Scripture appointed for the 5th Sunday of Easter includes Acts 11:1-18; Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35
If religion has a public relations problem, it may be the perception that religion takes the raw produce of spirituality and processes it into institutional cooking. Takes, that is, the sparkling dance of human spirit and divine Spirit and puts it in a box, trying either to preserve it or to tame it.
What the soul dislikes and protests is the turning-hard and unyielding of what is by its nature soft and fluid. The Church’s doctrine, worship, and leadership can trap the soul like a bee in amber, like a fern planked in the shale of a fossil.
And when this happens, as seems too likely and too frequent, the Church’s concept of its work and mission may be to serve itself rather than the world. Its point of fascination may become more a looking for God’s presence in the Church than a recognizing of God’s presence in the world.
These risks are inherent in the very root of the word. “Religare” in Latin is “to bind back”, as in staking a sapling to grow straight. A close English word, new to me, is religate (the emphasis is on its second syllable), meaning to tie—to sew up—a vein that is bleeding.
Why mention that? Because human needs play a large role in shaping religious practice and experience. “Religare” is just what’s needed when we’re being blown about by life, or when we’re bleeding out, feeling drained dry.
So the first definition of religion in the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is: “a state of life bound by religious vows, the condition of belonging to a religious order.”
Bound, order, belonging, vow… these are powerful words that may evoke mixed feelings as you hear them. Consider just one of them: bound.
A swaddled infant may feel secure, a sick person may take to his bed—but we want neither of these bindings to be permanent. Respect boundaries because, like good fences, they can make for good neighbors—but misuse binding laws to regulate the crossing of boundaries and, as we see in Arizona, you threaten the basis of a free society. Bind a sapling to a stake to help it grow straight, but when it comes into its own, cut that cord and pull that stake. Celebrate the binding-together of two people in holy matrimony as they become one—but what’s to be celebrated when one oppresses the other, or when one neglects the other?
In religion, as in all forms of culture, customs bind people to keep doing certain things in certain ways. There may be good reasons for this repetition. What is familiar may help us feel comforted, centered, put back together again. What is done faithfully may confirm our confidence and help unite us to God. And there are bad reasons for repetition in our practice of religion. Unexamined habit, prejudice, superstition, and ignorance explain some customs that bind people in their religion.
The story of Peter’s vision takes us to a time when the first Christians expected that what they were doing in following Jesus as Lord would make their age-old religion freer, more powerful, better at fulfilling the law and the prophets. They were eager to help God renew their religion, but they did not expect God to create a new religion: the council of apostles in Jerusalem, nearly all the original team hand-picked by Jesus, were quite certain that God expected them to keep observing the basic customs and requirements of the old law belonging to the old religion.
It appears that Peter was slowly parting company with them. Last Sunday, we heard the story of his raising Tabitha from her deathbed. Tucked into that story is the detail that in Greek her name was Dorcas. What sounds like a footnote is big news: Peter has just ministered the healing grace of God to a Greek lady, there in the port city of Joppa, where ships from many countries docked. This report might have made the apostles nervous on two counts: by tradition, he wasn’t supposed to be alone with a woman not related to him, and he wasn’t supposed to be associating with Gentiles.
“Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” the apostles press him, responding to yet another report of Peter’s missionary work. Peter was pushing the Jesus movement outside the Jewish religion, and the apostles didn’t yet know that this could be God’s doing.
Peter explains his actions by describing a vision he had, there in Joppa. This took real chutzpah, standing before the apostolic council that he belonged to, saying to them, “I think you’re too rigid, and here’s why: I had a vision.”
What he saw was like an inverted parachute being lowered from heaven, containing all sorts of birds, animals, and reptiles which were not lawful to eat, according to the laws of the old religion. Someone’s voice calls to him, “Rise, Peter, kill and eat!”
Is that Jesus’s voice? Peter calls him “Lord”. But on the heels of this vision, Peter says that the Spirit of God spoke to him, and in the New Testament sometimes the Holy Spirit is called “Lord”. Either way, the apostles’ eyebrows are up to their hairline as they hear all this, for Peter is insisting that God has directed him to preach the Gospel to Gentiles outside the old religion, and when Peter obeyed, the Spirit of God was poured out on those Greeks just as it had been given to the apostles.
Now, if one visionary experience isn’t enough for us today, we get two. In our second reading we hear the famous story of the revelation to John the Seer on the island of Patmos. He sees a new heaven and a new earth, and the holy city of God coming down from heaven prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
How often is it that you and I hear about new paradigms, and the imperative to think outside the box? Social networking has reached even our older generations (who knows, it may even reach me some day). Conferences are held and columns written about the impact of social networking on the Church’s life and mission.
We have set loose, this spring, a new Website for St. John’s, a thing of real beauty as well as a bearer of information and inspiration. We’re showing it after worship, this Sunday and the next two, on the big screen in the library.
“See, I am making all things new,” says the voice from God’s throne in John’s vision.
Don’t these two vision stories make you wonder how the Christian religion could get so bound-up in doctrine, tradition, and social attitude? Doesn’t the Spirit of God constantly move where it wills? Aren’t we required to learn, not just how the Spirit moved in times long past, but how that Spirit moves right now?
“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.” That’s Jesus speaking to his home team, the same ones who years later would grill Peter for stepping out of bounds by loving too freely, too broadly, too indiscriminately.
“The Spirit told me not to make a distinction between them and us,” Peter responds.
Peter gets it, comprehends how radical this new commandment is, and forever will be. Peter, who cringed by the seashore when, three times, the risen Jesus Christ asked him, “Do you love me?” And three times Jesus instructed him, “Then show it by feeding my lambs, by tending my flock, by feeding my sheep.”
Peter no longer needs to cringe.
He recognizes the sovereignty of God’s love and bears the freedom and the burden of being bound to the Spirit whose mission field is the world.
This Spirit who teaches not to make distinctions between “them and us” needs to be heard and followed as this nation finds just ways to reform immigration law.
This Spirit who would unite them and us calls political parties to reach across the aisle and the sad history that divide them.
In this tragic decade of terrorism and counter-terrorism, this Spirit is calling all people to learn to walk in the way of understanding.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Celebrating Earth Day's 40th
Scripture appointed for the 4th Sunday of Easter includes Acts 9:36-43; Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:22-30
Forty years ago last Thursday, the first Earth Day was observed. I was 23 and completing my first year in seminary in Manhattan, and I’m pretty sure Earth Day happened without me. It’s sobering to admit that 40 years later, Earth Day has happened without me, again. First, I was busy as a student; 40 years later, I was busy as a priest.
At Compline Thursday night, I chanted in place of the usual collect a thanksgiving for the created order, complete with the richness of mountains, the songs of birds, and the loveliness of flowers. At least the twenty of us gathered that night nodded liturgically to Earth Day, and some of them very likely kept the day more intentionally than I did.
It’s not for lack of persuasion or passion, my yearly tendency to catch Earth Day out of my rear view mirror. I applaud all that has happened on campuses and in schools, in board rooms and legislative chambers, and in churches and at kitchen tables to raise conscious care for this fragile earth, our island home.
I admire in particular our neighboring congregation, the First Congregational Church, for their systemic commitment to ecological education and action, and other area initiatives such as Williamstown’s COOL project.
It’s not as if we’re dormant here. The gas furnace we installed, several years ago, is a model of clean-burning high technology. Charles Bonenti has championed the replacement of incandescent and old-fashioned fluorescent lighting, not everywhere in these old buildings, but we’re more that way than not. Stuart Crampton single-handedly trucks our recycling results to the landfill. Since installing the galley kitchen, we’ve moved from paper to china. Motion sensors, light sensors, and timers govern our outdoor lighting. Automatic light controls in our church school rooms drive us nuts as they operate with a mind of their own, telling us we’re not there when we know darn well we are… but we’ll figure that out, in time, and we’re glad to be making progress. Soon, we’ll make more when we actually reduce our footprint, removing the old curate’s apartment, cutting the waste of heating and lighting space we’re confident we don’t need (and creating parking we know we do need).
Would we have taken these steps in a life without Earth Day, without minds and hearts and imaginations wakened to responsibility? I don’t believe so. And that tells me that Earth Day deserves a 40th that celebrates achievement, both local and national.
Our story resembles that of the disciple Tabitha. We’ve been raised from our deathbed. And it has taken apostolic zeal to achieve that.
To achieve what? Associated Press journalist Seth Borenstein answers: “Forty years later… smog levels nationwide have dropped by about a quarter, lead levels in the air are down more than 90 percent. Formerly fetid lakes and burning rivers are now open to swimmers…” and are habitat again for loons and herons. These improvements took shape in the form of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and changes in the way businesses treat the environment—reforms that grew out of the first Earth Day, 1970. Some would say that this is the most powerful, sweeping, society-wide change America has made since the New Deal.
