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  • Protagonist corner [Advent 2010]

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    Protagonist Corner

    Justo L. González

    Decatur, Georgia

    These days, “welcoming the stranger” has become a common theme in many churches and denominations. This is understandable as part of a valid and needed reaction to the growing xenophobia that seems to be gripping the nation. Too often, however, we move so quickly to our own role as do-gooders that we forget to ask the previous question, “Who is the stranger?” The answer is not that simple, for it is not just a matter of describing the stranger, but rather of determining first of all who among us is the stranger, and who the host. Several decades ago, my own United Methodist denomination had a flourishing Latino congregation in a large city here in the Southeast. It was the time when the Interstate Highway System was being built, and since this congregation’s facilities stood on the right of way, they were taken over by the government in exchange for their fair value. As the congregation debated where to build a new church, they were approached by the denomination with a very sensible suggestion. There was a declining church nearby whose building was in need of significant repairs. If the Latino congregation would invest its money in such repairs, the two congregations would be able to share the building. This was done, and for quite some time the arrangement worked without a hitch. But eventually there were frictions between the two congregations. These grew to such a point that the bishop came to try to mediate the differences. After listening to both sides, he turned to the members of the Latino congregation and said, “I know this is difficult for you; but after all, you must remember that you are guests in this church….” The bishop was wrong on at least two counts. First, he was obviously wrong in that he did not know his facts. He simply took for granted that he knew who were the hosts and who were the guests, who really belonged and who was a stranger. A bit of research would have been in order. But he was too busy to look into the facts, and he thought his stereotypes would suffice. But this was not his only error. He also erred theologically. He forgot that in the church we are all guests. We are all unworthy guests who have been welcomed and continue being welcomed by the grace of God. The church does not belong to us. We may have paid for the building. We may pay the utilities and hire the pastor. My grandmother’s name may be on one of the stained-glass windows. But still, it is not our church. This is a fact of which we are reminded whenever we celebrate communion and say and hear the words, “This is the Lord’s table. Our Savior invites those who trust in him to share the feast which he has prepared.” The church is built around the Lord’s table, and it is therefore the Lord’s and not ours. Thus, when we speak of “welcoming the stranger,” we must begin by acknowledging that we are all strangers. We may be strangers who have come to the feast a bit earlier. We may be the instruments the Lord is employing to set up the feast. But we are still strangers. The table does not belong to us, and neither does the church. We are all latecomers to the feast. The Epistle to the Ephesians puts it bluntly: “Remember that you were once without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenant of promise” (2.12). We are all aliens to Israel,

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    brought to join the people of God by the gracious love of the same one who chose Israel, not because of who Israel was, but because of who God is. It is only as a result of the grace of God that the words apply to us: “You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God” (2.19). We who by nature were aliens, by grace have been made citizens—no matter whether we have immigration papers or not! We who by nature were strangers, by grace have been made part of the family—no matter what our race, last name, or national origin! Our reason for welcoming is not that we are nice, friendly people. It is not that we feel pity for the stranger. Our reason for welcoming is that we too have been welcomed. Paul says it quite clearly in well-known words in Romans 15: “Welcome one another … just as Christ has welcomed you.” But there is more. Surprisingly, the only one among us who by rights is not a stranger is the one who “was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own did not accept him.” The NRSV says, “His ovmpeople did not accept him.” But the Greek does not say that. The Greek actually says, “He came to what was his own, and what was own his did not accept him.” It is not merely a matter of his own Jewish people rejecting him; it is a matter of a cosmic rejection. Jesus was made a stranger in that which was his, in the world that was made through him. We are part of that creation which was his and yet received him not. We are among those who made the Lord a stranger—who constantly and repeatedly, through our sin, by our many rejections, continue making him a stranger. We are not hosts welcoming strangers. We are strangers who often refuse to acknowledge the host. And yet the Host who is repeatedly made a stranger continues inviting us to his table and into his church. And then, to complicate matters still more, the Host gives us a chance to receive him as if we were the hosts, and he the guest. “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me . .. [for] just as you did to one of the least who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Who, then is the stranger? We must respond to that question at several different levels—levels that may seem contradictory, but are not. First, we are the strangers . We are the ones who are constantly welcomed; we are the welcomed people of God—welcomed, not because of who we are, but because of who God is. Secondly, the Lord is the stranger, the one rejected by his own, and just as it is through his death that we all live, so it is through his rejection that we are welcomed. And finally, one might even say that any stranger—no matter how bedraggled or how alien— is the Lord; the stranger is the opportunity the Lord gives us to welcome him. The way he puts it in Matthew 25, we either welcome the stranger or we reject the Lord. There is no other option. But in the phrase “welcoming the Stranger,” it is not only the “stranger” that needs to be redefined and clarified. We must also look at the matter of “welcoming.” If we look again at Paul’s words in Romans 15, it is clear that the welcoming to which he refers there is a welcoming after the style of Jesus Christ: “Welcome one another . . .just as Christ has welcomed you.” “Just as Christ has welcomed you” does not mean only that we are to welcome others because we have been welcomed. It certainly means that, but it means much more. It also says something about the nature of Christian welcoming. It is a welcoming “just as Christ has welcomed us,”

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    after the manner of his welcoming. He welcomed us who were strangers by himself becoming a stranger. Quite often welcoming is not just receiving a stranger, but also becoming a stranger. When the church welcomes the stranger in terms of advocacy and of seeking justice for those whom society considers strangers and aliens, quite often it finds itself treated as a stranger and an alien in its own community. Indeed, I suspect that this is one of the main reasons why so many individuals and churches refuse to become involved in ministries of justice and advocacy for the stranger: their good standing in their own communities is more important to them than welcoming the stranger. Some years ago, my wife Catherine and I were visiting at a Sunday school class where the subject was evangelism, and the guest speaker was a distinguished Presbyterian theologian. The first thing he told us was that the Presbyterian form of government is so well developed and so refined that one has to be at least a second or third generation Presbyterian before one could fully understand it and see its beauty. Clearly unintentionally, but in fact, he was calling his hearers to go out and invite people to join a church in which perhaps their children, but more likely, their grandchildren, will finally fit! I suspect this was something of an exaggeration. But to the degree where it may be true of any Christian body, welcoming the stranger may well require some adjustments in our system of government, in our worship, in our entire way of doing things. Welcoming is not simply saying, “Here we are. We think we have something good to offer you. Come and enjoy it. But do it on our terms. Become one of us, and then you will be welcome.” This is not easy or cheap. It was not easy or cheap for Jesus to became a stranger so that we might become citizens. To become a stranger for the sake of welcoming the stranger will require different things in different settings, but none of them is really easy. When it comes to issues of justice and advocacy, it may well imply going against the grain of commonly held opinions and values. It may even require going against the grain of the law. When its comes to issues of welcoming the stranger into the church in which we ourselves are no more than welcomed strangers, it implies placing mission ahead of polity and faithfulness ahead of prestige. Placing mission ahead of polity means that if at any point our polity hinders our mission, it is the polity, and not the mission, that must give way. And placing faithfulness ahead of prestige means that we must not treat our name as Methodists, or as Presbyterians or as Lutherans, as if it were a brand name to be protected, but as a blessing to be shared—and transformed in the very process of that sharing. A church that is afraid of change or of failure will not have the imagination necessary to view a future shared with the supposed “stranger,” and it will not endorse anything whose success is not fairly well assured. A church that allows polity to limit mission also allows polity to limit imagination and precedent to limit creativity: if something has not been done before, or if it risks failure, it should not be done. If it is not in the Discipline or our Book of Order, it cannot be done. Nor should it be done until the budget is assured. But in so doing we forget that we are to welcome the stranger just as Christ has welcomed us—that same Jesus Christ who put the need of the sick ahead of the Sabbath laws and whose victory came through the utter failure of the cross. Again, and finally, “Welcome one another . . Just as Christ has welcomed you.”

  • In the beginning

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    In the Beginning*

    John 1:1-5

    Matthew A. Rich

    First Presbyterian Church, Lumberton, North Carolina

    This is the beginning, where the story of Jesus starts as told to us by John.

