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  • Preaching the Psalms: Psalm 68:1-10, 32-35 (Ascension Sunday)

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    Preaching the Psalms

    Psalm 68:1-10, 32-35, (Ascension Sunday)

    J. Clinton McCann, Jr.

    Eden Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri

    At first sight, Psalm 68 does not seem like a prime candidate for proclamation. Even if a preacher were inclined to preach on Psalm 68, he or she might well be discouraged by the commentators, who regularly point out that Psalm 68 is among the more difficult psalms to interpret. 1 James Limburg mentions a German commentator

    who catalogued “some four hundred differing interpretations of the psalm!” 2 There is

    some justification for concluding that Psalm 68 is difficult. It includes unusual words; its syntax is not clear; it has no regular poetic structure; it contains a number of enig­ matic images and allusions. Even so, as Gerald Wilson points out, the essential message of Psalm 68 is clear: “Clear within this otherwise difficult poem are Yahweh’s demon-stration of his universal power and authority, the acknowledgment of that authority by the nations and their submission to it, and joyful praise for Yahweh’s righteous kingship by the whole earth. As a unified composition, then, Psalm 68 is a praise hymn celebrating the power of Yahweh to save.” 3

    Psalm 68 is about something which is as contemporary as this morning’s news­ paper – power (see “power” three times in vv. 34-35). Psalm 68 is about God’s sovereignty (note that God is addressed as “my King” in v. 24), a word and a concept which lie at the heart of Jesus’ preaching (see Mark 1:14-15, noting Jesus’ proclama­ tion of “the kingdom of God”) and at the core of Reformed theology. But the manner in which Psalm 68 makes the case for God’s sovereignty or power is also difficult – not difficult to understand, but rather difficult to accept. From the very beginning of the psalm, the case for God’s power is made by portraying God as the divine warrior, who routs God’s “enemies” (v. 1) and wipes out “the wicked” (v. 2). As it turns out this portrayal is relatively mild compared to the subsequent presentation of God as a sort of male, macho, military commander who leads out the troops (vv. 11-14), subjugates and humiliates the “captives” which he takes (vv. Π­ Ι 8), and apparently, disposes barbarically of those captives who refuse to cooperate (vv. 21-23). The bloody scene in v. 23 leads immediately into a festive celebration of God’s victory – Psalm 68 is sometimes categorized as a “victory hymn” – in the temple, it seems (vv. 24-27). The entire sequence is shockingly violent; and we are rightly bothered, even offended and repulsed. Of course, what we are apt to forget is that Psalm 68 is no more violent than what we daily take for granted in our contemporary world. A recent article in Time reminds us of the horribly violent real­ ities of just the past fifteen years of human history: “We’ve visited untold horrors on ourselves – in Mogadishu, Rwanda, Chechnya, Darfur, Beslan, Baghdad, Pakistan, London, Madrid, Lebanon, Israel, New York City, Abu Ghraib, Oklahoma City, an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania – all of the crimes committed by the highest, wisest, most principled species the planet has produced.” 4 But, the objection may be,

    these are human-orchestrated atrocities, many of which we label as terrorism. We expect better from the Bible and its portrayal of God. Yes, but what this objection misses is that Scripture is unremittingly incarnational

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    – that is, it uses human language and cultural symbols and systems to speak about God. What is at issue in Psalm 68, according to James L. Mays, is “the coming of the reign of God in space and time.”5 But how does one speak of the holy, transcendent God entering our world of “space and time”? By necessity, according to Gerald Wilson, one must speak in hyperbole and metaphor.6 In the case of Psalm 68, the Israelite poets have employed the mythopoeic, metaphorical stock of their Canaanite environment. In the Canaanite view, Baal was the one “who rides upon the clouds” (Ps 68:4; see v. 33), the one responsible for the rain which made the crops grow. This designation now is claimed for the God of Israel; and vv. 7-10 accordingly present God’s production of rain. This aspect of the poem does not bother us, but there are further dimensions of the Baal material upon which the Israelite poets drew. Baal is involved in a struggle with the god Mot (Death) and his chaotic forces, including Nahar (River) whom Baal defeats by crushing his head, an action similar to that of Ps 68:21, which introduces the most violent section of the psalm. As Wilson concludes concerning the effect of Israel’s borrowing from its Canaanite cultural environment, “The violence has become a metaphor for the completeness of God’s power and the certainty of the defeat of his cosmic foes.”7 But beyond a consideration of the cultural background which seems to have informed Psalm 68, there are aspects of the psalm itself that put its violence in a particular perspective. For instance, even though the “violence has become a metaphor for the completeness of God’s power,” it is evident that God exercises divine sovereignty as something other than the Rambo-like terminator which the psalm seems on the surface to suggest. In this regard, it is telling that the psalm begins with petition in vv. 1 -3 and returns to petition in vv. 28-31 – in short, there are still “enemies” (v. 1 ; see v. 21), those “who lust after tribute” and “delight in war” (v. 30). If God were simply an enforcer, there should be no enemies, at least not for long. But in the Psalms (see Psalm 2 and virtually all of the prayers for help), and in the life of Jesus, and in our own real-life situations, there are always those who oppose God and God’s purposes for the world (and sometimes it is we ourselves!). Given this reality, the logical conclusion is that God exercises sovereignty differently than the world generally expects power to be wielded. Ordinarily in the so-called “real world,” we are told, “might makes right.” But not for God! Rather, in the world of God’s reign, which the Bible consistently portrays as the real “real world,” it is just the opposite – right makes might. Or, in other words, God exercises power as love rather than unilateral force, as compassion rather than prohibitive constraint. While it may not appear to be the case at first sight, Psalm 68 itself reinforces this direction and conclusion, as Mays recognizes and articulates:

    In spite of its militant character and victorious confidence, such is not its spirit. There is a self-understanding and self-description in the psalm’s measures that belies such a reading. The uses assigned to the power of the LORD as divine warrior are crucial. The God who dwells in his holy habitation [see vv. 5,24-27] as victor is father of orphans and protector of widows, who gives the desolate a home and liberates prisoners [vv. 5-6]…. The song belongs to the lowly, who in the midst of the powers of this world remember and hope for the victory of God.8

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    Note well, as Mays emphasizes, that the uses of God’s power are crucial; and the psalm itself affirms that God, the divine warrior, “fights” for the vulnerable and the dispossessed. And note well too, in Mays’s words, that Psalm 68 “belongs to the lowly”! This is precisely why it is important not to excise vv. 11-31 from the psalm, as the lectionary does. Rather, we need to hear the whole psalm, as Gary Charles also insists in his sermon, “Rider of the Clouds.” To be sure, these violent verses may upset and unsettle us, maybe even embarrass us, as Gary suggests. And to be sure, I am familiar with the argument that violence in the Bible simply serves to reinforce the violent propensities of the powerful and ruthless, so that Scripture at these points is best ignored. While I have no doubt that this argument is well-intentioned, and while I certainly do not want to do anything to reinforce violent inclinations, I also take very seriously that Psalm 68 belongs to the lowly. It is precisely the lowly – the vulnerable and the dispossessed – who want and who need and who rightly claim the biblical view of a God who fights for them against the powerful forces of evil, injustice, and oppression. To read and heed the whole of Psalm 68 is, in essence, to stand in solidarity with the lowly, protesting the evil of those who oppose God, and professing the trust that it is indeed God “who daily bears us up” (v. 19). To read and heed Psalm 68 in its entirety is, in Gary’s words, to “let out a scream that will pierce the ears of evil.” Mindful of the danger that Psalm 68 might be appropriated triumphalistically by the ruthless and powerful to justify their violence by claiming that “God is on our side,” we should clearly emphasize in interpreting and proclaiming Psalm 68 that our God fights non-violently. The psalm itself points in this direction by portraying God’s power ultimately as love and compassion rather than as enforcement and constraint. Interpreting Psalm 68 as Christians on Ascension Sunday at the culmination of the Easter season reinforces this direction. Jesus, the resurrected and ascended one, is still the crucified one. The resurrection/ascension (and the earliest church probably viewed these as simultaneous rather than sequential) does not cancel or negate Jesus’ suffering, but rather the resurrection/ascension validates Jesus’ life and ministry. In the first century, the scandal of Jesus’ resurrection would not have centered on historicity , as it does in our contemporary context. In other words, the scandal would not have been that Jesus arose, but rather that Jesus arose – that is, the resurrection affirms that Jesus truly proclaimed and fully embodied the presence of God in our world in his ministry of suffering love.9 True power, genuine sovereignty, is the power of serving, suffering love. In his sermon, Gary helpfully articulates this conclusion by juxtaposing the two titles, “Rider of the Clouds” and “Climber of the Cross.” The proclamation of God’s power as serving, suffering love puts in perspective the concluding affirmation in v. 35 that God “gives power and strength to his people.” The thrice-repeated “power” in vv. 34-35 (see also v. 28, where the same Hebrew root repeated these three times in vv. 34-35 also underlies “might” and “strength,” suggesting again that “power” is crucial for the entire psalm) is ascribed to God as something which God shares. As Limburg comments: “This God, however, is not power hungry but gives power to the people of God (v. 35). God watches over orphans, protects widows, and is concerned for the homeless and for prisoners (vv. 5-6). Should not God’s people use their God-given power to do the same?”10 In short, the “power and strength” which God gives to God’s people are not to be construed triumphalistically as some sort of privilege or reward. Rather, the people of God are empowered to love as God loves and to serve as God serves. More

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    specifically, the people of God are empowered to confront and endure the same kind of opposition which God must confront from God’s “enemies” in Psalm 68. We Christians may properly understand such strength to be the power of the resurrection, which enables us to do what Jesus invited and invites his followers to do – take up their crosses and follow him (see Mark 8:34). To follow the God who is the “Father of orphans and protector of widows” (v. 5), to follow the risen and ascended Jesus who we Christians profess, fully embodied with the wisdom and power of the God of Israel, is to have a mission. Not coincidentally, the account of the ascension in Acts 1:9 is immediately preceded by the promise to the disciples of “power” (Acts 1:8); and a commission shared with the God revealed in Jesus Christ is at least implied or anticipated: “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” The Acts of the Apostles indicates clearly enough that the power which they received was not an insurance policy against hardship and suffering, but rather the strength to endure faithfully every manner of enmity and opposition, quite literally, for God’s sake. Gary’s concluding question is really an invitation to mission: “What if Ascension Sunday were our annual bookend to Easter Sunday when with the cadences of Psalm 68 beating throughout the service, we reclaimed the biblical image of God as a street fighter, a non-violent fighter, who will fight to the death rather than remain silent before the evil around us and within us?” Because we share God’s power, we also share in God’s fight against injustice and oppression. The “evil around us and within us” means that the faithful will always encounter opposition, as did Jesus and the apostles and prophets and psalmists. So, it is fitting that John Knox chose to conclude the Scots Confession with a prayer, which begins with Ps 68:1 and also reflects the content of vv. 32and35: “Arise, O Lord, and let thine enemies be confounded; let them flee from they presence that hate thy godly name. Give thy servants strength to speak thy word with boldness, and let all nations cleave to the true knowledge of thee. Amen.”11 The one who prays thusly will be properly positioned for praise, especially when praise is understood not only as a liturgical act, but also as a way of life in which we courageously conform our wills to the will of God, the “Father of orphans and protector of widows,” who “gives the desolate a home to live in” and “leads out the prisoners to prosperity” (vv. 5-6).

    Notes

    1 JohnGoldingay,Psa/mj, Volume 2: Psalms 42-89 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2007), 311312 . 2 James Limburg, Psalms (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 225. 3 Gerald H. Wilson, Psalms Volume 1 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2002), 934-935. 4 Jeffrey Kluger, “Ape with a Conscience: Why Bad Acts Come from Good People,” Time 170/23 (December 3,2007): 55. 5 James L. Mays, Psalms (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1994), 228. 6 Wilson, Psalms, Volume 1,944-946. 7 Ibid., 944. 8 Mays, Psalms, 228-229. 9 Stephen J. Patterson, The God of Jesus: The Historical Jesus and the Search for Meaning (Harrisburg, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 1998), 211-240. 10 Limburg, Psalms, 227. 11 Mays, Psalms, 229.

  • Designated readers: Deuteronomy’s portrait of the ideal king–or is it preacher?

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    Designated Readers:

    Deuteronomy ‘s Portrait of the Ideal King –

    or Is It Preacher?

    Brent A. Strawn Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

    If you know anything about preaching, you’ll know that a number of famous preachers and teachers of preaching have encouraged us to preach like Scripture itself. Put slightly differently, this means that our practices of teaching and preaching should be formed and informed by Scripture itself.11 agree wholeheartedly, and, in a related vein, have often encouraged students to develop their theologies of Scripture on the basis of specific texts from Scripture. Wanting to set a good example, I’ve tried to do this myself. I have five texts on my “for sure” list. They include the following:

    John 6:68: Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (NRSV)

    Eccl 5:2: Never be rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be quick to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven, and you upon earth; therefore let your words be few. (NRSV)

    Job 2:10: [Job] replied.. .”Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble? (NIV)

    Genesis 32:31: The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel [“the face of God,” in Hebrew], limping because of his hip.

    The fifth, very important text is Deuteronomy 17:14-20, Deuteronomy’s law of the king: When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, “I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,” you may indeed set over you a king whom the LORD your God will choose. One of your own community you may set as king over you; you are not permitted to put a foreigner over you, who is not of your own community. Even so, he must not acquire many horses for himself, or return the people to Egypt in order to acquire more horses, since the LORD has said to you, “You must never return that way again.” And he must not acquire many wives for himself, or else his heart will turn away; also silver and gold he must not acquire in great quantity for himself. When he has taken the throne of his kingdom, he shall have a copy of this law [Hebrew: torah] written for him in the presence of the levitical priests. It shall remain with him and he shall read in it all the days of his life, so that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, diligently observing all the words of this law [Hebrew: torah] and these statutes, neither exalting himself above other members of the community nor turning aside from the commandment, either to the right or to the left, so that he and his descendants may reign long over his kingdom in Israel. (NRSV)

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    Deuteronomy 17 and Old Testament Kingship It is a striking and rather under-known fact that in all of the Pentateuch, with its dizzying and seemingly countless laws, only one concerns the king. Several monarchs are mentioned in the Torah, of course, but there are no laws about the native Israelite king apart from this one single passage in Deuteronomy 17. Now, despite the venerable status of Deuteronomy 17 as Holy Writ or the long tradition of the three-fold office of Christ and his ministers as prophets, priests, and kings, I know that royal imagery is often in bad company these days. It’s too autocratic , too hierarchical, too dictatorial, hegemonic, you name it. I mean, it’s just plain anti-democratic. Nevertheless, despite the many real problems we may have with royal imagery, I have become convinced that this text holds great promise for us as preachers and servants of the Gospel (or is it servants of Torah?). Let me make a few comments. As you’ll recall from your seminary days, most biblical scholars agree that the foibles of the Israelite monarchy, and especially the mistakes of Solomon, are on the brain of the author of Deuteronomy 17. In the canonical flow, of course, Deuteronomy 17 long precedes Israel’s demand for a king in I Samuel 8, let alone Solomon ‘s rule as described in I Kings 1-11. But the links, both lexical and thematic, are strong, so strong that when readers get to those later passages, they already know something about them and how they are at odds with Deuteronomy’s law of the king. They hear the echoes and catch the allusions. Of course, that is probably exactly what Scripture, or at least those authors responsible for Samuel and Kings called the Deuteronomists, who apparently crafted their work with Deuteronomy on their brains, wants us to catch and to hear. So it is not impossible, and, in fact, according to many, quite likely, that Deuteronomy 17 was written after firsthand exposure to the exploits and exploitations of the monarchy. The deuteronomic law of the king that is, is to no small degree against kingship. Rejoice all who dislike tyrants!