The need for such change was dramatic in the months leading up to Earth Day 1970. Cleveland’s main river, the Cuyahoga, caught fire every now and again. An epic oil spill contaminated 30 miles of Southern California beaches.
Now, Borenstein says, “The challenges to the planet today are largely invisible—and therefore tougher to tackle.”
He quotes William Ruckelshaus, first head of the Environmental Protection Agency: “What we’ve done is shift from the very visible kinds of issues to those that are a lot more subtle today.”
Since 1970, carbon dioxide levels in the air are up by 19%, raising the average annual world temperature by one degree Fahrenheit, reports the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them…”
We encounter those words at funerals and hear them describing heaven. Consider them describing God’s new creation, the universal renewal of life that God is accomplishing in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.
And the metaphor the Church gives us on this Sunday in Eastertide is that of the shepherd. We are to understand God’s universal renewal of life requiring the tenacious responsibility of Jesus Christ the Good Shepherd, the brave guardian who will battle wolves and frustrate thieves to fulfil his promise to his flock, “You will never perish. No one will snatch you out of my hand.”
Let’s not be too busy at other things to hear an Earth Day application of this metaphor: We who belong to Jesus Christ the Good Shepherd have his care by listening to his voice and doing what he calls us to do. He calls us to his mission, the universal renewal of life. He asks us to share his own passionate responsibility for the whole shimmering orb of life that God has placed in his hands, and in ours… in his compassionate care and in ours.
Forty years ago last Thursday, the first Earth Day was observed. I was 23 and completing my first year in seminary in Manhattan, and I’m pretty sure Earth Day happened without me. It’s sobering to admit that 40 years later, Earth Day has happened without me, again. First, I was busy as a student; 40 years later, I was busy as a priest.
At Compline Thursday night, I chanted in place of the usual collect a thanksgiving for the created order, complete with the richness of mountains, the songs of birds, and the loveliness of flowers. At least the twenty of us gathered that night nodded liturgically to Earth Day, and some of them very likely kept the day more intentionally than I did.
It’s not for lack of persuasion or passion, my yearly tendency to catch Earth Day out of my rear view mirror. I applaud all that has happened on campuses and in schools, in board rooms and legislative chambers, and in churches and at kitchen tables to raise conscious care for this fragile earth, our island home.
I admire in particular our neighboring congregation, the First Congregational Church, for their systemic commitment to ecological education and action, and other area initiatives such as Williamstown’s COOL project.
It’s not as if we’re dormant here. The gas furnace we installed, several years ago, is a model of clean-burning high technology. Charles Bonenti has championed the replacement of incandescent and old-fashioned fluorescent lighting, not everywhere in these old buildings, but we’re more that way than not. Stuart Crampton single-handedly trucks our recycling results to the landfill. Since installing the galley kitchen, we’ve moved from paper to china. Motion sensors, light sensors, and timers govern our outdoor lighting. Automatic light controls in our church school rooms drive us nuts as they operate with a mind of their own, telling us we’re not there when we know darn well we are… but we’ll figure that out, in time, and we’re glad to be making progress. Soon, we’ll make more when we actually reduce our footprint, removing the old curate’s apartment, cutting the waste of heating and lighting space we’re confident we don’t need (and creating parking we know we do need).
Would we have taken these steps in a life without Earth Day, without minds and hearts and imaginations wakened to responsibility? I don’t believe so. And that tells me that Earth Day deserves a 40th that celebrates achievement, both local and national.
Our story resembles that of the disciple Tabitha. We’ve been raised from our deathbed. And it has taken apostolic zeal to achieve that.
To achieve what? Associated Press journalist Seth Borenstein answers: “Forty years later… smog levels nationwide have dropped by about a quarter, lead levels in the air are down more than 90 percent. Formerly fetid lakes and burning rivers are now open to swimmers…” and are habitat again for loons and herons. These improvements took shape in the form of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and changes in the way businesses treat the environment—reforms that grew out of the first Earth Day, 1970. Some would say that this is the most powerful, sweeping, society-wide change America has made since the New Deal.
The need for such change was dramatic in the months leading up to Earth Day 1970. Cleveland’s main river, the Cuyahoga, caught fire every now and again. An epic oil spill contaminated 30 miles of Southern California beaches.
Now, Borenstein says, “The challenges to the planet today are largely invisible—and therefore tougher to tackle.”
He quotes William Ruckelshaus, first head of the Environmental Protection Agency: “What we’ve done is shift from the very visible kinds of issues to those that are a lot more subtle today.”
Since 1970, carbon dioxide levels in the air are up by 19%, raising the average annual world temperature by one degree Fahrenheit, reports the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them…”
We encounter those words at funerals and hear them describing heaven. Consider them describing God’s new creation, the universal renewal of life that God is accomplishing in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.
And the metaphor the Church gives us on this Sunday in Eastertide is that of the shepherd. We are to understand God’s universal renewal of life requiring the tenacious responsibility of Jesus Christ the Good Shepherd, the brave guardian who will battle wolves and frustrate thieves to fulfil his promise to his flock, “You will never perish. No one will snatch you out of my hand.”
Let’s not be too busy at other things to hear an Earth Day application of this metaphor: We who belong to Jesus Christ the Good Shepherd have his care by listening to his voice and doing what he calls us to do. He calls us to his mission, the universal renewal of life. He asks us to share his own passionate responsibility for the whole shimmering orb of life that God has placed in his hands, and in ours… in his compassionate care and in ours.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Breakfast Is Served
The Gospel appointed for the 3rd Sunday of Easter is John 21:1-19
It’s not every candidate for holy baptism who can say she has played the part of Jesus onstage, and the part of Caiaphas, and in the same play. Nor is it common in my experience that someone, prior to her baptism, has wrestled with the Book of Job bravely enough to write a play about his story.
But such are the distinctions that Chloe can claim. Though the Chloe I’ve come to know isn’t likely to make such claims.
Not that she’s shy. In fact, I will have lasting memories of the Williams Class of 2010 because Chloe is its third member to extend me a hand in self-introduction and add, “I’d like to be baptized,” (or confirmed, as in the case of the other two). That’s a record, at least in my time here.
And I have one more thing to say about Chloe, hoping it will give you a sense of the young woman I have been coming to know, and expecting that this may help pave the way for her later in this service. I met with her on Wednesday, to walk through the rite of baptism, and when we came to a moment when the Prayer Book directs me to ask her, “Do you desire to be baptized?” I found I had an urge (I resisted it at first, but decided to trust it) to follow her affirmative answer with another question: “Why?” When I shared that fragment of fantasy with her, she pretty much replied, “Okay.” And so, at the time when announcements usually happen, Chloe will tell us why.
Someone else is working today on the question Why, and that is Simon Peter. The portion of Luke’s Gospel appointed for Easter Day showed him walking away from the ebullient Mary Magdalene, shaking his head in puzzlement over all these things that had taken place. The disciple Mary was already an apostle, witnessing to those eleven men what she had experienced at the empty tomb. Not one of them was willing to believe her. Peter was the one who ran to the tomb to confirm her story, but he could make no sense of what he saw.
He deals with what he cannot figure out by returning to what he knows so well. “I am going fishing,” he announces to a little gaggle of his buddies. They all agree: that’s the thing to do. Perhaps this little fishing expedition is an exercise in avoidance, a trip down the river Denial. They get nowhere, catch nothing, and, when last seen, spent that long night, well, in the dark. Heaven knows what they talked about, whether they expressed their heartsick grief, or, in their empty boat, just quietly bobbed on the water, waiting, inwardly sinking under a sense that life would forever feel half empty, never again full.
“Children, you have no fish, have you?” comes the pointed words that waken their hearing just as sunlight touches their eyes.
“No.” That’s it, these are men of few words. But doesn’t something stir? Some synapses fire as they try to make out the figure on the shore against the light of dawn, and strain to hear what’s familiar in the cadences of that voice? This moment is like an icon of the soul seeking God: on this side of death, it will often be like seeing in a mirror dimly, a familiar phrase of St. Paul which Eugene Peterson in “The Message” paraphrases, “squinting in a fog, peering through a mist.”
Who beyond their own parents would call these grown men “children?” They slowly put two and two together, but he doesn’t wait: sharp advice comes next, feeding their hope, convincing them how close they are to the mother-lode that they will claim, a boatload of fish and an apostolate of faith.
Abundance triggers Peter’s recognition. Their three short years with Jesus taught them what the poet Richard Wilbur sees to be the point of another abundance-miracle, the water turned to wine at Cana:
“…It made no earthly sense, unless to show
How whatsoever love elects to bless
Brims to a sweet excess
That can without depletion overflow.
