to her next-door neighbor, that’s downstream information,” she said. “It’s a perfectly legitimate means of achieving public health.” Interestingly, she comments upon the imagery of “salt” at the end of the passage, noting that she thinks of salt most often as used in IV saline solutions to achieve balance in someone’s system – to keep someone’s blood from “diluting out.” “Perhaps to have salt in yourselves and peace with others is about balance,” she notes. “My patients need to be at peace with themselves, with what’s happening to their bodies, and with their proposed plan of care, or they won’t follow through. They also need to be at peace with me and trust me as their doctor, for optimal healing. Peace, trusting yourself and another person, are as essential to our sense of self as salt, perhaps,” she says. And finally, in Ordinary 30 (Mark 10: 46-52) we have the story of Blind Bartimaeus , the last healing story in Mark’s Gospel. The blind man, recognizing that Jesus is near, shouts out for Jesus to have mercy on him! “It’s interesting what have mercy might mean to this man,” my friend notes. “It could mean, take time and listen to me. It could mean, relieve me of this trial. It could mean, give me a blessing, or all of those things.” Jesus, she chuckles, sounds like some surgeons I know; the way he treats this man—“Go get the patient!” “What do you want?” Jesus is blunt, direct, and not exactly gentle, she notes. “Maybe he wants clarification as to what have mercy means to this man. Nevertheless, his bedside/roadside technique is to truly hear what this man is saying, to be totally present to him, even through the cacophany of others around them, some rebuking him, some cheering him on. Jesus employs an economy of talk in this story; his actions speak for themselves,” she says. “It’s a minimalistic approach: he heals one, giving evidence through this one, of his potential power for systemic healing,” she adds. My second ordinary “saint” is a 78-year-old widow, who lost her beloved husband four years ago, and who also has lost seven extended family members over the past two years. I wanted to hear her commentary on Ordinary 28 (Mark 10: 17-31), another story of someone approaching Jesus with a request so heartfelt that he falls to his knees: a request for the key to eternal life. What must he do to gain it? Is “being good” enough, or is something beyond that required to enter the kingdom of God. Jesus presses him further, with a demand to dispossess himself and give everything to the poor. My widow friend resonates with the word “poor,” and tells me that she came from a very poor farming background, where her mother was a teacher and her father was raised in an orphanage. She said she met her future husband when she was fourteen, and that God has been good to her and blessed her with children, with a home and food to eat, and with the opportunity to serve as a missionary with her husband. Upon hearing this story, she notes that although losing her husband has left a huge vacancy in her life (she said this three times), maybe this story means that she hasn’t lost everthing after all. “Maybe it means that one always has more to give than one thinks.” And when Jesus speaks of the one who “loses” home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me, how does a widow hear this, who has

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    lost her husband and many beloved family members in a very short time? What does she think her reward will be? “Maybe,” this widow notes, “my reward is simply that I am still here to help anyone who needs me – anyone who is not a family member.” She says she never considers herself to be first in anything, since she grew up poor. “To think that the last might be first means a lot to me,” she says. “But you must love God first to understand any of this.” In Ordinary 32 (Mark 12: 38-44) Mark juxtaposes two styles of discipleship: that of the teachers of the law, who are all show and no substance, and that of the poor widow, who is all substance and little show. The widow in Jesus’ story gives everything and is totally dependent on God for her livelihood. My widow friend read this and notes that the widow must have felt good about giving, but didn’t make a show of it or a display of her giving. “She did what she could do,” she said. “She didn’t try to say things to put herself above others.” She also said that giving means more than giving money – that it means “singing in the choir and ringing handbells, sitting with the sick, caring for new mothers and new babies, and working for reconcilation between groups that are predominantly one race or another.” Because one of Jesus’ primary roles in Mark’s Gospel is that of “teacher,” using the verbs “preach” fourteen times and the verb “teach” seventeen times and referring to Jesus as “teacher” twelve times, then it is not surprising that the primary opposition to Jesus’ ministry comes from those in the teaching profession: the teachers of the law, the scribes, and the Pharisees. So, my third saint is a teacher of the law, a university professor of philosophy and law, who was asked to share how he understands this conflicted relationship between Jesus and other teachers. In Ordinary 10 (Mark 3: 20-35), after Jesus’ own family members suggest his insanity, teachers of the law from Jerusalem confront Jesus with their own assessment that he is possessed by demonic or satanic spirits. Jesus responds with a series of sayings concerning Satan, culminating in the “truly, I say to you” issue of one unpardonable sin, blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, or in other words, the confusion of good and evil – which seems aimed directly back at the accusatory teachers of the law. Jesus calls their bluff. So it comes as no surprise in Ordinary 14 (Mark 6: 1-13), for Jesus to be rejected in his own home town for his teaching. My teacher of the law friend muses that “familiarity can breed an unwillingness to accept authority” in this case. He notes that his own capacity to teach often depends on his insight into his students and who they are. But in this story about Jesus, his own hometown people’s insight and understanding of Jesus are used to shut him out, lock him out. And this lack of trust, lack of openness on their part, actually hamstrings Jesus’ ministry there. “You can’t teach by steamrolling,” he says. “You have to bring them along.” My teacher of the law said this reminds him of the commission directly following Isaiah’s call, “ Go and tell this people, ‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing but never perceiving.’ Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed” (Isaiah 6: 9-10). In Ordinary 25 (Mark 9: 30-37), Mark’s second passion prediction, Jesus wants to talk seriously with his disciples about ultimate things, threatening things like betrayal, death, and “rising,” which they don’t understand and are afraid to even question him about. They prefer to talk about petty things like rank, esteem, and reputation, things that get in the way of their understanding about more serious issues. My teacher

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    friend notes that Jesus’ responding pedagogy is demonstrative, using his body in an enacted parable, sitting down, pulling a little child to stand among them, taking the child in his arms, to perform his message. “It’s performance preaching,” he noted. “Jesus’ conversation had the potential for shaking up their world,” he said. “But they were not listening to him because they were more concerned about how they were seen in the eyes of others. Children are not into the esteem game,” he said. “They need only love and affirmation.” The issue of favoritism arises in Ordinary 29 (Mark 10: 35-45). Will Jesus do a favor for James and John? Will Jesus grant them favored status in glory? Remembering that James and John (Peter and Andrew) were with Jesus at his mountaintop transfiguration (Mark 9:2-13), this request does not come from left field; it comes from their prior experience with him. Jesus answers them with one of his classic reversals, asking if they can remain close to him in the valleys as well – the suffering, the dying. My teacher notes that “sometimes in order to drive home a point, you take what the students give you and turn it around on them, turn it upside down to get them to go to a deeper level. That’s what Jesus seems to be doing here. Favor is key. I don’t think they want to be great. I think they want to remain in Jesus’ inner-circle, close to him in his glory, as they have been in his ministry, loved by him then, too.” Finally, in Ordinary 31 (Mark 12: 28-34), something extraordinary happens: a teacher is affirmed by Jesus, the only time this occurs in Mark’s Gospel! Is it because the teacher of the law asks a good question: Of all the commandments (613), which is the most important? “Maybe,” my teacher friend says, “it’s important to ask the pertinent question. But I think it’s more likely because this teacher of the law didn’t try to trap Jesus; because his question was sincere; because he had no hidden agenda; because he was being straight-forward, with no scheming or devious intent. I think Jesus recognized that they were on the same page and affirmed this teacher in a significant way by acknowledging his proximity to the kingdom of God.” My fourth saint is a body guard who was in the personal protection business and provided security for the likes of Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston, Bey once, Eminem, Alvin Iverson, Alicia Keyes, Earth, Wind and Fire, Jayzee, Will Smith, Kelly Clarkson, and Clay Aiken. He knows the phenomena of “crowds” very well, and since crowds play a major role in Mark’s narratives, he gives interesting insight into their function in the stories. In Ordinary 8 (Mark 6:30 -34, 53-56) Jesus and his disciples retreat by boat to escape the maddening crowd, but they follow him, and he has compassion on them because they are “like sheep without a shepherd” (v. 34). My friend says that you can tell if a crowd is wanting to do harm to someone. “Mostly, they are genuine souls,” he says. “They just want to be close to someone who has charisma. You can tell by their emotional state – they shake, cry, become hysterical. You have to put yourself in a good frame of mind to deal with them. Jesus leads with his heart. He puts others’ happiness before his own. He gives me the power to do that when I deal with crowds of people like this, and the crowds give me the opportunity to do Jesus’ work.” Later in the story, when the crowds throng to Jesus, bringing their sick on mats to touch and be touched by Jesus, my friend comments: “Touch is weird; some want to, others don’t. Some touch with love and some touch with fear. Their touch gives energy to Jesus, too. We should not assume that touch is always draining to Jesus. It gives him energy, too. Wouldn’t you rather preach to a crowd? Doesn’t that give you energy?” The same thought carries over to Ordinary

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    10 (John 6: 24-35) where the crowds take to boats to follow Jesus to Capernaum. “Jesus is gaining momentum by using the crowd,” my friend notes. “He is working that crowd! You can use the whole group to control the behavior of a few and keep them in line. I think Jesus is using the crowd to make his point. He speaks plainly to them and speaks truth to them and connects with them by speaking about something they all understand: hunger. The approval of the crowd is a sign of his leadership skills and their trust.” And in Ordinary 16 (Mark 8:27-39), where Jesus reveals to his disciples the true nature of his Christhood for the first time in Mark – suffering, rejection, death, and resurrection—and they refuse to believe him, Jesus then pulls in the whole crowd to make his point. Again, my friend notes, “When you talk to a crowd like this, you have to get close to them, be soft and gentle with them, earn their trust. No crowd is stable. It is risky being with a crowd. You never know their intentions.” He suggests that Jesus is noble, not brave, but noble, to go through a crowd like this. “He controls the crowd by speaking the truth,” he says. “He earns their trust by speaking truth to them plainly, probably in a soft, gentle way.” My last saint is a student, 16 years old, very articulate about her faith for someone her age. She looked at two very familiar passages where a child is a major character, and shares her insights. In the horrible story of political intrigue from Ordinary 7 (Mark 14-29), where Herodias manipulates the beheading of her arch-enemy, John the Baptist, my young friend says that from the young girl’s perspective, it’s a matter of guidance – or misguidance. “Young girls look to their mothers for guidance,” she says. “I’m looking at colleges, and I turn to my mother a lot for guidance. This mother should have been more concerned for her daughter and for what would have benefited everyone. Instead, she and the king are swayed by peer pressure. They are all more worried about how they appear to the public, and what will happen to them. This story reminds me of the Bravo show, Toddlers and Tiarras, which is more about manipulative moms than about the children. This kind of manipulation could be labeled abusive, because it does damage to the child,” she notes. And finally, in the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand from John’s Gospel (Ordinary 9, John 6:1-21 ), the only telling of the four Gospel accounts that includes a child/boy as a character (v. 9), she notes that this makes children feel special that they are part of this very important story. “It’s like Jesus saying, ‘Let the little children come to me.’ It’s a sign of inclusion and respect for children. It’s saying ‘don’t exclude children from the possibilities of Jesus’ miracles.’” She says that including a little boy in this narrative reminds her of one of her favorite verses, 1 Timothy 4: 12, which she has inscribed on a favorite necklace: “Do not let them look down on you because you are young.” My point in this is pedagogy: use the ordinary people in your community to gain insight into the stories of Jesus. If the story includes a teacher, speak with a teacher. If the story includes a child or a widow, speak with a child or a widow. They love sharing with you their views on the stories, and they enhance the way Jesus might have touched the lives of those around him then, and now. And these ordinary friends have valuable spiritual truths to share, as they have been touched by these stories about people like themselves, and as they also have been touched by Jesus himself.

    My sincerest thanks to the “saints ” who shared their heartfelt spiritual insights with me and allowed me to publish them in this article.

  • Preaching the prophets for Lent

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

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    Preaching the Prophets for Lent

    Carolyn J. Sharp

    Yale Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut

    Lent is a time for introspection and spiritual candor. Believers are to acknowledge our complicity in the deep brokenness of the world, seek to amend our lives, and wait in hope for the healing grace of our God. The preacher guiding a congregation through Lent would do well to consider ways in which the ancient Hebrew prophets can assist in Lenten spiritual formation. This may need to be accomplished with some creativity in lectionary-based churches, for regrettably, the Revised Common Lectionary does not claim the prophets as essential witnesses during Lent. Isaiah, of course, has always been a treasure trove for the Church and is richly represented: lections from Isaiah are used on Ash Wednesday, three Sundays in Lent, and throughout in Holy Week. But apart from Isaiah, the prophets are read seldom in Lent. Just one reading from Jeremiah is assigned to a Lenten Sunday. Ezekiel is read on Lent 5A and at the Easter Vigil, Joel is read on Ash Wednesday, and Zephaniah is read at the Easter Vigil. Otherwise, the Revised Common Lectionary does not provide for hearing of the biblical prophetic witness during Lent. Yet the corpus of the biblical prophets offers a wealth of resources for the Scripturally -grounded preacher seeking to offer Lenten instruction, remonstration, exhortation , or proclamation. The prophets challenge us to trust the deep purposes of God even when those purposes are not transparent to us or to our faith communities. The prophets call us to the practice of social justice as constitutive of the redeemed community , continually lifting up the poor, the powerless, and others whom our social and religious structures tend to forget. Beckoning to us and haranguing us, the prophets implore us to assent to the reality of God’s covenantal love despite the fears, threats, and temptations that fracture our lives.

    Prologue How might the preacher effectively engage the prophets as formative for Lenten discipleship? A preliminary note of caution is in order. Christians should not assume that we may cheerfully take the stance of the prophet over against political leaders or “sinners ״construed as folks other than us. Lent is not the time for over-confident believers to reach for the prophetic mantle. The prophets certainly did speak against political, social, and clerical exploitation of others. But a fearless moral and spiritual inventory needs to be undertaken within our own hearts and in our communities before we dare to speak words of judgment to others. Lent is a time of humility. We must not take our stand next to Amos and thunder, “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24) until we have first understood just how fully we ourselves are convicted by that prophetic word. Amos can help here. The book of Amos uses devastating irony throughout in order to undermine the smugness of Israelite leaders and people alike. Amos sets a brutal trap with his opening oracles against foreign nations. The implied audience’s glee turns to horror as those to be punished by God file by—the Arameans, the Philistines , Tyre, the Edomites, the despised Ammonites and Moabites—for we see none

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    other than Judah and Israel at the end of the line! Amos savagely deploys his people’s beloved Exodus traditions against them: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth,” God roars, “therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities’’ (3:1-2). God will pass through the midst of God’s people once again, but this time God will not spare (5:17). With regard to that cherished oracle, “Let justice roll down like waters,” used to stirring effect by Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights struggle and deployed with regularity by seminarians in their preaching classes, we would do well to recognize that Amos was not talking about the gentle burbling of a brook of divine justice. The topography of Israel is relevant: that dusty desert land has seasonal dry stream beds that are subject to powerful flash floods. Moments after a rain, with no warning, water can pour through those channels at flood stage, sweeping away everything in its path. “Ever-flowing stream” is far too bucolic and pleasant for what Amos had in mind. The Hebrew phrase nahal ’etan is better rendered, “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a permanent flash flood.” God’s righteousness cannot be contained, cannot be commodified for a particular theological bent or a particular social platform. “I hate, I despise your festivals,” the God of Amos rages. “Take away from me the noise of your songs!” We are all at risk: Christian educators and liturgical leaders who are certain that church could not take place without them, acolytes who elbow others aside to polish the brass, choir members who thrill to their own performance of impressive motets, and every preacher who likes to think that she herself gets to “be” Amos. No: we stand convicted before the mighty Amos and his God. We have fruitful and important spiritual work to do before we can speak an authentic prophetic word. During Lent, the preacher may consider the process of engaging the prophetic literature to be helpful in teaching congregations not to be arrogant about their own theological rhetoric, nor fetishistic about their liturgical practices, nor smug about their social-justice commitments. In what follows, I will use three prophetic texts to guide us into dimensions of prophetic literature that can provide rich resources for Christian formation during Lent.