    The “Designated Reader” Back Then Now the “against-ness” of kingship in Deuteronomy 17 is rather obvious and stark when set against Solomonic excess in I Kings, but it is apparent already in the words of the text itself. Note the severe restrictions placed on the executive branch: First, required membership in the community (17:15; cf. 17:20a): the king must be an Israelite. A foreigner may not be king “over you”; at least, a foreignborn king may not be selected by Israel itself. The language used here is quite familial: literally, “one of your brothers” you may set over you as king, but not a stranger, not someone Israel doesn’t know. This keeps leadership all in the family, so to speak, and already hints at some of the restrictions that will follow. Second, limitations on economic excess (17:16; cf. 17:17b): the acquisition of horses is connected in real ways to exploitation: returning the people to Egypt in order to multiply horses. The king can’t do that. Third, limitations on personal excess including both sexual and economic excess (17:17; cf. 17:20a): Even what might be called “interpersonal excess” is forbidden: the king shall not exalt himself (literally, “his heart”) over the other members of the community (literally, again, “his brothers”). In the old days, this

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    was called “pride”; the king can’t have any. These significant restrictions are answered by a series of positive injunctions, which can be boiled down to two (and ultimately, probably, just one): First, he must write a copy of this Torah in a book. Against the NRSV, the verb for writing used here is singular and active and implies, I think, the king’s own copying of the document. This king is, in short, a Torah scribe. In contrast to general ancient Near Eastern practice, the deuteronomic king is not a promulgator of the law so much as its servant and faithful transmitter. Second, this Torah must be with him and he must read in it all the days of his life. This personally-written copy of the Torah “shall remain with him” (NRSV), and it will get a lot of use: he must read in it constantly. Note the length and specificity of the injunction: “all the days.” That means every day “of his life,” that means all of it. This king is, in short, a Torah reader. A devoted and expert one at that. There’s more to the passage, but the heat and light are at the collision of the negative prohibitions and the positive injunctions. By any standards, let alone ancient Near Eastern ones, what Deuteronomy is describing here is by no stretch of the imagination a king. I mean, sure, no problem with the king being indigenous or monogamous. We’re probably okay with that (even if our politicians often aren’t!). But what kind of king, of any substance at least, doesn’t have lots of stuff? What king is not proud, exalted over his people? Those are hallmarks of monarchy. “Monarchy,” by definition, means “rule” (Greek: arche) of “one” (Greek: monos) over all others. By definition, even if those are, in fact, the negative hallmarks of monarchy. But the Israelite monarch imagined by Deuteronomy has none of those negative hallmarks. In their place, Deuteronomy envisions not a king, but a designated reader: someone (you can’t even call him a king; if you do, make sure you put it in quotation marks) who copies the Torah, who has it at his elbow at all times, and who reads in it incessantly with the result being that this person serves the Lord, keeps the Torah and the statutes, remains humble, is faithfiil, and thus ensures a long rule for himself and his descendants. And who wouldn’t want a king or a dynasty like that?

    The “Designated Reader” Now This notion of the designated reader has stuck with me ever since I first happened upon it. No external and certainly no exploitive accoutrements of power here. Instead, service by means of reading. I often tell students, especially those preparing for ministry, but also other folks (pastors, even liturgists in training), that Deuteronomy 17 is not a bad model for them. They are, or will be soon enough, designated readers, designated to read things that those whom they serve have neither time, desire, nor, let’s face it, interest in reading. Things like Scripture! The designated reader is a good model for all kinds of people, but I think it is an especially pregnant image for those of us who preach and teach the Bible, the good news of the Gospel of God. Imagine having (imagine being!) a preacher or teacher who wears no external and exploitive accoutrements of power, whether those are manifested in heavy-handedness in a board meeting, intellectual posturing by means of the well-placed but perhaps mispronounced Greek, Hebrew, or Latin term in the midst of the sermon, or the ever-expanding and thoroughly

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    careerist resume, but instead who is a member of the community, kin with students and parishioners, and, among other things-no scratch that-not among other things, but as the only thing – is their designated reader. Talk about a subject-centered classroom! Talk about a Scripture-centered community! Talk about a Bibleoriented church! This is a counterintuitive, counter-cultural model of leadership, but an empowering one for those whom we serve, the community of God’s people. It is an image of a queen robbed of queenship as humanly constructed, void of all the marks of success as commonly understood: money, sex, power, that unholy trinity that rules our churches as much as it does our economy. Instead, in their place, we have a ruler envisioned as God desires: a designated reader. And a designated reader of Torah. For we must not forget that it is not just any book or every book that this ruler reads and writes. It is Deuteronomy itself. It is Torah. It is Scripture. Now I know that last bit is easy for me to say, being a biblical scholar, Old Testament at that, who’s worked a bit in Deuteronomy with more ofthat ahead of me. Not everyone is so lucky, I’m afraid! But whatever our interests and expertise, mine included, we know we have to read a lot of books, not just Deuteronomy, not just Torah, and not just Scripture. (Alas!) But even then we can still be designated readers for our people. Indeed, Deuteronomy’s model of a humble ruler (better: reader) might be even more important vis-à-vis these other “books” (or subjects or areas) since they are often arcane, esoteric, in other tongues like seminary-speak, and so completely inaccessible to our people. How easy to lord it over them! To impress them with our learning and insight! But the designated reader does not exalt her heart over her brothers and sisters. Whatever books we must read in as part of our disciplines and as part of our callings, if we wish to learn from Deuteronomy 17, then we must not neglect its emphasis on Torah. I think that means that our pursuit, our designated reading, whatever the subject, must come back to and be rooted in our life with God and our pursuit of God; that it must be rooted in God’s instruction, in God’s designs and purposes. All these things and more are evoked by the Hebrew word torah, which means “law” or “instruction,” on the one hand, and on the other, can be used to designate the five books of Moses or even all of Scripture itself. Deuteronomy’s emphasis on reading the Torah, not something else, at all times means that ours is a properly theological task. There is more to that task than Scripture, though Scripture plays a preeminent role (in my humble Old Testament opinion!). But, regardless , our task involves, everywhere and always, God. That discipline must be with us always, and we must read in it all the days of our life. And we must write it, write in it, ourselves, not remaining content merely with someone else’s copy.2

    What Good Is Designated Reading? Now I think all this business about reading makes a lot of sense, but reading may seem like a highly unimportant luxury in the face of the real difficulties plaguing our world. What use is reading, in the face of war, I.E.D.s, famine, suffering, political races, murdered student body presidents, and all the rest? Huge social ills and large matters of public policy will not be fixed easily by simply reading a scroll.3 But then again, this scroll, this Torah we are talking about, is not just any book; it isn’t like any other book. The book that we’ve been called to read, cho-

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    sen by the Lord to serve as designated reader of, presents an alternative vision of how the world can be, a transforming vision of God, of society, of humanity, and all points in between and even beyond. It is a book, a vision, a place where the lowly are exalted and the powerful and wicked brought low (Luke 1:51-53); where widows and orphans count as much as the married and the parented; where the weapons of war are melted down and made into John Deere tractors just in time for harvest; where nations not only sign non-proliferation treaties, but they decide to disband their armies altogether and do away with intelligence agencies (Isa 2:4); and where the monarch herself reads the Lord’s words “all the days of her life.” And if this reading is going to matter, we mustn’t miss the fact that it is done on behalf of others, on behalf of future generations, so that not only the rulers themselves can live long in the land of God’s promise, but also their children after them, ensuring that this benevolent, Torah-obsessed, God-preoccupied designated reading on behalf of others never ends.4 The fact that our world leaders, all of them it seems, evidently do not care much for such rule or such reading only underscores the urgency of it. Far from being irrelevant or unimportant, then, the image of the designated reader is desperately needed, even if, for the moment, reading seems like the last thing one should be doing.5

    The Results of Designated Reading And what’s the result of all this reading? Perhaps it is too optimistic, but for Deuteronomy, the result is as automatic as it is axiomatic: right worship of the Lord, obedience, humility, fidelity, and a long rule, if in fact “rule” is the best word. A long “reading and preaching” might be more appropriate. Now let me ask you: who would not want to have a pastor or a preacher like that? And who wouldn’t want to be a preacher or pastor like that?

    Notes

    1. See especially the works of Thomas G. Long, Preaching and the Literary Forms of the Bible (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1989); and The Witness of Preaching (2d ed.; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), esp. 117-71; and Fred B. Craddock, Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon, 1985), esp. 170-93. See also Mike Graves, The Sermon as Symphony: Preaching the Literary Forms of the New Testament (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1997). 2. Note Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation (JPS Torah Commentary: Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996), 168, who points out that “writing makes a more lasting impression than does merely reading.” 3. See Walter Brueggemann, Deuteronomy (Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries; Nashville: Abingdon, 2001), 186-7. 4. Compare Brueggemann, Deuteronomy,188: The Torah keeps the managers of power fixed on the social fabric and the neighbor who has no horses, no silver, no gold, and perhaps only one wife or one husband who is underfunded.”

    This sermon was most recently preached in March, 2008, at a continuing education event for The United Methodist Church in Orlando, Florida.

  • Preaching Lenten repentance to a nation and a church

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    Preaching Lenten Repentance to a Nation

    and a Church

    Douglas John Hall

    Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Age after age their tragic Empires rise,

    Built while they dream, and in that dreaming weep….

    1

    A hundred questions crowd the mind that contemplates a topic like this. Is repen­ tance just contrition, or does it involve radical transformation? How does metanoia apply to social entities or institutions? What does a nation or a church repent of? Is the call to repentance the same for both nation and church? Can a nation repent? And are we speaking here of nations and churches in general, or of a specific nation and church? For me, in addition to these and similar questions, there is another preliminary problem. Journal for Preachers is a U.S. Christian publication and is rightly geared to the particular—and today, daunting—challenges facing serious Christians in the United States of America. I am a Canadian, and though I have dared to write about theology in “a North American Context,” 2 when I consider a piece like this, I have to

    wonder again whether I have any right to speak for two countries that, while sharing a great deal of history, language, and culture, are also—and despite the efforts of “continentalists” on both sides of the border—still significantly different. In particular, Canada and the U.S.A. differ in terms of global power—immensely so! It is all too easy for Canadians, living as we must on the edge of empire, to point the finger of guilt, scorn, and shock at the great, chaotic but world-dominant political monolith on our southern, once-undefended border. In The Decline of the American Empire, the almost demonically satirical film of Quebec producer, Denis Arcand, a group of clever, cynical and sex-obsessed Montreal intellectuals present themselves as all-knowing observers of the decline and fall of the U.S. From the ivory towers of Montreal Academia, they look over into nearby Plattsburg, Ν. Y., and remark sardoni­ cally on the moral and physical disintegration of the republic-become-empire. The religious version of this secularized Canadian view of the “elephant” with whom the Canadian “mouse” has to sleep (Pierre Trudeau) could well be, and often is, to announce how greatly in need of repentance is both nation and church in the U.S.A. Over against such naive Canadian self-righteousness, I stand with my teacher, Reinhold Niebuhr, who in the mid-1950s quipped from the pulpit of James Chapel in Union Seminary, “The Canadians are not less vulgar than we are—only less power­ ful.” As a beginning student in theology at that time, finding myself for the first time in the “strange land” that both fascinates and frightens Canadians, I heard this assessment of my country with some chagrin; but I have since learned to appreciate its perspicacity. Canada’s future, like its past, is inexorably linked with that of the United States, and the Sin (of pride and sloth, superbia and vulgarity) of which we must repent both as nations and churches in these nations amounts to variations on the same themes. The only advantage that Canadians may have (though very few of them make good on it—least of all our present “Conservative” government!) is a certain

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    distance from the command-centre of the North American political-technological Imperium—a little once-remove that may, if exercised both modestly and seriously, permit a modicum of wisdom (as it did, for instance, with Canadians like George P. Grant, Northrup Frye, John Kenneth Galbraith, and some of our more perceptive novelists and artists, including Denis Arcand).

    Preaching Repentance to a Church I will separate—at least temporarily—nation and church in this topic, because while (for reasons to be discussed) I believe they cannot be separated in reality, only in theory, there are aspects of the subject that apply quite differently to the two entities addressed by the preacher of repentance. Chiefly, I take it as a Protestant that repentance is not an option for the church, but an assumption of faith and life “in Jesus Christ.” Every time a congregation confesses its sin, it declares to God and all the world its intention to repent—with God’s help to “begin again.” The Reformation concept semper reformanda implies that repentance and the determination to “lead a new life” is not an unusual or occasional emphasis—a bit of extraordinary piety reserved for Lent—but an ongoing and permanent dimension of the life of the Body of Christ. Classical Protestantism rightly rejected the notion that, while individual Christians and even popes may sin, “the Church” cannot. The judgement [krisis], declares the first epistle of St. Peter, begins at the household of faith! Of what, in particular, ought the churches in the North American context repent? I answer: we must repent of our foundational, “constantinian” assumption that it is our vocation to be the “spiritual” dimension of an historical project variously designated “Western Civilization,” “Democracy,” or simply “America.” While it is obvious enough that Christianity has contributed a great deal (both good and bad) to this historical project, and while Christians ought certainly to be grateful for the humane virtues of “the West,” it is not the mission of the Body of Christ to represent, defend, and foster the avowed values and pursuits of any particular culture—even (and perhaps especially!) when that culture, its conspicuous secularity notwithstanding, still somehow covets the designation Christian culture. The first calling and allegiance of the Church is to its “Head,” Jesus the Christ, and therefore its mission is at once more exclusive and more inclusive than were it bound to a particular civilization, nation, society, race, or political ideology. It is more exclusive because loyalty to the Christ severely restricts the kinds and extent of allegiance that Christians are permitted to give to other entities which claim their attention as human beings, citizens, members of certain ethnic groupings, creeds, genders, etc. But it is more inclusive because life en Christo necessarily exposes otherwise chauvinistic souls to all sorts and conditions of human and creational concern. Paul (in Romans 13) and the early Apologists urged Christians to pray for and, under most circumstances, obey “the governing authorities”; but there can be no question that the biblical and most authoritative representatives of church/state theology throughout history taught that allegiance to the Christ precedes and conditions every other real or potential claim to allegiance to which Christians may be subjected. To state the matter in other words: the churches in today’s post-Christendom epoch are being called to repent of their long embrace of the whole idea of Christian “establishment.” For at the heart of that idea lies a deeply fallacious assumption that

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    obedience to Christ and obedience to a culture, state, or political ideology can be synthesized. Recent history has taught some of us how dangerous, theologically and morally, this assumption can be, for we have been shocked at the ease with which even a Christianity as sophisticated as that of German Protestantism could be co-opted by an ideology as crassly racist as Nazism. But relatively few North American Christians have applied this lesson in practical theology to our own context. Even among the remnants of classical Protestantism on this continent, still far too many assume that Christianity is inextricably linked with “our way of life,” and in the noisier forms of American Christianity, this assumption is raised to the level of an article of militant faith. Repenting of our embrace of Christian establishment is not a merely theoretical or “theological” gesture. It means letting go of the alleged “privileges” we have enjoyed because of our favoured-religion status. It means relinquishing our cosy arrangements with political, economic, educational, and other groupings in our society from which we have gained social statue. It means a new willingness to share the “spiritual” dimension of public life with faiths that, heretofore, we have belittled or ignored. It means a new resolve to listen to our world, and not simply to announce, declare, and declaim. It means developing a theology of reasoned and compassionate discourse and eschewing reliance on mere custom, bombast and creedal tradition. In short, the repentance asked of the churches in our society is their relinquishment of all the forms of reliance on power that they have exploited over fifteen or sixteen centuries of “Christendom”; for Christendom, at base, is nothing more nor less than the habit of seeking power through proximity to power. Repentance, when it is genuine, means for Christian individuals and churches, risking the Christian future on the grounds of faith alone—sola gratia, sola fide. It is a radical turning away from other principalities and powers and a radical trust in the power of the divine Spirit alone. And the reason why it is not possible in practice as well as theory to separate nation and church in this kind of discussion about repentance is that the churches, with a very few exceptions, have not (yet) shown a clear resolve ofthat character. We are all still clinging to the empty promises of Christian establishment, even when we have begun to recognize that they are indeed empty promises. Even when we lament and apologize for our continued dependence on the myth of a Christian America and a Christian Canada, we are still bereft of the faith—and the theological imagination—that is needed to contemplate possible alternatives to the condition of establishment. We are hardly in a position to demand of our nations that they repent of their greedy bid for greater and greater pre-eminence and glory, when we ourselves on the whole are parasitically dependent upon their power. The church can engage in a credible prophetic critique of its host nation only when it ceases to rely on its host for its own well-being and status. Too much ecclesiastical carping about state and society amounts to biting the hand that feeds us. Prophetic faith is authentic only where Christian individuals and churches have sufficiently detached themselves from the power structures and dominant culture of their society to assume a new kind of responsibility for them. Will a time come when the churches in North America are ready to meet that condition?