    1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

    Once upon a time … isn’t that the way that all good stories begin? Yes, once upon a time there was a baby boy born in Bethlehem. This baby had a mother and a father. His parents didn’t live in Bethlehem; they lived in a town about seven miles away. So when it was time for the baby to be born, these parents went to St. Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. That is the beginning of my story. Yes, once upon a time there was a baby born in Bethlehem … Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. It’s a great fact about my life whenever I play that game of introduction called “Two Truths and a Lie.” No one ever guesses it’s true that I was born in Bethlehem. But that is where my story begins. But is that really the beginning of my story? Maybe the story really begins with the birth of a baby boy in Buffalo, New York. He was the youngest of three brothers who grew up in a small town called Derby, just outside of Buffalo, on the shores of Lake Erie. Not long after that, a baby girl was born in Cincinnati,Ohio. She had one older brother, and while they lived in a couple of different houses, they never left Cincinnati. This boy and this girl both grew up and went to Baldwin Wallace College in Berea, Ohio. They met one night as she was coming out of a dance and he was going in. Maybe that is the beginning of my story. Or maybe it begins even before that. Because in the 1880’s and 1890’s, four teen-agers from Germany came to America with their families. None of them knew each other, but all of their families moved to Cincinnati. One of those teenagers was named Louise Lampe, and she got a job as a housekeeper for a Cincinnati family. At this family’s home she met one of the other teenagers, Fredrick Hassebrock. Fredrick drove the family’s carriage. They fell in love and were married and had eight children. The youngest was a girl named Helen – my grandmother. The other two teenagers from Germany, Francis Boerger and Arthur Pomsel, also met once their families arrived in Cincinnati. They had four children, three girls and then thirteen years later a boy named Ernest – my grandfather. So maybe my story begins with those teenagers at the end of the nineteenth century. But that would only be half of the beginning of my story. Johannes Reiych originally came from Germany and landed in Philadelphia in 1773. After four years as

    * This sermon was preached on September 27, 2009, at Homecoming.

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    an indentured servant, he married Susanna Maria Entsingerin, whom he had met as they journeyed across the Atlantic on the same boat. Their great, great, great, great, great grandson was an only child – Adin, Jr. – my grandfather. Then we’d need to go back even farther. Nathaniel Harwood came to America from England in 1658. He worked as a cordwainer, making shoes. He married a girl named Elizabeth, and it’s not clear whether he met her in England or in the colonies. But, if I counted right, their great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great granddaughter was a triplet – Loraine – my grandmother. Is that the beginning of my story? I don’t know, because all of those ancestors had ancestors. So where does one’s story begin? How far back would you go in order to get to “once upon a time …”? So, maybe it would be easier to talk about the beginning of our story. This is Homecoming after all, and we’re celebrating not my history, but our history as a congregation . The beginning of our story together goes back to me answering a phone call in late June 2006. I was sitting in my office when the phone rang. I picked it up and said, “Hello, thank you for calling The Presbyterian Church of Lowell. This is Matt.” The voice on the other end of the line said, “Rev. Rich? My name is Nancy Jessup , and I am the chair of the PNC at First Presbyterian Church in Lumberton, NC. I was wondering if you would be interested in talking to me about our church and if so, if this is a good time to talk.” Yes, that may be the beginning of our story together, but the beginning really goes back much farther than that. It goes back to phone calls made to Sam Warner, Sam Shumate, Bob Sloop, and Bob Alexander. Before that it was probably letters or visits to Carl Matthews and George Moorehouse, and the 16 other pastors and stated supply preachers before them. The story could certainly be said to begin with John Alexander McAllister, who served as this church’s clerk of session for 46 years in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. But our story begins even before Mr. McAllister. For in June of 1854, a committee of Fayette ville Presbytery gathered with thirteen residents of Lumberton at the Court House to officially organize this church. Is that where our story begins? Is that our “once upon a time …”? We can go back farther. We can go back to the first Scots Presbyterian settlements in the Cape Fear Region in 1740. In 1755 Hugh McAden visited a portion of this territory and found many residents of the region with Presbyterian roots, but no pastor. So as John Alexander McAllister wrote in 1917, “[Mr. McAden] induced Rev. James Campbell, then laboring in Pennsylvania, to visit his countrymen in North Carolina. Mr. Campbell came in 1757, and besides other points preached at Raft Swamp near McPhaul’s Mill. This is supposed to be Antioch and was the first Presbyterian Church in Robeson County” (Proclaiming the Good News, p. 4). Yes, our story can certainly begin then – more than 250 years ago. But all those Presbyterian ancestors had Presbyterian ancestors in Scotland and Ireland. So where does this story begin? How far back must we go in order to get to “once upon a time?” Well, as Christians, not just Presbyterians, we trace our roots all the way back to Jesus. And those who first set out to tell the story of Jesus had to begin somewhere. The Gospel of Mark, thought to be the earliest gospel in our scriptures begins, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1). Mark starts

    Journal for Preachers

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    his story with John the Baptist’s proclamation and Jesus’ baptism as an adult. So, Mark begins with the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. The Gospel of Matthew, takes a step back. It begins, “An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Matthew then, beginning with Abraham – the father of the Jewish people – traces the ancestors of Jesus to King David and then from King David to the deportation to Babylon and from Babylon to “Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born” (Matthew 1:1-16). For Matthew, the beginning of the story is Abraham. For the Gospel of Luke, though, the story begins even farther back. After telling the story of John the Baptist’s and Jesus’ births, a story of Jesus visiting the temple at twelve years of age, and Jesus’ baptism by John, Luke inserts his own genealogy. “Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his work. He was the son (as was thought) of Joseph.” Much like Matthew, Luke then traces the ancestors of Joseph back to David and then to Abraham. But Luke keeps going – he traces the ancestors of Jesus all the way back to “Seth, son of Adam, son of God” (Luke 3:23-38). Yes, for Luke, the beginning of the story is Adam – the first human being. The Gospel of John, our text for this morning, finds its beginning back one step farther. Not beginning with the first human being, John begins, “In the beginning ….” And, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Yes, in the beginning, long before there was a child born in Bethlehem, or two college students meeting at a dance, or teenagers coming to America, or former indentured servants getting married, or a cordwainer disembarking in Boston, there was God. Long before there was a phone call to a potential pastor, a letter or a visit to hear someone preach, a Presbytery commission to organize a church, or Scottish Presbyterians settling in a new land, there was God. Long before early Christians began writing down what they knew and had been told about Jesus life, death, and resurrection; long before King David ever shepherded his first sheep; long before Abraham heard a call; and long before Adam took his first breath, there was God. From the first to the last, from the alpha to the omega, from the beginning to the end, there is God. My story, your story, our story is the story of God’s love, grace, and faithfulness to all generations. As we celebrate 155 years of ministry as First Presbyterian Church of Lumberton today, let us never forget that our story does not begin and it will not end with us. No, we are here only by the grace of God.

  • Sanctuary for the weird

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    Sanctuary for the Weird

    Mark 1:21-28

    Agnes W. Norfleet

    Shandon Presbyterian Church, Columbia, South Carolina

    This is one of those Sundays when I am glad we do not have an electronic billboard outside broadcasting the sermon title for neighbors driving by. I sure don’t think I would have gotten “Sanctuary for the Weird” past the Hospitality Ministry, for all their evangelism efforts to welcome people to Shandon. But it was a sermon title inspired, frankly. Inspired not only by this text from Mark’s gospel, in which an exorcism is Jesus’ first public act after he calls the disciples, but also by something I heard recently from a child. Two weeks ago National Public Radio broadcast its longstanding feature, “This I Believe,” spoken that Sunday by a seven-year-old. Tarak McLain lives in Austin, Texas. He collects food for the homeless and raises money for orphans and impoverished schools. He likes to read about the world’s religions, and he also listens to public radio. His NPR radio column on January 18th was entitled, “Thirty Things I Believe,” and among them were these:

    I believe God is in everything. I believe we can help people. I believe hate is a cause for love. I believe we should be generous. I believe I should not whine. I believe people should wake up early. I believe people should go outside more. I believe people should use less trees. I believe that God helps us to have a good time. I believe we should help the poor. I believe it is OK to die but not to kill. I believe war should stop. I believe we can make peace.