    1. Grace First, consider covenant as means of God’s grace. God is continually extending to Israel the promise of covenant—not just back in the dust of ancient history, of course, but even today through God’s holy Word continually offered in Scripture to every believer and seeker. This is a holy word, and thus an invitation, that endures forever (Isa 40:8). God spoke creation into existence with the all-powerful Word (Genesis 1 and John 1). Our Creator is a terrifying God who causes the earth to quake and the heavens to pour down rain when marching through the southern desert (Psalm 68), who speaks on Sinai through thunder, lightning, smoke, and the blast of apocalyptic trumpets (Exodus 19). We should run in terror from this God! We should try to hide in the cleft of a rock from the death-dealing majesty of this Creator (Exodus 33)! We dare to seek this terrifying God only because Scripture tells us of God’s compassion and grace. The stories and oracles and hymns of Scripture insist on God’s yearning for covenant relationship with those whom God has made. Covenants abound in the Hebrew Scriptures. God chose the wily Chaldean migrant Abram to be a blessing for all the families of the earth (Gen 12:1-3) and to model

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    faith for all who believe (Gen 15:6; Romans 4; Gal 3:6-9). God chose the impulsive trickster Jacob to encourage the spiritual wrestling that is essential to mature faith (Gen 32:22-32). God chose the unprepossessing Moses to lead an enslaved ethnic minority group to freedom at the foot of Sinai. God chose the young shepherd David, who would be hailed as a paradigm of spiritual loyalty and despised as a ruthless mercenary. There are many refractions of Israel’s covenant traditions. But even in the exquisite cultural chaos that swirls around the varied narrations of patriarchal covenants, the competing priestly and Deuteronomistic articulations of God’s requirements , and the sharply divergent appraisals of David in Scripture, we can know one thing for a certainty: God chooses. God calls, and we respond. One of the earliest echoes of covenantal tradition may be heard in the tumultuous and rhetorically violent book of the prophet Hosea. Hosea knows Israel’s foundational traditions, and knowledge of God is a crucially important motif in that book. We glimpse some of the Decalogue in Hosea 4 (where the earth languishes because “swearing, lying , and murder, and stealing and adultery break out,” v 2). The wilderness wandering is a motif in Hosea (9:10-11). Hosea 11 is an agonized reflection on God’s calling of Israel out of Egypt. Where Hosea is innovative is in his extended use of a powerful metaphor of disrupted family relationships to portray the connection between God and God’s people. In Hosea 1-3, Israel is figured as Gomer, a prostitute whom the prophet loves and against whose infidelity he rages. Israel is also metaphorized as the children of Hosea and Gomer, little Lo-Ammi and Lo־Ruhamah, who look on in horror as the prophet and his God threaten to destroy the faithless mother. Through this extended metaphor, we are drawn into the passionate violence of God’s rage at Israel’s faithlessness. Hosea’s rhetoric shows us a God who is hyperbolically angry and abusive, who roars that he will strip Israel and expose her, kill her with thirst, lay waste her vineyards and fig trees. “Israel” in Hosea 2 is both a battered, shamed woman and a desolated land. God will put an end to both Israel’s economic viability and her participation in liturgical festivals; she will be left destitute and bereft of cultic means to seek restoration. These images and the enraged tone of Hosea 2 have been deeply disturbing to readers over the centuries. The entire book of Hosea is roiled by vivid language of shaming, beating, killing, miscarriage, and evisceration. Ephraim will be oppressed and crushed, trapped as an animal and trapped metaphorically in the womb, punished relentlessly with God’s fire and plague and the tumult of war. And there is no relief in turning to God—that is, not until the end of the book of Hosea. For Hosea, God is not only an enraged battering spouse; God is “like maggots to Ephraim, and like rottenness to the house of Judah” (5:12), “like a lion to Ephraim and like a young lion to the house of Judah,” one that will “tear and carry off’ with none to rescue (5:14). God brutalizes the people with their own words of sacred tradition, saying of this sinful people who try to manipulate the divine favor, “I have hewn them by the prophets; I have killed them by the words of my mouth” (6:5). God is a ruthless hunter who will cast a net over this people and bring them down (7:12); God will butcher the “cherished offspring” of Israel’s womb (9:16) and cause pregnant women to be eviscerated (13:16); God will “fall upon [God’s people] like a bear robbed of her cubs,” tearing open the covering of their heart, devouring them like a lion, mangling them like a wild animal (13:8). Hosea names his people’s transgressions not only through the prostitute metaphor,

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    but also through a cartography of geographical references to towns and sites associated with Israel’s history of idolatry, especially in instances of sexualized transgression. Named in this book are the Valley of Jezreel, the Valley of Achor, Gilgal, Beth-Aven, Mizpah, Tabor, Shittim, Gibeah, Ramah, Adam, Gilead, Shechem, Baal-Peor, BethArbel , Bethel, Admah, and Zeboiim. Almost all of these places are associated with a transgression of Israel that has been connected, in Israel’s tradition history, with sexualized or other boundary-crossing sin. Thus Hosea constructs his audience’s past in a particular way that focuses on the scandal of his people’s persistent faithlessness. Through his relentless cartography of Israel’s past sin and his dramatically disturbing images, Hosea leaves his audience nowhere to turn—the prophet seeks to shock, to disrupt the smugness of a people that did not understand what was at stake in their spurning of the covenant with God. So it stuns us when Hosea’s God says, “Out of Egypt I have called my son,” going on to use tender maternal imagery to characterize God’s relationship with baby Ephraim. The compassion of God throws us off guard here, precisely as it’s meant to do. Standing with Israel, we have been constructed as an unrepentant prostitute, as her forlorn and anxious children, as hardhearted, impure, and bent on idolatry. We as God’s people deserve absolutely nothing, according to Hosea’s narration of our identity. Our arrogance, our misguided and willful sinfulness, should rightly call forth only God’s wrath and our own obliteration. Yet God calls us. God chooses us. And God loves us. We hear in Hosea 11 that Ephraim is God’s beloved child: taught by God to walk, nursed tenderly by God. Ephraim deserves condemnation, rejection, punishment; but instead, Hosea shows us God’s overflowing compassion for the child of God’s own heart. “How can I give you up, O Ephraim?” God sighs. “How can I hand you over, O Israel? … My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath” (11:8-9). If the violent rhetoric of Hosea had disrupted believers’ insistent infidelities and stubborn cultural idolatries, well, this language of unmerited compassion disrupts something too. It disrupts the rigid Deuteronomistic calculus that weighs out human sin and divine response on the scales of conditional love. In fact, God is not like us, not about the business of vengeance. The Holy One in our midst does not repay in kind. “I am God and no mortal,” God sings. Here in Hosea 11 we learn of God’s unconditional love, undeserved by ancient Israel and undeserved by us as well. Here we learn of grace. It is only by the grace of God that we survive our own sinfulness, battered and skewered and ripped open as we have been by the traumatizing rhetoric of Hosea. Hosea’s scandalous and violent imagery orphans us—destroys our faithless mother, as the prophet threatens to do in Hosea 2 and also Hosea 4, where the prophet rages that “[the priest] will stumble by day, the prophet also shall stumble with you by night, and I will destroy your mother” (4:5). This “mother” narrated by Hosea is an adulterous prostitute, a faithless people whose idolatrous reliance on themselves and on foreign allies must be deconstructed if Israel is to understand who God is. Shaken and bruised by Hosea’s rhetoric, we finally find out who God truly is at the very end of the book, in Hosea 14. “I will be like the dew to Israel,” promises the real God who loves this people; “I am like an evergreen cypress.” Israel will blossom like the lily,

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    will strike root like the forests of Lebanon, flourishing as a garden under the shade of God’s protection. Israel’s fruit comes—has always come—only from this God of grace. It is through the initiative of the gracious love of God that we have been called out of slavery, out of idolatry, and out of our places of wilderness into relationship with our Redeemer. Many of our sacred Scriptures speak of God’s mercy and grace. But there is no book of the entire Bible that presses the Gospel claim of grace more vividly and powerfully than does the book of the prophet Hosea. While preachers can always explore the history of Christian interpretation to consider ways in which Hosea and Gomer represent Christ and the Church, we may also recognize in Hosea a risky but valuable resource that goes deeper than christological proof-texting. Christians may engage this disturbing and brilliant book, both in its surface content and in its deconstruct¿ ve dynamics, as an important means of formation for discipleship. Hosea helps us to feel, on a visceral level, the urgent stakes of covenantal relationship and the intense drama of God’s grace. The preacher dare not replicate Hosea’s brutal dynamics from the pulpit, of course. That would be homiletically irresponsible and could do harm to the congregation, especially to those who are survivors of trauma. But with care and pastoral sensitivity, the preacher can help make visible to the congregation the urgency of covenantal fidelity and our desperate need for God’s grace.

    2. Dying to Self The self-examination required by Lent raises the pastoral question of how the preacher may work effectively with the longings, wounded places, and struggles of the congregation, including family histories, communal gifts and trauma, and other dimensions of who they are as believers. Christian vocation is demanding, and we bring our whole selves—woundedness and all—to the enterprise. Our Lord asks that we take up our cross daily and follow Him. In all of Scripture, there is no better resource for exploring the cost of vocation than the book of Jeremiah. The commissioning of this prophet was a plan of God from long before Jeremiah took his place among the priests at Anathoth. The word of the L ord came to Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were bom I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Psalm 139 confirms this theology: God knows every word before we utter it; in God’s book are written all the days that are formed for us, before they even exist. God knows us more intimately than we can possibly know ourselves, and God knows for what God has made us. Our moments of learning and struggle, our transcendent moments of joy, and our darkest moments of fear: everything that makes up the life of the believer is already known to God. Discernment, then, is a matter of listening deeply, of attending to what God already knows about us but we have hidden, denied, misunderstood, or simply do not yet know about ourselves and the vocations we are to live out. But what God has prepared for us is not necessarily easy. And so Jeremiah struggles. Yielding to vocation can feel like being overpowered, especially if the ministry or witness to which believers are called leads them into places of antagonism and conflict. Jeremiah had to speak hard words to his people. He had to tell them that shalom was not to be theirs, that their leaders and seers could not save them, that their future held exile and death. Jeremiah is compelled by his God to be a prophet of doom—he is forbidden to intercede on behalf of his people, and he is wracked by the anguish of

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    his mission. He laments, “Is there no balm in Gilead? Why . . . has the health of my poor people not been restored? O that my head were a spring of water and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people! ״ (8:22-9:1). Jeremiah rages, knowing that his life is under threat by his own people at Anathoth, seeing that corrupt priests and royal officials are stubbornly refusing to heed the word of the L o r d. The Word of God is for Jeremiah the cause and source of his suffering, but he is compelled to speak. God’s truth is “like a burning fire shut up in the bones” of the prophet, something he cannot hold in no matter what derision or torment he may face as a result of his truth-telling. Jeremiah must give up his hope of having a normal life—he may not have a wife, he will never know the joy of children (Jeremiah 16). He cannot hope for the support of friends and family in his lonely sentinel position, watching on the ramparts as God’s terrible purposes unfold; he senses that all of his friends are waiting for an opportunity to harm him (20:10). The depth of his bitterness may be discerned in the way in which Jeremiah seeks to erase himself from his own life: “Cursed be the day on which I was bom! . . . Why did I come forth from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?” (20:14-18). Jeremiah must die to self in order to fulfil God ’s call to discipleship. The wrenching pain of it can be seen not only in the prophet’s laments but in the fractured struggles of the book of Jeremiah writ larger, a book riven by bitter disagreements about God’s plan, the role of Babylon, and what faithfulness means in a city and a culture under siege. Vocation is lived out incarnationally, and not only in the person and body of Jeremiah. Vocation is lived out—and contested—in the social body of Judah and in the historicized and ritualized “body” of ancient Israel as that body is drawn, erased, and redrawn by means of Israel’s sacred traditions. Jeremiah writhes in anguish, and Judah writhes along with him—both the Judeans present in the terrible sixth-century Babylonian onslaught and others who have stood with that community and read its story in future generations. And so when Jeremiah writhes and Judah writhes, it is fair to say that the Church writhes. We, too, are unsettled and anguished and displaced as we witness and participate in the cost of that discipleship. Reading the book of Jeremiah, staying present to its fear and not shrinking from its vitriolic conflicts, we glimpse what may be required if we are to die to ourselves so that we may be reborn in Christ. The life of faith is far from harmonious. Vision is not always clear. Believers of goodwill can disagree fiercely over how to move forward toward God’s purposes. Jeremiah witnesses to the whole complex and agonized truth of lived and living discipleship, both of the prophet and of the beloved community. Christian interpretive tradition offers a richness of christological readings of the man Jeremiah as a type of Christ and Jeremiah’s suffering as a proleptic foreshadowing of Christ’s Passion. I honor those christological readings but would urge the preacher to consider the formational power of encountering the whole book of Jeremiah: not just the lyrical passage in Jeremiah 31 about the new covenant written on the heart, but also the book’s fierce contestations and anxieties. We cannot read Jeremiah and continue to hold a cavalier view about the obvious propositional rightness of this or that social or political position in today’s Church. Justice and holiness are complicated things, as every pastor knows. With Jeremiah, we see the brokenness of community. In the polyphony of the book of Jeremiah, we hear stirring prophetic proclamation,

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    yes, but also resistance and struggle and despair. Staying present to that is a crucially important gift and witness that Jeremiah offers to the Church.