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    Can Nations-Become-Empires Repent? The detachment to which I am referring here implies neither passivity nor the abandonment of civic responsibility. To the contrary, it means the acquisition of a profound sympathy and compassion for the tragic dimension of all historical existence , beginning with the church’s own social and political context. No reasonable observer of human communities would dispute the fact that nations have a hand in shaping their own destinies. But Christians who live out of their own biblical and theological traditions know that “freedom” is not the only word that applies to the human condition—the condition of “life in a fallen world.” There is a lot of loose talk about freedom in our context. Canadians, for instance, regularly talk of “becoming the kind of country we want to be,” as if the future were a carte blanche and the past nonexistent . Nations, like individuals, inherit the decisions and actions—and the indecision and inaction—of their founders, forebears and successive generations. Silently, inconspicuously, the past lays upon the present and future a logic that transcends a people’s volition. This applies also, and with poignant, if not tragic, consequences, to the logic of empire. The application of the concept of “empire” to the United States of America has lately become fodder for the chattering classes of our society as well as for the critics and enemies of America. Especially since “9/11” and the Bush administration’s open and crass embrace of imperialistic policies, most of the now-nearly-ubiquitous denouncement of America’s imperialism is wholly devoid of any appreciation for the tragic dimension of the path that the United States has taken—the path that its own evolution has long exhibited, the path that most of the nations of the “free world” (including Canada), whilst complaining about U.S. naivete and aggressiveness, continue expecting and wanting America to take. It is implied, if not actually argued, in many analyses of the global scene today, that American political, economic, military, and technological imperialism is an invention of the Bush administration. As if, in the wake of the failure of the other superpower and the new readiness of a wounded population to seek out and destroy all threats to itself, a particularly belligerent U.S. government had discovered, de novo, the idea of global control. This simplistic analysis is, of course, aided and abetted by the Bush administration’s exaggerated deployment of the word “freedom,” its naive belief that “terrorism” can be erased by war, its grade-B movie division of the world into good and evil parts— in short, its apparent incapacity for nuance. The dream of empire has an impressive history also in America; and here too, it is a dream that is accompanied by quiet weeping on the part of the most knowledgeable dreamers. But such self-knowledge is sadly lacking in Washington’s present-day dreamers. The tragic dimension, as Reinhold Niebuhr and many others noted, has never been part of the American vocabulary; but the powers charting the course of America today seem devoid of any sense that their actions and decisions represent a playing out of the logic of empire that has been enacted many times in history and has a long, if covert, evolution in America’s own history. Following the thought of George P. Grant3 and others, I have been using the language of “empire” for decades,4 but I have yet to find a more persuasive illustration of the application of the logic of empire to the U.S.A. than Gore Vidal presented in his historical novel, Empire. Towards the end of the novel, Vidal creates a scene in which Henry Adams is in conversation with John Hay. The President (Theodore Roosevelt,

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    1901-1909), says Adams, “wants a war, anywhere will do, as long as we end up as custodian of northern China….” Adams smiled, showing no teeth. “You can say that the most marvellous invention of my grandfather, the Monroe Doctrine, originally intended to protect our—note the cool proprietary Our’—hemisphere from predatory European powers, has now been extended, quite illegally, by President Roosevelt to include China and, again by extension , any part of the world where we may want to interfere.” Hay counters with the familiar image of America Protector of the Weak: “Surely we have a moral -yes, I hate the word, too—duty to help less fortunate nations in this hemisphere….” “And [quips Adams ironically] sunny Hawaii, and poor Samoa, and the tragic Philippines? John, it is empire that you all want, and it is empire that you have got, and at such a small price….” “What price is that?” “The American republic. You’ve finally got rid of it. For good…The republic is dead; long live the empire.”5 What would it mean for the nation called the United States of American to repent? The most cogent answer, I think, lies precisely in this distinction: it would mean for this nation to repent of its imperial ambitions, take its rightful place as a nation (an important one) among nations (including full support of the United Nations), and try to play its laudable role as defender of the weak without resorting to the temptation of the strong to dominate the weak. In short, it would mean becoming in truth the republic that America has intended, at its best, to be. Too many Christians in the United States want their nation to be Christian ! Even where this does not translate into petty bourgeois self-righteousness and moralism and liberal sentimentalism, even where it is informed by an ethic of social responsibility, the insistence that America ought to be more “Christian” is a questionable approach to the “repentance” that is desirable. For one thing, it ignores the very real religious and cultural pluralism of the United States. For another, such a preachment of repentance presupposes the continued dependence of the preacher on the condition of cultural establishment and privilege. But at the deepest level, the expectation that a nation should be “Christian” is a counsel of despair; for no nation, least of all a nationbecome -empire, can realistically embrace the ethic of suffering love and the concomitant renunciation of power that that ethic demands. While Christians and others of good will may reasonably expect nations to act justly , they should not expect nations to love—not, at least, in the sense in which love is commanded of the Christian person and the Christian community. What Christians and others of good will may expect, or at least hope for, on the part of their host nations is that they will be true to their own best ideals and visions and not give way to sheer hubris and the domination of others. Instead of chiding the United States for its “secularity,” its lack of “spirituality,” its “immorality,” its lapsed Christianity, and the like, prophetic Christianity—when it is ready to give up its own reliance on power and privilege—ought to join with others who point out the discrepancies between America’s vision and rhetoric and its actual behaviour and do whatever they can to help the U.S.A. become the beacon of civilization that it claims to be and, at its best, really is. In short, they ought to help it recover its genuinely republican roots. But the question, of course, is whether, having once set out in pursuit of empire,

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    there can be any turning back—any “repentance.” Gore Vidal’s novel cleverly illus­ trates what many historians and other observers of American history—and of history generally—have shown in other ways, namely that there is a logic of empire that must always, or usually, be played out to the end, which means, of course, the decay and destruction of the experiment itself. History seems to demonstrate with a wearisome regularity that empires always self-destruct—that the decline and fall of imperial peoples is already embedded in their beginnings, a point that was argued not only by Gibbons and other historians, but also by theologians from Augustine onwards. Journalistic treatments of American imperialism give the impression that pretension of empire in the United States is a very recent thing—that the charge of imperialism is to be laid at the doorstep of the present U.S. administration, the Grade C Yale students, as the late Kurt Vonnegut called them in his last book, 6 who took over in the

    wake of 9Λ1. But more sober analyses, including Vidal’ s, recognize that the impulse to imperial power lies much deeper than that; that it is by no means a merely political thing in the first place, but a corollary of affluence and technological cleverness; that it must finally be traced to the mystery of human pride and fear that biblical faith has named “Sin” and “the Fall.” The great question with which we North Americans, and all the world, must live today and tomorrow is whether this one remaining Superpower, the greatest in history, can seriously alter the trajectory of its history or whether it must pursue the logic of empire to the very end. Some think, rather flippantly it seems to me, that the American empire has already fallen. No, we have not yet seen what very great technical skill combined with anthropocentric bravado can do by way of self-preservation! But we should know at least this: that if America does self-destruct, we are all going to go down with that ship—Canadians in the first lot! Reinhold Niebuhr believed, or tried to believe, that a people can change even at the eleventh hour. One hopes (most days hoping “against hope”) that this is right. Empires are not all the same, nor do they all suffer exactly the same fate. The ending of some is less catastrophic than that of Rome, with which the U.S. A. is often compared today. The British Empire, in which Canadians of my generation grew up, managed an ending that was at least more like a fizzle than a bang—or, to be fair, more like deathwith -dignity. It did so by calling on its reserves of experience and tested knowledge, its studied remembrance and reworking of all good things it could find in its long and ambiguous history—including the idea of parliamentary democracy, of social com­ passion, of basic human rights, of the corrupting tendencies of power and wealth, of decency and duty and other much-derided “Victorian” virtues. That England survived its once-vast empire, and (for example in the person of the present monarch) can still show up in the world with a lot to teach the rest of us about human dignity and responsibility, ought to embolden all who fear that the loss of power necessarily implies the loss of influence. With the decline of empire—as, sometimes, with the decline of health and vigour in individual life—new wisdom and new courage may emerge: the wisdom to recognize our common and shared creaturehood, the courage of truth and service. Let us hope that such wisdom and such courage will inform, with greater consistency, the future of our two “New World” nations.

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    Notes

    1. Clifford Bax, ‘Turn back, O Man, foreswear thy foolish ways,” 1919. 2. The subtitle of my three volumes of “contextualized” systematic theology: Thinking the Faith; Professing the Faith; Confessing the Faith, all published by Fortress Press of Minneapolis. 3. George P. Grant, Technology and Empire (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969). 4. See, e.g., Lighten Our Darkness: Towards an Indigenous Theology of the Cross, first published in 1976 by Westminster Press of Philadelphia and republished in an enlarged and revised edition by the Academic Renewal Press of Lima, Ohio, in 2001. 5. Gore Vidall, Empire (New York: Random House, 1987), 108f. 6. Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 99.

  • Preaching the Easter texts

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    Preaching the Easter Texts

    Agnes W. Norfleet

    Shandon Presbyterian Church, Columbia, South Carolina

    Last August while on my way home from a week at the beach, I received the sad news that a 47-year-old church member had died very suddenly. A pestering stomach ache turned out to be a deadly disease. Eddie’s wife grew up in the church, and their family occupies the same pew in the transept every Sunday. When I arrived at their home to discuss the arrangements, I encountered what every pastor I know dreads – family members who want to speak at the Memorial Service. And this time it was Eddie’s 14 and 11-year-old daughters. Their grandmother had tried to talk them out of it. Their mother had tried to talk them out of it. I asked with as much pastoral sensitivity as I could muster, “Are you sure?” The girls had already written what they wanted to say, were loudly insistent, and had a look of fierce determination on their faces. I had just shared with them that I was a little younger than they when my father died, that I knew first hand what they were going through, and that they would indeed survive this season of their hearts breaking. In a moment of pastoral confusion I agreed to let them speak at the service and sandwiched them in between the scripture and my meditation on the texts. The next day, following readings from 1 Corinthians 13 and John 14, these willowy youth ascended the chancel, stood side by side behind the pulpit, and the older one read what each had written. Three months earlier she had knelt before me on her day of Confirmation, and I had anointed her forehead with a cross smelling of frankincense and myrrh. Little did I know she would so soon taste its bitter perfume. The church was packed; the congregation audibly sniffling at this very public sight of Eddie’ s children before them. She began by thanking everyone who was there because she knew they loved her father and he loved them. Then a most amazing thing happened. This child began testifying to her faith saying, “I know my father is in heaven with God and Jesus because he has been raised to live with God.” She told a story about getting stitches in one hand and how her father asked her to squeeze his hand hard to take her mind off the one being sewn up. “I squeezed so hard I know it hurt him, but I will never forget his holding my hand that day,” she said. “My love for my father and his love for me will never die, because he is alive with God. I believe in the resurrection, and I know that in heaven Jesus has prepared a special place for him.” It was pure testimony. The primary thing this child of the church said that day was love never ends, and that she believes there is life after death because of Jesus Christ. In essence, she preached 1 Corinthians 13 and John 14. When we all stood at the end of the service for the Affirmation of Faith, using the words of the Apostle Paul, “We are convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord,”1 all of us were certain those words ring true, for we had just seen and heard that truth proclaimed from the bold testimony of a grieving child. To preach the Easter gospel calls for bold testimony. The church will pull out all

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    the stops and put up all the props. About a month before Easter, newspapers, magazines and television will tease our imaginations about what really happened with first century stories from archaeological science, and CNN will broadcast late breaking news about some recently discovered non-canonical gospel. Come Easter morning people will show up for worship in the usual mix of the faithful, doubtful and skeptical. They will expect the preacher to say something and hope it won’t go on too long. All we preachers can do is tell the story, like Eddie’s daughter at her Dad’s Memorial Service, with the passion and authority of one who has stood beside the grave and yet seen the tomb empty and believes the good news of resurrection to be true.

