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If you grew up anywhere near a church you probably learned the story of Jonah. It’s a favorite of children everywhere. Jonah gets swallowed by a whale. Actually, it wasn’t a whale, it was a large fish – sometimes details get lost in translation. Jonah tried to run from God’s call. Got on a boat and tried to sail as far away from God as he could go. But God sent a storm and Jonah just knew it was God out to bring him back so he asked everybody else on the boat to throw him into the sea. That’s when the whale (or the large fish) gobbled him up where after 3 days and 3 nights – (Christians love that part) – he was vomited up on the land (children love that part). Try as he might Jonah could not run from God’s call. That’s what a lot of people remember from this text. “God called me,” I’ve heard many a preacher say – even said it myself – “and I tried for a long time to run like Jonah until I just couldn’t run any longer.” But most of our stories about running from God’s call are more about the person not seeing themself as equipped or capable or comfortable enough in the role – as prophet, or preacher, disciple or some combination. Jonah’s attempted escape is about Jonah’s issue with God’s sense of justice, God’s soft spot for mercy in situations that call for punishment. Sometimes the details get lost in translation.
That big fish spits Jonah up and this time he makes it to Nineveh where he announces Nineveh’s overthrow. Yet the people repent. They put on sackcloth – the youngest to the oldest, the most powerful and the least. Even the animals. And then the very thing Jonah feared, occurs.
Listen now for a word from God to the church this day.
[Jonah 3.10-4:11]
–
A friend this week was lamenting the fact that you-know-who is running for the Presidency again and seems, incredibly, to have a good chance of getting his party’s nomination after all that has happened. “Proof,” my agnostic friend said confidently, “that there is no God.” I didn’t have the heart to tell my friend that there’s an even worse alternative – that there is a God with power to intervene who has a very demented sense of justice. In our existential world, when we wrestle with theodicy – which is the fancy word for what to do with the fact that there are bad things that happen to good people routinely in our world that call into question God’s presence or activity – we tend to connect theodicy with the presence or absence of God. When bad things happen, we wonder if God exists or has the power to do anything about the things that need changing in our world.
But Jonah believes God exists 110%. Jonah assumes God has the power to do anything God wants. Jonah is no deist, believing God to be the initiator of all that is but not much more, the clockmaker who sets everything in motion then retires for the rest of eternity. No. Jonah believes God is active, available, and powerful in all the ways that many of us long for in the world. The God who is real, present, active, available, and powerful. It’s just that Jonah believes God’s use of that power is way too generous, way too merciful toward people who don’t deserve generosity or mercy. Jonah doesn’t wonder if God exists. Jonah doesn’t wonder if God is powerful. Jonah wonders if God is good. It’s not God’s absence from the scene that bothers Jonah. It’s God’s graciousness. It’s the content of God’s character that drives Jonah crazy. It’s God’s inclination for choosing mercy when judgment has already been pronounced. It’s God’s habit of granting forgiveness to people who have done things that are unforgivable that makes Jonah want to turn and run. “That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning, for I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment.”
Which could make Jonah sound like a close-minded, vindictive person, unwilling to forgive. Maybe even xenophobic, hateful toward a country of people he doesn’t even know. Jonah, the close-minded Israelite who doesn’t like foreigners. That’s the way Jonah has been presented in some of the reflections I’ve read and heard. The one close-minded prophet in Scripture we’re not supposed to emulate.
But sometimes the details get lost in the translation. Jonah is being sent to Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria. At the end of the 8th century, the time period described in this story, Israel was a little vassal state stuck in between two global empires – the Egyptians to the south and the Assyrians to the north. Both demanded tribute from Israel – pay us money and we won’t mess with you: a kind of nation-state mafia. At the end of the 8th century, King Hezekiah of Judah took a gamble and told the Assyrians, no I won’t negotiate with terrorists. I refuse to pay you tribute. He allied himself with the Egyptians instead. The Assyrian ruler called his bluff, invaded and destroyed cities and towns with brutal carnage of the type most of us have never seen.
Jonah isn’t xenophobic. Jonah isn’t closed minded. He simply refuses to go to a nation-state that has done unspeakable violence to his own people. He refuses to participate in extending mercy to people who have shown none of it to others. He refuses to join God in excusing behavior that shouldn’t be excused. Sometimes the details get lost in the translation.
Most of us are a lot like Jonah. We won’t abide those who have abused power in our nation or in our lives after they’ve shown us exactly the kind of people they are. We don’t want to see God’s pardon offered to people who don’t deserve it.
But notice what God’s mercy actually means in this story. It’s not excusing bad behavior. It’s announcing judgment and remaining open to the possibility of repentance. “40 days more and Nineveh will be overthrown.” God’s judgment in this story is only suspended after the people of Nineveh have put on sackcloth and sat in ashes – have made visible signs of their intention to change their ways.
It’s that openness to the repentance of wrongdoers that Jonah is lacking. The openness to a relationship with someone who really does change. Which is a very difficult mindset to keep with people who have hurt you. Last week we saw that forgiveness isn’t tied so much to repentance. It’s more about protecting the graceful orientation of your own heart. It’s more about preserving your soul’s inclination toward goodness in the world than it is about someone else’s bad behavior.
But this week we have to face what happens when people do change, when they are sorry, when they do express the desire to repair a relationship. And sometimes that’s even harder than forgiving someone in the first place. Mostly, we see what God is really like – oriented so often to welcoming home the wayward child when she chooses to return.
I said that this story was set in the 8th century when Assyria was at the height of its empire. But like most of the Old Testament it probably wasn’t written then or didn’t come into the final form we have today until long after the Assyrians had been defeated by the Babylonians and the Assyrian empire was no more. In fact, it was likely told in its current form round about the time Israel was returning from exile and grappling with important questions about how to create a new community, a new nation. There were those returning to the land with a very exacting way of thinking about faithfulness. They were perhaps judgmental about some of the decisions that fellow Israelites had made, decisions they believed had led to God’s punishment in the first place. There were others who recognized that it would be nearly impossible to rebuild a community without some way for those who had done wrong in the past, to be forgiven for it. This story was a piece of their advocacy for how to deal with people who had done terrible things before. As long as they are willing to leave those old decisions behind, this story seems to say, they can be as much a part of the community as anyone.
With you-know-who running for President again, there’s certainly a lot of work to be done by all of us. The need to proclaim God’s justice as the most important thing that could determine the future of our county. How well we treat the stranger, the poor, those on the margins in our society, becoming more inclusive in all the ways we need to welcome the amazing diversity that God has blessed us with as a nation. But in the process of proclaiming that message we’re challenged by Jonah to remain open to so-called enemies who actually change, who actually learn more about justice and change their outlook and approach as a result. We’re challenged to take care that our zeal for justice doesn’t slouch into a thinly veiled vengeance that cares more about defeating anyone who has ever wronged us – becoming the grievance-fueled people with a grudge that we’re supposed to be opposing. God seeks Nineveh’s conversion, not their destruction, maintaining the hope and goal of all people healthy and secure with everything they need for a meaning-filled life.
If that grace-filled hope for some of your domestic enemies sounds outlandish, well just remember that the United States is in a similar position that Assyria was in years ago. We are one of the global empires. There are all kinds of Jonahs around the world who look at you and me as a great undifferentiated mass of bullies who extract the choicest fruits from the rest of the world and expect to extract God’s grace in a similar way. God seems to look at all of us as people. People God has created, cares about, and wants to see do well, together.
Instead of thinking about a 2024 rematch as a depressing time to further entrench, I wonder what would happen if we viewed it instead as God giving all of us more time to change. Another opportunity to get better. Another chance to engage those we believe have done actual harm and need to change. Additional time granted for us to change, reclaiming politics as the way of solving problems together instead of allowing ourselves to be lured back into the cynical view of a slugfest between people who have already characterized each other in flat, dishonest ways.
Doing that, I think, requires getting to the complex story of each person you meet instead of settling for the summary that we too often create in order to avoid engaging people in the first place. Like Jonah, so much of each story gets lost in translation.
The details of each person is where the truth lies. Each person God has created, invested in, laborer over. And while it may be unrealistic to expect everyone to put on sackcloth and sit in ashes, some of us were given chances to change in all sorts of ways. We were given an opportunity to become more of the person God created us to become. Wouldn’t we want to give others the same?
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“So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart,” Jesus concludes. On the face of it, the teaching is as clear as Jesus was back when he taught the disciples the Lord’s prayer. “For if you forgive others their trespasses,” he told them then, “your heavenly Father will also forgive you, 15 but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
It’s the ultimate reciprocal relationship. You only get as much forgiveness as you give. This seems to be true, at least relationally. The more exacting you are with other people, the more they tend to treat you the same way. The more they point out your flaws, the more likely you are to point out theirs. The more they fail to forgive you for every little thing, the more you tend to keep count in the same way.
But isn’t forgiveness the very thing that is supposed to interrupt this tit for tat dynamic that builds the grievance arms race in the first place? That never-ending game of “he started it” that you learn at a really young age? The keeping score dynamic that builds in much bigger ways and ultimately leads to violence? Isn’t making God’s forgiveness contingent on us offering forgiveness to each other just another form of that same quid pro quo economy that Jesus is supposed to be freeing us from by submitting to the cross instead of overthrowing Caesar in a bloody revolution that replaces one tyrant with another?
The answers aren’t exactly clear here which is normally the case when Jesus teaches with a parable. On the one hand you have the fantastically unreasonable generosity of the king who Jesus implies represents God. On the other hand you have the king’s top servant who owes the king 10,000 talents. One talent was equal to the wages of a manual laborer for fifteen years. 10,000 is the number you would use in biblical times to represent the largest possible numerical unit. As scholars Eugene Boring and Fred Craddock point out, “the annual tax income for all of Herod the Great’s territories was nine hundred talents per year. Ten thousand talents would exceed the taxes for all of Syria, Phoenicia, Judea, and Samaria.”[1] 10,000 talents is a ridiculously large number meant to be beyond calculation. The debt is truly unpayable. The king’s response to his servant’s request for patience is equally, fantastically ridiculous. He doesn’t just extend patience, he forgives the debt.
The kingdom of heaven can be compared to this, Jesus says at the top of the parable.[2] Jesus suggests that we cannot free ourselves from what we owe God. We’ve been given life – there’s no way to repay that. Also, we sin. We mess up, more than we let on, probably more than we even know. And God is incredibly generous with us, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love as the ancient texts say. God’s realm is marked by this incredible generosity.
And how do we respond to this generosity? To the gift of life we did not earn. To having everything we owe God not held against us? We respond like the servant who has received fantastically generous grace only to turn around and be stingy with each other instead. The servant, departing immediately from the presence of the king who has just forgiven his ridiculously large debt in a ridiculously gracious way, runs into a servant below him on the pecking order who owes him about 1/600,000th of the amount he owed the king.[3] No mercy, no grace, just a harsh response- thrown into debtor’s prison until he pays up.
Word gets back to the king and he revokes his unreasonably generous mercy choosing eternal torture instead. If you want God’s forgiveness, be careful to extend it to others. “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” And we’re back to where we started – Matthew’s reciprocal relationship between us and God. Or are we?
This parable actually started on the heels of last week’s teaching that wrestled with the conditions under which someone is kicked out of the community. (Matthew 18:15-20). Since Jesus recognizes that there are conditions under which someone should be booted from the group, clearly forgiving someone doesn’t necessarily mean tolerating their bad behavior. That’s important information since forgiveness is often talked about in just that way. That if you forgive someone you let them walk all over you. Clearly that’s not the case. Bad behavior needs to be challenged, according to Matthew. It’s challenged in a particular way as we saw last week – face to face, individual conversation intended to give a strained relationship the best possible chance of being restored in a new way. When that fails, two or three more witnesses are added to the mix to make sure that all parties are held accountable. And when that fails, the church itself gets in the mix to try to get things back on track. Only after all that effort is someone to be temporarily put out of the community.
This week we see again God’s persistence in getting them back. “What’s a reasonable number of times to forgive someone who sins against you? Peter asks, offering seven times as a possible answer, which feels pretty generous to me. But not to Jesus since he offers instead seventy times, as this translation reads or perhaps even seventy times seven, an equally possible translation. I think we all can agree that forgiving someone 490 times is above and beyond most of our forgiveness tolerance levels and probably an unreasonable thing to do.
Yet that’s what Jesus teaches his disciples we owe to anyone who has wronged us. Continual forgiveness. Not a forgiveness that is defined by letting a person’s bad behavior repeat itself again and again. But a forgiveness that involves releasing that person from a sort of debt they’ve incurred by virtue of sinning against you. Refusing to hold their bad behavior against them in your heart or said differently -refusing to let their bad behavior define the essence of their personhood. Remaining open, even expectant that the person might find the healing they are needing and that the relationship might, at some point, be restored. Forgiveness, understood this way, is just as much about protecting the purity of the heart of the person who has been wronged as it is about releasing the wrongdoer. Preserving the heart’s natural orientation toward grace in each other. Refusing to let the heart be hardened by the expectation of sin.
We are living through a time right now where the heart’s natural orientation toward grace has been tested by lots of bad behavior – bad behavior at every level of government, bad behavior in the Church most publicly in the sex abuse crisis and coverup in the Roman Catholic Church, but also the Church’s partisan endorsements of candidates whose policies and ethics are so far from Jesus’ teaching as to be absurd; and bad behavior by our fellow citizens – from police brutality toward people of color, to neighbors turning to the gun to settle disrespect at neighborhood festivals and on college campuses, to the Jan. 6 attack against our government, to just common indecency at all levels. All of our hearts have been affected and are being affected right now by all that bad behavior. And it’s very hard to love your neighbor if you are oriented toward fearing them, expecting them to do bad things.
