Just another WordPress site

Author: Sara Palmer

  • ‘You’ beyond our ‘weary selves’

    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.

    Page 30

    “You” beyond Our

    “Weary Selves”

    Walter Brueggemann

    Cincinnati, Ohio

    You God, Lord and Sovereign,

    you God, lover and partner.

    You are God of all our possibilities.

    You preside over all our comings and goings,

    all our wealth and all our poverty,

    all our sickness and all our health,

    all our despair and all our hope,

    all our living and all our dying.

    And we are grateful.

    You are God of all our impossibilities.

    You have presided over the emancipations

    and healings of our mothers and fathers;

    you have presided over the wondrous transformations in our

    own lives. You have and will preside over those parts of our lives that we imagine to be closed. And we are grateful.

    So be your true self, enacting the things impossible for us, that we might yet be whole among the blind who see and the dead who are raised; that we may yet witness your will for peace, your vision for justice, your vetoing all our killing fields.

    At the outset of this day, we place our lives in your strong hands. Before the end of this day, do newness among us in the very places where we are tired in fear, we are exhausted in guilt, we are spent in anxiety.

    Make all things new, we pray in the new-making name of Jesus.

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

    Journal for Preachers

  • Surprised by hope: rethinking heaven, the resurrection, and the mission of the church

    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.

    Page 44

    One New Book for the Preacher

    Joseph S. Harvard III

    First Presbyterian Church, Durham, North Carolina

    N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. New York, NY: HaperOne, 2008. 332 pages.

    Titles are important, at least that is my opinion. I probably spend too much time trying to find the “right” title for a sermon. Often, as I work on a sermon, the title changes. I bring this up because what first attracted me to N.T. Wright’s book was the title: Surprised by Hope. The attraction of the title was accompanied by an appreciation of the work for the Bishop of Durham, England. Now, I am not a bishop, only a humble pastor who serves a congregation in another Durham in North Carolina. Durham, England is our sister city, and I have had the privilege of visiting that marvelous cathedral in Durham where the bishop sits. (No bishop envy here – we sent our bishop, Will Willimon, to Alabama.) I like the title of the book, but I consider it an understatement. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is more than a surprise; it is a shock. It calls into question many of our carefully guarded assumptions about life, and it forces us to think outside the neatly arranged boxes in which we keep our perspective on life and life after death. I believe our vision of the afterlife is “muddled,” to borrow a word from the author, because the affirmation of our faith about hope in matters of life and death seems so strange and embarrassing. We need to listen as N.T. Wright offers a thoughtful consideration of what our faith traditions have to say about issues such as heaven and hell, afterlife and mission which are central to Christian theology. My rabbi friend and colleague in Durham, North Carolina, often tells me how hard he works on his sermons for “Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.” I tell him that it is the same with us Christian pastors for our “high holy days” as we prepare for Christmas and Easter. I find it particularly challenging and difficult to prepare a fresh, inspiring, and thought-provoking sermon for Easter. I remember the comment of the great Lutheran preacher- Edmond Steimle: “Don’t worry, let the music and the liturgy carry the day.” But we do worry, don’t we? There is pressure because we know the stakes are high as people hope we can address their hopes and fears. There is pressure because the pews will be full. Many of those in attendance on Easter are there because of the cultural expectation “to go to church on Easter.” Nevertheless, they are “listening in” to see if we have anything to say that makes sense. For those of us who feel the pressure of the occasion to capture the meaning of the resurrection, Surprised by Hope is a courageous and valuable guide to a deeper understanding of Easter Hope. Wright brings the insights of a biblical scholar and theologian to bear on a subject central to our faith. He seeks to address two fundamental questions: 1) What do people believe in when they talk about life after death? 2) What difference does it make? The breadth of his knowledge and his insight into the biblical witness to the resurrection and the way the church has affirmed its belief in the resurrection of the dead provides help for the preacher. Wright seeks to address the confusion with which the Christian community understands and answers

    Page 45

    these questions. The author believes that we have lost a clear vision about what happens to us when we die. The belief in the immorality of the soul reflects a dualism which is not biblical and dilutes the authentic good news that the God who raised Jesus from the dead will also raise us to new life at the end of time. He puts it this way: “It is simply assumed that the word heaven is the appropriate term for the ultimate destination, the final home, and that the language of resurrection and of the new earth as well as the new heavens must somehow be fitted into that” (p. 19). I get uncomfortable at memorial services and funerals when pastors give vivid descriptions of where the deceased is. Wright reminds us that our faith does not offer us an admission ticket to a place “out of this world” called heaven. He and my rabbi friend are on the same page theologically because they begin with creation. Our destiny is determined by God the creator, and it is connected with God’s work to restore heaven and earth. Wright emphasizes that it is not just about me and my soul. It is about a new creation. Listen to a portion of how the author elaborates on the title: “Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present. The ultimate future hope remains a surprise, partly because we don’t know when it will arrive and partly because at present we have only images and metaphors for it, leaving us to guess that the reality will be far greater, and more surprising, still. And the intermediate hope—the things that happen in the present time to implement Easter and anticipate the final day—are always surprising” (p.29). There are two reasons why I suggest this book. First, it encourages us to go back to the basic teachings of the church on issues of life after death and the resurrection. We should wrestle with the biblical texts and then listen to our mothers and fathers in the faith as they bear witness to what they have seen and heard. This strength in the book leads to a weakness. N.T. Wright believes there is only one way to understand our destiny after death. The dead are not in a place called heaven, but they are waiting for the second coming which will bring the general bodily resurrection. Clearly, this is central to our faith. There are, however, other perspectives in Scripture and our tradition. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that we are surrounded by a “great cloud of witnesses” who died in faith. One of my favorite times of the church year is All Saints, when we remember all the saints who from their labors rest and who make up the communion of the saints. I delight in the portion of the Great Thanksgiving prayer when we acknowledge that we are joined at the Lord’s table “with all the faithful of every time and place.” There is a great mystery about the whereabouts of all those who rest from their earthly labors. Wright’s certainty on these matters and his criticism of the hymns and sermons that diverge from the “correct” understandably left me uncomfortable. I stand with the Apostle Paul on these matters when he says that we see things dimly, but we shall see face to face one day (1 Corinthians 13:12). The second great strength of this book is the way Wright brings the resurrection down to earth. God’s raising Jesus from the dead is the beginning of God’s reconstruction of the new creation. This insight has important implications for the mission of the church. The last two chapters of the book flesh out the work of the church as a demonstration of what God intends for the whole creation. We have a vision in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ of what will come to pass in God’s own good

    Easter 2009

    Page 46

    time. Wright puts the challenge before us this way: “Our task in the present—of which this book, God willing, may form a part—is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and foretaste of the second” (p.30). It is my hope that you find this book an aid in getting ready for Easter and in living as resurrection people.

  • A mercy

    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.

    Page 63

    One New Book for the Preacher

    Sara Hayden Emory Center for Pastoral Services, Wesley Woods, Atlanta, Georgia, and Christopher Henry Morningside Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia

    Toni Morrison, A Mercy: ANovel.New York,NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.167 pages.

    Speaking to a conference of German pastors in the early 1920′ s, Karl Barth voiced the primary yearning of those who, week after week, enter a service of Christian worship. What they want to hear from preachers, Barth suggested, is the answer to a simple question: “Is it true, this talk of a loving and good God, who is more than one of the friendly idols whose rise is so easy to account for, and whose dominion is so brief? What people want to find out and thoroughly understand is, Is it trueV We who preach are familiar with the prodigious task of responding to this profound question with honesty and conviction. In our work, we have experienced the similarly sacred question: Does God care about me? Or perhaps, Does God know or care that I am suffering ? And so we preach from the pulpit, yes, but also at the bedside of a dying patient or to the family who wants to believe that we and God, at the very least, have heard their long-waged cries of lament. These questions stand at the heart of Toni Morrison’s new novel, which traces the intermingled lives of four women struggling for survival and meaning in seventeenthcentury Virginia. It is Jacob Vaark’s narrative that initially unites the women. Dutchborn , orphaned, and farmer turned trader, he inherits 120 acres from an uncle he has never met. Although he describes slavery as “the most wretched business” (26) and insists that “flesh was not his commodity” (22), Vaark himself acquires all of the women who tend his farm as he travels in search of fortune. Vaark’s wife, Rebekka, endured a six-week voyage from England to marry the man she had never met. Rebekka is stoically realistic about the situation: “Immediately upon landing Rebekka’s sheer good fortune in a husband stunned her. Already sixteen, she knew her father would have shipped her off to anyone who would book her passage and relieve him of feeding her” (74). Coming to the New World, Rebekka leaves behind the religious zeal of her parents, who “treated each other and their children with glazed indifference and saved their fire for religious matters” (74). Her mother objected to her “sale” not out of love or devotion, but because the husband awaiting her was a heathen man. As for Rebekka, her religious faith is faint when she arrives in America and turns to anger when she loses all of her children, one by one, to disease and accident. Morrison describes Rebekka’s sense of exasperation at the divine in her poignant conversations with Lina, her closest and only friend, a friend who calls her “Mistress.” The central character and primary first-person narrator in the novel is Florens, a young slave girl who is taken by Vaark at the beginning of the novel as partial payment of a debt owed to him. The scene is painful to envision—Florens offered to Vaark by her own mother in a moment that is to haunt Florens and her mother and give Florence an overwhelming sense of abandonment throughout her life. She comes to the Vaark

    Page 64

    farm without hope or meaning, but quickly fixates both on the person of the hired blacksmith, a free black man whose eye she catches and who becomes the source of her desire and aim of her attention. Vaark acquired Sorrow after she survived a shipwreck and wandered vagrantly through the harbor town where they met. Without family or community, Sorrow creates an imaginary sister, whom she names Twin, an action that symbolizes the solitariness that marks all of the characters in the novel. And finally, there is Lina, a Native American whom Vaark purchased as a farmhand when she was fourteen, after her village was destroyed by his forebears’ smallpox:

    Afraid of once more losing shelter, terrified of being alone in the world without family, Lina acknowledged her status as heathen and let herself be purified by these worthies. She learned that bathing naked in the river was a sin; that plucking cherries from a tree burdened with them was theft; that to eat corn mush with one’s fingers was perverse. That God hated idleness most of all, so staring off into space to weep for a mother or a playmate was to court damnation. (48)