    Resurrection News of Cosmic Proportions: Preaching Matthew 28:1-10 on Easter Sunday Matthew’s testimony is the largest and loudest and most earthshaking of them all with cosmic dimensions not found in Mark, Luke or John. His account of the death and burial of Jesus (Mt. 27:45-66) goes into great detail to make sure we know the body really was dead, how it was wrapped, where it was placed, and the huge size of the stone that sealed the tomb. Watching Joseph of Arimathea attend to the details were witnesses, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, and not only that, there was a governmental decree from Pilate himself to secure the tomb and post a guard of soldiers beside it. By Matthew’s account the dead body of Jesus was so well guarded that it would be absolutely impossible for it to go missing or get stolen or whatever. In this text God’s power to raise Jesus from the dead reaches through layers and layers of death-dealing security. Against a backdrop of a very sure and secure death, this gospel welcomes the cosmic forces of nature to help herald the good news of resurrection. The great stone rolled up tight against the door of the tomb is no match for God’s great earthquake. Unlike Mark and Luke’s accounts, this angel isn’t simply inside the tomb waiting for the women, but rather descending from heaven, appearing like lightening with clothing white as snow. Matthew exclaims the good news of resurrection as Tom Long has written, with “a shattering earthquake that rippled a seismic shock through history and signaled that the fault lines of human history had shifted dramatically toward grace and hope.”2 Everything has changed dramatically, irrevocably, eternally. Time itself, “after the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning,” has shifted into a new day’s observance of Sabbath celebrating the inauguration of a new creation. The women’s fear is paired now with greater joy as they throw themselves in awe-filled worship at the feet of their Risen Lord. By Jesus’ instruction to the women, the disciples become “brothers” to call forth a new family among all nations.3 The soldiers, in Matthew representing the deadly political powers, have fallen away like dead men upending the power structures of the old social order. The earth itself that has spun under the enormous and exhausting weight of death by violence, greed, poverty and disease quakes with new life and hope now that a greater power is on the loose. Matthew’s proclamation of resurrection is huge, loud, and globally good news. On Easter the preacher is challenged to proclaim this awesome, life-giving power beyond the seasonal spring wonder of bunnies, chocolate eggs, and the sentimental floral cross on the church’s front lawn. Occasionally, however, something happens in nature that is reminiscent of Matthew’s cosmic magnitude of the resurrection. In

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    January, 2002, a massive wet weather system moved into Central Mexico with unusually cold temperatures in the low 20’s, causing an unprecedented death of Monarch butterflies which migrate to Mexico from Canada and the United States each winter. Tens of millions of monarch butterflies at the two largest over-wintering sites in Mexico died in catastrophic, unprecedented proportions. The entomologists who gathered there to estimate the death toll found gray carpeted acres of decaying wings. In order to measure the depth of the dead, they reached down through the decaying layers of butterflies, and at about eight inches down, they discovered a layer of living monarchs which had been protected from the freezing rain by the ones that had died, just enough over time to restore the species to life. Buried beneath layers of death was hope for survival and a future for the species.4 With images from the natural order of God’s creation, earthquake and lightening, worldly powers fallen before the awesome power of God, new life in the midst of death, Matthew gives us opportunity to proclaim how God reaches through layers of death: betrayal by Jesus’ friends, the brutality of crucifixion, an air tight tomb, a guard of soldiers — through all of it to bring about resurrection and an altogether new creation. Matthew’s resurrection calls not only for trumpets, but also timpani. This gospel’s Easter Alleluias do not dangle at the end of an incomplete sentence as in Mark or get dismissed as women’s idle chatter as in Luke. Through multilayered depths of death the world has been experiencing since last Easter, from record breaking death tolls in Iraq to unimaginable suffering in Darfur, from forest fires in California to a cyclone in Bangladesh, from catastrophic oil spills to melting ice caps, from a college campus shooting spree in Virginia to a college student house fire in South Carolina, from individuals to families across our pews, God reaches through layers of death to raise up new life. Follow the word “great” through Matthew’s text – great stone, great earthquake, great joy – and what you have is powerful testimony.

    A Resurrection Church for Our Time: Preaching Acts of the Apostles during Easter Season Given Matthew’s resounding, earthshaking testimony, which sent the brothers and sisters of the Risen Christ into all the world baptizing and making disciples, perhaps this is the year to preach about the resurrection’s newly created family, the church. Let’s part company this go around with the usual Easter Season subjects, doubting Thomas, the couple on the road to Emmaus, the Good Shepherd, and consider the Acts of the Apostles where the ground beneath one’s feet is still trembling with resurrection power. In 2008 we recognize that the church has ceased to be propped up by the culture around us, and we struggle to discern who God is calling the church to be during this post-Christendom, post-Constantinian, post-denominational, postmodern time. As we do our grief work about what has changed, Anthony Robinson has written, “We may notice that we not only grieve some aspects of Christendom’s demise, we are also liberated by that death. We are free to embrace the wonderful, liberating oddity of being Christians, of following Jesus in a life more challenging and adventuresome than Christendom imagined.”5 The texts from the Acts of the Apostles appointed for the Sundays after Easter come from a series of early church sermons and events which describe the people’s response to the fresh news of resurrection. Interestingly, the form and content of these texts seem to follow the order of worship for the latter half of the

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    Service of the Lord’s Day. In response to the resurrection Word of God proclaimed, these passages of scripture invite us to explore, as if in liturgical order, the wonderful, liberating oddity of being Christian in our time.

    Second Sunday of Easter: Acts 2:14a, 22-32 as Affirmation of Faith For three Sundays following Easter, Acts 2 gives the preacher opportunity to consider how we respond to this good news in word and deed. On Easter we receive the resurrection news with joy, and on the 2nd Sunday of Easter we are invited to affirm our faith as witnesses to God’s awesome power. This second part of Peter’ s Pentecost sermon in Acts 2:22-32 presents one of the earliest Christian confessions of faith. These verses attest to Jesus the person, Jesus the Messiah, and Jesus as Lord.6 Peter’s proclamation of the resurrection claims continuity with the Old Testament saying King David died and was buried and his tomb can be visited. While David may have foretold resurrection, as Peter recalls paraphrasing Psalm 16:8-11, it wasn’t David whom God raised, but Jesus. Jesus fulfills the Messianic promises made through David and sung through the Psalms, that God is ever about the business of restoring us from death to life. Jesus performed “deeds of power, wonders and signs” which recall God’s mighty acts in the history of salvation, including the exodus. This oft repeated phrase describes Luke’s church in which the powers, wonders, and signs of the disciples become proof that the living God was at work among them. What Jesus began did not end with the crucifixion. Rather our discipleship begins in confession of who Jesus is because we are witnesses to the awesome power of God who raised Jesus from the dead.

    Third Sunday of Easter: Acts 2:14a, 36-41 as Celebration of Baptism After we confess Jesus Christ is Lord and Messiah, what next? Our grateful response is a call to repentance, the cleansing waters of baptism, and openness to the gift of the Spirit. The good news of resurrection summons public worship and changed lives. In her book, Celebrating Resistance: The Way of the Cross in Latin America, German Theologian Dorothée Soelle tells a story from Brazil where some twenty-five million children live on the streets. Every day homeless boys got together in one particular spot to chat, to discuss their problems and to share their fears and anger with one another. Church mission workers including a Catholic priest, a Methodist, a priest of the Umbanda cult, a Presbyterian, and a young Lutheran pastor established a ministry among them. One day, one of the boys said he would like to be baptized. “In which church, then?” asked the Catholic. “Which church? In ours here on the street, of course, I want to be baptized here among us.” The Methodist said he couldn’t get a certificate. The Catholic priest thought it wouldn’ t be possible to perform jointly with the Umbanda religion. Among the leaders an interdenominational issue arose about how to baptize this child. The boy, however, stuck by his wish, and finally the young Lutheran pastor followed his lead and organized the necessary things. He filled an old boot with water which the children provided and put it on a board over two crates. The Catholic brought along a candle, and the baptism took place on the street, in the name of Jesus Christ.7 In these verses from Acts we see how the good news of resurrection took to the streets, drawing all kinds of new people into the household of God, in ways that might enliven the work of the church in our post-Christendom, post-denominational time.

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    Fourth Sunday of Easter: Acts 2:42-47 as Eucharistie Community As Peter’s preaching washes over the congregation, we catch a glimpse of the essence of Eucharistie community in teaching and fellowship, breaking bread and praying together, and responding to God in worship with glad and generous hearts. Following Peter’s Pentecost sermon and the welcome of the first 3000 converts, we see in these verses the intentional formation of the church’s life together. The Christian community is defined not just by belief or doctrine, but by engaging in shared practices of faith formation. In their commentary on Acts, Anthony Robinson and Robert Wall write, “God is in the business of creating a people, building a community, and calling each of us into a new community that is defined by new loyalties and a new story. In Acts we see God at work to create a new people who are not to be defined by the old categories of race, language, gender or social class, but a people united in witness to the resurrection in a way of life that embodies what we call ‘resurrection practices.’”8 In these weeks after Easter our congregation will ordain and install elders, welcome the Confirmation Class, begin a season of commissioning various mission groups going into the world in service, as well as continue the regular rhythms of baptism and celebration of the Lord’s Supper. This snapshot of the early church, albeit sweetly nostalgic of a time before theological debate began creating division, gives us opportunity to interpret our life together as a community which practices resurrection. The healing, teaching, preaching, miracle performing ministry of Jesus continues among his followers who are nurtured by the shared meal of communion and empowered by the Spirit to do what Jesus did.

    Fifth Sunday of Easter: Acts 7:55-60 as Offering and Dedication After assimilating the good news of resurrection into the life of Christian community by confession of faith, baptism, and communion, now we have opportunity to consider how risky a business this faith can be. The stoning of Stephen is the preeminent offering of life and labor to the Lord. I find it fascinating that December 26 is Saint Stephen’s Day, as if an earlier church era must have meant to conjoin forever the birth of Jesus with the death of the first Christian martyr. In an artful little book, Saints: Who They Are and How They Help You, I discovered that Stephen is the patron saint of deacons and is to be invoked by headache sufferers.9 Well, headache is what the people must have suffered listening to Stephen, whose preaching was prophetic, but not very pastoral, calling them stiff necked people and Jesus’ betrayers and murderers. His faithful proclamation engendered rage among the crowds who did him in. Ironically, however, Stephen’s death by stoning did not scatter the church in fear, but emboldened the church with courage. Perhaps they had seen the most horrendous thing that could happen to a witness for Christ and decided the only thing worse than death was to withhold the proclamation of the life Christ brings. The presence of the then persecutor Saul, standing there, his head nodding in assent and approval as every stone is hurled, further underlines the amazing drama that God has in store for the Christian community in and for the world. As with Stephen, persecutions will come, but so will conversions like Paul’s. At the moment of his death, Stephen’s prayer for those who stone him bears witness to that resurrection power.

    Sixth Sunday of Easter: Acts 17:22-31 as Sending into the World Following lections from sermons of Peter and Stephen, here we have the

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    dramatically converted Paul preaching against a backdrop of the erudite philosophers in Athens and a religious shrine to an unknown god. Borrowing from their own style of philosophical debate and quoting Greek poetry, Paul makes his case on behalf of the God of all creation who alone has the power to raise the living from the dead. Although the name of Jesus is never mentioned, it is quite obvious that his resurrection is the central message of the text. The gospel of Christ is expanding into a world every bit as pluralistic as ours today, with many converging cultures, faiths and gods. Perhaps the main difference between then and now is that we don’t have to go as far as Athens to find Paul’s audience before the Aereopagus. That crowd is in our pews and within us, having read the recent New York Times bestsellers by renowned atheists, finding ourselves curious about the connections between universal myths and scripture, searching for truth in a country where the Wiccan and Islamic religions are growing faster than Christianity. Preachers can take a cue from Paul’s reasoned appeal to his audience, beginning where they are and trying to move them toward understanding the power of God to raise the dead. But when you get right down to it, we are left as Paul with no control over the response to revelation. Some scoffed, some believed, some wanted to hear more (Acts 17:32-34). To be sent to spread the gospel these days may mean to go far away in mission or simply to the places of our daily rounds where this kind of inquisitiveness meets us everywhere we go. Paul shows us how to be pastoral to seekers as we meet them where they are, how to proclaim the resurrection boldly nevertheless, and then how to leave the rest up to God.

    Seventh Sunday of Easter: Acts 1:6-14 as Benediction Reading from the Acts of the Apostles through these weeks of Easter, we have seen how the Spirit of the living Christ inspired faith and faithfulness among the earliest believers as they gave rise to the church. This early Christian community has been identified in Acts by resurrection practices as together they affirmed their faith, baptized newcomers, shared their goods in common, worshipped, ate together, and went forth into the world as bold witnesses to proclaim their resurrection faith in word and deed. At the end of Easter season this Ascension text takes us back to the beginning with a snapshot of the final resurrection appearance of the risen Christ. How had these early believers been empowered for founding the church and risking their lives for the sake of the gospel? They had heard the blessing and benediction of the risen Lord himself who said, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 8:1). Then between Jesus’ leave taking and the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost, they had been left alone for a while to figure it out on their own. They were left as we are left, with their doubts and their questions. When they had implored Jesus to tell them when the coming kingdom would come, he refused to answer, but he blessed them and took off! With the Ascension of Jesus, suddenly all the disciples had was each other and the testimony of what they had seen and heard. That, however, was all they needed to begin doing the work of Christ themselves as they spread out into the world obeying his charge. Benediction means simply “good word.” As he ascends into heaven, the good word of Jesus is that the Holy Spirit will come, and of that life giving, earthshaking resurrection power there will be no end.

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    Notes

    1 Romans 8:38-39. 2 Thomas G. Long, Matthew, Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 322. 3 Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006), 247. 4 Noah Adams, “All Things Considered,” National Public Radio, February 12, 2002, with details researched at monarchwatch.org. 5 Anthony B. Robinson, “Changing the Conversation: Nurturing a Third Way for Congregations,” Congregations, The Alban Institute (Summer 2007): 25. 6 Paul W. Walaskay, Acts, Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 41. 7 Hannah Ward and Jennifer Wild, editors, The Westminster Collection of Christian Meditations, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 203. 8 Anthony B. Robinson and Robert W. Wall, Called To Be Church: The Book of Acts for a New Day (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2006), 79. 9 Elizabeth Hallam, Saints: Who They Are and How They Help You (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1994), 111.

  • Rethinking resurrection: for better or for worse

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    Rethinking Resurrection: For Better or for Worse

    Samuel Wells

    Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

    Heaven When I was on my ordination retreat as a deacon, the four of us talked nervously about wearing clerical collars and moving into new houses, meeting new colleagues and leaving behind old jobs or colleges. A year later on my ordination retreat as a priest, there was only one subject of conversation: funerals. We all had stories of tragedy and farce, of the man so big they couldn’t close the coffin, of the incumbent who got too close to the grave’s edge at a burial, of the suicide where the young widower insisted on playing “I can’t live if living is without you,” of the young widow who sat alone on one side of the crematorium chapel while every other mourner sat on the other side. Given the amount of exposure newly ordained clergy get to death and bereavement, it’s in some ways surprising they so seldom preach about heaven and hell. It’s quite possible to go through a lifetime of participation in regular mainline worship service as a lay person and never hear a sermon on heaven or hell. Whether Jesus rose from the dead, yes, what resurrection means in this life, definitely, and where God is in the agony of loss, many times: but heaven or hell – quite possibly not. Freed as I currently am from the weekly or twice weekly funeral burden, I feel a sense of responsibility to redress the balance a little. Two obsessions have, I suggest, prevented preachers talking much about heaven over the years. The first obsession, which you’ll recognize, is what revivalist preaching is largely about. It’s the harrowing anxiety about who gets into heaven and who gets sent to hell and the determination to do whatever it takes to make sure one’s in the group going upstairs rather than downstairs. The more significant question of what heaven is like for those who get there never seems to come up in these discussions. I vividly recall my high school English teacher saying she lost her faith at the moment when a preacher started his sermon “It’s hot in here: but it’s even hotter in hell !” Most preachers seem so keen to distance themselves from that kind of turn-or-burn style that they end up saying nothing at all about the hereafter and thus ceding the ground to their overexcited colleagues. The second obsession is a much more contemporary one. It’s about offering words of comfort to the bereaved. Setting aside the conventional language of heaven and hell leaves us as a culture with a desperate search for platitudes in the face of the agony of losing a friend or relative. Pastors avoid facing hard theological and philosophical questions in the mistaken notion that their principal role is to offer comfort, however superficial and clichéd that comfort may be. Many clergy spend the majority of their pastoral time with people in the early days and weeks after a death. That isn’t usually the best time to explore the deepest questions about everlasting life. But one can’t ignore such questions indefinitely. The truth is you can’t enjoy the glory of heaven without first facing the reality of death. What I’d like to do is to describe three things heaven is not before going on to describe three things heaven is. In between I’d like to suggest a way we might distinguish between the truth of heaven and what we might regard as second-rate