In fact, sometimes I wonder if some of the hurt that some of us have experienced between and among each other in recent years has less to do with someone sinning against you and more to do with all the accumulated hurt we carry from deferred dreams and unfulfilled desires experienced in the world we now live in. We are so oriented to being beaten down and disappointed that we arrive here positioned for someone else to let us down.
Forgiveness, Jesus teaches us, is the way to interrupt that dynamic. To choose to stop keeping count of who’s wronged you so you can instead bring the expectation of God’s grace here and into more places in the world where it’s needed. And yes, your orientation toward grace won’t make you immune to bad behavior. It won’t stop it when it comes. But it will miraculously multiply and extend much farther into the community than bad behavior ever does. There is a realm of God’s grace, fantastically ridiculous grace that expands from your heart to the world like a native flower that takes root easily because it belongs there.
There’s just one piece of this story that remains a puzzle. If God’s grace is so ridiculously fantastic, and the disciples are called to forgive continuously, infinitely – seventy times seven worth of forgiveness, then how can God ultimately turn to torturing those who do not forgive? Doesn’t that go against the very nature of God, the foundation for forgiveness itself? Some scholars say the last two verses don’t really belong to the original story – the bit about the king handing over the servant to be tortured and Jesus saying his heavenly father will do the same to us if we don’t forgive. Those scholars argue that the story actually ends in verse 33 with a question – “should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?” Those scholars point out that parables are supposed to preserve questions and comparisons without becoming allegories where king=God; debt=sin; first servant=one who is forgiven lots of sin against God; second servant=one who has committed ‘ordinary sin against fellow human being.’ “It is better,” two scholars write, “to let the story remain unallegorized, so that it is an earthly king [not God] who reneges on his original gracious forgiveness, and let it illustrate, in an analogous way, the awfulness of failing to forgive as God forgives.”[4]
But I wonder, too, if Matthew’s Jesus is doing his best to get across to us just how central forgiveness is to abundant life with God. If we learned how to practice it better, we’d be so much more free in the world. Free to love with abandon, free to experience the very grace that each of us is able to bring right now into community instead of expecting community to deliver it up to us as payment for our efforts, free to bring to the world more of the healing and the help that so many are hungry for. I wonder if Jesus isn’t warning us that a failure to practice forgiveness again and again is its own kind of tortured life, which is entirely in our control to change. I wonder if he’s already thinking about the cross to which he’s headed, grappling with a way to share that his decision to die there isn’t a decision to accept bad behavior. It is a decision to expose it, simultaneously offering up something so much better – life as the gift that it is, a holy offering given for the sake of love in the world. The realm of God that’s open and available to this community right now.
[1] M. Eugene Boring and Fred B. Craddock, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press), 2004, p. 77.
[2] Heaven here isn’t a place. Heaven is a way of reverentially referring to God without using God’s name. So kingdom of heaven is the same as kingdom of God in Matthew’s Gospel which is really about the realm of God, the economy of God. See Boring and Craddock, 19.
[3] Boring and Craddock, p. 77.
[4] Boring and Craddock, 77.
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FRAME
This morning, we will bring the story of Palm Sunday to life through story, song, and reflection together. I will retell the Triumphal Entry from the perspective of Jesus. Our text this morning takes us through multiple scenes: the disciples and the colt, the crowd on the road, Jesus weeping at the edge of Jerusalem, the clearing out of the temple, and Jesus staying there to teach. A song by Sweet Honey in the Rock, called “Ella’s Song,” will play for 1 minute intervals between scenes. For this sermon, you will need a pen and a blank page in your bulletin.
I want you to write down the question: What makes you restless for peace? During the musical interludes, we will take time to write down our thoughts about this question. There are no right answers. This time is for you and for God. Let’s begin.
PRAYER
I am walking into town with my friends, near Bethphage, near Bethany. We end at this place called the Mount of Olives. I tell two of them, “Go into that town right there. When you get there, you will find a colt tied up. This colt will be unbroken, unrideable. Untie it and bring it back. Yeah – I want you to steal it. And if anyone asks you why you’re stealing it, just tell them, “The Lord needs it.” No one will ask you any questions.
They looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders, and headed into town. Just like I told them, a colt was there, tied up.
It took them a little while, but the disciples eventually made it back. When they arrived, they looked out of breath and a little shook. I mean, I had asked them to take off with stolen property without getting caught.
No such luck. They told us, “We walked right up to the colt, and untied him. The owners heard the commotion outside, and came out, yelling, “Why are you untying our colt?!” We did what Jesus said, and told the baffled owners, “The Lord needs it.” They scoffed and chased us! It was awful!”
Even though the colt was stubborn and unruly, I managed to get on his back. It took the two disciples who found him standing on either side and me on his back to keep him from bucking me off and running away. We did not have a saddle, so some of the disciples lent me their cloaks to put on the colt’s back. Eventually, he settled down, and we began to make it down the Mount of Olives Jerusalem.
What makes you restless for peace?
[SONG – 60 SECONDS]
People saw us coming from far away, and began crowding around the sides of the road. They put their cloaks down on the road for us. The crowds still weren’t sure what to say, but they stood, watching the spectacle, asking each other, “Who is this man? Who are these people with him?” The disciples started to shout about the miracles I’d performed, like the healing of the blind, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, and shouting, “Blessed is the king who comes in God’s name! Peace and glory in heaven!” Some of the religious leaders who were talking and watching in the crowds came up to me on the colt.
They tried to stop our procession, telling me, “You need to make your disciples stop shouting and making such a ruckus. They are stirring people up right before Passover, and we will draw Pilate’s attention.” I looked at them and said, “If I tried to make them stop, the stones on this road would start to shout. I cannot and will not make them stop.”
The religious leaders could not believe that I would talk to them like this. I saw the fear in their eyes. I know what disturbing the peace means for us as colonized people. I know that Ponitus Pilate was in town to make sure that we stay in our place. He brought a full military posse with him to intimidate the Jewish people from around the empire traveling during Passover. The religious leaders wanted nothing to do with us. They were afraid whatever attention we drew to ourselves would lead to trouble for them, too. They stood there alongside the road as our procession went by. Some of the people who had been on the sidelines joined in now, shouting and praising God about the miracles they’d seen.
What makes you restless for peace?
[SONG – 60 SECONDS]
I could see Jerusalem now, the temple glittering in the sun. I started to cry uncontrollably. I couldn’t help it. All I could think about was all of the people in the city, and I was filled with love for them. Then I prophesied over the city, something I never wish upon anyone.
Through my tears I said to Jerusalem, “If only you’d been paying attention to how to make peace. But now, you can’t see it. Someday, your enemies will set up for war against you. They will surround you, they will block you on every side of the city walls. They will destroy you and your children. They won’t leave any part of the city standing because you did not pay attention.”
I felt so tired. I was exhausted from traveling all over the region healing and teaching. I was weary from telling people the same things over and over again and hearing the same questions over and over again.
What makes you restless for peace?
[SONG – 60 SECONDS]
I kept thinking about the city as I rode through Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives to the Temple gates. I saw Roman soldiers on foot patrol and on horseback. I saw their weapons. I felt angry that as my people were preparing for some of their holiest days, the Roman empire was policing us even heavier than usual.
When I finally arrived at the Outer Courts of the Temple, I saw merchants selling animals of all kinds for sacrifice, I saw money exchange tables, and I lost it. My disciples and I forced them out. I knocked over their tables, scared away the livestock and birds, and scattered the coins all over the courtyard. I shouted, “It is written,
“My house is for praying, but you have made it a hangout for thieves!”
No one could keep me out, though, even though they tried. I stayed at the temple, teaching every day and having a sit-in. Everyone stayed to listen and none of the temple leaders could force me out.
What makes you restless for peace?
[SONG – 60 SECONDS]
I am restless for peace. I am tired of talking about guns. I am tired of talking about gun control. I am tired of the NRA with politicians in their pockets. The Columbine shooting took place when I was 10 years old. 10 years old.
24 years later, 12 children die from gun violence in America every single day [1]. 12 children a day. 12 children a day. And what has changed? The main thing that has changed since 1999 is the increase in mass and school shootings and the lack of tangible action to stop the unnecessary deaths of children.
This week, the shooting at a Presbyterian school in Nashville dominates the media. And no action is taken to stop the next.
Jesus was tired too. He was tired of the oppression of his people. He was tired of hypocrisy. He was tired of corruption. But Jesus was determined. He was determined to see his mission through to the end. He knew that he could not turn his back on the people he loved. Even while he prophesied and wept over Jerusalem, he still made his way into the city. He still taught in the temple courts. He still continued on the long road of suffering, knowing that he had a role to play in the long arc of justice.
If we are truly people who believe in peace, we will not rest. If we are determined to seek freedom from gun violence, then we will not rest. We will not rest until all children can go to school without the fear that they will be shot and killed in their classrooms. We will not rest until all parents can drop their children off without their hearts in their throats. We will not rest until children in this city can safely play in the streets. We will not rest until 12 children dying every day from gun violence is a thing of the past.
Yes, we can weep over Jerusalem. Yes, we can weep over our country. But we cannot give up. We must not give up. We keep walking.
FOOTNOTE
[1] “Crossing Lines – A Change in the Leading Cause of Death among U.S. Children,” New England Journal of Medicine (2022), https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2200169
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At the beginning of this chapter Luke sets the scene. He tells us about all of the baddies in the Roman Empire that are running the show. Tiberius Caesar, Herod and his brother Philip–Luke wants us to know which political and religious voices John the Baptist was speaking against while he taught and led others in the wilderness. This opening matters because context is important. It would be like listing the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcom X without any idea about the era or the cultural climate in which they lived and breathed. John the Baptist’s words transcend the moment in history when he spoke them, which is why they are included in the Gospel of Luke in the first place. Although John the Baptist spoke these words long ago, they still resonate today as we hear them this morning.
John the Baptist pulls no punches. His prophetic message may be hard to hear, but underneath that harshness is a joyful message. He quotes the prophet Isaiah, imagining a world where “valleys are lifted up and crooked ways are made straight.” He proclaims that world to his disciples as they come to him in the wilderness seeking direction and longing for answers. He proclaims these words to everyday people, to Roman soldiers, and to tax collectors–all types of people are drawn to his words and a dream of another way of living. And what he gives them is not a battle cry to overthrow the Roman Empire, but it is a vision of a world they can create with God. It is a vision of a world that requires them to consider others, to live with empathy, and to share what they have. He gives them a vision of a home where every person has enough to wear, everyone has enough money to provide for their needs, everyone has enough food to eat and does not go hungry, and everyone is treated fairly by representatives of the Roman government and religious leadership.
Our Advent theme this year, “Close to Home,” draws our attention to our longing for a place to lay our heads and a place to belong. This reminds me of The Highwomen’s song “Crowded Table”: I want a house with a crowded table/And a place by the fire for everyone/Let us take on the world while we’re young and able/And bring us back together when the day is done
That is the kind of home, the kind of world, that John the Baptist imagines for us this morning. Red Shed Village – St. Michael’s & All Angels – creating a home for everyone when the world around us said it wasn’t a good idea. It was March 2020 – outbreaks in the shelter system, lack of safety for trans and queer people experiencing homelessness, and a group of Central Baltimore clergy met to discuss what to do, and we decided to try something out and see what happened.
We came up with the idea to create a tent village at Red Shed Garden on St. Paul while we waited out the first few months of the pandemic. We thought we would only need to have these emergency shelters in place for three months. Well, those three months turned into six months. And then six months turned into nine months, and the first winter of the pandemic was fast approaching.
We started a campaign to fundraise to build tiny houses in the garden, with the permission of the Red Shed Garden leadership, in place of the tents, with the goal of helping residents transition from the street to the village to permanent housing. We successfully raised enough money to build tiny houses on the garden property, and did that in time to keep residents warm for the winter and out of the elements. We attracted the attention of Baltimore City’s Office of Homeless Services, and they came out for a site visit to see what we were doing at Red Shed Village. They were astonished to see that we had created a small ecosystem that was offering support and community, shelter and resources, and it was successfully rehabilitating people, one person at a time.
If you walk down St. Paul today, you will see green tiny houses, with murals painted on them depicting flowers and vines. You will see people sitting around a firepit, sharing their joys and sorrows. You will see neighbors building relationships with neighbors, whether they live in apartments, or houses, or tents. You will see a community of people who care for one another, all because the pandemic kicked local pastors and leaders into high gear. The need for something like the Red Shed Village was there all along, but it took an emergency for us to see the need for a community like this in Central Baltimore.
John Baptist sings out to us this morning in the words of The Highwomen’s “Crowded Table”: I want a house with a crowded table/And a place by the fire for everyone/Let us take on the world while we’re young and able/And bring us back together when the day is done
John declares a world of justice and equity, a world where all have what they need, no one is unhoused, hungry, or naked, no one is manipulated by money lenders or people with political power. This world is not that far off–it is around the corner, down the street, in your rearview mirror. All we need to do is look.
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I see the moon and the moon sees me/ The moon sees somebody I’d like to see/God bless the moon and God bless me/And God bless the somebody I want to see.
Whenever I sing this lullaby, I feel homesick. My paternal grandmother would sing it to my siblings and me as we climbed into the car and headed back home from her house. My grandmother has dementia that has slowly advanced over the past eight years. I stayed with her for a few nights at her apartment last summer. After getting us both ready for bed, I started singing this song to her. I hoped she would remember it. She joined in with me on the second line, and we sang each other a lullaby before we both went to sleep. Deep in her memory, that song lives within her and reminds her of home. Because home is not always a place, necessarily, but can be people. Home can be a song, too. Sometimes we need one another to call us home when we forget the way or forget the words.
