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  • No sin, no service

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    No Sin, No Service

    Matthew 9:9-13

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

    As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth ; and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him. And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax-collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax-collectors and sinners?” But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, Ί desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

    Have you ever noticed that at the restaurant you least want to eat at, the restaurant that looks the most unappealing and certainly the least elegant is always that restaurant that has the sign, “No shirt, no shoes, no service.” I find myself wondering, has this been a problem for them in the past? Do people walk into these places and realize, “Oh no, I forgot my shirt. And my shoes too.” Is it a community wide issue, or is there one particular customer who keeps forgetting, and the sign is just for him? In that case, it should say, “Jared, no shirt, no shoes, no service,” so the rest don’t get wacky ideas. When I’m in a restaurant like that, I am tempted to take my shoes off, just to see what they’d do. Or then I think, are shoes and shirts the only deal breakers here? What about pants? But I’ve thought it through, and I suppose what they are trying to say with that sign is that although this is a casual place, there are limits. We don ‘ t just serve anybody. You have to have clothing on. Or at least two items of clothing. Well, at least they put it out there. Most of society is not that honest. Groups of people have those signs in their heads, but outsiders never see those signs. So the new junior employee sits down at the cafeteria table and is horrified to dis­ cover he has plunked himself in the middle of senior management. Or a single man sits next to a beautiful woman only to be displaced by her husband for whom she was sav­ ing the seat, and he leaves embarrassed. Or a newcomer to the church sits in someone else’s regular seat and can tell from a look that something is wrong, but what is it? Or picture this moment. You enter the school cafeteria and freeze. You clutch your lunch and wonder. Where do I sit? Will I be welcomed? Will I be ignored? This is the worst moment, but you will get through it. You will get through it because you have been the new kid before. Every couple of years, in fact, you have gone to a new school and faced this hideous moment. But the noise from the lunch room hits you like a bomb. All that chattering, shrieking, and laughing does not include you, and it never has. You are the outsider. You have no-where to sit. You could turn around and spend the lunch hour in the bathroom, but then tomorrow you will have to deal with this again. “Is someone sitting here?” you ask at a table with an empty seat or two. A shrug. “Go ahead.” You remember your last school, where, when you asked “Is someone sitting

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    here?” they said “Sorry, it’s taken.” So you sat somewhere else and then spent the lunch hour looking at that still empty seat and the girls around it whispering to one another, saying “That was mean,” when their laughter indicated what it really was to them was funny to them. After that, you wondered if you would always eat alone at this school. And now, sitting here, doing this moment one more time, you sit down and wonder: Will they talk to me? Will I ever eat with these people again?

    “What’s your name?” the girl I have joined at the table asks me. Another says, “Where did you move from?” And at her question, my heart fills with such gratitude; I fight to keep back the tears. They have welcomed me. I have a place to sit. I will not have to eat alone in the middle of a crowded room. This was a scenario I went through every couple of years in my childhood, moving as we did from one place to another, a journalist’s family, a foreign correspondent, never staying in any one country very long. That internal first day in the lunch room dialogue, I have it memorized and can recall it as if it were yesterday. The desire to eat at the table with others seems to have been hardwired into human beings. And now let me ask you a hard question. Do you ever eat alone with the television on? I always read in health magazines that you shouldn’t do that. Apparently , you should practice mindful eating, quietly savoring every morsel in solitude. You get your remote in one hand and fork in the other, and channel surf your way through a wolfed down meal, wishing you were eating the pizza they are advertising on TV, and therefore eating twice as much of whatever you have in front of you. Why do we do that? Why, in the privacy of our own homes, do we watch TV when we eat? Because when we’re eating alone, it can feel lonely. We turn on the television for company. We like eating in the company of others. We can’t always pull it off today, but as human beings, we have always done it sometimes, gathered as groups to eat together, clearly enjoying it. Early art depicts it. The last supper clinched it. Eating at the table together has the capacity to be both very ordinary and earth shattering. In the communion liturgy from Luke’s gospel, we hear: “Their eyes were opened in the breaking of the bread.” God was in action when they gathered at the table. None of that would have happened had the disciples each been eating alone. But there is a social status element to all this as well. It is not just that we do not want to eat alone. We do not want to be seen as eating alone. Whether it is the wedding banquet seating arrangement or walking into the corporate cafeteria, we notice who eats with whom. Where does your boss eat? Which groups of coworkers are clustered together? Do the union members sit on one side of the break room, the supervisor on the other? From our earliest nursery school memories of snack time to the seating chart at the retirement dinner, we know that these seating arrangements, formal and informal, mean something about who we are and where we are placed. And it says something about our society.

    Let me give you an example from a certain local junior high school in our community. Those who set the rules for the school are aware of the social jockeying that takes place over where pre-teenagers eat, so they have come up with a solution. It is one of those heavy-handed solutions that kills the gnat with the baseball bat, and ends up damaging the table. When my son started at this school in the sixth grade, I

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    found out to my horror that the students had no choice about where they sat. Lunch time seating was assigned. By the Pharisees. Now, the kids have some say in it. They let you choose where to sit at the beginning of the year, but from then on it was set. You had to sit with those people from that time on. It was an effort to reduce the chaos of the junior high lunchroom (well, good luck with that), but also an effort to make sure everyone had someone to sit with, that no one would be left out or excluded. But how did the baseball bat kill the gnat and still damage the table? I’ll tell you. Those early teen years are some of the most cliquish times when good kids can be awfully hard on one another. You must remember those years yourself, when those social lines between groups are almost calcified. So what a message to send during that developmental period. You are stuck in one social group. You can not grow; you can not change. Your social rut is set, and you are stuck in it, from the first week of school on. It may seem minor, but that’s a damaged social table, and it sets the stage for social stratification in adult life. If Jesus had been a student in this school, he would not have been allowed to eat with the tax collectors and sinners. And you know you have sinners in junior high school. There would have been no opportunity for their redemption. But I have a feeling that if Jesus had gone to Hadley Junior High, he would have broken that rule. For in his life, when he ate with the tax collectors and the sinners, he was breaking rules that were more rigid than that. In Jesus’ day, who you ate with mattered. Where you sat was not a casual affair. You were associated with the people you ate with. If they were good upstanding people and they invited you to eat at their table, you were, by association, good and upstanding too. Add to this social pressure, the fact that there were dietary laws that good observant Jews followed, and those who did not follow them were considered unclean. So eating with the wrong people who were not careful about such observances would make you dirty by association. Even worse, if people were sinners, known to the community as such, you definitely didn’t want to eat with them. The only people who ate with the sinners were the other sinners, the people who had to share a table because no other table would have them. So people kept track of these things. In Jesus’ day, they weren’t all eating in a school cafeteria; they were observing one another in small town life. They kept track of who went into whose house, and who stayed for dinner, and who was invited, and who was not invited. Everybody watched, and while there wasn’t a sign hanging over the various dining room tables, you knew who would be served and who would not.

    By the time I got to high school, in the suburbs of Washington, DC, the last school I would attend before college, I had already been to nine other schools in seven different countries. So I knew how to read the lunchroom tables like an anthropologist. Tech-nically, you were free to sit anywhere you liked, but not really. There were the orches-tra kids, the ethnic and cultural groupings, the loud kids, the quiet kids. One table featured a group that you never saw in any class, because they only seemed to be present in school for lunch. There was another table that apparently you could only eat at if you were pretty. There was no sign posted, but there may as well have been. Only the handsome can sit here. The nerds hung together, talking about things the people at that previous table would not have been able to understand anyway. And then there was the back table, where any type of food could be turned into an aviation device, and

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    weapons were crafted from straws, ketchup packets and tater tots – those amazing tiny fried potatoes that can also function as missiles. You remember this table from your school days. That’s where I ended up, I must confess. The back table. Why? Because back when I was the new kid, they welcomed me. But high school was the first place in my life where I actually got to start and graduate in one school, and so something remarkable happened over those three consecutive years. The lunch room ceased to be a place of terror and instead became for me a wonderful social buffet. And I decided not be restricted to any one food group. I decided to cross pollinate the lunch tables. At first, when I would sit down at any of the afore mentioned enclaves, I was stared at as if I had made a mistake. But gradually I got to know different people, make different friends, and I realized that the cliques were not nearly as homogenous as I had been led to believe. There were smart students at the pretty table, and jocks at the orchestra table, and interesting stories everywhere. I admit it, I was practicing lunch table infidelity, and, like many forbidden things, it was fun. One day at the nerd table, a guy who had seen me at the back table over the years said, “You know, Lillian, you’re a lot less of a loser than you seemed to be.” I sympathized. “Yeah, you throw one tater tot and people think you’re a moron.” “Well, you actually threw a lot of tater tots,” he replied. “Whatever. Dude, we’ve got to break down these walls.” It was a moment.

    When Jesus was fishing for disciples, he was looking in some pretty shallow pools. These were not necessarily the best and the brightest. Not those voted most likely to succeed. At one point, he appears so desperate that the scripture tells us “he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And the tax collector got up from his booth and followed him.” Now, tax collectors were the most hated group in the social system, not to be confused with governmental officials today or the 1RS. While we may not always enjoy paying our taxes, we hardly blame the guy who reads our tax returns, right? But these New Testament tax collectors had sold out the Jewish people to the empire, ratted out their own kind, extorting money for a bully just to pay their own bills. If there was anyone you could judge, it was a tax collector. And as Jesus sat at dinner* in the house, then all sorts of other tax-collectors and sinners came and joined them. Because they had become a table with a culture. Not the nerd table, not the jock table, but the sinners table, the rejects, the people no one else wanted to eat with. And there were Jesus and his disciples not just eating with them, but recruiting leaders from within their ranks. The Pharisees, who were good and observant Jews, the ones who were most careful about the rules, saw this, and said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax-collectors and sinners?’ Why isn’t he sitting at his assigned table?” Because they were honestly baffled at this rule breaking. They were genuinely worried that Jesus was making himself unclean. And he was, without apology. “No shirt, no shoes, no service.” Most of the world isn’t that direct. But the unspoken and unwritten rules are often the ones that cause the most pain. Jesus turned the tables on that by sitting at the wrong table. What made it the wrong table? The wrong people were sitting at it. Who are the wrong people? The ones who are not like us. At our church, we house the homeless every Sunday night for twelve months of the year, right downstairs. Even though we live in an affluent suburb, our church hall

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    is filled to capacity with about 60 men, women and children in search of shelter. But in making a change this summer, to move from doing this seven months of the year to doing it year round, we have received some feedback from the community. There are concerns, because in the hours before and after the housing program, these homeless guests do not really have anywhere to go. So they frequent the Starbucks, and some of them panhandle. Others push their carts filled with their belongings around town, biding the time before the doors are opened for dinner or closed after breakfast. In other words, say these critics, by wandering around a town they could never afford a home in, they do not respect the assigned seating arrangements. In fact, some of the complaints I have heard center around the fact that the homeless have the nerve to sit on the bench outside the coffee shop, and by doing so, prevent others from sitting there. Who would not want to sit by someone like that? It is as if, in this affluent suburb, there is an unspoken sign that says that if you pay enough money for your home, you should not only not have to sit next a homeless person, but you should not even have to see one. This attitude is not everywhere in town. In fact, I think it is a minority opinion, and it is clearly not shared by the members of our church, as our commitment indicates. But you know that attitude pervades much of privileged culture. Jesus has a very clear answer that will not satisfy these people. The answer is this. In the world, there may be assigned seating, but in the kingdom of heaven there is not. So throw out the seating chart, in church as well as on the park benches, and remember that the church was born on the damaged consciences and rotten reputations of tax collectors, sinners and people in need. They were our founders. Matthew, who today some people would want to remove from a public picnic table, has a gospel written in his name that we read this Sunday. The church will always be criticized when it challenges the world on these issues. We will always be told that the barriers are there for a reason, that the rules are there to keep order, and that if we can all keep to our own lunch tables, we will all be better off. And the myth ofthat story is that you could keep all the sinners at their own table. Which is of course wrong and also profoundly self-deceiving. Because there are sinners at every table. You can argue with that. But I can say this for sure, there’s a sinner at every table I sit down at, because it’s me.

    Often, we read this gospel passage in church as a cautionary tale. Do not be like those Pharisees, who exclude and divide. It’s a decent lesson to take away, but it’s a lesson that puts us in the position of power and decision making, where we think we belong. That’s too easy. Instead today, try understanding this story like you’re the tax collector. You’re looking over the tables, wondering where you can sit down and who will have you. You want a way out of your past mistakes and your sins. You want to live better. And there you see a man who sits with sinners, you, me, and the tax collector, and if there had been a sign above that table, it would have said, “No sin, no service.” In other words, you need to be a sinner to eat at this restaurant. Which is just another way of saying, everyone is welcome here at the communion table, and on the beds in our church hall, or in the public spaces in our town. In the kingdom of heaven there is no assigned seating. So let’s not put up with it here on earth.

  • Life with laity

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    Life with Laity*

    Philippians 3:10; 12b; 4:2, 3b

    WillWillimon North Alabama Conference, United Methodist Church, Birmingham, Alabama

    I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his suffering by becoming like him in his death…. I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own…. I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord… .Help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel….

    Dear Columbia Class of 2008: All your study has come to this. Most of you, if not already, soon will be clergy, a condition I have had for thirty-three years. As pastor I have been privileged to work with some dreadfully earnest laity. I have served fine churches, congregations with impressive choirs, nice pensions, large organs. But I’ 11 tell you the truth: I would rather be made at gunpoint to drive to New York City backwards, listening to Brittany Spears, than to go back and do church.. .with any of those laity.. .ever again. Ah, the laity! You have spent years at Columbia, getting over being laity, so I figure that you are up for a misanthropic diatribe against the dear, sweet, simple, demanding, difficult, diffident laity. As bishop, one of my jobs is to cop the credentials of clergy calling it quits. And I can tell you novices, I’ve never had a pastor throw in the towel because he was fed up with Jesus. It’s the laity who do them in! The greatest challenge of the Christian ministry in any form is Jesus ‘ command to work with the people whom Jesus has called to work with him. In support of my argument I call on my clerical colleague St. Paul. Here is Paul waxing eloquently to First Church Philippi on the glories of Christ, his death and resurrection, calling in his most impressive theological artillery:

    Though he was in the form of God, Did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, But emptied himself.. ihat at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue confess… (2:5ff.).

    Here is the grandeur of the Christian faith, the full sweep of our theology! Then, as if he has finally gotten to what is really bugging him, Paul blurts out, “Euodia! Syntyche! Behave! Stop fighting. Be reconciled!” Amid the grandest theological affirmations , Paul calls out (by name, no less) two squabbling laity. What’s this? It’s the church! Sunday I’m putting finishing touches on my sermon on Philippians 2, a deft expo

    * This sermon was preached in May, 2008 at Baccalaureate, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia.