    After being purchased by Vaark, Lina “sorted and stored what she dared to recall and eliminated the rest, an activity which shaped her inside and out” (50). Her interior and exterior strength allows her to become the farm’s de facto manager, confidant of Vaark’s wife Rebekka, and mother-figure to the other two slaves on Vaark’s small farm. They begin together, peaceably tolerant of one another, their subsistent labor providing minimal benefits to each. Still, the roles of the women are tenuous and remind one of the stories of contest in scarcity and danger in the Bible. Like Ruth and Naomi or Sarah and Hagar, the women’s lives and relationships change rapidly with circumstance. The death of Master Vaark early in the novel threatens their exposure to interlopers, disease, potential slave owners, and famine. Duplicated are some roles: mother, worker, farmer, and yet each woman, affected differently by circumstances of race, health, and sexuality, becomes increasingly alienated from the others. And like the circumstances that (¿ove Ruth and her family apart, these women become orphaned again. Lina’s thoughts turn to the isolation of the Vaark farm and the three women who live without owner or patron:

    Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations.. .They were orphans, each and all. (58-59)

    As they struggle for mere survival, these four women also yearn for attachment to something beyond themselves. Each gives witness to the profound ambivalence that suffering and alienation can yield. Consider Job, as Rebekka does, drawn to his story as others may be in the midst of unpredicted and incomprehensible loss:

    Journal for Preachers

    Page 65

    Divine knowledge was less important than gaining, at last, the Lord’s attention. Which, Rebekka concluded, was all Job ever wanted. Not proof of His existence—he never questioned that. Nor proof of his power— everyone accepted that. He wanted simply to catch his eye. To be recognized not as worthy or worthless, but to be noticed as a life-form by the One who made and unmade it. Not a bargain, merely a glow of the miraculous. But then Job was a man. Invisibility was intolerable to men. What complaint would a female Job dare to put forth? And if, having done so, and He deigned to remind her of how weak and ignorant she was, where was the news in that? What shocked Job into humility and renewed fidelity was the message a female Job would have known and heard every minute of her life. (91)

    Startling social commentary runs ribbon-like through Morrison’s novel, each woman contributing her unique voice, circumstance, and story to the conversation, all conveyed by the author’s poetic and haunting prose. In the end, the act of mercy that began the story is given new meaning, leaving it to the reader to contemplate the pain of alienation and the insight that Lina gleans from her story, “We never shape the world The world shapes us.” (71) Toni Morrison has written a book that is true, in the deepest sense of the word, and one that will have a lasting impact on all who seek to answer the difficult questions that life presents.

    Note

    Karl Barth,”The Need and Promise of Christian Preaching.” The Word of Godand the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1935), 108.

  • Home

    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.

    Page 58

    One New Book for the Preacher

    Thomas H. Schmid The Falls Church Presbyterian Church, Falls Church, Virginia

    Marilynne Robinson, Home. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

    “Do you have GileadV asked the church librarian. “It’s gone and it hasn’t been signed out.” She knows that I have taken such liberties in the past. “No, I don’t. In fact, I can’t find my own copy of it, nor can I find my copy of Housekeeping. I must have loaned them out and now they’ve been passed on to someone else.” So it goes with good books. I really wanted to look over both books, and my marginal notes, before writing this review. Not all books come back, and this late in my career that may be a blessing. Three years ago Marilynne Robinson sprang into my consciousness with the publication of the Pulitzer Prize winning Gilead. I contributed a review of it to Journal for Preachers (Pentecost 2005) in order to share a wonderful new discovery, a window on the life and practice of ministry, and a deep look into the spirit of a Congregationalist minister, the Reverend John Ames. Set in the imaginary town of Gilead, Iowa, during the Eisenhower/Stevenson campaign of 1956, Gilead is in the form of a journal or letter from the elderly Ames to his young son, a means of imparting family history and lore which Ames would have done orally had he anticipated living longer. We learn about the death of Ames’ first wife and baby in childbirth, his decades as a widower, his late marriage to a much younger woman, his abiding friendship with the neighboring Presbyterian minister, Robert Boughton. Whereas Ames has no living children until late in life, “Old Boughton” and his wife have a houseful of eight. Ames was asked to baptize one of the sons, and at the baptism learned that he was holding his namesake, John Ames Boughton, as an attestation to the long and deep friendship between the two men. In preparation for writing the review of Gilead, I read Robinson’s earlier novel, Housekeeping, which appeared in the early 1980s. It is often described as “a modern classic,” and I thought it would give additional insight into Robinson’s mind and writing. It is worthwhile to become familiar with Housekeeping prior to a reading of Home inasmuch as it looks into the lives of two women who become homeless. Certainly in the ministry there are many of us who encounter homeless persons with some regularity. We have various responses to Matthew 25, greeting Christ in our neighbor, and we find ourselves responding within carefully set parameters. The gist of Housekeeping is that the two women are eccentric, but they are not crazy, an insight that has carried into my subsequent encounters with our homeless – what? – clients, guests, friends, manifestations of the Risen Christ. Perhaps some are just repeats. However, in every encounter the possibility remains…. Ah, now comes the surprise of Home, recently nominated for the National Book Award. Those who have read Gilead see immediately that what is happening in the home and life of Robert Boughton is concurrent with the story we read three years ago. Surely there are other examples of this in literature, but none immediately comes to mind. So tightly woven is the narrative that we are present at several scenes that appear

    Page 59

    in both books but are written from different perspectives. Home is the story of two of the Boughton children, Glory and Jack, both of whom come home to their aging father’s house. Glory, who has been a high school teacher of English, is disappointed in love. Her elderly father can frame it in the best possible light, that she has come home to take care of him in his decline, and so she does. The truth, however, is that she has allowed herself to be taken advantage of by a dishonorable man, should have left the relationship years before she did, and has given away her youth, what money she had, her profession, and her pride. All this is easy for her to see in retrospect, but remains ever difficult for her to say aloud. The prodigal John Ames Boughton, homeless alcoholic, soon returns after an absence of twenty years. We hear what we already know from Gilead, his boyhood role as the odd man out, the child who could always be counted on to say the right thing but to do the wrong, the one who was an embarrassment to the family and particularly to his minister father. Ever present is the memory of Jack’s youthful relationship with a young woman that resulted in a little girl the elder Boughtons sought to reach out to, in their own way, and who died in childhood. If Jack Boughton is Robinson’s portrayal of a prodigal son, Robert Boughton takes the role of the loving father, the one who never gives up on the wayward child, who always holds out hope that Jack will return and do well, who can always forgive and start anew, who to the very end lives in concern that Jack will embrace and make his peace with God. Although Robert Boughton loves all eight of his children, he makes allowances for Jack that far exceed his emotions for the other seven. Home is a very quiet book, mostly a series of conversations between Glory and Jack. They are in the kitchen having coffee together, or working in the barn or garden, observed by their father who sits on the porch. The conversations go over the same ground again and again. In Gilead we were fascinated by Jack from a distance, although we gradually learn Jack’s noble secret side of which his father might have been enormously proud, had he ever known. Or perhaps the Reverend Boughton would have been ashamed and embarrassed once again at Jack’s secret. It’s hard to tell, given the mores and attitudes of Gilead and the times. Now we see Jack gradually unfolding his story to his sister, revealing himself bit by bit, ultimately departing before the product of his secret appears to Glory. We hear the two adult children of the manse repeat certain familiar scriptures they had learned in the home. They tend to be a bit casual with the expressions of piety that were genuine to their parents, keeping the theological words and concepts, but giving different interpretations based in their own lives and experience. Many of the conversations will sound familiar to adult children of Presbyterian, or any, ministers. One ponders how Robinson, who teaches in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, managed so well to insinuate herself into the little world of our homes, our families, our profession. One does not read Home without considering the realities of aging parents or alcoholism or racism in America in the 1950s or now. We always want to consider that the homeless people we meet are carrying crosses of their own, burdens that may be unexpressed but with which someone is dealing in his own way as best he can. Just as I have considered the two eccentric women of Housekeeping as I have met their counterparts these last three years in Falls Church, perhaps we can all think of Jack Boughton when we try to infuse our ministry to the homeless with a new shot of compassion. Lent 2009

    Page 60

    At the heart of Robert Boughton’s final days is his worry about Jack’s spiritual being. Near the end of Robinson’s narrative, Jack uses carefully chosen words to try with integrity to reassure his dying father that he has made spiritual peace, only to be answered by the old man’s ramblings. Is it Alzheimer’s or “hardening of the arteries,” as we were taught to say back in the 1950s? The poignancy of utter disappointment moves through the reader before the old man regains himself and seems to rejoin the conversation, too late for Jack to complete his intention. We do, however, end with a sense of hope that, even in the worst of us, there is grace and redemption.

  • An altar in the world: a geography of faith

    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.

    Page 42

    One New Book for the Preacher

    Joe Evans

    Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church, Lilburn, Georgia

    Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009.

    “I don’t have any spiritual practices,” I told my acupuncturist a couple weeks ago, “I’m a Presbyterian.” “What do you do then to center yourself?” she asked as she stuck a needle dangerously close to my eyeball. I thought about it, which was hard considering the needle, and responded, “I don’t know, read books I guess.” Judging by the volume of books I’ve read over the past few months, I’ve really been feeling de-centered. I’ve read about how the Church could change to engage young people in the coming decade and how clergy should be responding to that change. Γ ve read about how I should be preaching, what I should be seeing in the Bible, and how, if I really wanted to, I could be reaching out to generations of people who have slipped out the back door of our denomination. But none of these books have been especially “centering.” In fact, while I am grateful to many of them, and while I’m thankful to be challenged to think about how I can minister better, there is a real temperament of inadequacy that I’ve gained from reading about how I can do things better, as what is assumed is that I’m not doing enough right now. However, the signs of the times make taking satisfaction in current realities impossible. Books, seminars, and articles on doing ministry better seem natural and necessary considering all the anxiety over slipping mainline dominance. My favorite scholars have parodied mainline decline as a kind of exile – our country, as President Obama has alluded to with no little controversy, cannot be called a Chris­ tian nation. And while I tend to side with the likes of Leonard Pitts, an editorialist who recently wondered whether we really ever were (Leonard Pitts, ” Stand on torture a very unchristian response,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 6, 2009), what is certainly true is that the perception of Christianity’s weakening dominance is provok­ ing concern, even outrage, throughout our country, prompting some to withdrawal, attempting their own microcosms of Christendom. A notable example is in Immokalee, Florida. Presbyterians might associate this town with migrant labor abuse, but Immokalee’s newfound notoriety is due to Ave Maria University and the intentional community that has sprouted up out of tomato fields. The intentional community of 25,000 radiates from a church on Annunciation Circle, has attempted to prohibit stores from selling contraceptives and pornography, and has requested that cable TV providers refrain from any adult programming (Mitch Stacy, “Billionaire Makes College, Town Grow,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 09, 2009). Maybe tired of engaging a secularized society, maybe attracted by the idea of living in community with likeminded idealists, but obviously driven out of their majority culture into a kind of self-alienation, Immokalee certainly seems like a last ditch effort at John Winthrop’s “city on a hill.” I have thought of spirituality as a means to that same end – a retreat from where

