Scripture appointed for the 3rd Sunday of Easter includes Acts 3:12-19; I John 3:1-7; Luke 24:36b-48
No other world religion insists upon the importance of flesh and matter as much as Christianity does. The Gospels begin with the Incarnation, the divine nature robing itself in human flesh so that human nature might grow into the full stature of Christ. And the Gospels culminate in all the material matters of Holy Week: palm fronds on a dusty road, bread and wine in an upper room, water poured on disciples’ feet, a kiss in the garden of Gethsemane, cruel blows falling upon a gentle Messiah, tender embrace of that bruised body by mother and dear friend.
And in his end is our beginning. Raised through death, from death, his physicality remains central to his story. In one resurrection appearance, he broils fish for his disciples’ breakfast. In another, he meets one disciple’s resistance by urging that brother to see him whole by touching his wounds. And today, the story of one more appearance features both his display of his injuries (testifying that he is the man of Golgotha) and his appetite for their familiar table fellowship (“Have you anything here to eat?”).
It is this honoring and utilizing of material being that made it natural during Lent to enrich our study series on creation by encouraging one another to sign up for daily e-mail suggestions from the Ecumenical Lenten Carbon Fast, an approach to Lent launched by the United Church of Christ and endorsed by Episcopalians and many others. Last year, over six thousand people the world over welcomed this day-by-day opportunity to fast from carbon as their Lenten discipline, embracing Lenten opportunity to become more conscious and conscientious in their daily lives. Barbara, our organist and choir director, was one of those six thousand, and this year some unknown number of us followed her lead.
In what I believe I can promise to be a different sort of sermon than usual, I’d like to mark this Earth Day by sharing with you three of this year’s Lenten suggestions. Each offers answers to a particular question.
The first is: What can you do about junk mail?
Each year, the average American adult receives 41 pounds of junk mail. The online business 41pounds.org estimates that over a five year period, that volume of catalogs, credit card offers, unsolicited charity appeals, and circulars consumes over 100 million trees and 28 billion gallons of water, and produces more carbon dioxide than nine million cars. For $24.00 (that’s an Earth Day special offer), 41pounds.org says it will for five years stop 80-95% of your junk mail.
Or you can do it yourself, if you’re the industrious type—and passionate enough to keep at it—by using CatalogChoice.org to stop unwanted catalogs, 1-888-5-OPTOUT to eliminate credit card offers, and DMAChoice,org to report other junk mail. I hear there’s also an Apple ap to help stem the tide of what enters our mail boxes.
The second Lenten Carbon Fast question is: Is it bad to leave chargers plugged in after their job is done?
Jumping to one bottom line, a disciplined approach to this matter may save the average household $200. But there’s always another bottom line: how might this help our environment? Standby power use is responsible for an estimated one per-cent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Some people will say that’s not enough to matter; others will believe that every little bit helps.
So this question addresses two matters. One is “vampires”, appliances that suck energy even when you think they’re shut off, like microwaves, DVRs, TVs, and game systems—anything with a colorful light or a digital clock. If unplugging these items is awkward, one noted blogger recommends putting such appliances on power strips, clustering two or three per strip.
“Wall warts” are the second offender. These are chargers with big boxy plugs, and other AC adapters. Often, we leave them plugged in when disconnected from the gadget they recharge. I’m likely to leave my phone charging overnight, which uses ten times the energy that leaving the charger dangling would use. It isn’t rocket science to observe how long my phone takes to recharge, and then begin imagining other times of day (or night) than bedtime to do it… but that’s my habit, and I’ve been sticking to it—until this weekend, when practicing what I would be preaching prompted me to discover how easy it was to start changing that habit.
Third among the Carbon Fast questions that caught my eye was this one: Are there ways to green our funeral care? As you’d bet, the answer is Yes, and the reasons for asking this question are many.
One may be the personal desire expressed by someone who is a water resources management specialist at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. “I have always felt,” she writes, “that the modern ways of burial are not the way I want to go. I would want to be connected to nature in death, not shut out from nature.”
Toxic embalming materials like formaldehyde are part of that shutting-out, and burying into concrete vaults caskets made of impermeable finished wood and metal further the job. The finishing touch is to locate burial in a cemetery, by its nature an inflexible use of land that supports neither naturally-existing plant and animal life, nor much by way of human communal use, when you get right down to it.
It has been estimated that US cemeteries inter more than 1.5 million tons of reinforced concrete each year, along with more than a million tons of steel, and 30 million board feed of hardwoods.
Alternative choices, both new and ancient, can be explored through the Green Burial Council, the first nationwide clearinghouse for greener burial products and services. What are some examples?
Caskets made of plain pine wood, woven willow branches, painted cardboard, cane, bamboo—all described as beautiful, simple, and biodegradable.