Which is to say that what love sees is true;
That the world’s fullness is not made but found.
Life hungers to abound
And pour its plenty out for such as you…”
Then comes a moment of quick change: flustered Peter covers his nakedness, and jumps into the sea! An image of baptism, they say. In the early Church, each candidate for baptism was dressed in a plain white tunic, symbol of transformation and new life: into water over the head, but clothed in Christ whose abundant love holds us in life and raises us from death.
Then is heard an invitation that could make us laugh and cry. We have heard a lot made of “Come unto me, all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest,” and “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world…” But what do we make of “Come and have breakfast”? By the nature of the Gospel, that invitation, like those other better-known invitations, is made not only to first-century disciples, but to us as well.
Jesus Christ invites you to breakfast! Is that both wonderful and weird? So try it this way: Jesus Christ invites you to break bread with him. That’s more familiar.
And what he does with this circle of apostles-in-the-making is to do with bread and fish what in the other Gospels he does with bread and wine: he takes, he blesses, he breaks, he gives. While not all these verbs are present, what is suggested is the familiar action of eucharist, communion.
Then he confronts Peter with a grilling, not of fish, but of an apostle who had shown promise for leading the others, but had in short order betrayed his master when the going got rough, betrayed him three times. Three times now, Jesus asks, “Do you love me?”, tearing open Peter’s heart. Which is just what Peter needs.
Conversion, said C. G. Jung, often involves a collapse of the ego, a discovery that one’s ego is not sufficient for life. Or, to borrow an image from Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, if one has made for oneself a life raft, it can be hard to give that craft a graceful hull.
Will the change that comes upon Peter in his boat carry into his soul? Will that flurry of baptismal dunking turn around Peter’s heart to belong to God, make whole the heart that betrayed, convert Peter to whole-hearted commitment and service?
This will be shown, says Jesus, not by Peter’s words but in Peter’s life. A converted life, he says, will show itself in feeding my lambs, tending my sheep, feeding my sheep.
The order here matters. First Jesus feeds us, then he asks us to feed others. What God expects, God enables. Grace is given before responsibility. God’s abundance inspires our gratitude and releases our generosity. We love because God first loves us.
The order here matters. “After this,” we are told, Jesus said to Peter, “Follow me.”
“First, know me enough… know your heart enough… and follow me. You will find the rest.”
First, he makes himself known, shows his mercy and his love, reveals enough of his nature that one desires to follow him, and follow him as he is, not a distorted image of him. First, he gives himself, then he asks of us.
What Chloe desires, she already has, by his self-giving. In the action of her baptism, Christ’s people seal and celebrate his promise’s fulfillment, well underway even before she claims it, his promise to be with her always, to the end of time and beyond.
In the action of her baptism, Chloe will claim his promise and respond with promises of her own. It is for us to encourage her—and each other—to keep claiming his promise, and, by grace, to keep the vows we make.
(Richard Wilbur’s verse is excerpted from his poem “A Wedding Toast”, found in his “New and Collected Poems”, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988, p. 61.)
It’s not every candidate for holy baptism who can say she has played the part of Jesus onstage, and the part of Caiaphas, and in the same play. Nor is it common in my experience that someone, prior to her baptism, has wrestled with the Book of Job bravely enough to write a play about his story.
But such are the distinctions that Chloe can claim. Though the Chloe I’ve come to know isn’t likely to make such claims.
Not that she’s shy. In fact, I will have lasting memories of the Williams Class of 2010 because Chloe is its third member to extend me a hand in self-introduction and add, “I’d like to be baptized,” (or confirmed, as in the case of the other two). That’s a record, at least in my time here.
And I have one more thing to say about Chloe, hoping it will give you a sense of the young woman I have been coming to know, and expecting that this may help pave the way for her later in this service. I met with her on Wednesday, to walk through the rite of baptism, and when we came to a moment when the Prayer Book directs me to ask her, “Do you desire to be baptized?” I found I had an urge (I resisted it at first, but decided to trust it) to follow her affirmative answer with another question: “Why?” When I shared that fragment of fantasy with her, she pretty much replied, “Okay.” And so, at the time when announcements usually happen, Chloe will tell us why.
Someone else is working today on the question Why, and that is Simon Peter. The portion of Luke’s Gospel appointed for Easter Day showed him walking away from the ebullient Mary Magdalene, shaking his head in puzzlement over all these things that had taken place. The disciple Mary was already an apostle, witnessing to those eleven men what she had experienced at the empty tomb. Not one of them was willing to believe her. Peter was the one who ran to the tomb to confirm her story, but he could make no sense of what he saw.
He deals with what he cannot figure out by returning to what he knows so well. “I am going fishing,” he announces to a little gaggle of his buddies. They all agree: that’s the thing to do. Perhaps this little fishing expedition is an exercise in avoidance, a trip down the river Denial. They get nowhere, catch nothing, and, when last seen, spent that long night, well, in the dark. Heaven knows what they talked about, whether they expressed their heartsick grief, or, in their empty boat, just quietly bobbed on the water, waiting, inwardly sinking under a sense that life would forever feel half empty, never again full.
“Children, you have no fish, have you?” comes the pointed words that waken their hearing just as sunlight touches their eyes.
“No.” That’s it, these are men of few words. But doesn’t something stir? Some synapses fire as they try to make out the figure on the shore against the light of dawn, and strain to hear what’s familiar in the cadences of that voice? This moment is like an icon of the soul seeking God: on this side of death, it will often be like seeing in a mirror dimly, a familiar phrase of St. Paul which Eugene Peterson in “The Message” paraphrases, “squinting in a fog, peering through a mist.”
Who beyond their own parents would call these grown men “children?” They slowly put two and two together, but he doesn’t wait: sharp advice comes next, feeding their hope, convincing them how close they are to the mother-lode that they will claim, a boatload of fish and an apostolate of faith.
Abundance triggers Peter’s recognition. Their three short years with Jesus taught them what the poet Richard Wilbur sees to be the point of another abundance-miracle, the water turned to wine at Cana:
“…It made no earthly sense, unless to show
How whatsoever love elects to bless
Brims to a sweet excess
That can without depletion overflow.
Which is to say that what love sees is true;
That the world’s fullness is not made but found.
Life hungers to abound
And pour its plenty out for such as you…”
Then comes a moment of quick change: flustered Peter covers his nakedness, and jumps into the sea! An image of baptism, they say. In the early Church, each candidate for baptism was dressed in a plain white tunic, symbol of transformation and new life: into water over the head, but clothed in Christ whose abundant love holds us in life and raises us from death.
Then is heard an invitation that could make us laugh and cry. We have heard a lot made of “Come unto me, all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest,” and “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world…” But what do we make of “Come and have breakfast”? By the nature of the Gospel, that invitation, like those other better-known invitations, is made not only to first-century disciples, but to us as well.
Jesus Christ invites you to breakfast! Is that both wonderful and weird? So try it this way: Jesus Christ invites you to break bread with him. That’s more familiar.
And what he does with this circle of apostles-in-the-making is to do with bread and fish what in the other Gospels he does with bread and wine: he takes, he blesses, he breaks, he gives. While not all these verbs are present, what is suggested is the familiar action of eucharist, communion.
Then he confronts Peter with a grilling, not of fish, but of an apostle who had shown promise for leading the others, but had in short order betrayed his master when the going got rough, betrayed him three times. Three times now, Jesus asks, “Do you love me?”, tearing open Peter’s heart. Which is just what Peter needs.
Conversion, said C. G. Jung, often involves a collapse of the ego, a discovery that one’s ego is not sufficient for life. Or, to borrow an image from Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, if one has made for oneself a life raft, it can be hard to give that craft a graceful hull.
Will the change that comes upon Peter in his boat carry into his soul? Will that flurry of baptismal dunking turn around Peter’s heart to belong to God, make whole the heart that betrayed, convert Peter to whole-hearted commitment and service?
This will be shown, says Jesus, not by Peter’s words but in Peter’s life. A converted life, he says, will show itself in feeding my lambs, tending my sheep, feeding my sheep.
The order here matters. First Jesus feeds us, then he asks us to feed others. What God expects, God enables. Grace is given before responsibility. God’s abundance inspires our gratitude and releases our generosity. We love because God first loves us.
The order here matters. “After this,” we are told, Jesus said to Peter, “Follow me.”
“First, know me enough… know your heart enough… and follow me. You will find the rest.”
First, he makes himself known, shows his mercy and his love, reveals enough of his nature that one desires to follow him, and follow him as he is, not a distorted image of him. First, he gives himself, then he asks of us.
What Chloe desires, she already has, by his self-giving. In the action of her baptism, Christ’s people seal and celebrate his promise’s fulfillment, well underway even before she claims it, his promise to be with her always, to the end of time and beyond.