    Journal for Preachers

    Page 43

    God is not perceived to be, in order to encounter the divine in purer surroundings— and while there is certainly emphasis on such retreat in Barbara Brown Taylor’s newest book, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, what I gained is that whereas feelings of alienation may be more likely now than ever before among North American Christians, preaching is not about shielding from a vulgar society and starting out anew. Preaching must be guidance in the art of “The Practice of Waking Up to God” right where you are:

    To learn to look with compassion on everything that is; to see past the terrifying demons outside to the bawling hearts within; to make the first move toward the other, however many times it takes to get close; to open your arms to what is instead of waiting until it is what it should be; to surrender the justice of your own cause for mercy; to surrender the priority of your own safety for love – this is to land at God’s breast. [206]

    Considering the gated communities many of our members live in or the locked doors of our sanctuaries, I don’t think that the importance of this call to preachers can be understated. Many preachers have witnessed, participated in, or encouraged the tendency to withdrawal in judgment of the world, a move towards self-righteous finger pointing fueled by anxiety and fear, but Taylor offers language to say something else that seems so much more faithful. As though it were a 209 page interpretation of Peter’ s dream in Acts, Taylor expounds in brilliant prose around the principle of “What God has made clean you must not call profane;” or maybe more around the story of Jacob, who in exile from the familiar is amazed to find God away from home: “The first time I read Jacob’s story in the Bible, I knew it was true whether it ever happened or not [2].” Just as Jacob found God at Bethel after estrangement from the familiar, Taylor offers preachers language for our faith that is not new as much as it is re-centering. The world is full of God, and we may all know God just as intimately as Francis of Assisi: “He read the world as reverently as he read the Bible. For him, a leper was as kissable as a bishop’s ring, a single bird as much a messenger of God as a cloud full of angels” [9].

    Advent 2009

  • Impossible situations: perceiving!

    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.

    Page 21

    Impossible Situations: Perceiving!

    Luke 1:5-13 (NRSV)

    Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., Chicago, Illinois

    “Do not be afraid Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife, Elizabeth , will bear you a son and you will name him John.” During this season, in a time of chaos and confusion, I want you to look with me at how God deals with impossible situations. Advent is a time of expectancy and a time of joyful anticipation. It is a time when the Christian church looks forward with hope. We are in the season of Advent, and instead of this being a time of hope, it is really a time of chaos and confusion. Our country is in the middle of a war that was started on the basis of phony evidence. This is a time of chaos and confusion. We have seen an avalanche of legal memos exempting the executive branch of our government from the law and the legal justification for condoning torture. This is a time of chaos and confusion. We are not even numbed by the widespread torture, even when the people being tortured are not enemy combatants, just Arabs with names that most of us cannot pronounce. This is a time of chaos and confusion . There has been a deep shroud of secrecy dropped over the presidency and the claim that the President can lock away any person, American citizen or not, on his own say so as the commander-in-chief. This is a time of chaos and confusion. We have a tax break for the rich. We have seen the budget surplus turn into a budget deficit. We have seen no education for Blacks and Browns buried under a slogan (stolen from Marian Wright Edelman) with no money to fund the phony program from the start, and we have seen a so-called healthcare bill passed to benefit the pharmaceuticals and the HMOs while 47 million American citizens do not have any healthcare insurance whatsoever. This is a time of chaos and confusion! We have also seen (as Jonathan Shnell says) an across-the-board rejection on the part of those in power of being accountable for any of this mess that we are in. We are living in a time of chaos and confusion, and it gets worse. We have seen 51 percent of the American voters (or so they told us) look at all these things four years ago. Lies about the war. Lies about the evidence for weapons of mass destruction. Lives lost as a result of the lies and the war, more than 4,000 on our side, more than 200,000 on the other side. Fifty-one percent of the American voters (or so they told us) looked at all of these things: Condoned torture. Condoned rape of Arab women – noncombatant women. Secrecy shrouding the presidency. Unbridled power for the commander-in-chief. Fifty-one percent of the American voters (or so they told us) looked at all of these things: Tax break for the rich. Tax burden for the poor. Underfunded education programs designed to help and make Black and Brown kids fail. A healthcare bill that does not care about health. Fourteen million American children and a total of 47 million Americans with no healthcare insurance and an administration that refused to take responsibility for any of this. We have seen 51 percent of the American voters (or so they told us) look at all these things and call them good.

    Page 22

    In the words of Terry Atkins, we live in an age where information is more important to people than knowledge. We live in an age where mediocrity is propped up as genius. We live in an age where the billionaire is the hero of contemporary life, and most tragically, we live in an age where image veils a lack of substance. We are living in a time of chaos and confusion. Now, to an outsider looking in at our messed-up situation, it would almost seem obvious that we are faced with some impossible situations, and that is why I want you to look with me during this season of Advent, in a time of chaos and confusion, at how God deals with impossible situations. Just a quick note here before we go any further: Many Christians (conservative and liberal) often raise this question about my sermons: Why does he always have to talk about politics? Please notice, if you will, that I am just doing like Luke. Luke starts off with the political, and then he moves to the personal. Look at how Luke starts off. Look at Verse 5. “In the days of King Herod of Judea” – that’s political – and to Theophilus back in Verse 3 to whom Luke is writing, as well as to everybody else who would hear or read Luke’s Gospel in the first century, Luke not only started off with the political. By saying “King Herod of Judea,” Luke starts his narrative with what we call in our day “a hot mess.” King Herod the Great was bad news for everybody in Judea who was not a Roman . Herod was half Jew and half Idumaean. He was an illegal puppet, handpicked by the Supreme Court (I mean handpicked by those in power, the Romans). Herod had made himself useful to the Romans in the wars and the civil wars in Palestine, and the Romans trusted Herod the Great. You have got to be careful when your enemy picks somebody who looks like you to be over you, but whose allegiance is to the enemy. That is who Herod the Great was. He was bad news politically. Herod murdered his own wife, Mariamne, and her mother, Alexandra. Herod had three of his own sons assassinated, and this is this same Herod who kills all of the baby boys two years of age and younger just a little later on in Luke’s Gospel story. I am sorry if you don’t like me mentioning politics in my sermons, but blame it on Luke. Luke starts off with the political. John and Jesus are about to be born into a time of political chaos and confusion . John and Jesus are about to be born into what anybody in his or her rightful mind would call an impossible situation. You have a king who is crazy (Luke says a head of state who can order the murder of innocent civilians, not enemy troops). A commander-in-chief who can do whatever he wants and who does not have to answer to anybody. That is Herod the Great. A megalomaniac who can kill at will. Luke starts off telling you what the political lay of the land is. In the days of King Herod of Judea, he writes…, and then after starting off with the political, Luke moves to the personal. Luke just calls a name, “Herod the Great,” and images of chaos and confusion come to mind. (A man who murders his own wife, a man who murders his own sons – three of them – a man who murders infants and toddlers, all in the name of Herod’s Homeland Security.) Luke just calls one name, and the hearers ofthat name in the first century know that he has just conjured up an image of an impossible political situation. But then Luke moves from the political to the personal, and that’s what I want to do.

    Page 23

    Luke moved to the personal because no matter how impossible the political situation may seem to be (or may actually be), Luke knew that there were some hearers then (just like there are some hearers now) who were (and are) living in the midst of some impossible personal situations. Look at the impossible personal situation that Luke lays out for us in this text. Luke says there was a priest named Zechariah, and his wife was named Elizabeth, and Luke says that these were good people. Both of them, both Zechariah and Elizabeth, were righteous before God living blamelessly according to all of the commandments and regulations of the Lord. Verse 6 says that both Zechariah and Elizabeth were good people, and look how Verse 7 starts. But (I love this text because it teaches me that we can be good people and still find ourselves in impossible situations.) The whole Book of Job teaches us the same truth that Luke teaches us in two verses. We always end up trying to figure out, like Job’s friend, what we do to get into such an impossible situation. What signs did we miss? What messages did we not hear? We must have done something. We must have left something undone that we should have done. Job’s friends even suggested that maybe he had some secret sin that he had not confessed, and we will take that notion and run a four-minute mile with it. Oh yeah. Oh I remember now. Oh no, I had forgotten all about that. One of my friends in the Deacon Ministry asked me many years ago, “Rev, did you ever have one of those, oh, ‘what-the-heck nights’? Stuff you done forgot all about, people’s names you can’t even remember?” You ain’t confessed it because you done forgot all about it. Maybe that’s what caused this trouble that’s coming into my life. We operate on a cause-and-effect logic. We think we must have done something that has put us into this impossible personal situation. I love this text, however, because it teaches that we can be good people and still find ourselves in impossible personal situations. Zechariah and Elizabeth were good people, but they were in an impossible personal situation. They had no children because Elizabeth was barren. Barren means Elizabeth was not capable of bearing children. Barren means she and her husband would never be the parents of any children. That is bad enough, but the double whammy comes in the last phrase ofthat sentence. Look at it. Elizabeth was barren, and they were both getting on in years. Now that is a nice biblical way of saying, “We are both past the age of being able to make any babies. My getup – and-go done got up and gone. Been gone – and my wife doesn’t have what she needs to have if we are going to have any children.” Zechariah and Elizabeth were in an impossible situation, and in this message about how God deals with impossible situations, I want you to look with me at the issue of perceiving. “To perceive” means becoming aware of through the senses – Zechariah’s senses: his physical senses and his mental senses. He became aware of the impossibility of his personal situation through his senses and through Elizabeth’s senses: she was getting on in years; she was past the age of childbearing. Months and months and years and years of barrenness taught her through her physical senses that it was impossible for her to have a baby. The perception was that it was impossible . The perception was that there was no way. The perception was that their opportunity had passed, and I need to stop right here and come away from Jerusalem.