Our theme for Advent this year is Close to Home. The scripture passages we are about to encounter are passionate, emotional, and raw. Jesus tells the disciples of God’s coming judgment, Luke tells us of the visitation of the angel Gabriel to Mary, and we hear strong words urging us to repent by John the Baptist, and the song of Mary captivates us with its powerful imagery. They are all expressing some longing for God’s world to be made real on earth, for Emmanuel, God-with-us, to come dwell among us and set the world a-right.
The season of Advent and Christmas can bring up a mixture of emotions for us, too. Some of us might be homesick or might be missing loved ones who have died due to illness or tragedy. Some of us might feel lonely or dislocated, far away from family and friends. Some of us might be weary with the pandemic and the ways it has changed how we open our homes and our lives to one another.
This year, my prayer for us all is that Emmanuel will comfort us in times of homesickness and grief, loneliness and exhaustion. May we experience God’s closeness to us this Advent, and God may bring us home, no matter how far we wander.
Jesus points us towards the way home in today’s passage from the Gospel of Luke. Sometimes called the “Little Apocalypse,” you might have heard echoes of the Book of Daniel in this prophecy from Jesus. Well, if you did hear those echoes, you were listening closely, because they are definitely there! Jesus is building on the Jewish prophetic tradition in this passage, creating images of what the world will be like when God returns to dwell among their creation.
He tells his listeners that they will see signs in nature–in the sun and in the moon, in the stars and on the earth, and they must pay attention to what they see rather than ignore what they see, no matter how disturbing or distressing those signs may be.
Then, as Jesus tends to do, he tells a story. Rather than tell a story that emphasizes the power and might of God’s return, this is a story about a fig tree. It is a story about hope. He tells them that God’s kingdom will come like the new leaves on a fig tree in the spring. Those moments of early life in the spring are beautiful surprises. The return of layers of birdsong, flowers coming up from the ground, and those brand new, tender leaves on branches long barren. That is the kingdom of God, too.
Jesus gives us two contrasting images of God’s return–distressing and delighting, and surprising either way. Like the shock of the Son of God riding down from heaven on a cloud, so will the new leaves on the fig tree evoke wonder and fear in us. I wonder if this is what the world may feel like to some of us right now. We are coming up on the two year anniversary of the pandemic shutdown in the United States, migrants from across the sea and across our borders enter our country seeking refuge, and natural disasters plague our planet. Turmoil exists everywhere we turn.
And yet, the trees continue to make new leaves, Jesus tells us. God keeps showing up in our world every Advent, in the coldest days and the longest nights, to make all things new. And my grandmother can still sing, “I see the moon and the moon sees me,” no matter how much of her memory or her ability to care for herself she has lost.
Jesus says, “stand up and raise your heads.” Jesus tells his listeners to physically embody hope. He commands them to be alert, to keep watch, to be ready, for the change about to come. He says to do this “because your redemption is near.” Not only is our redemption near, Jesus reassures us, but “the kingdom of heaven is near.”
Our deepest longings often intersect with our deepest hopes. Jesus knows this. We want God to swoop in and rescue us, riding in on the clouds to save the world. We want God to reveal hope to us at a pace we can handle, like the slow growth of new leaves of a tree. We long for change, for the pain around us, for the pain within us to stop, for the unanswered questions that gnaw away at us to disappear, for God to show up and explain it all.
And instead, we get signs and wonders. We get spring flowers. We get confusing parables. We get God-with-us, Emmanuel, showing up anytime, asking us to always be ready for the kingdom to break out among us.
The hope of Advent, the hope that Jesus promises us today, is not a shallow one. It is a solid hope based on what we know God has done and will do. Hope is a memory of the future–it is full of dreams, desires, and foolishness. Hope is defiance in the midst of suffering. Hope is the daily choice to persevere, to sacrifice, and to keep growing through tragedy. Hoping well means risking disappointment, risking rebellion, and risking disruption. [1] This is the kind of hope Jesus promises us if we “stand up and raise [y]our heads.”
The shadow side of hope is despair. And such a temptation it is and such a difficulty to resist it. Why hope if nothing ever changes, cynicism asks us. Why try to make anything better if the old way of doing things works just fine, conventional wisdom says. Despair tells us to numb ourselves with addictions to substances, to technology, or even to work because hope asks too much of us. We are afraid of looking foolish because hope asks us to take risks. We are afraid of hope because we are afraid of losing control–we pretend that we do not care so we will never feel disappointment. We are completely closed off to God, to others, and to ourselves when we give in to despair. Despair says to us, “No one will get to my heart.” [2]
Here comes Jesus with his prophecies and his parables to incite, to arouse, to provoke, and to intensify our longings. He calls to what could be. He calls the world and us to repentance. He creates a vision for the future that exposes the reality of the present. He speaks of hope. [3]
Advent draws us into the hope of God’s kingdom coming here on earth, inviting us to live into the tension of the season–Jesus is here, among us, yet not here among us. The kingdom of heaven is so close we can almost see it, but it is still out of focus. Advent hope says to us this morning–say yes. Say yes. Say yes to beauty. Say yes to glory. Say yes to wonder. Say yes to awe.
Keep your head up and your eyes on the heavens, hoping that God will be there. Plant that tree, hoping it will survive the winter. Sing that lullaby to someone you love, hoping they will remember. Embody these words of Mary Oliver from her poem, “When Death Comes:” When it’s over, I want to say: all my life /I was a bride married to amazement./I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms./When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder/if I have made of my life something particular, and real./I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,/or full of argument./I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world. [4]
Footnotes:
[1] Paraphrase from notes from “Hope” lecture, “Faith, Hope, Love” course, Dr. Dan Allender, The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology, Fall 2011.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] “Poem 102: When Death Comes” by Mary Oliver.
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Most weeks, when I call my grandmother with dementia, she tells me the same story–her favorite memory of me. If you’ll oblige me, I’d like to share it with you, too, this morning. When I was in kindergarten, I walked to her house by myself because I couldn’t wait to go over. At the time, my sisters were 3 years old and 12 months old. Translation – my parents were very distracted and did not notice, when I was all dressed and ready to go, that I slipped out of the house and marched myself down to my grandmother’s house four blocks away. I walked up to her front door, rang the bell, and waited. She opened the door and saw me standing there by myself. Surprised, when she saw no one else with me and my parents’ car nowhere to be seen, she asks me, “How did you get here?” I proudly tell her, “I walked over.” Her surprise turns into fear. “Do your parents know you are here?” I said, “No, I was ready, so I walked.” My grandmother says, “Come inside right now and call your mother.” And I happily obliged. I was so proud of myself for walking to her house on my own that it never occurred to me that I might be in trouble.
This childhood memory of going from my mother’s house to my grandmother’s house reminds me of the book of Ruth. I hear Ruth’s insistence on going wherever Naomi goes in my decision to walk to my grandmother’s house on my own. I hear Naomi’s insistence that Orpah and Ruth go home to their mother’s house at my grandmother’s command that I call my mother and tell her where I am. I hear Orpah’s decision to go back to her mother’s house, and I do not hear her story in my story. Naomi sends her back, and she decides to go.
I want to dwell on Orpah this morning because I think she has some wisdom for us as we linger on the habits of faith during this sermon series. Our theme for today is ‘sending’ and the story of Naomi, Orpah, and Ruth is only fitting. The chapter begins with a famine in Bethlehem, ‘the house of bread,” in Hebrew. Only desperation would send a family from Bethlehem to Moab. Moab is the home of the descendents of Lot. In Genesis, two of Lot’s daughters get him drunk and have sex with him. They both become pregnant and bear sons. One of them bears the name Moab–meaning “from my father.” The people of Israel viewed the Moabites as incestuous, indecent people. To add insult to injury, the sons of Naomi and Elimelech marry Moabite women. Not only has their family fled to this savage country, their sons have married native women. Now, all of the men are dead. Elimelech, husband of Naomi, and Mahlon and Chilion, sons of Naomi and wives of Orpah and Ruth, are dead.
With no other family and no one to care for her, Naomi decides to make the journey back home to Judah. She had heard through the grapevine that the famine in Judah had ended and she could find a way to provide for herself and rely on extended family there. Both Orpah and Ruth were going to come, initially. But Naomi has a change of heart. She realizes that she is subjecting them to a life of poverty and pain, with no prospects of remarriage or security, if they come with her to a foreign country, a country where their people are despised and ridiculed. Naomi tells them both, practically, that going back to their mother’s house is the best course of action for their lives.
They will be with family, in the country of their upbringing, where their culture and language are understood and respected. They did not want to leave her–this is how much they loved one another, this is how loyal they felt to their mother in law, Naomi. Orpah follows the advice of her mother in law and she heads back to her mother’s house. The choice to say “mother’s house” instead of “father’s house” implies that Moabite culture is matrilineal [1]. Israelite culture was a combination of both matrilineal, meaning one’s right to land and claim to Jewish heritage came through the mother, but one’s social standing and power came through the father. Naomi’s insistence that Orpah and Ruth return to their mother’s house is a reminder of Native American culture. She chooses her “indigenous mother’s house over that of the alien Israelite Father,” according to Laura F. Donaldson, Cherokee biblical scholar. [2] Orpah’s name in Hebrew means ‘neck or nape of the neck.’ The implication here is that Orpah’s identity is the ‘back of her neck.’ She is named thus for turning away from Naomi and from the God of Israel, and choosing to stay with her people in Moab. Donaldson argues that Orpah is synonymous with “the narrative role of abandoner. Some writers even suggest she later becomes the mother of Goliath, the famous enemy of Israel, and that Goliath himself was ‘the son of a hundred fathers.’ ” [3]
So what can Orpah teach us this morning about habits of faith? She teaches us how to live in place. Not to long for another world, another state, another city. Even in the midst of her significant losses, she chooses to stay. She could start over somewhere new with Naomi and Ruth, and leave her culture, her language, her religion, and her family behind.
Orpah may be seen as a faithless abandoner, a fearful homebody, a cowardly pagan, but I see our congregation reflected in the legacy of Orpah. Like Orpah, Brown Memorial Park Avenue chose to stay in Baltimore City. Even when half of the congregation fled the city with the majority of white people during white flight, we did not close our doors. We did not say, it is better to be in the county where everyone looks and thinks and dresses like us. We have been called to this neighborhood and to this city, and this is where we are staying. I see our congregants in the legacy of Orpah. I see our faithfulness is working within institutions to change them as part of Orpah’s life moving through us. I see our political activity and our power organizing as examples of the way we work across a variety of sectors to insist that God’s way is coming if we stay in one place long enough to see it through.
This may not seem like a sermon about sending, but about staying. I’d like to argue the opposite. Orpah did not want to stay in Moab. She wanted to leave it all behind. The grief of losing her husband, the grief of starting over in the same place, the grief of going back home after 10 years of marriage, the grief of being childless. Naomi sends her back. I believe that Naomi was speaking with the Holy Spirit in Orpah, telling her to stay. Telling her to be faithful in the place where she already lived. This is bold in a different way. This is bold because it requires trust that God has something new to show Orpah, a new life, in a familiar place. She chooses her people, her culture, her language, her religion. Staying in the new sending–for Orpah, and for us.
We have been sent, too. Not to the four corners of the Earth. Here, on the corner of Park and Lafayette. Here, in Bolton Hill. Here, in Baltimore City. God sends us out of these doors every week, like Naomi sent Orpah years ago, back to her people. The people in the pews and back at home on Zoom are your people. Your neighbors are your people. The citizens of Baltimore City are your people.
So, I ask you, what will you do with this sending? Do you see it as defeat or as an opportunity? Do you see this as giving up or as a deepening your commitment? God is sending us back into our neighborhoods and into our city just like Naomi sent Orpah home. You are here, in this time and in this place, for a purpose. May you have the courage of Orpah to root yourself in Baltimore City as God sends us out, again and again, out of these doors and into the streets.
Footnotes
[1] , Bruce RoutledgeMoab in the Iron Age: Hegemony, Polity, Archeology, 2004, 119.
[2] Laura Donaldson, “The Sign of Orpah: Reading Ruth Through Native Eyes,” Postcolonial Biblical Reader, 2005, 146.
[3] Laura Donaldson, “The Sign of Orpah: Reading Ruth Through Native Eyes,” Postcolonial Biblical Reader, 2005, 147.
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Our stewardship series begins today and continues for the next six weeks. Andrew and I will be preaching on habits of faith. We were inspired by the different movements in worship–gathering, listening, proclaiming, responding, celebrating, and sending. After spending so much time apart from one another during the pandemic, we wanted to focus on the habits of our faith that we practice together. Because it is in our unity in these practices that we draw closer to God and to one another.
We also celebrate World Communion Sunday, our annual practice with churches around the world, to remind us that God is with us wherever God’s people gather to proclaim God’s glory and grace. This is why our sanctuary is covered in various representations of our global partnerships–Camajuani in Cuba, Pejuhutazzizi in the Dakota Presbytery, and San Salvador in El Salvador. We honor and celebrate our partnerships this morning, too.
So, in the midst of celebrating our life together as a church and our life together around the world as Christians, it seems fitting that we turn to the book of Hebrews, a letter written to second generation Christians in the Roman Empire. This book captures the spirit of an electrifying faith, one that draws people together across social, political, and economic differences–the kinds of differences that marked the lives of believers then and now.