Chemical-free burial is possible. Unless a body is to cross state lines, embalming is not required by law. Refrigeration will buy time, or prompt burial can be an answer for some, as it long has been for Jews, Muslims, Baha’i, and Quakers.
The green burial movement is creating a new kind of burial ground, in partnership with land conservation groups. Natural lands, not manicured grounds, are preserved for multiple uses, including bike or walking paths, native species conservation, environmental study, and burial, though not marked by large headstones-- perhaps a tree, a small marker, or just a GPS coordinate known to the family. While there are 200 green burial grounds in the UK, the movement is still in an early phase here, and has still a short list of such memorial preserves.
Cremation can certainly be a green practice, but has its own environmental hazards that are being addressed, like controlling carbon emissions at cremation facilities and resisting the pressures of the funeral industry to invest in miniature concrete vaults that seem designed to defy the opportunity to allow the return to the earth of human dust and ashes.
I believe I may have delivered on my promise of a diferent kind of sermon for the 3rd Sunday of Easter. Questions like those raised by the Carbon Fast belong in Eastertide, when our scriptures tell us that the righteousness of Christ is shown in the right deeds of his people, and when Christians are challenged to show by our actions what we profess by our faith.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Word Made Flesh
Scripture for the 2nd Sunday of Easter includes Acts 4:32-35, I John 1:1-2:2, and John 20:19-31
No other world religion makes the fleshly claim of Christianity, that God should choose to wrap divine being in the body, mind, and spirit of a human being; that the Word by which all creation came into being should be made flesh.
Incarnation, we call this doctrine. Notice its DNA all over our readings today. Jesus to Thomas: “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.” The apostle John writing his primer of Christian faith: “We declare to you… what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands… this life was revealed, and we have seen it…”
And, as if the incarnation of God in Jesus hasn’t been shown seated deeply enough in its appeal to the human race, a claim is made in the Book of Acts that goes to another deep place in the human psyche, that visceral place of private ownership of real estate.
We must not miss the exquisite timing, that we should hear this apostolic story on April 15th. The day our tax returns are due is when we hear the claim that no one in the first-century Jerusalem church claimed private ownership of any possessions.
It is said of the Roman imperial tax system that it wasn’t based on earning or selling, but on breathing. If you lived within the emperor’s reach, you were taxed—but apparently our apostolic forbears did not have to report capital gains.
It is also said by at least one well-regarded church historian that there’s not much evidence that the early church actually lived up to this standard of everything owned being held in common. This may have been the ideal, but how much was it practiced? In the Hebrew Bible we find a command from God that every fiftieth year should be a year of jubilee, marked by emancipation of slaves; but it’s not clear whether this was honored. Here, the Jerusalem church is distinguished by what happened on the fiftieth day after our Lord’s resurrection, such outpouring of God’s Spirit that the ragtag apostolic band was ignited and fused in one heart and soul, manifesting powers and gifts and radical commitment, an example being this pure socialism we hear about today. Is it the New Testament’s version of jubilee, a perfect ideal to profess but too hot to handle?
Well, consider that what we heard today is the second time that the Book of Acts makes the claim. Earlier, in chapter two, we hear, “(The Jerusalem Christians) devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.” (Acts 2:42-47)
Why tell about this community of goods twice in four chapters, unless it was based on something that actually happened?
“See how these Christians love!” their urban neighbors are reported to have exclaimed, impressed by something costlier than table fellowship. It was the Christians’ distribution system, their readiness to help people in crisis, “to each as any had need.”
Did it last long, this community ownership of goods that positioned the church to engage the world? The history of the primitive church doesn’t tell us, but we do spot it again, in time, as the monastic movement embraced poverty as one of its cardinal vows, creating an ongoing tradition of communal ownership that was, at its best, geared towards caring for the poor and the visitor as if each were Christ himself.
And when you consider the source of this dedication to higher dreams than home ownership, wasn’t it he himself? “Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals,” he instructed his seventy disciples as he sent them out to prepare the way for his public tour to heal and teach, to elevate the poor and deflate the rich. As he countered the culture as a mendicant Messiah, so his followers are to lay at the feet of the apostles the wherewithal to proclaim good news of the incarnate God having his way on earth as in heaven, and to do this proclaiming as evangelists with a double major in practical theology and economics.
“As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Jesus says this to all his disciples, promoting us all to the A Team. “You mean to me what I mean to my Father. You are as essential to my mission as I am to his. You are the next level of the incarnation, I in you and you in me. As I have been sent, so I send you.”
That line is the jewel in the crown of our Gospel story today, even though Thomas usually catches the preacher’s attention. There stands Thomas, resisting belief in the superabundance of the grace of God that is stronger than death, and what his fears really prevent is his deployment as an apostle in mission for Christ.