    3. Newness of Life in Community Finally, Lent invites us to consider the reformation of the believing community. Faithful reading involves being attentive not only to the content of Scripture—its propositions and claims and images—but to its poetics and narratology, its ironic and paradoxical gestures, its rhetorical artistry, and the dynamics of deconstruction and re visioning and contestation that enliven Scriptural witness as a whole. The preacher’s biblical pedagogy from the pulpit is funded by the truth that every process of engaging Scripture faithfully is superintended by the Holy Spirit. Now, can particular readings miss the mark, be self-serving or distorted or theologically inadequate? Of course. But even in those instances, even in our hermeneutical moments of failed vision or unwitting narcissism or simple misunderstanding, we are seeking God through God’s holy and life-giving word. In the faithful and courageous ongoing engagement of the biblical prophets, we are taking a tremendous risk as individual believers and as communities of faith. The prophetic Word of God will convict us and disturb our idolatries; it will fire our imaginations in ways that will leave us perpetually dissatisfied with the status quo; it will require that we dare to be open to the Otherness of God and the strangeness of each other in communities that stretch across cultures and across millennia. An excellent resource within Scripture for thinking about God’s continual reformation of community is Isaiah 56. The book of Isaiah constitutes a marvelous multilayered witness that responds to several historical contexts, from the eighth century through the post-exilic period. Isaiah 56 is a key text in the post-exilic community’s wrestling with who they are called to be. Framed by the opening call to justice (“Maintain justice and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come,” 56:1) and the closing indictment of Israel’s blind sentinels and drunken shepherds—false prophets and exploitative rulers—are some extraordinary verses about a newly expansive and courageous community. The community reformed in God’s purposes invites into the ranks of worshippers the despised eunuchs and foreigners who had been prohibited, according to Deuteronomy 2 3 , from worshipping with Israel. “Thus says the L ord: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths .. . and hold fast my covenant I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off’ (56:4-5). And foreigners who keep the sabbath will be brought by God to God’s holy mountain (56:7); their offerings will be accepted, for—Isaiah’s God thunders—“My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” A monument and a name {yad vas hem) better than sons and daughters: this is not grudging acceptance, “tolerance,” or any of those tepid ways that communities have of signaling that someone may join them so long as they don’t seem too “different.” “Better than sons and daughters” means a radical reconfiguring of the community at its core. The stranger is to be invited into the very heart of what community means! The life of the community depends on the yad vashem of the foreigner and the eunuch . A staggering claim, and deeply moving when we consider the horrific ways in which believers of many traditions have worked for so many centuries to silence and exterminate the Other from their midst. Those who have visited Jerusalem in recent

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    decades may have been to the Holocaust memorial outside of the city. It is a place of excruciatingly important witness. This memorial throws a searching light on the unspeakable brutality of those who commanded the genocide of Europe’s Jews and other marginalized populations. But more than that, it testifies to the indescribable preciousness of the Other, the one who will never be “like us ״and whose need is our most urgent ethical concern, according to Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas. The name of that Holocaust memorial? Yad Vashem. A name that will not be cut off, no matter what, no matter how despised the Other might have been . . . whether despised in the dusty streets of post-exilic Yehud, or despised on a hill called Golgotha in first-century Palestine, or despised today in congregations across this country that are still made too anxious by difference to welcome every single person or couple that crosses the threshold. Isaiah calls us to newness of life in community—to life superintended by a Holy Spirit whose vision can never be constrained by human agendas. This is a scary thing, because it means that “we” will be remade along with “them.” We will be configured and reformed in ways that testify to who God is—the Holy One of Israel, God and no mortal!—rather than testifying to that about which we are most smug or which makes us feel safest. And it is only in the sustained engagement of the prophetic corpus , and indeed all of Scripture, that we will hear this word of newness in something even beginning to approach fullness. If we’ve read Deuteronomy 23 with its forceful exclusion of some from the worshipping congregation, and we’ve pondered the book of Ruth with its Moabite protagonist, we will hear Isaiah 56 more clearly, and we will hear the Suffering Servant Songs of the book of Isaiah more richly, and we can begin to understand more of the scandal and promise of Jesus Christ. Lent is an ideal time for the preacher to foster such hermeneutical engagement.

    Conclusion Preachers may invite their congregations into the witness of the prophets in myriad ways. Preaching can make visible the ways in which we wrestle and submit, plead and rage and cower and rejoice in our encounters with this holy Word through which breathes the living Word that is Christ. The congregation can be beckoned into covenantal fidelity in its Scripture-reading practices. Preachers can look for the incamational truth-telling and suffering of God’s prophetic people and glimpse there the Son of God, broken on the Cross and resurrected in glory for the sake of the world. If we are brave, we may allow the prophetic word to invite and cajole and browbeat us into newness of life in community and thereby open our hearts to the radical action of the Holy Spirit. All this is to say, preachers can invite their congregations to learn how we are formed and reformed as we read together. Unmerited grace, dying to self, newness of life in community: all are there in the Hebrew Scriptures. As we begin to understand more deeply the truth of this ancient Word that stands forever (Isa 40:8), then and only then might we dare whisper with Amos, “Let justice roll down like v/aters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

  • Stewardship preaching and the care of the Earth: the fire this time

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    Stewardship Preaching and the Care of the Earth:

    The Fire This Time

    D. Cameron Murchison

    Black Mountain, North Carolina

    I begin with texts from the Old Testament and from the New Testament that speak of the scope of God’s covenantal and redemptive relationships to what God has made. In each case the italic portions of the texts have caused me to direct my attention beyond a merely anthropocentric reading of those relationships.

    Genesis 9:8-17 8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, 9 “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, 10 and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I l l establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” 12 God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: 131 have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, 151 will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. 16 When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” 17 God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

    Colossians 1:15-23 15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; 16 for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. 21 And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, 22 he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him— 23 provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven. I, Paul, became a servant of this gospel.

    James Baldwin concluded his 1963 book, The Fire Next Time, with the words of

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    an epic slave song: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign/ No more water, the fire next time!” Of special interest for stewardship preaching that is attentive to the care of the earth is the attention that Baldwin’s words inadvertently draw to the passage above from Genesis 9. Using words from the spiritual, “Mary Don,t You Weep,” Baldwin reminds us of the great promise of God following the flood. The promise was that never again would God reject the creation as had been done in a catastrophe of water. A new covenant was offered of which the rainbow was the sign: No more water! But Baldwin, and the spiritual from which he drew the phrasing, adds the ominous phrase, “the fire next time.” Allowing the phrase to invite us into a closer look at the Genesis passage, we discover two important things. First, it (along with most readings of the passage) restricts the rainbow sign and promise too narrowly. And second, it adds the threat of fire as an alternative means of world destruction though nothing is said about this in the Genesis passage. Thereby, the phrase gives us an ideal entrance into the concerns of stewardship preaching and creation care.

    I First, the fire next time. Though the Genesis passage does not mention anything about fire, concentrating instead on God’s promise not to destroy the creation again by the waters of a flood, the slave song composer of “Mary Don’t You Weep” was a careful student of the full sweep of scripture. She knew that 2 Peter added fire to the equation as it offered hope to those who were confronted by scoffers belittling the expectation of early Christians for deliverance in the coming of the Lord. These scoffers taunted Christian hope in God with the saying that “all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation” (3:4). But 2 Peter, remembering the Noah story, says that such scorn ignores the fact that long ago “the world…was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word, the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the godless” (3:6-7). It is not hard to see why a slave song writer who was composing a ballad of deliverance rooted in scripture would pair the promise to Noah (which included a promise not to destroy the world by water) with the promise to the oppressed (which included a promise to destroy oppressors and oppression by fire). With these two passages joined, there is a consistency in God’s promising no more water, but the fire next time. Both promises are expressions of God’s determination to deliver and sustain all that God has created, consuming by fire all that stands against God’s creative and redemptive intentions. Thus it is not hard to see why “no more water, but the fire next time” was also invoked in the tumultuous civil rights struggles of the 1960s. But what does “the fire next time” have to do with care of the earth? Just this—next time is now, and the fire in question threatens the disruption and potential destruction of earth as habitat and home. What we now know is that the fire that fuels our world is primarily fossilized sunlight that emits C02 into the atmosphere, trapping heat close to the earth and causing a variety of profound changes in the earth’s climate. These changes produce intensified weather patterns with excruciating draught in some places and cataclysmic flooding in others. These changes lead to a startling increase in species extinction, melting of polar ice caps, rising sea levels, depletion of water supplies, and attendant agricultural crises.

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    Here is the irony. The fire (in the form of fossil derived energy) that fuels our world threatens to become the fire that consumes and destroys not only human civilization , but the creaturely habitat in which it is set and on which it depends. Despite the dedicated efforts of some deniers of these trends, more recent polling seems to suggest that a distinct majority of the American public now believes that climate change is a clear and present danger, thus aligning itself with the massive scientific evidence that reaches the same conclusion.1 Even as we begin to recognize the challenge, we are so embedded in a view of humanity’s place at the pinnacle of creation with vast powers over it—made possible primarily by our use of fire over the last 250 years or so—we can scarcely imagine what we are to do, other than more of the same. Campaign rhetoric is especially telling on this point. People need jobs. The economy needs growth. So we are inclined to fight fire with fire, employing the technologies that are dependent upon continued use of fossil fuels in the hopes that we will bring a creation that is crossing its tipping point under control. One potent symbol of this dead end track the world is on is the energy with which oil companies seek to harvest the tar sands oil from Canada. It contains twice the C02 of conventional oil, which magnifies the warming effect of its use.2 Such a response threatens to become a consuming fire, with the globe literally heating up and with nations locked in the conflagrations of war upon war to preserve access to those fuels. Not the fire next time—but the fire this time!

    II So let’s return to the rainbow sign. Like virtually every commentator on the promise God makes in Genesis 9, the composer of the slave song concentrates on the promise to Noah. But readers mindful of the fire that threatens to engulf us today have more recently called attention to the fact that God’s promise has a much broader audience. God says to Noah, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you (Gen. 9:10). All our ready talk of God’s covenant with Noah simply overlooks, in our human centered presumption, that God directs the promise to all creatures and even to the earth itself. So God continues in the address to Noah: never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth (9: 11). The passage adds the promise of the bow in the clouds the rainbow sign—as a sign of the covenant “between me and you and every living creature…between me and the earth” (9:12-13). If we are going to respond to the challenge of the “fire this time,” we will begin with strategies that do not stress our superiority over, and set-apartness from, the rest of creation, but rather with strategies that recognize that God promises us a future along with the rest of creation. Nor are we limited to the passage from Genesis for such an understanding. The Colossians text that celebrates the pre-eminence of Christ describes him as the firstborn of all creation and celebrates him as the one in whom all things in heaven and on earth were created, in whom all things hold together, and through whom God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things (Col. 1:15-20). We could scarcely be more explicitly directed to strategies of response that attend to “all creatures of our God and King, to all things bright and beautiful.” Instead of fighting fire with the fire of fossil fuel, we can learn from our companions in the earth and the earth itself how a sustainable world might be fashioned, one that does not have

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    to become a consuming fire. While there are any number of books written in recent years that rightly stress the severe difficulties that the world is likely to confront in the coming years, one in particular has recently (and more helpfully) stressed how we might refashion our technologies with nature as our exemplar. In The Sixth Wave, Australians James Bradfield-Moody and Bianca Nogrady say:

    We tend to think that we as a species somehow stand apart from nature. Indeed, we often see ourselves as struggling against nature for our survival. However, as technology develops and our population continues to grow, we are gaining a new awareness that our survival is entirely dependent on the natural world. Even more sobering is the realisation that, when compared to nature, we are novices in the presence of a profound genius.3

    Their book is an account of how a new economy will have to be fashioned that learns the lessons of the whole earth—that an often overlooked source of energy is efficiency and that nothing can or need be wasted. In short, they say that economic growth will have to be decoupled from resource consumption and modeled on what nature can teach us. In this they join with a number of other voices, perhaps most enchantingly that of Joe Hutto, a naturalist whose delightful PBS documentary, “My Life as a Turkey, ״recounts his “adoption” of turkey hatchlings who imprinted on him as their parent. For more than a year he undertook this parenting role but soon discovered that he had more to learn than to teach. As the turkeys walked daily with him through the Florida forests, Joe realized that among other marvelous things, they differentiated venomous from harmless snakes by distinctive vocal signals. Commenting on the astounding things the turkeys taught him, Hutto says: “As I leave the confines of my language and culture, these creatures seem to become in every way my superiors. They are more alert, sensitive, and aware. They are in many ways in fact more intelligent. Their understanding of the forest is beyond my ability to comprehend.” Joe Hutto’s WHAT? gives a new meaning to being a turkey. He reminds us that serious people are looking to the world of nature to find sustainable answers to everything , from how we move water around to how we keep habitats cool in the face of intense heat to how the so-called waste of one organic process becomes a resource for another organic process. Bradfield-Moody and Nogrady sum it up by saying, “Like errant children, we are coming to realize that we can learn something from our parents. And, like all caring parents, Mother Nature has many lessons for us.”4 When God saved Noah together with every living creature and with the earth itself, more was involved than allowing the rest of creation to ride on the coattails of humanity’s survival. It was just as much the other way round, as we are learning. Humanity is saved with the rest of creation not merely so that humanity can take care of the rest of creation, but also so that the rest of creation can continue to exercise its ministry of the sustenance of all things—humanity included. When Colossians speaks of all things being created in, held together, and reconciled to God by Christ, we see again that we are woven into, rather than set apart from, the tapestry of creation. To use the words of theologian Thomas Berry, this wisdom of God speaks of “the intimacy of humans with the natural world in a single community of existence.”5

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    Conclusion As we focus on stewardship preaching attentive to care of the earth, we face a fire this time that will be successfully fought not with more fire from our fossil fueled past, but with a recovered biblical vision of our complex relation to “all creatures,” to “all things bright and beautiful.” As both Genesis and Colossians show us, we stand not apart from, but embedded in, all that God has made. That location, coupled with our authentically human vocation of learning from the world in which God has set us, opens us to the prospect of fighting the fire of climate change with the wisdom we gamer from our earthly companions, inanimate and animate alike. Despite the likelihood of considerable social turbulence in the years ahead as we learn how to live sustainably, as humankind learns new ways of fighting the fire this time, there are deep resources of hope offered us in these passages that furnish us with a needed resilience. For God did give Noah—and all creation—the rainbow sign: the emphatic promise that the earth would not be destroyed. And the Christ hymn of Colossians heralds the truth that all things are created, held together, and reconciled to God in Christ. And as we are grasped by this hope, we are also grasped by our partnership with the rest of creation as we move toward a sustainable future. In a book with the arresting title Reinventing Fire, Amory Lovins and his colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Institute take a comprehensive look at (in their words) “how to eliminate oil and coal completely by 2050, with less risk and less cost to society than business-as-usual.”6 They conclude with a call to leadership on the part of all of us to make the kinds of changes, small and large, personal and social, local and global that will be required to provide viable habitat for our children and our children’s children, indeed for all things bright and wonderful. Here is their challenge posed as a question: Shall we continue down the path we’re on, toward economic stagnation, rising costs, unpleasant risks, social upheaval, and an ever more dangerous world, or shall we make a bold break and start laying the energy foundations of a world without waste, want, or war?7 Christians whose ancient, wise, and authoritative texts include God’s rainbow sign to all creation and Colossians’ witness to God’s creation, preservation, and redemption of all things in Christ surely are made ready for the latter choice: a bold break that starts laying the energy foundations of a world without waste, want, or war. So might it be.

    Notes 1 David L. Wheeler, “Social Scientists Try to Break the Climate-Change Impasse,” Chronicle of Higher Education (May 6,2012). 2 Cf. James Hansen, “Game Over for the Climate,” New York Times, May 10,2012. (http://www.nytimes. com/2012/05/10/opinion/game-o ver-for-the-climate .html). 3 James Bradfield Moody and Bianca Nogrady, The Sixth Wave: How to Succeed in a Resource-Limited World (Austrailia: Vintage Books, 2010). (Kindle location, 3778-3782). 4 Ibid. 5 Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York, New York:Bell Tower, 1999), 193. 6 Amory B. Lovins and Rocky Mountain Institute, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era (White River Junction, VT, 2011). Kindle location, 439-40. 7 Ibid., Kindle location, 7538-39.

  • Are you talking to me?

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    Are You Talking to Me?