For the majority of my preaching life, I have steered away from the book of Hebrews. I admit that I have dismissed it because of its exclusive and graphic explanation of what happens on the cross. But I hear the words of the author of Hebrews differently after 18 month of pandemic living. I am encountering Jesus in these verses in new ways, and I hope the same may happen for you too this morning. Jesus is described as “the exact imprint of God’s very being” in verse 3. This image of Jesus can point us towards how to polish and reflect the image of Christ within ourselves and within our gathered community.
Pastor Roger Nishioka researches the departure of young adults from mainline churches. He says that young adults are looking for a “palpable, passionate Jesus.” [1] I would argue that the author of Hebrews is looking for Jesus, too, and wants to draw his readers back into a relationship with a Jesus who they can touch, see, and hear. It is through the suffering of the human experience that a passionate Jesus is made perfect–the paradoxical ways of being human fully on display. Jesus embodies contradictions–fully human and fully divine, fully suffering and fully resurrected–all the precise image of God in human flesh. Jesus is nothing if not authentic, the author of Hebrews would argue.
To the Hellenistic Jews of this era, this description of Jesus would have been scandalous. God is a mystery, with a name so holy no human being may utter it. People could never see God because God’s presence is too powerful for us to behold. To the Hellenistic Greeks and Romans, this description of Jesus would be absolutely absurd. A God who lives the full human experience–feels, suffers, grieves, dies–undercut all they understood about the gods being above the human experience and arbiters of the universe’s power. A god who becomes fully human is not God at all. But to the author of Hebrews and the second generation Christians he addresses, a fully human and fully divine Jesus embodies the contradictions of grace and suffering, embodies a God who loves without conditions. [2] This is the Jesus that the author points us to desire.
The language in this passage may seem a bit extreme, and it would be very easy to think that Jesus is far removed from people and the experience of being human. The author compares Jesus to heavenly and earthly powers to demonstrate how Jesus relates to them both. Not to create distance between Jesus and humanity, but to show how Jesus connects to all peoples in all places–that Jesus gathers us in and brings us into relationship with God through his life, death, and resurrection. We, too, can grow into the Jesus Way–the way of suffering and grace, the way of resurrection and hope.
What makes the Christian life unique is the particular way God invites us to embrace paradox. We are people of grace and truth, light and darkness, life and death, joy and service. These paradoxes flow through the being of God into the incarnate Christ, and Jesus shows us the way to embody these contradictions. In this passage, Jesus represents “authority and servanthood, power and suffering, glory and humiliation, grace and obedience.” [3] In all of these balanced opposites, the God of the universe comes up close and personal –into our world, into a human body, and into our lives.
The letter to the Hebrews was written to the generation of Christians after the disciples–the ones who did not see, touch, or hear Jesus themselves, but heard testimonies of his life and ministry, his power and presence. They did not experience the passion or the intimacy of walking with Jesus in ministry. With the pressures of living in the Roman Empire and the persecution of believers around them, they had become apathetic and afraid. Their spiritual exhaustion and anxiety might sound familiar to our ears. Many people I speak with are tired–tired of pivoting at work and at home, tired of pandemic living, tired of trying to maintain some normalcy in the midst of so much uncertainty. It is almost like we are experiencing a type of ‘spiritual chronic fatigue’ –out of sync, weary, unable to muster the discipline or the joy that once flowed from our lives so easily. Hebrews can serve to gather us into a deep and meaningful relationship with God again–one that reminds us of the imprint of God’s image within us and others–one that reminds us that suffering and joy is God’s power within us.
Footnotes
[1] Rev. Dr. Roger Nishioka, “Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12,” Feasting on the Word: Year B, Vol. 4: Season after Pentecost 2.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
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James is back this week with another searing reminder about what it means to be a person of faith and action. Rather than a lesson about how our inner world manifests itself in the way we live, James is here to tell us that our faith is as good as dead without actions to back it up. And to illustrate his point, he uses the example of favoritism to solidify his claims.
In the first chapter, James tells us that faithfulness to God means we reflect God’s character in the way that we live. Life apart from God is subject to our whims and desires, whereas life with God is subject to living as God would have us live. James uses the example of caring for widows and orphans and preference for the poor in the community as examples of this kind of faithful living. If they are true Christians, James argues, their values will be on display consistently in the way they act.
In the second chapter, James takes it to the next level. He wants his readers to understand that they might agree with him in theory, but not in practice. So he makes it personal. He asks them, what happens if a poor person walks into your congregation? When a wealthy person wearing fine jewelry and designer clothes visits our church, do we treat them as more important than the poor person in dirty clothes? James has a hunch that his readers are more likely to give the well dressed person a better seat in the sanctuary and tuck the poor person away into a corner or in the back.
That kind of behavior does not sit well with James. It does not line up with what he describes as living the life of faith looks like in his argument about faith and actions matching up. He boldly claims in verse 5, “God [has] chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom.” He acknowledges how easy it is to play favorites with people who are more like us–closer to our social status or our financial circumstances–rather than to attend to people whose suffering reveals how close we may be to their situation. James argues that this is lukewarm faith–a kind of faith that gives in to the temptation to “be comfortable, to be upwardly mobile, to experience only life’s ups, and to be insulated from life’s downs.” Authentic faith requires that we step out of these temptations to comfort, according to James. It looks like tending to the widows and the orphans, to the wounded and down and out, to the naked and the hungry.
This kind of life is counterintuitive for most people. No one wants to be poor. No one wants to be cut off from resources or isolated from opportunity. No one wants to be referred to as downtrodden or in need of help. No one seeks out this kind of life unless they have been overwhelmed by the circumstances of their life. No one wants their body to display the suffering and As commentator A. K. M. Adam of Oxford writes, “this face of one who has known sorrows … is our birthright.” James goes on to say the law of the kingdom of God commands us to love our neighbor and that the poor will inherit this kingdom. He refers to the poor as the heirs of this kingdom, and sees them as God sees them–as royalty who deserve places of honor rather than places of disregard both in this world and in the world to come.
I served a church in Center City, Philadelphia before coming to Brown. They exemplified James’s insistence on hospitality to the poor and disregarded. A church with only 8 members left in 2002, the presbytery of Philadelphia closed the church and began renting out the building to the University of the Arts for rehearsal and performance space. Two years later a young Prebsyterian pastor asked if he could try to revive the congregation and start a new church in the building. He and his team started with dinner. They passed out invitations to anyone and everyone they saw on the streets–business people, bike messengers, students, artists. And people from all walks of life began showing up for dinner, but not the ones they were expecting. Returning citizens, people sleeping in the subways, addicts in all stages of recovery, people with active mental illness, trauma survivors–all showing up for a meal and community.
In fact, so many people began showing up for dinner that they tore the pews out of their 800-seat sanctuary to make room for tables, and turned the sanctuary into a free restaurant seven meals a week. They sold some of their organ pipes to a cathedral in Germany so they could keep the church going. And they started worshipping backwards and replaced the pews with chairs. They turned the chairs to face the back of the sanctuary so they faced the city whenever they sang, took communion, prayed, or listened to a sermon. They believed and practiced what James said–that anyone walking inside the church building deserved a place of honor, and there was a seat at the table for every single person. They believed and practiced the radical hospitality that James described for us this morning–the kind of hospitality that looks upon someone as a child of God before taking in their status or the circumstances of their lives.
James believes that a faith with integrity does not sidle up to privilege or turn away from the needs of others. He argues convincingly that unless faith is married to action it is not faith at all. We are baptized into grace so we can extend that grace to others throughout our lives, not hoard it for our own gain.
Adam says accurately, “Faith involves more than affirming theological formulas, but a thorough reorientation of one’s life. Faith makes a difference in us.” [3] And not only that, faith sees life where others see death. Where the presbytery leadership in Philadelphia saw rental income in an old church building, a pastor saw the opportunity to minister to all sorts of people in a new way. Where others saw an empty sanctuary with little to no worshippers, others saw community over dinner. Where others may expect people standing in line to receive handouts, others saw tables where everyone sat down as equals. Where PhDs and felons share dinner together is the kingdom of heaven, according to this church in Philadelphia. And according to James, too.
This kind of faith–this radical, open-hearted, hospitality-filled faith–is the kind that God commands of us. We are all vulnerable, if we are honest with ourselves. God chose those who are more visibly vulnerable than others to embody the good news of the gospel. If we have the eyes to see this, the ears to hear this, the hearts to receive this, we will not be the same. The faith that lives within, the faith we practice, and the people we encounter will transform us, one radical act of hospitality at a time.
Footnotes
[1]
A.K.M. Adam, “Commentary on James 2: 1-10, [11-13], 14-17” Published September 6, 2015. Accessed September 2, 2021. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-23-2/commentary-on-james-21-10-11-13-14-17-4
[2] Ibid., A.K.M. Adam.
[3] Ibid., A.K.M. Adam.
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Six days after Jesus foretells his death and resurrection, he takes a few of his closest friends up to the top of a high mountain – Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. He does not take everyone with him. He wants to be far away from everyone else after the prophecy of his suffering, death, and resurrection. I wonder if he wanted to show them his true self. He went away from the rest of the group after a spiritually intense segment of teaching and preaching. The Queer Theology Bible podcast talks about this passage as the “coming out” of Jesus. [1] Much like when someone is coming out, they need their closest friends around them. They often need to tell the people they trust the most first.
Once they are up there on the mountain, Jesus changes. His clothes begin to shine with bright light. His face begins to glow like the sun. Not only that, Moses and Elijah, long dead, appear on the mountain and begin to talk to Jesus. He completely shows them who he is in all of his glory. He does not hide any of his power, any of his light, any of his majesty. Jesus displays his full divinity and his full humanity.
When someone comes out, this is what they are doing – whether this was you or someone else, you may recall what it feels like to fully be yourself in front of others you love and who love you. Podcast hosts Brian G. Murphy and Father Shannon TL Kearns argue, “this is why coming out in the queer community is so important – we can’t fully be in a relationship with other people until we are fully known.” [2]
While Jesus reveals himself to the disciples, he also communes spiritually with his Jewish ancestors – Moses and Elijah. Moses, representative of the Law, and Elijah, representative of the Prophets. Jesus is the union of the Law and the Prophets, the union of the Human and the Divine. He cannot do what he is about to do in the next part of his life and ministry – everything he talked about in the previous chapter that would happen to him and to his disciples if they continue to follow him – without calling upon the wisdom of the Law and the Prophets, without seeking the guidance of Moses and Elijah. In his fullest self, Jesus shines brilliantly and emanates light. When he is most attuned to who he is, Moses and Elijah meet him on the mountain.
But this holy moment of communion and connection cannot last forever. Peter interrupts their conversation. He jumps in, saying, “Jesus, it is good that James, John, and I are here. I will build three shelters for the three of you on the top of this mountain.” Peter wants to keep the party going is often what commentators say about him. Others say he wants to make himself valuable. He needs to feel needed. I have even read analysis to the effect that Peter wanted attention, and sought to receive it by elevating himself.
I wonder something else. What if Peter wants to protect Jesus? After all, Jesus has prophesied some terrifying realities only a week prior to this mountain top. Imagine seeing your rabbi, friend, and leader functioning as his highest self. Away with you and a few close friends, communing with your guides and tapping into the spiritual wisdom that brings you energy and life. Wouldn’t you want it to keep on going indefinitely? Wouldn’t you want it to linger just a little bit longer? Perhaps if they stay up there, everything Jesus said last week might not come true. Perhaps they can enjoy this powerful and sacred time with their spiritual ancestors without any concern for what may await.
But before Peter could complete his proposal, a bright cloud overshadows all of them. From this cloud a loud voice says, much like it did at the baptism of Jesus, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” This moment recalls the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. A dove descends and a voice speaks from the heavens, saying words that almost exactly parallel these. Both his baptism and his transfiguration signify a transition in the life and ministry of Jesus – the beginning and the end of his three year ministry on earth.
Peter, James, and John were afraid. They fell on their faces, terrified of everything happening around them – the transformation of Jesus, the appearance of Moses and Elijah, the bright cloud and the bodiless voice calling out to them.
Jesus comes over to where they fell on the ground. He touches them and says to them first, “Get up.” He does not tell them to stop being afraid. He tells them to get up in spite of their fear, in spite of themselves. Next, Jesus emphasizes that they do not need to be afraid. Easy to say, Jesus, hard to do!
When they finally looked up, it was like nothing had happened. Jesus stood before them. Alone. The bright cloud – gone. The bodiless voice – gone. Moses – gone. Elijah – gone, too! The shining clothes and the glowing face – gone.
Jesus tells them to say nothing and to keep this event a secret until the resurrection – his resurrection, to be specific, the one he prophesied about only a week before this unexpected visitation from Moses and Elijah. For Jesus, the transfiguration was not something to broadcast in front of the rest of his followers. Unlike his baptism, this holy declaration of his belovedness and belonging to God happens in front of a handful of people. This is a vulnerable, intimate moment with Jesus and a few of his closest friends. This is the passage that sets the stage for the rest of Matthew’s gospel. Jesus now turns his face towards the city of Jerusalem and his impending death. Moses and Elijah visit with Jesus on the mountain top, giving him the courage he needs. The Transfiguration gives Jesus the strength to leave the mountain and head towards the Holy City.
But before we head down the mountain with Jesus, I’d like us to linger there for a moment. In fact, I’d like us to go back up to verse four when Peter jumps in and says, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” Peter does not deserve the bad reputation he often receives in this passage. Perhaps he isn’t being pushy, insecure, or arrogant when he walks up to Jesus and makes this offer. Perhaps he is sincere in his offer to create space and time for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah to dwell on the mountaintop a little while longer. “What’s the rush?” he seems to suggest. “I’d be so happy to make that possible that I will stay and build them myself.”