There is another noteworthy coincidence about all this incarnation and its implications for our financial stewardship. Our parish budget this year, our best sense of how God is calling and sending us into the world, is running a deficit of about $25,000. To give that some perspective, that’s 5.5 % of our total budget.
And this is after a successful appeal with half our households increasing their pledges, and a dozen new pledging households. That’s a lot to be thankful for!
At the same time, an unusually high number of deaths and moves last year took a red pen to our numbers, and some of our elder members haven’t been able to maintain their generous giving. While we’re close to the bone on the expenditures side, we’ve had to step up our funding of health insurance, a pricey thing, as we all know.
You don’t often hear about the parish budget from this pulpit. Why am I mentioning it today? Because anyone who examines our budget will notice that over and above the nearly $50,000 that St. John’s sends to help fund our Diocese and our national Church and their outreach regionally and globally, we also have committed some $25,000 to maintain our longstanding voluntary mission grants that help empower twenty-five mission partners, local, national, and global. An orphanage in India. Northern Berkshire Habitat for Humanity. The Berkshire Food Project. The list is long.
Who can miss the math? Our apostolic generosity involves just about the same number of dollars as our deficit. Because we believe we are called by God to be ready to engage the world, we are not going to erase our deficit by erasing our outreach. Because the apostles’ DNA shows stronger on our parish budget than the red ink, we intend to keep our minds and hearts open to find faithful answers to our need. It’s time to ask that we each take that task home with us today.
That’s about as soft an approach as you can get, compared to those first-century forbears who sold land and houses to empower their outreach. But, just like them, great grace is upon us. We, like they, have received the Holy Spirit that banishes fear. We, like they, are sent by Jesus on his mission, causing his word to be made flesh in our time.
No other world religion makes the fleshly claim of Christianity, that God should choose to wrap divine being in the body, mind, and spirit of a human being; that the Word by which all creation came into being should be made flesh.
Incarnation, we call this doctrine. Notice its DNA all over our readings today. Jesus to Thomas: “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.” The apostle John writing his primer of Christian faith: “We declare to you… what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands… this life was revealed, and we have seen it…”
And, as if the incarnation of God in Jesus hasn’t been shown seated deeply enough in its appeal to the human race, a claim is made in the Book of Acts that goes to another deep place in the human psyche, that visceral place of private ownership of real estate.
We must not miss the exquisite timing, that we should hear this apostolic story on April 15th. The day our tax returns are due is when we hear the claim that no one in the first-century Jerusalem church claimed private ownership of any possessions.
It is said of the Roman imperial tax system that it wasn’t based on earning or selling, but on breathing. If you lived within the emperor’s reach, you were taxed—but apparently our apostolic forbears did not have to report capital gains.
It is also said by at least one well-regarded church historian that there’s not much evidence that the early church actually lived up to this standard of everything owned being held in common. This may have been the ideal, but how much was it practiced? In the Hebrew Bible we find a command from God that every fiftieth year should be a year of jubilee, marked by emancipation of slaves; but it’s not clear whether this was honored. Here, the Jerusalem church is distinguished by what happened on the fiftieth day after our Lord’s resurrection, such outpouring of God’s Spirit that the ragtag apostolic band was ignited and fused in one heart and soul, manifesting powers and gifts and radical commitment, an example being this pure socialism we hear about today. Is it the New Testament’s version of jubilee, a perfect ideal to profess but too hot to handle?
Well, consider that what we heard today is the second time that the Book of Acts makes the claim. Earlier, in chapter two, we hear, “(The Jerusalem Christians) devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.” (Acts 2:42-47)
Why tell about this community of goods twice in four chapters, unless it was based on something that actually happened?
“See how these Christians love!” their urban neighbors are reported to have exclaimed, impressed by something costlier than table fellowship. It was the Christians’ distribution system, their readiness to help people in crisis, “to each as any had need.”
Did it last long, this community ownership of goods that positioned the church to engage the world? The history of the primitive church doesn’t tell us, but we do spot it again, in time, as the monastic movement embraced poverty as one of its cardinal vows, creating an ongoing tradition of communal ownership that was, at its best, geared towards caring for the poor and the visitor as if each were Christ himself.
And when you consider the source of this dedication to higher dreams than home ownership, wasn’t it he himself? “Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals,” he instructed his seventy disciples as he sent them out to prepare the way for his public tour to heal and teach, to elevate the poor and deflate the rich. As he countered the culture as a mendicant Messiah, so his followers are to lay at the feet of the apostles the wherewithal to proclaim good news of the incarnate God having his way on earth as in heaven, and to do this proclaiming as evangelists with a double major in practical theology and economics.
“As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Jesus says this to all his disciples, promoting us all to the A Team. “You mean to me what I mean to my Father. You are as essential to my mission as I am to his. You are the next level of the incarnation, I in you and you in me. As I have been sent, so I send you.”