    Not a bad list of beliefs for young Tarak McLain. But there was one belief that stood out from the rest, that sounded mature beyond the years of a seven-year-old, and which resonates so beautifully with our scripture reading for today. This seven-yearold also said, “I believe everyone is weird in their own way.”1 Now, weird is a popular word these days, and my guess is the members of the Confirmation Class who are leading our worship this morning, along with many others in our midst, are well acquainted with the word weird. According to our youth minister, Katy Schneider, if you listen to our youth, you will discover that most of us parents in this congregation are weird, really weird. But if any of you want to hammer someone with a palatable verbal insult, you might come up with another, because truth be told, weird is not such a bad word. Admittedly it has taken on negative connotations that are far from its roots, but weird comes from the same Old English word from which we also get the word worth, and literally means fate or destiny.2

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    Originally then, weird referred to persons worthy of their destiny. Not until the nineteenth century did it take on the connotations of “uncanny, odd, and strange,” and that was due to Shakespeare’s use of the word weird describing the sisters who confronted Macbeth about his destiny. So, given how often we hurl the word weird around these days, we would do well to remember that the most basic understanding of it is worthy, from which we also derive the word worship. “I believe everyone is weird in their own way” is not just an insightful affirmation of a seven-year-old, but if you consider the original meaning of the word, it is the truth of the gospel. Everyone is worthy of the destiny Jesus Christ intends for all. Had they had the Old English language at their disposal, I imagine those hanging around the Capernaum synagogue with Jesus that day would have called the man with the unclean spirit weird- a misfit, odd, strange, out of his mind. Sick people like that, you see, did not normally enter the public place of worship. Folks went to synagogue pretty much the way folks come to church today. They might have cleaned up a bit before going, and they knew what to expect—the rabbi would read from the Torah and say some interpretive words. They would sing a couple of Psalms and recite familiar prayers, and all in all, going to worship had become quite familiar and habitual and rather ordinary. But then there was this new rabbi passing through, this itinerate preacher and teacher on the scene named Jesus. There was something about him that commanded the attention of folks in a new way. He had authority, they said; he did not sound like the usual scribes and religious leaders. He had a presence about him, this Jesus, which recalled the promises of scripture that God would lift up in their midst a new prophet, a new kind of teacher who would speak the very words of the Lord God. And so on this particular day in Capernaum, when Jesus was teaching as one with authority, something very unusual happened. Someone who was not supposed to be there, the man with the unclean spirit, came in. Surely those around would have called him weird. But Jesus looked at him as if to say, “No, he is not weird, rather he is worthy. He is worthy of the destiny God intends for all of humankind.” Jesus was showing them, in word and deed, that this demon possessed man belonged there, he was welcome among them in the synagogue and in the context of worship, he was healed. Jesus wants us to know that in this man’s weirdness lies his worthiness; he was at home in the place where people worship because he was in the presence of God. Make no mistake about it. We will see Jesus go about his healing ministry in homes, beside the sea, at the foot of the mountain, in crowded city streets. But the first place he demonstrates his healing power is in worship, in the place where, whether we like to admit it or not, we all come seeking the healing presence of Christ. Robert Shaw was one of the great American choral conductors, and as the son of a minister, he was also a keen observer of what happens when we worship. He once said, “The absolute minimum conditions for worship are a sense of mystery and an admission of pain.” A sense of mystery and an admission of pain. Like the demon-possessed man in our scripture who cries out to Jesus for healing, so we too bring our pain, whatever it is – our need for forgiveness, our brokenness, our illnesses, our anxiety, our concern that we may not fit in. And by the power of God, Jesus Christ will take whatever it is that makes us weird and call us worthy. Whatever is odd and strange about us, whatever we think might set us apart from others, Christ takes and makes us acceptable in the eyes of God, wherever we are, but especially here in the place of worship.

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    Through long years in ministry I have discovered that a lot of us come to church thinking that we have to have it all together: that our life should be better balanced, that we should be more this or not so much that, that our faith should be stronger. When you think about it, we don’t have any evidence of Jesus’ engaging in conversation with folks who have it all together. He doesn’t go up to the scribes in this text and say, “Let’s talk about Torah -just those of us who are in the know.” No, he is forever reaching out to the sick, the cast-off, the poor, the vulnerable. So if we want to have a holy encounter with God in this place, week after week, we do well to remember Jesus calls us to let our guard down, to come as seekers of healing to this sanctuary for the weird. James Autry is a business consultant and poet who has written a little book called Looking Around for God. In one chapter, called “Chasing a Miracle,” he begins by saying, “You don’t think about miracles much until you think you need one.” Then he recounts how he and his wife spent desperate years seeking help for their autistic son. Many of you here know something about that kind of miracle seeking. They took young Ronald to countless doctors from their home in Iowa to New York City. They tried a psychic healer; they tried horseback therapy with a specialist who used animals to help children with special needs. Finally it was an educator who provided more help than any other, and they threw themselves into supporting the public schools and their therapists, because along the way, Ronald began to show great signs of improvement. Autry connects this experience to his faith saying, “With all that we tried, I believe we’ll never know what worked and what didn’t. Maybe none of it; maybe all of it, but I don’t waste time anymore trying to analyze it. I do know that at some point, while chasing after the one big miracle, I finally recognized the real miracle workers and realized that miracles are happening almost every day, one person at a time, one teacher, one friend, one family member, one coach, one music teacher, one parent at a time.”3 Friends, if we chase after the one big miracle, we might miss the little ones that happen every day. When Jesus stopped worship in the Capernaum synagogue to call a demon out of the possessed man, it was not simply “the one big miracle.” He would go on to perform many more, and he still does. It is no small coincidence that it happened in the sanctuary, in the place of worship where people were intentionally gathered in the presence of God. He opened the doors to that sacred space wider than they had ever been flung open before. And he welcomed into his holy presence, not just for the first time, but forever, every odd, strange, ill, weird person whose destiny is now in his hands. He showed that man needing healing then, and he is saying to us now, “You are welcome here. Your weirdness simply makes you worthy of the life I intend for all.” What a day that must have been. What a day it is.

    Notes 1. Tarak McLain, “Thirty Things I Believe,” This I Believe, National Public Radio, 1/18/09. 2. John Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins (New York, New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990), 570. 3. James Autry, Looking Around for God: The Oddly Reverent Observations of an Unconventional Christian Macon, Georgia: Smyth & Helwys Publishing, Inc., 2007).

  • Advent sermon

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    Advent Sermon1

    Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8

    David Bartlett

    Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

    I. It’s the second Sunday of Advent; expectation fills the air. Advent lights shine in windows all around the neighborhood. At church we light our Advent candles, prepare the mitten tree and practice the pageant. Halfway through the service we sing a not-too familiar hymn and pay some attention to words that sound as though they are going to be familiar but turn out not to be so familiar after all. “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ….” And since we know how that good news begins, we listen for the beloved story of the angels singing, shepherds scurrying, and magi searching all those miles. But Mark, as usual, surprises us. Either he’s never seen a church pageant, or he deliberately ignores those features of the story we like best. For Mark, gospel, good news, does not begin with the manger.