Part of being in true relationship with one another is having the courage to be our full selves, like Jesus did as he prophesied about his death and resurrection with his disciples. He took this a step further and transformed into a being full of light and brilliance in front of Peter, James, and John. Although I referred to this full sequence as the ‘coming out’ of Jesus earlier, I am curious about what happens next. What happens when Jesus has his ‘coming back’ when he heads down to the rest of the disciples and the people waiting for him below?
When someone in our lives shows us who they really are, how do we respond? Do we acknowledge their vulnerability? Do we see the risk they have taken to bring us into these intimate parts of their lives? I want us to consider what it would be like to respond as Peter does. In our own way, we want to protect the people we love. We want to keep them safe from harm. Especially if we hear about the future danger before it happens, much like Peter. He does not want harm to befall his beloved Jesus. He does not want this time on the mountain to end. He sees Jesus, in all of his glory and grandeur, and wants to keep his beautiful life safe.
I see myself in Peter, and I wonder if you might as well. I often want to keep the people I love out of difficult or risky situations. I even want to cocoon them from the world’s troubles. Although I cannot do those things, much like Peter cannot build shelters for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. None of us can protect each other completely from harm and pain and trouble. But we can make transfiguration moments – holy moments of transcendence – possible with one another.
These are the kinds of segments of time where we are not distracted or concerned with the difficulties of the day, of the month ahead, of the moment before. We are free from distraction. What we want is pure connection. We want deep relationships where we can receive the vulnerability and the power of those we love, and we can offer them a brave space to fully reveal who they are. Peter’s desire to create shelters is human. It is a desire we know because we are human, too. We want to build a place where all can be the fullest expression of who God created us all to be – in our glory, in our light, in our transcendence.
We want a place, as the poet Sigfried Sasson says, where
“Everyone suddenly burst out singing;/And I was filled with such delight/As prisoned birds must find in freedom/Winging wildly across the white/Orchards and dark green fields; on; on; and out of sight.
Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted,/And beauty came like the setting sun./My heart was shaken with tears; and horror/Drifted away … O but every one/Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done. [3]
Footnotes
[1] Queer Theology Bible Podcast episode, “Transfiguration: Jesus Comes Out – Matthew 17:1-9” February 22, 2017 https://www.queertheology.com/podcast/168/
[2] Ibid.
[3] “Everyone Sang” by Siegfried Sassoon
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Like a lot of Isaiah fans, I’m all about the future that God promises to give to the people – “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.” –words from Isaiah 43:2. Or these words from Isaiah 56:7: “my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples,” Or Isaiah 61:1: “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners,to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
I’m all about these future visions especially one at the end of today’s text that speaks to me in these days when our city can’t seem to catch a break:
Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in. (Isaiah 58:12)
It’s the vision that I’ve held in my heart through the last eighteen years of ministry in Baltimore where I’ve believed that our city could be the best city on the east coast, a majority Black city which I believe could set a national model for a kind of rebirth that doesn’t have to displace Black or Brown or poor people in order to get better, that preserves our irreplaceable architecture, our quirky neighborhood flair, refusing to imitate NY to the north or DC to the south. A city that lives into John Waters’ tagline, “Baltimore: Come and Be Shocked,” not from the murders, not from the dysfunction, not from the broken pavement or the boarded up homes, but shocked but a renaissance that could happen by building a city like a garden in which to grow beautiful people, to paraphrase Jim Rouse.
It’s that vision that has driven me in the last two years of my public leadership with many of you in the BUILD organization working through a global pandemic to answer a fundamental question asked by our current Mayor before he even took office. “What would it take” he wanted to know, “to make your organization’s redevelopment success on the eastside, my administration’s strategy citywide?” It’s not hard to see why he asked that of the organization that our congregation has been a member of since the 1980s when we are remembered as one of the first predominantly white faith communities to join this Black led, faith grounded group. After all, BUILD’s development approach has worked, increasing the population of three neighborhoods at the same time that the rest of the city has been hemorrhaging people; doubling the median income in those neighborhoods, cutting vacancy rate from above 40% to below 7%, restoring the wealth of hundreds of homeowners without displacing a single person, keeping a 90%+ Black neighborhood 90%+ Black, even cutting the murder rate in half. Scaling up that vision is what attracted me to this kind of work – relating to other faith leaders on the front lines of neighborhoods like Edmondson Village, and Franklin Square and Darley Park and Johnston Square with hope instead of hand wringing. Facing the board up realities of our streets with the conviction that ruins shall be rebuilt. Surviving the daily sirens in some of our neighborhoods with the belief that we will raise up many generations. Engaging the trauma of so many families with the expectation that the Words of scripture are trustworthy and true and can lead us all to become repairers of the breath. Visions do that – they paint a picture of the world as it could be, the world as it should be – watering the most parched of our places when the world is harsh and untenable.
And the beautiful vision at the end of Isaiah is especially satiating after the 39 blistering chapters of judgment at the beginning of the book. Thirty-nine chapters of rant from a prophet whose words were all about what the people had done wrong, all about a verdict delivered from the Lord with a sentence of exile imposed in harsh and unforgiving rhetoric. I prefer the vision without the tension on the front end. I prefer the vision without the harsh rhetoric. I prefer the vision without the threats and the shouting that precede it.
Indeed this part of Isaiah – the 3rd and final part of the book – is supposed to be emptied of the judgment. The first part of Isaiah is all judgment. The second part is mostly about the promise of return. This 3rd and final part is supposed to be all about restoration. Yet here comes the prophet with fire in his mouth:
“Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.” “they ask of me righteous judgments; they want God on their side.” “Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” (58:3)
Answer: you serve your own interest on your fast day and oppress all your workers. You fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. (58:4)
The fast that will get God on your side, the prophet goes on to say, is not a bunch of smoke and mirrors. It’s loosing the bonds of injustice, undoing the straps of the yoke, letting the oppressed go free, breaking every yoke. It’s sharing food with the hungry and getting homes for the homeless, and tending to the poor. (58:6,7)
If we want to realize the vision, the prophet is saying, we’ve got to do things differently than we’ve done them in the past. And apparently the whole book of Isaiah is proof that if a community wants to do things differently than it’s done them in the past, tension is needed to move them there. The tension of judgment on the current practices that keep us in uninterrupted cycles of doing things the way we’ve always done them in the present even though we say we want a different future. The tension of anger at the current way of doing things over and over that aren’t leading in the direction that God wants us to go.
“Shout out; do not hold back!
Lift up your voice like a trumpet!
Announce to my people their rebellion,
to the house of Jacob their sins.” (Isaiah 58:1)
So I know I shouldn’t be surprised this past week when I found myself incredibly frustrated and angry on a call with the Mayor’s staff as they started to waver and wobble on standing with all of us at a press conference that will take place on February 16 announcing the two things that are essential to change our city’s trajectory:
- the creation of a state-authorized special purpose entity to address the systemic problem of 70,000 vacant properties at its roots;
- and the targeted investment of public dollars in a strategic, community-led way to leverage billions of dollars of additional private investment to rid our city of its vacants once and for all.
Making the changes that we’d been talking about together for nearly two years to attend to the vision that everybody says they want to see in our city – neighborhoods rebuilt and right-sized, wealth restored, vacants eliminated, people allowed to stay in their homes – the vision that everybody says they want until we begin to understand just how much we’d have to all change to get there.
I shouldn’t have been surprised but I was surprised. Surprised and angry for all the meetings, the time, the power – your power – and the power of so many other people of faith and community leaders who have put blood, sweat and tears into walking the streets, meeting with agency heads, corporate leaders, municipal bonding experts, state legislators, and the top vacancy experts in the country – all that work – 121 page report scheduled to be released this Thursday – all that to run up against business as usual in Baltimore. The slow grinding down of neighborhoods and leaders who are tired of the status quo.
I was surprised, I must confess, because like so many white, middle class people I was raised to believe that if you have all the facts, do all the right research, talk to all the right people, that’s what leads to change. And despite a couple of decades of on the ground training to the contrary, it’s very hard for me to let go of my miseducation. I would like to live in a world, where the vision of the prophets alone is what leads to change, not the raised voices, the judgment on the current ways of doing business, the public tension that precedes the change. I don’t like creating tension.
I can see myself in those middle class white clergymen who Dr. King critiqued from that Birmingham jail so many years ago for preferring “a negative peace which is the absence of tension, he wrote, to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”[1] I can see myself in some of our public leaders who use most of their elite education to communicate to us what we can’t do instead of working to accomplish what we must do together. I can see myself in those who measure their success by the absence of tension above all else.
Except that I don’t want to be living in a city where firefighters get killed by a vacant roof that collapses a block from where I live. Where people start fires inside of vacants to stay warm, and murderers hide the bodies of their victims. I don’t want to double down on my call to ministry in Baltimore only to discover years from now that things didn’t get better they got worse.
The city needs the tension to shake us out of our acceptance of this mess. Our acceptance of 300+ murders a year. Our acceptance of 70,000 vacant properties. Our acceptance of absentee owners and speculators that buy up property and don’t fix it up. Our acceptance of a government that doesn’t take bold action to fix the problems it created many decades ago. Our acceptance of the Black wealth inequalities that are driven so much by the housing crisis. Our acceptance of the way things are.
Which is why, despite my aversion to tension, at the end of the day I know I’m going to choose the path that Rev. Marion Bascom and Bishop Douglas Miles encouraged me to take – the one where it’s better to be respected than to be liked. I’m going to remember Jesus at the table, the one who loved Isaiah’s visions, quoting from him more than any other prophet as he turned over tables and upset polite company to change our world for the better. I’m going to gird up my loins in the words of scripture for another fight to stand with the Black Church that’s always known what Frederick Douglass wrote that power concedes nothing without a demand. I’m going to remember Fannie Lou Hamer reminding us that sometimes you’ve got to upset this apple cart to move things forward.
And if you feel as frustrated, angry, and as hopeful as I do that the Lord can make us strong like a watered garden that grows beautiful people, that our ancient ruins can and will be rebuilt, that he Lord will satisfy us in the parched places and make our bones strong, you can join me, too, Feb. 16 – 11am – at the Greater Harvest Baptist Church where my friend and colleague the Rev. Brent Brown has been trying to do something about the 8 vacants across the street from his church for years. We can stand together in all the tension that prophets taught us is necessary to become repairers of the breach, restorers of streets to live in.
[1] Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 1963, quoted from memory.
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While watching the Republican members of the House of Representatives try to elect a Majority Leader for the twelfth time on Friday, that age old definition of insanity came to mind. Doing the same thing and expecting a different result. The party that has built its brand of late on the idea that government is incapable of doing anything seems to be imploding on its own philosophy. But this kind of “doing the same thing and expecting a different result” insanity, extends far beyond a political party. You can see it in a string of Baltimore Mayoral Administrations, each of whom has tried to eliminate some of the 15,000 abandoned properties that plague our neighborhoods. Project 5000, Vacants to Value, Project CORE – seemingly different attempts to change our city with the same insufficient structure and inadequate resources to actually make the changes that are needed. You can see it in our nation’s inability to create any meaningful changes in the proliferation of guns – I wrote that sentence just before a 6 year old boy shot his teacher in Virginia on Friday. You can even see it in the most recent catastrophic football injury that has been in our public consciousness of late. All the padding in the world isn’t going to change the reality that when grown men hit each other repeatedly, eventually someone’s going to get seriously hurt.
Yet noticing this definition of insanity repeatedly at play can also create an opposite sort of problem within all of us – the cynical problem of believing that nothing can change. The cynical belief that since some are obviously motivated only by what’s in it for them, then everyone must be. The cynical idea that because this current political party is plagued by the inability to govern, then all must be. The cynical belief that since Baltimore hasn’t been able to get rid of its vacants in the last 30 years, or stem the killing that takes place each week that it can’t ever make those changes. The cynical conviction that since gun legislation failed after Sandy Hook that it will never pass or that since football is inherently dangerous then we shouldn’t even try to make it safer for those who put on the uniform.
The trouble with cynicism is not what it does to the people who are already in it only for themselves, but what it does to the rest of us. Robbing us of our hope, and with it, our agency.
Herod is obviously only in it for himself. The contemporary Pharaoh, as Gretchen pointed out last week – digging up that old Pharaonic playbook which every dictator inherits. Crush all opposition, kill your enemies, anticipate new ones and cut them down before they can harm you, even children. I know the common contemporary idea about dictators is that they enjoy terrorizing others, but Matthew’s Gospel makes a different kind of claim. Because maintaining power is their only concern they are always consumed by the fear of losing it. There’s a threat around every corner, a potential enemy cloaked in every friend. People like that live always in fear. Herod’s terrorizing brings little enjoyment, only temporary relief from one threat that will always be replaced by another. His story is a warning to those who are seduced into thinking that power alone can give us the life we want. Matthew doesn’t want us to be like Herod.
The chief priests and the scribes serve as a different kind of warning – exposing that dangerous myth that knowledge always leads to what is good. The chief priests and scribes have a kind of knowledge that the magi do not have. They know the scriptures – the prophecies that give them special insight into the rise of the Messiah. The Magi come to Jerusalem, thinking that Jerusalem is the obvious place for any king – the capital city, the place of the temple, the home of the inside-the-beltway urban elites and all the power that comes with it. The Messiah must be born there among the usual suspects. But the chief priests and scribes know better – Bethlehem, the small town 9 miles south of Jerusalem – that is where the Messiah is to be born – in the city of David. The chief priests and the scribes know all of this and yet they use their knowledge not to lead them to their true king but to assist Herod with his malevolent motives.