That line is the jewel in the crown of our Gospel story today, even though Thomas usually catches the preacher’s attention. There stands Thomas, resisting belief in the superabundance of the grace of God that is stronger than death, and what his fears really prevent is his deployment as an apostle in mission for Christ.
There is another noteworthy coincidence about all this incarnation and its implications for our financial stewardship. Our parish budget this year, our best sense of how God is calling and sending us into the world, is running a deficit of about $25,000. To give that some perspective, that’s 5.5 % of our total budget.
And this is after a successful appeal with half our households increasing their pledges, and a dozen new pledging households. That’s a lot to be thankful for!
At the same time, an unusually high number of deaths and moves last year took a red pen to our numbers, and some of our elder members haven’t been able to maintain their generous giving. While we’re close to the bone on the expenditures side, we’ve had to step up our funding of health insurance, a pricey thing, as we all know.
You don’t often hear about the parish budget from this pulpit. Why am I mentioning it today? Because anyone who examines our budget will notice that over and above the nearly $50,000 that St. John’s sends to help fund our Diocese and our national Church and their outreach regionally and globally, we also have committed some $25,000 to maintain our longstanding voluntary mission grants that help empower twenty-five mission partners, local, national, and global. An orphanage in India. Northern Berkshire Habitat for Humanity. The Berkshire Food Project. The list is long.
Who can miss the math? Our apostolic generosity involves just about the same number of dollars as our deficit. Because we believe we are called by God to be ready to engage the world, we are not going to erase our deficit by erasing our outreach. Because the apostles’ DNA shows stronger on our parish budget than the red ink, we intend to keep our minds and hearts open to find faithful answers to our need. It’s time to ask that we each take that task home with us today.
That’s about as soft an approach as you can get, compared to those first-century forbears who sold land and houses to empower their outreach. But, just like them, great grace is upon us. We, like they, have received the Holy Spirit that banishes fear. We, like they, are sent by Jesus on his mission, causing his word to be made flesh in our time.
Friday, April 13, 2012
Give It Away
Scripture appointed for Easter Day includes Isaiah 25:6-9; Acts 10:34-43; Mark 16:1-8
“The boxwoods planted in the park spell LIVE.
I never noticed it until they died.
Before, the entwined green had smudged the word
unreadable. And when they take their own advice
again - come spring, come Easter - no one will know
a word is buried in the leaves…”
So begins Andrew Hudgins’ poem “Christ as a Gardener.” I’ve nipped off those few lines because I like that image of a word buried in the leaves.
Perhaps you’ll go rustling among the leaves of the Easter story, looking for the message that once spoke to you and might again, or a word you’ve yearned to hear, have yet to find, but long for, believing you will somehow recognize it when you hear it.
Like the poet’s boxwood, the Easter message we seek now may not be shaped quite like it was when we first heard it. Intervening falls and winters have entwined that message with conflicting claims, may have smudged the word unreadable.
The poet’s eye was caught by ragged remains of the original shaping of those boxwoods, but what inspires him is not what was but what will be, when power is released and those bushes burn with all the chemical reactions that we mean by springtime—when they take their own advice and rise, fresh shoots shaping renewal of life more eloquently than any human words can tell.
Easter’s message brings it own good news, that such a power is available to the human spirit. As we look for a word buried in the leaves of the first-century story, let it be a word that frees us to notice that certain power, released then, active to bless us now in this twenty-first century. Whatever living word we find in Easter, make it one that helps us recognize how God keeps releasing that certain power now.
Poet Luci Shaw describes that power in a poem that speaks to Jesus:
“You…
were the kind who used a new math
to multiply bread, fish, faith.
You practiced a radical sociology:
rehabilitated con men &
call girls. You valued women,
aliens, & other minority groups.
A general practitioner,
you specialized in heart surgery.
Creator, healer, innovator,
shepherd, story-spinner,
weather-maker, botanist,
alchemist, exorcist, iconoclast,
seeker, seer, motive-sifter,
you were always beyond us,
ahead of your own time, & ours.
And we would like to be
like you…
Grant us degrees in all
the liberal arts of heaven."
At the end of this poem, Shaw reminds the reader how it was that Jesus released the power to be like him: gently and simply, he took cool water and a towel and washed the feet of whomever God had given him. Doing that, he took the biggest step he could in downward mobility, to the very bottom of the totem pole of household servants, the one who washed the feet of guests at the front door. A stunning move by one whom, we heard earlier, God had anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power.
All his short life long, Jesus gave away power. To disciples, he never said “Worship me,” but “Follow me. Do as I do. And do it not by your own strength of will but by letting my mind be formed in you.” Harnessing this power that he kept giving away, sharpening it, deepening it, would be his kind of praying: Hallowed One, your will be done on earth as in heaven.