    Page 24

    I need to stop right here and come away from the Judean town and the hill country where Zechariah and Elizabeth lived. I need to come away from there and minister for just a little while right here. Not by the Sea of Galilee, but by the ocean called the Atlantic. Somebody reading this sermon needs to see this point Luke makes. You are a good person, and you are in the midst of an impossible personal situation . I don’t know who you are, but God knows who you are, and God providentially arranged for you to be reading this message right now, hearing from God and not from me. The perception is that in your personal situation, what you want is impossible. I don’t mean your fairytale wish list situation. I mean the desires of your heart that are consistent with the Will of God. The perception is that the possibility ofthat happening is nonexistent. The perception is that there is no way. The perception is that your opportunity has passed. Perceiving, becoming aware of the harsh facts of your situation through your senses has you convinced that your situation is impossible , and somebody reading this message has lived long enough to know that for many of us, perception, how we perceive, perception, is 100 percent fact. Well that may be how it operates in the human arena, but that is not how it operates in the divine arena. You keep on praying! You do just like Zechariah did, and in the face of your impossible situation, you keep on praying. Why? Because for God, faith outweighs fact. For humans, perception is 100 percent fact, but for God, faith outweighs fact. Examine the scriptures with me. The facts said that Sarah was also past the childbearing years, but faith said, if God says it can be so, it will be so. Where God is concerned, God honors faith in spite of the facts. The facts said that the Egyptian army far outnumbered the raggedy band and the mixed multitude that Moses was leading. The Egyptians were skilled. They were experienced, and they were superior to the struggling stragglers who were dressed up for battle but who had not fought anybody in 400 years. The Egyptian army under Pharaoh was like the United States military under Bush. They were the most powerful fighting machine anybody ever had to face. That’s what the facts said, but guess what? God honors faith and sometimes God honors faith in spite of the facts. Moses had the faith to stretch out his rod. Moses had the faith to “stand still and see the salvation of the Lord,” and that skilled force, that experienced force, that superior force, the most powerful fighting machine anybody ever had to face, they all got drowned because of one man’s faith. God honors faith in spite of the facts. The facts said Goliath was a skilled warrior who had been fighting for more years than David was old. The facts said that David was a shepherd and Goliath was a soldier. That’s what the facts said. The facts said that a slingshot is no match for a seven foot sword. That’s what the facts said, but the faith of the one who said, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want…,” the faith of the one who said, “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear. The Lord is the strength of my life of whom shall I be afraid,” his faith enabled him to do what the facts said were impossible. God honors faith in spite of facts. The facts say that fire burns. The facts say that fire kills. The facts caused the ones heating up the furnace to get wiped out before they could put anybody in, but the faith of the three Hebrew boys said, “The God we serve is able to deliver us from out of your furnace and from out of your hand.” The faith of the Hebrew boys

    Page 25

    said, “But even if our God does not deliver us, we still will not serve your gods,” and their faith caused the fourth Qne to get in the furnace with them, and the King said that the fourth one looked like the Son of God. God honors faith in spite of the facts. Let me give you some historical examples if the biblical examples have not convinced you. The facts said Harriet Tubman was a slave for life. The facts said Harriet was born a slave and Harriet would die a slave. The facts said that all of the racist laws of this land from the Circuit Court to the Supreme Court were stacked against Harriet, so she would never be free. But her faith not only got her free, her faith made her make nineteen trips back into the South to free over 300 more Africans, and her words are a haunting reminder of the impossible social situations we are in today. Harriet said, “I could have freed more, if they had only wanted to be free.” God honored Harriet’s faith in spite of the Supreme Court’s facts. The facts said that after 246 years of legalized slavery, legalized segregation, lynching, rapes, and inferior schools and housing, the Africans in Diaspora and North America were doomed to mediocrity at best and inferiority at worst. That’s what the facts said. But, faith produced a Black Nobel Peace Prize winner named Martin King. Faith produced a Siamese-twin-separating Black brain surgeon called Ben Carson. Faith produced a Black female astronaut called Mae Jemison. n Faith produced a Black female Bishop in the Episcopal church and three Black female Bishops in the sexist African Methodist Episcopal church. Faith produced a 42-year-old Black Senator in the United States Congress as a sign of hope in the same year that the Presidential Election caused many people to despair. God honors faith in spite of the facts, and God honored Zechariah’s faith in spite of what all of the facts said. The facts in our text said there was a problem. Age was a problem, but God cares more about prayer than God cares about problems. You keep on praying. Look at what the message of God during this season of Advent says. The message of God says in Verse 13, “Zechariah, your prayer has been heard. Your wife, Elizabeth , will bear you a son and you will name him John.” Zechariah kept on praying to the Almighty in spite of the problem of age, and that is why this message of God is saying the same thing to you who are reading it today. You keep on praying. God cares more about prayer than God cares about problems . You keep on praying. No matter how bad it looks, you keep on praying. No matter how impossible it may seem to you, you keep on praying. No matter what the facts say, you keep on praying. I want to give you three lessons from the text about the issue of perceiving. Perception is 100% fact for many folk, but lesson number one from this text says that God honors faith in spite of the facts. Lesson number two says: God cares more about prayer than God cares about problems, so no matter what the problem is, you keep on praying. But, finally this text teaches me that God answers prayer, and God overrules problems. God says in so many words, “Zechariah, your prayer has been heard, and I have come with the answer.” I am a living witness that God answers prayer and overrules problems. I created more problems in my ministry, in my personal life, in my pastorate, and in my family’s life than you could ever imagine, but I had a praying mama, and I had a praying daddy who kept on praying in spite of

    Page 26

    the problems. They asked the Lord to be a fence all around me while I was acting a fool. They asked the Lord to be a hedge of protection all around me when I was too stupid to know that I needed protection. The Lord heard their prayer because of their faith. God honors faith in spite of the facts. One of the reasons I love that story about those men taking their friend who was paralyzed to Jesus and not being able to get into the house because of the crowd is because it teaches the same principle. I love that story not because of the details, and the details are exciting. You remember the story! His friends went to the front door of the house where Jesus was, and the crowd was so thick they couldn’t get through the front door, so they went around back. They would not be outdone. When they got around back, the crowd was so thick back there that they couldn’t get in the back door either, so they went to the side windows, and the side windows had folks leaning in the windows and leaning out of the windows. They could not get in the windows, but they still would not give up. They climbed up on the roof, carrying their friend up on the roof with them, tore the roof off the sucker, and let their friend down at the feet of Jesus. Now, the details are exciting, yes, but that’s not why I love the story. The story says when Jesus saw their faith, he did something for the man who had not asked Him for a thing. When the Lord saw my mama’s faith, when the Lord saw my father’s faith, in spite of the problems I was creating, God honored their faith in spite of my facts. God heard their prayer because God cares more about prayer than about problems, and God (I know from personal experience), God answers prayer and overrules problems. Somebody reading this message also knows that God answers prayers and overrules problems! You have had personal experiences that taught you (as my experiences taught me) that your faith was in a God who cares more about your prayer than about your problems. You have had personal experience with a Lord who honors faith in spite of the facts. And you have had personal experience with the Lord who answers prayer and overrules problems. That is the message of Advent, the message of hope, and the message I give to you this day.

    Closing Prayer

    During this season of Advent, O God, in a time of chaos and confusion (political and personal), and with many of us feeling as if we are trapped in impossible situations, we have looked at how You deal with impossible situations. First we looked at the issue of perceiving. For many of us perception is 100 percent fact, but for You, O God, faith outweighs fact. You, O God, honor faith in spite of the facts. You are a God who is more concerned about our prayers than our problems, and You are a God who will answer prayer in spite of our problems. As we thank you, Oh God, for the message, we thank you for this season and what it promises in terms of hope in spite of what appears to be hopeless times. Bless now your people as they go from this place of worship into the world that you love. Bless every home. May your love that is unconditional , your grace that is still sufficient, and your peace that passes all understanding surround them and sustain them through Christ our Lord.

  • ‘Who is worthy to open the scroll?’

    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.

    Page 49

    “Who Is Worthy to Open the Scroll?”

    Revelation 5:1-14

    Robert Williamson, Jr.

    Ph.D. Candidate, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

    For most of my life I have found the book of Revelation terribly confusing and at least a little bit frightening. It has always felt very distant to me, written for a time and a place and a people who had very little in common with me. So, for most of my life I had managed to let Revelation sit quietly at the end of my Bible, hoping that if I ignored it, maybe it would ignore me. Then one day, quite unexpectedly, I realized that Revelation was written precisely for people like you and like me, and precisely for a time such as this. It was written to people who lived in the most powerful nation on earth—a nation whose military might reached to the farthest corners of the earth, an Empire that could make other nations tremble with every rattle of its saber. It was written to people living in a nation that dominated the economics of the world—when the Empire sneezed the rest of the world caught a cold. Revelation was written to Christians who lived in the first century superpower , the nation that dominated the world, the Roman Empire. Like us, those early Christians lived in a world deeply divided between the rich and the poor, the first world and the third world, the economic elite and the economically exploited. And the Christians of that day found themselves on both sides of the economic divide. We tend to think of early Christians as poor and persecuted, living in the catacombs and hiding from the Romans. And it is true that church history is filled with stories of martyrs executed by the Roman government or fed to the lions. But the Christians of the Empire did not all suffer in those early days. Many Christians, particularly those in the churches of Asia Minor, the ones to whom John of Patmos was writing, enjoyed the benefits of the Empire’s economic and military power. They found themselves loyal to the Kingdom of Heaven on the one hand, but also deeply invested in the continued prosperity of the Kingdom of Rome on the other. They were merchants, tradesmen, political leaders. They were lawyers, stock analysts, web designers, and stockholders. They enjoyed the benefits of economic prosperity. They sent their children to the best universities. They hosted dinner parties and spent their afternoons sipping skinny vanilla lattes at Starbucks. They went to plays and the theater, rented movies from Blockbuster, and attended games at the coliseum, doing the tomahawk chant and cheering on the Braves. The Book of Revelation was written to people not so unlike us after all. Like us, they had days when they wondered about truth and meaning. They wondered what it meant to be Christians living in a prosperous land. They wondered how to make sense of their lives. The government propaganda in the newspapers and on CNN and Fox News talked about the Pax Romana, about the great peace that the Roman Empire was bringing to the world. Talking heads claiming to be in the “no spin zone” of objective truth assured them that what was in the best interest of Rome was also in the best interest of the world at large. But deep down inside they knew—they saw—they heard the news behind the news, the Pax Romana wasn’t so peaceful after all. They lived in the most violent