    Matthew 10:24-33

    Martin B. Copenhaver Congregational Church (United Church of Christ), Wellesley, Massachusetts

    I don’t know how it is with you, but I find that there are two kinds of Jesus’ teachings that are difficult to hear, two categories of Jesus’ teachings that convict me to such an extent that I want to cover my ears and sing a loud song. There are those teachings that clearly are directed to me, and there are those teachings that clearly are not directed to me. The first category—those teachings that clearly are directed to me—includes, among other things, the entire Sermon on the Mount. The most pointed words in that sermon find a bulls-eye in my heart:

    You have heard that it was said to those of old, “You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment.” But I say to you that every one who is angry with his brother or sister shall be liable to judgment (Matthew 5:21). Beware of practicing your piety before others (6:1). Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven (6:19). Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself (6:34). Judge not, that you be not judged (7:1). Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? (7:3).

    I could go on, of course, but I would rather not. All of those teachings are just too clearly directed to me. When Jesus gets going like that, I feel like the man who reported that he felt so convicted by John Wesley’s preaching that he would bury his face in his hands, and when he raised his head he expected to find the entire congregation staring at him because he was convinced that the preacher was talking just to him, and to him alone. The second category of Jesus’ teachings I find difficult to hear are those that so clearly are not directed to me. This gospel reading is one of those teachings. Jesus is preparing his disciples to go out and preach and to teach in his name. In some sense, he is preparing all of his followers. He is preparing us. He is telling us what we need to know to be sent forth in his name, and from the beginning, he makes it clear that his followers are going to have a rough go of it. Jesus says, in essence, “As my followers you can’t expect to be treated any better than I am. In fact, you’ll probably have it worse. They have called me Beelzebul. Imagine what worse things they will do to you.” And when I read that I think, “Are you talking to me? I don’t think you’re talking to me.” You see, I have not been reviled or persecuted or cursed for being a fol-

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    lower of Jesus—at least, not in ways that Jesus seems to have imagined I would be. After all, I serve a church in Wellesley, Massachusetts, a bastion of privilege. I lead a rather comfortable life. And as a congregation, we’re not reviled. We’re appreciated . We’re the oldest institution in town. We’re on a hill, on the most prominent intersection in town, as if watching over all that we can survey from this perch. And even people who have never set foot in our building seem to like the fact that we’re there. Why, a picture of our steeple graces the cover of the new phone book of our town. Obviously, we don’t pose much of a threat. So Jesus’ words seem not to be addressed to me or to the church I serve. We are not reviled or persecuted or cursed for being his followers. Does that mean that we have found ways to do our master one better, to proclaim the Realm of God in ways that everyone is ready to sign on? Or, in the two thousand years since Jesus sent out the first wave of his followers with words of warning and encouragement, has the culture really come around? Perhaps the society is so transformed that there is no one left to revile us. But, alas, there is another possibility . Perhaps we are no longer worth persecuting anymore. Perhaps we don’t pose that kind of threat. Perhaps we no longer represent the kind of clear alternative to the ways of the surrounding culture. And that is why I feel convicted by this word, because clearly it is not directed to me. It assumes that I, as a Christian, would pose a threat to earthly powers, that I would be worth persecuting. A while back I was invited to participate in a meeting at a center for leadership associated with a prominent church. The center aims to equip people at the beginning of their careers to lead as Christians—not in the church, but in the secular workplace. They are asking, “How does a Christian faithfully exercise leadership in the world?” When I asked what I might read in advance of that meeting, I was referred to several books, including Jesus CEO by Laurie Beth Jones. This popular book has about forty short chapters, each with an engaging title that conjures a characteristic of Jesus worth emulating, including these titles:

    • “He Kept in Constant Contact with His Boss” • “He Believed in Himself’ • “He Said Thank You” • “He Formed a Team” • “He Said, ‘Why Not Me?’” And, my personal favorite: • “He Was a Turnaround Specialist”

    But I couldn’t help noticing that one chapter that is conspicuously missing is the one entitled “He Was Crucified.” Have we done our master one better? Have we figured out how to proclaim the Realm of God without having to pay the consequences? Or perhaps we are simply not worth persecuting anymore. Some of the leaders at the center clearly assume that whoever is supervising these young leaders in the workplace would love to have them get this kind of training in Christian leadership. It would make them better employees with more promising futures. But what if the program were evaluated by how many people went back to work and were reviled, perhaps for asking questions that no one else dared ask, or for insisting on a higher code of conduct than others are willing to

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    adhere to, or for failing to see the bottom line as the sole measure of success? Would that be too much to expect from a Christian leadership center? Perhaps they could keep track of how many folks were demoted some time after they left the program. After all, Jesus sent his followers off with words of encouragement, yes, but also with words of warning. Soren Kierkegaard once mused, “I wonder if a man handing another man an extremely sharp, polished, two-edged instrument would hand it over with the air, gestures, and expression of one delivering a bouquet of flowers? Would not this be madness? What does one do, then? Convinced of the excellence of the dangerous instrument, one recommends it unreservedly, to be sure, but in such a way that in a certain sense one warns against it. So it is with Christianity….” Indeed, when Jesus handed over the gospel to his followers, he did so with a warning: “They called me Beelzebul. Imagine what they are going to call you.” But did we need that warning? Was he talking to us? During the Clinton administration, at the height of the debate over whether gay folks should be allowed to serve in the military, Stanley Hauerwas wrote an op-ed piece in the Charlotte [North Carolina] Observer entitled, “Why Gays (as a Group) Are Morally Superior to Christians (as a Group).” In that article he observes that the military is somehow threatened by having gay soldiers, but they’re fine with having Christians. And Hauerwas tries to imagine what it would be like if Christians took their own discipleship so seriously that they would pose a threat, that they would be so dangerous to have around that the military would exclude them as a group. For example, Christians are potentially dangerous for morale in the barracks. You don’t want these people gathering at night, holding hands with heads bowed. Who knows what kind of disgusting behavior in which they might be engaged? Why they might be praying for the enemy. Could you trust someone who would think it more important to die than to kill unjustly? When they eat as part of their worship, they say you cannot come to the meal with blood on your hands. And would you want to shower with such people? They might try to baptize you. And that, concludes Hauerwas, is why gays as a group are morally superior to Christians as a group, because Christians as a group don’t do those things that would exclude them from being in the military. In that setting, we are not reviled, persecuted, or cursed. In fact, it’s hard to find a setting in this country in which we are. And yet…and yet, Jesus still knows how to get his friends into trouble. I’m thinking of the star high school lacrosse player who misses a week of practice during spring vacation because he is with his church, building homes in partnership with the poor through Habitat for Humanity. He knew that he would have to sit out two games upon his return—it’s the usual punishment for missing practice. In front of all of his teammates, the coach says that his decision to go on the Habitat trip makes it clear that he is a loser. When the team does lose both of those games, the coach is quoted in the school paper as saying that the only reason they lost those games is because this young man didn’t play. He put his own interests above the team’s interests. The coach did everything but call him Beelzebul. I’m thinking of the woman who lives in the neighborhood where her church is establishing a home for adults with mental retardation. The whole neighborhood is up in arms—property values, you know. She invites all her neighbors to her home for a reception and invites the young adults who will live in the home to pass the hors

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    d’oeuvres. I’m thinking of the doctor who lives in an affluent suburb, but her patients are all men, women, and children who live on the streets of Boston. The church helps support her work financially. Then one day she stands up and says, “I am grateful for the help. But we need to do more. So I want to ask everyone in this church who has a second home to sell it and give the proceeds to help those who don’t have any home.” Even those of us who support her work slipped out the side door that day. Or, how about the new pastor who refuses to baptize the grandchild of two pillars of the church because in baptism covenant promises are made and those promises mean something, and because the parents are not committed to raising their child in a church. Under other circumstances the grandparents might have understood. But this is their grandchild! Or, how about the fourteen-year-old boy who calls his parents from summer camp. “How are things going?” the parents ask. “All right, I guess. I gave the vespers meditation last night before lights out. I told my cabin that I don’t think it’s right for someone to be called ‘gay’ as a put-down, that there is nothing wrong with being gay.” The parents ask, “How’d they take it?” A long pause. “They didn’t get it. No one really understood what I was trying to say.” “And what gave you the idea to use that as the subject of your meditation?” “I guess I have you to blame,” the boy says with a bit of a laugh. “You and the church.” Then there’s the young personal financial advisor, with a wife and three young children at home, who is getting pressure from his supervisor to push certain financial products, even though those products are not suitable for a lot of his customers. He’s supposed to act like he is giving impartial advice and at the same time recommend only those products from which the firm derives the greatest profit. He can’t be fired for refusing to go along with the scheme, but there are ways in which his life can be—and is—made difficult. So he quits. And there’s the attorney who for sixteen years defended someone on death row on a pro bono basis. Sixteen years of arguments, motions, and appeals. For most of those years this lawyer is the only contact his client has with the outside world. So, in addition to his official correspondence, the attorney writes his client chatty letters. He sends him pencils and chewing gum. When the final appeal is denied, he gets on a plane and flies to Alabama with his thirty-year-old son so that someone other than the guards and state officials will be there when his client is executed. And when he approaches the prison, there are demonstrators outside holding signs that commend both the condemned prisoner and his lawyer to the fires of hell. Yes, Jesus still knows how to get his friends into trouble. All of those people I just told you about are members of the church I serve, all in some way aiming to be a follower of Jesus and getting themselves into trouble in the process. You know, none of those folk are exactly reviled or persecuted. These are not heroic gestures on a grand scale. Certainly they do not represent the magnitude of all we are called to be as followers of Jesus. No, these are just small incidents, little incursions and inroads, small glimpses, cracks in the established order through which a light shines. Just that. Something small. But then I remember that Jesus says that God likes to work with small things—things like mustard seeds and pinches of salt and teaspoons of yeast. And Jesus says that God watches over small things with great care—things like sparrows, the smallest

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    of all birds. In this passage, when Jesus gives his followers some instructions, it is with soaring words and high expectations, as if asking them—asking us—to mount up with the wings of an eagle. And I want to ask, “Are you talking to me?” But then Jesus adds, “And God watches over the sparrows. ״The sparrows.

  • ‘Let the redeemed of the Lord say so’: receiving the texts and living the faith of the Lenten season

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    ‘Let the Redeemed of the Lord Say So ’ : Receiving the

    Texts and Living the Faith of the Lenten Season

    Kelly S. Allen

    University Presbyterian Church, San Antonio, Texas

    Joan Chittister says, “Lent is a call to renew a commitment grown dull, perhaps, by a life more marked by routine than by reflection.”1 By Lent, the newness of the new year has worn off and the commitment of preaching can surely be a practice “more marked by routine than by reflection.” Given the relentless pattern of the arrival of Sundays (every 3 or 4 days it seems!), it is tempting for those of us responsible for weekly preaching to see Lent only as a time for a shift in focus, a deeper message about discipleship and spiritual practices, with more reference than in other seasons to the shadow of the cross. For Lent to be a season saturated with meaning and a journey worth making for those blessed and burdened by listening to us week after week, it must be a season of deep reflection for us as preachers who are also followers of Jesus. This Lent, could our own preparation for preaching become a time of profound self-examination and an inward pilgrimage? Could our sermon preparation become truly a Lenten discipline? Could we find opportunity for being awakened to our own mortality and our own need for redemption? As preachers we often determine that we will keep to a division between our own spiritual practice and our encounter with the Biblical text for the purposes of preaching and teaching. We also distinguish between our ability to worship (which is usually when we are in someone else’s church) and leading worship, which we call “work.” I’m starting to wonder, however, if we can’t worship and work at the same time, how can we expect people in our congregations to see their vocations as teachers , lawyers, parents, and engineers as acts of worship? And isn’t this what we hope for -that those we lead in worship and counsel in our studies and whose children we baptize will see all of life as a “continual thank-offering to [God] .”2 I am not talking about merging our own spiritual lives with our congregations. I am not talking about overloading sermons with self-referential tidbits or burdening congregations with our unresolved neuroses or flailing doubts. I’m talking about being reminded that the texts we study are addressed first to us as people of faith and then, through the presence and work of the Spirit, to others we have the privilege of speaking to week after week. I am suggesting that we let our own struggles, fears, and doubts enter the room in which we prepare to preach and drive us into deeper interaction with the text and perhaps even deeper connection with God. As preachers and pastors, biblical texts can too easily become “tools of the trade” that we use “on” others (even if we aren’t using them as weapons). As an exercise in Lenten self-examination, perhaps this is a season to ask for feedback on your preaching. How are hearers reflecting on the sermons they listen to throughout Lent? This is a wonderful opportunity to receive gifts of the spirit from the congregation(s) with whom you share worship. I find myself awed at times, when I am privileged to hear how something that came out of my mouth on a particular Sunday reverberated in the life of a particular person or family. I am humbled at other

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    times, when I realize a message that surely came across loud and clear is still floating around, seemingly disembodied, yet to become incarnate.

    Lent 1: Being reminded of the future. In this first week in Lent, we ask to know the ways of God (Psalm 25:4). We profess a desire to be led in God’s truth (v.5), and we pledge to “wait all day long (v.5). ״We admit, as we enter this season, to “troubles of [the] heart”(v. 17), which we had perhaps hoped to keep hidden. To trust in the steadfast love of God celebrated in Psalm 25 is to be reminded that we have been held, are held, and will be held in the strong and gentle care of God. We have a future with God. We step onto a path, a pilgrimage that is Lent. I hear rushing water. It is at first frightening water, the water flooding the earth as God washes away everything and everyone in a heartbroken act of violence in hopes of starting over with a creation God called “good.” I think of how hard we as pastors work to respond to tragedy by assuring people that God did not “cause” the flood that washed away their beloved grandchild this summer, nor was God punishing your sister whose house burned to the ground in central Texas. And yet we are asked to grapple with a text like Genesis 9, in which God makes a covenant with the earth through a pledge of nonviolence, hanging God’s weapon of war (the bow) in the clouds in a gesture of peace. Noah, his family, and two of every creature come through the flood, joyful no doubt to be alive and part of a new relationship with God. Thankful for God’s covenant and rejoicing in God’s salvation, Noah et. al must have still been haunted by the death and destruction they saw in those churning waters, and you have to wonder if they were plagued by “survivor guilt” in the dark of the night. Being “saved through water” (see 1 Peter passage) is glorious and traumatizing. Jesus emerges from the Jordan river, after being baptized along with those seeking to be drenched in forgiveness, who followed John the Baptist out into the wilderness. As Jesus surfaces, he sees the heavens “tom apart” to make way for a dove-like Holy Spirit to come toward him like a meteorite piercing the atmosphere, accelerating toward earth in the grip of gravity. I remember in seminary we referred to the Markan version of this scene as the “dive-bombing dove.” As Noah and family learn of their place in God’s covenant through the 40 days and nights of sea sickening travel in an ark, Jesus appears to learn of his identity as beloved child of God through the voice of a God who then immediately drives him into the wilderness for a parallel 40-day ordeal encountering Satan and wild beasts. The bow in the clouds, the proclamation of Jesus’ identity, and the waters of baptism referenced in the Mark and 1 Peter passages serve as reminders of what the future holds for us in our relationship with God. In each, God defines a relationship that drives us into a tumultuous, yet blessed future as children of God, as subjects of God’s steadfast love, as bearers of God’s presence in the world. Given the turmoil of these days, economically and politically here and around the world, to be reminded of this future is to walk in a freedom and fearlessness that is not gained by following the prognosticators of the day.