In the action of her baptism, Chloe will claim his promise and respond with promises of her own. It is for us to encourage her—and each other—to keep claiming his promise, and, by grace, to keep the vows we make.
(Richard Wilbur’s verse is excerpted from his poem “A Wedding Toast”, found in his “New and Collected Poems”, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988, p. 61.)
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Become the Evidence
Collect for the 2nd Sunday of Easter:
Almighty and everlasting God, who in the Paschal mystery established the new covenant of reconciliation: Grant that all who have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body may show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The scripture appointed includes Acts 5:27-32; Revelation 1:4-8; John 20:19-31.
Three sweet essential messages speak to me, this Easter, and they’re all heard in today’s collect.
First, in the mystery of Easter God has established a new covenant of reconciliation, a new way to build peace on earth.
Second, in the mystery of our baptism we have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body. Our first birth is into a family, our second birth into a worldwide fellowship.
Third, our relationship to both these mysteries requires us to act on what we believe, to show in our lives what we claim by our faith.
It’s impressive, how six short lines of prayer can pack such a punch, collect light like a prism and cast such a rainbow of good news.
First, the new covenant of reconciliation. The old covenant is an agreement between God and Israel, God calling Israel to obey laws of purity and justice, God promising to Israel steadfast love, Israel accepting the responsibilities that go along with the privilege of being chosen to serve as a light to the nations. This covenant still defines the Jewish people.
The new covenant of reconciliation announces news that God is using the Easter mystery to reach out beyond the first covenant. Beyond Israel to the Greek world, and to extend that offer the young Church’s leaders (most of them Jewish) learned to speak of Jesus as Alpha and Omega, advertising in Greek his first and last importance.
But the first Christians had to learn peacemaking the hard way, from the inside out. This would be harder than learning a few Greek words. They would teach that in God’s eyes, there is no important difference between Jews and Greeks, or between men and women, or between slaves and free.
But demonstrating that peaceful spirit, helping all people see themselves as one proved hard. In our lesson from the Book of Acts today, we hear the Jewish high priests cry out to Jesus’s apostles, “You keep blaming us for your master’s death!”
“Darned right!” answer Peter and his fellow disciples. “You had him killed by hanging him on a cross!”
That’s a snapshot of how Christians and Jews got along—or didn’t get along—in New Testament times, and it has affected (you might say infected) relations between the two religious communities ever since. None of us wants that to continue, and all of us have a responsibility to read and tell the Bible’s stories in ways that advertise good news of God’s way of making peace through Jesus Christ—not by blame, but by such a love that frees in us a deep honesty to recognize the unity we have in God.
We who carry his name, who have the sign of his cross on our foreheads and the presence of his Spirit in our hearts from baptism, find in Jesus Christ the love that frees us for, and binds us to, deep honesty. In the mystery of our baptism we have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body. Our first birth is into a family, our second birth into a worldwide fellowship.
And the long 2000-year history of that universal Church is really the collected stories of the literally billions of us who have found a relationship with Jesus Christ as personal and real as his first apostles had with him. For the new covenant of reconciliation reaches out beyond death, indeed through death, which became for Jesus not the obstacle but the very pathway by which we know him.
It is an astonishing claim, but what is offered in Jesus Christ is no less than friendship with him, knowing him and being known by him, his presence real to you and your presence in this world made all the more real in him. It is he who is offered to Chloe in baptism, next Sunday. It is he who is offered to each of us at the communion rail. And he who is with us when we pray. And when we don’t. He is with us always, to the close of time and beyond: that is his promise in the new covenant.
The relationship that you or I have to both the Easter mystery and the baptismal mystery requires us to act on what we believe, to show in our lives what we claim by our faith.
That is dramatized for us in Thomas’s story. He’s a very modern man, logical, practical, and feeling alone. He isn’t with his brothers and sisters, that Easter night. He needs peace and reconciliation, and he’s struggling with the whole fellowship thing.
So he works out of the logical, practical, isolating side of himself and demands meaningful evidence. He must touch the wounds of Jesus; only then will he believe.
Thomas knows how to do reasoning. Like so many of us, he has to learn how to do the mystical. Remember, what we’re given in Christianity is Easter mystery, baptismal mystery. It’s how Jesus will be known.
And when he is, when Thomas returns to fellowship and in that community meets Jesus all over again, Jesus uses that mystical moment to honor reason. Go ahead, he says, examine your evidence.
And then Jesus drives it all home. “Do not doubt, but believe.” Jesus calls Thomas to action. Take all that effort and energy by which you’ve been doubting and redirect it. To believe is itself an action of the will: it is to welcome the reconciling love that Jesus brings to the friendship, and then to build peace with that love. To believe is itself an action of the will, receiving the gift of relationship with God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, freeing us for, and binding us to, honesty.
To believe is the act of the will by which we become evidence of the risen Jesus.
Think of that! But don’t think too long… Become.
Almighty and everlasting God, who in the Paschal mystery established the new covenant of reconciliation: Grant that all who have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body may show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The scripture appointed includes Acts 5:27-32; Revelation 1:4-8; John 20:19-31.
Three sweet essential messages speak to me, this Easter, and they’re all heard in today’s collect.
First, in the mystery of Easter God has established a new covenant of reconciliation, a new way to build peace on earth.
Second, in the mystery of our baptism we have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body. Our first birth is into a family, our second birth into a worldwide fellowship.
Third, our relationship to both these mysteries requires us to act on what we believe, to show in our lives what we claim by our faith.
It’s impressive, how six short lines of prayer can pack such a punch, collect light like a prism and cast such a rainbow of good news.
First, the new covenant of reconciliation. The old covenant is an agreement between God and Israel, God calling Israel to obey laws of purity and justice, God promising to Israel steadfast love, Israel accepting the responsibilities that go along with the privilege of being chosen to serve as a light to the nations. This covenant still defines the Jewish people.
The new covenant of reconciliation announces news that God is using the Easter mystery to reach out beyond the first covenant. Beyond Israel to the Greek world, and to extend that offer the young Church’s leaders (most of them Jewish) learned to speak of Jesus as Alpha and Omega, advertising in Greek his first and last importance.
But the first Christians had to learn peacemaking the hard way, from the inside out. This would be harder than learning a few Greek words. They would teach that in God’s eyes, there is no important difference between Jews and Greeks, or between men and women, or between slaves and free.
But demonstrating that peaceful spirit, helping all people see themselves as one proved hard. In our lesson from the Book of Acts today, we hear the Jewish high priests cry out to Jesus’s apostles, “You keep blaming us for your master’s death!”
“Darned right!” answer Peter and his fellow disciples. “You had him killed by hanging him on a cross!”
That’s a snapshot of how Christians and Jews got along—or didn’t get along—in New Testament times, and it has affected (you might say infected) relations between the two religious communities ever since. None of us wants that to continue, and all of us have a responsibility to read and tell the Bible’s stories in ways that advertise good news of God’s way of making peace through Jesus Christ—not by blame, but by such a love that frees in us a deep honesty to recognize the unity we have in God.
We who carry his name, who have the sign of his cross on our foreheads and the presence of his Spirit in our hearts from baptism, find in Jesus Christ the love that frees us for, and binds us to, deep honesty. In the mystery of our baptism we have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body. Our first birth is into a family, our second birth into a worldwide fellowship.
And the long 2000-year history of that universal Church is really the collected stories of the literally billions of us who have found a relationship with Jesus Christ as personal and real as his first apostles had with him. For the new covenant of reconciliation reaches out beyond death, indeed through death, which became for Jesus not the obstacle but the very pathway by which we know him.
It is an astonishing claim, but what is offered in Jesus Christ is no less than friendship with him, knowing him and being known by him, his presence real to you and your presence in this world made all the more real in him. It is he who is offered to Chloe in baptism, next Sunday. It is he who is offered to each of us at the communion rail. And he who is with us when we pray. And when we don’t. He is with us always, to the close of time and beyond: that is his promise in the new covenant.
The relationship that you or I have to both the Easter mystery and the baptismal mystery requires us to act on what we believe, to show in our lives what we claim by our faith.
That is dramatized for us in Thomas’s story. He’s a very modern man, logical, practical, and feeling alone. He isn’t with his brothers and sisters, that Easter night. He needs peace and reconciliation, and he’s struggling with the whole fellowship thing.
So he works out of the logical, practical, isolating side of himself and demands meaningful evidence. He must touch the wounds of Jesus; only then will he believe.
Thomas knows how to do reasoning. Like so many of us, he has to learn how to do the mystical. Remember, what we’re given in Christianity is Easter mystery, baptismal mystery. It’s how Jesus will be known.
And when he is, when Thomas returns to fellowship and in that community meets Jesus all over again, Jesus uses that mystical moment to honor reason. Go ahead, he says, examine your evidence.