    Page 50

    country in the world. Their sons and daughters were sent to far away lands to enforce Rome’s military might. Their crime rate was the highest in the world. More and more criminals were sentenced to public execution—to electrocution, to lethal injection, to crucifixion. There was unrest among the poorer classes. Riots erupted in the streets of Rome and Alexandria and New Orleans. Bandits waited in the shadows to prey on the unwary, whether on the road from Jerusalem down to Jericho or on the streets of Los Angeles. Poor kids, with no hope for the future, pulled guns on each other. They were not so unlike us after all. Like us, those early Christians would lie awake at night and wonder how to make sense of the world, wonder what was true and right and good. They would ponder what it meant to live a good life, to be successful, to be Christian. And on some nights, perhaps suffering from depression or stress-induced insomnia, they restlessly wondered whether indeed life had any purpose or meaning at all. As night slipped into early morning, their thoughts would drift to their broken marriages and dead-end careers, the dreams they had once thought were promises. What had happened to the Great Roman Dream of 2.3 kids and a dog and a nice house in the suburbs? They had all ofthat, and their lives still felt empty. What had happened to fairy tale promises of happily ever after? Their lives were a blur of long work weeks, high stress, too little money, fighting with spouses. The Empire had promised them so much. But where were those promises now? And so they would lie awake at night and despair. They would despair—and they would pray—that there was some deeper meaning to it all, that beneath the violence and the loneliness and the discontent there was some deeper purpose at work in the world. That somewhere, behind the scenes, beyond their experience, there was some deep Truth, some elemental meaning, some purpose to life that made all of this make sense. And they longed to hear it. Among all the voices that claimed to speak the truth to them, among all of the spin and political talking points, they waited for a Truth that resonated, that touched them, a Truth that proved itself worthy of being followed and trusted. They were not so unlike us after all. One of those early Christians, John of Patmos—the writer of the book of Revelation—had a vision one night as he lay awake pondering the meaning and purpose of his life. He writes ofthat vision, “After this I looked, and there in heaven a door stood open! And a voice said, ‘Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this!’” And so John, in his vision went up into heaven and saw God, the Almighty, seated on a throne. And in his right hand he held a scroll, written on the front and the back, a scroll that contained all of the truth about existence and meaning, a scroll that could make sense of the world. How many times in my life—in the midst of wrestling with a difficult decision or feeling despair over the senseless violence we inflict upon one another—how many times have I wished that God would just appear to me in a vision and explain it all to me, or rent a billboard on 1-85 and, in giant letters that I could not mistake, explain to me what course my life should take, remind me who and whose I am, tell me what greater purpose my life has served. Right there where I could see it, in neon lights, so there could be no doubt. A message from God. Haven’t you ever wished for that? And that is precisely what John of Patmos, the writer of Revelation, sees in his vision. Not a billboard, but a scroll. And on that scroll, written on the front and the back,

    Page 51

    a message—not just for John or for you or for me—but a message for all the world, for all of creation. A scroll revealing to us the meaning and purpose of life. Can you imagine? Right there before our eyes, a scroll containing the deepest truths about existence—the meaning and the purpose of human history. “There it is!” John must have shouted. “This is what we have been praying for! Tell us what is written on the scroll!” But as he looks closer, John sees that the scroll is sealed with seven seals so that it cannot be opened or read. The truth, so close, yet remains hidden. You see, such deep truth and meaning cannot be revealed by just anyone. It can only be revealed by one who is truly worthy of such things. But who, John thinks, is worthy? Who in our world speaks deep truth? Who can tell us what life is truly about? Who can reveal to us how we should live lives of meaning and purpose? Who is worthy of our trust and allegiance? The government? The media? The church? The university? Who? And so the call goes out from the angel to all the world: “Who is worthy? Who is worthy? Who can open the seals? Who can open the scroll and read its mysteries? Who can tell us the truth about life?” The call goes out to the scientists. “Open the scroll and tell us the meaning of life !” But they cannot. They can show us pictures of galaxies light years away and land robots on Mars. They can clone sheep and tinker with our genes. But they cannot tell us what is fundamentally true about our life. They cannot open the scroll. Not Newton, not Einstein, not Stephen Hawking. They are not worthy to tell us what is ultimately true. The call goes out to the teachers and the philosophers who carry the wisdom of the ages. “Open the scroll and tell us the truth about life !” But they cannot. They can write of shadows moving dimly on cave walls. They can ponder the Numinous and the Ego. They can prove that they exist by their ability to doubt their own existence. But they cannot open the scroll. Not Plato, not Descartes, not Marx or Arendt or Murdoch. They are not worthy to tell us what is ultimately true. The call goes out to the political leaders with their carefully orchestrated campaign strategies, with their plans for economic growth, universal healthcare, and no child left behind. “Tell us the truth about life!” But they cannot open the scroll either. Not George W. Bush or John McCain, not Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Not Roosevelt or Lincoln or Washington. They are not worthy to tell us what is true. The call goes out to the leaders of corporate America with their slick advertising campaigns and beautifully airbrushed supermodels, with their catchy slogans promising easy answers to all of life’s problems. “Tell us the truth about life!” But they cannot open the scroll either. No matter how many times they say “Just Do It” or promise to be “The Real Thing,” they cannot open the scroll. They are not worthy to tell us what is true. So the call goes to the religious leaders with our expensive seminary educations, able to read the Bible in Hebrew and Greek, well-versed in the theology of Calvin and Augustine and Aquinas and all the great Christian thinkers. But we are not worthy, either. Not even the saints are worthy. Not Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King, not Francis or Irenaeus, not even Abraham or Sarah, King David or Paul the Apostle. No one is found worthy to open the scroll. No one in heaven or on earth or under the earth is able to open the scroll or to look into it. The scroll that contains the deep Truths about life remains sealed. No one is found worthy to tell us what is true.

    Page 52

    When the scroll cannot be opened, John says, “I began to weep bitterly.” So close to understanding the meaning and purpose of life; so close to discovering who is worthy of ultimate allegiance, and yet the scroll remains sealed. The truth about life remains hidden and unknown. And so John weeps. I imagine that you know that kind of weeping. I imagine you have felt it. I know I have. It is the sort of weeping that comes from the depth of your soul in those moments when life seems to have lost all meaning, when existence seems to have no purpose. It is the weeping of a young professional, overworked and underpaid, trapped in the unhappiness of a meaningless job. It is the weeping of a little girl with her face buried in a pillow, drowning out the sound of her parents’ fighting that never seems to stop. It is the weeping of a woman whose aging mother has forgotten her, who just stares at her blankly without a glimmer of recognition. It is the weeping that comes in our darkest moments, when the future seems futile. When our steps are weary and our hearts grow faint. When we lack the strength to muster even one more step. It is the weeping that comes when we realize that no one is worthy to open the scroll. But into the midst of our bitter weeping comes the elder. “Do not weep,” he says. “See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.” Who is this who will comfort our weeping? Who is this who will reveal to us the work of God in the world? Who is this who will come to us in our late night desperation and assure us that there is something more to this life than meets the eye? Who is this Lion of Judah? Who is this mighty warrior? He has conquered. He is worthy. He can reveal to us the deep Truth of life. But when we turn to see this great warrior, this mighty conqueror, this Lion, this king of the jungle—what do we see? Only a lamb, standing as if it had been slaughtered, a puny sheep without even the good sense to keep himself from crucifixion. This is the one who is worthy? This is the one in whom our hope rests? This is the one with the power to make sense of our lives? The military leaders scoff: “This is no mighty lion, no conquering warrior. He has not been victorious ! He is not capable of Shock and Awe ! He has been slaughtered by the sword! How can our hope rest in him? Our hope lies in having the military strength to subdue the world!” The political leaders chide him: “This is no leader, but a follower. This is no shepherd, but only a sheep. Our hope lies in those with charisma, those who can win followers with a handshake, a promise, and a well-scripted photo op. This Lamb, despised and crucified by the crowds, cannot be worthy to open the scroll.” The teachers and philosophers dismiss him as inferior: “This one does not have the wisdom of an owl, but only the simple mind of a lamb. How can he reveal the truth when he speaks in stories that even the common people can understand?” The economic leaders hardly glance at him: “To make it in this world you have to have an image, a gimmick, that intangible star power. The slaughtered Lamb look just doesn’t cut it. How can he be the one to reveal the truth?” The religious leaders are embarrassed by him: “People want to worship a God who is strong and powerful, someone who will reward them with comfort and prosperity, someone they can strive to be like. We can’t preach about this slaughtered Lamb, this meek one who teaches love for our enemies and compassion for the poor—our pews

    Page 53

    will be empty! How can he be the one who is worthy?” And yet, according to John’s Revelation, this is the one to whom the scroll is given. Over all the protests of the Empire, this is the one who is worthy. This is the one who can open the scroll. This is the one by whom the Truth is revealed, not by the might of the military leaders, not by the promises of the political leaders, not by economic gurus or the CEOs of multi-billion dollar corporations, not by the products we buy or the comfort we pursue, not by the scientists or philosophers, the scholars or teachers, not even by the religious leaders, if you can dare to believe it. Not by anyone but this one—the Lion of Judah, the Slaughtered Lamb, this Jesus, the Christ. In him the truth is revealed. In him meaning resides. In him rests the vision of hope for our future. So as we gather here this morning, as we stand in this contested space between the old world and the new, between the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of the world, as we listen to the clamor of voices claiming to be worthy of our trust and allegiance, claiming to know what is best for our world, who is it that we declare to be worthy? What is it that we declare to be true? In whom do we place our hope for the future? In the living of our lives, who is it that we truly worship? When we gather to worship our God in this place, we say to the kings of the earth, “You are not worthy. We will not worship you.” We say to the Democrats and to the Republicans, “You are not worthy. We will not worship you.” We say to our economic leaders, “You are not worthy. We will not worship you.” We say to the seductions of wealth and security, of prestige and honor, “You are not worthy; you are not true. We will not worship you.” And then may we fall to our knees in the presence of the Slaughtered One, and may we shout with the elders, “To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever! Amen.”1

    Notes

    1 The genesis of this sermon was a course on the book of Revelation entitled “Apocalypse Now!,” taught at Columbia Theological Seminary by Charles L. Campbell and Stanley P. Saunders, two profound teachers to whom I am deeply indebted. The exegesis is informed by the work of Wes Howard-Brook and Anthony Gwyther, Un-veiling Empire: Reading Revelation Then and Now ( Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1999). The sermon was first preached at Fort Hill Presbyterian Church in Clemson, S.C.

  • How God gets through

    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.

    Page 27

    How God Gets Through

    I Samuel 3:1-10; John 1:35-42

    P. C. Enniss

    Trinity Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia

    The younger members among us will recognize the Silverstein poem “Whatifs”:

    Last night while I lay thinking here, Some whatifs crawled inside my ear

    And pranced and partied all night long And sang their same old whatif song.

    Whatif I’m dumb in school? Whatif they’ve closed the swimming pool?