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    imitations. I understand that sometimes grief is so profound that we can cast off from our theological moorings in search of comfort. But my aim is to show that what the Bible promises us about heaven is so much greater than what’s on offer from Hallmark greetings cards. So, here goes with three things heaven is not. Heaven is not the continuation of a person’s eternal soul. Countless people over the centuries have taken comfort in the belief that, while their loved one’s body lies a- mouldering in the grave, his or her soul goes marching on. This isn’t a belief rooted in Christian theology. The dualist idea that we are essentially physical bodies and spiritual souls which become detached at death whereupon we continue simply as spiritual souls – this idea is one that arises among the Greek philosophers centuries before Christ. It’s not something the Old Testament comprehends. For the Bible, humans are one in life, body and soul, and one in death, body and soul. Death is real. Many people have found reassurance in the words uttered by Canon Henry Scott Holland in St Paul’s Cathedral on Whitsunday 1910, reflecting on the passing of King Edward VII. “Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room…. Life… is the same as it ever was. There is absolutely unbroken continuity.” These were certainly words of comfort; but they can hardly be described as orthodox Christian theology. Can anyone look at Jesus on the cross and say “death is nothing at all”? Can anyone look at the aftermath of a suicide bombing in a market square and imagine the words “I have only slipped away into the next room”? Can anyone have experienced the scene of a terrible car accident and say “there is absolutely unbroken continuity”? Our death is the end of us. Our hope lies not in pretending otherwise , but in knowing that our death is not the end of God. Here’s the second thing heaven is not. Heaven is not our reabsorption into the infinite. This idea that when we die we blend back into the ground of being is a mixture of the simply biological assumption that we dissolve into the soil and the quaintly spiritual notion that we become part of the ether. Just as the champion of the eternal soul argument is Henry Scott Holland, so the great exemplar of the reabsorption argument is Mary Frye. These are her most famous lines: “I am a thousand winds that blow, I am the diamond glints on snow, I am the sun on ripened grain, I am the gentle autumn rain.” Again, these are comforting words, but they seem to have come out of a world view that has stopped caring whether a belief is true so long as it’s reassuring. Note that, like the Scott Holland piece, God is wholly absent from this understanding of heaven. Jesus seems to have achieved nothing of any significance in his cross and resurrection, at least as far as our death and life thereafter is concerned. Perhaps the reason that the verses usually entitled “Death is nothing at all” and “Do not stand by my grave and weep” have become so enormously popular in our contemporary culture is that they offer pictures of continuity beyond death that require no belief in God or reference to Jesus whatsoever. The trouble is, they do so by denying the reality of death, and the pictures they offer, of heaven as a waiting room or as a disembodied wind, are so bleak as to offer little or no real hope at all. The third thing heaven is not is simply the reconstitution of our fleshly bodies. This is less of a mistake than the first two, and it may sound obvious in an age where cremation of dead bodies is relatively commonplace, but it’s still worth stating. The funeral sermon that says, “I’m sure Peggy’s up there now watering and pruning her roses just as she did down here,” seems to be assuming that heaven is basically a continuation of our present physical life in all its prosaic mundanity. To be sure, heav-

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    en is a physical existence, but the bodies of the saints are not simply embalmed versions of the ones we have here. To be sure, our experiences of joy in this life are foretastes of the joy to come, but heaven is not simply earth in a loud voice. The idea of the Rapture is one that likewise overstresses the physical continuity of heaven. It’s said in some circles that the Rapture is a good thing because it would whisk away all the fundamentalists and leave everyone else to get on with things, but that still distracts from the fact that the Rapture offers an impoverished picture of heaven. So these are three things heaven is not. It’s not unbroken continuity, it’s not reabsorption into the infinite, and it’s not the simple recomposition of our earthly bodies. What’s wrong with them is that they make no reference to the scriptural notion of heaven, have no place for God, and specifically have no relationship to anything brought about by Jesus. I wish I could say they were harmless, but I can’t, because in fact they distract attention away from the Bible, away from God, and specifically away from the God we meet in Jesus. The Bible doesn’t speak much about heaven as the eternal dwelling place of Christians. Instead it speaks of heaven as the place where God dwells. And this points to the crucial difference between a Christian notion of life after death and the ones I’ve been describing. For Christians, there is only one thing greater than the overwhelming horror of death, and that’s the overwhelming glory of God. The popular verses I’ve quoted lose their credibility when they deny the overwhelming horror of death, and they lose any sense of wonder when they ignore the overwhelming glory of God. The Christian hope is that after death we come face to face with the wondrous power and love and passion of God, an experience we could liken to a tidal wave or a raging fire or a dazzling light; and yet, because of Jesus, that overwhelming glory doesn’t destroy us, sinners that we are, but transforms us into the creatures God always destined us to be. After death we face neither the oblivion of physical disintegration nor the obliteration of spiritual destruction, but the transformation of glorious resurrection. As we turn now to the three things heaven is, we realize that we find those things not by massaging our own bodies or souls for continuity, but by looking to what we are shown of the character of God and discovering that God’s purpose is to model our transformed character on his. So the first thing heaven is about is worship. It’s no coincidence that one scriptural picture of heaven is of a choir, because a choir is a wonderful picture of what it means to have a body of your own, but to find your true voice in a much greater body, a body where your voice sings most truly in harmony with the voices of others, where you find your voice most fully in words of praise and thanksgiving, where you are lost in concentration and where every detail matters, where you rejoice at the gifts of others which only enhance the gifts that are your own, where fundamentally you are all turned to face the source of your gifts and the focus of your praise. I currently serve in a church where we put enormous care and attention into the way we worship. And that’s because we believe the way we worship is the most significant way we depict and anticipate the life of heaven. Every Sunday Christians gather together and depict and anticipate the life to come. That’s why worship matters so much – because in eternity, that’s all there’ll be. And worship isn’t just some abstract ideal. Everything depends on who we worship. And the book of Revelation makes it absolutely clear who we worship – we worship the Lamb who was slain, the Lamb on the throne, Jesus, the one who gave his life because God loved us too much

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    to leave us to oblivion and obliteration, the one whose resurrection gave us the life of heaven for which we long and on which our hope depends. What we strive for in worship is that every ounce of our energy and concentration is focused on the God we find in Jesus Christ, so that we are truly lost in wonder, love and praise – because that’s what heaven is like. And here’s the second thing heaven is about. Heaven is about friendship. Jesus said at the Last Supper, “no longer do I call you servants -1 call you friends.” The heart of God is three persons in perfect communion. And yet at the table there is a fourth place – a place left for us to join the communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is heaven – the experience of being invited to the table of friendship to join the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. At last we discover, not just what God can do when left to do it on his own, but what is possible when in perfect communion, humanity and all creation join the everlasting dance of the Trinity. If friendship is what heaven is about, that means not just friendship between God and us, but friendship between us and one another. And this is what the book of Revelation points us to when it talks at the very end of the coming of a new heaven and a new earth. At the very end of the Bible, we have a picture of Jerusalem the new city, coming down from heaven. In other words cities are not essentially transitory, dirty, soiled things that are transcended by the coming of heaven. There will always be a city. Learning to live together as friends is at the heart of preparing for heaven, just as worship is. The reason why Christian communities work as hard at their relationships with their neighborhoods and cities as they do at their worship is because they believe making friendships across social barriers is what they shall spend eternity doing, and what they are called to do now is to anticipate heaven. And the third and final thing heaven is about is eating together. This is maybe the most common picture of all in the New Testament – heaven as a great feast, a banquet celebrating the marriage of heaven and earth, the perfect union or communion of God and all God’s children. Just imagine a fabulous meal where there were no allergies, no eating disorders, no inequalities in world trade, no fatty foods, no gluttony, and no price tag. The reason why the Eucharist is at the center of the life of the Church is because the Eucharist is where food, friendship and worship all come together. We are made friends with God and one another when we eat together in worship. In eating together we recall the transforming meals Christ shared before, during, and after his passion, and we anticipate the great banquet we shall share with him. The Eucharist depicts what creation was for and what it cost. And when we gather together as two or three or twenty or two thousand and make new friends by eating together, we are celebrating a little Eucharist, a little icon of the Trinity at table together, a little glimpse of heaven. This is what heaven is. Worship, friendship, and eating together. Don’t settle for anything less. Don’t pass into the next room or become a thousand winds that blow. Don’t leave the central claims and shape of the Christian hope behind you in the face of death, just when it really matters. Enter the life that God has prepared for you, the life that Jesus laid down his own life to open up for you. There are things I haven’t talked about. I haven’t talked about whether heaven comes to us on the day we die or whether we await our resurrection on the last day. I haven’t talked about near death experiences and whether they tell us anything about life after death. I haven’t talked about how we preserve our individual identity and

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    personality when we’ve been so thoroughly transformed. I haven’t talked about whether the end of the world is coming soon or is millions of years away. I haven’t talked about them because I don’t think, finally, they matter all that much. Like the popular verses, they ‘ re all about us, whereas what we’ 11 discover is that heaven is all about God. There’s a great sense of mystery about heaven, but I think the scriptures tell us all we really need to know. They tell us what matters. What matters is being overwhelmed by the power and love and glory of God, now and forever. Heaven isn’t a half-hearted reward for those who have lived a life of grudging misery, and it isn’t an automatic entry into a revolving door of thudding dullness. Heaven is being overwhelmed by the horror of death and then finding not oblivion or obliteration, but a further overwhelming . This second overwhelming is an overwhelming by the glory of God. It’s a transformation into the life that the Father gave us, Jesus lived, and the Spirit infuses in wondrous worship, loving friendship, and a feast of praise. That’s what matters. In the end, that’s all that matters.

    Hell There are good reasons for believing there’s such a place or experience as hell. Most obviously, Jesus seems to refer to it a number of times in the language of gnashing teeth, weeping, and the fiery furnace. And of course the book of Revelation is particularly vivid in its portrayal of the lake of fire and its contents of burning sulphur. The existence of hell underwrites a whole moral universe in which those who have shunned the light and truth of Christ and the gospel and particularly those who have made life a living hell for others on earth reap the rewards of their evil deeds. Those who turn to God in anger and dismay when cruelty and malice seem to prevail can find a certain comfort that not only are the good vindicated on the last day, but that the evil are roundly punished. There are broadly three ways of conceiving of hell. The first is the endless, bloodthirsty torment of body, mind, and spirit that has captured the religious imagination over so many centuries and is the stuff of nightmares, graveyard humor and revivalist preaching. This version sometimes appears with significant exceptions – for example it’s relatively common among advocates of eternal damnation to have get-out clauses for infants, for those who have never had a chance to hear the gospel, or even for those who have been faithful adherents of other faiths. Rather as we noticed with heaven earlier on, the question of who goes upstairs and who goes downstairs generally proves more fascinating than anything else about eternal life. One curious aspect of this is that it reveals the curious spectacle of theologians and preachers in some cases strongly appealing for the admission to heaven of people who have made it clear they have no aspiration or desire to go there. The second kind of hell is a modified version of the first. It makes a distinction between the references the New Testament makes to hell as a time or place of agony and remorse and the somewhat fewer references in which that time or place of agony and remorse is described as permanent. The modified notion of hell sees it as a finite time of punishment or preparation, sometimes known as purgatory. The third kind of hell recoils from the traditional emphasis on physical torment and sees punishment as simply annihilation. After death, those who are written in the book of life go to eternal blessedness, while those whose names are not to be found in glory simply drop out of existence. They don’t rot or scream or curse – they just cease to be.

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    A modified form of this annihilation proposal is that hell is the experience of the absence of God. This is a mixture of the first kind, the agony and remorse, with the third kind, the oblivion and obliteration. The absence of God is truly eternal hell, but it seems to spare those with refined tastes of the grisliness of howling screams and boiling oil. There are two main reasons why hell is a theological and philosophical problem. The first we could call the moral objection. What kind of a god takes delight in consigning people to eternal damnation? Is it possible to imagine the God who formed us and called us and came among us and transformed us turning round and consigning us to perpetual horror? At the very least there seems to be a problem of proportionate response here. However ghastly the crime (and the twentieth century saw a good number of unspeakable atrocities), surely it could be paid off after the first 50 million years in hell? Isn’t eternal punishment a little, well, excessive? It’s hard to see how anyone could be happy in heaven forever knowing that eternal damnation was still going on downstairs. The second objection to hell we could call the sovereignty problem. If God is allpowerful , how is it possible that things ultimately turn out differently from the way he wants them to go? Once we have ruled out the vindictive, merciless picture of God and thus assumed God wants all people to go to heaven, the suggestion that some never make it presents a major theological problem. How could God allow any aspect of his creation somehow to be lost forever? It’s no use saying this is about free will, because it’s simply not possible to imagine anyone choosing eternal damnation, however limited the rest of the menu and however unstable or antagonized they were at the point of choosing. These two philosophical objections to hell are pretty overwhelming because they strike at the two most fondamental Christian assumptions about God – that God is all loving and all powerful. The existence of hell implies that God isn’t all loving, otherwise he couldn’t consign parts of his creation to eternal damnation, and that God isn’t all powerful, otherwise he’d be able to bring their torment to an end whenever he saw fit. The notion of eternal hell implies not just that there comes a point where we can’t change our minds, but that God is as constrained as we are. Thinking theologically about hell means doing justice to the scriptural imagery, to the full dimensions of eternity, to the centrality of Jesus and God’s achievement in Jesus, and to the character of God as power and love. In that light I think we should be wary of the first objection. There’s always a danger of reducing God to our own size. It’s obviously a mistake to project onto God all our anger and frustration and assume God gives the people we don’t like a really hard time forever. But it’s also dangerous to concoct a list of polite and genteel and fashionable virtues and say God is just a big version of that. God is our definition of good. If there is a hell, we have to believe that’s all part of God’s loving economy, whether we understand it or not. But the logic of the second objection is a whole lot more convincing. The major flaw in arguments for hell is that they take evil so seriously that they make it more significant than good. The reason I don’t talk more about the Devil is because the Devil always ends up sounding more interesting than God. And I want to talk about God. At the heart of God is Jesus. And Christians believe that in Jesus, particularly in his death and resurrection, God defeated sin, death and the devil. But the existence of an everlasting hell suggests that there is something God didn’ t defeat in Jesus – some part

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    of eternal existence that continues to hold out against God, a part of God’s economy that refuses to abide by his grace. Again, it’s no use saying this is a matter of free will, that if people weigh up the pros and cons and plump for eternal damnation, God loves them enough to let them go. That would be putting human choice at the center of the universe instead of God’s grace. Surely the character of God’s grace, the wonder of God’s grace, is that God finds a way to draw back into his glory even those who are dead set against his kingdom and his love. The heart of the problem of hell is that it suggests God didn’t achieve everything in Jesus, that the gift of Jesus didn’t somehow give us everything we need, that there’s still somewhere a fundamental, eternal estrangement from God. So how do we listen obediently to the words of Scripture that speak of fire and torment and gnashing of teeth, and on the other hand, believe not just that Jesus shows us the character of God, but that God achieved everything in Jesus? I suggest the key lies in some words from the prophet Malachi. “Who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.” Think about this picture of a refiner’s fire. Consider that the line between good and evil lies not like a thread through society between good and evil persons, those destined for heaven and those destined for hell. Suppose instead that it goes through every single human being. And imagine that there is indeed a fire which burns, not eternally, but until the last day. And that after we die, every little piece of us that has not turned to the glory of God, every tiny part of our history or character, every word or thought or deed that shrinks from God’s grace is burned off by the refiner’s fire. And that means that when that process is finished, not all of our earthly self gets to heaven. But not none of it, either, even among the worst that humanity has produced. Out of such as remains from the refiner’s fire, God remakes a heavenly body fit for worship, friendship and eating with him forever. For the Mother Teresa and the Francis of Assisi, we can imagine there’s very little burnt off, and the refiner’s fire is pretty much a painless process. They have accepted the forgiveness of God and been transformed by the sanctification of the Holy Spirit. They’re pretty much in the clear and in heaven, they’ll be instantly recognizable. But the Adolf Hitler and the Joseph Stalin are another matter. Almost everything in them, so we imagine, turned away from the grace and transforming love of God in Christ, and forgiveness was something they never sought. But here’s the twist. Because God created them, because they emerged from God’s creative purpose, we cannot simply say they are evil without giving up on the all-pervasive grace of God. So what we say is that for people like them, the refiner’s fire is an agonizing and almost total experience, and that what’s left is pretty much unrecognizable. It takes God to the very limits of his grace to make something beautiful and heavenly out of the scant and desolate remains that emerge from the refiner’s fire. And what does appear in heaven after God’s astonishing work is almost unrecognizable from the earthly person that perpetrated so much that desecrated the name of God. So that’s what hell is. Hell is not an eternal horror that abides forever as a scar on the face of God’s glory. Hell is a refiner’s fire, from which that in us that has been soaked in God’s forgiveness and transforming sanctification moves on quite rapidly, but in which that in us that has turned away from the glory of God remains being