    II. For Mark, the good news begins with the prophet: “As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, ‘See I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way.’” For Mark, the good news begins with what we call The Old Testament and our Jewish neighbors call Tanakh and what for Jesus and the first disciples was just plain Scripture. And the truth is, though we remember best the shepherds and the wise men, every one of our Gospels can only get underway by calling attention to the Old Testament, because the truth is that we can’t get to the good news of Jesus in any other way. In Luke’s Gospel, even before the shepherds bow, there are songs sung by Mary and Zechariah that sound just like Old Testament psalms, and the very first words Jesus speaks when he begins his ministry are words from this same prophet, Isaiah. In Matthew’s Gospel before we get to the birth or the magi, we go through the genealogy that fixes Jesus firmly in the history of Abraham and David and Rahab and Ruth. And in the first verse of John’s Gospel we hear echoed the first verse of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God”; John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word.” It is hard to get what John is saying in this astonishing prologue, but if we don’t know Genesis, we haven’t got a clue. Some years ago I was on the committee recommending to the president of the University a new chaplain for Yale. One of the members was the late Donald Cohen, for many years the director of Yale’s Child Study Center. One of the responsibilities of the committee was to travel to various churches to hear candidates preach on their home turf. Donald said that as a Jew, one thing that amazed him was how much Christian worship talked about the Jews. Donald said Jews can go to the synagogue week after week and not have to talk much about Christians, but Christians can’t get through a worship service without Israel, the prophets, the law, the promises. Sometimes Christians worry about Judaism in ways that are wise and open and sometimes in ways that are foolish and closed—but Donald had it right. Part of the Christian deal is that we can only understand ourselves in the light of God’s dealings

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    with Israel, and we can only understand Jesus as the Jew he was. In the light of this passage and in the light of the whole New Testament, it behooves us to remember that in the first century, the issue wasn’t whether Jews could be part of God’s covenant. The issue was whether Gentiles could. Israel’s place was a given—the miracle was that the rest of us were now allowed to join the party. The miracle was that in the light of Jesus Christ, when we hear God speak through Isaiah, “Comfort, comfort my people,” we Gentiles are actually included as part of God’s people, too. It is something to think about the next time some ugly sign of anti-Judaism appears in our community or in our neighbors’ conversation. If you want to get to Jesus Christ, there is no way to get to him that does an end run around Israel. You can’t really know him without the Old Testament any more than I can really know you without knowing where you came from and who your family is. The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is Isaiah and Genesis and the Psalms.

    III. It’s the second Sunday of Advent, and expectation fills the air. But Mark, as usual, surprises us. Either he’s never seen a church pageant, or he deliberately ignores the features of the story we like best. For Mark, Gospel, good news, does not begin with the manger. For Mark, the good news begins with John the Baptist. So much less appealing than the babe in the manger—the prophet in the wilderness. Not swaddling clothes, but camel’s hair and a leather belt. And—worse yet—not peace on earth, good will among people, but John the Baptist preaches “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” The good news is also tough news. There is no way to get to Jesus without going through John the Baptist. No end run around the demanding prophet to get to the redeeming Christ. (Of course the redeeming Christ turns out to be pretty demanding, too, but that’s another sermon.) And again Mark is not so quirky as might first appear. Luke has the angels and shepherds . Matthew has the magi. John has the prologue and the Word made flesh—but in all four Gospels, before the grown-up Jesus can give one sermon or do one miracle, there is John the Baptist. There is no way to Jesus that doesn’t go through the Old Testament, and there is no way to Jesus that doesn’t stop and listen to John. What John preaches of course is baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The heart of the matter is repentance. The good news of the Gospel begins with repenting the bad news of our lives before the Gospel came along. Christmas is not just a nice holiday to add to the other three hundred and sixty four days that go on as usual. Christmas is a turning point: put off the old; put on the new. Let it go. Lay it down. Repentance. And John the Baptist stands as a stark and inescapable reminder that Christmas isn’t just a matter of giving, it’s a matter of giving up. Letting go whatever that old life is that keeps you from receiving the new life that comes with the incarnation of Jesus Christ our Lord. Perhaps more than any novelist of the twentieth century, Graham Greene puzzled about sin and repentance and forgiveness. In his novel, The End of the Affair? Greene tells the story of Sarah, who is married to Henry, but is in love with Maurice. Her affair with Maurice is full of passion and delight and deceit and regret. More and more she is nagged by a vision of some fuller life that includes not only fidelity to her husband, but fidelity to a God in whom she barely believes.

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    It’s World War II; it’s London. Sarah is in the hotel room waiting for Maurice. She hears air raid sirens and then a terrible explosion. Sarah is sure that Maurice is dead. These are her words:

    I knelt down on the floor. I was mad to do such a thing: I never even had to do it as a child. . .. I hadn’t any idea what to say. Maurice was dead. Extinct. There wasn’t such a thing as a soul…. I knelt and put my head on the bed and wished I could believe. Dear God, I said—why dear, why dear?—make me believe. I can believe. Make me, I said, I’m a (fool) and a fake. I hate myself. I can’t do anything of myself. Make me believe. I shut my eyes tight… and I said, I will believe. Let him be alive and I will believe…. That wasn’t enough. It doesn’t hurt to believe. So I said, I love him, and I’ll do anything if You’ll make him alive. Let him be alive.. .and I said, people can love without seeing each other, can’t they; they love you all their lives without seeing You, and then he came in the door, and he was alive, and I thought, now the agony of being without him starts.

    The agony of being without him, the surprising possibilities of being with God, a return to her husband, the beginnings of faith. This is the beginning of the gospel, dear friends, but it is not just a matter of happy carols and cheerful lights. The way to Jesus leads through John the Baptist and the repentance of sins. That is tough news. It is good news, too.

    IV. In the church where we belonged in Oakland, there were a number of Advent customs that we learned to love. On the last Sunday of Advent, Christmas just about to come, two members of the choir sang in harmony the simple carol: “What Shall I Bring to the Babe in the Manger?” I’ve lost the rest of the lyric, but I’m quite sure that what we brought were all the good gifts of our lives—our talents, our love, our faith, our hope. Bring these, and lay them down at the manger. But Advent is not only about giving; it’s also about giving up. John the Baptizer, that scraggly, uncouth prophet stands as a constant reminder that there are other things to bring to the manger—to lay them down before the good news of God’s Son. Maybe this Advent we should bring to the manger that old jealousy that has poisoned a relationship and soured our own joy. Maybe we should lay that down. That old regret that we didn’t go the other direction, all those years ago. Time to lay it down. The disappointment in someone we loved, the disappointment in ourselves: lay it down. The anger at those who did not value us as we deserved. Lay it down. You know what it is, that damned thing you carry that can turn even the good news of Christmas into the same old Blah. Lay it down. Christmastime is repentance time. You can bring it all. You can put it down. You can leave it all with the child who is strong enough to bear it all. Good news.

    Notes 1. This is a revised version of a sermon originally preached at Baiteli Chapel, Yale University, and published in Bartlett, David Lyon, and Ian Doescher, To All God’s Beloved in New Haven: David Bartlett’s Yale Sermons (Xlibris 2003). 2. Greene, Graham, The End of the Affair, (London: Penguin, 1991).

  • Memory and personhood

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    Memory and Personhood

    Martin Β. Copenhaver Wellesley Congregational Church (UCC), Wellesley, Massachusetts

    I remember the first time that my grandmother was not able to recognize me, the first time that it was clear that she did not remember who I was. I was in high school. The look on her face revealed that she had no idea who had just walked into her room. “It’s me, Grandmother. It’s Martin.” The expression on her face—if one could call it that—did not change. She was the only grandparent I ever knew; because my father was an only child, she had only three grandchildren—not many to keep track of, but there is no memory, however precious, that is immune to the ravages of severe de­ mentia. My grandmother and I were not particularly close. To be frank, even when she was well, my siblings and I always experienced her as a rather formal and distant woman. Her dementia only added to that sense of distance, because there is nothing quite so distancing as a loss of memory. As her memory receded, the focus of her world narrowed, until she was only able to recognize my father, her only child, the one upon whom, at other stages of her life, the sun rose and the sun set. And then, her memory reached the vanishing point when she could no longer remember even my father. When my father died quite suddenly, we went to tell my grandmother the news, news that she was not able to comprehend. But we thought we should say something. Her only child…. Yet, in another way, we were grateful that she could not take in this news, because it would have been overwhelming. In a sense, dementia saved her from grief, so there was some comfort in that. Still, her only child had died, and it seemed unspeakably sad that she could not remember him or recognize his name or mark the loss. The prophet Isaiah asked, “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb?” In the case of my grandmother, the answer would have to be, “Yes.” But then, Isaiah follows those words with these words of God’s own assurance, “Even these will forget, yet I will not forget you.” When my grandmother died a number of years later, we said things like, “She was not herself for many years. This was not Grandmother. She left us a long time ago.” I have since heard similar thoughts expressed many times, when someone dies after a long illness and particularly after a long and losing struggle with dementia. “She left us a long time ago.” So I want to consider with you some of the ways in which statements like that are true and ways in which they may not be entirely true. That is, I want to think with you biblically, spiritually, about the relationship between memory and personhood. One could make the case that, to a significant degree, we are what we remember. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in an essay entitled, simply, “Memory,” writes:

    [Memory] is the thread on which the beads of man are strung, making the personal identity which is necessary for moral action. Without it, all life and thought were an unrelated succession. As gravity holds matter from flying off into space, so memory gives stability to knowledge; it is the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump, or flowing in waves.