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    sition of the préexistence of Christ and its implications for people who drive Volvos. The door to my study swings open and a prepubescent acolyte screams, “Preacher, come quick! Euodia and Syntyche are squared off in the sacristy over whether it’s carnations or mums for Epiphany! Syntyche is threatening to bop Euodia with a memorial vase.” How is it that St. Paul is forced to put up with such laity idiocy? How is it that you should give your life for this? Three years ago I left academia. Sometimes people ask, “What do you most miss about life in the university, compared with your life now as church bureaucrat?” I answer: “I miss most the Duke Office of Admissions. The university Admissions Office insured that I would never be forced to work with anyone who was not like me – same background, same gifts for manipulating the system to my advantage. Church, on the other hand, is notoriously nonselective. We pastors are forced to work with anybody whom Jesus drags in the door!” So there you are. You gave your life to Jesus and got stuck with Euodia and Syntyche . I know that you Presbyterians shy away from language of “laity” and “clergy.” More typical of the Reformed is to speak of people being ordained to various offices for the edification of the church. Well, you can pretty it up anyway you like. It’s still us against the laity. “Spirituality” is all the rage — feeling religious, sort of, without the bother of having to be religious with people who are not as vaguely spiritual as you. Why? “Spirituality” is Jesus without the laity! Or, as the poet Shelley put it, “I could believe in Christ if he did not drag behind him that leprous bride of his, the church.” I led a clergy conference in Hawaii. Before the meeting we toured the islands as sightseers. The guides told us, “Hawaii is a tropical paradise. Here, unlike where you’re from, all these ethnic groups live in love and harmony….” I believed it. Then I met with the pastors. “Harmony?” They complained of disjointed congregations where the Japanese think they’re better than the Koreans and the Koreans look down on the Samoans and everyone detests the Japanese as much as they despise the Anglos, and high rates of drug abuse, and shocking poverty. Leave it to the clergy, I thought – enmeshed with the laity – to discover the ugly underbelly of paradise. I asked one of my M.Div. students, “Why are you headed toward ministry?” He answered, “Because I enjoy working with people.” I replied, “Dear, have you actually met any of the people with whom you will be working? What sort of masochist finds enjoyment in that?” I have never had anyone withdraw from a church where I served saying, “Jesus’ demands upon us are just too much.” No, why they leave is, “We think the world of Jesus, but we just can’t stand his friends.” There is a reason why Paul speaks of crucifixion, and then immediately recalls Euodia! Syntyche! Take my first congregation. Please. It was rural Georgia and as many of you have learned, rural doesn’t get much more rural than that. I, fresh from Yale Divinity School, all Bultmanned-Tilliched-up for grad school at Emory. Saturday before my first Sunday I went out to survey my church – a forlorn place that went by the utterly inappropriate name of “Friendship Methodist Church.” I noted apadlock on the front door. The lay leader – a man so named because he laid carpet in Smyrna – informed me that the lock belonged to the Gwinnett Country Sheriff who locked down the church

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    after a somewhat difficult church meeting. “People started ripping pews out of the floor and carting off stuff they had given to the church, so the Sheriff come out here and put that lock there until the new preacher could get here and sort things out,” he explained. That typified my days there – squabbling, one failure after another, Euodia and Syntyche dooking it out in the parking lot after a wedding. It was more than I could take. One day, in youthful despair, I poured out my frustration to my favorite Emory professor. The horror — one such as I, with theological training such as mine, condemned to care for people like them? My professor sympathetically listened to my tale of woe. He agreed to the injustice of someone like me forced to serve people like them. The laity are lousy. “And worst of all…,” he said, “Jesus says that whores and taxcollectors get to go into the Kingdom of God before us good people.” Jesus teaches, preaches, heals and finally suffers and dies. And on his way to paradise, deserted by his own disciples, hanging in agony on the cross, Jesus enters paradise with nothing to show for his trouble but one slightly informed, somewhat penitent thief. Some trophy. And yet Karl Barth designates this gathering of Jesusand the two thieves as birthday of the church. The Kingdom of God is a great banquet where though really nice people are the first invited, they find other things to do. In anger the master of the banquet goes out and invites everybody — the maimed, the lame, and the blind, the broken hearted, Republicans, Rotarians, rejects, racists, and reprobates. That’s God’s Table – a bunch of losers whom no nice person would be caught dead with on a Saturday night. So says Jesus. “I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord.. ..help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel…. ” For all their faults, these women are chosen by God as fellow strugglers with Paul in the “work of the gospel.” As those ordained, called, these women are like Paul, under orders to be reconciled. “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection…, ” says Paul. To whom did the resurrected Christ appear? Not to the cognoscenti cleros, but to the squabbling laos — fearful, misunderstanding women, according to the gospels. You know not the “power of his resurrection” until you know that Christ returned to those who forsook and disappointed him, to Euodia and Syntyche, and thus to you and thus to me. It’s a heck of a way to run a Kingdom of God, but it appears to be His way. In response to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” John Calvin said of course we think well of our friends and family, no great surprise in that. The odd thing is that Christ commands us to love our enemies. How is that possible? Calvin answers, “All should be contemplated in God, not in themselves.” If we look directly at the human race, says Calvin, unaided by God, we will feel more hate than love. We must look upon people as God looks at people. The ability not only to endure but also to love Euodia and Syntheche arises from our theological commitments. The night I was ordained, when a bishop (a position whom many of you don’t believe in) laid hands on my head, the Holy Spirit descended neither in the singing of the choir nor in the presence of loving family and friends, but rather when the bishop intoned the ancient words of the Ordinal, “Never forget that the ones whom you serve are the beloved sheep of his fold for whom he died.”

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    I wondered, “Will the church appreciate my superior training and gifts? Will I get an all-electric parsonage?” The Ordinal shook me: Don’t forget kid, the ones you’re lucky enough to preach to, to weep with, and to join in looking out for the Kingdom are the ones for whom he died.” Bless you for the guts to try to live with, lead, and maybe by God’s grace even to love the laos in Jesus’ name. The only good reason to be here is Christological. The only means of persevering to the end is that Jesus, in his wisdom, means this to be so. One of my churches serves breakfast to close to two hundred homeless people every morning. I was there awhile back and on my way in noticed a man in the kitchen, washing dishes, up to his elbows in dishwater. (The pastor of the church believes that the homeless ought always to be served by the church on china rather than plastic.) I recognized the man as a lawyer, member of our largest, most affluent suburban congregation. “I think it’s wonderful that you are here, washing dishes for the homeless,” I said to him. “Good for you,” he mumbled, not looking up from his work. “Have you always enjoyed ministry with the homeless?” I asked. “Who told you I enjoyed working with the homeless?” he asked. “Have you met any of the homeless out there? Most of them are crazy, so addicted or messed up that nobody, not even their family, wants them home.” “Well, I, er, uh, think that makes it all the more remarkable what you are here doing,” I said. “How did you get here?” He looked up from the dishwater and replied, “I’m here because Jesus put me here. How did you get here?” Ah, the laity! Budding theologians, fledgling leaders of the Body of Christ, I have little with which to commend to you the church, the People of God, this evening. I have no rationale that justifies throwing away your time and talents on the likes of Euodia or Syntyche. Except this: these are the ones whom the very Son of God loved and for whom he died and to whom he rose. Amen.

  • The church and Latino immigration: what a pastor can do

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    The Church and Latino Immigration:

    What a Pastor Can Do

    Catherine Foster

    Decatur, Georgia

    The testimony of Pentecost demonstrates that, from its very inception, the church crossed borders. The original disciples may have all been from the same place and spoken the same language (Acts 2:7), but the moment they came into contact with the Spirit, the disciples invited into the church people from at least fifteen different areas, languages, or ethnicities (Acts 2:9-11). While scriptures throughout the Old and New Testaments bear witness to God’s mandate to love the alien (Leviticus 19:33-4, for example), the story of Pentecost should compel pastors to consider how their churches might be in ministry for and with local Latino immigrants. Pentecost begins in homogeneity and in a single room: twelve Jewish males, all from Galilee, gather together in one place (Acts 2:1). Their uniformity is not unlike the state of most mainline Protestant churches in the United States today. The twelve were also not part of the neighborhood where they were meeting. They were a “commuter” rather than a “community” church. Their neighbors knew this fact about them, too, when they insisted, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?” (Acts 2:7b). Nevertheless, God used the disciples’ homogenous backgrounds to create a miraculous preaching opportunity to launch the church. Like the crowd around the disciples, many of our congregants are filled with perplexity , skepticism, and even animosity about new Latino immigrants in our communities . For most, it is inconceivable that in forty years (by 2050) Latinos will constitute 25 percent of the U.S. population.1 Like the crowds at Pentecost, our congregations raise at least two key questions for their leaders to answer: first, “What does this mean?” (Acts 2:12), and second, “What should we do?” (Acts 2:37). An issue as contentious and complex as Latino immigration demands courage and clarity from church leaders, but an issue as human and urgent as Latino immigration commands a Christian response. Over the past five years, I have had the privilege of working with pastors and congregations in Charlotte, North Carolina, and in Atlanta, Georgia, as they have prayerfully discerned their involvement with the burgeoning Latino immigrant population in the southern United States. Without a doubt, talking about immigration as a church is difficult. For any one church member, the topic can instantly link to divisive issues such as politics, race, ethnicity, national security, the economy, the rule of law, education, and health care. The concerns are legitimate, but so is God’s call to care for the least of these in our communities—the foreigner, the criminal, the disenfranchised, the day laborer, the child—the undocumented immigrant. The job of the pastor is not to be an expert on immigration. Indeed, most of us do well to remember a little high school Spanish or to make it back from the Mexico mission trip with all of our youth. What Pentecost challenges every church leader to do in relation to Latino immigration is to help their congregation answer the questions “What does this mean?” and “What should we do?” It is no accident that God gave birth to the church among sojourners in Jerusalem

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    who spoke many languages. The contemporary American church’s task is to figure out how God calls the U .S. church into relationship with America’s sojourners who do not speak English as their first language, all the while remembering how the church and its members are also sojourners. As a pastor, attaining a starting point to engage immigration with the church may seem daunting. You may know little about national and local immigration. Your Spanish may, at best, be rusty and elementary. Chances are your parishioners hold divergent and potentially clashing views on the topic. Why bring such a politically, racially, and economically charged issue into the church? Because, for the church, this is not primarily a political, racial, or economic issue; for the church, undocumented Latino immigration is a humanitarian crisis unfolding in our backyards. People on all sides of the immigration debate agree that America’s immigration policy and border security are broken. Whether the solution is for more visas or for more border patrol agents, the fact of the matter is that somewhere between twelve and twenty million children of God are in the United States without papers. Every single day, one to two people die trying to cross the 2,000-mile U.S .-Mexico Border.2 Many Latino immigrants in the U.S. are performing jobs that “involve toxic chemicals or pesticides or dangerous equipment.”3 Local law enforcement agents are acting as immigration officials, which leaves undocumented individuals afraid to report crimes committed against them. America’s current border and deportation policies are separating children from parents and husbands from wives. In all this brokenness, the church is called to be present. Christians are to see Christ in “the least of these” because, when God judges the nations, the questions will be: Did you feed the ones who did not have food in their home countries ; did you clothe the ones who arrived here with only a shirt on their backs; did you help the ones who were sick or pregnant and had no medical care; and did you visit the ones society has labeled “illegal” in detention prison? (Matthew 25: 35-37). From Abraham and Moses in the wilderness, to Mary and Joseph in Egypt, to the man the Samaritan finds somewhere between Jerusalem and Jericho, God consistently demonstrates God’s concern for the migrant, the alien, the wanderer, and the sojourner. The early church thrived on radical hospitality as they followed Jesus’ parable to “go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame” (Luke 14: 21b). In her book Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, Christine Pohl claims |modern “people view hospitality as quaint and tame partly because they do not understand the power of recognition. When a person who is not valued by society is receiyed by a socially respected person or group as a human being with dignity and worth, small transformations occur.”4 How then should the socially respected institution of the church recognize the unseen and unvalued immigrants in our society? j A pastor can begin by helping the congregation ask: “What does this [Latino immigration] mean?” Sometimes the origin of understanding is as simple as noticing. Notice if there are Spanish-speaking radio stations on the dial tone. Notice what areas around town have clusters of signs written in Spanish. Notice what language the people who work in restaurant kitchens or hotel housekeeping are speaking. Notice who landscapes the neighborhood’s lawns or who builds the city’s buildings. Notice what words the nightly news, politicians, and service providers use to describe

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    undocumented immigrants. Notice if your church headquarters has a Latino ministry division. Just notice. The first time I visited Central America, I had the privilege of staying in a rural farming community in northern Nicaragua. In the evening as most of the community gathered together to relax after a long day, I looked at each person and noticed the absence of men from age fifteen to fifty. Surprised, I asked some of the women where their husbands and sons were. Some replied, “Mexico.” Others, “Texas.” Still, others responded, “Carolina del Norte”—North Carolina. When I returned to Charlotte a week later, I could not believe my eyes. People who had simply been part of the wallpaper of my life suddenly became Olga’s son constructing my new academic building and Maria’s husband grilling my chicken sandwich. The relationships I had formed forced me to notice. The relationships I continue to make oblige me to speak out. Informed noticing becomes awareness, and responsible awareness promotes recognition. To help the congregation ask, “what does this mean,” pastors can begin to bring what they notice into worship. Replace the communion white bread with tortillas from a local Mexican bakery. Wear a stole or drape the table with colorful fabrics from Peru or Guatemala. Refill the candy jar on your desk with exotic treats from a nearby Hispanic “tienda.” Incorporate hymns with Latin American origins, like “Lord, you have come to the lake shore” or “Cuando el pobre/ When a poor one.” As certain members of the congregation notice local immigration also, invite one of them to offer a “minute for mission” about a local Latino service provider. In the prayers of the people, include migrant workers, oppressed laborers, families split apart by borders, and migrants living in fear. Most important, preach about immigration. However small the allusion may be, what matters is that we break the church’s silence about immigration and create safe space for our parishioners to wrestle with all sides of the debate. Immigration has been painted as an economic, cultural, and safety issue through sound bites and half-truths. The church needs informed leaders to nuance and balance the community’s conversations about immigration. The Bible provides plenty of archetypal characters as migrants—Abraham, Joseph , Moses, Ruth, and Jesus, to name a few. Additionally, the Scriptures give paradigms to consider some of the longer-term immigrant humanitarian crises. For example, how might Mary and Joseph’s flight to Egypt inform the family values of immigration policy (Matthew 2)? What does the parable of the laborers in the vineyard say about the U.S. business sector’s treatment of Latino workers (Matthew 20:1-16)? If Jesus said, “go and sin no more,” to the adulterous woman, what would he have the U.S. say to undocumented immigrants already in the U .S. (John 8:11 )? No matter what scripture and exegetical angle a sermon takes, what the church must do is educate its members so that immigration is, first and foremost, a human issue, a family issue, a Christian issue. To be clear, there are many faithful political, programmatic, and legal responses to undocumented immigration. The pastor’s job is not to run headlong into the policy debate in a sermon. Rather, the pastor is uniquely situated to reveal the human face of immigration. Undocumented immigrants are in too vulnerable a position to tell their own stories, but a pastor can expose the precarious, fearful, and oppressed life journey of a migrant. Lift up just one person’s story—someone who came to the church for