And then Jesus drives it all home. “Do not doubt, but believe.” Jesus calls Thomas to action. Take all that effort and energy by which you’ve been doubting and redirect it. To believe is itself an action of the will: it is to welcome the reconciling love that Jesus brings to the friendship, and then to build peace with that love. To believe is itself an action of the will, receiving the gift of relationship with God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, freeing us for, and binding us to, honesty.
To believe is the act of the will by which we become evidence of the risen Jesus.
Think of that! But don’t think too long… Become.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Rising from Violence
I was stopped dead in my tracks the other night, in conversation with one of my sons. We were watching the 6:30 news, and I was stuck in disbelief at the report of a Christian militia in southern Michigan.
I struggled with even saying those two words in one breath, Christian militia. I sputtered about how it was unthinkable to me, that professed Christians should plot to kill and incite armed conflict. What a name they’re giving to Christianity, I muttered.
“You’re forgetting about the Crusades?” replied my son.
At whatever age, children are such a trip. Perhaps God gives them to us so that we can’t stay too settled in our thoughts and assumptions.
I was left without words at that moment, so I chose to listen to what was being called up within myself: and as I did, the first thing that came to my mind was slavery and how the Church for so long was on the wrong side of that monstrous abuse of power, one more example of Christian violence.
It was through men and women of religious conviction that slavery was outlawed in England, then here. Powerful Christian witness is part of that story, though it took an astonishing 1800 years or more after the first Easter Day for Christians to hear in their Bible and in their evolving consciences the clear call to end such inhumanity that robs human beings of their freedom and dignity.
It is time now for Christians to find fresh, effective ways to disavow armed violence, verbal violence, and emotional violence. It is time, standing as we do nearly 2,000 years after the first Easter Day, to pay close attention to how our Bible calls us to love, including our enemies, and to take apart, piece by piece, the walls of hostility that separate one part of the human family from another.
Haven’t our consciences evolved enough to know that reactive violence—verbal, emotional, physical—is incompatible with our nature as children of God? Is human violence too settled an oppression to be dislodged?
In the account of the first Easter, it takes angels to roll away the stone from the tomb. Surely the point of that detail is to convince us what power is on our side when we do our best to follow Jesus.
What explains the abuse of power by our homegrown American Christian terrorists? What motivates that twisted church family from Kansas who protest at the funerals of young Americans who have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan? They blame these young soldiers for serving their nation, a country these Christians say has angered God in a number of ways, including by recognizing the rights of gays and lesbians. Have these agents of hate experienced such shifting of power sharply away from supporting their world-view, as if the laws of physics had been repealed and their planet is wobbling out of orbit?
However we understand these fellow Americans, or cannot understand them, nothing justifies their resorting to armed violence or verbal and emotional violence.
Why, you may wonder, do I choose to speak of such things at Easter? Why spend even a moment considering extremists like Christian militias and hate-spewing protestors? Aren’t we the good guys and they the bad guys, and never the two shall mix?
Not if you’ve recently renewed your appreciation of Holy Week, when cruel and damaging things happened to Jesus as much through his sworn friends as by his sworn enemies. We may not find ourselves drawn to extremism, but a lively sense of sin ought to remind us that we and they (the extremists) occupy one world, one society, and, it seems, one Body of Christ.
And I speak of extremists today because they do what they do in our name. No, in his name, and that is the more outrageous offense. What Christian witness will counteract and outweigh their message to our society? As fewer and fewer children and teenagers feel any belonging in our churches, what messiahs will our kids meet in the media ether that surrounds them? We know they’ll meet zealots of insurrection whose hallmark is hatred and defamation. Will we find the zeal to make sure that our children and grandchildren meet the Christ of resurrection who makes himself known in the breaking of bread, the washing of feet, the indwelling of hearts and the making of peace?
We may put extremists in a different category from ourselves. But what infects them is at large and free-floating in our society. The same society that has spawned 1700 militias has created a far larger number of school bullies. It was in South Hadley, a town much like ours, where last month 15-year-old Phoebe Prince was taken down by months of emotional, verbal, and physical violence from a few of her peers.
And can you remember a time when members of congress have had their lives threatened and their character defamed as in these past two weeks? A brick through a window, venomous words hurled…it all becomes too easy.
At work in our society, shown by agents of hatred, is a death of the heart and a death of the imagination from which we all are called to rise, called by Jesus Christ who absorbed the world’s venom and defeated it by being true to his nature, true to God.
God is his nature: Jesus Christ is God’s Son. Not another talking head in history, Jesus Christ is divine so that each of us may be a dwelling-place of God, an agent of Jesus’s love. He is in each of us by divine Spirit, our finest hope and our truest nature. God in the DNA of Jesus unites him to God as surely as a compass points to magnetic north. So the risen Christ in us draws us to claim and show our truest nature.
By the grace of resurrection set loose in our world on this day some 2000 years ago, we are equipped to practice and demonstrate a yet more excellent way than reactive violence. Our homes, churches and workplaces, our friendships, politics, and foreign policy are all locations to practice the call of God in Jesus Christ to live by the Spirit of truth and love and reverence, which is our truest nature.
How will we inspire and encourage and expect one another to show this yet more excellent way?
I struggled with even saying those two words in one breath, Christian militia. I sputtered about how it was unthinkable to me, that professed Christians should plot to kill and incite armed conflict. What a name they’re giving to Christianity, I muttered.
“You’re forgetting about the Crusades?” replied my son.
At whatever age, children are such a trip. Perhaps God gives them to us so that we can’t stay too settled in our thoughts and assumptions.
I was left without words at that moment, so I chose to listen to what was being called up within myself: and as I did, the first thing that came to my mind was slavery and how the Church for so long was on the wrong side of that monstrous abuse of power, one more example of Christian violence.
It was through men and women of religious conviction that slavery was outlawed in England, then here. Powerful Christian witness is part of that story, though it took an astonishing 1800 years or more after the first Easter Day for Christians to hear in their Bible and in their evolving consciences the clear call to end such inhumanity that robs human beings of their freedom and dignity.
It is time now for Christians to find fresh, effective ways to disavow armed violence, verbal violence, and emotional violence. It is time, standing as we do nearly 2,000 years after the first Easter Day, to pay close attention to how our Bible calls us to love, including our enemies, and to take apart, piece by piece, the walls of hostility that separate one part of the human family from another.
Haven’t our consciences evolved enough to know that reactive violence—verbal, emotional, physical—is incompatible with our nature as children of God? Is human violence too settled an oppression to be dislodged?
In the account of the first Easter, it takes angels to roll away the stone from the tomb. Surely the point of that detail is to convince us what power is on our side when we do our best to follow Jesus.
What explains the abuse of power by our homegrown American Christian terrorists? What motivates that twisted church family from Kansas who protest at the funerals of young Americans who have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan? They blame these young soldiers for serving their nation, a country these Christians say has angered God in a number of ways, including by recognizing the rights of gays and lesbians. Have these agents of hate experienced such shifting of power sharply away from supporting their world-view, as if the laws of physics had been repealed and their planet is wobbling out of orbit?
However we understand these fellow Americans, or cannot understand them, nothing justifies their resorting to armed violence or verbal and emotional violence.
Why, you may wonder, do I choose to speak of such things at Easter? Why spend even a moment considering extremists like Christian militias and hate-spewing protestors? Aren’t we the good guys and they the bad guys, and never the two shall mix?
Not if you’ve recently renewed your appreciation of Holy Week, when cruel and damaging things happened to Jesus as much through his sworn friends as by his sworn enemies. We may not find ourselves drawn to extremism, but a lively sense of sin ought to remind us that we and they (the extremists) occupy one world, one society, and, it seems, one Body of Christ.
And I speak of extremists today because they do what they do in our name. No, in his name, and that is the more outrageous offense. What Christian witness will counteract and outweigh their message to our society? As fewer and fewer children and teenagers feel any belonging in our churches, what messiahs will our kids meet in the media ether that surrounds them? We know they’ll meet zealots of insurrection whose hallmark is hatred and defamation. Will we find the zeal to make sure that our children and grandchildren meet the Christ of resurrection who makes himself known in the breaking of bread, the washing of feet, the indwelling of hearts and the making of peace?
We may put extremists in a different category from ourselves. But what infects them is at large and free-floating in our society. The same society that has spawned 1700 militias has created a far larger number of school bullies. It was in South Hadley, a town much like ours, where last month 15-year-old Phoebe Prince was taken down by months of emotional, verbal, and physical violence from a few of her peers.
And can you remember a time when members of congress have had their lives threatened and their character defamed as in these past two weeks? A brick through a window, venomous words hurled…it all becomes too easy.