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    prepared to meet God for as long as it takes until the job is done. The punishment, if that’s the right word, for the Hitlers and the Stalins and indeed for everything in each of us that we call sin, the punishment, is that by the time it gets to heaven, it’s unrecognizable from its earthly self. And the less you allow yourself to be changed by the grace and transforming love of God in this life, the more agonizing and more radical the change will be when you leave this life. Where is Jesus in this refining fire? The answer is that Jesus is at the heart of the refining fire. Can you imagine that the work of the refining fire is easy? Can you imagine what it costs God painstakingly to eradicate everything in us that turns from him and even more painstakingly to reconfigure a new person based on however little is left after the fire? This is to take on total alienation from God and try to transform even that alienation into something beautiful and glorious and truly heavenly. This is exactly what Jesus wanted to say no to as he knelt in Gethsemane. This is exactly what took Jesus to Calvary. This is exactly what was taking place on the cross. Jesus literally went through hell for us. Jesus on the cross was taking upon himself all in each one of us that turns away from the glory of God – all the sin of the world. On the cross Jesus was in the refiner’s fire, burning with agony so that he could refashion each one of us for heaven. The astonishing thing is that Jesus doesn’t just enter the fire and make something wonderful from our ordinary and limited humanity. He even makes something out of the ashes. Somehow, once the fire has done its work, God in Christ transforms even the lost. And in the resurrection we see in Jesus God’s grace and commitment to give each one of us a restored and transformed identity once the refiner’s fire has done its work. Even the risen Jesus wasn’t identical to his precrucifixion self. How much different many of us may be. But because of Jesus, hell is not God’s last word on sin. So the more we focus on the cross, the less we think about hell. Jesus really did change everything. This is a picture of hell that stays true to the scriptural imagery, stays true to our faith in the self-giving and loving character of God, and stays true to our belief in the almightiness of God. Most importantly, it brings us closer to the wonder of what God gives us in Jesus Christ. This is a faith that leaves us not trembling in agonized fear or cozy in judgmental complacency, but lost in wonder, love and praise. And that’s a big part of how we know it’s true. I want to finish with a prayer. It ‘ s a prayer that unites the themes of heaven and hell. It’s a prayer that sums up this lecture, which is to say that the way to think about heaven and hell is to focus on the God of Jesus Christ and not to settle for anything less. It’s a prayer that I hope may become as precious to you as it is to me: “Loving God, if I love thee for hope of heaven, then deny me heaven; if I love thee for fear of hell, then give me hell; but if I love thee for thyself alone, then give me thyself alone. Amen.”

  • Preaching the Psalms: Psalm 23, fourth Sunday in Lent

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    Preaching the Psalms: Psalm 23

    Fourth Sunday in Lent

    J. Clinton McCann, Jr.

    Eden Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri

    Everyone knows Psalm 23. It is so familiar that William Holladay calls Psalm 23 “an American secular icon.”1 The adjective “secular” may be surprising, but it seems accurate. After all, even people who do not attend church generally do attend funerals, and Psalm 23 is an almost universal presence at funeral services in the United States. In fact, I have never attended or conducted a funeral which did not include Psalm 23, thus the psalm’s pervasive presence in our culture, even to the point of being “an American secular icon.” The familiarity of Psalm 23 is one reason that Walter Brueggemann begins his comment on Psalm 23 with this observation: “It is almost pretentious to comment on this psalm.”2 But beyond the familiarity of Psalm 23, what Brueggemann also seems to have in mind is the obvious power of Psalm 23 to speak to us in times of extremity and loss. At a field education seminary several years ago at Eden Seminary, UCC pastor David Spooner, drawing upon his many years of experience as a chaplain at a local medical center, observed simply: “There is power in the Twenty-third Psalm.” Indeed! And Gary Charles’s sermon, “Songcatchers,” which appears in this issue, captures faithfully and eloquently the power of Psalm 23 to proclaim “God’s loving presence” in such a way as to “make even the darkest Friday good.” Because Gary has focused effectively on the ability of Psalm 23 to speak “in times of great love and loss” and “in the face of death and tragedy,” something that makes it appropriate for the season of Lent, I am going to develop in this essay another dimension of Psalm 23 – namely, its potential ability to speak to us also in more ordinary times and to shape our daily living. This dimension of Psalm 23 is, I shall suggest, also appropriate for the season of Lent. To begin to get at this dimension of Psalm 23, it is helpful to realize that Psalm 23 does not possess in other contexts the secular-icon-status that it has is the United States. Jeff Moore, a UCC pastor who has just returned from four years of ministry in Lesotho, recently put it like this: “Psalm 23 does not mean the same thing in Lesotho as it does in the United States.”3 The difference, he explained, has to do in part with the fact that Lesotho is a primarily rural, agrarian nation; and thus people in Lesotho see shepherds at work every day. Consequently, they are far more inclined to appropriate Psalm 23 for daily living as well as for times of extremity ; and this is a step in the direction which I want to take in this essay. Another indication of how Psalm 23 may speak differently in other contexts, including Africa again, is offered by Philip Jenkins, as follows:

    Or read Psalm 23 as a political tract, a rejection of unjust secular authority. For Africans and Asians, the psalm offers a stark rebuttal to claims by unjust states that they care lovingly for their subjects – while they exalt themselves to the heavens. Christians reply simply, “The Lord is my shepherd – you aren’t!” Adding to the power of the psalm, the evils that it condemns are at once political and spiritual, forces of tyranny and of the devil. Besides its

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    political role, Psalm 23 is much used in services of healing, exorcism and deliverance.4

    It simply would not occur to most North Americans to read Psalm 23 as a “political tract” or a condemnation of evil forces in the world. But again, this is a direction which I shall pursue in this essay. I shall suggest that Psalm 23 is “political,” at least in the fundamental sense of the word – that is, Psalm 23 has implications for how we should organize our lives together. Furthermore, Psalm 23 makes its “political” points by condemning forces that, it seems to me, are tyrannical and demonic. By inviting us readers to resist such forces in our lives and in our world, Psalm 23 demonstrates its appropriateness for the penitential season of Lent.

    Verses 1-3 The Asian and African appropriation of Psalm 23 as a “political tract” is quite compelling in view of the fact that “shepherd” in the ancient Near East was, in essence, a political title. Kings were known as the shepherds of their people, and it was their responsibility to provide for their people in the way that the Lord as shepherd provides for the sheep in Psalm 23. When the kings of Judah failed to fulfill their responsibility, the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel spoke out “against the shepherds” (Ezek 34:10; Jer 23:1-2), proclaiming that God would take over and actually do what the kings had failed to do – rescue, protect, and feed the sheep/people (see Jer 23:3-6, and especially Ezek 34:11-16). A citizen of Judah hearing these words in the early sixth century B. C. E. might well have been led to say to the Judean king, “The Lord is my shepherd – you aren’t!” Psalm 23 remains, at least in some contemporary contexts, a criticism of governments which fail, for whatever reason, to provide for the lives of all their citizens. Upon hearing this Asian and African appropriation of Psalm 23, we in the United States may be inclined to think that this dimension of meaning – “a stark rebuttal to claims by unjust states that they care lovingly for their subjects,” in Jenkins’s words – does not apply in our democratic republic. Perhaps this conclusion is correct, although given the growing extremes of wealth and poverty in the United States, it is probably more debatable than we would like to think. In any case, we in the United States are not off the hook so easily, because Psalm 23 is at least an implicit criticism of our tyrannical (and some would say demonic) merit-oriented, consumer-driven, socio-political order. What God as shepherd does is to create conditions in which the sheep can say, “I shall not want.” The NRSV preserves the RSV and KJV translation at this point, and “want” can mean “lack,” although this is a rather archaic sense of the word. A better translation is “I shall lack nothing.” This condition of lacking nothing should not be understood as luxuriance or excess; rather, the shepherd provides the basic necessities which make life possible for a sheep – food (“green pastures”), water (“still waters,” which sheep need in order to feel comfortable enough to drink), and protection (“right paths,” the difference between remaining safely with the shepherd and flock as opposed to getting dangerously lost). The phrase, “restores my soul” (Hebrew nephesh, which means fundamentally “vitality, life”) is probably best translated as “keeps me alive.” In short, God the shepherd provides what all the sheep together need to live, and

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    such provision is a gift. At this point Psalm 23 becomes a criticism of our sociopolitical order in the United States; or in Jenkins’s words again, at this point we begin to see “the evils that it condemns.” In our North American society, life (or the “good life,” as we sometimes call it) does not generally involve having simply what we need’, rather it involves accumulating more and more. And in our society, life and the resources which sustain it are almost never viewed as something we have received, but rather as something we have achieved. The system amounts to a form of tyranny, all the more effective because it is so subtle. Thomas Merton characterizes it well: “Even though there’s a certain freedom in our society, it’s largely illusory. Again it’s the freedom to choose your product, but not the freedom to do without it. You have to be a consumer and your identity is to a large extent determined by your choices, which are very much determined by advertising. Identity is created by ads.”5 When identity is created by advertising, the result is a socio-political system which fosters greed. Nearly seventy years ago, Reinhold identified greed as “the besetting sin of a bourgeois culture.”6 More recently, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan suggested that “our national illness is … ‘infectious greed.’”7 If this is the case, then the cure needs to be something like the perspective offered by Psalm 23-that is, an identity formed not by advertising, but rather by the knowledge that life and its resources are the gift of a gracious God. The result would be a sociopolitical system which fosters not greed, but gratitude. Jesus, using political language, called this system the “kingdom” or realm of God. Living in such a realm, we might even be led to say, “I shall not want,” in the contemporary sense of the word “want.” In other words, “Because I have everything I need, I don’t want anything else!” One of the symptoms of our “infectious greed” is the general inability to distinguish between wants and needs, a situation to which advertisers happily continue to contribute. In this context, how radically faithful it might be to say, in the contemporary sense of the word, “I shall not want.” To be sure, such a declaration is almost unimaginable in our cultural context, but it is entirely in keeping with the season of Lent. I used to think that giving up something for Lent was trivial, and of course, it can be; but now I look far more favorably upon this traditional observance of the season, because we need all the practice we can get at living with enough and not wanting more stuff as a matter of identity-formation. If it is not reduced to triviality or self-help, then giving up something for Lent might be a healing movement toward wholeness beyond “infectious greed” and a form of penitence by which we confront and combat “the besetting sin” of greed, one of “the evils that… [Psalm 23] condemns.” Following Jenkins’s lead a bit further, perhaps we should even speak of being led by Psalm 23 toward the possibility of being exorcised, or at least being delivered, from our captivity to greed. Notice finally, in terms of vv. 1-3, that God provides the necessities which sustain life “for his name’s sake.” The word “name” can connote “character” – that is, it is God’s essential character to will and work for life. In this regard, it is significant that Douglas John Hall summarizes the content of the Christian mission with the word “life” as follows: “The goal of mission is nothing more or less than this: to participate in our Lord’s mission to help creation discover and realize the LIFE [sic] that is being offered in the midst of all this death.”8 At this point, Psalm 23 not only condemns certain evils, but it also commends certain faithful pursuits. It reminds us that Lenten self-denial is not an end in itself,

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    but is to be in the service of God’s mission in the world (see the missional direction in Eph 5:8-14, the Epistle Lesson for the day). In short, the life we have received is the life that we are called to share with the world. True gratitude always issues in generosity.

    Verse 4 The shepherd metaphor continues in v. 4, but it is appropriate that NRSV sets off v. 4 from vv. 1-3 because of the grammatical shift. Whereas God had been referred to in the third person in vv. 1-3, God is now addressed directly in v. 4b, which also happens to be exactly the central poetic line, according to the layout in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. As is often the case in the Psalms, the central structural line is also central theologically: “You are with me.” This assurance is all the more emphatic since the clause in Hebrew is verbless, necessitating the use of the personal pronoun “You.” Unlike in vv. 1-3, an extreme situation is in view in v. 4, which reinforces Gary Charles’ s point that Psalm 23 “does not promise that Jews and Christians get the good from life while the rest of the world gets the dregs.” As suggested above, Gary’s sermon develops faithfully and helpfully the ability of Psalm 23 to speak to us in times of extremity. As the sermon makes clear, the promise is God’s powerful presence in the midst of pain, suffering, and adversity, not that these things can be avoided. As Gary puts it, how could it be otherwise for those of us “who follow a crucified Lord?” If one is looking for points of contact among the lections for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, NRSV s translation, “darkest valley” (instead of “valley of the shadow of death”), could possibly be put in conversation with the themes of light and darkness in Eph 5:8-14 and John 9:1-41.

    Verses 5-6 Although there is some room for debate, it seems fairly clear that the metaphor shifts in v. 5 from shepherd to gracious host. In any case, the metaphors are parallel; the gracious host provides for the guest as the shepherd provides for the sheep – food (“a table before me”), drink (“my cup overflows”), and hospitality/protection (“you anoint my head with oil”). Just as v. 3 concluded with an allusion to God’s character, so also v. 6 has God’s character in view, especially when it mentions “mercy.” The Hebrew word is hesed, and NRSV usually translates this word as “steadfast love.” In any case, “mercy” or “steadfast love”captures in a word God’s essential character (see especially Exod 34:6-7); and it is not surprising that the word pair, “good’V’goodness” and “steadfast love,” appears frequently in the Psalms as a sort of standard description of who God is and/or what God does (see Pss 100:5; 106:1; 107:1; 118:1; 136:1). NRSV s “shall follow me” is a very weak translation. The Hebrew verb here clearly means “pursue;” and John Goldingay uses the word “chase,”9 which even better captures God’s active, even frantic, attempt to reach us with the gift of life and the resources which sustain life. The verb in question may also shed some light upon, or at least be related to, the mention in v. 5 of “the presence of my enemies.” Ordinarily in the Psalms, it is the enemies who “pursue” or “chase” the psalmists (the NRSV sometimes translates the verb as “persecute”). Here, the enemies are present, but it is

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    God’s goodness and steadfast love which are out to get the psalmist! It is a striking reversal. It is still not entirely clear, however, what the enemies represent or are doing. Do they represent extremity or threat, paralleling “the darkest valley” of v. 4? Are they there for the psalmist to taunt as he or she enjoys the meal which the host has provided? Or perhaps, are the enemies dining at the table with the psalmist? I prefer the latter option, and if the conclusion to Psalm 22 can be taken as a canonical clue, it is at least a possible construal. The conclusion of Psalm 22 imagines a thanksgiving feast (see Ps 22:26), which includes not only the poor, but also finally a world-encompassing list of guests (“all the families of the nations,” v. 27), gathered by the universally sovereign God (v. 28). A table that big is bound to include our enemies! Despite the uncertainty surrounding the interpretation of the enemies, it is clear that the psalmist is safely sheltered “in the house of the Lord” (Ps 23:6), not just temporarily, but for his or her “whole life long.” As in vv. 1-3, God’s gracious provision for life will be received on a daily basis, and it will be received in a communal (that is, “political”) context. As Konrad Schaefer concludes: “The poet voices the community sentiments. The “table for me” is not a meal in solitude, but a convivial banquet, and the “house of the LORD” is a public place where the community enjoys worship and public life.”10 The final verse of Isaac Watts’ s metrical paraphrase of Psalm 23 also captures well the celebration of God’s daily provision for God’s household:

    The sure provisions of my God attend me all my days; O may your House be my abode, and all my work be praise. There would I find a settled rest, while others go and come. No more a stranger, or a guest, but like a child at home.11

    Watts’ s interpretive expansion – “like a child at home” – also eloquently conveys the spirit of humble gratitude and daily reliance upon God which characterizes those who know that life and the resources which sustain life are the gifts of a gracious God. So, in the final analysis, Psalm 23 is a timely “political tract” for Lent, simultaneously condemning the evil tyranny of greed and excessive individualism which characterize our socio-political context and commending a Lenten discipline consisting of humility and gratitude, the foundations of penitence and authentic self-denial, which enables us to discover our true selves in communion with God and with all God’s household.