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    Later in that essay, he writes of memory as the personification of a divine presence:

    Memory performs the impossible for man by the strength of his divine arms ; holds together past and present, beholding both, existing in both, abides in the flowing, and gives continuity and dignity to human life. It holds us to our family, to our friends.

    Our memories are so much a part of who we are that it can be hard to imagine who we would be without them. What if I no longer remembered what it was like to grow up in my family? What if I could no longer remember my parents and what it was like to feel so completely loved by them, which I have always thought of as the origin and source of my sense of self-esteem? Or, what if I no longer remembered falling in love with my wife? Or, the times of bonding with friends? Or, what it was like to feel the stir of a call to ministry? Or, if I forgot about the birth of our children? Or, that I even have children? Or, what prayer is? Or, which baseball team I root for? Or, what if I could no longer remember what baseball is? Or, the voice of Ella Fitzgerald? Or, the face of my wife? If I could no longer remember what it is to be Martin Copenhaver, would I still be Martin Copenhaver? In what sense would I be a different person—or a person at all—if I no longer remembered? If I lost much or all of my memory, might someone say, understandably, “He left us a long time ago?” So, yes, one could make the case that, to a significant degree, we are what we remember. But, just as surely, we are more than our memories. We do not say of an infant, living in those early months before memory, “Well, she’s not yet arrived. She’s not yet a person.” When we baptize an infant we do not say, “It’s too bad that he is not yet a person, someone who can remember events like this.” No, we affirm that an infant is a person, even without memory—a full and growing person, not yet all that she is to be and yet, from the beginning, a full person. The truth is, we are always changing, always gaining and relinquishing, grabbing hold and letting go—of relationships , of abilities, of memories, at every stage of our lives. A loss of memory does not make us any less a person. In fact, I have learned that equation of personhood and rationality is a peculiarly western notion. I gather that, for instance, the Eastern Orthodox tradition lays less emphasis on rationality as the criterion for human status, and more on the person in relationship. According to that tradition , we are who we are not so much because of what we remember, but rather, we are who we are through how we are remembered by others in community. What if we acted out the understanding that those who no longer can remember the prayers of the church, or the Bible stories, or the hymns, have a special place in the church because it is a community that remembers the prayers and stories for you and sings the hymns on your behalf when you no longer can? What if we are more than what we remember? What if we are who remembers us? And what would it require to be that kind of community? In the end, what is most important, what ensures our personhood, is that we are remembered by God. It is true that throughout scripture we are reminded to remember, told to remember, commanded to remember, that, in some sense, remembering is an act of faith: “Forget not all God’s benefits.” In the end, however, here as elsewhere, what matters ultimately is not our actions, but God’s actions. If we do not remember God or God’s benefits, God still remembers us.

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    Isaiah asks, “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb?” And the answer is, “Yes. Tragically. Sometimes, yes.” But Isaiah quickly adds these words, which he takes to be God’s very assurance, “Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.” It is as if God says, “You are not something I merely hold in my hands because something that is held can be dropped. You are not something that is merely written on my hands, because what is merely written can be washed off or worn away. No, you are inscribed on the palm of my hands. You are marked on the palms of my hands in a way that cannot disappear or even fade. I will not forget you. Even if you forget me, I will not forget you. I hold you dear and always will.” Psalm 139 reminds us that God will not let us go or let us go alone. God accompanies us, through triumph and trial, through the heights and the depths.

    Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; If I make my bed in Sheol—in the shadowy pit—you are there.

    We might add:

    If I ascend to the heights of rationality, you are there; If my memory leaves me altogether, you are there.

    It is true that throughout scripture we are reminded to remember, told to remember, commanded to remember. But, thank God, scripture always points beyond our actions to God’s actions. And God will always remember us. The psalmist goes on:

    You knit me together in my mother’s womb… My frame was not hidden from you, When I was being made in secret, Intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

    We might add:

    And even now, at the other end of my life, In a different kind of darkness than the darkness of my mother’s womb, The darkness of forgetfulness, Even there I am not hidden from you, Once again, as always, you see me, and know me.

    You see, we are so much more than what we remember. We are what God remembers .

  • He suffered under Pontius Pilate: Jesus and torture

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    He Suffered under Pontius Pilate: Jesus and Torture

    Matthew 5:43-44; Hebrews 13:1-3

    Scott Black Johnston

    Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York, New York

    Matthew 5: 43) “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44) But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

    Hebrews 13: 1) Let mutual love continue. 2) Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. 3) Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.

    This past week, a good deal of attention has been paid to the release of high-level memos and legal documents that describe American interrogation methods in aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. For the most part, government officials (past and present) are not denying that the treatment described in these memos actually took place. Instead, the argument that is raging (probably on Sunday morning, pundit-thick television at this very moment) regards whether or not harsh interrogation methods are ever warranted—justifiable. This morning, I think it is important for us to take some time to talk about a Christian perspective on torture. It is not, I realize, an appealing subject for people who are hoping that church will be an escape—a little respite from the world after a hectic week. To tell you the truth, when I heard that it was going to be such a gorgeous weekend here in New York, I almost bagged the subject. Surely, I have got a flowersare -blooming, Frisbees-in-the-air, life-is-good sermon somewhere in the file!? Then, as I was thinking these cowardly, but happy thoughts, I listened to last Sunday ‘s sermon by Randy Weber. Randy preached on the story of “doubting” Thomas— the story of the risen Jesus inviting the disciple to touch the holes in his hands and the gash in his side. It was a powerful sermon on a powerful story. It also reminded me that our Lord, the resurrected Christ, is not some pristine, blemish-free human, but has a body that still bears the marks of his suffering—his torture and execution at the hands of the Roman government. Yes, Easter is our glorious celebration of the open tomb. He is risen ! Risen indeed. Yet, for all its joy, this season does not offer us an escape from hard truths. The marks of Good Friday linger. Among other things, this means that, today, in the context of a national debate on interrogation techniques, Christians cannot ignore the fact that we worship a God who was once tortured. To begin our discussion this morning, it is probably helpful to put forth a definition . According to international law, torture is the intentional infliction of severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, for whatever reason.1 It is a pretty simple definition. Although, I have also been helped by looking back at the root of the word. “Torture” comes from the Latin word torquere which literally means “to twist.” It

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    seems appropriate, for not only are human bodies and spirits intentionally twisted through torture, but those who plan for and administer the torture are twisted by these terrible practices too. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 for his work on The Gulag Archipelago, a description of his own imprisonment and torture by the Soviet state. In reflecting on his time in the gulag, a sentence imposed for his criticism of Joseph Stalin, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “Our torturers have been punished most horribly of all…. They are departing downward from humanity.” There is something insidious that surrounds acts of torture. It seems like all who are touched by the practice (the person tortured, the torturer, and even the person who rationalizes it in a legal memo)—all become twisted by it. Torture has been around for a long, long time. There is no society of which I am aware that has not, at some point in time, practiced torture. Early Christians were tortured for being Christian. Later, once they had the blessing of the state, Christians became torturers themselves. In the Spanish Inquisition, Jews and heretical Christians were tortured for not converting to Christianity and not professing orthodox beliefs. In Medieval Europe, torture was practiced by many rulers who saw it as an effective way to crush political opposition. In the 1690’s, in this country, magistrates in Massachusetts subjected women, who were reported to be witches, to various tortures, including partial drowning—a precursor to what we now call water-boarding. State sponsored torture is not confined to any one end of the political spectrum. Rightist and leftist governments, communists and fascists, dictatorships and democracies have all employed torture. These governments have used torture to instill fear, to punish, and to try to extract information. That is, of course, the reason that officials of the American government have given for authorizing practices that we have been hearing about this past week. All of which brings us to the so-called ticking time bomb scenario. The scenario (right out of the television program “24” or the recent installments in the James Bond franchise) goes like this. A bomb has been set to detonate that will kill thousands of people. A terrorist who has knowledge of the bomb is in custody. An interrogator is aware that the terrorist knows the location of the bomb and also knows that the only way he will reveal this information in time to save countless innocent lives is if he is tortured. What would you do? Ethicists and pundits have a field day with this, but as Christians, we need to tread very carefully in these waters. As Dr. George Hunsinger, theologian at Princeton Seminary and longtime friend of this church, puts it, we never do have a perfect ticking bomb scenario in real life. We never know that torture will be the only effective means of getting information. We do not know if prisoners actually have valuable information . We are human. We make mistakes. We don’t always even know if we have the right bad guys. During the reign of Augusto Pinochet during the 1970’s, it is estimated that over 31,000 people were tortured in Chile. During that time, a dark joke was told in the bars of Santiago. One night a military police officer was guarding a road and captured a fleeing rabbit. “Why are you running away, Bunny?” asks the guard. The rabbit responds , “They are killing all the elephants in Santiago.” The border guard soothes him, “That’s ok, you’re a bunny.” To which the rabbit responds, “And how am I supposed to prove that?” The joke was meant to point out the mistakes made by Chilean police