    Lent 2: Personal redemption and the renewal of the world The psalm portion for this Sunday is the last section of the Psalm that Jesus begins to speak from the cross. Psalm 22 begins with the cry of abandonment “My God, my

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    God, why have you forsaken me?” and concludes in a celebration and gratitude for God’s response to this cry of desolation. The personal celebration of God’s gracious response to the psalmist’s agony is woven in with echoes of the covenant with Abraham . The psalmist imagines the fulfillment of the covenant given in Genesis 17 by proclaiming, “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him” (v. 27). The psalmist’s experienee of personal redemption is thus projected on a larger screen encompassing the past, present, and future of human experience with this covenanting, redeeming God. I am reminded here of Mary’s audacious words in the Magnificat in which something very similar happens. Mary’s experience of being a pregnant woman becomes part of the cosmic story of the Creator’s redeeming love at work in the world: “Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed….God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly… .God has helped [the] servant Israel, in remembrance of God’s mercy, according to the promise God made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever” (Luke 2:48,52,54,55). Paul interprets Abram’s faith generously when he says in his Romans commentary on this story, “[Abraham] did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead …, or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb” (Romans 4:19). And get this: “No distrust made him waver conceming the promise of God.. .”(v.20). Ummm.. .really? Paul may have mislaid his copy of Genesis and conveniently forgotten the “Hagar and Ishmael” affair, among other instances of wavering trust on Abram’s part, between the initial promise of God in Genesis chapter 12 and the “reset” covenant promise we approach this Sunday in chapter 17. Paul’s willingness to see the best in our spiritual ancestor Abraham gives us encouragement that perhaps those of future generations who reflect on our lives may see fit to highlight the “good bits.” In Mark 8, embedded in Jesus’ first passion prediction, we have a call to discipleship . As Abraham’s call becomes the blessing for generations, Jesus’ life becomes the path for those who follow him. We see Peter reflecting the disciples’ and our own resistance to a costly journey in the shadow of a cross. Brian K. Blount and Gary W. Charles write that “to ‘take up your cross’ is a call.. .to public ministry that confronts whatever powers prevent the saving work of God.”3 To take up one’s cross is “not to endure stoically the burdens of life but rather to set oneself on the same trajectory of Jesus, thus to ‘follow me [Jesus].”’4 I asked a group of women I have the privilege to meet with each week who are incarcerated for federal crimes to reflect with me on this passage. One woman wondered out loud why Jesus thought anyone at all would follow him when he put it in such harsh terms. It occurred to us then to be quite shocked that there was anyone who hung around long enough to become his follower, let alone still be repeating his call to discipleship two thousand years later. For the women I meet with, the harsh, either/or tone of Jesus’ words don’t seem to phase them a bit, however. For many, their lives have been so absorbed in violence and/or the curse of drugs and drug dealing that this is their first opportunity to have sobriety and quiet. They often become haunted by their own actions and seized with an overwhelming desire to change, or more accurately, to be changed by God. It makes complete sense to someone caught in the prison of addiction that the choice is either to focus on divine things or human things, to lose life through trying to save it (get a fix, secure power, etc.) or save it

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    through losing it. This might be the week for us as preachers to retell ourselves our own journey of faith in the silence of our own studies, to remember our own cries to God, our own experiences of renewal and redemption, and our own reluctance to relinquish life for our true life to emerge. As we imagine a sermon, is there a cry of agony to be revealed? Is there a moment of redemption to be shared? I cling faithfully to the advice of my first preaching professor Wade P. Huie to never make myself the hero of my own story. I also trust the wisdom of my 16 year old daughter who helped me prepare to be the keynote speaker at a presbytery youth conference by advising, “Mom, the kids need to know that this means something to you ” That turned out to be all I needed. These passages may challenge us in our spiritual journey as preachers also to be cautious about how the state of our own spiritual health impacts our proclamation to a community of faith. Aware as we are of how others’ states of mind and heart influence their perception of the world and their behavior toward others, we have an opportunity here to be cautioned not to project our own unexamined states onto the canvas of history.

    Lent 3 The ordinances of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; Sweeter also than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb. (Psalm 19:9-10)

    As Protestants, we seem saturated in the false dichotomy of grace vs. law. We are invited by Psalm 19 to view the law of God as sweetness and fulfillment of a deep desire for the treasure that is God. What a change for those of us who were weaned on tirades against the “legalism” of the Pharisees, Roman Catholicism, or even “Evangelical Christians.” Paul of course has spurred us on in this, but probably only because we lost sight that he was trying to bring Jews and Gentiles together in a new community where all were on equal terms, not to flush all of Hebrew Scripture down the drain. In Exodus we are introduced to the law as a gift of freedom, a gift to those who have lived under the law of Pharaoh for hundreds of years, a law that served to feed the power and purse of a leader who had no concern for the flourishing of the Hebrew people. This law, these new commandments which are communicated in the wilderness, are to give shape and form to a community, that they may reflect God in the world and live in faithful relationship with one another. If we discount “the law” as a list of silly rules and regulations (as I have heard people do), we inadvertently suggest that our relationship with God is only an individual matter rather than a community enterprise. We suggest that behavior toward one another has no significance and that we have no measure of morality or righteousness. On the other hand, to act as if no adaptation is required or new understandings are relevant as we interpret the law, we are not using the gifts of the Spirit we celebrate at Pentecost. Calvin, in his “Institutes,” suggests that the commandments in Exodus 20 that

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    begin with “Thou shalt not” not only tell us what not to do, but they suggest, even compel us, to do their opposite.5 So the commandment not to steal translates into an exhortation to generosity; the commandment to not kill becomes a call to nourish life. When we read and discussed the Ten Commandments together in the prison Bible study, one woman talked about her two young children visiting her. They surprised her by performing a version of the Ten Commandments in song and dance that they had learned at the church they were attending with the relative that was caring for them. When they got midway through the performance, they asked their mom, “What comes next, Mom?” She said to us with a tinge of shame, “I didn’t know what came next.” The children finished off the song, and this mother, who is riddled with guilt over what she has and is putting her beloved children through, said she understood at that moment that the law of God was as sweet as honey. In John, the “cleansing of the temple” scene takes place right after Jesus’ first sign: the changing of water into wine at the wedding at Cana. The Temple was gone by the time the gospel of John and most likely all three of the others were written. If the Temple was meant to be the eternal dwelling place of God, the sign of stability, the endurance of a tradition, Jewish faith would need to restructure itself in light of its destruction. Inasmuch as the readers/hearers of John’s gospel were living in the aftermath of this destruction, this story contributes to the shaping of one community ’s response to this event: the argument that Jesus himself takes the place of the temple. This act of Jesus need not be seen as pitting the early Christian believers against the Jewish tradition as a whole. It is an act reminiscent of the prophets who often railed against religious ritual and sacrifices, when they were attempts to mask or distract from justice for the poor, or when they were flowery words paired with evil action (see Jeremiah 7:4 in which he blasts the people for saying, “The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord” while carrying out evil deeds). Religious pronouncements, the speaking of religious words or prayers, can either spur faithful response or be a substitute for faithful response. Those of us who make a living crafting religious phrases and meanings may be especially vulnerable to this form of sin. If we spend the day thinking religious thoughts and talking about religious things, do we let ourselves off the hook of living the religious lives we seek to encourage members of our congregations to live? People make the very generous assumption that because I talk about prayer, generosity, social justice, and biblical faithfulness, that these things are solidly present in my own life. It is seductive, not to mention convenient, to let them think this. Again to emphasize the significance of Lent for us as preachers, we can pause for significant reflection on whether the structures of meaning we are attempting to build in the lives of others apply equally to our own. Do we proclaim the “foolishness of Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:18-25) with our lives as well as our words?

    Lent 4: Let the Redeemed of the Lord say so. Psalm 107 begins Book 5, the last book of Psalms. The Psalmist begins with a summons to listeners: “Let the redeemed of the Lord say so, those God redeemed from trouble and gathered in from the lands…” (v. 2-3). Who are the redeemed who are called to witness to the restorative power of God? Those who “wandered in desert

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    wastes” (v.4), those who “sat in darkness and in gloom, prisoners in misery and in irons( ״v.lO), those who “were sick through their sinful ways( ״v.17). In each case a cry is made to God and God “saved them from their distress ״or “delivered them from destruction.. . At moments the psalm seems to touch the experience of the Israelites as they journey through the desert and into the promised land, but the allusions are subtle and the breadth and depth of all of human experience seem to be addressed. Johanna Van Wijk-Box points out that the boring name of the book of Numbers alone does a lot to make sure the book is “assigned to obscurity and neglect.”6 The tales in Numbers are far from boring, however. The book does a good job creating a sense of anxiety in the listener/hearer as we witness a pattern of the people of Israel complaining in the wilderness and being punished by God. Trust is eroding, obedienee to God is rare, and Moses’ leadership is under threat. Alienation and hostility between God and humanity begins to pulse through the narrative. Psalm 107 could well be a response to the complainers in the wilderness, prodding them to recognize the work of God to bring them out of danger, starvation, and illness. In Numbers 21 the complaining has reached fever pitch. They lash out at Moses and God with words that don’t even make sense: “For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food”(21:5). So, is there food or not, guys? Make up your mind! The people do not recognize their own ingratitude until poisonous serpents bite and kill some among them. When they confess their sin, Moses is instructed to construct a bronze serpent and lift it on a pole. When those bitten by a serpent look at it, they live. In this week’s passage in John 3, Jesus presents himself as the Son of Man who will be lifted up as the serpent was by Moses, and those who see him will “believe” and experience the wholeness even more life-giving than the healing serpent: eternal life. In a discussion about the Numbers passage with the women in jail, they identified immediately with the Israelites’ tendency toward ingratitude and grumbling. One commented that incarceration brings a sense of gratitude for the simplest gifts of life, especially those that are not available to them. Gratitude for children is first and foremost as mothers long for the opportunity to be at their son or daughter’s birthday party. In experiencing communion with homemade bread, laughter broke out into the silence as several women were surprised by the wonderful taste of the bread. Several participants pointed to the symbolism of the raised serpent as meaningful wisdom about healing. Being arrested and jailed leaves plenty of time for reviewing one’s life. Lack of access to drugs gives some of these women the clearest thinking they have had in a long time. They are at a crossroads and have the choice to look seriously at what brought them to this place and to confront it. In the group they were clear: “We have to face ourselves and what we have done to be healed.” The tragedy is most of these women will not receive adequate resources and support to stay out of jail once they have left. We as preachers often pride ourselves on holding to a fairly nuanced theology and struggle with words like these from Ephesians 2:1: “You were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient .” In this week’s John passage, we have the clear distinction between light and darkness: “And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil “(John 3:19).

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    In a Bible study at my church, folks would be disturbed by this dualism and clarity of distinguishing between good and evil. In the Bible study in the jail, these images speak powerfully to the experience of the women I meet. They quickly name good and evil, light and darkness, and enthusiastically pray to a God who draws people out of darkness and sin into marvelous light. Their willingness to enter into this clear distinction makes me reflect on what darkness might be engulfing our lives out of which we need to be drawn.

    Lent 5: A heart transformed Psalm 51 is the Psalm for the day, echoing the beginning of Lent with its characteristic use on Ash Wednesday. This penitential psalm, associated with the narrative of David’s revealing encounter with the prophet Nathan, encourages us to consider our deep need for transformation. This is not a psalm about tweaking a few faults around the edges of our lives, but opening to a full change in the structure of our life’s DNA. Many of us in church would be hard pressed to allow ourselves to dive into the deep cleansing waters alluded to in this text. It may be that this psalm is for us, most of the time, an exercise in hearing or mouthing words that so clearly apply to others: those blinded by greed, seduced by power, distracted by lust. Yet, thanks to the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit in the reading and hearing of scripture, Psalm 51 may find us at just the right time, and if we had not been introduced to this text, sung this text, heard this text when we didn’t need it, it wouldn’t be there to teach us what it means for life to be restored by a merciful God when we do need it. And there is no doubt, if we haven’t needed it yet, we will need it someday. Jeremiah 31:31-34 anticipates with hope the kind of whole-life transformation articulated in Psalm 51. It proclaims a new covenant, a day when the ways of God will be inscribed in the genetic structure of human life (written on the heart), or to use another image derived from contemporary science, new pathways created in the brain. God’s brain, it seems, will be reprogrammed as well, to “remember their sin no more” (31:34). Perhaps the image of Christ as high priest in Hebrews, so potentially off-putting to Protestants, is exactly what we need to respond to the invitations of Psalm 51 and Jeremiah 31. This high priest is not an image of cold power, but one who “sympathizes with our weaknesses” (see Hebrews 4:15) and who is “able to deal gently with the ignorant and the wayward” (5:1). This high priest joins his human life with ours and leads us through the transformation that leads to obedience. Rather than being a stoic functionary, this priest, “in the days of his flesh,… offered up prayers and supplications , with loud cries and tears” (5:7). This passage in Hebrews gives those of us who preach and pastor an important opportunity to reflect on our role in a community. There are many experiences in pastoral ministry or chaplaincy which can nudge us, perhaps unknowingly, into a sense of being far too set apart from the people we serve. We can become tender from criticism, cynical from encountering apathy, frustrated by those who show little interest in growing in faith and knowledge. Some people cope with these experiences by adopting a “prophetic outsider” persona, feeling compelled to manage, correct, or guide congregations from “above.” It feels safer here and allows us to exempt ourselves from complicity in the dysfunction or lack of vitality we see around us. If we consider the image of Christ as high priest, we become part of the congregation

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    that looks to the high priest. We are invited to be the one who gestures toward Christ (rather than the one who stands in for Christ), all the while watching and listening for the ways our fellow pilgrims gesture with their lives and hearts toward the same high priest. We might point out the path, but it will be a path that we are clearly on as well, rather than a journey we are perceived as having completed. In standing with those we serve, and in listening for insights from them, we are likely to be humbled by the richness of the faith that is all around us. This week’s passage in John finds Jesus in Jerusalem and the forces of death hovering closer and closer. Jesus declares that “the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified”(12:23). This theme of crucifixion as glorification is characteristic of John’s gospel, along with the understanding of Jesus as the one who comes down from heaven and will return to heaven. In this passage, John’s Jesus will say that in this act of being “glorified,” he will “draw all people to myself.” In a rare echo of the synoptics, Jesus says, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (12:25), which serves as a call to discipleship in the midst of the turmoil that is Jesus’ last days. In Mark and Matthew Jesus asks for the cup of suffering to be removed from him during the scene of agony in the garden. Though scholars wonder how much, if any, access the writer of John had to the synoptic traditions, there must have been an awareness of this garden tradition and a desire to dispute it. “John actually portrays Jesus in the act of considering whether he should make this prayer or not and then deciding not to”7 when Jesus says in 12:27, “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say – ‘Father save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.” In John Jesus creates and follows a trajectory that brings to those who trace it with him eternal life, but confounds those who are wrapped in darkness. To grapple with this passage on the Sunday prior to Palm/Passion Sunday gives us the opportunity to ponder whether we will follow this path with our lives and actions, when we know what Good Friday means.

    Notes 1. Joan Chittister, The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life (Dallas: Thomas Nelson, 2009), 111. 2. The Book of Common Worship (Louisville,:Westminster /John Knox Press, 1993), 157. 3. Brian K. Blount and Gary W. Charles, Preaching Mark in Two Voices (Louisville: Westminster/John Know Press, 2002), 149. 4. Ibid, 148. 5. John T. McNeill, Ed. Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960). 6. Johanna W. H. van Wijk-Boss, Making Wise the Simple: The Torah in Christian Faith and Practice (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), 170. 7. John Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 489.