    Notes

    1. William L. Holladay, The Psalms Through Three Thousand Years: Prayerbookofa Cloud of Witnesses (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 359; see 359-371. 2. Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984), 154. 3. Jeff Moore, Breakfast Forum address on contextual biblical interpretation, Eden Theological Seminary, October 9, 2007. 4. Philip Jenkins, “Liberating Word: The Power of the Bible in the Global South,” Christian Century 123/ 14(Julyll,2006):26. 5. Thomas Merton, The Springs of Contemplation (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press), 110. (My thanks to Veronica Walsh Don, who called this work to my attention.)

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    6. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, Vol 1. Human Nature (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941/1964), 191. 7. Phyllis A. Tickle, Greed: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 18. Tickle (p. 59) cites Greenspan’s “semiannual report to the Senate Banking Committee on 16 July 2002.” 8. Douglas John Hall, Christian Mission: The Stewardship of Life in the Kingdom of Death (New York: Friendship Press, 1985), 98. 9. John Goldingay, Psalms, Volume 1: Psalms 1-41 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 345,352. 10. Konrad Schaefer, Psalms (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2001), 59. 11. Isaac Watts, “My Shepherd Will Supply My Need” in Hymns, Psalms, and Spiritual Songs (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), no. 172.

  • Rider of the clouds: Psalm 68:1-10, 32-35

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    Rider of the Clouds

    Psalm 68:1-10, 32-35

    Gary W. Charles

    Central Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia

    As the church keeps time, this is the last Sunday in the season of Easter. The season started with a bang – literally, to the sounds of timpani and trumpet, but it ends today on a much quieter note. Maybe this strange season of unchecked celebration coupled with uncomfortable silence, a season marked by resurrection appearances and recurring doubt, should end on a quiet note before the Pentecost storm arrives next Sunday. But before we bid the season of Easter a calm adieu, there is a date we have missed on the calendar – Ascension Day. Arriving forty days after Easter Sunday, Ascension Day is the church’s attempt to celebrate “he ascended into heaven” in the Apostles’ Creed, to announce that the work of redemption is complete, that the risen Jesus has joined God in glory. Ascension Day, or as our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers call it, “The Feast of the Ascension,” is tucked far away from most everyone’s sight. It falls on a Thursday, and for most Protestants at least, it is a celebration that we rarely observe, and when it is observed, we rarely attend. For most members of the Christian family, Ascension Day came and left this past Thursday without one exchange of Ascension Day presents, without one Ascension Day meal, and without the singing of one “Happy Ascension Day” song. This holiday is so obscure in the church that you can’t even shop for it on eBay! So, for all of us who missed the missing festivities last Thursday, the worship staff would like to invite you to a grand and glorious celebration of Ascension Sunday. Well, actually, our celebration this morning will not be especially grand – the timpani and trumpet were already booked – and it will not be all that glorious either – we just couldn’t figure out the right palette of flowers to use to surround the sanctuary, so we didn’t use any. To make the celebration potentially even less grand and glorious, the assigned Psalm for today is Psalm 68 and only portions of it, at that. If you poll regular readers of the Psalter, Psalm 68 will not ascend to their “favorites” list, especially when read in full. It is way too raw, too filled with mythical language, too violent, especially for our sedate, rational, and peace-loving ways. Replete with cosmic and bizarre images, it is almost as embarrassing to stand up and read this psalm in worship as it is to sit here and celebrate an up, up, and away church holiday. Maybe, then, today is the day for a really short sermon – call it a “meditation.” We can sing an extra hymn or two, pronounce the benediction early, and call it a day. You should be so lucky ! Settle in, because I happen to love to celebrate Ascension Day and think Psalm 68 – all 35 verses – should be pulled out of the church’s recycling bin. In Psalm 68, God fights against anything and anyone who would destroy God’s good creation. The God we meet on Ascension Day and in Psalm 68 is not a timid, impotent remainder of all our Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment math, who hides in the clouds. Ascension Day is not a timid celebration of the church, even if we are

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    timid about celebrating it, and Psalm 68 is not timid, and because it is not, we have exiled it. Early in Psalm 68, we are asked to: “Sing to God, play music to God’s name, build a road for the Rider of the Clouds, rejoice in Yahweh, dance before God. Father of orphans, defender of widows, such is God in God’s holy dwelling.” Gerald Wilson reminds us that these are fighting words, because in the popular theology of the day – Canaanite theology – Ba’al, not the Lord God of Israel, was the cloud rider. What better Psalm to read at the end of the Easter season, lest anyone doubt that our God is a fighter and expects as much from us. Ascension Sunday features the image of “Rider of the Clouds,” hardly a serene image that we conjure up while gazing skyward. It is a military metaphor for a God who will not be defeated by the most advanced arsenal of evil – be they the gods of the Canaanites or the gods of our own devising. Isn’t the Ascension a metaphor for the same thing? In Psalm 68, we meet the same God who fights non-violently from the cross, reminding us to work against evil and in the face of evil to pray, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” In the view of the world from the cross and from the eyes of the Ascender into the Clouds, we see, as Psalm 68 declares, that our God does not sit passively on high and watch with sympathy or delight the machinations of the human comedy. Maya Angelou closes her powerful poem, “My Guilt,” with this line, “My sin lies in not screaming loud” (The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou, p. 45). The psalmist commits no such sin. He screams in holy rage in the name and for the sake of the Rider of the Clouds who notices things that others miss, who sees people that others pass by. That’s why the church cannot afford to consign Ascension Day to liturgical obscurity. On this day we not only give thanks for the Rider of the Clouds, but set our sights anew on the Ascender into the Clouds. You can read Psalm 68 with its militaristic language, “let his enemies scatter, let his opponents flee before him” as just another example of silly, superstitious religious bravado that offends pacifistic sensitivities. You can dismiss this psalm as being out of step with our more sophisticated theological ruminations about God. Or you can take a deep breath, give thanks for the Rider of the Clouds and the Ascender into the Clouds and let out a scream that will pierce the ears of evil. Lots of ink is being spilt today about the decline of the church, especially in the mainline, but now also the mega-churches are experiencing a significant loss of membership. New books come out each month telling pastors and congregations how to turn this trend around. They describe how to be an “Emergent” church, how to do contemporary worship, how to brand our share of the church marketplace. Like Chinese food, I read these books and I’m hungry again an hour later. What I am waiting for is an Ascension Day book that will speak to the heart of the issue of why so many people yawn when the word “church” is mentioned. While the Rider of the Cloud watches for us to act and listens for us to speak, we have grown lethargic and hoarse. It’s not that we no longer fight. We do, but most often it is a family feud that keeps us preoccupied with ourselves while the evil about us grows unchecked and largely unchallenged. Psalm 68 knows nothing about such a timid, distracted, and unengaged god, but knows everything about God, the Rider of the Clouds, who is also the Father of orphans and widows, of any and all who are the most vulnerable prey of evil. Maybe Ascension

    Easter 2008

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    Day is a day to read Psalm 68 – all of it – and hopefully to find our voice again, just as Lutheran pastor Heidi Neumark found her voice fighting Molech, an ancient god in a modern outfit, who is alive and well and working its deadly ways in the South Bronx:

    “Do you renounce all forces of evil, the devil, and all his empty promises?” These words are also part of our baptismal liturgy. It is impossible to pronounce these words and send the children out like lambs to the slaughter. It is impossible to anoint their foreheads with scented oil and rich promise: “You have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever,” and do nothing as they go off to substandard schools that virtually seal their failure to survive in today’s economy. We put a lighted candle in each waiting hand: “Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works ….” Why must the church fight and work for better public schools? There is no better reason than the baptism of these children. Are we going to stand by and allow Molech to snatch them from us as so much prison fodder? Once we’ve said no to the devil, we need to keep saying it: Hell no. (Breathing Space, p. 12)

    What if Ascension Sunday became our annual service when we rededicated ourselves to “screaming loud” in the name of and for the sake of the Rider of the Clouds, the Climber of the Cross, and the Ascender into the Clouds? What if we were to begin our worship with confession for the ways we have been complicit in the abuse of the most vulnerable that God has given to our charge? I walked up to our night shelter last fall, and one of the guests started a standing ovation for me, saying, “He’s the one who makes it possible for us to be here.” His words were an undeserved and grace-filled compliment, but taken literally, they spoke way too much truth. How does the psalmist describe God in Psalm 68? “God gives the lonely homes to live in.” In part, because you and I are not “screaming loudly” enough in Congress and across the street at the State Capitol on behalf of those consigned to streets and shelters in this society that you and I are the responsible ones. What if we were to reclaim Ascension Sunday as our annual bookend to Easter Sunday with the cadences of Psalm 68 beating throughout the service? What if we reclaimed the biblical image of God as a street fighter, a non-violent street fighter, who will fight to the death rather than remain silent before the evil around us and within us? What if Ascension Sunday were our annual wake-up call one week before the spiritual tsunami of Pentecost? Maybe then, the Spirit of God, the Rider of the Clouds, would find us ready, really ready, for a fresh, life-transforming breath of wind. Happy Ascension Sunday!

  • Protagonist corner [vol 31 no 2 2008]

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    Protagonist Corner

    Elizabeth McGregor Simmons

    University Presbyterian Church, San Antonio, Texas

    Ever quoted Walter Brueggemann in a sermon? Of course.

    Kathleen Norris? Yes.

    AnneLamott? Sure.

    JohnHagee? Who’s he?

    John Hagee is the pastor of the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, where I live. To be honest, in the 14 years that San Antonio has been my home, I may have spent a grand total of 10 minutes thinking about him. Recently, however, I was contacted for an interview by a British academic who is writing a book on Christian Zionism, the movement which focuses on “end times” scenarios that involve “ingathering” all the world’s Jews in Israel against the backdrop of major international warfare.1 The author was interested in a mainline Protestant pastor’s perspective on Hagee. When I told him that John Hagee is pretty much off the radar screen of my daily existence, he was incredulous. He told me that in his view Hagee’s apocalyptic script is a major export from the U.S. to the rest of the world, and furthermore, it is what many Europeans now regard as American Christianity. It was my turn to be incredulous, and my incredulity ratcheted upward when I learned of a 2002 Time/CNN poll which reported that 59% of Americans say that they believe the events in Revelation are going to come true, that nearly one-quarter think that the Bible predicted the September 11 attacks, and that 36% of those polled who support Israel “say they do so because they believe in biblical prophecies that Jews must control Israel before Christ will come again.”2 It would be false to impute responsibility for these statistical results to John Hagee alone, but, make no mistake about it, he is enormously influential. He claims that 99 million households tune in to his weekly radio and television broadcasts. He is the founder of the organization Christians United for Israel which bases its political agenda on a dispensationalist reading of the Bible. CUFI is no fringe group; at its July 2007 gathering in Washington, D.C., President Bush sent his good wishes by letter, and John McCain, Newt Gingrich, and House Minority Whip Roy Blunt were featured speakers. In a speech delivered before the group, Senator Joseph Lieberman said, “Of describing Pastor Hagee in the words that the Torah uses to describe Moses, he is an Ish Elokim, a man of God and those words really do fit him; and, I’d add something else, like Moses he’s become the leader of a mighty multitude, even greater than the multitude that Moses led from Egypt to the Promised Land.”3 John Hagee is no longer off my radar screen. The apocalyptic imagery used by him and by the popular Left Behind series of novels is the subject of many a conversation between me and the members of the church which I serve. I have been listening more closely when they tell me of the hesitation and the intimidation which they feel when their neighbors, their classmates, their co-workers, even members of their own families start quoting Bible verses as if they were lines in a divinely penned screenplay of specific current events. “We want to speak confident good news to counter violent,

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    absolutist, bad news,” they say, “but we find ourselves speechless.” I doubt that conversations such as these are unique to me and the congregation at University Presbyterian. I have a hunch that many long for their pastors to do more to equip them to be evangelists in the true sense of the word, that is, bearers of good news. Talk to someone who has been rendered speechless by a Bible-quoting end-timer, and five minutes into the conversation, you will find yourself bumping up against “The Rapture.” Might a sermon on the subject of the Rapture be a good starting point in equipping your congregation to speak good news? Many will be open-mouthed at learning that what they have heard of the Rapture or even read of it themselves in the first volume of the Left Behind series is never mentioned in the book of Revelation. The closest the Bible gets to describing something that sounds a bit like a Rapture is in I Thessalonians 4:17, “then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever.” One must be careful to note, however, that when the line is read in context, Paul is writing in this earliest of his letters to reassure those early Christians about what would happen to their loved ones who had died. The line isn’t emphasizing that some will be left behind, but rather that all will be together with their loved ones when Christ comes again. From whence then does this idea of a Rapture come? It comes from a method of reading the Bible called dispensationalism. John Hagee’s theology and the theology embedded in the Left Behind series rest on this nineteenth century invention by John Nelson Darby who said that there were “dispensations,” intervals of time ordering a grand timetable for world events. According to Darby’s view, God has divided history into seven distinct dispensations or ages. It lays out a rigid master plan for all of human history, and the Rapture is a part of this.4 One of the best lines I’ve heard was passed on to me by Douglas Brackenridge, Trinity University professor emeritus of religion, who said, “Saying ‘the Bible says’ is like saying ‘the library says. ‘ ” Dispensational theology constructs a master plan for history by taking three verses from the book of Daniel and hooking them onto passages in I Thessalonians, Matthew, John, and Revelation. As Brackenridge’s observation indicates, it would be something like browsing the shelves at the library, selecting Darwin’s Origin of the Species, a volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, anda John Grisham novel, splaying the books open, and with no small degree of effort, pasting a sentence from one, a verse from another, and a paragraph from yet another into a single document. Still, with all the cutting and pasting in the world, the only way that dispensationalists can make the Bible into a rigid master plan for all of human history is to impart some “gaps,” as it were. Witness John Hagee’s interpretation of Isaiah 9:6. “For unto us a child is born. Unto us a son is given” was fulfilled in Jesus’ birth, Hagee says. But the second part was not fulfilled, he says. The part that reads, “the government shall be upon his shoulders, and his name shall be called ‘Wonderful Counselor’” will only be fulfilled thousands of years after Jesus’ birth, in Jesus’ future millennial kingdom. So a single verse from Isaiah 9:6 actually refers to “two widely separated events in history.”5 There is something rational about it. The explanation sounds science-like, appealing, for things to fit together so neatly, for no loose ends to be left dangling. The problem is that there is absolutely nothing in the biblical text which even hints toward

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    such a reading. It is a complete and utter fabrication. In a pastor’s quest to offer help to those who are speechless in the face of end-times theology, laying out what the Bible doesn 9t say is an important first step. The second

    step is to proffer a word about what the Bible does say. Barbara Rossing, professor of New Testament at Chicago’s Lutheran School of Theology, offers a helpful word about apocalyptic language as visionary language when she likens Revelation to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol a morality play in which the miserly Scrooge is taken on a visionary tour of his life. A hair-raising visit from the ghost of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley, gives Scrooge the first warning of what his future will be if he does not change his life. Subsequent visitations by three spirits show Scrooge his painful past and his even more painful future. He also sees a scene that inspires hope—the warmth and love of the Cratchit house. These contrasting visions prove to be a wake-up call for Scrooge. Scrooge is changed by the final vision when he sees his own lonely grave. He pleads with the Spirit of Christmas Future to let the visions only show what “may be,” so he can still hope to change his frightening future. In the terrifying moment when he sees a vision of his own grave, Scrooge alters his life. Assured that what he sees does not have to come to pass, he commits to walking a different path. Scrooge awakes to realize that he is still in bed. He has been on a visionary journey that has changed him forever. 6

    Like Λ Christmas Carol apocalyptic literature, biblically speaking, contains ter­ rifying scenes, but the scenes are not a literal immutable time line, a la John Hagee, where believers are dealt a get-out-of-Tribulation-free card which entitles them to sit on the heavenly sidelines as voyeuristic spectators. The scenes are a wake-up call to reality—that no empire on earth will last forever, that even those empires with the greatest military and political might are, in the grand scheme of history, ephemeral and short-lived, and that when the way of life on which we rely comes to an end, God pro­ vides a new vision to guide us. If we preachers can do our part in equipping the members of our congregations to speak confidently of these things, it will be good news indeed.