    Easter 2010

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    who purportedly arrested and tortured the wrong individuals, individuals who insisted that they were not at fault, but who were thought to be liars by the police. No intelligence system is perfect. Decisions about employing torture are made by flawed individuals. What’s more, says Hunsinger, once you introduce torture, it never stays confined. It creeps. It spreads. It increases in severity and scope. It is witnessed by others who decide to use it in ever expanding ways. This is the insidious nature of torture. Once we authorize degrading, debasing, and humiliating treatment of another human being, we introduce a toxin that will spread. This is the true ticking bomb, says Hunsinger, the moment when torture becomes accepted by some segment of a society. When we do this, as John McCain indicates on the cover of today’s bulletin, we lose the moral high ground. One of the most frequent confessions that we affirm together here in worship is the Apostles’ Creed, an early statement made by Christians about their beliefs, perhaps as early as the first century. At the center of the Apostles ‘ Creed is a paragraph about Jesus of Nazareth, a few sentences that include the haunting words “he suffered under Pontius Pilate.” In other words, at the heart of this ancient confession is an acknowledgement that Jesus was tortured by the Roman government. This is the same Jesus who admonished his followers with the most uncomfortable (almost impossibly difficult) ethical charge of all time, “love your enemies.” I am not, I like to think, naïve; I realize that there are people in the world today whose hatred knows no bounds. Yet, as Christians, when we think about protecting ourselves and those whom we love, we must also grapple with the torture of Jesus. I believe that when we are lured by the promise of “a greater good” into using dehumanizing treatment, we have been tempted into walking down a very dark path indeed. Yes, there are twisted people out there in the world—people who are even now dreaming up terrible possibilities for the citizens of this country. Of this I have no doubt. Yet, despite the great burden that this places on our leaders, we must not become what we despise. We worship the gentle Jesus who was tortured by the government of his day, and because of this we simply cannot condone either the “aberrant” abuses that have been the result of illegal actions (Abu Ghraib) or “officially sanctioned” interrogation practices. Sometimes people speak as if our nation has a soul. If it is true that something as incredibly diverse and complex as a country can have a soul, then I believe our nation ‘ s soul is at risk as we consider how we will treat those—yes, even those who hate us— who are in our custody.

    Note

    1 Kenneth Roth, “Getting Away with Torture” in Torture is a Moral Issue: Christians, Jews, Muslims and People of Conscience Speak Out, edited by George Hunsinger, (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans Press: 2008), p. 4.

  • Peripheral angels

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    Peripheral Angels

    Luke 1:5-25; 57-69

    Agnes W. Norfleet

    Shandon Presbyterian Church, Columbia, SC

    I have a friend who has a profound trust in angels. She has had some pretty serious heart problems in midlife, which limits her activity, but she is ever cheerful and insists that angels are watching over her. Her talk about angels always makes me a little bit nervous, because she sees them all the time, and everywhere, and in whomever she suspects just might be winging a message to her from heaven. Over time, I have come to realize that my issue with angels has less to do with my friend’s faith in them and more to do with my own struggles brought on by the cultural popularity of angels. In books about angels, in the movies, on greeting cards, and even in religious circles, angels have become sort of dumbed down and sweetened up, whereas biblical angels arrive as frightening messengers with unexpected news that disturbs and disrupts. It’s no coincidence that the first word out of the mouth of any angel in Jesus’ birth narrative is, “Do not be afraid.” Anyone to whom they appear is absolutely terrified. That’s hardly the Hallmark greeting card version of angels. Just take a look at Gabriel in our scripture this morning. First of all his name, Gabriel, means “God is my strength,” and what does he do with that strength? He strikes Zechariah mute; he renders the priest speechless. He delivers the same news that found old Abraham and Sarah in such disbelief that they fell down laughing, while God stood by musing, “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?” “You are going to have a child,” Gabriel announces to old Zechariah, and for the duration of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, he is absolutely dumbfounded. One of the things I love about this story of Zechariah and Elizabeth is that it counters a myth that is alive and well during this season of the year, a myth that obscures the full gospel meaning of the birth of Jesus, and that is that Christmas is primarily for children. Now, of course, Christmas is for children, and there is plenty of evidence for it. Perhaps no other gospel story captures the imagination of a child like the one filled with angels and animals, mysterious visitors from afar, and God in the body of a baby. There is no doubt that the gospel story of the birth of Jesus lends itself to a child’s sense of wonder. But if you pay close attention to what the angels say and do, you realize that the heart of Christmas is more grown up than a child’s worldview. God’s powerful in-breaking Word calls forth faith and faithfulness, an openness to God’s presence in life-changing ways. None of the characters in Luke’s narrative of the birth of Jesus gets at the transcendent quality of this amazing, earth shattering good news quite like Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary’s aged cousins. We forget that these peripheral characters, getting on in years, are also the recipients of an angel. I have a file of articles, preaching ideas, scholarly biblical papers, and the sermons of others I have collected over time on the first chapter of Luke. It’s an inch thick, probably the thickest file I have except the one on Luke 2, the Christmas story. Few of those papers even nod in the direction of Zechariah and Elizabeth. It’s filled with meditations on Mary’s encounter with Gabriel, but not one mentions how Gabriel winged his way to Mary, breathless after striking

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    Zechariah speechless. It’s filled with sermons on Mary’s Magnificat, but there’s not one mention of Zechariah’s Benedictus. John gets little face time in our Christmas traditions, but who has ever seen Elizabeth totter into the Christmas pageant, leaning on her cane at eight months pregnant? And you have to admit, Zechariah himself brings comic relief. Have you ever seen a minister who cannot talk for nine months? Probably wish you had! A man so dumbfounded by the news that he’ll be a father that he is unable to participate in the predictable family feud about the naming of the child: “But nobody in our family is named John…, of course you’re going to name him Zechariah…, we’ll call him Junior.” Zechariah stands there facing this Godly mess of unexpected births so unable to speak that he has to write it down: “His name will be John.” Elizabeth and Zechariah are peripheral characters, and yet they give us an entrée into the birth of Jesus that is movingly pastoral and relevant to all of us. They remind us that peripheral characters are also on the receiving end of angel messages. Yes, Gabriel will tell Mary the earth-rending news that she will bear a son and name him Jesus; he will be the Son of the Most High, the holy Son of God. Yes, the angel chorus will hover over Bethlehem’s shepherds and sing to the whole world: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace.” But before those angel messages are broadcast for everyone to hear, an angel appeared to Zechariah, saying to him directly for only him to hear, “Do not be afraid, your prayer has been heard; you will have joy and gladness.” It would appear that peripheral characters not only encounter angels; they receive really personal, even intimate messages from them. “You have nothing to fear, your prayers are heard, your prayers will be answered; you will know joy and gladness.” When things in our lives get out of sorts, when we are unexpectedly thrown for a loop, when we look into the future with no idea what to expect, the Bible says angel messengers may come; they might just upend our ordinary lives with extraordinary news; they can shake us out of our complacency with grace and truth from on high. While Mary is getting ready to give birth to baby Jesus, which of course is the main drama here, peripheral angels assure us that God also has an eye on the peripheral people, the outliers – we might call them today – the ones always around the edge of someone else’s more central part. In the heart and mind of God, peripheral people always count; they always matter, they always have a role to play, here they even set the stage, if you will, for the starring character in the drama of salvation. Martha Sterne, who was a colleague of mine in urban ministry years ago in Atlanta and is now serving an Episcopal church in East Tennessee, has written of angels saying, “So the real job of angels is to pass hard and living good news on. Sometimes they show up in a conversation, or in a dream, or in a moment on a bus, or most often for me in the checkout line at the grocery store. They are more likely to stir up the spirit than to smooth things down. Angels can be downright irritating since angels are in the business of startling people with the Holy, and thus jump-starting people to come alive in the Spirit…. Are you aware,” she asks, “of angels fluttering in your very own soul?”1 Elizabeth and Zechariah invite us not to fear, but to be brave and listen for peripheral angels, not just sweet and sentimental ones we might like to imagine, but powerful messengers, the kind that are sent from God with unbelievably good news. Their story, filled as it is with historical detail and genealogy, with poetry, song, prophecy, a little