Crowds surrounded Jesus with all the wraths and sorrows of this world, and each person, one by one, became the recipient of his power. Until so much Judean Spring had come, so much divine power spread among so many so freely, that no one could fail to recognize: here was the fulfillment of the prophet’s vision, God making a feast for all peoples. Until, that is, certain powers-that-be-- the kind that be in all times and places, powerful men who accumulate power and share it only with those who do their will-- until they too recognized the potential, and clamped down hard on Jesus the light of the world.
If there is a word buried in the leaves of this story, it could be the word of the boxwoods: LIVE, for in him was life, and this life was the light of all people.
What has become of the Easter message in these past twenty centuries? Much entwining, smudging the word unreadable; and that’s a verdict Jesus’s closest friends and followers would likely agree on. His church, his people, have too often been marked by the futile effort to keep power, too often resulting in abusing power, rather than being known for choosing his way, to give power away.
Until “they take their own advice again—come spring, come Easter…” and fresh shoots of vision, courage, and authentic mission cause the bush to burn in renewal.
For the story is not finished. Having done their worst, the powers-that-be disposed of his body behind a heavy stone sealing the mouth of a tomb. This was not enough to end what God had begun in Jesus.
By the power Jesus had given away, he, the Word of God, could not be silenced in that tomb.
The closing words of Mark’s Gospel today say that “Jesus himself sent out through (his followers), from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.”
Jesus the Word is not buried in the leaves of what happened to him in the first century. His power, released throughout his followers, ensured that his story has not been finished. His certain power continues to bless this world, person by person, so long as it continues to be given away.
“The boxwoods planted in the park spell LIVE.
I never noticed it until they died.
Before, the entwined green had smudged the word
unreadable. And when they take their own advice
again - come spring, come Easter - no one will know
a word is buried in the leaves…”
So begins Andrew Hudgins’ poem “Christ as a Gardener.” I’ve nipped off those few lines because I like that image of a word buried in the leaves.
Perhaps you’ll go rustling among the leaves of the Easter story, looking for the message that once spoke to you and might again, or a word you’ve yearned to hear, have yet to find, but long for, believing you will somehow recognize it when you hear it.
Like the poet’s boxwood, the Easter message we seek now may not be shaped quite like it was when we first heard it. Intervening falls and winters have entwined that message with conflicting claims, may have smudged the word unreadable.
The poet’s eye was caught by ragged remains of the original shaping of those boxwoods, but what inspires him is not what was but what will be, when power is released and those bushes burn with all the chemical reactions that we mean by springtime—when they take their own advice and rise, fresh shoots shaping renewal of life more eloquently than any human words can tell.
Easter’s message brings it own good news, that such a power is available to the human spirit. As we look for a word buried in the leaves of the first-century story, let it be a word that frees us to notice that certain power, released then, active to bless us now in this twenty-first century. Whatever living word we find in Easter, make it one that helps us recognize how God keeps releasing that certain power now.
Poet Luci Shaw describes that power in a poem that speaks to Jesus:
“You…
were the kind who used a new math
to multiply bread, fish, faith.
You practiced a radical sociology:
rehabilitated con men &
call girls. You valued women,
aliens, & other minority groups.
A general practitioner,
you specialized in heart surgery.
Creator, healer, innovator,
shepherd, story-spinner,
weather-maker, botanist,
alchemist, exorcist, iconoclast,
seeker, seer, motive-sifter,
you were always beyond us,
ahead of your own time, & ours.
And we would like to be
like you…
Grant us degrees in all
the liberal arts of heaven."
At the end of this poem, Shaw reminds the reader how it was that Jesus released the power to be like him: gently and simply, he took cool water and a towel and washed the feet of whomever God had given him. Doing that, he took the biggest step he could in downward mobility, to the very bottom of the totem pole of household servants, the one who washed the feet of guests at the front door. A stunning move by one whom, we heard earlier, God had anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power.
All his short life long, Jesus gave away power. To disciples, he never said “Worship me,” but “Follow me. Do as I do. And do it not by your own strength of will but by letting my mind be formed in you.” Harnessing this power that he kept giving away, sharpening it, deepening it, would be his kind of praying: Hallowed One, your will be done on earth as in heaven.
Crowds surrounded Jesus with all the wraths and sorrows of this world, and each person, one by one, became the recipient of his power. Until so much Judean Spring had come, so much divine power spread among so many so freely, that no one could fail to recognize: here was the fulfillment of the prophet’s vision, God making a feast for all peoples. Until, that is, certain powers-that-be-- the kind that be in all times and places, powerful men who accumulate power and share it only with those who do their will-- until they too recognized the potential, and clamped down hard on Jesus the light of the world.
If there is a word buried in the leaves of this story, it could be the word of the boxwoods: LIVE, for in him was life, and this life was the light of all people.