  • How do you plan for this?

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    Page 33

    How Do You Plan for This?

    Matthew 27:11-54

    Mark Ramsey Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, North Carolina

    Museum guides at the Louvre in Paris have noticed a strange pattern. Many people, after standing before DaVinci’s Mona Lisa, walk away perplexed and even frustrated—complaining that it wasn’t what they had hoped. Visitors seem underwhelmed. Why? Well, Mona Lisa is not just the most famous painting in the world—that means that it is also one of the most widely reproduced works of art in the world. In an odd twist, the very fame that leads to the many copies makes the original unremarkable, over-familiar. Yet, people still buy the posters and t-shirts because the fame of the picture has become more of a draw than the artwork itself. When the Mona Lisa was stolen several decades ago, thousands lined up to stare at the empty space on the museum wall where it used to be.1 It might be we risk putting Jesus through a similar fate as we begin this Holy Week. Because Jesus’ “fame” is more famous than his actual life and teachings, I’m not sure we take the time to see the real Jesus of this week. Anthony Griffith grew up in the rough neighborhoods of Chicago’s South Side. He is a stand-up comedian who moved his family to Los Angeles in 1990 to seek his fame and fortune. Within a week of moving to LA, he received two momentous phone calls. One was from the talent coordinator of Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show,” saying that they wanted to work with him to appear on the show — the Holy Grail for every comedian. The other call was their doctor, telling him that his two-year- old daughter’s cancer had returned. For the next year, Griffith lived a surreal life, caring for his daughter each day, gigging at clubs each night. He appeared on “The Tonight Show” and was a hit. They wanted him back. All the time, as his daughter’s condition worsened, the talent coordinator for Carson kept urging him to keep his material light – “Don’t be so dark and biting.” He was working on material for his second appearance while his daughter was in the hospital suffering from radiation treatments. “I have to be a clown,” he recalled, “because I have to earn a living to keep my family afloat. And nobody wants a clown who is not funny.” Suppressing all these true feelings, he was light, and he is funny, and the second appearance on “The Tonight Show” went even better. On the same day that he is preparing for a third appearance on Carson’s show—he got a call from the doctor. The doctor told him they’d done all they could, and nothing else could be done for his daughter. He asked how long. The doctor said six weeks at most and that “they should plan for that.” Anthony Griffith thought to himself: I had planned to buy my daughter a bicycle. I had planned to walk her to school on the first day of kindergarten. I had planned to take pictures of her going to her first prom. I was planning a career that now included “The Tonight Show.” How do you plan to buy a dress for your two year old daughter to be buried in?2 How do we plan for a week like this—this week of Jesus’ Passion? Every-

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    body that week in Jerusalem long ago had plans—the powers-that-be had their plans, people like us like to think we have urgent plans, Jesus, presumably, had plans, but how do any of us plan for this? The religious and political authorities had plans; they always have plans to deal with the likes of Jesus. Usurp, absorb, ignore, snuff out if you must. That’s the plan. T.E. Lawrence, better known as “Lawrence of Arabia,” reflected on the success and ultimate failure of his trying to bring a measure of justice to those crushed under imperialism early last century, when he said:

    We lived many lives in those swirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves any good or evil; yet when we had achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again, and took from us our victory, and remade it in the likeness of the former world they knew. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven, and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly, and made their peace.3

    The plans the authorities made early in the week probably hardly even thought of Jesus. Usurp, absorb, ignore, snuff out if you must—but keep a lock on the world that you know How was Jesus a threat to the world to which they held fast with power and threat and privilege? A colleague recently pointed this out: last year, a TV talk show host called on Christians to “look for the words ‘social justice’ on your church’s website, and if you can find them there, run away… .[They] are code words for socialism, Nazism, communism. I picture that TV host among those who begged Jesus not to go to Jerusalem at such a politically volatile moment but to stay in Galilee, miles away from messy conflicts.”4 Our faith is not about socialism, Nazism, or communism, but it is about justice and a religious tradition that challenges social, political, and economic arrangements that work to the disadvantage of the poor and vulnerable. Jesus embodied that tradition—he stood with the vulnerable of the world and would not leave their side. And that was a threat. Palm Sunday suggests that if we are following Jesus, we’re right in the middle of all that mess and all those conflicts. It was the spring of 1963 in Birmingham, and the civil rights movement increasingly looked defeated. The city had more jail space than the civil rights workers had people. But then one Sunday, reports historian Taylor Branch, two thousand young people came—no older than our confirmation class—out of worship at the New Pilgrim Baptist Church and prepared to march. The police were shocked. How much longer was this going to go on? How many more people were they going to have to arrest? The line of young people was five blocks long. As the marchers approached the line of police officers and dogs, the notorious Bull Connor walked out to confront them, shouting for the firemen to turn on the hoses. The line of young people came close, face-to-face with Connor and the firemen and police. Then they knelt and prayed. The Rev. Charles Billups stood and shouted, “Turn on your water! Turn loose your dogs! We will stand here ’til

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    we die!” After a few moments, Billups and the young people walked forward, the hoses dropped, and the firemen parted.5 What kind of faith does it take to nurture Christians capable of living like that? What kind of savior is this that we follow into this week? We have plans for this week—we always have plans. John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, writes about “path dependence.” Path dependence refers to “something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice.”6 Does Holy Week give us any cause to change our plans? Years ago, Duke University hosted Billy Graham as the Sunday preacher at Duke Chapel. The week before Graham arrived, the office of university security called with urgent questions for the chapel office, like: “Will Graham be bringing his own security people?” And, “All his security forces needed to be registered with the university police.” If he was not bringing sufficient police with him, then the university police needed to be notified so that they could augment their security forces. They were told that the chapel must be emptied for at least three hours before the service, in order that a thorough search could be made for bombs. The chaplain dutifully called Dr. Graham, asking him about what security arrangements he required. Dr. Graham replied, “I have the Lord as my security. I plan to fly into Raleigh-Durham on Saturday afternoon and rent a car and drive it over to the hotel myself. It’ll just be me.” It seems that Billy Graham was determined to be a follower of the Savior who entered the city riding on a donkey.7 Who is this savior, and what are his plans? When Arcade Fire won a Grammy for album of the year, their lead singer came to the podium where a parade of egos had held forth all evening. Everybody expected a speech of triumph and self-indulgence. After all, that evening had already showcased Lady Gaga emerging from an egg, a short-skirted Katy Perry swinging from the ceiling, and Gwyneth Paltrow dancing in stilettos on a piano. Instead, the band said: “Thank you. We’re gonna go play another song because we like music.”8 Their “plan” it seemed was to do nothing except what they always did. To be who they always are. We should watch Jesus—what he says and what he does, what he doesn’t say and what he doesn’t do—before we make our plans for this week. Jesus doesn’t say to Pilate, “I’ll be back to even the score.” Jesus doesn’t say, “This isn’t fair.” In fact, Jesus doesn’t say much. Mostly, Jesus is silent. What does Jesus do? Well, while others appear fearful about what is happening, Jesus does not react to fear. In his poem, “How to Hide Jesus,” Steve Turner writes:

    There are people after Jesus. They have seen the signs. Quick, let’s hide Him. Let’s think; carpenter, fishermen’s friend,

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    disturber of religious comfort. Let’s award Him a degree in theology, a purple cassock and a position of respect. They’ll never think of looking here. Let’s think; His dialect may betray Him, His tongue is of the masses. Let’s teach Him Latin and seventeenth century English, they’ll never think of listening in. Let’s think; Humble, Man of Sorrows, nowhere to lay His head. We’ll build a house for Him, somewhere away from the poor. We’ll fill it with brass and silence. It’s sure to throw them off. There are people after Jesus. Quick, let’s hide Him.

    In 1903, the German poet, Rilke, enjoyed a correspondence with a young aspiring poet, in which he offered this advice: “Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” Then gradually, Rilke suggests, “You will live into the answers.”9 Perhaps more than anything else this week in Jerusalem long ago, Jesus lived the answers of the consequences of God’s radical, reckless abundant love, lived out in vulnerability in a world where we prefer to make our own plans. Fred Buechner once said,

    You can hardly blame Pilate for washing his hands of Jesus. He asks so bloody much, this Jesus. Bloody is the word for it What he calls us to is the terrifying game of letting him enormously move us as the story of him lives and breathes and converges on us beyond all our ideas of him; as it bids us, moves us, to do and to be God only knows what, which can be a very bloody business indeed if we do it right.10

    Stephen Tobolowsky is a character actor who has appeared in over 200 movies . Chances are you would recognize him, even if you’ve never heard of him. He plays Sandy Ryerson, a fired teacher on Glee. He was on Heroes. He played Ned – Needle-nose Ned, Ned the Head – in Groundhog Day. Twenty years ago, he portrayed the leader of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan in the movie Mississippi Burning. They filmed on location in rural Mississippi. For

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    Tobolowsky’s main scene – a Klan Rally – they invited local residents to serve as “extras” in the crowd, and reportedly half of the two thousand extras used their actual Klan membership cards as ID. The speech Tobolowsky was to give was in two parts. The first was to trumpet the virtues of Mississippi life. The second was more racially charged. The plan was to use the crowd for the first part of the speech, then send them home and film the second part, using close-ups. They shot take after take after take of the first part. But, an unexpected thing happened. One time, running through the speech, the director did not yell “cut” at the end of the first part. Tobolowsky , being a well trained actor, just kept going into the second part of the speech, the racially charged, hateful, Klan-laden part of the speech. The crowd reacted immediately. Not in a bad way. They started yelling: “You ought to run for governor! Tell it like it is!” The filming was stretching long into the early morning hours. After one cut, Tobolowsky was asked if he needed anything, and he said some tea would help his voice. One of the movie staffers yelled for Craft Services to get “Mr. Tobolowsky some tea.” “Hey,” they yelled, “we need some tea for Mr. Tobolowsky.” The only person left working Craft Services that night was a 14-year-old African American boy named Joshua. The staffer yelled again, “Hey, boy, didn’t you hear me the first time? Get some tea for Mr. Tobolowsky!” You could feel the hostility rise in the crowd. Finally, Joshua appeared. “Joshua, did you hear me?” “Yes sir,” Joshua replied. The staffer turned to Stephen Tobolowsky and politely asked, “What kind of tea would you like?” “Maybe some Earl Grey.” And then the staffer turned back to Joshua and yelled, “Boy, get Mr. Tobolowsky some Earl Grey tea!” The crowd—already amped up by the speech—was even more on edge. Joshua started to make his way through the hostile crowd to get the tea. Stephen Tobolowsky called after him. Joshua stopped and turned around. Their eyes met, and Joshua smiled. “Joshua, I’m sorry. ” The crowd, with all these KKK extras, tightened around the 14-year-old employee, blocking his way. Joshua stood there, looking up at the men. He never said a word, but held his ground. He took a few steps and then turned around and said to the actor, “Mister, you keep doing what you’re doing. You’re doing a real good job. Don’t worry about me – I’m going to be fine.” And at that, the boy turned back toward the crowd, and Stephen Tobolowsky watched two thousand people part to make a path for the boy to walk through. Later, Stephen Tobolowsky said, “What I learned that night from that young man was that courage is nothing that Hollywood makes it out to be—bravado, kicking down doors, or blasting away the enemy. Courage is a disciplined absence of fear. It is continuing on… continuing on in the face of all the obstacles or plans put in our way.”11 Jesus, in spite of our plans, ignoring our plans, focuses on only God’s intention for the world. Because Jesus is so convinced that God’s love conquers all, he just kept going. He kept going. He kept going all the way to the cross, trusting God to carry it all from there. Carry Jesus from there. Carry you from there. Carry every one of us…through anything and everything…from here on.

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    Notes 1 “Mona Lisa and Jesus” by Jamie Arpin-Ricci, posted on Red-Letter Christians blog, April 3,2011. 2 Anthony Griffith, “Best of Times, Worst of Times,” The Moth Podcast, March 21,2011. 3 As quoted by Jeff Greenfield in And Then Everything Change (New York: Putnam), 2010. 4 John Buchanan, “Amid Messy Politics,” The Christian Century, April 19, 2011. 5 Kyle Childress, “Reflection on the Lectionary,” Pulpit Resource, Logos, April 17,2011. 6 David Brooks, “Tools for Thinking,” The New York Times, March 29,2011. 7 William Willimon, “Jesus: Redefining Monarchy,” Pulpit Resource, Logos, April 17,2011. 8 Jesse James DeConto, “On Music: Arcade Fire, Anger, and Longing,” The Christian Century, April 19,2011. 9 William Sloane Coffin, Letters to a Young Doubter (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), Preface. 10 Cited in Context, edited by Martin Marty, December, 2010, Part B. 11 Stephen Tobolowsky, The Tobolowsky Files, Episode 39, “Contagion,” October 29,2010.

  • Preaching Easter at old first gnostic

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    Preaching Easter at Old First Gnostic

    Thomas G. Long

    Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

    “As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.” Mark 16:5-6

    “I do not think that anyone, anywhere, at any time brings dead people back to life.” John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography

    Old First Gnostic Church stands in a prominent place in town – actually in every town. Among its members are the “best and the brightest” – attorneys, physicians, teachers, thoughtful and open-minded people of every stripe. Old First Gnostic is Presbyterian, or perhaps it’s Methodist or Baptist or Lutheran or U.C.C, or Disciples. Stewardship at Old First Gnostic is always a challenge, especially in these economic times, but the money seems to come in eventually, and, of course, there is always the endowment. Parents at Old First Gnostic hope their children will grow up to make wise choices about their religion, but the main desire is for their children to be happy in life and to be good people. Old First Gnostic has a handsome and historic building and is holding its own in terms of membership, but worship attendance is a constant concern. The church has a professional (and expensive) music program and a fine choir, which provides inspiring and quality music in the Sunday services. The leadership of Old First Gnostic is well aware of the wildfire growth of the so-called “mega churches” in town, the ones with the energetic, digital-fueled worship services and sermons on topics like “Tweeting Jesus,” but their heads are not turned. In fact, Old First Gnostic sniffs at pop Christianity and understands itself as the alternative to such flashy and superficial churches. At Old First Gnostic, there are challenging adult forums on “ecology,” “understanding Islam,” and “What does the Bible really say about sex?” Old First Gnostic is progressive, inclusive, committed to education, and the pews are populated by smart, probing, intellectually honest people who prize thought-provoking and spiritually challenging sermons. It is the kind of church many astute clergy yearn to serve. Easter, however, is a problem at Old First Gnostic.