At work in our society, shown by agents of hatred, is a death of the heart and a death of the imagination from which we all are called to rise, called by Jesus Christ who absorbed the world’s venom and defeated it by being true to his nature, true to God.
God is his nature: Jesus Christ is God’s Son. Not another talking head in history, Jesus Christ is divine so that each of us may be a dwelling-place of God, an agent of Jesus’s love. He is in each of us by divine Spirit, our finest hope and our truest nature. God in the DNA of Jesus unites him to God as surely as a compass points to magnetic north. So the risen Christ in us draws us to claim and show our truest nature.
By the grace of resurrection set loose in our world on this day some 2000 years ago, we are equipped to practice and demonstrate a yet more excellent way than reactive violence. Our homes, churches and workplaces, our friendships, politics, and foreign policy are all locations to practice the call of God in Jesus Christ to live by the Spirit of truth and love and reverence, which is our truest nature.
How will we inspire and encourage and expect one another to show this yet more excellent way?
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Honoring Jesus
Scripture for the 5th Sunday in Lent includes Isaiah 43:16-21; Philippians 3:4b-14; and John 12:1-8.
A lot is said in that first sentence of our Gospel today: “Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead.” John the Gospel-writer sets the context for all that will happen in Holy Week: Jesus has withdrawn to a safe house, and from there he sets his course to coincide with the arrival of all those pilgrims from around the Mediterranean Basin for whom Jerusalem is the destination. Destiny is more what is on our Lord’s mind. And his destiny is prefigured in what happens in that safe house.
To call it safe is a stretch. At table with him is Lazarus, for it is his home. And it is because of the raising of Lazarus from his grave that the death warrant for Jesus has been issued by the powers-that-be in Jerusalem. Jesus healed many lepers, madmen, and blind beggars; and with each healing, his reputation grew, and his following. But a tipping point was reached when he summoned his friend Lazarus out of the sepulcher. From that moment, our Lord’s street cred peaked. Listen to the next verses that follow our portion today: “When the great crowd learned that Jesus was at Lazarus’s house, they came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was on account of him that many were deserting the old religion and were believing in Jesus.”
How to understand that plotting by chief priests whose calling was to serve and celebrate the glory of God? They didn’t recognize the divine glory when it appeared before them. They expected it to reside in the box of the temple in Jerusalem. Instead, the divine presence erupts all across the Judean countryside, especially the villages, especially among the poor, especially among the outcasts and riffraff of society, where God was pleased to dwell. You might say that God’s glory was perfectly camouflaged from the eyes of the chief priests. Like many upright ordained professional leaders of institutional religion, their time was not spent socializing with outcasts. Living inside the box, they thought inside the box.
And very soon, their nemesis will come knocking on the walls of that box, reaching its gates in militant humility, laying siege to the walls of Jerusalem not with an army but with the shekinah, the divine presence and glory, burning within him.
What Rome expected of the chief priests was that they excel at crowd control. Pilgrimage crowds, for example, which offered good cover to radical zealots, as they do to this day. In the first century, as close as one might come to a suicide bombing might be a self-appointed messiah setting up his soap box in the city precincts, calling on Israel to rise up and overthrow the infidel Caesar. That speech would not last long. But that it might happen in the temple precincts, that the speaker might have unusual command of the law and the prophets, that this radical demonstration might command a big restive audience—all that could come home to roost on the chief priests and elders and scribes, all of whom might lose their power and their influence at the discretion of Pontius Pilate, Governor of Judea. And so they plot to protect themselves, while simultaneously our Lord’s destiny is being reached by his becoming vulnerable to that very plotting, even by one of his nearest and dearest.
It’s not primarily his own destiny that concerns him. Passover celebrates the action of God calling-forth and gathering-up his people, freeing them from bondage to tyrants, setting them on the world stage as a nation capable of blessing all nations. Jesus knows that the divine glory is breaking down all barriers to the in-gathering of all God’s children, and to that inclusiveness he gives his passion. As if on cue, some Greeks approach the disciples during this festival and announce that they wish to see Jesus. Pharisees are heard slapping their foreheads muttering, “You see, you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!”
But I’m getting ahead of our story. Today, this is still a safe house, where Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha live. Martha has prepared one of her signature meals, prefiguring the Last Supper that will soon take place. And Mary has spent an entire year’s wages on a pound of perfume.
Was it she who worried, back on that gracious fateful day, that there was already a stench coming from her brother’s tomb? Now the room fills with the sweet sting of pure nard, the lavish extravagance of this prodigal daughter. She is at the center of this little Gospel story.
What she does prefigures yet more of Holy Week. That she anoints Jesus looks ahead to how he will be anointed for burial. That she anoints his feet calls us to see Jesus washing the feet of his disciples on the night of that future supper, the night in which he was betrayed.
In art across the centuries, men usually occupy all the spots at that upper room table. Notice here it is a woman who shows us what discipleship looks like. New Testament scholar Gail O’Day says it so well: “In Mary, then, the reader is given a picture of the fullness of the life of discipleship. Her act shows forth the love that will be the hallmark of discipleship in John and the recognition of Jesus’ identity that is the decisive mark of Christian life. The power of the witness of Mary’s discipleship in this story is that she knows how to respond to Jesus without being told. She fulfills Jesus’ love commandment before he even teaches it; she embraces Jesus’ departure at his hour before he has taught his followers about its true meaning… She gives boldly of herself in love to Jesus at his hour, just as Jesus will give boldly of himself in love at his hour.”
She expresses in action what St. Paul expresses in words: “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”
And then there’s Judas Iscariot. John has us inhale the sweet fragrance of all this devotion, then says, “But…” But Judas, one of the twelve, said by some to be among the closest to Jesus, Judas raises an objection. Why hasn’t someone grabbed that pound of perfume out of Mary’s wasteful hands and sold it to feed the poor?
Which gives the evangelist John his gratifying moment to tell us that Judas was all about Judas, not about the poor.
Reacting sharply to Judas’s blaming Mary, Jesus rebukes him: “Leave her alone. This is her choice, and she has provided for me so generously that it will be enough for the day of my burial. You do understand that this is where we’re heading, don’t you, Judas? A genuine concern for the poor will always be a hallmark of the people of God, and it will be to honor them as God honors them. Mary is honoring me. Are you?”
We must allow ourselves to hear that question asked of us. We are practical souls who plan to spend our time carefully. When Holy Week comes, seven days from today, how generously, like Mary, will we honor our Lord Jesus Christ by our presence at his table Maundy Thursday, in the hours of his passion on Good Friday, and as his church gathers at his empty tomb on Easter Eve?
Will these be expendable moments that just can’t hold a candle to the more pressing things we’ll have to do that week, or will we recognize that it is time to allow ourselves to be anointed yet again by this sweet and precious knowledge that Christ Jesus has made us his own?
(Gail O’Day’s commentary on the Gospel of John is found in Volume IX of “The New Interpeter’s Bible.”)
A lot is said in that first sentence of our Gospel today: “Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead.” John the Gospel-writer sets the context for all that will happen in Holy Week: Jesus has withdrawn to a safe house, and from there he sets his course to coincide with the arrival of all those pilgrims from around the Mediterranean Basin for whom Jerusalem is the destination. Destiny is more what is on our Lord’s mind. And his destiny is prefigured in what happens in that safe house.
To call it safe is a stretch. At table with him is Lazarus, for it is his home. And it is because of the raising of Lazarus from his grave that the death warrant for Jesus has been issued by the powers-that-be in Jerusalem. Jesus healed many lepers, madmen, and blind beggars; and with each healing, his reputation grew, and his following. But a tipping point was reached when he summoned his friend Lazarus out of the sepulcher. From that moment, our Lord’s street cred peaked. Listen to the next verses that follow our portion today: “When the great crowd learned that Jesus was at Lazarus’s house, they came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was on account of him that many were deserting the old religion and were believing in Jesus.”
How to understand that plotting by chief priests whose calling was to serve and celebrate the glory of God? They didn’t recognize the divine glory when it appeared before them. They expected it to reside in the box of the temple in Jerusalem. Instead, the divine presence erupts all across the Judean countryside, especially the villages, especially among the poor, especially among the outcasts and riffraff of society, where God was pleased to dwell. You might say that God’s glory was perfectly camouflaged from the eyes of the chief priests. Like many upright ordained professional leaders of institutional religion, their time was not spent socializing with outcasts. Living inside the box, they thought inside the box.
And very soon, their nemesis will come knocking on the walls of that box, reaching its gates in militant humility, laying siege to the walls of Jerusalem not with an army but with the shekinah, the divine presence and glory, burning within him.