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    help or a family you met in the grocery store or even someone mentioned in a local newspaper article. Help the congregation think about the situations from which these immigrants have come. Inform them of the precious few options the family’s breadwinners had. Bring to light the types of work and services these immigrants are providing for the community. The interconnections between undocumented immigrants and everyday Americans are infinite, but well hidden. As the congregation and the pastor grow in awareness, they will together answer the question: “What does this mean?” In the narrative of Pentecost, after Peter has shared the gospel message, the multilingual crowd is “cut to the heart” and unanimously asks, “What should we do?” (Acts 2:37). Undoubtedly, the powerful Holy Spirit worked both in Peter’ s words and in the hearts of the crowd. If after hearing about the human side of immigration, the Holy Spirit is calling a congregation into relationship with local Latinos, there are rich possibilities for outreach and partnership. Just as the disciples prepared for Pentecost by defining their own group (Acts 1 : 12-26), any congregation should first look inward and outward before beginning a new effort. As they encounter “the other,” the congregation needs to ask, “Who do we want to be?” before answering, “What do we want to do?” Each congregation’s selfunderstanding and theology of outreach will be unique. The skills represented in the congregation should influence the shape of its service. That is to say, a congregation’s vocational gifts, including education, medical, technical, and legal skills, should be the ones that they offer in their outreach. In addition, responsible outreach must take into account the area around the church. Even if congregants are passionate about offering English as a Second Language (ESL) classes, they will need to reconsider if two other churches in the area are already teaching them. Similarly, if the church is located miles away from the city’s Latino population, any outreach efforts must travel to the Latino neighborhood, not visa versa. The local United Way or community foundation may be very helpful in knowing what services are already being provided where and identifying possible areas of need where a church could help. Winning the trust of the Latino community and communicating effectively with each other can require quite a bit of time because of the vulnerability of some of the population and other language and cultural barriers. For this reason, churches may want to actively seek out partnerships with other churches or organizations that are already established within the Latino community. Good research not only makes the congregation a good neighbor; it also boosts the probability that the congregation’s efforts will be needed and utilized. Outreach to Latino immigrants requires a special sensitivity to their community’s unique needs and lifestyle. Events should be scheduled outside of their working hours. Transportation and childcare are two concerns that must be addressed. If the congregation is using its own facilities, be sure to mark parking spaces, buildings, and other important areas with signs in Spanish, Portuguese, or the appropriate dialect. The congregation’s specific outreach can vary widely. Some successful programs have included after-school tutoring for youth, since many are learning in a second language and foreign school system. All types of childcare can be helpful since many Latino families have two working parents. ESL classes are popular, but sometimes individuals also need basic literacy classes as well. Other successful programs have included classes on driving in America, health and nutritional information, parenting,

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    computer skills, Bible study, and community laws and services. If the immigrants’ work is seasonal, the congregation may structure some services around the farming or construction calendar. For example, workers may have more time to attend an intensive class in the wintertime than a weekly class year-round. Families may also need extra clothing, food, or funds during the low-point in their annual work cycle. Finally, if a church feels called to advocacy, there are specific local issues where congregants can have a maximum effect. Their engagement may involve supporting funding for ESL classes in public schools, asking for a Spanish-speaking career and social counselor in public schools, campaigning for a sheriff who does not want to enforce federal immigration law or racial-profile traffic stops, ensuring that basic water, electricity, and renting contracts do not require a social security number, and demanding the appropriate number of agricultural and work visas. Ultimately, congregants should explore and support faith-informed national comprehensive immigration reform. The first harvest of Pentecost is the faith, fellowship, and food shared among the disciples and the crowd (Acts 2:43-47). Similarly, established congregations have plenty of faith, fellowship, and food to share in partnership with Latino immigrants. More than 90 percent of Latinos in the U.S. identify themselves as Christian, and of those, a growing 30 percent are Protestant, usually Pentecostal or Evangelical .5 Settled and immigrant Christians can always share prayers, songs and worship. Settled congregations can partner with a Latino group or congregation to alternate cooking cultural meals for the whole group. Churches have also successfully partnered for movie nights, service projects, festival/holiday exchanges, and Vacation Bible School. English speakers should also consider asking their Latino brothers and sisters to teach them Spanish or Portuguese. Some immigrants may feel comfortable teaching home maintenance or gardening classes in addition to traditional Sunday school or Bible study classes. With mutual respect and clear communication, the possibilities for helpful and creative partnerships are boundless. The miracle of Pentecost and the testimony of the disciples ultimately led to the crowd’s conversion and to the beginning of the early church. In that model, the work of the Holy Spirit and the witness of Christian pastors will help to convince our congregations of the humanitarian concerns around Latino immigration. In my experience, Christians begin to care about immigration, not because of a compelling debate or staggering statistics, but because an encounter with a Latino immigrant converts them to caring about a group of people and the unique struggles and injustices that that group is facing. The American church may never hold a uniform understanding of just and comprehensive immigration reform; we should all agree that Latino immigrants, regardless of their immigration status, are children of God who deserve respect and dignity. At Pentecost, the disciples did not already know the many languages that they used to “speak about God’s deeds and power” (Acts 2:11) or wield the skills to perform “many wonders and signs” (Acts 2:43). The Holy Spirit empowered their ministry. Likewise, the Holy Spirit yearns to empower today’s Christian leaders and their congregations to reach across language, cultural, and social barriers to encounter where the Spirit is already at work in the Latino community and to embrace what the Spirit will create in their partnerships. Begin by noticing, continue by recognizing, and

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    live in service and love. Ultimately, the Holy Spirit will carry the church into the future as it continues to cross borders, testify to God’s power, and share God’s wonders, signs, and deeds with all of God’s children.

    Notes

    1 “Table la. Projected Population of the United States, by Race and Hispanic Origin: 2000 to 2050.” Population Projections. U.S. Census Bureau, http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/ usinterimproj. Last Modified: July 31,2008. 2 Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, ed. Religion and Social Justice for Immigrants. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 11. 3 Ibid, 9. 4 Christine Pohl: Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition. 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1999), 17. 5 Arlene Sanchez Walsh, “The Mexican American Experience,” Introduction to the US. Latina and Latino Religious Experience. (Boston: Brill, 2004), 40.

  • Speak tenderly

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    Speak Tenderly

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

    Sam Wells

    Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

    Egypt and Babylon. The Old Testament is shaped around these two stories. First the children of Israel are slaves in Egypt. God raises up Moses and through the exodus brings his people to freedom in the promised land. Then we wait. We wait to see what they’ll do with their freedom. Then they’re in exile in Babylon. There they discover a part of God’s character they hadn’ t known before, and they return with a new understanding of themselves and a new understanding of God. Then we wait. We wait to see whether the life they have after their return from Babylon can really be called freedom. The stories are similar. But there’s a big difference between them. Slavery in Egypt is not Israel’s fault. They were hungry, so they came to Egypt; they did well there, so they became a threat to the regime; the regime made them slaves to keep them down. So when we imagine Israel in Egypt, we identify with the oppressed everywhere , the downtrodden, the abused and hurt and cruelly treated. We like to read these stories, because it makes us feel righteous. It tells us God vindicates in the face of injustice, God sets history straight. But Babylon isn’t like that. The books of Isaiah and Kings and Jeremiah and Lamentations and Ezekiel make no mistake in portraying Israel’s time in exile as a time of suffering and sorrow. But the difference is this. The time in Babylon is self-inflicted sorrow. This is suffering that need not have been. This is suffering that Israel brought on itself by turning from God’s ways. We don’t like to read these stories. They don’t make us feel righteous. They make us feel embarrassed and uncomfortable. We’d rather take refuge in military and economic and geopolitical explanations for the fall of the Israelite kingdom. But the Bible’s having none of it. Israel made her own bed and spent 70 years lying in it. That’s what it says. I wonder how that embarrassment and discomfort touches you. I wonder if there’s a suffering and pain in your life that need not have been, because it was self-inflicted. Yes, we spend a lot of time licking the wounds of our slavery in Egypt, resenting the ways the sins of others bring us down and make our lives harder than we feel they should be. But I’m not talking about Egypt today, because Isaiah’s not talking about Egypt. I’m talking about Babylon. I’m talking about the place you ended up because you got it very badly wrong. It may be a very visible place, like Babylon was for Israel. It may be that you know what it means to face public humiliation: to hear the gasp of strangers as they’ve read about you in the paper or sense the anguish of friends or family members (or former friends or former family members) who know what you did and feel inconsolably let down. It may be that every time you see certain people, you blink and wince because you feel they’re judging you for the worst thing you’ve ever done, and you’ll never be able to look them straight in the face again. Or it may be a secret, known only to you or perhaps one or two others. It may be something you’re terrified of coming to light, something you wonder whether you could ever share with anybody without them going cold and distant and politely ending

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    the friendship. You may be wondering if you’ 11 be spending the rest of your life in some kind of hiding or disguise. You may be feeling like you’re living in some kind of a prison of your own making, because most of the courses open to you lead to some kind of disclosure or encounter or reminder that tests the secret to its limit. It could be you find yourself bursting into tears for no reason. Perhaps you’re surrounded by people now who couldn’t imagine or understand or ever be reconciled to the story you have to tell. Maybe you feel angry or paralyzed that you have to live your life with this secret chaining you down. Hear these words of Isaiah: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.” Now these words are directed at the people of Israel in exile. But I want to look closely at what these words meant to the people of Israel in Babylon to discover precisely what they might mean to you today. Israel has a series of reasons to find God’s dazzling new word hard to countenance. To start with, when you’ve made a mess of things, when you’ve sinned big time, there’s a lot of hurt. By hurt I mean the impact of wrongdoing on hearts and minds and souls and most of all on the heart of God. But besides hurt, there’s also damage. Damage refers to the lasting practical effects of what you’ ve broken. For Israel the hurt was their estrangement from God. The damage was the fact that they were in Babylon, a thousand miles from home. But look what God says. He says I’ll deal with the hurt and the damage. “Cry to Jerusalem that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid.” In other words, her sin is forgiven and its consequences are healed. That’s the difference between forgiveness and healing. Forgiveness deals with the sin, but after the sin is forgiven, there’s still the damage to be faced. Healing addresses the damage, and it sometimes takes a whole lot longer. Israel has another obstacle in the way of accepting God’s comfort. “We’re 30 days’ journey from home, and in between are mountains, valleys, and all sorts of difficult terrain.” In other words, I’ve put myself in such a distant place that even God’s forgiveness and healing aren’ t going to be enough to get me back. Well this is what God has to say about that distance and that terrain. “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.” In other words, don’t you go worrying about the road back. You know the way when an Eastern king is travelling around his empire, and a herald travels a day or two ahead of him to make sure the road ahead is flat and straight and free of obstacles? That’s the way it’s going to be for you – a herald’s going ahead of you to make sure your route is all flattened out and well prepared. You’re going home on a Blue Ridge Parkway to Zion. And then there’s another obstacle. The flesh is weak. We’ve had two obstacles that said the damage is too great and the distance too far. Now we’ve got a third obstacle that says my strength isn’t up to it. Israel said in the old days we had great figures like Jeremiah and Hezekiah. When we came out of Egypt, we had Moses. But now they’ve all gone and we’ve got no one. We say to ourselves, God may have forgiven me, even healed me, and even overcome the impossibilities of the situation I’ve created, but I just haven’t got it in me to face the future. I’m tired. The grass withers, the flower fades: I’m like the grass. But this obstacle is dismantled like the previous ones. “The grass withers, the flower fades. But the word of our God will stand forever.” In other words, you’re not going to do this in your own strength. You’re going to do this in God’s strength. To borrow words from later in this same chapter, “He gives power to the faint,

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    and strengthens the powerless. Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” And then there’s yet one more obstacle. And this one seems the biggest of all. We’ve had one about consequences. We’ve had another about distance. We’ve had a third about human weakness. But this last one is the big one. This last one is about fear. Don’t forget Israel assumed anyone who saw God would die. God was so holy, and Israel felt anything but holy. Remember that when Isaiah himself was in the temple in Jerusalem and saw God, he was petrified. It was such a holy moment we recall it at every communion service when we sing “Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of power and might.” The first three obstacles are about imagining ourselves without this constant burden of guilt and sorrow and regret. It’s hard to forgive ourselves because we’re used to telling a story in which we’re the main player, albeit a player who ruined the play. Even if we can get over our own reservations about being given a new identity free from our sin, we’ve then got to face up to God. We’ve got to stop looking at the ground and raise our eyes to meet God’s gaze, ashamed as we are. And here it seems we’re in for a big surprise. “Behold your God!” We’re face to face with God, and he’s mighty – of course he is, after all he’s just overcome our weakness, flattened the mountains and valleys, and repaired all the damage we’ve done. But it turns out when we look closer, he’s really a shepherd who loves us like his own sheep. He doesn’t drive us faster than we can go, and when the going’s too much for us, he gathers us into his arms and carries us in his bosom. Behold your God. That’s how God announces to Israel that her exile is over. God says, “Yes, you sinned, and yes, there’ve been major consequences, but I’ve forgiven you and I’m helping you clean up the mess you made. Yes, you’ve put yourself a long and difficult way from where you should be, but I’ll flatten whatever lies between here and there. Yes, you’re worn out and in many ways you’re as much hurt as those you’ve hurt, but this is going to be done in my strength, not yours. Yes, sin is a terrible thing in the face of my holiness, but don’t be afraid: I love you so tenderly I’ll embrace you, and if you can’t make the road back alone, I’ll carry you over the parts where you can’t walk.” Think of these words as describing a body coming back to life. The first words are about the mineral—rocks, valleys, and rough ground. Then there are words about the vegetable—grass and flowers. Finally there are words about the animal—sheep and lambs. There’s a cosmic coming alive here – the animal, vegetable and mineral world is coming out of exile too. There’s a political coming alive here – Israel is emerging from more than half a century of obscurity and subjugation. And there’s a personal coming alive here, as we’ve just been exploring. Israel’s alienation from God has cosmic, political, and personal dimensions and consequences. God resolves these consequences in a cosmic, political, and personal way. At the center of these words lies this promise: “Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” God’s solution is so much bigger, so much greater, so much more profound than the problem. Israel had departed from God; after years of grief and sorrow, the result is that all flesh shall see God – and live, and the God they shall see is tenderness itself. These words are about Israel coming back to life. That’s why they appear at the very beginning of Mark’s gospel. When John the Baptist says “Prepare the way of the Lord,” he’s saying all these promises are about to come true. Jesus is coming to bring Israel back to life. God the Father is saying to

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    God the Son, “Comfort, O comfort my people. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid.” That’s how God announces to Israel that her exile is over. And that’s how God is announcing the same news to you, this Advent – today. You’ve been carrying this humiliation, this embarrassment, this secret, this burden that keeps your head down and your eyes focused on the ground in front of you. You know there’ve been major consequences. But hear this word from God. Comfort ye. You have served your term. Your penalty is paid. It’s over. There may be high mountains and deep valleys between you and where you should be, but every one of those valleys shall be exalted, and every one of those mountains and hills shall be made low: and every crooked path shall be made straight, and the rough places be made plain. God is making a straight way for you, a highway to Zion. You may feel so weak that you feel like grass in the wind, but you will be borne up like an eagle on the wings of God’s Spirit. And he hasn’t utterly forsaken you. He will lead you like a shepherd, and where you can’t find it in you to go further, he’ll carry you in his heart. Feel your body coming back to life – its bones, its flesh, its organs, its limbs, its heart. Don’t stay in exile any more. That’s not the place for you. God doesn’t want you there. Here is your God. Speaking tenderly to you.