    Gnosticism Redux It has been twenty years since cultural and literary critic Harold Bloom declared that American religion is “irretrievably Gnostic.” By this bold claim, made in The American Religion: the Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation,1 Bloom was arguing that, despite what denominations and congregations may say officially about their creeds and convictions, their true religion is Gnosticism. American religion, claimed Bloom, rests its faith not on revelation, but instead on gnosis, “a knowing, by and of an uncreated self, or self-within-the-self.” This gnosis, which is at one and the same

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    time divine inner illumination and self-knowledge, is seen as a knowledge that leads to freedom, but it is “a dangerous and doom-eager freedom: from nature, time, history , community, and other selves.”2 At first, Bloom’s book was poorly received, to say the least. Suspicions were already loose that Bloom was a quirky and unreliable interpreter of religion because of the publication two years earlier of The Book of J, a runaway bestseller with the headline-grabbing claim that the Yah wist strand of the Torah was written by a woman in the Solomonic court, perhaps even a daughter of King Solomon himself. When The American Religion appeared, then, Bloom’s readers already had an eyebrow arched over his amateur forays into religion. This new book, with its rash and sometimes sloppy claims about American Gnosticism, was seen by critics as overblown and uninformed, “a trifle eccentric”3 and as “suffering from Bloom’s usual vices – arrogance and melodramatic exaggeration – to mention a tin ear to some aspects of the faith… .”4 It didn’t help that, a few years later, Bloom trumped himself in Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection, where he gleefully hinted that Jesus himself was probably a Gnostic, whose subtle wisdom was misunderstood and mangled by an irascible and authoritarian apostle Paul.5 In retrospect, though, Bloom had a better critical eye than it first seemed. For all of his brashness and blather, he nevertheless managed to detect an authentic impulse in the American soul, to name the Gnostic spirit that animates much of our homegrown religion, especially American Protestantism. For Bloom, Gnosticism was a broad and pervasive theme, and he saw it everywhere – especially among the indigenous American religious “brands,” such as Mormons, Southern Baptists, and Christian Scientists. But what is far more interesting is what Bloom largely overlooked, the more focused and well-defined sort of Gnosticism that lately has begun to appeal to some of the most thoughtful and progressive people in the old mainline churches, the faith of those gathered, in my imagination, at Old First Gnostic. For a variety of complicated reasons, reasons that have been well explored elsewhere,6 what might be called historic or apostolic Christianity, with its ancient creeds, truth claims, and churchly embodiments, seems less and less plausible to many people today. Some, feeling the burden of creeds they can no longer honestly recite and churchly institutions they no longer find life-giving, have wandered away from church altogether into private spirituality, or into nothing. But others have remained on the rolls and in the pews, loyal but restless pilgrims wandering through the ruins of their ancestors’ faith. For some of the most discerning of these pilgrims, even as traditional talk of miracles or the saving power of Jesus or the second coming of Christ seems increasingly detached from reality, an alternative language of faith, constructed out of strands of spirituality and pragmatism already present in the American experience, has grown up to rival the older formulae. And Bloom is right. This alternative expression bears a striking family resemblance to an old nemesis that has dogged Christian faith virtually from the beginning, namely Gnosticism. Many of these “spiritual but hesitantly religious” pilgrims have become the congregants in Old First Gnostic. In the early church, Gnosticism was the minority report, a threat to orthodoxy perhaps, but a conviction voiced mainly by a few marginalized elites. But now, argues Bloom,it has become amass phenomenon. “There are tens of millions of Americans,” he says, “whose obsessive idea of spiritual freedom violates the normative basis of

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    historical Christianity, although they are incapable of realizing how little they share of what was considered Christian doctrine.”7 Irenaeus, the second-century bishop of Lyons, furiously battled the Gnosticism infecting the churches in Gaul. His famous treatise on the subject is usually referred to as Against Heresies, but the proper title is The Detection and Overthrow of the Pretended but False Gnosis. Today, Gnosticism is best considered not as a heresy and certainly not as something to be sniffed out, detected, and overthrown, but instead as a certain impulse that often rises in Christianity whenever the claims of the faith and the structures of the church are perceived as implausible, or perhaps worse, as rigid, intellectually dishonest, confining, violent and oppressive. In contemporary Gnosticism, we see not some kind of counterinsurgency to orthodoxy , but instead as a place of spiritual refuge, a place where thinking Christians often go when they can no longer make sense of the creeds and can no longer abide what they perceive as mindless and dogmatic authoritarianism and institutional failure in the churches. Today’s Gnostics do not stand in direct historical continuity with the folk who beleaguered Irenaeus. Gnosticism is not like Anglicanism or Lutheranism, a historically continuous movement with a chain of leaders, a literary heritage, and a set of institutions to preserve its memory. To the contrary, Gnosticism is a kind of escape from historical continuity and institutional embodiment. It erupts when history seems contaminated and institutions are broken. It is more akin to a motif like “the spirit of rebellion,” a phenomenon that recurs in history whenever historical circumstances breed its appearance. The rising quotient of Gnosticism among many of the most alert and intelligent Christians should command our attention, not because it needs to be rooted out, but because it needs to be challenged afresh by the gospel it never fully grasped and, therefore, felt it must leave behind. Contemporary Gnostic Christianity presents itself as bold, mature, and intellectually honest, but it is actually a pale, thinned-out, basically bourgeois, and finally lonely version of the faith. We should pay attention to those in the pews at Old First Gnostic, not because they have dangerous ideas to be feared, but because of what Gnostic Christianity misses about the fullness of the gospel and the richness of the Easter faith.

    Seekers Enlightened vs. Sinners Saved What is contemporary American Gnosticism? What do Gnostics believe? There are many places we could look for answers (and there is far more to say than can be said here), but we could hardly do better than to explore the pages of Robin Myers’ Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshipping Christ and Start Following Jesus. This engaging book with the sensationalist title is delightfully written, witty, aptly illustrated, and winsomely addressed to intelligent lay and clergy readers. It is also a pitch-perfect expression of a Gnosticized Christianity. It could well sit on the book table at Old First Gnostic. If one of the basic quests of faith is to draw closer to God, to be at one with God, then many traditional Christians would point to the work of Jesus Christ and to the cross and say with Paul, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” They would sing, “Amazing grace, how sweet that sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found….” Myers, however, points to a different center of the faith: obviously, no matter how much preaching we hear to the contrary, fewer

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    and fewer of us actually order our lives around the axis of sin and salvation. Rather, we order it around a search for meaning in a world that often seems meaningless. We are looking for a teacher, not a savior.8 At root, Christian Gnosticism is a search for meaning, and it vibrates to the conviction that human beings are transformed by special spiritual knowledge (gnosis), rather than being saved by the power of the cross and grace. In the ancient Gnostic texts, Elaine Pagels observes, Jesus “speaks of illusion and enlightenment, not of sin and repentance. Instead of coming to save us from sin, he comes as a guide to open access to spiritual understanding.”9 In short, Gnosticism celebrates the Jesus Myers desires, a teacher, not a savior. In the Book of Common Prayer, this traditional confession appears:

    Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, we have offended against thy holy laws, we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, spare thou those who confess their faults, restore thou those who are penitent, according to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesus our Lord; and grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, to the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

    Virtually every phrase of this prayer rubs the folk at Old First Gnostic the wrong way. The prayer depicts human beings who have thought and desired and loved their way into tragic consequences. Strikingly, it is not humanity at its worst that has become lost sheep; it is humanity aspiring to be its best whose “devices and desires of our own hearts” have contradicted what is wise and holy. Humanity cannot find its own way to life and, therefore, must stand in humble penitence pleading with God for mercy, restoration, and guidance. For John Calvin, human beings are magnificent creatures, capable of artistic beauty, noble philosophies, and powerful works of charity, but always prone, even in our highest achievements, to self-deception and destruction. Like Amish quilters who intentionally drop a stitch as a testimony to the imperfection of even our most beautiful efforts, Calvin saw moral ambiguity even in the purest human intent and action. Thus, the rhythm of penitence and restoration is a lifelong process, a kind of holy and merciful warfare the end of which is divine redemption:

    This restoration does not take place in one moment or one day or one year; but through continual and sometimes even slow advances God wipes out in his elect the corruptions of the flesh, cleanses them of guilt, consecrates them to himself as temples, renewing all their minds to true purity that they may practice repentance throughout their lives as and know that this warfare will end only in death.10

    To the folk at Old First Gnostic, all of this breast-beating over sinfulness is seen as weak, passive, and misguided, a kind of groveling, unbecoming to our status as

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    rational creatures with a free will and made in the image of God. The members of Old First Gnostic are thoughtful people, most of them responsible members of society, and they cannot imagine themselves as inherently self-deceptive or destructive. They’re not perfect, of course. Maybe they are not fully informed, and, therefore, need to be educated, or perhaps they have not arrived at full maturity, and are, thus, in need of growth, but, with proper guidance, they can think and feel their way toward the good. To know God is to know oneself, and truly to know oneself is to know God. As Pagels says of Gnostics, “[S]elf-knowledge is knowledge of God, the self and the divine are identical.”11 The favorite text at Old First Gnostic could well be what Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” We see here a collision of theological anthropologies. Is the human condition one of captivity to sin? Then we need a God who comes as liberator and savior. Or is it basically one of lack of true wisdom? Then we need a God who comes to illumine the wise path so that we can choose it. Gnosticism puts its dime on gnosis – illumination and wisdom; Gnosticism is a religion of enlightenment. As Myers puts it,

    [The] two roads that “diverged in a yellow wood” so long ago looked equally fair, but now one is well worn. It is the road of the Fall and redemption , original sin, and the Savior. The other is the road of enlightenment, wisdom, creation-centered spirituality, and a nearly forgotten object of discipleship: transformation. This is the road less traveled. It seeks not to save our souls but to restore them.12

    For Myers, Jesus is not a savior, but a sage, and the church, he thinks, is confused because it wants to “believe in” Jesus instead of simply learning from him and following him:

    This difference, between following and worshiping, is not insignificant. Worshiping is an inherently passive activity, since it involves the adoration of that to which the worshiper cannot aspire. It takes the form of praise, which can be both sentimental and self-satisfying, without any call to changed behavior or self-sacrifice. In fact, Christianity as a belief system requires nothing but acquiescence. Christianity as a way of life, as a path to follow, requires a second birth, the conquest of ego, and new eyes with which to see the world. It is no wonder that we have preferred to be saved.13

    So for Myers (and for the flock at Old First Gnostic), traditional worship runs the danger of passivity because it involves bowing down before a so-called divine Jesus we cannot ourselves become or even imitate. The sage Jesus, however, doesn’t save us, because we don’t need to be saved, and he doesn’t ask us to bow before him in worship, because he is simply a more spiritually mature version of ourselves. Rather he enlightens our souls through wisdom and helps us grow beyond our egos, even to the point that, by learning and following, we can ourselves become Jesus-like. This reflects, of course, an extraordinarily low Christology. It also reflects an optimism about humanity that is not only thoroughly Gnostic but also – and here

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    again Bloom is right – as American as apple pie. It is a view that found powerful voice in Emerson, who believed that we should call Jesus a great man because he, alone in all history, saw how great we are. For Emerson, the incarnation was not the Word become flesh in Jesus of Nazareth; it was the divine infused in all flesh, the holy merged with all humanity. Jesus’ message was, “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.”14 In other words, if you want to see God today, look at me when I am thinking right, when I am thinking like Jesus. American spirituality loves this theme. It was heard in the nineteenth century in Emerson, in the twentieth century in the “power of positive thinking” of Norman Vincent Peale and the “possibility thinking” of Robert Schuller , and in the twenty-first century in the Gnostic self-help preaching of Joel Osteen, who says, “Remember, you have the DNA of Almighty God. He has equipped you with everything you need to fulfill your destiny.”15 In a more liberal form, this same message is softly proclaimed from the pulpit of Old First Gnostic. When Dietrich Bonhoeffer reflected on his experience at Union Seminary in New York in the early 1930s and his exposure to American Christianity, he was alarmed to find even then the reduction of the gospel to religion (what we would today call “spirituality”) and ethics (doing good in the name of Jesus) that we find in full flower at Old First Gnostic. American theology, he discovered, was essentially natural theology , devoid of Christology, lacking any notion that God is in Christ redeeming the world, including the church. He said,

    God has granted American Christianity no Reformation. …American theology and the American church as a whole have never been able to understand the meaning of “criticism” by the Word of God and all that signifies. Right to the last they do not understand that God’s “criticism” touches even religion, the Christianity of the churches and the sanctification of Christians, and that God has founded his church beyond religion and beyond ethics. A symptom of this is the general adherence to natural theology. In American theology, Christianity is still essentially religion and ethics. But because of this, the person and work of Jesus Christ must, for theology, sink into the background and in the long run remain misunderstood , because it is not recognized as the sole ground of radical judgment and radical forgiveness.16

    Being Enlightened vs. Being Credulous Because Gnosticism is all about personal illumination, it inevitably implies two classes of Christians: the enlightened and the unenlightened. Some early Gnostics, in fact, practiced two forms of baptism: a first, cruder, water baptism, and a second, higher, more spiritual baptism. In the first, converts promised to serve and obey God the creator, lawgiver, and judge. In the second, the faithful, having progressed beyond all such primitive images of God, were welcomed into a more elevated and enlightened understanding of God as the source of all wisdom and being. The second baptism was a sign of maturity, evidence of moving from being God’s servant to being God’s offspring.17 Old First Gnostic likewise defines itself over against less enlightened forms of

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    Christianity, and its members have chosen this church precisely because it does not participate in the Bible-thumping, judgmental dogmatism they see in so many other churches. In Myers’ book, too, there lurks the specter of unenlightened American Christianity. He consistently contrasts his views of Christianity with a naive and credulous literalism that sees the faith as acquiescence to fictions such as the virgin birth and the divinity of Christ. At one point, he dreams of dumping out the garbage of typical churchly Christianity: “Just imagine that we could take an industrial-size garbage bag and fill it with every discredited myth in the church—the inerrancy of scripture, the virgin birth, the miracles as suspension of natural law, the blood atonement , the bodily resurrection, and the second coming. Twist it, tie it up, and carry it out to the curb. It will be gone in the morning.”18 With the garbage disposed of, what remains is Jesus the ethicist, the Jesus who teaches the Beatitudes. The creeds are all gone, the demands for belief in unscientific claims tossed into the dumpster. “The questions are all ethical,” says Myers. “None are theological. How can we do the will of God? No one thinks to write a creed.”19 On the Maginot Line between enlightened and unenlightened Christianity, Myers and at least two other popular contemporary Gnostic writers, Marcus Borg and John Shelby Spong, constantly wage war with conservative, literalistic, near fundamentalist Christianity. Why? They would claim that this malformation of the faith must be battled because it is the default drive understanding in popular Christianity and, consequently, very powerful and destructive. But I suspect that two other reasons also motivate their combat. First, all three of them grew up in rigid, conservative religious environments, and they seem compelled to do battle with the demons of their past. Second – and they would all vehemently protest this analysis – they are engaged in pitched battle with literalistic Christianity because they’re actually fighting for the same turf. Despite the claims of these writers to read the Bible poetically and metaphorically , they actually tend toward the same kind of literalism found in conservative circles. Spong, for example, who once wrote a book called Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (Jesus may not be a savior, but Spong surely is), wrote another book, this one about the Resurrection, in which he surveys the Bible’s multiple accounts of Easter and finds them collectively to be “an inconsistent, contradictory, mutually exclusive witness,”20 which, of course, they are when read with the eyes of wooden literalism. Myers thinks that the New Testament writers took the simple story of an ethical sage named Jesus and, in the name of “marketing,” “propaganda,” and the accumulation of power, transformed it into a supernatural fable about the Son of God that no reasonable, thinking person could swallow, which of course it is if the reductionist enlightenment definition of “supernatural” is allowed to deal the cards. Myers thinks that scholarly methods, such as those employed by the Jesus Seminar , allow us to reverse the damage and the mangling done by the New Testament writers and to return to an Ur-Jesus, the Galilean sage and his unvarnished ethical wisdom. (Myers, like most of the contemporary Gnostics, is enamored of the Jesus Seminar and its new quest for the historical Jesus, but for all of this supposed interest in “history,” in true Gnostic fashion history ends up – like creeds, institutions, and all other humanly constructed realities — being a vulgar, embodied, contaminant . The pure Jesus was defaced by the “fingerprints” of the Gospel writers and the political manipulations of the historical process.) When Myers demythologizes

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    the New Testament accounts of Jesus, he actually stands on the same scientifically governed playing field as fundamentalists. Fundamentalists read the biblical myths and say they are scientifically and historically true. Myers reads them and says they are scientifically and historically bogus. The literalists say Jesus walked on water; Myers says, “No, he didn’t.” They say, “It’s a fact;” he replies, “No, it’s not a fact,” but both are working with the same flat, fact-based understanding of truth. Myers scoffs at uncritical believers who slap, “The Bible says it; I believe it; and that settles it” bumper stickers on their cars by essentially slapping a bumper sticker on his car that reads, “The Bible says it; I don’t believe it; and that settles it.” For Gnostics, spiritual wisdom is not exactly the equivalent of rationalism, but it must pass the test of scientific rationality. Charles Taylor describes the intellectual plight of thoughtful contemporary people who want to have faith but who have to pass all the claims of faith through the truth filter of modern science, that is to say, the very people who sit in the pews at Old First Gnostic:

    But today, when a naturalistic materialism is not only an offer, but presents itself as the only view compatible with the most prestigious institution of the modern world, viz., science; it is quite conceivable that one’s doubts about one’s own faith, about one’s ability to be transformed, or one’s sense of how one’s own faith is childish and inadequate, could mesh with this powerful ideology, and send one off along the path of unbelief, even though with regret and nostalgia.21

    Taylor’s account allows us to see why writers like Myers, Spong, and Borg have such an enthusiastic audience at Old First Gnostic. Like all Gnostics, they provide a definition of an “adult” and “mature” faith that transcends childish belief, one that does “mesh with this powerful ideology” of the contemporary gnosis called science. They enable people to be loyal citizens of the world carved out by post-enlightenment scientific rationality while at the same time holding onto a vestige of faith. They accomplish this by turning the wine into water, by transforming the Jesus who healed the sick and fed the multitudes into a sage who utters Gnostic illumination, ethical wisdom, to our souls.