    Notes

    1. Definition of “Christian Zionism” from www.christianzionism.org. 2. Nancy Gibbs, “Apocalypse Now,” Time, July 1,2002. Quoted in Barbara R. Rossing, The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 72. 3. From the October 7,2007, PBS broadcast of BillMoyers Journal http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/ 10052007/profile.html. 4. A good explanation is provided by Rossing, 23. 5. John Hagee, From Daniel to Doomsday: The Countdown Has Begun (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1999), 41. Quoted in Rossing, 28. 6. Barbara Rossing, The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 82-84.

  • Get lost, God!: A sermon on Psalm 39

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    Get Lost, God! A Sermon on Psalm 39

    J. Clinton McCann, Jr.

    Eden Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri

    Over one hundred of the Psalms show up at least once in the three-year cycle of the Revised Common Lectionary, but Psalm 39 is not among them. Apparently, the framers of the lectionary agree with the psalmist’s originally stated intent – that is, he should have kept his big mouth shut! But he didn’t; he couldn’t. A “fire burned” (v. 3) within him, and so he did what he said he wouldn’t do. The words came pouring out, and some of them weren’t very nice. According to Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, most churches are places of “suffocating niceness”;1 and in a context that is suffocatingly nice, words like the psalmist’s just won’t do. There is no slot in the lectionary for Psalm 39! Actually, the psalmist’s words are fairly mild at first and even rather polite: “Lord, let me know my end, and what is the measure of my days” (v. 4). It sounds like the famous verse from Psalm 90, “So teach us to count our days/that we may gain a wise heart” (v. 12). And the psalmist’s subsequent musings in vv. 4-6 and 11 on the transience of human life also sound a lot like Psalm 90 which appears in the lectionary three times. This must not be the problem for the framers of the lectionary. Nor does the problem seem to be the psalmist’s request for deliverance and relief in vv. 8-10 and 12, nor his affirmation in v. 11 that God punishes sin. All this is fairly standard biblical fare. And along the way, the psalmist even says at least one thing which is downright positive. It’s v. 7, which happens to be precisely the central line of the psalm: “My hope is in you.” But, as it turns out, this powerful affirmation at the heart of the psalm cannot compensate for what the framers of the lectionary clearly found unacceptable – the psalmist’s final words in v. 13: “Turn your gaze away from me, that I may smile again, before I depart and am no more.” In other words, “Get lost, God!” “Get lost!” of course, is not a very nice thing to say, especially to God! But let’s be honest; after all, that’s what the psalmist was doing. Haven’t you ever felt like telling God to “Get lost”? Or maybe you have told God to “Get lost!” Or maybe you are a little more polite than the psalmist, so you express your doubts and feelings of despair in the form of a question – How could you, God? Where were you, God? Why didn’t you, God? How could you, God, let a gunman kill thirty-two innocent people on a peaceful college campus? Where were you, God, when my mother died of cancer? Why didn’t you do something, God, before that tsunami swept away thousands of unsuspecting people? Come to think of it, God, why didn’t you design a world where our days weren’t like “a few handbreadths” (v. 3) and where things turned out like they were supposed to? Haven’t you ever felt like asking such impertinent questions and maybe even telling God to “Get lost”? The psalmists do it all the time in these prayers which are often known as laments or complaints – laments or complaints, because the psalmists are boldly and brutally honest with God in articulating the rough places and the jagged edges of their lives and of human life in general. And these laments or complaints are certainly among the foremost biblical examples of prayer. Biblically speaking, you

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    see, it is OK to ask God difficult, impertinent questions, and even to tell God, amid life’s seemingly unbearable difficulties, to “Get lost!” As Walter Brueggemann puts it, “How wondrous that these Psalms make it clear that precisely such dimensions of our life are the stuff of prayer.”2 Jesus too asked God some impertinent questions. Remember his words from the cross (Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34), “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” which he borrowed from the opening line of Psalm 22. We probably cannot imagine very easily that Jesus would have told God to “Get lost!” but he comes pretty close! John Goldingay even suggests that “Ps. 39 is a prayer Jesus might have prayed… [in Gethsemane], and one that believers on the way to resurrection still pray.”3 It’s OK – indeed, it’s desirable and Christ-like – to pray Psalm 39, with all its doubts and expressions of disappointment and despair, and even its “Get lost, God!” Remember that the psalm’s central verse, surrounded by all the doubt and despair, is an incredible affirmation spoken directly to God: “My hope is in you.” It’s not that the psalmist was confused or inconsistent. Rather, he was simply being true-to-life. Reflecting upon another of the prayers of lament or complaint in the Psalter and recalling Martin Luther’s description of the psalmist’s mood as “the state in which hope despairs, and yet despair hopes at the same time,” James L. Mays says that what we learn from psalms like 13, 22, and 39 is this: “The agony and the ecstasy belong together as the secret of our identity.”4 The agony and the ecstasy belong together! Human life is, our lives are, not only maddeningly short and sometimes almost unbearably frustrating, but also and simultaneously , they are incredibly and mysteriously wonderful. Death would not be so painful if life were not so wonderful ! Despair and hope, suffering and glory, the agony and the ecstasy, belong together. Or, we Christians might want to put it this way – the cross and the resurrection belong together as the secret of our identity. One word of caution is in order here – some of you may be uncomfortable, as I am, that the prayers of lament or complaint seem to portray God as a cosmic scorekeeper— “Remove your stroke from me;/1 am worn down by the blows of your hands” (v, 10) – and a divine micro-manager of the world (in which case, it would seem, God is not doing too well!). In terms of the questions I mentioned earlier, I don’t believe that God could have magically stopped the shooter at Virginia Tech; I don’t think that God willed or caused my mother to die of cancer at an all-too-young age; and I don’t understand God to be in the business of causing earthquakes. But at the same time, I simply cannot conceive of any of these events apart from God’s involvement in the world. So, when I pray these psalmic prayers, I do so not to accuse or blame God, but rather to protest that things are not right and that life can and does hurt so badly. Psalm 39 and the other laments or complaints in the Book of Psalms invite us and enable us to take our pain and the pain of the world to God in prayer; and ultimately, we trust, God also feels that pain, and God shares it. For God, as well as for us human beings, the agony and the ecstasy belong together, as the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ so clearly reveal. Friends, the psalmist was right. Ourdaysare”afewhandbreadths.” Like a “passing guest,” we won’t be here long. And that is sad, as even my four-year-old daughter recognizes and poignantly articulates when she says, “Daddy, I don’t want to die.” I don’t either! But I will and she will and you will. In John Goldingay’s words again, Psalm 39 “invites us to live life in light of the fact that we are on our way to death”;

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    but, he continues, this “does not imply living in gloom and fear, but making the most of every day because we know our days will not last for long.”5 Friends, the psalmist was right – our hope is in God ! So, live life urgently and fully. Revel in life’s incredible wonder and indescribable ecstasy. Protest its innumerable injustices and abysmal agony. And pray! Pray honestly and boldly; and it’s OK if every now and then, you find yourself telling God to “Get lost!”

    Notes

    1 Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the ChristianColony (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 149. 2 Walter Brueggemann, Praying the Psalms (Winona, Minn.: St. Mary’s Press, 1988), 31. 3 John Goldingay, Psalms, Volume 1: Psalms 1-41 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 565. 4 James L. Mays, “Psalm 13,” Interpretation 34 (1980):281-282. 5 Goldingay, Psalms, Volume 1,565.

  • ‘One church, indivisible…’: Psalm 133; Ephesians 2:11-22

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    “One Church, Indivisible… “*

    Psalm 133; Ephesians 2:11-22

    Fred Seay

    First Presbyterian Church, Lake Charles, Louisiana

    People from the First Presbyterian Church of Lake Charles could tell you that I do not ordinarily “read from my notes” when I preach. I will change that today…not because I did not prepare for this service, but simply because I do not want to leave anything out on this important day. At times over the past months, we have joked hollowly about “the elephant in the room.” And today, it would do no one a service to deny that the elephant is sitting here. This is the last time the Presbytery of South Louisiana as many of us have known it will gather around the Lord’s Table. As has happened at other times in the history of our branch of the Church of Jesus Christ and our nation, the demands of conscience are pushing some of us to seek a new denominational home and others to remain in this visible manifestation of Christ’s body. Words born of conviction have been spoken. Lawsuits have been filed. People have been hurt, and hearts have bled.

    I. The Work of Christ There was a profound enmity some two thousand years ago in the setting where the Church of Jesus Christ first began to bloom. The gap between Jew and Gentile was both deep and bitter. It was dug by centuries of mutually inflicted slights and filled with bitter memories and even ugly humor. About fifty years ago, the compilers of The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible said that the gulf between Gentile and Jew was regarded in the ancient Roman Empire as more unbridgeable than the modern disparity between East and West, Communist and non-Communist.”1 The barrier between the two groups was as real as the old Berlin Wall that came down to great celebrating in 1989. In this setting, Ephesians proclaims that in Jesus Christ not only are Jew and Gentile reconciled with God, but they are reconciled with one another. By his incarnation, his death on the cross, and his resurrection, Jesus Christ has knocked down that wall of separation. It is a spiritual reality. The two groups might not fully embrace each other. They might choose not to enter, from their part, the fullness of the new reality in Christ. Psalm 133 sounds wonderful. It is far from what we have experienced in recent times. The point in the Psalm is that the unity enjoyed among God’s people is ultimately God’s gift. Like any gift, we can choose not to open it or even return it. But where hearts are opened to God’s reconciling work in Christ, there is peace, and there is celebration. The Greek verb translated “destroy” is luo. Dr. Wallace Carr and I could name a professor of Greek who in the Summer of 1985 drilled a number of Greek conjugations into his students. I can still remember “luo, lueis, luei” and the basic, most common

    * This Communion Sermon for the Presbytery of South Louisiana was preached at First Presbyterian Church, Bogalusa, Louisiana, on October 13, 2007.

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    meaning, “to loose, to set free.” It is used in the Gospels where Jesus “sets free” an individual from sickness or spiritual oppression or physical disability. Jesus also frees people from age-old feuds. Jesus frees his people from bondage to old bitterness.

    II. What Does This Mean for Us? Now—I am not going to stand here and plead with some of you not to leave this presbytery or denomination. The reality is that I suspect that course of action has already been firmly decided. We have probably not all been fully “in communion” for a long time, and a wall of frustration and resentment has gone up over the years, brick by brick. We Presbyterians do say we believe in “The Sovereignty of God,” and that Jesus Christ is Head of the Church. Perhaps he has called some of us to go in a different direction as surely as he has called most of us to remain in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). “Reconciliation” for us may well not mean that we stay together in a visible denomination, a presbytery quantifiable in documents and statistics. The reconciling work of Christ surely applies to the manner of our parting now, and our future, as well. These past few years have not been the first time that Presbyterians in South Louisiana have had intense disagreements. Early in our history a gifted preacher, the Reverend Theodore Clapp, was called to preach in New Orleans. He was a powerful speaker, but he skated on the thinnest ice in the pond of orthodoxy. Mr. Clapp eventually declared his disagreement with some key tenets of the Westminster Standards. The Presbytery of Mississippi put him on trial for heresy, and the process was both lengthy and bitter. Clapp wrangled especially with Dr. George Potts, the chief prosecutor , and the Rev. Benjamin Chase, the clerk. They parted as enemies when in 1832 Mr. Clapp was “defrocked” and joined the Unitarian Church. Years passed. One day Dr. Potts and Mr. Chase were visiting a beach up North. They stood gazing out to sea, caught up in the beauty and majesty before them. Suddenly, each felt a hand fall gently in his shoulder and heard a familiar voice…and it said… “and Satan also came. ” It was none other than the once Rev. Mr. Clapp. The three had a good visit that day, and in spite of all that had gone on years before, they became fast friends.2 God delights in surprises, especially when God’s people are sure they have declared a matter or a relationship closed.

    III. Who Knows What the Holy Spirit Will Do in the Future? In the meantime—if we are going to part—may we do so respecting one another, and loving one another as sisters and brothers in Christ That means respecting one another’s consciences, whether they pull a friend or family member to go or to stay. It will mean respecting the integrity of one another’s denominations. May we be open to what Christ may call us to do in the future. I take no pleasure in saying this, but there will be other hurricanes that will come to Louisiana. They came to our shores well before Katrina and Rita. They came before Audrey and Betsy. They will come again. And the winds and storm surges and falling trees will not differentiate between EPC and PCUSA, between “Traditional” and “More Light.” If and when another day comes when our communities are battered and hurting, and our members with them, may we be ready to work together in ministry and relief in every way that we can.

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    May we remember that we are bound together, forever, in Christ. That is not r always welcome news. Some disagreements have been so profound that they have led to this parting. There will soon be a new “Visible Church” Presbyterian presence in South Louisiana. But spiritually, we are bound together inextricably in the “invisible Church” that belongs to Christ alone. As we gather visibly together at this Table, let us never forget that we are tied together in ways that cannot be broken by votes and decrees. And may we all permit ourselves to be prepared for whatever surprises our reconciling God may spring upon us in times to come. Here today, the past is being closed. Let us not forget, now or ever, that the future is not in our hands or in the hands of civil or church courts, but in the hands of God.

    Notes

    1. The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible,(l962), Volume 4, page 17. 2. Penrose St. Amant, A History of the Presbyterian Church in Louisiana Π 961), page 42.