    Whatiflgetbeatup? Whatif there’s poison in my cup? Whatif I get sick and die?

    Whatif I flunk the test? Whatif green hair grows on my chest?

    Whatif I tear my pants? Whatif I never learn to dance?

    Everything seems swell and then The night time whatifs strike again … The whatifs.

    Of course adults play What If too, especially when they reach a certain age. Often late at night or all alone they will drag out some old class yearbook, browse through the pages and pages of pictures of the classmates they knew best, and recall those days when they first knew them in school (ten or twenty years ago, or whatever it was). Inevitably the eye will halt on certain ones while the mind races back in time, calling up the crazy antics, the fun, the excitement, the heart-breaks. But also the dreams, the ambitions, all those things once talked about doing and becoming after graduation, after we’d grown up. And then, just as inevitably, they think about those same classmates today. What they have actually done with their lives after graduation, after they have grown up, where they are and who they are today. And that’s when the What ifs begin to crawl inside the ear. What if Shirley had just not married so early? Of if she had played the field more or a little longer. What if Freddie had taken his studies more seriously and hadn’t begun to run with that crowd? And of course, before long the scenario shifts to the self. What if I…had gone to Duke instead of Davidson , majored in chemistry instead of English, gone into the Navy instead of the

    Page 28

    Army or maybe neither? What if…? The What ifs belong not only to the young. The two Bible stories the lectionary gives us today are scattered with What ifs. Both are stories with but minimal interpolation to allow for the passing of time, true to life stories of people who heard, or thought they heard, the voice of God. First, there’s Samuel, shy little kid brought up since the age of two in the Temple under the tutelage of the old and half-blind priest Eli (not because any of it was Samuel’s idea, but because Samuel’s mother had thought she could not have children, and then when little Samuel came along and surprised them all, interpreted it as God’s special gift, and so gave the child to the service of the Lord in the Temple). Still, as one reads the story, one senses that it was .much more like the kid that gets sent off to summer camp for the convenience of the parents than any burning zeal on the part of Samuel to be there; for though he performed his simple duties well, the story indicates “Samuel did not know the. Lord.” Nonetheless, one night, nearing daybreak as the story tells it, the oil in the night lamp about to run out, Samuel hears a voice calling his name. Thinking Eli has called, he inquires. Eli says, “No, go back to bed.” Note now, nobody,, not even the old priest, is expecting God to speak. Scripture says, “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision.” Nobody but the nuts really expects to hear the voice of God call their name. Now do we? I told some of you ofthat taxi driver from Daytona Beach who, years ago when I was still at Central Presbyterian Church, cornered me one Sunday saying God had directed him to announce his candidacy for president from Central church. When I inquired, “Why here?” he was quick to answer that it was all part of the plan. God wanted his campaign photograph to show in the background both the cross of the church and the dome of the State house, and it would all be a symbol of his platform, and he wanted permission to announce and to have his photograph taken at Central. Well, I was nice, and I tried to be sensitive, but I did allow that I thought we could not grant that permission because we really didn’t like to mix religion and politics at Central. (I have since repented.) Nonetheless, our Sunday visitor was rare, for these are not days of frequent vision. And when one does show up for Sunday service announcing that he has heard the voice of God, he seems unusually suspect. You know the story. Three times God called Samuel, and the third time, little Samuel answered, “Speak, Lord, for your servant heareth.” And sure enough, God spelled out the call, and Samuel went on to become one of God’s most faithful prophets. In the New Testament, the story is slightly different. This time all the players are adults, grown and graduated and already in a profitable career in the fishing business when they encounter Jesus. And after spending some time with Jesus, they decide to change directions, to quit the fishing business in favor of a more philosophical or spiritual quest, becoming as the old text has it, “fishers of men.” Now it’s clear at this point, the disciples are not clear. Somewhat like little Samuel, they are not sure what they have heard or what it means. But, there is sufficient interest or curiosity or compulsion (or whatever we call it when we aren’t sure); there is something in them that compels them to respond to Jesus’ urging, “Come and see.”

    Page 29

    Now, just imagine all the What Ifs at play here. Late at night when sleep won’t come, or maybe in the early dawn when day has not quite broken and the night is hanging on, and the mind is most susceptible. Don’t you know Samuel had his moments of wrestling with the What Ifs? “What if… What if what I took for the voice of God was no more than adolescent insecurity?” And those two disciples Andrew and Simon, who somewhat impulsively, it might seem to us, signed on. Simon, always the more impetuous of the two, so taken by the whole event that he changed his name on the spot. Don’t you know there were days of second thoughts and nights of “What Ifs,” wondering if he had acted wisely. Or possibly over-reacted . And wondering if he had it to do all over again, would he do the same thing. Whatif? All of this raises to mind “How does God get through?” If God wants to get through to you and me, how does God get through? And if God speaks to some, why doesn’t God speak to all? And if God speaks to all, why doesn’t God speak as clearly and as convincingly to some as he does to others? What if the voice of God is no more than the subjective whisperings of my own desire? What if God’s voice is but the verbalization, the human verbalization, of my own psychological need for security and approval or for punishment, as the case may be? What if the voice of God can be explained away as my own craving for love and acceptance? And for psychic companionship, for some assurance that I am not alone, but that there is more to life than just me, more to time than just now, more to history than the simple acting out of my own lusts? Or, on the other hand, what if God is all those things God is supposed to be: truth, hope, virtue, love, purpose. How does God get through to folk like us who crave truth, hope, virtue, love and purpose? I do not know, and Scripture does not give us all the answers. But I do know some. I know, for example, that we are in that season of the church year which historically has come to be called “epiphany,” meaning revelation or appearance or vision or occurrence, like the two given us in the texts today, where God appeared to people, people not altogether unlike you and me, even in times like these when the voice of God is rare, but when God appears and has spoken in convincing ways. There are enough occurrences in Scripture and in subsequent history too for us not to leave revelation only to taxi drivers from Daytona, and indeed enough to offer some credibility to the question “What if God did call my name?” Well, we don’t have all the answers, but the historical human experience counts for something, and if we chronicle all those Biblical epiphanies and add a few of our own, we do know some things. We know, for example, that God never speaks to me at the detriment of another. To the grave disappointment of some I am sure, God does not play favorites, and if what J hear is a voice that suggests violence or injustice toward another person or race or tribe or nation, I know that it is not the voice of the Lord. I know that. We know, for example, that the voice of God is always a summons to wholeness , healing, harmony, reconciliation, salvation. It is not the will of God that any be lost or that any be ill or that any be less than whole. And any voice that suggests otherwise is clearly not the calling of the Lord. We know that. We know, for example, that we have to be very careful when evaluating voices, because there are so many impersonations, and so we must be very careful not to evaluate by our values, but by God’s. Jerry Falwell was frequently wrong,

    Page 30

    but he was right on target when he warned against Jim Bakker ‘s false gospel of affluence , for God does not call some to affluence at the expense of others. God has a higher standard of values, a clearer set of ethics than that. And we know that. And then another thing our epiphanies have taught us is the foolishness of trying either to predict or to program God’s speaking, or on the other hand, to limit when and how God speaks. The spirit blows where it wills, and try as we may, we cannot control the wind. Now, we can of course put ourselves in places, with people , and in environments, where God is known to have spoken before. In church, study groups, retreats, etc. But even that is no guarantee that God will not choose God’s own time or place or medium, all of which may come as quite a surprise to those who have been regimented to dislike surprises. Woody Allen refers to that shocking Old Testament story of God’s speaking to Abraham. You remember the account where God is supposed to have spoken to Abraham and suggested that he sacrifice his son Isaac on the altar. As Woody Allen tells the story, Abraham is certain that he has heard the voice of God because “It was a deep, resonant voice, well modulated and nobody in the desert could get a rumble in their voice like that.” Later, when Abraham is embarrassed that he did not catch on to God’s little joke, Abraham nevertheless pleads with God that his willingness to sacrifice his son should at least prove that he was faithful to God and should count for something even though he was mistaken. And God says, according to Woody Allen, “All it proves is that some people will follow any order, no matter how asinine as long as it comes from a resonant well-modulated voice.” Well, one has to be very careful in presuming or in limiting God. Listen, for example, to Fred Buechner writing of God’s way of getting through to folk like us in very unlikely places. Buechner speaks of a time when his own life seemed locked in like a trap or a dead end.

    Only, I discovered that it really wasn’t that way at all. I discovered that if you really keep your eye pealed to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as I was living on Rupert Mountain opened onto extraordinary vistas-taking your children to school and kissing your wife good-bye, eating lunch with a friend, trying to do a decent day’s work, hearing the rain patter against the window. There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because ofthat, all the more compellingly and hauntingly.

    And then Buechner goes on at great length, but he sums up his discovery with these words: “Listen to your life,” he says. “See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness, touch…taste…smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis, all moments are key moments and life itself is grace. Listen to your life,” says Buechner. Listen to your life, because, I think, some things no one can tell you. Some things you can only hear for yourself. Like that winter Joanna Adams and Ed Loring were on that afternoon radio talk show. The subject was homelessness in Atlanta , and they were describing the shelter ministries that have sprung up all over

    Page 31

    town in churches, like the Central Night Shelter, which Joanna described in great detail. And the question was asked if we ever preached to those people. “Do you conduct worship in the Shelter?” And when the answer was “no,” the caller, who one sensed had the question ready, pounced, “Where then is Christ in what you are doing?” Following an awkward pause, Ed Loring said, “I suppose you’ll just have to come down and see for yourself.” “You’ll just have to come and see”—Jesus’ words to Peter and to Andrew. “You’ll just have to come and see for yourself!” And ask yourself what if? What if Christ is here, present and alive amidst the smelly shelter cots and snores of sleeping homeless men and the gentle grace of a warm, safe place to spend the night and a bowl of hot soup? How does God get through? There is no way one can tell another, except to recall and to share those unexpected epiphanies that have occurred in our own experiences along the way, as we look and listen and become even more open to the calling of our name. A lingering memory of my own childhood is that of traveling with my father in the summer when school was out. My father worked for the railroad, and his job was to call on the station masters at the various railroad terminals around the state of Florida. I would always sit in the corner or maybe find an empty desk somewhere out of the way while he transacted his railroad business with the station master. What I remember most vividly about those wonderful visits was the constant clackety-clack-clack of the telegraph in those train stations, the little steel hammer clacking away against the Prince Albert tobacco can. I sat in awe and wonder at what messages were flying through the air of those musty old stations, messages which I could hear but not understand. I would imagine all sorts of things. What if there had been a train wreck down the tracks or a bridge was out or there had been a great train robbery. And I remember straining to hear in the clacking the SOS, the only Morse Code I could remember. Now I know that probably those messages were no more than inquiries about lost luggage and delayed schedules . But for me, in those childhood days when I was less steeled against surprises, I wondered what word was trying to get through, what urgent message, what emergency . Everybody else, all the grown-ups there, even the station master whose job it was to listen, seemed so casual and uninterested in what in my imagination were very urgent messages. “What if…?” That was long ago, but I confess I still play What If every now and then. I still wonder what if God is trying to get through? What if God’s voice is there like the clack ofthat hammer against that tobacco can, calling out for someone to hear? What if in it all is the sound of my name? What would it mean and what difference would it make? What if those “What Ifs” that climb inside my ear and prance and party all night long and sing their same old What If song, what if, in all that, is found what our epiphany has come to experience as the call, the presence of God? What if God is trying to get through…even now?