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    family feud about the baby’s name, and the startling news of a word from on high, all invite us into this thing that has come to pass. They stand as a bridge linking the faithfulness of God long past to something utterly, altogether new in the movement within Mary’s womb. They recall God’s faithfulness to Abraham and Sarah and all those other old Israelites for whom what seemed like dead ends, by the power of God, began to open upon bright futures. Their story opens the gospel, in many ways, sounding so ordinary, so much like many of our stories. They knew the kind of joy and anxiety that comes with expecting a child; they had family and neighbors who meddled in their personal lives, entering the debate about the baby’s name, and all, wondering what in the world was the matter with a priest who lost his voice. And later, we can only imagine the struggles they may have suffered as upstanding people in the Temple and community, raising a wild-haired adolescent like John the Baptist. Yet, what we know for certain is that theirs is the kind of faithful witness that helps us all grow old with the gospel and never lose sight of its ability to render us speechless with awe and wonder. For from the periphery, where all of us stand on the sidelines of this unfolding story, old Zechariah looks into a future rendered possible only by God and sings: “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” If that’s the faith that peripheral angels can inspire in us, then bring them on, O God, bring them on.

    Note 1 Martha Sterne, Alive and Loose in the Ordinary: Stories of the Incarnation (Harrisburg: Morehouse Publishing, 2006), 54.

  • Protagonist corner [33 no 4 Pentecost 2010]

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    Protagonist Corner

    Mark Douglas

    Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

    As a seminary-employed theological ethicist who spends considerable amounts of time teaching in various churches, I have the opportunity to hear many sermons from many different people. I hear our students in daily chapel services. I hear area pastors when I attend their worship services after I’ve led one type of adult education class or another. I hear preachers from around the nation at various conferences and gatherings. And even when I’m not listening to them preach, I still get to talk with small groups of pastors who regularly meet to talk with each other about what they will be preaching and who have invited me to spend time with them. And in the midst of all this hearing and talking about sermons, I am increasingly convinced that preaching the lectionary is bad for the church. This is not to say that I think sermons ought to be about something other than the explication of scripture for the edification of God’s children. Indeed, I think preaching always ought to be about letting the Holy Spirit breathe fresh life through old texts for new times. The church is a community that gathers around and then becomes formed around these texts. Nor is it to say that I hear bad preaching; I am regularly fed by the sermons I hear and often even pleasantly surprised by them. The processes of exegesis and sermon development that are being taught in our seminaries are very good. Nor is it to say that I am opposed to the lectionary in general. I like, I read, I use the lectionary . I am saying, however, that preaching from the lectionary is bad for the church. I recognize, of course, that there are good reasons to preach from the lectionary. Theologically, it reminds preachers that the whole Bible—and not just a set of favored passages—can become the word of God. Ecclesiastically, it connects them to other preachers around the world who are preaching from the same text. Pastorally, it saves them from what Kierkegaard called “the anxiety of infinite options” by allowing them to bypass the initial crisis of choosing a text. Practically, it gives them easy access to resources structured around the lectionary. (And fiscally, I should confess, it pays a little bit, as when David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor come knocking on the door asking for yet another essay for the Feasting on the Word series. Of course, that benefit may come to an end after the W/JKP folks read this essay. For that matter, the Journal for Preachers might have second thoughts about continuing to give me a space in which to register dissenting views about matters important to its readers!) Yet each of these reasons conceals within itself flaws that threaten the coherence and integrity of the “preaching event” and undermine the theological significance of scripture for the church. Reminded to preach from the whole Bible, even those preachers who regularly preach across the lectionary texts (from the Old Testament this week, an epistle the next, then a gospel) regularly take the texts supplied them by the lectionary and either contort them to the point of breaking in order to mesh a standardized text with a distinctive context or ignore the specificities of their contexts to maintain the integrity of the text. The former violates a coherent theology of scripture, the latter a substantive theology of preaching. And claims about the serendipitously frequent matching of universal text to specific context beg the question: we may live in grace

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    and rely on providence, but serendipity is a synonym for neither, so why should we presume to lie on the serendipitous—and hardly universal—meshing of text and context? Moreover, preaching out of specified pericopes—especially when preachers leap from Old Testament to epistle to Gospel to Psalm in proceeding weeks—tends to hinder the ability of those in the pews to discern any coherent narrative that connects texts and helps them make sense of scripture for themselves. At least lectio continua allows listeners to get a sense of a whole book over time! Why contribute to biblical illiteracy in order to maintain claims about the biblical integrity? Those who would defend preaching the common lectionary on theological grounds at least ought to think more about the theological costs that come with the practice. What of the ecclesiastical defense of the lectionary—the one about being reminded that preachers all over the world are preaching from the same texts and therein manifesting the unity of the one church? Setting aside facile criticisms of such a claim (many preachers and traditions don’t use the lectionary, and some use different lectionaries ; as long as there are multiple texts each week, not everyone will be preaching from the same text; “But everyone else is doing it” isn’t a better argument in this context than it was when you tried it on your mother and she responded with “If everyone else was jumping offa cliff.. .”or something like that), the question still remains: what makes preaching the lectionary a more coherent display of church unity than, say, recognizing that we all preach from the same Bible? If agreement among preachers is such a valuable manifestation of church unity, why not have everyone preach the same sermon each week? Besides, the point isn’t to express unity among preachers. It’s to express unity among believers. Surely there are better ways to express this (weekly communion in all our traditions comes to mind, but that’s a debate for another day). Or what of the pastoral benefit that comes with being supplied a text rather than having to choose one? At best, this benefit simply defers the struggle: having been supplied a set of texts, the preacher faces an even greater dilemma about how to preach from those texts—a dilemma that is exacerbated by the theological tensions I describe above. Ministers have been entrusted with the privilege of sharing—of participating in the manifestation of— God’s word. If we are willing to trust them with that, surely, we should trust them in making preliminary choices about texts. You’ll note, moreover, that reducing the number of available texts isn’t the only way to resolve the tension in choosing one. Another solution would be to become more familiar with more texts. This is one reason that I’m still a fan of the lectionary. Only rather than preaching from it weekly (a practice that instrumentalizes the text by giving it attention only as the basis for getting the next sermon ready), I think preachers should read from it daily—as, for that matter, should other Christians. The discipline of daily lectionary reading not only helps locate each text in relation to what comes before and after it (thereby helping to resolve the problem of dislocated pericopes), but brings greater familiarity with the whole of the Bible. Choosing a text may not be easy, but it may become more meaningful when we have more texts that are ready-at-hand. Get the daily lectionary sent to your email account. Join the Company of Pastors. Make the daily readings part of your devotional time. In so doing, you may discover the joys of texts you’d otherwise either ignore in the press to find a sermon text or miss altogether.