As a Jewish follower of Jesus, Matthew wanted to argue that many of his own religious leaders colluded too much with the interests of their Roman occupiers. And more specifically, that even knowledge of their own scriptures was not enough to lead them to worship Jesus. The actual history during Jesus’ day and later in Matthew’s time is more complicated than that. But his essential argument that just because religious leaders know more about their own tradition does not mean they are more inclined to do the right thing holds true today. And just because science can generate new knowledge does not mean that knowledge will automatically be used for the common good. Just because you know something more doesn’t automatically mean you are going to do more good than someone else. Another warning from the text. Matthew doesn’t want us to be like the religious leaders he critiques.
Matthew wants us to be wary of Herod and power-hungry pharaohs like him, wary of religious leaders and anyone who has knowledge but isn’t guided by it in the just ways Matthew envisions. Matthew wants us to be more like the magi. Now if you were in Jack Hodges’ Advent class I think you might join me in wagering that Jack would be very happy with the way we have handled the magi today. We haven’t called them kings because the text doesn’t call them kings. We haven’t called them wise men because the text doesn’t tell us their genders – so our gender-bending hymn was more accurate than the original.[1] We didn’t call them by the names Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar – those were names that people added later. And the only reason we got the idea there were three magi is because there are three gifts named in the text.
All of those descriptors are distractions from who the magi were. Even some of our modern-day scholarship in my mind is also a distraction from who they are for Matthew and for us. We don’t need to pin down their country of origin or even their specific brand of astrology. What Matthew wants us to see is that the magi were seekers. They were seekers who used their knowledge to lead them toward this most recent revelation of the God they longed to worship. What they knowledge they had, they used to lead them toward greater understanding in service of what is good. What they didn’t yet know they were eager to learn. The Magi were seekers and as the new year rolls around I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to occupy a seeker’s stance. What it means to be confident in what you know without pretending that you know more than what you do. I’ve been contemplating how to maintain that stance in a time when the world seems full of Herods who are only out for themselves, but also full of cynics who think that because Herods are real, then their own efforts to try to do good, or be good don’t matter.
It seems to me that to be like the magi you have to be willing to be on the move a bit – to remain unsettled in the world as you find it. To keep yourself from choosing sides too quickly, preventing yourself from giving your allegiance to what another claims is absolutely true too firmly. There is a kind of openness, grounded in goodness, that I admire in the magi and want to try to aspire to myself.
In the Christian tradition those magi came to represent the revelation of the God of Israel to the Gentiles through Jesus. It’s hard to imagine but in Matthew’s time, the God of Israel was exactly that – the God of and for Israel alone. Non-jews were sort of irrelevant and some might argue still are pretty irrelevant from inside the Jewish tradition today. In the magi, Matthew saw a significant expansion that the apostle Paul had already meditated on extensively. The promise that was made all the way to Abraham – that through him Israel would become a light to all people – that promise was being realized in Jesus the Jew.[2]
The trouble today is that a lot of those Christian Gentile descendents act more like Herod and his religious pawns than the magi. Christians who use their knowledge of their own tradition in the service of unilateral power. Christians who use the power of their privilege in this country to oppress others not to share their light. Christians who are so convinced they have the truth that they’d miss God if she showed up in a stranger, or the hungry, or thirsty, or naked or poor. Sometimes I’m afraid I’d miss God, too, as hard hearted as I’ve become on some days, convinced that there’s not much more than power than corrupts, or leaders caught in insanity loops, or human beings closed to possibility.
On Epiphany rather than viewing God’s revelation only as an historic event to a people who are most of our ancestors, I wonder what it would mean to view it as the enduring truth that God can always be found by those who wish to find him – regardless of their IQ, regardless of their nationality, or their gender or their religious affiliation. This is a God who wants to be found by seekers open to truth that there is much more to life than the will to power over others, there is much more that is possible for those who believe that God is present in the world, there is much more awe and love and grace and freedom available to anyone curious enough to move from the settled stances they occupy to seek what more can be found.
The magi were seekers which doesn’t mean they were politically naive, or unsophisticated about the world in which they traveled. They knew what Herod was up to. They were savvy enough to go home by another road. But somehow they didn’t let their experience of people doing terrible things eliminate their belief that God could be found. They continued to seek God until they found Jesus and with him, great joy, something that Herod and his religious experts likely never found.
As you put away your Christmas decorations for the season, you might want to keep your magi close by. Don’t let Herod or his religious experts rob you of your hope. Don’t let him steal from you your joy. Be like the magi, on the move in search of hope and love and joy that can be found.
[1] On this Sunday we changed the words of “We Three Kings” to “We Three Magi of Orient Are. . .” and the three soloists who were in costume did not all identify as male.
[2] It’s important to make clear that neither Paul nor Matthew are making a supersessionist argument – the heresy that gives religion fuel to anti-Semitism, among other things. Paul’s vision is that the covenant made with the Jews is not abrogated but expanded to include Gentiles. Matthew was lodging an internal critique from within the Jewish faith. He did not imagine that his words might be used by later Christians to condemn Judaism wholesale or argue that Christians were a kind of “new Israel.” That argument is alien to the text and needs to be condemned consistently.
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“He saw me.” That’s the first key line in this story about Jesus and me. As he and his disciples were walking along, he saw me. I had not said anything. I was not a yeller like my buddy Bartimaeus ,whose insistent voice Jesus heard over the crowd. No, he saw me. Now, I know … Continue reading Seeing Beyond Us and Them
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“Michael’s Death”[1] Like so many of you who have shared your experiences of Michael’s death with me, my emotions in these last days have run the gamut. I have felt a deep, deep sorrow for my loss, and for ours – he was not only one of the best organists in the land, an extraordinary … Continue reading “Michael’s Death”
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Clearly some folks didn’t think the new temple compared with the old. Some wept while others shouted with joy. Was it the contemporary music that now sounded in the new temple that disappointed some? Was it the fact that the previous temple had been built with the riches of a beloved monarch, remembered as wise … Continue reading Homecoming Over Time
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“Reading the morning newspaper is the realist’s morning prayer,” the German philosopher Hegel wrote. “One orients one’s attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former [that is, God] gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands.” Hegel was reflecting on the … Continue reading Grounding Our Being
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Jesus is a rotten guest. On his way to eat a meal at the home of a Pharisee he heals yet another person on the Sabbath intending to get a rise out of the experts in the law and the Pharisees. They say nothing, which is particularly charitable given Jesus’ in your face action, yet, … Continue reading The Offensive Grace of God
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“Do you think that I have come to bring peace on earth?” Well, yeah, Jesus. Peace is what the angels said you’d be bringing back in the 2nd chapter of the same book. I don’t like this Jesus very much. I want the one back that we had a couple of weeks ago. The “blessed … Continue reading When the World is So Messed Up that Even God is Stressed Out
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When composer Phoebe Knapp first played her newest, unnamed melody for her good friend, Fanny Crosby, Crosby had an immediate reaction. The music says, “blessed assurance,” Crosby declared. Her feeling about the melody gave rise to one of the most popular hymns ever written. It’s hard to believe now, but emotions hadn’t played much of … Continue reading The Head and the Heart
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“The ante-bellum Negro preacher was the greatest single factor in determining the spiritual destiny of the slave community,” wrote Howard Thurman in his book, Deep River and the Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death. “He it was who gave to the masses of his fellows a point of view that became for them a veritable … Continue reading There Is a Balm
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My dearest daughters,[1] Like both of you, I’m angry at the Supreme Court’s decision this week overturning Roe v Wade. I’m fearful over what this decision could mean for anyone like you who is able to conceive,[2] not only in regards to the right to end a pregnancy but in the possibility that things we took … Continue reading A Letter to My Daughters Following the Supreme Court Decision Overturning Roe v. Wade
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These words seemed to them an idle tale and they did not believe them. Part of the reason they did not believe them is because they were women. Typical misogyny that we’ve had no shortage of seeing in the last several years, or ever. But I bet there’s more than a few of us here … Continue reading An Idle Tale for Prisoners and Others Desiring Freedom
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It was the city that disappointed him. The city, with a habit of rejecting prophets sent to it, according to Luke. Luke makes that point several times. The most outrageous case of this prophet rejection was back in the book of 2 Chronicles when Zechariah ben Jehoida was stoned to death at the command of … Continue reading God Loves
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We’re back online and I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels weary of all the whipsawing! The decision to go online – like so many decisions the church has made through covid – was not clear cut by any means. We desperately need to gather together. So many in our community are craving … Continue reading Home by Another Road
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Maybe that’s why naming God is so difficult for liberal people to do in 2021. We seem to have inherited some dualistic idea that God’s activity is always attached to the purest of human action. So we’ve learned to tell whitewashed, heroic stories about ourselves on the one hand, or tear down any less than perfect action that has been taken on the other, instead of recognizing that God is involved in working light through our messes, our own mixed motives, working good out of what is incomplete in us.
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“Habits of Faith: Proclaiming (I)” One of the hardest things about being a Christian is the embarrassment and offense I experience at the beliefs and actions of other Christians. It seems like every week I’m asked to explain Christian support for misogyny, homophobia, and racism emanating from some Christian pulpit. Or explain why some Christians … Continue reading Habits of Faith: Proclaiming
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When we gather each and every week we are literally gathering around this book. Which is weird. There’s no other area of your life where you would possibly value anything else in a similar fashion. No one goes car shopping and asks to get the oldest beater on the lot. No one goes to the … Continue reading Habits of Faith: Hearing
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The book of James seems so full of contradictions. “Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom” James writes and then goes on to call his listeners murderers and adulterers. The writer calls his own people sinners and double-minded then later pleads with those same people not to … Continue reading Everyday Wisdom
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“Watch your mouth,” my mother said. “If you speak like that again, I’ll wash it out with soap.” Nevertheless, round about age 13, I persisted. I had been used to the smell of Ivory soap for most of my childhood. But the taste was tough to get out of your mouth. It was a very … Continue reading Watch Your Mouth!
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It’s a Brown Memorial kind of scripture fest today. What counts to God, according to Jesus isn’t your ritual acts by themselves. What counts to God is your ethical behavior – the things that come out of your heart and flow into the world: the way you relate to other people. Be doers of the … Continue reading No Rescue in Sight
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David wants to build a house for God, but God doesn’t want David’s help. It’s not that God thinks a house is a bad idea. God says, yeah, I’ll take a house later. I just want your son to build it, not you. Recognizing this inconsistency, some scholars have argued that this part about … Continue reading When God Doesn’t Need Your Help
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It seems ironic that the lectionary passage today speaks of strength through weakness as our nation celebrates Independence Day, a day full of parades, flags, and cookouts. On a day we celebrate the successful victory of our nation over the British Empire, Paul gives us this phrase to ponder: “whenever I am weak, then I … Continue reading Complete Power
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Before I begin my sermon, I want to acknowledge where we are. We are celebrating Pride, Juneteenth, and Father’s Day this weekend as a culture. Narratives around the joy and struggle of this day for lgbtq rights may fill our minds this morning. Narratives around symbolic change, such as a Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday … Continue reading Open Wide (Y)our Heart(s)
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Has anyone heard of the Chinese term revenge bedtime procrastination lately? (1) It has picked up more traffic on Chinese social media lately due to the pandemic. Allow me to describe it to you. It is close to your usual time on a weeknight to get ready for bed. Instead, you do not fall asleep. … Continue reading Those Who Dream … Persevere
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Every single one of us has a money story, whether we are aware of it or not. We might be living a story based on anxiety or guilt. We might be living a story that the church is irrelevant. We might be living a story that our choices will not have any impact on the … Continue reading Our Money Story – Remember
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This parable hits right where it hurts, doesn’t it? I bet you’re thinking, why yes, it does–it brings up all sorts of resistance inside of me, and I don’t understand why you picked such an awful gospel reading this morning. In fact, you might be wondering why in the world Jesus would tell a story … Continue reading Slave to the System
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Introduction: Back in December, Andrew and I began discussing a three-week sermon series on democracy and faith. We were both thinking about how to spiritually prepare and respond as Christians in the weeks leading up to and following the presidential inauguration. I am shocked, but not surprised, that as we start this journey together our … Continue reading Claimed in Public
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Sing: Oh God, you are closer than we are to ourselves. Draw us closer to you. Today is the first Sunday of the season of Lent, our annual forty day spiritual journey into the wilderness where we encounter God and ourselves in meaningful ways. Andrew and I will serve as your travel guides during Lent, … Continue reading Again and Again, God Meets Us
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All those days you felt like dust, like dirt, as if all you had to do was turn your face toward the wind and be scattered to the four corners or swept away by the smallest breath as insubstantial— did you not know what the Holy One can do with dust? The words of Jesus … Continue reading Practice A Holy Lent
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John 3:16 is arguably the most memorized verse in the Bible, and arguably the most misunderstood. It appears, on its own, as if the rest of the dialogue and the story around this single statement of Jesus is the good news in a nutshell. But without the rest of the conversation, this sentence is left … Continue reading Again and Again, God Loves First
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The world has learned to grieve in new ways during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Egypt, family members are not allowed to wash the bodies of their deceased loved ones before burial. In India, mourners cannot have funeral pyres in the Ganges River. Attending a wake and sitting shiva in person are out of the question, … Continue reading Again and Again, the Sun Rises
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Two weeks ago, I was in Mount Hood National Forest with my father in law in Oregon. As we hiked, we saw trillium in bloom, smelled the unmistakable scent of skunk cabbage, and heard the sound of water rushing over the rocks of the Salmon River. But what struck me the most about this hike … Continue reading Jesus Is Our Nurselog
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The story of the first man and woman in the book of Genesis has generated significant confusion and spiritual trauma because of poor interpretation. Among this laundry list of sins are societal evils such as misogyny, queerphobia, and religious manipulation. Church leaders have blamed Eve for introducing sin into the world and destroying the bliss … Continue reading Where Are You?