    This sermon was preached at Central Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia, on January 17,1988.

  • Easter Sunday 2006: Acts 10:34-43; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Mark 16:1-8

    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.

    Page 10

    Easter Sunday 2006*

    Acts 10:34-43; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Mark 16:1-8

    Barbara Brown Taylor

    Piedmont College, Demorest, Georgia

    Happy Resurrection Day ! May the news of Christ’s risenness touch the dead spots in your heart and bring them back to life, so that you become part of the good news that flows forth from this place today. May you be springs of living water in all the dry places on this sweet, parched earth. May the fresh life that God has given you spill over to freshen all the lives that touch yours—in your homes, in your work, in your schools and neighborhoods. May you be Easter people, this day and forever. I have probably over-thought this sermon. Easter is a tough preaching gig, especially for a guest like me. Good Friday is a much easier assignment, all in all— because most people are far more familiar with suffering and death than they are with resurrection. Resurrection is so difficult from so many angles that most Christians are content to think of it as something that happens after we die. God raised Jesus from the dead and took him to heaven. Because we believe in Jesus, God will do the same thing for us. So far, so good. But if that is the best we can do, then today becomes the day we thank God for what will happen when our lives are over, and Christian faith becomes the faith of those who care less for life than afterlife. I would have called this an exaggeration until I heard one of my Religion 101 students say it in plain English. “I love studying other religions,” she said, “because they have so much in them about how to live. This is different from Christianity, which is about going to heaven when you die.” When theologian Harvey Cox taught a class called “Jesus and the Moral Life” at Harvard College, he left the resurrection off his syllabus. One reason was because he had students from a wide variety of religious traditions in his class. Another reason was because the resurrection “stood on the borderline between the historical and the mystical.”1 Only the faithful saw the risen Christ, and not even all of them. Faith was a prerequisite to the resurrection, and not all of his students had it. So Cox ended his course with the crucifixion, spending the last few sessions of the class discussing some of the different takes on the moral significance of Jesus’ life that have arisen in the centuries after his death. The class was hugely popular, growing every year until Cox finally had to move the class to a theatre usually reserved for rock conceits. His students pressed him, however, and not just the Christians. They wanted to know why Cox was leaving out the climax of the story, the part that made Jesus different from Moses, Muhammad, or the Buddha. Listening to them talk, he discovered that the closest parallels some of them had for Jesus’ resurrection were the stories of Dracula or the Terminator. So he decided to add the resurrection to his syllabus, but not before he had done his own research.

    * This sermon was preached at Cannon Chapel, Emory University, on April 16, 2006.

    Page 11

    Chief among his surprises was the discovery that stories of raising the dead in the Hebrew Bible have nothing to do with immortality. They are about God’s justice. “They did not spring up from a yearning for life after death,” he writes, “but from the conviction that ultimately a truly just God simply [has] to vindicate the victims of the callous and the powerful.”2 To restore a dead person to life is to strike a blow at mortality, Cox points out, but to restore a crucified man to life is to strike a blow at the system that executed him. This changes the way today’s story reads—or not, for those who do not want God getting mixed up with politics. But Cox is right about the Hebrew Bible, which is the Bible Jesus grew up on. He is also right about what resurrection meant in Jesus’ own time, which struck Paul with oracular force on the road to Damascus. For God to bring a dead man back to life meant that God’s reign was very near. And if God’s reign was very near, then the reign of the callous and the powerful was very over, in truth if not in fact. For anyone who could read the signs, an empty tomb was the signal that God’s justice was on the move—not just in heaven, but right here on earth. So of course the women were scared when they saw the stone rolled away from the tomb. They had come to conduct a funeral, not a revolution. They had come to grieve, not to organize. Even if they were not up on their messianic theology, they knew they had lost more than their beloved friend. They had also lost their best hope for a new kind of life on earth. When Jesus was alive, it had been possible for them to imagine a world in which children had enough to eat, sick people got well, and old people did not have to worry about who would care for them once they could no longer care for themselves. When he spoke, it had been possible to imagine a world in which women were worth talking to, lepers could retire their bells, and people with nothing in the middle of nowhere could find themselves at a picnic for five thousand, with twelve baskets to spare. It had even been possible to imagine a world with no Romans in it—patrolling the streets in their metal breastplates and pointy helmets, barking their orders, demanding their taxes. If God was in charge, then God had a funny way of showing it. For all practical purposes, Caesar was Lord—keeping peace through military power, using fear to stay in control. There were benefits of course, at least for those who supported the imperial agenda, but the problem with eating at the emperor’s table was that you got addicted to his rich food. When Jesus was alive, he showed up with his own food—nothing fancy, just some stale loaves and dried fishes. While they were chewing it, he said things that made them chew quietly enough to hear him—speaking of peace through justice, using love to yield control. Well, people noticed. Unlike the other Lord, he was not armed. Unlike the other Lord, he told people not to fear. Yet when he spoke, his words rang with such authority that demons fled, faint hearts revived, and even those dead sat up to take another look around. This was such good news that there was no way to shut up about it. He was the one they had been waiting for. With evidence like that, who could doubt it? When the time was right, he would act decisively—to set things right again. He would send the conquerors home to beat their swords into plowshares. He would wipe away the tears from all faces. He would destroy the shroud that is cast over all peoples and swallow up death forever.

    Page 12

    That was the hope, at least, but when Lord Caesar’s people heard the news, it sounded anything but good to them. Who wanted a plowshare? They had not gotten where they were by putting their trust in farm tools. They put their trust in swords. So they sent some people with swords to arrest the Lord Jesus—who did not have one of his own, of course—and by the next afternoon he was dead. End of news. When the women came to anoint his body, they were not just coming to mourn their dead friend, then. They were coming to mourn their dead hope. They were coming to bury the dead future he had helped them imagine, to lay to rest their dead vision of the way things might have been. Story over. We are all dead now. According to Mark, the first clue the women had that the funeral was not going to happen was that the tomb stone was not where it was supposed to be. They had been worried about who was going to move it for them. Maybe they even hoped that no one would, so that they could go back home and say they had tried to get in without actually having to go in. It was a dangerous place for them to be seen, after all, at the tomb of a folk hero executed by the state. If they had listened harder, they might have heard camera shutters clicking in the bushes for the wanted posters that would go up later that afternoon. If the Committee on Un-Roman Activités wanted to wipe out the rest of the nest, all they had to do was follow the women back home. The two Marys and Salome might as well have been wearing t-shirts that said, “This way to the men folk.” But they were not that scared yet. They were not really scared until they ducked inside the tomb and saw the young man dressed in white sitting there. “Do not be alarmed,” he said, because they were so clearly alarmed; “you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” Now that is news, though you are not likely to read it in the Imperial Times. Lord Caesar has failed to silence Lord Jesus. The crucified one has been raised. The dead one is not here. He has gone ahead to Galilee—back to where the story began—to begin the buzz all over again. Those who want to see him will not stay in the tomb trying to verify what did or did not happen there, any more than they will fold their hands and turn their gaze toward heaven. The young man in white does not say that Jesus is going ahead of them to heaven; he says that Jesus is going ahead of them to Galilee. God’s hope is alive on earth. That is what the women are supposed to go tell the disciples and Peter. But they do not, or at least not according to the oldest version of Mark’s gospel. In that version, which we heard all the way to the last verse today, the women “fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” In Greek, the ending is even more abrupt: “And no one anything they told,” it reads, “they were scared, you see, for….” For what?! There’s a whole new Da Vinci Code waiting to be written about how such an ending came to be. Did Mark slump over his manuscript at that point, dead himself from a sudden heart attack? Did a Roman soldier walk up behind him and say, “You’re done, son”? Maybe those who inherited Mark’s manuscript were so appalled by what he had written that they ripped it off right there, right in the middle of that sentence, and pretended that was all there was to it. Or maybe Mark was simply a brilliant storyteller, the James Joyce of his generation, willing to take linguistic risks

    Page 13

    that no one else dreamed of taking. “They were scared, you see, for….” You know what you are scared of, don’t you? They were scared, you see, for as wrecked as they were by Jesus’ death, they knew how to behave in the face of death. You view the body, you seal the tomb, you go back to the house to eat fried chicken and green bean casseroles with the neighbors. You accept that there is no going back and you get on with your life, diminished as it is. But when the tomb is empty and the body is gone? How do you get closure on something like that? They were scared, you see, for they did not know how to behave in the face of death’s undoing.” They were scared, you see, for even though they had caught Jesus’ vision and given themselves to following him, they were still stuck with this guilty relief they felt when they realized how many things they did not have to do, believe, or hope anymore. In a lot of ways, hope is harder than death. At least with death you can stop trying so hard. They were scared, you see, for they were pretty sure they did not want to move mountains again. They were scared, you see, for if he was risen from the dead, then so were they. Lord Caesar could go on governing by the same tired rules—might makes right, strike before you are struck, watch your back and let others watch theirs—but they did not have to live like that anymore. Death had lost its grip on them. They were going to be harder to control now that they knew what limited damage violence could do to God’s cause. They were scared, you see, for they had never been fearless before, and all of a sudden there was nothing to hold them back. Mark did not know exactly what we would be scared of all these years later; he just knew we would be. By ending his gospel right there, right in the middle of a sentence, he also left us free to decide what to do about it. Will we tell or won’t we? Will we go to Galilee or won’t we? That is where the Lord Jesus has gone—not to the town in northern Israel, but to all the real places on earth that we have come here from— where we bring up our children, earn our livings, pay our taxes, cast our votes. That is where God is raising the dead. If we want to practice resurrection, then that is where we will go too. Because we clearly need more practice. Death may be beat, but death has not hit the ground yet. Lord Caesar may be gone, but his successors are not out of business yet. That is why we need this meal we are about to share, to remind us that the Christ who died, the Christ who is risen, is the Christ who will come again. Meanwhile, God’s hope is alive on earth. Though wounded, peace lives. Though killed, justice rises. Though buried, love goes ahead of us to Galilee; there we will see him, just as he told us.