  • Deeply dialogical: rethinking the conversation called preaching

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    Deeply Dìalogìcal: Rethinking the Conversation

    Called Preaching

    Mike Graves

    Central Baptist Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Kansas

    The Jewish critic George Steiner claims that “God is capable of all speech acts except that of monologue.”1 In other words, God chooses to be in dialogue with us. Only a few verses into Genesis we not only read about God creating order out of chaos, but we hear God speak, “Let there be light” (Gen .1:3). Only three verses into the story, and already the narrator employs quotation marks. Direct, not indirect, discourse will characterize God’s ways with creation. Let there be plants, and let there be planets. Let there be this, and let there be that. If the first page of Scripture is any indication, God is going to do a lot of talking. Unfortunately, while God wants to talk with creation, sometimes the creation doesn’t want to participate in dialogue. Recall Israel’s spotted record when it comes to listening to the prophets, or the prophets themselves who didn’t always want to listen either. Then there are the times when people try to prevent others from participating in dialogue. Recall that story in Mark’s Gospel when Jesus is passing through Jericho and a blind beggar by the name of Bartimaeus cries out for mercy. Those standing nearby act like librarians, shushing him mercilessly, even as he cries out all the more (Mk. 10:48). This shushing is nothing less than an act of violence, a way of denying someone’s existence. Think about women in the United States not being able to vote until the early part of the twentieth century or the silencing of women in the pulpit even today in some places.2 Think about the oppression of blacks and the resulting Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Orthinkaboutthe “enemy combatants” atGuantanamo Bay who apparently have no rights whatsoever. So the shushers do their shushing and Bartimaeus cries out all the more. Jesus notices him and calls him over. Suddenly the shushers become encouragers, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you” (Mk. 10:49). While Jesus’ question (“What do you want me to do for you?”) seems a bit ridiculous, Bartimaeus is invited into dialogue, a real conversation. In his own words he tells Jesus he wants to regain his sight. The story ends not just with his healing, but his following Jesus “on the way” (Mk. 10:52). The one who was marginalized and silent becomes a part of the community, joining Jesus and the others. Dialogue is nothing new to preaching, but in homiletics dialogue is typically restricted to only the literal kind. While that is one type of dialogue, it might be more helpful to think of three different types: literal, internal, and deep. Let me explain. In the late 1960s and more recently in the Emerging Church movement, preachers have experimented with various models oí literal dialogue—cms or more preachers taking turns during the sermon, or the congregation adding their own insights to the preacher’s, to cite just two examples. In the early 1970s internal dialogue began to appear on the preaching scene. Fred Craddock launched what became known as the New Homiletic with his stress on inductive sermon flow. This was not a literal kind of dialogue, but the preacher giving voice to the kinds of concerns listeners might bring to texts and life. As Craddock

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    notes, for far too long, if listeners were part of the preaching event at all, it was as “javelin catcher.”3 Craddock sought to correct that imbalance, and internal dialogue in its various expressions arose as a way to honor how listeners participate in preaching, albeit in a silent kind of internal dialogue. This kind of dialogue is what we hope happens in all good preaching. The third type, deep dialogue, is more metaphor than technique. Deep dialogue occurs when the preacher says something that matters, when the preacher names the longings of all God’s children, in personal and global ways. As Walter Brueggemann observes, “The church—summoned, formed, and empowered by the God of all dialogue—has in our anxiety-driven society an opportunity to be deeply dialogical about the most important issues .”4 This, too, is another kind of dialogue that we hope happens in our preaching. Homiletical trends over the past thirty-five years or so have focused mostly on internal dialogue, and while more recently preachers have been experimenting once again with literal dialogue, I am more interested in deep dialogue. Or to be more precise , I am interested in the relationship between the two—literal and deep. Unfortunately, both in the 1960s and the Emerging Church movement today, while literal dialogue has been something of a trend, so has silence—and oddly enough, at the same time. What I mean is that too often preachers have remained silent about issues that matter (the Vietnam War or the never-ending “war on terror” ; the riots in Watts and Detroit or the lessons of post-Katrina New Orleans, to cite just a few examples ). This silence has occurred while preachers experimented with literal dialogue . How ironic, dialogue and silence! As a teacher of preaching I am interested in the literal dialogue trend for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that some of my students are experimenting with it in their churches, but I am much more interested in the lack of deep dialogue in our day because while the church is talking once again (clergy and laity alike), the topic of conversation doesn’t always seem to matter. Sad to say, but the church has become the homiletical equivalent of so many news outlets, more interested in Britney Spears’s latest exploits than genocide or global warming. This shallowness is something we preachers should talk about. So let’s begin with deep dialogue.

    Conversations that Matter: Deep Dialogue Nearly twenty-five years ago Neil Postman wrote one of the most important books that many preachers never read, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Postman begins by reminding readers of George Orwell’s predictions in his once futuristic work, 1984, how one day Big Brother might: 1) ban books, 2) withhold information from us, and 3) conceal the truth. Postman says that at roughly the same time, Aldous Huxley predicted something else entirely. In Brave New World, Huxley predicted that a time would come when: 1) no one would want to read books, 2) we would be overwhelmed with information, and 3) the truth would drown in a sea of irrelevance. As Postman puts it, his book is about “the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”5 As just one example of the grip of our entertainment culture, Postman contrasts then current political debate (1985) with the seven debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, some of which lasted as long as seven hours. And this was not a presidential race, not even a race for senate. Contrast that with our most recent

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    political debate, the network host monitoring the event, “The question is about measures to stem global warming. You have ninety seconds to answer.” I think a similar dynamic is at work in much preaching today as well. In order to address some of the complexities of deep dialogue, I want us to look at Psalms 42 and 43, originally one organic piece of poetry .6 Taking clues from Walter Brueggemann’s treatment of another psalm, I want us to hear four distinct “voices” within the psalm—the schizophrenic self, the people of God, the systemic powers of evil, and God—all of which are dynamic and disturbing partners in the conversation of this Hebrew poem.

    The Schizophrenic Self Contrary to the contemporary chorus joyfully sung in churches everywhere (“As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longs after you…”), the self-talk in this psalm begins in complete despair. While many churches project these words on a screen, complete with the image of a beautiful doe lapping water from an idyllic stream, Claus Westermann claims it should be translated as a deer panting over a dry ravine.7 This poor creature is dying of thirst. In a phrase, the psalmist is desperate. Yet this same desperate “self cries out confidently three times in the psalm’s refrain, “Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God” (42:5; 42:11 ; 43:5). This schizophrenia, which is common in psalms of lament, reflects the self-talk of all God’s children according to Brueggemann. He writes, “During the day, the speaker might imagine his entire life in the single, unified, coherent, manageable selfannouncement . But at night, that singular coherence falls apart into a cacophony of voices, all of which press for airtime.”8 Deeply dialogical preaching acknowledges that we all live in what Alan Lewis calls “Holy Saturday,” with one foot firmly planted in Good Friday and the other in Easter Sunday.9 Deep dialogue acknowledges the schizophrenic self-talk of all God’s children.

    The People of God The psalm’s cacophony of voices also includes communal remembrance, how he “went with the throng, and led them in the procession to the house of God” (42:4). Contrary to the Lone Ranger spirituality common today, the Scriptures are exceptionally communal. In the New Testament the stress on community is so pronounced it uses second person plural pronouns almost exclusively—”y’all” is how we said it in Texas. The New Testament is so corporate that even in the personal letter from Paul to Philemon, what begins with “you” (singular) gradually gives way to “y’all” (plural). In his book The Homiletic of All Believers, Wes Allen proposes that we think of Sunday’s sermon as part of an ongoing dialogue within the life of the church community.10 More importantly, he says, the conversation should include the topics everyone is talking about, in the church and in the world—war, genocide, famine, taxes, elections, sexuality, crime, the environment, domestic violence, the list goes on and on. Deep dialogue means the preacher names the longings of all God’s children, longings for personal and global justice.

    Systemic Powers of Evil The psalmist also writes about those who taunt him, adversaries who in essence ask, “So where’s your God now?” (42:3,10). Most scholars believe the historical

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    context was the Exile, following the destruction of the Temple. Experiences of Exile still happen, as a visit to a homeless shelter, nursing home, or a prison will bear witness. Deeply dialogical preaching engages with our present day and speaks truth to power, as homiletician Charles Campbell has eloquently noted. 11 In our day the powers that

    need to be challenged include a long list of “isms”: ageism, sexism, classism, racism, and even capitalism as our own never-ending thirst for oil has obviously shaped foreign policy here in the United States.

    The Voice(s) of God In a sense the whole of Psalms 42 and 43 happens in dynamic conversation with God, but there are specific lines when the psalmist moves from conversing with God to a conversing about God. Even the direct engagement with God moves back and forth between praise and lament. This fluidity is something of a metaphor for the com­ plexities deep dialogue needs to acknowledge when interpreting the Scriptures, as opposed to so much shallow preaching in our day. Many church-goers grow up exposed to the God of the Bible as some flat deity, predictable and easily pigeon-holed. The Scriptures, as it turns out, are not like the old Radio Shack slogan, “You’ve got questions. We’ve got answers!” Consider just a few examples. For instance, sometimes various writers offer contradictory theologies. Amos an­ nounces a direct link between Israel’s and Judah’s disobedience and their punishment in Exile (Amos 2:4-8), while Job’s story stresses that sin is not behind every form of suffering (Job 1:1-12). Or in the New Testament Paul claims that the government is appointed by God (Rom. 13), while John, exiled to Patmos, portrays the Roman Empire as a beast (Rev. 13). Or sometimes a biblical story runs counter to our simple Sunday school training, like when Abraham nearly sacrifices Isaac on the altar and after intervening God says, “Now I know that you fear God” (Gen. 22:12). How could God not have known ahead of time? These are the kinds of questions that children especially bring to the Bible, the kind that have forced many a Sunday school teacher to shush the kids or declare, “Ok, children, I think it’s time to have a snack now.” This shushing has been part of our preaching as well. Thankfully, in recent years a multiplicity of interpretations and acknowledging theological complexity has become more accepted by parishioners, many of whom have given up on a steady diet of “chicken soup” and “left behind” pabulum. Some lay folks have started reading authors with more calories to offer—scholars such as Marcus Borg, John Shelby Spong, and Ν. T. Wright, and memoirs by writers with spunk, folks like Anne Lamott and Nora Gallagher.

    Talking amongst Ourselves: Literal Dialogue Trends toward literal dialogue may be more than just trends; they might tap into an ecclesiology we have overlooked. In the late 1960s when God was pronounced dead and attendance in Sunday school and worship really was dying off, homileticians wrote about the “shared sermon” and the “miracle of dialogue,” with books extolling the wonders of a new approach to preaching. 12 As Wes Allen notes, preachers ex­

    pressed this dialogue in several different ways. Some preachers modeled a conver­ sational style of preaching, even if no literal dialogue occurred. 13 And there was the

    internal kind of dialogical preaching that arose in the early 1970s, first with inductive

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    approaches and later with narrative preaching. But there were also numerous expressions of literal dialogue. Sometimes two preachers would engage each other while the congregation listened in. This dialogue between preachers was sometimes tightly scripted, at other times more of a dynamic give-and-take. And these older expressions of literal dialogue still occur. At the seminary where I teach, a co-pastor team of husband and wife engaged in a dialogue on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of full ordination for women in the United Methodist Church, an example of literal and deep dialogue to be sure. At other times literal dialogue occurred when the preacher engaged a select group of laity in conversation about a sermon still in progress.141 did this more than once in a pastorate, with the Wednesday night Bible study initiating the discussion of a text to be preached on the coming Sunday. The energy these folks brought not only to the mid-week discussion, but the preaching on Sunday, was amazing to witness. The sermon belonged to the community. Forty years later dialogue preaching has popped up anew, again taking several distinct forms. In the Emerging Church some preachers rely so heavily upon the comments offered by parishioners that the sermon could go in any number of unanticipated directions (for example, Doug Pagitt at Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis , Minnesota), more of a study than sermon in the traditional sense of the word.15 A variation on that theme allows for congregational discussion even as the preacher moves toward a planned sermon focus (Tim Keel at Jacob’s Well in Kansas City, Missouri, for instance).16 In other places, the preacher encourages comments and discussion after the preaching event, an open microphone approach for responding to the preached word (Paul Abernathy at St. Mark’s Episcopal in Washington, D.C., is one example) ,17 While it takes a special kind of person to pull off the first type, the latter two have much for most preachers to consider. When I attended Jacob’s Well with my college-age daughter, we noted how the discussion encouraged listeners to share ideas, even as the preacher moved toward what seemed like a clearly planned destination. In fact, Tim Keel later told me that his style of dialogical preaching is more “teleological” than Doug Pagitt’s. He also said that listeners can tell if a preacher is truly interested in their comments. Tim tries hard to listen closely when parishioners share, and as a result he often takes a detour on the way to his carefully planned focus. As for the content, the Sunday we were there he spoke on the lure of materialism in our culture even as he announced an alternative way to celebrate Advent and Christmas. His exegesis was also quite sophisticated. This was deep dialogue, sprinkled with bits of literal dialogue along the way. I visited the early service at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D. C, the Sunday following the presidential elections of 2004. Judging from the conversations before worship, it was obvious that most of the parishioners present were in a state of despair, having hoped for a different electoral result. I had gone to St. Mark’s because of the reputation of the church’s senior minister, Paul Abernathy, but he was not there that Sunday. In his place there was a guest minister, Stephen Edmondson, a church history professor at Virginia Theological Seminary, who spoke from Thessalonians 2:1-5,13-17, an apocalyptic passage driven by several pastoral issues on the mind of Paul. In addition to it being the first Sunday after the election, it was All Saints Sunday. And in addition to that, the church’s Worship Task Force had been wrestling with how to respect the mysteries of the faith, even as two persons were being baptized

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    in that same mysterious faith at the later service. In other words, apart from the sermonic conversation, the church’s ongoing liturgical and social conversation was a richly textured one. Among other things, the preacher shared a story about St. Francis of Assisi and his care for the poor and dispossessed, which evidently spoke to several persons present. The tradition at St. Mark’s is for a congregational dialogue at the conclusion of the sermon, what they call “sermon seminar.” The priest steps back from the pulpit, and open microphones among the congregation allow for different voices to be heard. On this particular Sunday several commented on the preacher’s treatment of the lectionary reading as well as the St. Francis story, one person even adding another historical anecdote about the thirteenth century saint. And of course there were those who expressed their despair, even outrage, over the election results and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that would continue. For some of them the preacher had not been direct enough in that regard. They were hard on him even as they were supportive. At one point, he stepped back up to the pulpit and defended his approach to the subject, but not in a self-defensive manner. This was deep dialogue at its best, because as the preacher noted on the website posting, “This is an edited version of the sermon originally preached—it is closer to what was preached at 11:00 a.m. than at 9:00 a.m., after receiving much helpful editorial advice.” The voice of a preacher was heard, but so were other voices—the text, the voices of systemic evil in our day, and the congregation ‘s too. Reflecting on that experience and the various types of literal dialogue available to preachers, I think about the heated conversation between Jesus and the Canaanite woman who comes to Jesus asking that he heal her daughter. She shouts at Jesus for mercy, and still he “did not answer her at all” (Matt. 15:22). The disciples, who apparently didn’t do well in their pastoral care classes, tell Jesus she should be sent away. Jesus does not seem to come off much better when he finally says to her, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 15:24). Despite his apparent exclusivity and his reference to feeding leftovers to dogs, she not only persists, but challenges his thoroughly Jewish theology. The exchange ends with him changing his mind as a result of her challenge. This is literal dialogue at its best, where even the preacher’s theology can be challenged.