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The winds howl, the tongues of fire descend – I can feel those Marvel-esque superpowers about to descend on those disciples so they can change the world! Send us that Spirit that can shake the rafters, blow through the streets, upend systemic oppression, clean house and our hearts. Come on Holy Spirit. We need that Pentecost … Continue reading Pentecostal Power
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When was the last time you felt loved? It’s an uncomfortable question yet it’s the one that many people come back to when they are honest with their therapist, or their partner, or their parent, or their friend. It’s often on the hearts of those whose deathbeds I have visited. It’s on the minds of … Continue reading Shared Love
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It’s proving hard for some of us to surrender to the season of Lent this year. “It feels like we’ve been living in Lent already,” one of you said last week to the nods that, even on Zoom, were vigorous and clear. Perhaps that’s what I had been telling myself last Monday when I chose … Continue reading Listening. . .Again and Again
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Are you prepared to deal with the depth of God’s irresponsible generosity? God’s willingness to forgive the unforgivable person. The liar who God sees is more than the sum of their lies? The cheater who God sees as more than the sum of their cheating? The white nationalist who God sees as more than just … Continue reading The Purpose of Politics
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God’s answer to a time of national calamity – at a critical time when some religious and political leaders have lost their way – God’s answer is to raise up new leaders. To raise them up – children and fishermen, marginalized women and people outside of acceptable groups – to raise them up for a … Continue reading Call and Recruit
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Do the magi really believe Herod that he wants to pay homage to this newborn king? We do not know. But we know that Herod wants this knowledge in order to eliminate this new threat to his reign. Knowledge is power. On this, king and magi seem to agree. Yet Herod and the magi approach … Continue reading Those Who Dream . . .Persevere
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The day after I got out of jail back in 2007, the late Rev. Marian Bascom called me and asked me to lunch. I was worried. I had only been in Baltimore for a few years and our relationship was new. Though he had taken to calling me “young buck,” which I had interpreted as … Continue reading Calling on the Saints
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Every year at stewardship season, I lose sleep over the budget. I’ve tried not to, but I do, because every year for the past 7-8 we come up a little short which means I have to face telling committee chairs and staff to cut back and/or the Session takes a little more from our endowment … Continue reading Our Money Story – Restore
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The widow gives away everything she has – the model for pure generosity. Jesus lifts her up as the example to follow. That’s the way most of us have heard this text. But while Jesus might be impressed by her faithfulness, he’s not celebrating this moment. He’s pointing out how corrupt the whole temple system … Continue reading Our Money Story – Reimagine
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Like all money stories, my own was rooted in something much deeper than money. My grandparents lived through the depression. The grandparent who lived on a farm in SC knew real hunger, scarcity, and the fear that came from it. She made it her life’s goal to insulate herself and her children from it, by … Continue reading Our Money Story – Release
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Jonah is a prophet who does not want his job. Since we’re stepping in midstream, here is the quick version. He receives a direct command from God to preach to the Gentiles in Nineveh, and he refuses to go. He takes off on a ship going the opposite direction, gets caught in a storm at … Continue reading Nineveh, Anger, and Us
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Everybody needs a good hero. People who rise to the historical moment. People who say and do the right things when the pressure is on and the right things aren’t easy. People to look up to. So it’s disappointing to discover that few change-agents in history were consistently right in their values or ideology. Ibram … Continue reading Messy Midwifery on the Way toward Justice
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It’s hard to believe that Jesus – our model for inclusion – actually compares this Canaanite woman and her child to dogs. -Calls them dogs because they are not part of his religious/ethnic group. We can do what we can to make the best of Jesus’ insult – Maybe he was tired from his 40 … Continue reading The God Who Listens
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We watched the horror movie, “Alien,” while on vacation this week. To understand how I got two teenagers to watch a 1979 classic starring Sigourney Weaver with 1979-quality special effects, you only have to know that the 2018 Marvel Movie, Avengers: Infinity War makes reference to it early in the film. That was … Continue reading Name Calling
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The chickens have come home to roost for Jacob. Having tricked his father out of the blessing that belongs to his older brother, aided by the shrewd assistance of his mother, Jacob finds himself blessed and therefore stressed, not the equation we normally celebrate, but the more common one we find in the … Continue reading Blessed and Stressed
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Over the last ten weeks, we journeyed through our sermon series together, “Unraveled: Seeking God When Our Plans Fall Apart.” We have walked alongside Jewish refugees in Babylon, the apostle Paul, the gathered church on Pentecost, the suffering and faithful Job, the Samaritan woman at the well, and many others. We began this series partway … Continue reading If We Open Up Our Hands
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Please note, footnotes do not transfer into the HTML versions of our sermons. Please refer to the PDF copies below for all citations. Because of policies of Pharaoh, Hebrew boys were more at risk than their Egyptian counterparts. Like every social inequality, if you want to understand how this came to be, you have to … Continue reading Dismantling Pharaoh’s Systems, One Brick at a Time
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Please note: We discovered recently that footnotes do not carry over from our some of of our word processors into the HTML (text) publications of our sermons. Until we rectify this situation, please refer to all pdf copies of sermon for full attributions. As part of our training, many Presbyterian clergy have to complete a … Continue reading The Humor of our Situation
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The “Jesus was a feminist who liberated women from misogynistic Judaism” school of interpretation has become so mainstream that it’s tough to engage this text today as it is instead of as we’ve heard it to be. Chances are you’ve heard that school of interpretation so often that it doesn’t even seem like interpretation anymore. … Continue reading Ready to Relate
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Here we are, again. The Israelites are back to wandering through the Near East, this time as prisoners of war in exile. The Babylonian Empire ransacked Jerusalem and took the Israelites with them back to their capitol, Babylon. This was a common practice in ancient empires as it allowed their leaders to exercise control of … Continue reading Needful Facts
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Unclean spirits and demons were a real problem in the 1st century. Though you could not see those dastardly demons, they had terrible, tangible effects. They took over a person’s identity, disconnecting them from their true self, defacing the goodness that is at the core of every human being. So powerful were these demons that … Continue reading Exorcism in America
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Pentecost is here–the one Sunday a year when the Church lets the Holy Spirit out of the closet to join the rest of the Trinity. The Sunday that is sometimes referred to as “the birthday of the church,” because it is the day we celebrate the arrival of the Holy Spirit and the anointing of … Continue reading This is Us. This is America. This is Pentecost.
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There Peter is with his fellow disciples on the sea, their tiny boat tossed back and forth, tortured by the waves, the wind howling all around them – and Peter wants to get out of the boat. “Lord, if it’s you, command me to come to you on the water.” This isn’t Jesus’ idea. He … Continue reading Stepping Out
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Nobody wants a God who can come into your life at any moment and flip you upside down. It doesn’t matter whether you are liberal, conservative, whatever gender, whatever race, whatever age – we prefer a God who settles down the chaos of our lives, not stirs it all up. I bet there are more … Continue reading Unlikely Conversions
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Phyllis Trible, feminist biblical scholar, says that “the Bible is a pilgrim wandering through history to merge past and present.” I’d venture to say that we, too, are pilgrims wandering trying to merge the past of this biblical text with our current time and place. So when we are confronted with the ugliness of the … Continue reading Love in Public
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The Book of Job is dramatic fiction, scholars tell us, which is a relief if you know anything about this story. Job is the most righteous man on the planet, prompting Satan to choose him for his double blind study to see if he can prove that people only obey God when they get something … Continue reading Inscrutable Love
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Dramatic Gospel Reading Luke 24:13-35 Rev. Michele Ward, Shirley Parry, Bonnie & Elden Schneider Michele: The Gospel reading comes from the book of Luke. Listen now for the Word of God. Michele: Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with … Continue reading On the Road
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I know it’s a mistake to read every text through the lens of COVID-19 but this one made that approach especially difficult. Last week Jesus was the perfect poster child for the public health campaign. “Do not hold onto me,” he told Mary Magdalene, who was not doing a very good job keeping her social distance. But public health Jesus falls apart this week. He enters someone else’s house (not permitted) and breathes on the disciples. Then he comes back the following week and has people sticking their dirty hands in his open wounds. Everything in me just wants to scream, “Coronavirus! Coronavirus!”
But public health problems aside, it’s comforting to see that one week after Easter, the disciples are stuck, like us, behind closed doors wondering, like us, if Easter made any difference. “A week later,” the text says, “Jesus’ disciples were again in the house.” It’s groundhog’s day for them all over again. The only thing different for them from last week is that Thomas, who was absent when the resurrected Christ first made an appearance, is now with them. He had been absent last week on Easter when the disciples were in the same place, behind locked doors for fear of the authorities. The text actually says for fear of the Jews, but by now many of us know that “fear of the Jews” is the author’s community talking. Historically this phrase wouldn’t make sense since all the people locked behind the doors were also Jews. The fear of those Easter evening disciples must have been fear that what happened to Jesus at the hands of the state could happen to them.
It’s important to remember that fear before we start talking about Thomas and his doubt. Those early disciples weren’t having purely intellectual conversations from the comfort of their armchairs. Do you believe or not believe that Jesus was this or that from a safe, philosophical distance. Following Jesus – believing in his authority and his way – came with potential costs – suffering and possibly death. Belief wasn’t casual. It was life or death. Thomas seemed to catch on to this early in his time with Jesus. He only speaks three times in the New Testament, all three times in John’s Gospel. The first is on the way to the tomb of Lazarus. Jesus, speaking of the death of his friend says “For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe.” Thomas, retorts, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” Death has been on Thomas’ mind early on and he seems skeptical that the Jesus way is going to win.
The second time is again in reference to that line between death and life at the last supper. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus tells his troubled disciples. “Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. 4 And you know the way to the place where I am going.” But Thomas is the kid who asks the questions that everybody wants to know but is afraid to ask. “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”
I’ve heard it suggested that Thomas’ problem is that he doesn’t believe Mary Magdalene. She is the first witness to the resurrected Christ and the first preacher proclaiming resurrection hope. But by the time Thomas says “unless I see Jesus for myself, I won’t believe,” every one of the disciples is testifying to the risen Christ. I think Thomas’ problem is not really a problem to most of us. It’s a virtue. We’ve learned to question the way subjective experience is presented as objective fact. We’ve learned that kind of skepticism for good reason. It’s so obvious during this Coronavirus pandemic that we barely have to name it. We can all see the way a rumor that people of color can’t catch the coronavirus can put people of color more at risk on top of the structural racism that already leaves people of color, as a whole, more vulnerable to the virus. We can all see the way neglecting data early on, left our nation and others ill prepared for the reality that has come. As our fossil fueled economy rests, we all see the way climate change denials have left the planet in some hot water that we’ll be dealing with for generations to come.
We’ve learned how to be skeptical of claims to truth that aren’t backed up by data to support it. Few of us would want to criticize Thomas for that. We want to commend him for it. Yet Thomas’ “seeing is believing” approach doesn’t necessarily lead to the whole truth.
There are some truths that we can’t see in the conventional sense. Cyrus Habib knows this. The young lieutenant Governor of the state of Washington trekked up Mount Kilimanjaro last year to fulfill a lifelong dream. He made it to the top which would impress some people, since Habib has been blind since the age of 8. But the impressive part to me was Habib’s description of what he experienced. “You feel it,” Habib told Frank Bruni of the New York Times. “You feel the whole world dropping away. I have a sense of spatiality, based on acoustics and maybe even other types of senses that I can’t scientifically describe. I can feel when I’m in a huge cathedral. I can feel when I’m in a small bedroom.” At the top of Kilimanjaro, he said, “It felt to me like I was on the moon, because of the thinness of the air. You’re kind of high — lightheaded — and you feel this sense of vastness that’s not just around you but also below you. You can feel it in your body.” There are some things that can’t be “seen” with conventional sight.
Yet individual sight of any kind can be misleading for yet another reason. We have to use our brains to interpret and weigh what we are “seeing.” Some would say that is exactly the problem with some of our more inept leaders who trust what they see with their own eyes more than what the data tells them. “The apparatus that sees the world is over 400 million years old,” one social psychologist told a reporter recently. “The prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that comprehends projection models from the C.D.C. — is maybe 2.5 million years old. That’s brand-new, in evolutionary terms. It’s still in beta testing.” And yet this is the part of the brain that we need the most in addressing the very things that we can’t see such as climate change, and viruses that attack the body long before we see its effects. Seeing, it turns out, might lead to belief, but it doesn’t necessarily make that belief any more accurate.
So how are we to differentiate between beliefs that we should only hold when we see with our own individualized ways of “seeing” and those that we may only see through the testimony of others? John’s Gospel answered the question by saying, the whole purpose of writing this book is so that you can believe through what others have seen. You can believe that Jesus was the presence of the divine in flesh and blood through the testimony of others. But the very existence of this book, created at the time when Jews who believed Jesus was Messiah were banned from the synagogue also raises questions about this approach. Obviously many other people did not believe in the testimony of others. Testimony was not enough for everyone. It may still not be enough for some of us.
Rather than viewing Thomas as a problem to be solved, a doubter that the church should be in the business of converting, I wonder if it’s better to think about Thomas as that doubting part of us, the fabric of our being. As a grieving friend who is also a minister wrote to me recently, “I trust that God is the renewing force in the scientific processes all around us. I also believe weird woo woo spirit heaven things are real and matter and somehow find me when I am in the midst of a ‘maybe it’s all horse crap’ moment. I have no patience for anyone who is certain about either extreme though. I can handle poets and music and kids and birds.” I love the way my friend, in testifying to the reality of God’s searching presence, also acknowledges that possibility that this faith business could all be crap. It’s almost like she knows that trying to silence any one of those voices – the scientific skeptic or the new agey mystic, would not only be unsuccessful, it would rob us of our humanness. That essential curiosity and desire to know truth impossibly weaved together with our sense that there is a love that finds our impossibly small selves in the universe. A truth that our infant brains just aren’t big enough to behold.