What has become of the Easter message in these past twenty centuries? Much entwining, smudging the word unreadable; and that’s a verdict Jesus’s closest friends and followers would likely agree on. His church, his people, have too often been marked by the futile effort to keep power, too often resulting in abusing power, rather than being known for choosing his way, to give power away.
Until “they take their own advice again—come spring, come Easter…” and fresh shoots of vision, courage, and authentic mission cause the bush to burn in renewal.
For the story is not finished. Having done their worst, the powers-that-be disposed of his body behind a heavy stone sealing the mouth of a tomb. This was not enough to end what God had begun in Jesus.
By the power Jesus had given away, he, the Word of God, could not be silenced in that tomb.
The closing words of Mark’s Gospel today say that “Jesus himself sent out through (his followers), from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.”
Jesus the Word is not buried in the leaves of what happened to him in the first century. His power, released throughout his followers, ensured that his story has not been finished. His certain power continues to bless this world, person by person, so long as it continues to be given away.
We Are Related
Scripture mentioned in this Easter Eve homily includes Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Exodus 14:10-31, 15:20-21; Ezekiel 37:1-14
This is a year when a lovely thing happens. Christian Easter and Jewish Passover festivals overlap on the same weekend.
Novelists Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander have published a new Haggadah, the script used at the Passover table to tell the story of God’s relentless love for the human race, a story we are rehearsing tonight in our own way.
Foer recently wrote about the experience of writing this Haggadah, which may replace the most popular and widely used script from the past two generations in America, a Haggadah prepared and distributed free (as a very effective piece of public relations) by the Maxwell House Coffee Company. I want you to hear a portion of his article:
“Like every child, my 6-year-old is a great lover of stories—Norse myths, Roald Dahl, recounted tales from my own childhood—but none more than those from the Bible. So between the bath and bed, my wife and I often read to him from children’s versions of the Old Testament. He loves hearing those stories, because they’re the greatest stories ever told. We love telling them for a different reason.
We helped him learn to sleep through the night, to use a fork, to read, to ride a bike, to say goodbye to us. But there is no more significant lesson than the one that is never learned, but always studied, the noblest collective project of all, borrowed from one generation and lent to the next: how to seek oneself.
A few nights ago, after hearing about the death of Moses for the umpteenth time—how he took his last breaths overlooking a promised land that he would never enter—my son leaned his still wet head against my shoulder.
’Is something wrong?’ I asked, closing the book.
He shook his head.
’Are you sure?’
Without looking up, he asked if Moses was a real person.
‘I don’t know,’ I told him, ‘but we’re related to him.’”
Yes, we are. And we count on many great figures and their sensational stories to teach us to recognize, use, and be grateful for the powers given to us by God.
We are related also to Xzavior, Athena, and Aura. In just a few moments God and we will seal that deal of relatedness by the covenant of baptism, when they will receive the Holy Spirit promised by Jesus, making them members of his worldwide family and intimately related to us.
Their families and we, their new family, will promise to do our job and see that these children keep learning from Moses and Ezekiel and, most of all, from Jesus, just what powers these are that God has given them. For we’ve heard tonight some important clues.
Moses’ story, leading Israel to freedom, speaks of the powers of courage and trust. Ezekiel’s story of the dry bones tells us a lot about the powers of spirit and hope. And the creation story points to the truth that we are given the power of creativity, and called into a grateful partnership with God who empowers us to be good stewards of creation.
This is, most of all, Jesus’s night, when the story of his life being stronger than his death shows us what powers he gives us: the power of love to become good caregivers and servants to one another, the power to inspire and teach and use our talents, the power to open our hearts, our friendships, and our world to God’s justice and peace, and the power of joy that rises out of the gift of life that is stronger than death.
His story really does become our story, for we are related to him.
(Jonathan Safran Foer’s article appeared in The New York Times on Sunday, April 1, 2012.)
This is a year when a lovely thing happens. Christian Easter and Jewish Passover festivals overlap on the same weekend.
Novelists Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander have published a new Haggadah, the script used at the Passover table to tell the story of God’s relentless love for the human race, a story we are rehearsing tonight in our own way.
Foer recently wrote about the experience of writing this Haggadah, which may replace the most popular and widely used script from the past two generations in America, a Haggadah prepared and distributed free (as a very effective piece of public relations) by the Maxwell House Coffee Company. I want you to hear a portion of his article:
“Like every child, my 6-year-old is a great lover of stories—Norse myths, Roald Dahl, recounted tales from my own childhood—but none more than those from the Bible. So between the bath and bed, my wife and I often read to him from children’s versions of the Old Testament. He loves hearing those stories, because they’re the greatest stories ever told. We love telling them for a different reason.
We helped him learn to sleep through the night, to use a fork, to read, to ride a bike, to say goodbye to us. But there is no more significant lesson than the one that is never learned, but always studied, the noblest collective project of all, borrowed from one generation and lent to the next: how to seek oneself.