    Conclusion In his survey of what makes black preaching so powerful, Cleo LaRue claims that while narrowing it down is no easy task, it is not so much the literal dialogue in the form of call and response (“Help him, Jesus” uttered by the congregation or “Can I get a witness?” on the preacher’s part), a trait that stands out for many casual observers, but the preacher’s naming the plight of God’s people, in the text and today.18 In other words, deep dialogue. This is what made the preaching of Martin Luther King, Jr. so powerful, not the rhetorical niceties (“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today…”) or refrains that live in our nation’s collective memory (“I have a dream…” or “Let freedom ring…”), but the specific cries for justice in the face of rampant racism. Perhaps the combination of literal and deep dialogue is what makes black preaching such a powerful force. What the church and the world desperately need at a time like ours is not merely a new technique for preaching; God knows homiletics has tried that kind of trick

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    before, but we might as well confess there are no sermonic shapes that can save us if our content is too shallow. Conversational style on the part of the preacher won’t cut it, and neither will talk-back on the part of the congregation, even if such dialogue has its place. What we need is a conversation of substance, an authentic encounter with the complexities of the texts we preach and the scripts, another kind of text, by which people live their lives. When a seminary student in Hebrew Bible class asked professor Brevard Childs what it would take to make an A on the next exegesis paper, the scholar’s response was brilliant: “If you want to do better exegesis, become a deeper person.”19 How profound! That is what the church needs, preachers of deeper depth who are willing to engage people at the depths of their existence as well. In a world of cacophony, the sermon is not an attempt to ignore life’s many voices or silence them or speak louder than all of them, but to sound each of those voices fairly, all the while claiming by faith that there will be justice. Then at last we shall be able to proclaim with the psalmist,

    Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God. (Ps. 43:5)

    Notes

    1 George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 225. 2 On the idea of women’s “voice” in preaching, see Mary Donovan Turner and Mary Lin Hudson, Saved from Silence: Finding Women’s Voice in Preaching (St. Louis: Chalice, 1999). 3 Fred B. Craddock, As One without Authority, rev. ed. (St. Louis: Chalice, 2001), 46. 4 Brueggemann, “The. Fearful Thirst for Dialogue,” 73-75. 5 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1985), vii-viii. 6 The lack of an introduction to Ps. 43, as well as the three-fold refrain bridging the two poems (42:5-6a; 42:11 ; and 43:5), point to a coherent structure, as nearly every scholarly study acknowledges. As for the internal structure of the psalm, see Luis Alonso Schökel, “The Poetic Structure of Psalm 42-43,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 1(1976):4-11, and the accompanying responses by Martin Kessler and Nie. H. Ridderbos. 7 Claus Westermann, “From the Old Testament Text to the Sermon,” Review and Expositor 72 (Spring 1975): 171,176. 8 Brueggemann, “The Fearful Thirst for Dialogue,” 85. 9 Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001 ), 33. See also the more recent work by David S. Cunningham, Friday, Saturday, Sunday: Literary Meditations on Suffering, Death, and New Life (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007). 10 O. Wesley Allen, Jr., The Homiletic of All Believers: A Conversational Approach (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 14-15,59-64. 11 Charles L. Campbell, The Word Before the Powers: An Ethic of Preaching (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002). 12 William D. Thompson, Dialogue Preaching: The Shared Sermon (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1969); Reuel L. Howe, The Miracle of Dialogue (New York: Seabury, 1963); and Idem, Partners in Preaching: Clergy and Laity in Dialogue (New York: Seabury, 1967). 13 Charles L. Rice, “A More-or-Less Historical Account of the Fairly Recent History of Narrative Preaching,” in What’s the Shape of Narrative Preaching? ed. Mike Graves and David J. Schlafer (St. Louis: Chalice, 2008) 11-15, notes the conversational style of Lutheran preacher and homiletician Edmund Steimle on the radio program, “The Protestant Hour.”

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    14 Allen, The Homiletic of All Believers, 6-15. 15 See Pagitt’s Preaching Re-Imagined (Grand Rapids : Zondervan, 2005). The church’s website, which does not include audio files of sermons is: http://www.solomonsporch.com/. 16 See the church’s website which includes MP3 audio files of recently preached sermons: http:// Jacobs wellchurch .org/messages. 17 The church’s website for previously preached sermons is: http://www.stmarks.net/worship/ sermons .html. 18 Cleophus J. LaRue, The Heart of Black Preaching (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000), 13. 19 Cited in O. Wesley Allen, Jr., “Deeper Exegesis,” unpublished papers of the 2004 Academy of Homiletics,22.

  • Easter sermon

    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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    Easter Sermon

    Romans 14, 15; John 20:19-31

    Liz Goodman

    Monterey United Church of Christ, Monterey, Massachusetts

    A small Bible church in the Bronx that ran a large daily soup kitchen in their basement, the Love Gospel Assembly, was in a shabby store-front in a nearly deserted neighborhood, crowded only with those who looked as if they could use a good meal and a welcoming place to eat it. Most of the volunteers who worked in the soup kitchen were church members—black men and women who were just a step or two on the socio-economic ladder above the guests they served. But it was clear they found much dignity in being able to serve those who were even less fortunate. “Look at this nap­ kin,” said one man to us, teaching us the proper way to set a table. He held the white paper napkin up for us all to see. Having taken it from the ream of napkins as they’d been packaged, he said, “It’s all bent and wrinkled. Don’t use the ones that look like this.” He rummaged deeper into the pile and pulled out an unrumpled one. “Use the ones like this.” He set it down on the folding table that was covered with a vinyl cloth— one of 20 or so tables. We were a youth group from my home church in New Hampshire where I was a seminarian. Leading this group on its annual mission trip, Γ d managed to get everyone on the bus to New York, on the subway from Grand Central Station, off the subway at 103 rd street, and two blocks north and one block east to the youth hostel where we’d

    camp out in one of their bunk rooms for a week. We were a tight-knit group—middle class white kids from a mainline church who all attended high school together, all came from “good” families and “good” homes. Oh, except for Joanne. She wasn’ t a member of the youth group; she was a frequent skipper of school and would one day soon be a runaway from her troubled home; and she was here with us in New York because her mom had urged her, and I, as her long-ago babysitter and once across-the-street neighbor, had invited her. I admit to having a soft spot for this tall, awkward girl who had a loving but ineffective mother, a father who was long gone, a stepfather who was cruel, and a much younger half-sister who was a shining star. Joanne always seemed hell-bent on her own failure, leaving me sometimes to feel that I was the only one rooting for her. On our first evening in New York, while the boys in the group played pick-up basketball in the court across the street from the hostel and the girls sat on the hostel stoop watching people go by on Amsterdam Avenue, Joanne held fast to the payphone in the hallway across from our room—yelling at her mother for having made her come on this dorky trip, crying to her friends that she hated the people she was with, complaining to anyone she managed to reach that she wanted to come home. When she got off the phone, I told her I’d overheard her and offered her the chance to catch a bus home. But she said she’d stick it out; it was only a week. Whatever. The other group of volunteers set its sights on Joanne as if she were prey—the weak one from the pack that would easily (and rightly) be winnowed away. From a more conservative church, they lookeçl like us but seemed foreign in every other way. We all made some attempts at talking land getting along; we didn’t get very far. Only Joanne seemed to have much of an inter-action with them. I glanced up from my work

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    once to see a circle of them gathered around her, and a few minutes later she stormed out of the room. I followed to find her upstairs and outside, leaning against the crumbling building, smoking a cigarette and using language she didn’t learn in Youth Group. The gist of her rage was this—they’d interrogated her about stuff she didn’t know anything about, and then they mocked her for her not knowing what they meant, and then they called her “Thomas” as if they were calling her a really bad name. “Oooh, Thomas,” she mocked their mocking, though it clearly had hurt. “They said a bad word!” They were stupid. They were dorks. But they’d also caught her off guard and left her with no comeback. She spit out the words, “Why were they calling me Thomas?” Why were they calling Joanne Thomas? Were they implying she looked, or seemed, like a boy? Was Thomas slang for something awful where they came from? It was an insult, clearly. Thomas, of course, is the disciple known for his doubt. That’s what we’ve been told, anyway. As if a puppet in a piety play about bad and good, right and wrong, saved and damned, Thomas is the one who doubted while the rest believed. And so we’ve learned the lesson that we shouldn’t be like Thomas, that indeed to be like Thomas is to be bad and wrong or at least not to be blessed as those who have not seen and yet come to believe, that even to be called “Thomas” is to be judged and mocked and condemned—chased out, cast out, crucified…? Thomas, though, we might also remember, left his life behind to follow Jesus as he wandered around Judea with no apparent purpose or point. Compelled, he must have been, by faith that this Jesus was someone worth following, though not for any obvious reasons, that this Jesus had authority, though not earned through any of the usual channels, that this man from Nazareth was also of God, was perhaps even His Messiah, Thomas spent three years walking with Jesus wherever he went, listening to Jesus whenever he preached, witnessing Jesus work (even on the Sabbath), all of which was to sense love in action—how it attracts and transforms all who are near. Thomas, a doubter? I doubt it. What’s more, Thomas endured the confusing and then terrifying events in Jerusalem that led up to the crucifixion of Jesus and two other outlaws. And while the sky darkened and the streets emptied and the crowd once taken up by bloodlust (“Crucify him!” they had cried all together in a wonderful and frightening unison, “Crucify him!”) was now dispersed in fear (“What have we done?” someone somewhere might have wondered), and the disciples—betrayers and deniers and abandoners all, keepers of silence when any of theirs might have been the voice to calm the stormy sea or to turn the tide that was moving unchecked toward violence or to quell the rising need for catharsis—hid themselves behind locked doors in that upper room, where the bread that Jesus had broken a few nights earlier might still be on the table, where the cup that Jesus had poured that last night when they were all together might still be sitting ready to be shared again, locked away all for fear that this sacrifice might not have brought about catharsis and then calm, but that the authorities and the whole city might need another and another and another and another such that Peter and Thomas and James and John and the rest needed to fear the crowd, and such that those unnamed people in the crowd who had all demanded a crucifixion needed to fear Peter and Thomas and James and John and the rest, and such that Peter and Thomas and James and John and the rest needed to fear one another, for hadn’t each of them betrayed and denied and abandoned Jesus in his hour of need so that each was worthy of the blame

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    of the others, of the punishment of the others? Accusation was on the loose; it was accuse or be accused. Death, it seemed, was winning the day; it was kill or be killed. And when 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, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” And he showed them his hands and his side, and as the disciples rejoiced, he said again, “Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, so I send you.” This was no mere greeting: “Peace, man.” This was no mere wishing them well: “May you find peace.” This was a commissioning; this was a command : “Peace be with you. As God sent me, so I send you.” They would find themselves , as Jesus did, among those who would betray and deny and abandon and kill, and they were to bring peace—an end to the accusing, an end to the scapegoating, an end to the bloodlust that would justify itself by seeing to the suffering of the guilty and swearing by the guilt of those who suffer, an end to the works of religious sacrifice that would bring about catharsis that would bring about calm at least for a time, an end to the vicious cycle whose only end is a dead end. “Peace be with you,” Jesus said. And then he breathed on them, as God breathed into humankind in the beginning. And then he said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” And all the disciples did receive this Holy Spirit who is the paraclete, the advocate, this one who stands with and within a person who is being pinned with blame, this spirit who speaks for one who is nailed with blame. The disciples saw and touched and received from the Resurrected Christ. Oh, except for Thomas, who apparently was out—the only one of the disciples not locked away in fear, the only one of the disciples on that third evening after the crucifixion not hiding out in the upper room. And what he was doing we don’t know, but it may well have been that he was getting food and water to sustain the disciples during their indefinite stay behind those bolted doors. Or it might have been that he was sending word to loved ones that they were all right, though hidden away yet safe, not missing, not dead. Or it might have been that he was like the dove was to Noah and all the creatures on the ark—sent forth to find out if the violent sea had settled back into calm and safe waters. Whatever it was, I doubt it was a matter of Thomas’s socalled doubt getting the better of him—bailing out on the disciples now, after all that had already happened. Whatever it was, I doubt it was a matter of his being doubtful at all. It seems, rather, that he was simply unlucky, cursed with a case of unbelievably bad timing. Imagine him coming through the door. He’d have had to knock, of course, and even to have called out to the ten who were hidden inside, raising his voice so they could hear that it really was him and so it was safe for them to unlock the doors. Imagine him walking into the room. He’d have had food, maybe, and drink for his friends, and perhaps offered assurance that the city had settled back into the usual cautious calm. Imagine him as his friends told him, excitedly, “We have seen the Lord.” Imagine him using language perhaps that he wouldn’t have learned in Youth Group. Or imagine him simply saying what the story remembers him to have said, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hand, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” We hear this story every year on the Sunday after Easter. I’ve preached on this series of events several times now. Here’s what strikes me this time around: that Thomas doesn’t seem to doubt that they saw Jesus. If he did doubt that, he would likely have said, “Unless I see his face and hear his voice for myself, I won’t believe.” No,

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    he doesn’t seem to doubt the reality of the Resurrection. He seems to doubt that Jesus who is the Messiah of God and who was alive last week and is alive now still, or again, was crucified. “Unless I see the mark of the nails and in his hand….” He seems to doubt the reality of the crucifixion—that God’s Son, who was to come in glory, who was to come in awesome power and might, would fall to being the scapegoat of a people who had been waiting for him, waiting for him, waiting for him to rescue them. If Thomas doubts anything at all, he doubts that God’s anointed one would suffer crucifixion. And, you know, I think people still doubt this. Whenever we hear of God acting in wrath to avenge his enemies, we hear doubt that Jesus took on the cross. Whenever we imply that God is at work in making rich people rich and poor people poor—the Prosperity Gospel that casts the wealthy as deserving their wealth and the poor as deserving their destitution—we reveal our doubt that God’s son took on the cross. Whenever we speak of God conforming to the value system that we live by in the world, we confess a doubt that God Himself suffered that we might be saved from systems that thrive on the belief that human suffering is divinely ordained. Such doubt in Christ crucified sounds like this, “Blessed are the aggressors, for they will inherit the earth,” but belief sounds like this, “Blessed are the meek….” Doubt in the cross of Christ sounds like this, “Blessed are the power-mongers, for they will be called children of God,” but belief sounds like this, “Blessed are the peacemakers….” Doubt that God would come not from on high in power and might but from below in vulnerability and compassion sounds like this, “Blessed are the strong in faith, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” but belief that God would come to us not from on high in power and might but from below in vulnerability and compassion sounds like this, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” If Thomas doubts anything, he doubts the crucifixion. And if Thomas is to be used to teach us anything, it’s that we should, like him, come to believe in the crucifixion, for it is such a God who takes on our human compulsion to crucify and yet rises to life anew that truly has the power to save us—from ourselves, from one another, and from the gods we have created in our image. The funny thing about those kids insulting Joanne by calling her Thomas is that they were right on one account. Joanne is like Thomas, unlucky to the point where she seems almost cursed, yet in that, like the meek and the peacemakers, somehow blessed. So, on this account those kids were wrong: to be likened to Thomas isn’t an insult; it’s practically a confession of faith in the true God who we crucified and yet who lives and comes to us in forgiveness to offer us such life. I don’t know if Joanne has ever come consciously to know this God. I do know that if she has, it’s no thanks to the Youth Groups she happened across that day. What’s more, I’d guess it’s no thanks to me, as I didn’t offer her much in the way of support, just an allowance to finish that cigarette alone. Suffice it to say, the church in its incarnation that morning in that nearly abandoned neighborhood wasn’t quite living up to its calling—feeding the poor, yes, but turning the poor in spirit back out to the street. But, this too I know—that God does know and love Joanne, as God does know and love each of us. And, this too I know— that God does come to us as we need Him to, whether we ask in language we learned in Youth Group or in language we learned on the streets, breaking in to our world and our lives that we might know ourselves as he does, children of God.