“The reasonable [person] says in his head, ‘There is no other life after this,’ but only the wicked says it in [their] heart.” So said the Spanish philosopher Michael Unamuno describing that essential truth that the very things we cannot prove rationally may still be truth that drives our life, that gives us purpose. “Since the wicked [person] is possibly only a [person] who has been driven to despair, will a human God condemn them because of their despair? Their despair alone is misfortune enough.”
I’d rather live, rationally yes, trusting with my friend, that God is working through the scientific process. Flattening the curve makes sense because someone discovered that math could describe a reality and the description of that reality could help save lives. God gave us brains and someone used theirs to invent statistics and others applied it to help us stay safe together. I want leaders who listen to public health data rather than their own two eyes just as I believe with all my heart that the doctors and nurses in our hospitals who have gone to school to gain wisdom about our bodies are the healers that God has sent to us now.
And at the very same time, there are some kinds of realities that we don’t have understanding, knowledge, or language to describe. Chief among them is the experience of God’s visitation, God’s presence planted so deep in my soul, the sense of God’s love watching over us yes, but in a personal, particular way. A sustaining love that I do not understand and probably never will. Love that gets to us behind every door that we try to lock for our own self-protection, showing us that while we can never erase our wounds, it is possible to live with them. A presence that evokes faith, not in some defensive sense of needing to prove anything to others, but a trust that life is good, that I am enough for the tasks and the life to which God calls me only because God has declared this to be true.
I’m in good company with many of you who have, at different points in your life journeys, expressed something similar, and also with Cyrus Habib. That young lieutenant governor on the rise in Washington State politics stunned many when he announced last month that he wouldn’t be running for reelection this November. Instead, he’d be joining the Jesuit priesthood. Habib saw that the celebrity culture of politics is a never ending river that carries people along whether it’s still good for them or not. There’s always the next pillar to climb up on. That’s true for most good things in life. “That can-do, can-overcome mentality is fantastic and can get you far,” Habib said in the interview. “But if hardened into an ideology of its own, it can crowd God out, because it makes you into a kind of god and says: ‘I’m not a contingent creature. I’m completely independent.’”
He says his decision has nothing to do with the current crisis. But Frank Bruni observes that it does “reflect the sort of moral inventory that many people conduct at a time of great suffering, the type of spiritual epiphany they experience in the face of terrifying uncertainty.” The truth that even as something naked to the eye attacks us all, something greater is at work within and beyond us.
I know this is a difficult time for many of us. The difficulties are likely to multiply. All the more reason to remember those early disciples, behind locked doors, grieving their losses and the shattering of their own world. There God found them. There God gave them a peace in an odd way beyond understanding. May the wounded love of God find you, too.
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Easter feels very different this year. No smell of lillies wafting through the sanctuary, no robed worship leaders. The only brass-tinged choirs we’ll hear are recordings from the past and I’m preaching in the living room to myself. That’s not weird. It’s not all bad, of course. We’ve seen again what generations of Jesus followers have told us – that the church is not a building; the church is not a business; the church is not a thing. The church is God’s people, connected in phone calls and zoom worship and actions of compassion and justice and care undertaken mostly now from home, the best most of us can do to preserve the lives of our neighbors and those heroic health care workers on the front lines. The body of Christ is alive in the world even and perhaps especially when the world shuts down.
But on Easter we have to acknowledge that we’re all putting on a good face. Sitting at home is no substitute for being together. Recorded music is no substitute for a choir singing their hearts out on Eastern morn. Passing the Peace across computer screens is no substitute for a warm and welcoming embrace. All this while the healers amongs us take care of thousands of fellow human beings who are sick, struggling to live, and we all worry about the financial future. To state the obvious, this is not the Easter we planned. It is not the Easter we hoped for. It is not the Easter we would choose if we had the power to make it so. Easter morning this year includes its own bit of loss, Easter’s own little death.
Acknowledging the obvious must be important since that’s the first thing the resurrected Christ cajoles Mary Magdalene into doing at the tomb. “Woman, why are you weeping?” Jesus already knows the answer to the question. She’s weeping because he’s dead. She’s weeping because she saw this person that she loved executed and that trauma doesn’t just go away. She prepared his body for burial with her own hands. She’s weeping because she’s grieving. There’s no question in my mind that Jesus already knows this. So why does he ask her this question?
It could be that Jesus is more of a prankster than we care to acknowledge, pretending to be the gardener just so he can screw with Mary. This isn’t the first time that Jesus seems to mess with grieving people at dead-end tombs. As we heard a few weeks ago, when he learned that his dear friend, Lazarus was sick he waited two critical days before going to see him. He let him die, he let the people who loved Lazarus grieve rather than rush there to save him. Maybe Jesus is just like any other prankster you might see on social media these days. The guy who asks his sibling, “What sound does a whale make?” before spitting water in his sister’s face, or the girl who puts her hoodie on backward so she can stand in the refrigerator and scare the mess out of her mom. Maybe Jesus is more of a prankster than we care to admit. The worst kind of prankster – dishing out the most terrible April Fools joke you’ve ever seen for his own personal enjoyment.
But I wonder if Jesus asks Mary the obvious question because he wants Mary to take a closer look at her own grief. To pay deeper attention to the nature of that loss. What, specifically, are you grieving, Mary? What is at the root of your loss? Is it fear of facing the world without your teacher, your friend? Is it the uncertainty of what’s next for you? Is it the hunger for that person who knows you better than you know yourself? Or is it knowing that you will have to fill the gaps that he left? Why do you weep? Mary, for her part, isn’t in any mood to be analyzing her grief. She’s been grieving for days at this point. And, anyway, she doesn’t have time to engage, much less answer the question, because one sentence later her grief comes to a screeching halt as she recognizes that the man questioning her is Jesus himself.
“Rabbouni!” Mary says in Aramaic, reaching out, as people with affection for one another do, as Mary must have done so many times, to embrace her teacher and her friend. But Jesus stops her – “Do not hold onto me because I have not yet ascended to the Father.” “Don’t touch me,” literally, in the Greek. It’s an astonishing command for a number of reasons not the least of which Jesus never says anything like this anywhere else. He does say “do not” a lot in John’s Gospel. “Do not be astonished,” “do not sin anymore,” do not be afraid,” “do not let your hearts be troubled.” But never “do not hold onto me.”
It’s an astonishing prohibition to offer to a loved one who has been grieving someone’s absence. Imagine a military parent arriving home from a tour of duty saying to their children, “Do not hold onto me.” Imagine a spouse returning from near death virus treatment in isolation saying to their loved one, “do not hold onto me.” Imagine any scenario where someone was presumed dead, reappearing to their loved one only to say in the midst of this kind of overwhelming joy, “don’t touch me.”
Holding on to Jesus is Mary’s first instinct upon seeing her teacher and her friend and Jesus rules it out with a rationale that is the opposite of what I would expect. “Do not hold onto me because I have not yet gone up to the Father?” No, no that’s the opposite of what I would expect. Hug me now because I have not yet gone to God. Embrace me now because I have not yet departed. Hold onto me now because I’m only here for a little longer.
But you see that kind of rationale – Mary’s rationale to hold onto Jesus – the one that I have shared – the one that we have typically shared at Easter – is built on the assumption that resurrection means that everything can go back to the way it was before. That Jesus can return home with Mary and the disciples and get back to the way things were before they all saw him nailed to the tree. That death – the ultimate in social distancing – is ended by resurrection once and for all. As if resurrection relieves us from having to walk through loss, grief, betrayal, hurt, injustice – all those things that the disciples experienced before.
Mary tries to move quickly past the loss, pushed there by profoundly good news. It’s the same way we’ve all treated Easter for centuries. Resurrection is the antidote to our grief. Resurrection offers protection against all loss. We can forget Golgotha, forget the agony of our Lord, forget the loss of hope, forget the pain of loving. Resurrection is one big eraser on the whiteboard of painful living.
And yet the first Easter wasn’t like that at all. I don’t just mean the live instruments, and the food, and the hullabaloo. I mean the joy didn’t completely erase the pain. The good news didn’t completely snuff out the bad. The reality of Jesus’ reappearance didn’t relieve the disciples of their next assignment which would be carried out without Jesus leading them in the way he had led them before, which in the midst of great joy is its own little loss.
Easter doesn’t take us back to life the way it was before, it takes us forward into the life God wants to give to us now. Easter doesn’t undo death, it provides a pathway through it, beyond it. Easter doesn’t silence grief, it refuses to allow it to have the only word. Easter doesn’t undo everything that’s been done, it makes joy possible where it wasn’t possible before. Easter doesn’t nullify the past; Easter is God transforming it into something new, which I think comes as a disappointment to some of us.
We want new life without any death. We want Easter Sunday without Good Friday. We want the fairy tale Easter with bunnies that never lose their bounce. Even some of our visions of heaven sound a lot more like recreating the past than receiving a future that God wants to give to us. Jesus – making life great again. We want to go backward to what we knew and I’m afraid the church’s celebrations in the past may have contributed toward this kind of fantasy of a faith that is defined by the absence of pain rather than the presence of God’s love. The presence of God’s powerful love that can transform the worst of what we do and the worst of what has been done into new life.
Which means, dear church that we should not be surprised if Easter brings its own kind of loss for us this year. The grief of recognizing that the new life that Jesus promises, delivers less than what we hoped for and asks more from us than we likely expected to give. And maybe this is why Jesus wanted Mary to pay a little more attention to her own grief. Because he knows that resurrection comes within grief. New life comes out of the center of death. Not around it. In the center of it. If we look more closely there, we might begin to see what new life is coming.
It’s like Kate Bowler, the 30-something young mom and church sociologist with stage 4 cancer said recently in an interview. “We’re learning right now in isolation what interdependence feels like and what a gift it is. And the more we’re apart, the more we realize how much we need each other.” New life is being seen in the loss. “We’re allowed to be like beautifully, stupidly needy right now,” Kate Bowler says. “We’re allowed to FaceTime people and be like, I feel like a mess, and all I want to do is be loved.” Pay attention to your loss – life begins again in the middle of it.
And as disappointing as that may be – to discover that resurrection doesn’t take us back to the way things were before, I’m more and more glad about it. When this social isolation ends, we cannot go back to the way things were before. We’ve seen too much to make us want to go back. This pandemic has unveiled the way our deep inequalities leave those with wealth much more protected than those without. It’s unveiled a nation, in the words of the NY Times, “in which professional basketball players could be rapidly tested for the coronavirus but health care workers were turned away; in which the affluent could retreat to the safety of second homes, relying on workers who can’t take paid sick leave to deliver food; in which children in lower-income households struggle to connect to the digital classrooms where their school lessons are now supposed to be delivered. . .a nation in which local officials issuing stay-at-home orders must reckon with the cruel irony that hundreds of thousands of Americans do not have homes.” I don’t want to go back to that world. That world needs to die – so we can welcome the one that could come after it.
Pay attention to your grieving, I can hear Jesus saying. Look at it more deeply because it’s there where new life needs to come. In fact, the seeds for new life are already there, right there in the losses. We can all see that we need a world where health care is a basic human right. We can all see that it’s not good for anyone when half a million Americans are homeless on a given night. We can take a closer look and learn that if individual income had kept pace with overall economic growth since 1970, Americans in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution would be making an extra $12,000 per year, on average – a game changer in this coronavirus fight. The seeds for new life can be seen in the death that we see all around. Pay attention.
Pay attention, because the hardest reality on Easter is that Jesus isn’t going to fix it for us. We can’t hold onto him to make everything right. He won’t let us. That’s what he tells Mary. Go and tell everyone that I’m alive and I’m leaving. Which sounds a lot to me like, “you don’t have to be afraid of anything now and it’s up to you to go and tell the world what you’ve seen. That’s all Mary does. She runs and tells the disciples “I have seen the Lord!” the first sermon by the church, that original group of disciples who run around looking for evidence of God’s presence in the world and name it. And there is no shortage of that kind of good news in our world today. The doctors and nurses heroically caring for the sick – teaching us what courageous love looks like. We can name that. The countless numbers of people who have checked in on their elder, homebound neighbors showing us what loving your neighbor looks like – we can name that. The teachers who have gone above and beyond the call of duty to make sure their kids not only get an education, but get fed – we name that. The chaplains praying at the bedsides of their corona sick, the priests dying as they bury their Italian dead – we see it and celebrate it. And some leaders at state and local levels – Democrats and Republicans – who have shown us again that the best kind of leadership is the kind that puts people first. It must be named.
That’s the assignment to all disciples of Jesus. Name the power of God’s life when we see it so that when the world shifts in a way that no one ever thought possible, people have a chance to choose life once again. When the world shifts, we all have a chance to choose God’s way of the common good above any ideology, the way of liberation above any tyrant, the way of love above any fear that gets in the way. When the veil is torn exposing the systems that have guided us and directed us and snookered us, we won’t go back to the way things were. We will see the new life that God wants to give to us – abundant life – and we will choose it. We’ll fight for it. If necessary, we’ll die trying to live for it.
Easter feels very different this year. It is not the Easter we planned. It is not the Easter we hoped for. It is not the Easter we would choose if we had the power to make it so. But with the fear of death so present, and the reality of our world’s deficits so apparent, and with signs of new life that we already see in the middle of our endings, this Easter may be closer to the first one than we have ever experienced.
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