A few nights ago, after hearing about the death of Moses for the umpteenth time—how he took his last breaths overlooking a promised land that he would never enter—my son leaned his still wet head against my shoulder.
’Is something wrong?’ I asked, closing the book.
He shook his head.
’Are you sure?’
Without looking up, he asked if Moses was a real person.
‘I don’t know,’ I told him, ‘but we’re related to him.’”
Yes, we are. And we count on many great figures and their sensational stories to teach us to recognize, use, and be grateful for the powers given to us by God.
We are related also to Xzavior, Athena, and Aura. In just a few moments God and we will seal that deal of relatedness by the covenant of baptism, when they will receive the Holy Spirit promised by Jesus, making them members of his worldwide family and intimately related to us.
Their families and we, their new family, will promise to do our job and see that these children keep learning from Moses and Ezekiel and, most of all, from Jesus, just what powers these are that God has given them. For we’ve heard tonight some important clues.
Moses’ story, leading Israel to freedom, speaks of the powers of courage and trust. Ezekiel’s story of the dry bones tells us a lot about the powers of spirit and hope. And the creation story points to the truth that we are given the power of creativity, and called into a grateful partnership with God who empowers us to be good stewards of creation.
This is, most of all, Jesus’s night, when the story of his life being stronger than his death shows us what powers he gives us: the power of love to become good caregivers and servants to one another, the power to inspire and teach and use our talents, the power to open our hearts, our friendships, and our world to God’s justice and peace, and the power of joy that rises out of the gift of life that is stronger than death.
His story really does become our story, for we are related to him.
(Jonathan Safran Foer’s article appeared in The New York Times on Sunday, April 1, 2012.)
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Lift High the Cross
Scripture for the 4th Sunday in Lent includes Numbers 21:4-9, Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21
The lilacs are budded. Tulips are up six inches in my south-exposed garden, where there’s a blaze of crocuses causing a stir-up of bees. It’s the Fourth Sunday in Lent, when custom calls for a lightening-up of Lenten discipline—even if the author of the Letter to the Ephesians keeps insisting that Christians be wary of “following the desires of flesh and senses.” It’s spring, for heaven’s sake, and we’d be dull clods if we didn’t smell it in the air and rejoice. That’s what this fourth Lenten Sunday has long been called: Laetare Sunday, from the Latin “laetare”, rejoice, the first word of the psalm in the old Roman rite.
Mothering Sunday is another of its nicknames. Tumble back to the 16th century, and you’d find people keeping this as one of their very few holidays. Domestic servants were given the day off to return to their mothers and, with them, attend worship in their “mother churches”, the hometown churches where they’d been baptized and raised.
“Refreshment Sunday” is yet another of this day’s names. Back when Lent meant forswearing meat and dairy products, people were ready by this Lenten midpoint to kick back and be bad… simnel cakes, bacon, and two eggs over easy, please. No accident, that today’s collect asks God to “evermore give us this bread”, even if what’s meant is metaphorical and spiritual, the true bread, Christ.
Real bread has been baked for us, this Lent. Diana Elvin and Elvy O’Brien have been our bakers, so far. I’m hoping there are more bread bakers among you who’d like to provide communion bread for future Sundays. While we may have grown attached to those wafers the nuns make for us, it’s a nice change to get our hands and our taste buds on real bread. Someone has said that the church demands no greater leap of faith than when she asks her people to believe that those wafers are bread.
Speaking of belief, what’s going on in the Book of Numbers with Moses ordering a bronze serpent to be held up on a pole? There was just never a dull day in those days of old. Don’t expect a neat answer to this one. And why even bother? Well, there’s Jesus in John’s Gospel telling us, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
Snakes do not make out well in the Bible, do they? Like dragons, they represent evil and the devil. It probably didn’t help their reputation in ancient Israel, that certain neighboring nations had a religion that worshiped snakes. Commentators say that what’s going on in today’s story is that Israel is co-opting that pagan religious image, showing their neighbors (while also showing any backsliders in Israel who might have been tempted to practice snake worship) showing everyone that Israel’s God was greater than the pagan snake-god.
So this was supposed to be a kind of wilderness evangelism. Because of the loyal love of Israel’s God, who faithfully kept the covenant promises made to the patriarchs and matriarchs, if any of those Israelites in the wilderness were bitten by snakes, they simply had to look to the pole in Moses’s hand and they would live.
As far as I can see, it’s open season for efforts at making sense of this story. The commentators don’t seem any too confident in their explanations. And the point in even trying is to catch what our patron St. John has in mind when he revives the image.