    Notes

    1. Harvey Cox, When Jesus Came to Harvard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 271. 2. Cox, 274.

  • He meant to pass them by

    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.

    Page 49

    Protagonist Corner

    He Meant to Pass Them By

    Mark 1:40-45 and 6:45-52; Matthew 25:31-46

    W. Guy Delaney, Virginia Beach, Virginia

    We think we know Jesus, but do we? How well do we know anyone? Think about the person you know best—perhaps your spouse, a good friend. How well do you know that person? Just when we think we know Jesus, something he does or says makes us wonder. The disciples are at sea. They’ve been rowing for hours. After putting them in a boat and sending them across to the other shore, Jesus goes aside to pray. That evening Jesus returns only to find the boat still at sea, barely halfway to the other side. Walking on the wave-tossed sea, we are told that Jesus “meant to pass them by.” Pass them by? Why? We cannot ignore that “to pass by” is the way in which God manifests himself to humans in the Old Testament. Keeping that in mind, we should still wonder if there are times when Jesus means to pass us by, to leave us to struggle alone against the forces of life that keep us from reaching our destination. Are there times when he’s close enough to reach out and touch us, and in his heart he means to pass us by? What might make Jesus consider doing such a thing? There are other times, maybe more than those recorded in scripture, when Jesus doesn’t seem to want to get involved. When we think of the Good Samaritan, it’s hard for us to imagine Jesus being the priest who, when he saw the wounded man, crossed over on the other side, or the Lévite who, like the priest, just passed him by. No. That’s not the Jesus we think we know. The Jesus we know is the Good Samaritan, who, when he saw the man beaten and left to die, gave him aid and paid for his needs. Jesus, we might think, would never have passed him by, but might he have wanted to? Do we know the mind of Jesus well enough to know for sure? Think about another reading from Mark’s gospel, the one we heard earlier about the leper who came to Jesus, who said “If you will, you can make me clean.” Is it possible that Jesus “meant to pass him by”? There are two readings that describe Jesus’ response—the first is the more accepted, but probably the less accurate, which says that Jesus was “moved with pity.” The second, and the less accepted but probably the more accurate, says that Jesus was “angry.” Now there’s a world of difference between being “moved with pity” and being “angry.” What would make an ancient scribe change the text as he copied these words from one parchment to another? Isn’t it the same thing that makes us preachers tailor the gospel to our audience. We do it to make our message more acceptable. Yes. We do it all the time. We fail to address critical issues of hunger and homelessness and greed and a miserable war in Iraq that’s killing more than our supposed enemies—a war that’s killing our nation. Instead of helping you feel the hurts of the world, we preachers absolve you of any responsibility for reaching out

    Page 50

    and touching those who are unacceptable. We make it easy for you to pass on by. In fact, we escort you. What Jesus may have meant to do, “to walk on by,” we preachers do without a second thought, and for the most part, that’s the way you want it. Whatever prophetic voice may have once resonated through God’s word is left mostly unspoken by us preachers. Whatever Jesus may have felt—even anger—we preachers wipe away with cheap grace. I want to be thought well of by you. My ego is a powerful detriment to my preaching the gospel. I don’t want to pay the price of your rejection. But being accepted is not the only reason I’m tempted, like Jesus, to pass on by those issues that I don’t want to deal with. I have already been expelled from one church for my attempt to bring a prophetic voice to the pulpit. I failed in my first pastorate for being too prophetic. When my wife Charlotte was dying, we spent many hours together the last three months of her life, reliving moments in our life together that had special meaning—happy moments, sad moments. “Remember our wedding night?” I would say. “How could I forget; could there ever have been two more awkward people?” she would respond. “And the time Amy turned on the clothes dryer with the cat in it?” I would say. “Yeah I remember, Ling Ling was never the same after five minutes at 300°F,” she would say. We remembered the night our fourteen year old daughter Annette had a stroke while babysitting and hung by a thread between life and death for ten days. Sad moments that we relived for the sake of our love for each other. We talked about the painful days and months leading up to our expulsion from my first church. Statements of pain, followed by periods of silence, and then Charlotte gazed into my eyes as she said softly, “You were a prophet, my love, and you were beautiful in your prophet days.” I didn’t feel beautiful, but more than that, I didn’t feel like a prophet. I felt more like an Isaiah, who at the end of his ministry said, “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.”—Isaiah 49:4. For those of you who don’t like me now, you would have liked me less in my prophet days. I know from reading my Bible and from experience that to be successful as a pastor I cannot preach the Word as it comes to me—not in this society—and that I must dance around certain issues or ignore them altogether. Like many other preachers, I give in to the need to succeed or risk the consequences of your going some place else to hear a message more to your liking. Even when you do not tell me face to face, I hear whispers. For anyone who speaks ill of me, let me assure you, I speak ill of myself. For any who hold me in contempt, I hold myself in contempt. I struggle within myself to preach what needs to be preached without the risk of losing you. And that’s why I dread saying what I’m about to say. In fact, I’m angry that it’s a subject I feel I can’t avoid. I’m ready to give up preaching because of what I’m becoming. I’d much rather just pass it on by, leave it alone, not to have to say things that are sure to make many of you unhappy. You can’t imagine the struggle that has brought me to this moment. The whole cultural, and yes, religious reasons that kept lepers at the edge of society, are at work among us to keep a whole class of people at the edge of our faith. The reason Jesus was angry when asked to heal a leper is that it interfered with his agenda. He was on his way to the city to preach. If he took notice of this

    Page 51

    leper, he would not be able to continue on. He would not be allowed to preach in the cities of Judea because his contact with the leper would make him unclean. The leper stood between Jesus and his mission, and the leper’s cry made him angry. What we see is a glimpse of humanity struggling with divinity. It was like Jacob wrestling with the angel on the banks of the Jabbok River. It was like Delacroix’s painting of Jacob and the angel locked in embrace. It almost worked because we are told that Jesus was angry. But just when humanity was about to have its way, Jesus reached out and touched the leper and said, “Be clean.” In doing this, Jesus was flying in the face of both his culture and his faith. Levitical law prohibited anyone from touching a leper. A leper was banished from normal society, was required to remain outside the city, wearing rent clothes, head bared, with a covering over his upper lip. And wherever he went, he was required to give warning of his presence by crying “unclean, unclean.” The leper was untouchable. By touching the leper, Jesus crossed the boundary of his Jewish faith. The great irony in Jesus’ action is that at the very point where faith leaves Jesus no room, Jesus makes room for the one person most excluded by faith—the leper. The human urge to do what’s expected almost kept Jesus for doing what he came to do. Doing what Jesus did set him on a path that would end with his own death. Doing what’s expected is a powerful motivator to keep us preachers from doing what we are called to do. And who is the leper among us? It’s the gay male and the lesbian female. I suspect that one or both or more are worshipping with us today, trying to find a place for themselves in the faith that the Christian Church does not give them, sitting among us with secrets that if revealed would threaten their place in the pew next to us. I know what the scriptures say about homosexuality. I also know what the scriptures say about divorce and a lot of other things that society and religion have taught us to pass on by. And I know how we pick and choose those scriptures that support our world view and how we pass by those who don’t. I know how we used the scriptures to support slavery. I know how we used scripture to burn more than a quarter million people at the stake during the Inquisition. I know how we used scripture to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964.1 know how we use scripture to support our political ideologies. We come to scripture preconditioned to hear what we want to hear. We are not always at our best when we open our Bibles, so I do not intend to proof text today’s sermon. So what I intend to do is to speak theologically. Mind you, theology, if it’s good theology, is based on the correct understanding of all of scripture, not just on a few isolated passages. And while my theology may not be perfect, if I err, I want to err on the side of grace rather than on the side of judgment. So let me begin with the affirmation that Christian anthropology defines our identity in two ways and in two ways only: first that we are created in the image of God, and second that we are sinners for whom Christ died. That and that alone gives us our identity. Being gay or being straight does not give us our identity. My question to you this morning is this: if we are all defined by the same identity, how can we give Christian privileges to some and not to others? How can we give full church membership to some and partial church membership to others? If our defining identity is that we are created in the image of God and that we are sinners

    Page 52

    for whom Christ died, how can we judge some as worthy and some not? Maybe you saw the news clip on MSNBC which began with the words, “A mega church canceled a memorial service for a Navy veteran twenty-four hours before it was to start because the deceased was gay.” The pastor of the church, in response to the media attention said, “We declined to host the service—not based on discrimination, not based on hatred, but based on principle.” They can bury an atheist, you understand, but they can’t bring themselves to bury a gay Navy veteran who professes faith in Jesus Christ. Shame on that church and its 5,000 members. The way you get to be a 5,000 member church is to tell the people what they want to hear rather then what they need to hear. There’s a scene in the New Testament in which Jesus describes the last judgment. It speaks of the Son of Man, surrounded by angels, sitting in full glory upon his throne, and before him are gathered all the people who have ever lived, and they are divided on his right and left. And this is what Jesus says to those standing before him: “Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me. I was gay and you accepted me’” (Matthew 25:34-37). Now I know the words I was gay and you accepted me are not in your Bible. They’re in mine only because I penciled them in. My urge is to erase them, but I fear that if I tried, the words would be like Duncan’s blood that Lady Macbeth could not wipe off her hands. Because these words are in my Bible, even though they are penciled in, I cannot ignore them. If this is the anger Jesus felt as the leper blocked his path into the cities of Judea, it’s the same anger I feel. If this is what Jesus felt when he saw his disciples making no headway against the wind and the waves and he meant to pass them by, then his humanity and my humanity are in lock step. Fortunately for us, his humanity did not win the day. Fortunately for us he rose above his humanity to do what he came to do. His humanity paid the price, but his divinity won the victory. He was angry because he had to make a choice he didn’t want to make. He meant to pass them by, but he didn’t. He meant to pass the cross by, but he couldn’t. I have no cause to think that Jesus would do anything different today than he did two thousand years ago. Given the circumstances, I have every reason to think that we do not know Jesus as well as we think we do, that we do not know his heart. If Jesus were with us today, who would he reach out and touch, and who would he just walk on by?

    This sermon was preached on August 5,2007, at Bayside Presbyterian Church, Virginia Beach, Virginia.