    The Crisis of Easter So now it is Easter at Old First Gnostic, and we have a problem. The members are persuaded that traditional Christianity expects them to believe an Easter claim they find impossible to affirm, that Jesus was killed on a Roman cross on Friday afternoon , but on Sunday morning he was resuscitated, alive again, embodied, and was walking around on the earth, the recipient of a science-defying, supernatural miracle. Only those who believe this, goes the party line, are saved and will go to heaven. The congregation at Old First Gnostic resists these claims, and Myers speaks for them:

    Sadly, the church has been declaring all those who do not believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus to be heretics…. This includes thoughtful, committed Christians who do not believe that Easter has anything to do with the resuscitation of a corpse or believing things you know are not true in order to get rewards you secretly doubt are available. We don’t live in a

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    three-story universe anymore, and the disappearance and reappearance of corpses should be left behind with the ideas of demon possession, slavery, and the subordination of women.

    Myers, operating within the framework of scientific gnosis, describes the plight of Easter worshippers at Old First Gnostic: “They come to Easter service believing that they must believe the impossible in order to feel the implausible. Before they can sing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus,’ they must check their brain at the door. God’s ‘yes’ to Jesus is assumed to be a ‘no’ to the laws of the physical universe.”22 So what is Easter to these Gnostics, to these scientific rationalists? To begin with, it’s not about a bodily resurrection; it’s about a spiritual resurrection. “Some gnostics,” writes Elaine Pagels, “called the literal view of the resurrection the ‘faith of fools.’ The resurrection, they insisted, was not a unique event of the past: instead, it symbolized how Christ’s presence could be experienced in the present. What mattered was not literal seeing, but spiritual vision.”23 Myers agrees. Easter is not about something that happened to Jesus; it is about spirituality, something happening now in the hearts and souls of the followers of Jesus. The reason the New Testament presents the resurrection as an embodied reality is because of a limitation in ancient Judaism. For “Jews, there could be no resurrection without a resurrection of the body. How could one ‘rise’ without a body to rise in?”24 But, of course, for more enlightened (non-Jewish?) moderns, we know that events can happen in our psyches without the need for crude notions of embodiment. “The nonspatial ‘interior life,’” says Myers, “is a modern, psychological concept.”25 At Easter, the disciples had their hearts transformed by the reassurance that the enlightened teachings of Jesus were existentially true and imperishable. Myers, citing John Dominic Crossan, states, “Easter is not about the start of a new faith but about the continuation of an old one. That is the only miracle and the only mystery, and it is more than enough of both.”26 Jesus did not rise to new and embodied life, but instead, as Bultmann claimed, ” ‘ Jesus rose into the kerygma’—that is, into the faith of the first believers.”27 To insist on a bodily resurrection, argues Myers, becoming explicit about his Gnosticism, “cuts us off from all those generous and compassionate latter-day gnostics for whom Easter is a spiritual, not a molecular , event.”28 Leaning again on the creed of scientific rationality, Myers insists, “To ask the question of whether the resurrection is true, and to mean by this that only a resuscitated corpse constitutes such proof, is to impose the standards of the modern mind upon a prescientific culture of myth and magic.”29 Bishop Spong is even more fulsome about how Easter is an event of the interior life of disciples. Here, according to Spong, is what happened:

    One night in the early fall, Simon and his mates had a particularly good catch. They were happy as they dragged the fish ashore. They built a fire, placed some of their catch on the grill, brought out the bread from the boat, and prepared to feast. As was his custom, Simon took the bread, said the ceremonial blessing, broke and distributed it. In his blessing, he likened the bread to Jesus’ broken body. Both, he said, were meant to give life. Then it happened. A light went on in Simon’s head. It was as if the heavens opened and so did Simon’s eyes, and Simon stared into the realm

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    of God. There he saw Jesus as part of God’s being and God’s meaning. It was not delusional. Death could not destroy the one who made God known. “Death cannot contain him. I have seen the Lord!” was Simon’s ecstatic exclamation. Then Simon opened the eyes of the others to what he saw. Each of them grasped this vision, experienced Jesus alive, and were themselves resurrected. That was Easter. It was both objective and subjective, but above all it was real.30

    So, what’s the problem here? This spiritualized understanding of Easter allows thoughtful people to hold onto their faith while not relinquishing a scientific worldview . What is more, the members at Old First Gnostic can become ethical followers of Sage Jesus. They may not be able to recite the Apostles’ Creed without crossing their fingers behind their backs, but they do take up the cause of the poor, the outcast, and the marginalized. By their fruits you shall know them. No harm; no foul. But, there is, in fact, a foul. Gnostic faith finally shipwrecks on the shoals of its own rationality and ends up impoverishing the Christian life. To begin with, it is selfcontradictory . Like Bultmann, it wants to view the mythological claims of scripture as the outdated vestiges of an obsolete worldview. It wishes to affirm in the Bible only what can be affirmed within the constraints of modern science. As Myers says, “We don’t live in a three-story universe anymore,” and no one wants to have beliefs that violate the laws of the physical universe. However, in a world of physical laws, a world largely bereft of divine agency, contemporary Gnostics nevertheless affirm that there is still one tiny space where God still reigns, namely, the faith experience of believers. But they are playing poker with the house. If God performs no mighty works externally, what reason do we have for affirming them internally, in our souls? We see here Bultmann’s (and the contemporary Gnostics’) failure of nerve. They are eager to accept a world of natural laws and rationality and bold to reject any idea of God operating outside those constraints, but that have no issue with a God who operates inside the tiny tableau of our psyches. “God acts on me, speaks to me, here and now,” says Bultmann.31 Paul Ricoeur names the inconsistency: “It is striking that Bultmann makes hardly any demands on this language of faith, whereas he was so suspicious about the language of myth.” As Kevin J. Vanhoozer puts it, “Bultmann is critical of the mythos…employed by the biblical authors for speaking of God’s acts but uncritical of his own.”32 The deepest sadness about Gnostic Christianity, though, is not in its internal inconsistencies , but instead in what it misses about the Easter gospel. The resurrection of Jesus, indeed the resurrection of Jesus’ body, is not a magic trick or a supernatural violation of the so-called laws of nature. The New Testament depiction of the risen Christ is not, as Myers would name it, a “resuscitated corpse.” The risen Christ is a glorified body, one that is both continuous and radically discontinuous with the body of the historical Jesus. The followers of Jesus recognize him, and they don’t. The risen Jesus is not a ghost and invites his disciples to touch him, but the risen Jesus walks through locked doors and disappears from their sight. The risen Christ is embodied in history but transcends it. The affirmation that God raised Jesus from the dead, says New Testament scholar Steven Kraftchick, is a claim that cannot be proven by the mechanisms of logic or history, for—like the claim of Christ’s “new life”—it is a claim of faith. Such

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    claims have historical consequences, but ultimately they speak of matters beyond history. Thus, the attempts to “prove” or demonstrate the truth of the resurrection as a historical event will founder on their own suppositions because they misconceive the nature of the resurrection claims themselves. To claim that the resurrection is real is to make a statement that stands in judgment of our historical and logical capacities; it cannot therefore be exhausted by them.33

    The resurrection of Jesus’ body is unbounded good news, and the good folk at Old First Gnostic need to hear it proclaimed. The resurrection of Jesus’ body is, first, an affirmation of creation. The God who raised Jesus – not just in spirit, but in body – is a God of embodiment, the God whose Word became flesh and dwelled among us, the God who took formless dust and shaped it into a sacrament, a gift of embodied grace, a creation that was and remains “very good.” Wendell Berry’s moving novel Jay ber Crow is titled after the name of the barber in the small village of Port William, Kentucky. At one point, Jayber expresses bafflement over the preachers in their local church who preach sermons about the evils of the world and the flesh:

    [T]his religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to me… .While the wickedness of the flesh was preached from the pulpit, the young husbands and wives and young courting couples sat thigh to thigh, full of yearning and joy, and the old people thought of the beauty of the children. And when church was over they’d go home to Heavenly dinners of fried chicken, it might be, and creamed new peas and hot biscuits and butter and cherry pie and sweet milk and buttermilk. …[A]nd the preacher, having just foresworn on behalf of everybody the joys of the flesh, would eat with unconsecrated relish.

    The resurrection of Jesus’ body is not only an affirmation of the goodness of the creation, it is also a validation of the ministry of Jesus. Jesus was not simply a sage who left behind some inspiring thoughts; he embodied the presence of the reign of God. He touched lepers with healing, he put his hands on the eyes of the blind, he overturned the tables in the Temple, he opened his mouth to speak parables, he broke bread and fed the hungry crowds, he raised a twelve-year-old girl to new life, and he set his face to go to Jerusalem where he offered his body and his life, even to death on a cross. Easter’s good news is not that a mystical light goes on in our heads, but that the mercy and grace, embodied in what Jesus did with his hands, what he spoke with his mouth, and where his feet took him, is now validated as eternal truth. He performed acts of liberation and spoke words of wisdom. With his body, he was both savior and teacher. He put his body in harm’s way for the sake of others, and the body of the risen Lord still bears the wounds of what the world did to him. The memory of his life, the memory of his self-giving love even to death, is held and preserved in his risen body. The resurrection of Jesus’ body is also a call both to repentance and hope. Repentance , because the resurrection is God’s validation of the way of life embodied in Jesus; all other ways are exposed and judged as the ways of death. Hope, because

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    Jesus’ way of life is now glorified in the risen body; it is this way of life that will endure, and all others will pass away. The resurrection of Jesus’ body summons us to trust no other truth than what we have seen and heard in him and to find our hope in his body, that is, in living in our own lives the pattern of embodied faithfulness we saw in him. As John Howard Yoder has said,

    [T]he cross and not the sword, suffering and not brute power determines the meaning of history. The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience. The triumph of the right is assured not by the might that comes to the aid of the right, which is of course the justification of the use of violence and other kinds of power in every human conflict. The triumph of the right, although it is assured, is sure because of the power of the resurrection and not because of any calculation of causes and effects, nor because of the inherently greater strength of the good guys. The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship of cause and effect but one of cross and resurrection.34

    The resurrection of Jesus’ body discloses the difference between what counts and what doesn’t count in life. Some people seek spiritual renewal in the “thin places,” such as Iona or mountaintop retreats, and these are worthy sanctuaries, perhaps, but the resurrection of Jesus’ body reveals that true depth is found in those places where people, often unnoticed by others, are placing their own bodies in the shape of Jesus’ life. The mother who is up all night with a sick child, the husband who cares tenderly for his wife whose Alzheimer’s is so advanced she no longer knows his name, the sister who prays for and seeks to help her alcoholic brother, the office worker who risks her job by speaking out against racial injustice in her company, the father who proudly takes the hand of his autistic son and walks with him to the first, and frightening , day of school — these are the places, the embodiments, of real holiness. The resurrection of Jesus’ body affirms that these quiet places of service and sacrifice are eternally valid, forever remembered in the life of God. As John Ames, the old minister in Marilyn Robinson’s novel Gilead, says,

    I know this [world] is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.35

    The gospel, said Yoder, discloses “that people who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe. .. .One comes to [that belief ] by sharing the life of those who sing about the Resurrection of the slain Lamb.” On Easter, brave and faithful preachers will stand up, even at Old First Gnostic,

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    and proclaim with joy, “He is risen! He is risen indeed!”

    Notes 1 Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). 2 The American Religion, 49. 3 John J. Reilly, “Getting Over the End of the World,” First Things (February, 1997), 44. 4 Jeremy Lott, “American Gnostic: Harold Bloom’s ‘Post-Christian Nation’ Ten Years On,” Books and Culture 8/6 (Nov-Dec, 2002), 36. 5 Reilley, “Getting Over the End of the World,” 46. 6 For a superb treatment of these trends, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007). 7 Bloom, The American Religion, 263. 8 Robin R. Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 7. 9 Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), xx. 10 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I/III. 11 Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, xx. 12 Meyers, Saving Jesus, 10. 13 Myers, Saving Jesus, 15. 14 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Divinity School Address,” delivered in the Divinity College at Harvard, July 15,1838. Accessed at http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/dsahyp. html. 15 Joel Osteen, It s Your Time: Activate Your Faith, Achieve Your Dreams, and Increase in God’s Favor (New York: Simon and Schuster. 2009), 303. 16 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, Vol. I (London: Collins, 1965), 112-113. 17 Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 136-139. 18 Myers, Saving Jesus, 33. 19 Ibid., 34. 20 John Shelby Spong, Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (San Francisco: Harper, 1994), 105. 21 Taylor, A Secular Age, 28. 22 Myers, Saving Jesus, 77. 23 Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, 11. 24 Myers, Saving Jesus, 76. 25 Myers, Saving Jesus, 77. 26 Myers, Saving Jesus, 90. 27 Myers, Saving Jesus, 76. 28 Myers, Saving Jesus, 93. 29 Myers, Saving Jesus, 76. 30 John Shelby Spong, “The Easter Moment: Drawing Conclusions,” Beliefnet, accessed as http://www. beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/2001/04/The-Easter-Moment-Drawing-Conclusions.aspx 31 Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 64. 32 Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 17. 33 Steven Kraftchick, “The Demands of Resurrection,” Insights: the Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary 123/1 (Fall, 2007), 18. 34 John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Ra[ids: Eerdmans, 1994), 232. 35 Marilyn Robinson, Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004), 52.