    Pentecost 2010

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    Finally, there are practical considerations. One sort of practical consideration has to do with figuring out ways for the church to learn to inhabit time: a lectionary shaped around the liturgical year reminds us that the church thinks about its time in history in distinctive ways (though see my “Protagonist’s Corner” from the 2009 Easter edition of this journal for questions about at least parts of the liturgical year). Again, though, I’m not arguing against reading the lectionary. I’m arguing against preaching from it. Surely the daily reminder of lectionary readings ought to be more than sufficient for the church, especially if daily lectionary reading becomes a discipline of the church and not just its preachers. The other sort of practical consideration has to do with the availability of lectionary resources. Again, setting aside facile criticisms (practical considerations shouldn’t trump theological concerns; many lectionary resources could still prove useful, albeit in a way that might take some additional indexing), it is helpful to remember that the revised common lectionary was only formally established in 1994, and many of the lectionary resources are considerably younger. In an age of internet and entrepreneurialism , need we really worry whether new resources would come into existence? I hear Bartlett and Taylor are always looking for new work; maybe they’ll come up with something.

  • Protagonist corner

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    Protagonist Corner

    O. Benjamin Sparks III

    Westminster Presbyterian Church, Nashville, Tennessee

    The source of inspiration for these reflections is an essay in The Power to Comprehend with All the Saints (Alston and Jarvis, eds., Eerdmans, 2009) by Cynthia Jarvis. Her title suggests my direction, “On Not Offering Psychological Banalities as God’s Word: A Reformed Perspective on Pastoral Care.” That set me thinking about the entire practice of ministry and about the responsibility of us preachers to and for Holy Scripture, and for its interpretation in the life of the church through preaching and teaching. I thought as well about the encouragement we receive (or do not receive) to be faithful to those tasks as well as for the sacramental life of congregations. If you are ordained to the ministry and are not engaged in these regular practices that are basic to the life of the one holy, catholic, and apostolic church, then you need to proceed directly (without passing Go or collecting $200.00) to a pastorless congregation near you which desperately needs you to meet your unique responsibilities on its behalf. Further, since I have become interim pastor of a large, theologically and biblically literate congregation, I am even more convinced that the presbyteries do hardly anything to encourage faithful ministry and have failed and continue to fail pastors as we go about the daily tasks of preaching, teaching, and pastoral care. To say that differently , especially for us who are organized for governance and ministry with a parity of lay and ordained officers making decisions, we have too often offered psychological, organizational, and sociological banalities for how to support pastors, how to encourage congregations, and how to undertake mission. The institutional church, beyond the congregation, continues to flounder, to lose the interest of the best and brightest (and most faithful) among us, and at the national level, reports rather staggering annual membership losses. For example, in a required interim ministry seminar, the overwhelming emphasis was on how to “fix” broken congregations, and on how to deal with the grief of losing a pastor. Finally one bright spark in the room said, “All we’ve heard for the last few days is a model for helping sick and grieving churches. Do you have a model for healthy churches?” The hesitant, honest answer came back, “No, we really don’t.” Surely it should be the primary concern of every governing constituency of ministers (presbytery, diocese, conference, and classis) to encourage/require theological reflection among the ministers – using the tools of our trade. These tools would be the Holy Scriptures studied together – not just for preaching, but for spiritual insight; confessions of faith (for those who depend upon such documents for theological, ecclesial identity), primary theological texts (Augustine, Edwards, Barth, Niebuhr, Tillich, Moltmann, Bonhoeffer-in addition to a variety of emerging theologians); and working papers from, and essays on, developing world churches as well as the emerging church. Each of us would add to or subtract from that list, but the substitutes ought not include “how to” manuals on church growth or counseling for niche members of our congregations with conditions so arcane that we might only see two or three examples in a lifetime. One wonders why interim ministry seminars don’t major in the theology and practice of ministry and require us to read similar theo-

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    logians and books on preaching rather than trying to teach us how to diagnose and tinker. In addition, governing bodies, were they truly involved in the support of pastors, charged as they are to hold us accountable, would require annual reports about substantive theology read and require written reports on what has been learned. Likewise they would require pastors to be mentors and helpers of each other in “companies of pastors,” for mutual support and prayer, for theological discussion, and for encouraging one another in the joys, obligations, and tribulations of ministry. In addition to the banal emphases to which the American church has succumbed in the past three decades, we have been obsessed by human rights and justice. That language has crept into ecclesial discussion, sometimes masquerading as inclusivity and hospitality, but all centering on self-righteous attempts to denigrate those who are homophobic, gay, straight, liberal, or conservative. This is accompanied by sneers and guffaws about those others – who themselves feel victimized. No matter which hat you wear, we are all of us, far too often, caught in destructive efforts to gain theological, political, and moral advantage. Yet if governing bodies would take responsibility for bringing pastors together for mutual help and support, if we saw ourselves as a community in need of the means of grace so that we might be expositors of and leaders toward that grace in our congregations, then the whole tenor of mainline Christianity might begin to change direction. Our hearts of stone might break in each others presence; we might discover instead hearts that engage each other in love, in upbuilding and encouragement for the sake of the whole church – and not just “our kind” or our faction. Several years ago I had the privilege of attending the opening worship of a gathering of homiliticians in Williamsburg. The guest preacher was James Forbes of the Riverside Church, and his sermon was on the gift of preaching and the joy and difficulty of being a pastor. In the middle of this sermon, he told a story that has stuck with me – not only because it struck a nerve, but because it reveals what every preacher needs and how difficult it is to maintain if we try to go it alone. There was a Baptist preacher who had labored long and hard in the vineyard of a congregation where he was not appreciated. But he preached faithfully every week and visited the members and moderated the board of deacons where, sometimes, he actually received attacks on his character. He was unfailingly kind to every one, even his detractors, especially when those critics were sick in hospital or had pastoral needs. One evening after deacons meeting, some of the deacons were standing out in the parking lot chewing over the decisions they had made, as well as criticizing the preacher for his preaching and for his lack of administrative skills. They fastened on just about anything they could find to tear him down in their own eyes and make themselves feel better. Finally, one of them told the others to stop because he had finally figured out what was wrong with the preacher. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with that man; he really believes this shit!” And of course that is what is right about this man – and about all of us. Though we are often racked with doubt, not just about the gospel, but about ourselves and our inadequacies, we are made strong for effective ministry when we are encouraged to believe, to trust, and when we don’t have to go it alone. Even our weaknesses are made useful in Christ’s strength.

    Journal for Preachers

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    To the extent that all of us preachers – now and then – have just the same experience as that faithful African American preacher, then the mutual support of our sisters and brothers becomes crucial. Theological and ecclesial conversation will then strengthen the body and soul. Who knows, such companionship in Christ may even help begin a reformation of the mainline church in our time. Banalities be damned.

  • Easter in the very belly of nothingness

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    Page 42

    Easter in the Very Belly of Nothingness

    Walter Brueggemann

    Cincinnati, Ohio

    Death will be all right for us when it comes.

    But dying is another matter-

    so slow,

    so painful,

    so humiliating.

    Death will be a quick turn,

    the winking of an eye

    but dying turns and twists and waits and teases.

    We have not died,

    but we know about dying:

    We watch the inching pain of cancer,

    the oozing ache of alienation,

    the tears of stored-up hurt.

    We can smell the dying

    of bombs and shells

    of direct hit and collateral damage

    of napalm spread thin and even of cities turned craters

    of Agent Orange that waits years to show,

    and lives turned to empty stare.

    We watch close or distant;

    we brace and stiffen

    and grow cynical or uncaring.

    And death wins—

    we, robbed of vitality, brought low by failed hope,

    lost innocence,

    emptied childhood,

    and stillness.

    We keep going, but barely;

    we gather at the grave,

    watching the sting and

    the victory of dread.

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    But you stir late Saturday; we gather early Sunday with balm and embalming, close to the body, waiting for the smell but not; dreading the withered site . . . but not; cringing before love lost.. .but not here.

    Not here . . . but risen, gone, awakened, alive!

    The new creation stirs beyond the weeping women; O death .. .no sting! O grave … no victory! O silence … new song! O dread . . . new dance! O tribulation … now overcome!

    O Friday God—Easter the failed city, Sunday the killing fields. And we, we shall dance and sing, thank and praise, into the night that holds no more darkness.

    Used by permission: Prayers for a Privileged People, Walter Brueggemann, Abingdon Press, 2008.

    Easter 2010