  • Protagonist corner [Vol 32 no 3 2009]

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    Protagonist Corner

    Mark Douglas

    Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

    Call this the “Antagonist Corner.” In the midst of an edition of the JP that is rich in Easter wisdom, I’m going to push us back to a focus on Lent—and do so, paradoxically, as a way of saying that that we shouldn’t ever focus on Lent. I’m going to argue that at least those of us in the Reformed tradition should do away with Ash , Wednesday, giving things up, a season of penitence, and the whole Lenten smorgasbord . At the end of the day, I doubt I’ll have convinced anyone not already convicted by my (decidedly minority) position. Maybe, though, I’ll have at least encouraged some folks toward further thought on the matter. Though the purposes of Lent are varied through time and across denominational lines, they mostly boil down to some combination of the following emphases: 1. Lent is a time in which the church celebrates its ecumenical ties across the world and through time by participating in a shared season. 2. Lent is a time for education prior to full participation in the church. In the early church, catechumens spent the weeks prior to Easter being taught in the mysteries of the church in preparation for their Easter baptisms. 3. Lent is a time of penitence in which we reflect on our own mortality (“Remember: you are dust and to dust you shall return.”), thereby gaining further clarity about Jesus’ mortality, our own limits, and our dependence on the grace of God. 4. Lent is a time during which we prepare ourselves for the grace-explosion of resurrection by learning to discipline our bodies and our lives. 5. Lent helps us order and live in time by creating the space to focus on one aspect of the faith because it is difficult to focus on all the parts all the time. Before making my larger case against Lent, let me try to orient us with regard to those five purposes. Some of them make sense at first blush but become more problematic upon reflection. Why, for instance, do we think that the way to celebrate our ecumenical ties with other communions (as per reason #1 above) is by behaving like those other communions? To highlight the obvious, Christians in the Reformed tradition don’t believe we should think or act just like Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Orthodox, Baptists, or any other of the hundreds of communions in the world. For instance, unlike some communions, reformed churches don’t recognize or celebrate saints’ days. Does that make us less ecumenical? I think not; after all, ecumenical relations become most meaningful not when we insist that we all must be alike, but when we create space for our differences and yet learn to love each other in the process. In the Reformed tradition, the only criteria for being church are that the Word of God is preached and the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper are rightly administered. Nothing in there about Lent or any other of the many systems of ordering (time, space, ecclesial power, etc.) to which we should find ourselves beholden . It could even be that a witness of not observing Lent—when done thoughtfully and openly—may help those communions for whom it is more basic to the faith clarify why they practice it. So an emphasis on ecumenism, at least by itself, won’t supply us with reasons adequate to perpetuate the practices of Lent.

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    Others of the purposes of Lent (#2, #3) are rather straightforwardly non-problematic . Who would argue against education? I’m all for it—provided we think that we should be involved in “being transformed by the renewing of our minds” (Romans 12:2) in a year-round way. Likewise, what kind of Reformed theologian would I be if I didn’t recognize the full humanity of Jesus, the reality of human failings, and our absolute dependence on the grace of God—again, though, provided we think that we should do this throughout the year. So in these two instances, my problem isn’t with a purpose so much as a willingness to connect it to a particular season. Moreover, since I think we’re supposed to give special attention to these things on the Lord’s day, if these are our Lenten emphases, then we should include Sundays in Lent. But we don’t include Sundays in the forty days of Lent because each Sunday is a “little Easter” on which we celebrate the Resurrection—a point to which I wish to return momentarily. Still other reasons for Lent are more troubling to my Reformed mind. Believing that grace is always a surprise, that apart from God’s grace we can do nothing, and that resurrection is the deepest, most mysterious expression of God’s grace, I simply can’t make theological sense of the claim that any of us can do anything to prepare ourselves for the arrival of such grace on Easter Sunday (as per reason #4). Easter is a shock of divine goodness that reveals not the evidence of our worth or the magnitude of our efforts, but God’s astounding power, to which we can but whisper “Thank you,” not “Okay: now I’m ready.” Whatever work we do at learning to discipline our bodies and our lives, we do in response to God’s grace, not in preparation for it. But there, again, this response—this disciplining—isn’t a seasonal exercise; it’s a lifelong one. That leaves purpose #5 (Lent helps us order and live in time), my discomfort with which goes to the heart of my argument against Lent. Simply put, I don’t think Lent helps us order time; I think it is the most visible manifestation of just how disordered our sense of time is. It is confusion sacrilized; willful error baptized; a covert expression of our disease, not the cure. It maliciously perpetrates the very error it claims to correct. Do I overstate? You decide. Set aside the petty problems with time that have grown up around Lent (e.g., Fat Tuesday—Mardi Gras—as a last chance to act crazy or Easter Monday as the day we can give up our idiomatically wearying projects of giving things up). The detritus that Lent has accrued over time isn’t really its fault. Set aside the quasi-sacramental reminder of our mortality that constitutes Ash Wednesday. (How privileged or sheltered a life must one lead that one needs a yearly ritualized reminder that our time on earth has an ending?) My principle argument against Lent is that it encourages us to think about living as if we are on the way to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection— to place ourselves in a “time before” both in order to more fully appreciate those events. I, on the other hand, think that we are called to think about living after crucifixion and resurrection—to place ourselves in the “time between” resurrections in order to more fully understand our own place in time as those who wait for the completion of the Kingdom of God which was inaugurated 2000 or so years ago. Rather than saying, “Since I can’t focus on everything all at once, I’ll focus on this part of Jesus’ life and death now and the resurrection part later” (which is the typical Lenten argument), I’m saying that we should be trying to make theological sense of Jesus’ life and death through the lens of his resurrection. Conceding the point that we can’t look at everything at once, my argument is that the Easter events constitute the lens through which we look at all those other discrete points. To say that more strongly,

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    after Jesus’ resurrection, to try to look at those events—to try to look at any events, for that matter—in any other way is tantamount to forgetting when we are. Since that’s what I see Lent doing, I say Lent distorts our understanding of time and our place in it. One of the clearest expressions of this difference comes in the context of how we think about the relationship between death and resurrection. Liturgically separating the time we spend thinking about death and disciplining our lives from the time we celebrate resurrection has the effect of disconnecting sin and death from God’s response to them. That is, Lent encourages us to separate death from Easter, to treat resurrection as a way of getting over—or, more accurately, getting past—death rather than as an answer to death. Lent creates an Easter aporia in which we no longer talk about death. Do you doubt me? Ask yourself: when was the last time you heard an Easter sermon about death and dying? For that matter, when was the last time you heard any sermon on the topic? But as William F. May has so insightfully put it:

    To preach about death is absolutely essential if Christians are to preach with joy. Otherwise they speak with profound melancholy of men who have separated the church from the graveyard. They make the practical assumption that there are two Lords. First, there is the Lord of the Sabbath…. Then there is a second Lord, a Dark Power about whom one never speaks, the Lord of highway wrecks, hospitals, and graveyards who handles everything in the end The Christian faith, however, does not speak of two parallel Lords. The Lord of the church is not ruler of a surface kingdom. His dominion is nothing if it does not go at least six feet deep…. For this reason, the church must be unafraid to speak of death.1

    Resurrection doesn’t separate us from death; nor should we separate our time for celebrating the former from our time for being aware of the latter. Easter (or any of the little Easters we celebrate each Sunday) is the time we most need to talk about death—to locate it within the purview of a single Lord whose dominion goes six feet deep; to relativize its location in our lives by connecting it to the gospel’s witness that it will not be the end of things for us—not the time to stop talking about it. We more properly situate ourselves in time when we see ourselves as living between the first resurrection and the second, not when we live in a season of preparation for celebrating the first resurrection. “But Mark,” I already hear the reply, “that’s why we connect Good Friday to Easter Sunday. And, by extension, why Lent leads up to holy week. Lent is our time to walk with Jesus to Jerusalem; to re-focus our attention so that we can recognize his (literally) life-giving work for us on the cross—and then God’s even more literally lifegiving work in resurrecting him.” Again—and again setting aside our confusion about who or where we would be on that journey (not Jesus, but the ones who urged his death and for whom he died, thereby revealing that Lent only inverts the problem preachers face on Palm Sunday: how to connect the crowds singing hosanna to the mob shouting, “Crucify him!”)—the problem is one of time. I’m not arguing against connecting Good Friday and Easter Sunday; I’m arguing/ör it, and therefore, against the project of separating the two, a project which Lent tacitly reinforces by giving us a convenient beginning and ending to our time of reflecting on those aspects of the faith that deal

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    with sin and death.2 We live after the resurrection, not after death. And Lent hides that from us (or, perhaps more accurately, hides us from that). So let’s stop observing it. We’re better off observing Easter more fully and thoughtfully.3 See? There was a reason to put this “Protagonist Antagonist Corner” in this issue. Easter blessings!

    Notes

    1 William F. May, “The Sacral Power of Death in Contemporary Experience” in On Moral Medicine: Theological Perspectives in Medical Ethics, 2nd Ed., ed. Stephen E. Lammers and Allen Verhey (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1998), 200-201. 2 It is for this reason, incidentally, that though our approaches and rhetoric seem utterly opposed to each other, I find myself in deep agreement with Alan Lewis’ s brilliant book, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman’s Pub. Co., 2001). 3 For starters, we could all read Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 1982).

  • The power of approval

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    The Power of Approval

    P. C. Enniss

    Trinity Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia

    Three days before Christmas, the intercom in my office buzzed. The secretary said, “There is a young man here who wants to see you….He says all he wants is for you to bless him.” Well, I knew what that meant. He wanted money. They all do, especially at Christmas. Any excuse will do—anything to get in. That’s the first rule in panhandling, get inside. But the Emergency Relief Office was closed for the day, so I said, “Sure. Show him in.” He was not at all what I expected. He was nicely dressed, neatly shaved, late 20s, I suppose. There was an air of dignity about him, no glassy look in the eye, none of the usual signs of having been on the street, as we say. “‘Sorry to take your time,” he apologized, “but I just want your blessing.” He did not seem depressed or desperate; in fact, he appeared in pretty good spirits, very much in control, I thought, and I attempted to try to explain that theologically speaking, Presbyterians are not Catholics, and our preachers don’t have the power to bless. But somehow that did not seem appropriate at the moment, certainly not what he had come for. “All I want is your blessing,” he said. Well, it was Christmas, and so, with some theological misgivings and some pastoral apprehension, I said, “Sure. What’s your name?” “Andy,” he said. And with that, Andy knelt down on the carpet in my study while I had a prayer, which was not so much a blessing (at least not in the usual sense), nor was it a pleading for God’s blessing. Rather, it was a general kind of prayer of thanksgiving for God’s promise to be present in Andy’s life—in acknowledgment of the way God had already blessed him—in acknowledgment of God’s concern for him, and God’s purpose and future for him. When I said “amen,” Andy stood, smiled, shook my hand, said “thanks,” and left. Not a word about money—or a meal—or a bus ticket—or a place to stay. “All I want is your blessing,” he said. Now, you know, as I know, no one of us has any more power (or any less power, I might add) to bless than any other. Protestants believe in the priesthood of all believers, of course. Now it is true that Biblical tradition, often encouraged by superstition and opportunist preachers, has frequently promoted the notion that some are uniquely empowered to bless, but in our more sober moments of reflection, we do not really believe that, do we? Even St. Paul, listing for the Corinthian Church the catalog of gifts found within the body (some apostles, some teachers, some prophets), does not list the power to bless as being assigned to any particular group, ordained or otherwise. But if it is not within the power of a few to bless, can it not be, I wonder with you, can it not be within the power of all to bless? After all, the blessing is not ours to give— never has been in the Biblical tradition. It is God who blesses. Even in the Old Testament they understood that. (Aaron with arms outstretched to bless the children of Israel, Jacob, wrenching the coveted blessing from his half-blind father, Isaac.) They knew the blessing was God’s alone to give. In the New Testament as well, Mary, whom all generations have risen up to call “blessed”—they all knew—as you and I know, the blessing is God’s to give. We simply celebrate and pass on what is already given.

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    I heard of a woman elder in one of our Presbyterian churches who asked her pastor if he would bring the Session to her hospital room for a service of prayer and laying on of hands. (Now if you want to see a Presbyterian minister squirm, just make that kind of request.) Instinctively, the pastor stiffened, protesting, “I am a minister, not a magician. I don’t have the power to heal.” “Ah,” she said, “that is not the point. I am dying. I know that. I know you cannot make me well. I am already well. I just want to celebrate that with those who believe it too.” Nobody here believes Jesus needed to be baptized, do we? But nobody here believes either, do we, that we need to be baptized. Baptism is not magic. Baptism is not miracle. Baptism is not blessing. Baptism is celebration. Now it is good, and proper, and important that we be baptized, but it never has been essential for salvation that one be baptized. Baptism doesn’t do anything. Baptism celebrates what has already been done. Baptism claims a blessing that is already ours, even as our faith is our awakening (our celebration of the presence of God’s grace that has been there all along). There is a revealing scene in Flannery O’Conner’s short story, “The River.” You remember it. The occasion is a country baptism with the little congregation all gathered at the bank of the river where this well-meaning couple have taken a neighbor boy named Bevel to be baptized. Bevel’s parents are back at the apartment, both suffering from hangovers and glad to have the boy out of the house. So, in the story the preacher says,

    “If I baptize you, you’ll be able to go to the Kingdom of Christ…do you want that, boy?” “Yes,” the boy says. “You won’t be the same again,” the preacher says. “Then he turned his face to the people and began to preach and Bevel looked over his shoulder at the pieces of the white sun scattered in the river. Suddenly the preacher said, “All right, I’m going to baptize you now.” And without warning he tightened his hold and swung him upside down and plunged his head into the water. He held him under while he said the words of baptism and then he jerked him up again and looked sternly at the gasping child.”… “You won’t be the same again…,” the preacher said.