What Rome expected of the chief priests was that they excel at crowd control. Pilgrimage crowds, for example, which offered good cover to radical zealots, as they do to this day. In the first century, as close as one might come to a suicide bombing might be a self-appointed messiah setting up his soap box in the city precincts, calling on Israel to rise up and overthrow the infidel Caesar. That speech would not last long. But that it might happen in the temple precincts, that the speaker might have unusual command of the law and the prophets, that this radical demonstration might command a big restive audience—all that could come home to roost on the chief priests and elders and scribes, all of whom might lose their power and their influence at the discretion of Pontius Pilate, Governor of Judea. And so they plot to protect themselves, while simultaneously our Lord’s destiny is being reached by his becoming vulnerable to that very plotting, even by one of his nearest and dearest.
It’s not primarily his own destiny that concerns him. Passover celebrates the action of God calling-forth and gathering-up his people, freeing them from bondage to tyrants, setting them on the world stage as a nation capable of blessing all nations. Jesus knows that the divine glory is breaking down all barriers to the in-gathering of all God’s children, and to that inclusiveness he gives his passion. As if on cue, some Greeks approach the disciples during this festival and announce that they wish to see Jesus. Pharisees are heard slapping their foreheads muttering, “You see, you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!”
But I’m getting ahead of our story. Today, this is still a safe house, where Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha live. Martha has prepared one of her signature meals, prefiguring the Last Supper that will soon take place. And Mary has spent an entire year’s wages on a pound of perfume.
Was it she who worried, back on that gracious fateful day, that there was already a stench coming from her brother’s tomb? Now the room fills with the sweet sting of pure nard, the lavish extravagance of this prodigal daughter. She is at the center of this little Gospel story.
What she does prefigures yet more of Holy Week. That she anoints Jesus looks ahead to how he will be anointed for burial. That she anoints his feet calls us to see Jesus washing the feet of his disciples on the night of that future supper, the night in which he was betrayed.
In art across the centuries, men usually occupy all the spots at that upper room table. Notice here it is a woman who shows us what discipleship looks like. New Testament scholar Gail O’Day says it so well: “In Mary, then, the reader is given a picture of the fullness of the life of discipleship. Her act shows forth the love that will be the hallmark of discipleship in John and the recognition of Jesus’ identity that is the decisive mark of Christian life. The power of the witness of Mary’s discipleship in this story is that she knows how to respond to Jesus without being told. She fulfills Jesus’ love commandment before he even teaches it; she embraces Jesus’ departure at his hour before he has taught his followers about its true meaning… She gives boldly of herself in love to Jesus at his hour, just as Jesus will give boldly of himself in love at his hour.”
She expresses in action what St. Paul expresses in words: “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”
And then there’s Judas Iscariot. John has us inhale the sweet fragrance of all this devotion, then says, “But…” But Judas, one of the twelve, said by some to be among the closest to Jesus, Judas raises an objection. Why hasn’t someone grabbed that pound of perfume out of Mary’s wasteful hands and sold it to feed the poor?
Which gives the evangelist John his gratifying moment to tell us that Judas was all about Judas, not about the poor.
Reacting sharply to Judas’s blaming Mary, Jesus rebukes him: “Leave her alone. This is her choice, and she has provided for me so generously that it will be enough for the day of my burial. You do understand that this is where we’re heading, don’t you, Judas? A genuine concern for the poor will always be a hallmark of the people of God, and it will be to honor them as God honors them. Mary is honoring me. Are you?”
We must allow ourselves to hear that question asked of us. We are practical souls who plan to spend our time carefully. When Holy Week comes, seven days from today, how generously, like Mary, will we honor our Lord Jesus Christ by our presence at his table Maundy Thursday, in the hours of his passion on Good Friday, and as his church gathers at his empty tomb on Easter Eve?
Will these be expendable moments that just can’t hold a candle to the more pressing things we’ll have to do that week, or will we recognize that it is time to allow ourselves to be anointed yet again by this sweet and precious knowledge that Christ Jesus has made us his own?
(Gail O’Day’s commentary on the Gospel of John is found in Volume IX of “The New Interpeter’s Bible.”)
Friday, March 19, 2010
And Who Are We?
The Gospel appointed for the 4th Sunday in Lent is Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32. Also cited in this sermon is Henri Nouwen’s “The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Meditation on Fathers, Brothers, and Sons”, published by Doubleday, 1992.
“Hey, Dad! Drop dead. I want your money.
“No, not all of it. Give me SOME credit… just my share of the farm.
“Acreage? No use for that. Flocks and herds? Who has time for them? Cash is what I’m after. Some habits cost money, you know! Especially the finer things in life. But you wouldn’t know about that, living in this Godforsaken wilderness…
“I want what’s coming to me, right now.”
So opens what may be the best known of Jesus’s parables. What is a parable? Put it simply, a parable is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. Another definition is offered by C. H. Dodd in his book “The Parables of the Kingdom”: “At its simplest, the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving
the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into
active thought.”
So come, let’s be teased.
Start with the setting. As in real estate, a parable is affected by its location, its context. St. Luke gives it to us like this: “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ So he told them this parable…”
There were two types of people in that audience. Tax collectors got no respect; they got lots of grief, because they were seen as traitors betraying their people to a greedy Roman empire. If the emperor didn’t do it first, a greedy tax collector would suck the marrow out of your bones. Tax collectors “and sinners”, use your imagination to fill in the blanks of their guilt, get lumped together in this first portion of Jesus’s audience. And they are conscious sinners, aware that they have no right standing, no righteousness, of their own to boast.
The second type in that audience consisted of Pharisees and scribes. The New Testament gives them a bad rap, but scholars tell us that these were educated, progressive, spiritual, influential, powerful community leaders—upright, even if too upright for their own good, trusting in their own righteousness.
If you would be teased by this parable, you must place yourself in one camp or the other. Sinner, or saint? It’s easy to get a bunch of churchfolk admitting that they’re sinners, and of course we’re too modest and honest to call ourselves saints. But come on, who wants to cross the line and sit down with traitors and outcasts, downcast and frowned-upon types, when you could take your proper place among God’s own chosen (if also frozen) people?
Whichever side of the audience you’re in, it’s easy to catch the character of the younger son in this story. One side is likely to give him a more sympathetic hearing than the other, but both will shake their heads at how over-the-top spendthrift he is. That, says my dictionary, is what “prodigal” means: extravagant, wasteful, even lavishly wasteful.
And, as I suggested at the start, it’s this son’s rush to fast-forward to the death of his father that makes his attitude grisly. An inheritance, after all, ought to wait for a death to trigger it. Until then, the farm belongs to Dad. But in this story, Dad chooses not to respond in tough love and tell junior to get a job. Dad decides, not by law but by generosity, to allow junior’s flight to freedom.
Which, we know, is exactly what junior does not find. He spends all that he has. Had there been VISA and MasterCard, he would have kept on spending. He is not unlike many an American before the Great Recession. He lived way beyond his means, and then came the famine. His bad habits and his lack of vision and discipline cost him control of his life. And then came what was even more beyond his power, a bad case of economic collapse.
Sinners in the audience might already have found him a sympathetic figure. I can hear the comments, “Been there… done that…” and “There but for the grace of God…” But are there rumblings of compassion even from the saints? Does this young man’s fall in the recession earn him some mercy? And how about the fact that he does get a job? Are the saints breaking down at all? Ah, they’re a hard bunch…
Maybe it’s when he comes to his senses and realizes how he has traded his birthright for a mess of pottage… Saints love conversion stories. And what a high view of human nature is at work in this story, that this moment of hitting bottom should be described as his coming to himself, as if waking from a long drugged delusional sleep.
But wait… Is he rehearsing a speech to give to his father? Having manipulated his way off the farm, is he now plotting his way back in? O saints, unite and defend this Dad from his ne’er-do-well son!
We find that that’s a lost cause, as we turn to the father and hear in one astonishing sentence, “But while the boy was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” That little speech gets mumbled into the folds of the father’s embrace, a moment that Rembrandt captures in his haunting gorgeous painting “The Return of the Prodigal Son”. I’ve put a print of this in the display cabinet at the back. Please make that an additional station of the cross to visit today.
How can I describe what Rembrandt sees? The father stands in quiet strength, the son kneels, collapsed in weariness. The father wears rich clothing and a mantle of scarlet, the color of passion and blood, while the boy’s clothes need to be taken and burned. A tattered shoe is on his right foot, but it has no heel; his left foot is bare. The father’s hair and beard are long; the son’s head is shorn, or is it patchy from scabies and bad diet?
But all of that is the outward visible expression. The inward spiritual grace—his yearning for it, his moment of feeling it—we see in just how the boy has laid his face against his father’s chest, or is it even lower, the bowels of compassion mentioned by writers of old.
In one of his books, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says, “The cry to God as Father in the New Testament is not a calm acknowledgement of a universal truth about God’s abstract ‘fatherhood,’ it is the child’s cry out of nightmare.” Abba! Daddy!