    Now one might be tempted to argue a bit over O’Connor’s depiction of baptism, but that would be to miss the point. That would only lose the moment. The time to talk about the doctrine of baptism is in the classroom, not at the river, not standing before the font. You don’t debate the resurrection at the funeral. You debate the resurrection in the library and the classroom and during long and worrisome sleepless nights, but you don’t debate the resurrection at the funeral. At the funeral you celebrate the resurrection. So it is with the doctrine of baptism. Baptism, apart from all the theological implications of sin, forgiveness and new life—of initiation into the church—of commitment and promise—all of which are important (and never let it be said there is no place for that), but apart and beyond all that, the moment of baptism is that unique occasion when the human yearning for approval is ultimately answered. “And when Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water and behold, the heavens were opened and he saw the spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him, and lo a voice from heaven saying, ‘this is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.’” The lectionary has it, “This is my child, whom I approve.”

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    Country preacher Clarence Jordan might translate it “This is my boy, and I am proud of him.” I ask you, is there any longing more universal than the craving of a child for the parents’ approval? How often have you heard, in discussion over coffee and at cocktail parties, “I somehow never seemed to please them…my mother always wanted me to be perfect, and I wasn’t…never once do I recall my father approving a thing I did.” I don’t know if Jesus needed to be baptized or not, but I do know if the Bible is right about Jesus being human in every way I am human, Jesus needed to know God’s approval. That is what we all need to know, isn’t it? At the deepest level of our being, we want approval, we want to be noticed, we want to count, we want to know even when we mess up, we are still loved. And incidentally, I do not believe that deepest need can ever be answered by any casual “I’m OK, You’re OK, everything’s OK,” because everybody’s OK. When I’m at my worst, I do not find that very comforting. Bill Muehl is precisely correct when he asserts that the biggest concern religious people have today is not figuring out how to live the righteous life—not even the dreaded horror of breaking the commandments, of going to hell, or any of that. The bigger fear, in our time, is the deeper anxiety that no one—literally—gives a damn what we do. “The problem of our time,” says Professor Muehl, “is not an obsessive sense of the meaning of human existence, but a terrible dread, a deep anxiety, that the whole show is indeed an archaic charade.” And to tell people caught in that kind of circumstance (where nothing matters) that they are “OK” is to confirm the worst of their fears. After all, if there is no standard for morality, there is no sin. If there is no wrong, there is no forgiveness. If there is no judgment, there is no grace. If there is nothing to disapprove, there can be no approval. “All I want is your blessing,” he said, standing in my office three days before Christmas. He did not stay long enough to say the precise character of the blessing he craved. Perhaps just as well. I sensed though, it was no superficial absolution from insignificant sin. I sensed it was no blanket endorsement of his current behavior. I sensed a young man was seeking some assurance that his life counted for something, and so he sought out the closest preacher to tell him again what he needed to know. In picking out one of God’s anonymous representatives for a blessing, I sensed the young man was mirroring the universal human need for God’s approval, or again, is that just my projection? I do know the biggest difficulty with God’s approval never has been with God, but with ourselves, which is why Tillich’s definition of faith rings so true. “Faith is our acceptance of God’s acceptance of us even though we know we are unacceptable.” Well, let me tell you where that Christmas week experience has led me. It has led me to reconsideration of those ways in which we do indeed have it in our power to bless one another—not as magicians or dispensers of cheap grace, but as agents to one another—mirrors of God’s indispensable approval. There was once a picture on the cover of Time of the Pope sitting in a prison cell, knee to knee and eye to eye with his would-be assassin. The subheading said, “A pardon from the Pontiff, a lesson in forgiveness for a troubled world.” Now we are not popes—except as Luther suggested each is a pope to every other. Nevertheless, friends, we do have the power to bless, for there is power in approval. Indeed, is it not true that most of the pain in the world today stems from a need to be noticed—to count—to be taken seriously, and to share appropriately in the power? I know it sounds simplistic, but trace it back to its psychic origin, the war in Lebanon, the plight of the poor, upheaval in Central America, run-

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    away kids, school dropouts, the rise in crime, church squabbles, family tensions. All these are at their core a craving for recognition, to know that one counts. If we could just ever learn to hate the crime and love the criminal. If we could just ever learn to condemn the causes of poverty without condemning the poor. If we could ever learn ways of resolving differences with our enemies without having to defeat them. There is more power in approval than in condemnation. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” My God, what a blessing. What a blessing to mirror. Sam Clark is a Methodist minister I once knew. One night, he saw an old man stumble and fall on the sidewalk. He stopped his car and ran over. The stranger seized Sam by the coat collar and said, “Edgar, you came.” The next day Sam went to the hospital to check on him. The man, still semi-conscious, grabbed Sam’s arm. “Edgar, I am sorry for what happened. Is it all right?” The wife whispered, “He had a son who left home twenty years ago, and he thinks it was his fault.” Sam told me that for one of the few times in his life he felt as if he spoke with the authority of Jesus. He leaned close and said, “Yes, it is all right. You are forgiven.” There is power in approval, and if it is not the unique gift of some to bless, let us never forget it is the common gift of all to bless, to claim, to celebrate, and to share the blessing which God has already pronounced upon all people.

  • Christian faith and sports

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    Christian Faith and Sports *

    II Timothy 4:5-8

    Rush Otey Selwyn Avenue Presbyterian Church, Charlotte, North Carolina

    Hi, my name is Rush and I am a sports fanatic. I came to be this way naturally and honestly. As I was growing up in Georgia, sports were part of the rhythm of the seasons and daily life. Sports can bring some order and some community to lives which often are disordered and lonely. In the autumn, there was Gainesville High School Red Elephant football on Friday night, college games (mostly on the radio) on Saturday, and the Washington Redskins on Sunday. There were usually only two or three games on Saturdays and Sundays to be viewed on television. Sometimes even Sunday school became a discussion, often heated, about the games the previous day. We would be happy for days if our team had won and our friends’ favorite had lost. We would weep when the evil Paul Bryant, with all his dirty Alabama players, would emerge victorious over Georgia or Georgia Tech. It was said by people from Alabama that Coach Bryant was so mean that a ferocious animal was named for him. In Alabama football is the state religion. Bear Bryant used to say, “If you want to walk in Heaven where the streets are gold, you’ll have to know the password, ‘Roll, Tide, Roll ! ‘” One of the most famous jokes about Bear Bryant is that an Auburn fan had just arrived in Heaven and looked out at a tower where an old man wearing a hounds tooth hat was seated and supervising a football practice. “Oh, no,” cried the Auburn fan. “Don’t tell me Bear Bryant is up here!” St. Peter replied, “No, that’s God—He just thinks he is Bear Bryant!”1 We didn’t only listen to, watch, and talk sports; we played them. I was at least a five sport participant—football, basketball, baseball, of course, and then tennis and golf whenever possible and affordable. Make it six if you count bicycle riding for several miles every day, seven if you count swimming as often as the weather allowed, eight if you count the occasional pugilistic encounter at school or on the playgrounds, nine if bowling qualifies ! At that time we had not entered into the mystical discussions of whether billiards or poker are sports—apparently they are, because now they are on the cable sports channels and not elsewhere. This was also before soccer, lacrosse, hockey, NASCAR, volleyball, or any of the x-treme sports made it to the Southland in any organized way. There was budding NASCAR activity when some people who shall remain anonymous at least one time did drag races across the Thompson Bridge over Lake Lanier, which was almost exactly a quarter mile. Very stupid! Of course the originators of NASCAR were known to many as they transported their white lightning from stills hidden away in the mountain hollows. I attained some local notoriety by leading my eighth grade basketball team to the city championship as point guard, scoring 14 of the team’s 36 points in the finals, and that was before the three point shot was invented. If only I had been born later, I would have scored a lot more. My sports dreams suffered a serious blow when I was around

    * This sermon was preached on February 3,2008, at Selwyn Avenue Presbyterian Church, Charlotte, North Carolina

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    sixteen—and,because of injury,ineptitude,and barely average stature, simultaneously was put on permanent waivers by the NCAAJVFL, NBA, MLB, WTA, and PGA, and no team or agent picked up my offer to play for free. By the time I turned thirty, my agent quit returning my calls and obtained an unlisted phone number! Nevertheless , I continued to love and play sports—in college and seminary as intramural quarterback and wide receiver and as point guard and as Softball pitcher. I also got in the occasional golf game and tennis match and attended a Master’s and a British Open long ago. I played on many of the famous golf courses of Scotland. Over the years I remember seeing Hank Aaron and the Braves go against Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale and the Dodgers back when major league ball first arrived in Atlanta and numerous games since then. Over time I have watched more Southern Conference, ACC, SEC and Panthers games than I can count. My last run at organized basketball was when I lived in Atlanta, and we had a better than .500 record in the church league, but statistically led only in the category of technical fouls. We were in our 40’s mostly, and the other teams were usually two decades younger, and the referees sometimes caught us tackling from behind on the opponents’ fast breaks. I could go on, but please understand that I do appreciate sports. They are given to us for joy, play, and, one hopes, for physical health. Sports are probably meant to be played instead of watched. It’s more important to be on the field than it is to be in the stands. For, me, and maybe for you, as time has passed and the marketing has intensified, I wonder, I just wonder, whether sports have become an idol for us. Now, an idol is a good thing which we elevate to a position of power and authority. Usually idols are wonderful things which take over and assume authority in a way which becomes unhealthy and unbecoming, especially for people of faith. Remember, the first commandment of the Ten is “You shall have no other gods before me,” and the commandments are given to us not to make us feel guilty, but to make us free. Sports ought not to take the place of God, because sports cannot save us or give us grace or life in any deep sense. We tend to take on the value system of our idols. In the case of contemporary sports, this may be “winning is the only thing,” or “show me the money.” If one good thing about sports is the teaching of teamwork, discipline, and even sacrifice, why is it that so often we read or hear about an athlete or a coach forsaking a team simply for more personal gain or getting in trouble after hours or taking short cuts with “performance enhancing drugs?” These latter day values may not be very consistent with the best of our religious tradition, where a Cross is at the heart and winning in human terms doesn’t matter because we are moving toward a kingdom where the last shall be first. And, I wonder, I just wonder, if I don’t need help with my sports fanaticism. Maybe, just maybe, it has become an addiction. I may be hooked, and so I need your help, please. The problem with addictions is that they make us behave in stupid and out of control ways, and they interfere with our relationships and work and community living and service. Maybe in this age of cool and of repressed emotions, we need to have places where we can scream without fear of retribution, but I find myself often screaming at the television. So far, no officials have reversed their dumb calls and no coach has heeded my excellent advice ! Though I have never painted my face or taken off my shirt in the stands in a midwinter game, I understand those who find it meaningful to do so. I find myself sometimes expending more emotional energy with

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    the sports pages than with the sufferings of the poor or with major issues such as homelessness and affordable housing. There were two cartoons about the Super Bowl which caught my eye. In one, a woman is saying to a man, “We’ve already watched three quarters of the game. Can’t we talk abouti during the fourth quarter?” Inanother the woman says to a bleary-eyed guy who is on the couch and surrounded by beer bottles and newspapers, “What will you do with your life after the Super Bowl?” Now, when our idols and our addictions tag team against us, we are no match for them without others to come to our aid. Our idols and addictions are strong. As the first step of the twelve-step program puts it, “we are powerless before them.” The joy, the play, diminishes, and our moods are under the sway of whether our team has won or lost. The play becomes more often the past memory, and the present becomes passive viewing of an electronic screen. We have our opiate, our great tune out, our American version of bread and circuses. Our idols and addictions also sometimes stoke our other and perhaps more lethal addictions (watch the advertisements during athletic events !), and they also carry over to our children. With many of you, I have struggled with the invasion and escalation of youth sports becoming more and more dominant at younger and younger ages. Children are encouraged to specialize in one sport and never learn others. They are subject to overuse of certain muscle groups and more risk of serious injury and possibly to public humiliation by adult onlookers, overzealous coaches, or even by their own parents. Family schedules and faith commitments are besieged by Sunday games and practices . We are asked now to make difficult, but indeed necessary decisions about our life’s priorities and what we really want to teach and to model for our children. If the Church has two or three hours a week of Christian education for children, and that is abdicated for the sake of sports, our children will not have a sustaining and abiding faith as they grow older. And, by the way, the lure of sports becomes stronger and stronger and more expensive as your children age, requiring hundreds and thousands of dollars per season, depending upon the frequency of away games and travel teams. Other than football, the typical high school athlete will have an average of 24 games per season, most of them on school nights. Yes, the Church can be flexible and offer more convenient times for worship and for study, but during the week there are also practices, games, workouts, along with homework and other activities. Yes, exercise is more and more important in a culture of obesity, but also remember that fewer than 1% of high school athletes will play in college, and a much smaller percentage of college athletes will ever become professional athletes. It’s probably better not to anticipate the college scholarship or pro contract for our children. With all the emphasis and excellence of high school athletics in Charlotte, and with thousands of young people participating each year, I can think of only three or four from our area who are playing professionally. Youth sports should be about fitness and fun and not so much about winning. The question after the game should be “Did you enjoy playing today?” instead of “Why did you miss that goal/foul shot/ fly ball/pitch?” You see, our idols and addictions eventually raise hard questions, difficult questions, about our stewardship of time, of talents/energy, and yes, of money. If our personal expenditures on sports and entertainment are more than our Church tithe and other charitable giving, we may need to realign our actions to be more in accordance

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    with our Scriptures. Our idols and addictions also lead to questions about social priorities and political decisions. With regard to stewardship of time, if you, like me, are happily able to watch three sporting events per week on television (and that could easily become five or ten depending on whether it’s March Madness or bowl season. This past year there were 32 bowl games), if you watch three sporting events per week, over the course of a year, you are watching sports as many hours as you would invest in many weeks on the job or in some community service or mission. Nine hours a week for 52 weeks equals 468 hours or the equivalent of 11 forty-hour weeks. That is time lost and gone forever, spent in every sense of the word. With regard to stewardship of money, one hesitates even to tread here. Some tickets to today’s Super Bowl are being sold for $12 thousand each. Ads are about $5 million per minute (one 1/2 minutes ???? is he saying 1.5 minutes or .5 minute????? of advertising costs more than the total raised every year of the national Souper Bowl offering for hunger). The salary of one average professional athlete would erase the deficits of the major arts organizations in Charlotte and would exceed the annual budget of many struggling schools and relief agencies. It’s not that sports are bad or that other things are not equally as strange (movie stars and entertainers’ incomes, for example), and it’s not that many sports figures don’t give generously of their wealth (some do, but most don’t). It’s just that our proportions and our judgment have become seriously out of kilter. Locally, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte is seriously considering spending $100 million in order to start a football team, much of which would be funded by increasing student fees by $150 per year. William Friday, former president at Chapel Hill, recently said that fewer than ten universities in Division I athletics make any money from sports, and all the rest lose considerable amounts. On the professional sports level, the question of public money being spent for the benefit of athletic team owners has been well debated in Charlotte, and we are about to do that again with plans for an uptown baseball stadium. Our idols and addictions can quickly take hold of our family life, our time, and our checkbooks. And they can also do serious harm to our bodies. Given to us for health, teamwork, and joy, sports more often than not have become a passive spectator event. I need your help. I think the congregation is one place where these issues need to be considered deliberately, seriously, and hopefully, and members of the congregation are called to be leaders in the culture and perhaps to put some clear thinking and faith commitments into the mix whenever possible. There are ways for our children to be involved at a fairly high level of competition without our having to give up our participation in worship and Christian education, and this begins with parents being parents and with parents sticking together. So I leave us with some questions: 1) If you have driven hundreds of miles to attend athletic contests, but have not driven the five miles to the soup kitchen, Room in the Inn, the Habitat house site, or the nursing home, maybe there is time for you to regain your balance. 2) If you have neglected your family too often for the sake of sports, maybe there is time for repentance. 3) If you have kicked your dog or hated your neighbor because your team lost, maybe there is mercy. In an address in 1995 on “Ethical Issues in American Sports,” Dr. Stanley Eitzen of Colorado State University said this:

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    Sport has the potential to ennoble its participants and society. Athletes strain, strive, and sacrifice to excel. But if sport is to exalt the human spirit, it must be practiced within a context guided by fairness and humane considerations. Competition is great but it can go too far. Personally, I know that my competitive drive has gone too far when: a) the activity is no longer enjoyable—i.e., there is too much emphasis on the outcome and not on the process; b) I treat my opponents with disrespect; c) I am tempted to gain an unfair advantage; d) I cannot accept being less than the best even when I have done my best. I believe that many times those intimately involved in sport have stepped over these lines.2

    I need your help with my sports fanaticism. And so to begin a personal journey toward better health for myself, I am going to start a plan of exercising a half hour for every hour I spend watching sports. This week, if I watch the Super Bowl and also watch the Tar Heels defeat the Blue Devils on Wednesday night, that should be about three hours of exercise. (Better make that a revised resolution—for every hour watching , fifteen minutes of exercise.) In summary, let us remember the words of John Wooden, who won ten national titles as UCLA basketball coach: “I always tried to make clear that basketball is not the ultimate. It is of small importance in comparison to the total life we live. There is only one kind of life that truly wins, and that is the one that places faith in the hands of the Savior. Until that is done, we are on an aimless course that runs in circles and goes nowhere.”3

    Notes

    1. For an illuminating essay on Alabama football (and by inference, big time sports everywhere), see Rick Bragg, “The Rising Tide,” at www.SI.com {Sports Illustrated), August 21,2007. 2. Stanley Eitzen, “Ethical Issues in American Sports,” Vital Speeches of the Day, 1995. 3. Alan Williams, Walk-On: Life from the End of the Bench (Austin: New Heights Press, 2006), 57-58.

  • The preacher

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    The Preacher

    Lillian Daniel

    First Congregational Church, Glen Ellyn, Illinois

    My preaching colleague once preached a sermon which had an important refrain. Over and over again in the sermon, he said, “We are all God’s.” He was reminding us that we all belong to God, first and foremost. In this individualistic culture, he was giving the counter cultural message that we are not our own. It’s not all about us. We are all God’s. The repetition drove the point home. I loved the sermon, and standing next to him in the receiving line, I noted the responses, one after the other. “Morning.” “Why was Mary in the prayer concerns? I couldn’t hear.” “Can you tell me where the youth group medical waiver forms should be dropped off?” And occasionally, there was a reference to the preaching: “Nice sermon.” Finally one man came through the line and held the preacher’s hand with intensity. “That sermon was what I have been waiting to hear preached in this church for years. Incredible. Life changing. Thank you.” Now, this man was actually an occasional critic of the preaching at the church, both my own and my colleague’s. We knew that he was a devotee of an obscure new age Indian guru whose pamphlets he passed along to us as examples of what we might say instead of “spouting doctrine.” He came to church to appease his wife and children, but he was also clearly a seeker with a deep passion for matters of the spirit. So his praise was unexpected and notable in a sea of “Nice sermons.” “What moved you?” the preacher asked. “You finally got it right. I mean that one line said it all: we are all gods. Every one of us is a god. There is no one big god who is better than the rest of us. We are all gods ourselves. It’s what I have been trying to say around here for years, and finally, you get it.” The preacher blanched. Others were pushing through the line, and there was no time for him to respond that this was not what he had intended to say. But after the receiving line, and by the time he preached that sermon at the second service, the refrain was no longer “We are all God’s.” The refrain had become “We all belong to God.” It was not the first time a preacher has been understood to be saying exactly the opposite of what he thought he was saying. He made adjustments. Every preacher has a story in which someone has interpreted a sermon to mean the opposite of what it meant. We can go back and look at our notes, and we think we were clear, but people bring their whole lives to the listening. Sometimes something is lost in translation. This isn’t always a bad thing. Most preachers have experienced the flip side of this situation. We have delivered a sermon that was not our best. Perhaps we even thought it was our worst. And then later we will hear that it touched someone in a particular way. They brought their lives to church that day, a recent diagnosis, a heartbreak, the thrilling news of a first grandchild on the way, and somehow our meager offering delivered more than our own efforts. The Holy Spirit was at work. Was the Holy Spirit at work when the man heard “We are all gods” instead of “We

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    are all God’s”? That is a question I am waiting to ask Jesus when I meet him in heaven and all questions are answered. But I hope he tells me this: not everything that happens in the preaching moment is of the Holy Spirit. Some interpretations are in error, just as some sermons are in error, and there needs to be a place for the discernment of the spirits. For now, I live in this awkward liminality where somehow the Holy Spirit chooses to work through the broken vessel in me and the broken vessel in the listener to proclaim God’s word. Never was that more clear than when I decided to explain from the pulpit the social and historical context of the image of Jesus as the shepherd. “Most of us have no idea what life is like for shepherds,” I explained, projecting my own urban prejudices upon the entire congregation. But I had at least taken the time to read something about sheep and their shepherds. “The shepherd really knew the sheep,” I explained. “I mean, he really knew them.” I noticed a few people in the congregation grimace, as if uncomfortable . I had no idea why, so I sought to be clearer. “No, what I mean to say is that the shepherd wasn’t just in charge of the sheep; he cared about them. I mean, he was out there, all alone, with them. So he loved them. Really loved them.” More expressions of people who looked somewhat disgusted. “So my point here is that this wasn’t a distant or disconnected relationship. Perhaps he was lonely himself, longing for companionship with those for whom he was responsible.” I could tell by their expressions they were not following, so I had to explain. “The shepherd, God, was intimate with those sheep.” At that point giggling broke out, and I moved on to my next point, baffled. It wasn’ t until after the sermon, when people with farm experience told me a little bit about life that I realized I had given the worst sermon about Jesus the shepherd that they had ever heard, and sadly, would never forget. I had taken animal husbandry to a whole new level. “How do you come up with what you say on Sunday mornings?” It is a question that every pastor gets asked. There are few jobs in the world that require anything like a sermon once a week. Some people are impressed that we can do such an enormous thing. Others think we are making it up on the spot. Sometimes both are right. Preachers can make it look hard and impressive, or casual and easy. Either way, it is the most important thing most ministers do in a given week, and for me, it is the reason I do what I do. I am a preacher. More than any other aspect of the job, this is the one thing that defines my particular call. Yet I know there are ministers for whom preaching is not the central point around which their ministry revolves. They may be in a specialized ministry where their focus is on youth, or children, counseling, chaplaincy or pastoral care. Increasingly, the church is finding ways to use clergy’s different gifts and acknowledging that not everyone’s gift is preaching. But most clergy find themselves preaching at some point, whether they like it or not. Few would admit it, but clergy know that there are pastors who preach every week, but do so grudgingly. It is the payment for getting to do all the other things they love to do. There are churches that faithfully exist without good preaching, in which the members are cared for at the hospital bedside, babies are baptized, and God’s word is proclaimed at funerals. At some churches, the preacher may enjoy preaching, but the congregation gets little out of it. And still the church goes on. It makes one suspect that the Holy Spirit may actually be at work.

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    Preaching, when done well, can change lives, build congregations, rebuke the haughty, inspire the discouraged, challenge the proud, and lift up the lowly. When we stand up to preach, we follow a man who started preaching as a youth at the temple and never stopped, even on the cross. There is much that the Son of God did that we could never hope to do. But in standing up to preach, in reflecting on the sacred texts, we really do follow Jesus. I work more on my sermon than any other aspect of my work. In ministry, much of our time management is triage. Most of the work that is demanded of us is worthy, good, and of God, but we cannot possibly do it all. So we make decisions. I am not ashamed to make the decision to put my sermon preparation at the top of my list each week. I have learned that of everything I do, the sermon is the thing that touches the largest number of people. It deserves the greatest amount of attention. There are clergy who disagree with me on this point. They will drop everything to rush to the hospital, to respond to the latest need, to deal with an administrative matter because a lay leader is clamoring for something to be fixed right now. By Saturday night, the sermon is left undone. These clergy are working into the wee hours, writing with the last scrap of energy from the week. These clergy are faithful. Some of them are excellent preachers. They claim to care deeply about preaching, but they believe that outside forces such as the demands of the pastorate are keeping them from giving the sermon the attention it deserves. But my colleagues who are writing these sermons in the middle of the night or the early morning hours on weekends are exhausted. If they do care deeply about preaching, they feel somewhat guilty too. They know in their hearts that they are not giving the task their best, but rather giving it their leftovers from a glass that is more than half empty. Their families and friends who have waited until the weekend to get their attention are also left shortchanged. Lay people might be shocked to discover how many clergy live on this hamster wheel, in which preaching has been stripped of both its joy and its privilege. If church members’ demands and expectations have created this situation, they would do well to consider the consequences to the church as a whole. But if this situation is caused less by the laity and more by the unrealistic expectations the pastor imposes upon herself, the lay leaders can still help. They can tell the pastor how much they value the preached word. It is what every preacher longs to hear from a church member: that this particular work matters. The Sunday when the church says goodbye to the pastor is not the right Sunday to have this conversation. By then, it is too late. But when preaching is given its due, started early and entered into as a gift of study, creativity, and generosity, it is the most life-giving thing I can do as a pastor. And the one receiving the gift is I. What a mind-boggling privilege to get to sit with the scriptures, to ponder the text, to wrack my brain in search of the right story, to read and take in the culture around me, to search myself with the passion of an artist, all in service to Christ. No other career offers such an opportunity. There are people all over the world stuck in jobs that offer nothing but monotony, yet we are given the opportunity to create, teach, and preach. Why would a pastor leave such a thing hanging undone? When finally we approach it, it should be with reverence for the uniqueness of the task. Yet having privileged this task so highly, I cannot imagine being a minister for whom preaching would be my only duty. I know there are a few ministers out there who

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    have jobs that allow them to focus almost exclusively on the study and proclamation of the word, or celebrity preachers who travel and speak in one place after another. But for me, preaching is rooted in the rest of my pastoral life. When I visit a family in their home to prepare for a baptism, I am taking in their lives, learning in our conversation what matters to them. I want to see what state their living rooms are in, as well as hear about the state of their souls. The questions they ask about the church are often not the ones I would have assumed they had. I remember these points, and they find their way into a sermon down the road. In meeting with couples in crisis, I realize that my own reflections on marriage are being shaped and enriched in ways that undoubtedly will make their way into my preaching. In the administration meeting where we agonize between two important budget items, my thoughts on stewardship are being shaped. Later when I read a text for the week, all these memories become part of what ends up on the page. For this reason, I am baffled to hear about preachers who use sermons that other people have preached. Not only is it unethical, but I can not imagine it working. The congregation needs to see themselves in the sermon, and a sermon written for an entirely different congregation would ring false. Perhaps this is why pastors who steal sermons are often caught. The church can tell when a word is for them and when it is not. And congregations would rather have the preacher speak from his heart and theirs than use the polished and impressive words of another. They will forgive poor word choice or clumsy writing and call it a good sermon when it is clear to them that the pastor knows them, cares for them, and is speaking to them. For that reason, when I speak to groups other than my congregation, I know I am not doing my best preaching. While the gospel is constant, what I bring to it is in danger of being irrelevant, because I am winging it and working on hunches. On those occasions, I do my best, but I miss the intimacy that a parish minister has with a body of people. The best sermons are not written in a vacuum. They are crafted in community, each sermon part of a long conversation that continues week after week. The congregation shapes the preacher as much as the other way around. Yet when the time comes to actually write the sermon, the congregation is with me in spirit only. I am alone with the task of putting all this into words. For this reason, for many preachers, the time of sermon preparation is a lonely set of hours. There we are, with a job that no one else can do for us. With nothing but some texts from the Bible, we are stripped down. The blank computer screen, the unmarked legal pad, the pen that taps nervously on the desk, these are the reminders that we are on our own here. But of course we are not. It is in the deep loneliness of preaching preparation that I find myself closest to God. At that moment when I feel like I have nothing to say, prayer comes easily. It is a prayer of lament or petition or a confession as to my unworthiness for the task at hand. I feel Jesus with me at those times, encouraging me to try anyway. The moment before the writing begins is the loneliest time of the week, and Jesus uses it to get the attention of otherwise busy pastors. I have to listen to him at that moment. There is nothing left to distract me. When I say “there is nothing left to distract me,” I mean that I have already fully milked every possible distraction. I have made myself a bagel. I have surfed the web. I have tried coffee and soda and I am about to consider liquor. I have appointed myself the church janitor to take care of some stains on the rug, and I have finally cleaned out the youth group’s “lost and found” box. Now, I wander into the offices of other staff

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    members, looking pathetic, asking them if they would like to hear my suggestions for a program for next year. They know how to respond. “So, you’ve got writers’ block again, Lillian? Don’t worry, something will come to you.” And sent back to my lonely office, something does. I am convinced that the “something” is Jesus, who knows how hard this job is and picked me anyway. I am convinced that the “something” is God, who took seven days to create the universe, and so would probably prefer that I start my sermon on day one. I am convinced that the “something” is the Holy Spirit, who intercedes in the loneliness with sighs too deep for words. I know the loneliness is a valley through which I walk to get to the rich pasture of Sunday morning. There, the day finally breaks and the loneliness ends. In preaching, the silence is broken. It is the moment I wait for all week. It’s not always perfect. Sometimes, it’s not even good. But when the sermon is working, when the congregation is meeting me in this liminal moment with the gift of their attention, there is an electrifying presence of the Holy Spirit that leaves me feeling like I have run a race and won, not through my own legs, but because there are wings on my shoes. In every generation, somebody predicts the death of preaching. In our generation, technology has been lifted up as the big distraction. Churches make creative use of video screens and sound systems to keep up with the changes. But still, that preaching moment is decidedly low tech. A person stands alone telling a community what she knows of the word of life, and they listen. I am always struck by that and humbled. They actually listen. After the Sunday services are over, I go home and experience a peace that is absolutely unique to that moment in the week. I really do relax. I can barely make conversation. I am so tired, but blessedly so. I would like to tell you I pray, but at that time, what I really do is eat pasta, watch mindless television, and sleep for hours on end. Sunday afternoon, after preaching, is the Sabbath. Creation has been taken care of. Like the God who made us, we get to rest. And in that rest, I reflect on what I have done—or, to be more accurate, what God has done through me. Sometimes I say that it is good. Other times, I find myself reliving quirky moments I felt in preaching that leave me wondering about moments like this: Why were they laughing at my explanation of the different streams within early Judaism? After all, all I said was, “In the ancient world, they had sects just like we have sects.”