Of Rembrandt’s painting, theologian Henri Nouwen says what we could say about the parable itself: “the painting… contained not only the heart of the story that God wants to tell me, but also the heart of the story that I want to tell to God and God’s people. All of the Gospel is there. All of my life is there… (in) a mysterious window through which I can step into the Kingdom of God… a huge gate that allows me to move to the other side of existence and look from there back into… my daily life.”
And there, on the other side of existence in this story, is the older brother. In the painting, he looms over the scene, but far to the right, in profile so we catch the hard glint off his left eye as he literally looks down on both his brother and their father. His hands are clasped as if he is wringing them. He stands on a platform on a different plane from the reconciliation that is beneath him. In the story he isolates himself from his own flesh and blood, angry, refusing to join them. When his father pleads with him to come in from the cold and celebrate their reunion, the elder brother lets it all rip.
You heard his words. “All these years I haven’t had a life. You pity junior because he wound up a servant—well, I’ve been your slave, never disobeying your command. But when did you give a party for me? This son of yours works his way back into your heart, and you go all out for him. What about me?”
The saints can be hard. Even when his generous father assures him that the whole farm will pass to him, this older brother is still calculating what his young brother has cost him, the net loss from the prodigal’s escapades. Even when his father tries to help him feel this joy of resurrection by turning back his harsh words and turning them around—“this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found,” the story has no more words to say whether he turned the heart of his older boy to his younger brother. As we leave the story, #1 son is stuck, paralyzed, too upright for his own good.
And what do you think of the father? Both sides of the audience think he’s a prodigal too, lavish, extravagant, willing to see his hard work turn to dust as it passes through his younger son’s fingers, all so that the boy will discover what he most values and so find freedom to walk into the embrace of life.
The embrace of God… for doesn’t this story, revolving around this parent, get us thinking about the nature of God? As Jesus tells the story, God is exactly who you want to meet, if you’re a sinner. But those who think they’re righteous may find God difficult to approve.
How have you been teased to active thought by this parable? I invite you to be still with that question, a while.
“Hey, Dad! Drop dead. I want your money.
“No, not all of it. Give me SOME credit… just my share of the farm.
“Acreage? No use for that. Flocks and herds? Who has time for them? Cash is what I’m after. Some habits cost money, you know! Especially the finer things in life. But you wouldn’t know about that, living in this Godforsaken wilderness…
“I want what’s coming to me, right now.”
So opens what may be the best known of Jesus’s parables. What is a parable? Put it simply, a parable is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. Another definition is offered by C. H. Dodd in his book “The Parables of the Kingdom”: “At its simplest, the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving
the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into
active thought.”
So come, let’s be teased.
Start with the setting. As in real estate, a parable is affected by its location, its context. St. Luke gives it to us like this: “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ So he told them this parable…”
There were two types of people in that audience. Tax collectors got no respect; they got lots of grief, because they were seen as traitors betraying their people to a greedy Roman empire. If the emperor didn’t do it first, a greedy tax collector would suck the marrow out of your bones. Tax collectors “and sinners”, use your imagination to fill in the blanks of their guilt, get lumped together in this first portion of Jesus’s audience. And they are conscious sinners, aware that they have no right standing, no righteousness, of their own to boast.
The second type in that audience consisted of Pharisees and scribes. The New Testament gives them a bad rap, but scholars tell us that these were educated, progressive, spiritual, influential, powerful community leaders—upright, even if too upright for their own good, trusting in their own righteousness.
If you would be teased by this parable, you must place yourself in one camp or the other. Sinner, or saint? It’s easy to get a bunch of churchfolk admitting that they’re sinners, and of course we’re too modest and honest to call ourselves saints. But come on, who wants to cross the line and sit down with traitors and outcasts, downcast and frowned-upon types, when you could take your proper place among God’s own chosen (if also frozen) people?
Whichever side of the audience you’re in, it’s easy to catch the character of the younger son in this story. One side is likely to give him a more sympathetic hearing than the other, but both will shake their heads at how over-the-top spendthrift he is. That, says my dictionary, is what “prodigal” means: extravagant, wasteful, even lavishly wasteful.
And, as I suggested at the start, it’s this son’s rush to fast-forward to the death of his father that makes his attitude grisly. An inheritance, after all, ought to wait for a death to trigger it. Until then, the farm belongs to Dad. But in this story, Dad chooses not to respond in tough love and tell junior to get a job. Dad decides, not by law but by generosity, to allow junior’s flight to freedom.
Which, we know, is exactly what junior does not find. He spends all that he has. Had there been VISA and MasterCard, he would have kept on spending. He is not unlike many an American before the Great Recession. He lived way beyond his means, and then came the famine. His bad habits and his lack of vision and discipline cost him control of his life. And then came what was even more beyond his power, a bad case of economic collapse.
Sinners in the audience might already have found him a sympathetic figure. I can hear the comments, “Been there… done that…” and “There but for the grace of God…” But are there rumblings of compassion even from the saints? Does this young man’s fall in the recession earn him some mercy? And how about the fact that he does get a job? Are the saints breaking down at all? Ah, they’re a hard bunch…
Maybe it’s when he comes to his senses and realizes how he has traded his birthright for a mess of pottage… Saints love conversion stories. And what a high view of human nature is at work in this story, that this moment of hitting bottom should be described as his coming to himself, as if waking from a long drugged delusional sleep.
But wait… Is he rehearsing a speech to give to his father? Having manipulated his way off the farm, is he now plotting his way back in? O saints, unite and defend this Dad from his ne’er-do-well son!
We find that that’s a lost cause, as we turn to the father and hear in one astonishing sentence, “But while the boy was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” That little speech gets mumbled into the folds of the father’s embrace, a moment that Rembrandt captures in his haunting gorgeous painting “The Return of the Prodigal Son”. I’ve put a print of this in the display cabinet at the back. Please make that an additional station of the cross to visit today.
How can I describe what Rembrandt sees? The father stands in quiet strength, the son kneels, collapsed in weariness. The father wears rich clothing and a mantle of scarlet, the color of passion and blood, while the boy’s clothes need to be taken and burned. A tattered shoe is on his right foot, but it has no heel; his left foot is bare. The father’s hair and beard are long; the son’s head is shorn, or is it patchy from scabies and bad diet?
But all of that is the outward visible expression. The inward spiritual grace—his yearning for it, his moment of feeling it—we see in just how the boy has laid his face against his father’s chest, or is it even lower, the bowels of compassion mentioned by writers of old.
In one of his books, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says, “The cry to God as Father in the New Testament is not a calm acknowledgement of a universal truth about God’s abstract ‘fatherhood,’ it is the child’s cry out of nightmare.” Abba! Daddy!
Of Rembrandt’s painting, theologian Henri Nouwen says what we could say about the parable itself: “the painting… contained not only the heart of the story that God wants to tell me, but also the heart of the story that I want to tell to God and God’s people. All of the Gospel is there. All of my life is there… (in) a mysterious window through which I can step into the Kingdom of God… a huge gate that allows me to move to the other side of existence and look from there back into… my daily life.”
And there, on the other side of existence in this story, is the older brother. In the painting, he looms over the scene, but far to the right, in profile so we catch the hard glint off his left eye as he literally looks down on both his brother and their father. His hands are clasped as if he is wringing them. He stands on a platform on a different plane from the reconciliation that is beneath him. In the story he isolates himself from his own flesh and blood, angry, refusing to join them. When his father pleads with him to come in from the cold and celebrate their reunion, the elder brother lets it all rip.
You heard his words. “All these years I haven’t had a life. You pity junior because he wound up a servant—well, I’ve been your slave, never disobeying your command. But when did you give a party for me? This son of yours works his way back into your heart, and you go all out for him. What about me?”
The saints can be hard. Even when his generous father assures him that the whole farm will pass to him, this older brother is still calculating what his young brother has cost him, the net loss from the prodigal’s escapades. Even when his father tries to help him feel this joy of resurrection by turning back his harsh words and turning them around—“this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found,” the story has no more words to say whether he turned the heart of his older boy to his younger brother. As we leave the story, #1 son is stuck, paralyzed, too upright for his own good.
And what do you think of the father? Both sides of the audience think he’s a prodigal too, lavish, extravagant, willing to see his hard work turn to dust as it passes through his younger son’s fingers, all so that the boy will discover what he most values and so find freedom to walk into the embrace of life.
The embrace of God… for doesn’t this story, revolving around this parent, get us thinking about the nature of God? As Jesus tells the story, God is exactly who you want to meet, if you’re a sinner. But those who think they’re righteous may find God difficult to approve.
How have you been teased to active thought by this parable? I invite you to be still with that question, a while.
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