I figure that what Moses decided to do was to make it impossible for his people to deny that they had a problem, a problem that could unite them. He put a bronze snake on that pole because live snakes were nipping at their ankles, everybody’s ankles. He put on that pole a graphic image of their problem. I think he knew that this strategy could unite them at a time when something more vicious than snakes was feeding on them.
So far the only thing that was uniting them was their anger and their fear. Remember that these former slaves had taken the biggest gamble of their lives when they stepped off that river bank and followed Moses out of their status quo as mistreated slaves in Egypt, into freedom in a new land that God promised (through Moses) to be flowing with milk and honey. It didn’t take them long to discover that in a long wilderness march, you run out of food and water. Back home in Egypt, they at least had food and drink. The longer and the harder their journey, the more they complained bitterly (even when they were saved from hunger and thirst by the providence of God), sinking into the worst of human nature as “children of wrath”, to borrow a phrase from our second lesson.
How bad did this get? Every time God sent blessing, God’s people cursed. Water for their thirst? Moses found them a well by a rock—it wasn’t enough. Food for their hunger? Migrating quails literally fell on their camp, and a vegan option, manna, condensed on the foliage overnight—they found that menu boring and literally beneath them.
Finally, God is said to have taken a desperate measure to restore perspective: having opened to them all the native resources of the land, God wondered what it would do for their outlook if they noticed one more example of the abundance of God’s creation: the prodigious supply of snakes in that wilderness. It might also be said that God was indulging in a bit of heavenly retribution—but that would suggest that a grumbling people had reduced Yahweh to a grumbling God, and that should alarm us, that people should have such wrathful power.
I think Moses put that snake on his pole because it was the very best and most accurate image he could find to represent not God’s anger, but theirs, his people’s. Were they so angry, so blinded by their complaining, that they didn’t watch where they were stepping, didn’t watch out for one another, didn’t even pay attention to a far worse danger than having to eat leftovers? “Remember the snakes, people!” his rod and staff said, loud and clear. “And remember the power of your own attitude to adversity. It will either carry you through this time of great danger, or it will lay you low. Poisonous attitudes pose a greater risk than poisonous snakes. Try gratitude.”
Does anything carry over from this treatment of Moses’ story to John’s revival of it?
The “lifting up” that must happen to the Son of Man refers to what the church calls the Passion of Christ—his life, his death, his resurrection. His life, his public ministry, lifted up out of obscurity the outcast people of Palestine, in fact the marginalized and ill-treated “little ones” of all times and cultures, lifting them up while casting down the mighty, rendering all people equal in God’s sight. This radical movement he initiated set him on a collision course with the dominant powers of his world, this world, and he freely chose to ride out that collision as he was lifted high upon the cross, punished and executed by the collaborating powers of both state and religion. That neither, nor both, could silence his Word and terminate his power and defeat his love is shown in his being lifted up, raised, from death. And beyond, the fellowship he created constantly lifts him up in Word and sacrament, in servanthood and the practice of his kind of love. All of this lifting up is best symbolized by the cross, which (however partially) unites Christian people unlike anything else.
What was a shameful instrument of death has become a potent sign of the enduring power of loyal love. Like the curative sight of Moses’ pole, the cross of Jesus invites us to stop grumbling about our own little piles of thorns—or our big ones-- and gain perspective.
The cross that has Jesus’s body nailed on it urges us to watch where and how we walk, that we not add to the breaking of Mary’s heart, or the wounding of the Body of Christ, but bind ourselves to God by an attitude of reverence for all life.
The cross that has on it Jesus’s transformed body freed by resurrection, robed as a priest and crowned as a king, draws us to measure the riches of his grace that saves us for good works through God’s church and in God’s world.
And the cross that has no body on it shows no less where loyal love has gone and wants to go still, all-embracing by its cross-beam and joining earth to heaven by its pole.
Like the pole of Moses’ making, the cross of Jesus makes it obvious to us, and undeniable, that we have a problem. We live in a world that resorts to violence, a world where death appears to have the last word. The cross displays what the grace of God can make of violence and death. Like Moses laying claim to a symbol of worldly power and redeeming it for higher purpose in the service of God, Mother Church lays hold of the cross, converting it from representing brutal capital punishment and brazen death, freeing it to stand for the greatest love that calls us to look to it and live.
To look up to the cross of Jesus is to let our attitudes be reshaped to a gratitude that is itself the antidote to venoms that inflame human hearts. It is the sign of the cross that restores in us the divine likeness in which we are made, by which our world is remade in God’s new creation.
The lilacs are budded. Tulips are up six inches in my south-exposed garden, where there’s a blaze of crocuses causing a stir-up of bees. It’s the Fourth Sunday in Lent, when custom calls for a lightening-up of Lenten discipline—even if the author of the Letter to the Ephesians keeps insisting that Christians be wary of “following the desires of flesh and senses.” It’s spring, for heaven’s sake, and we’d be dull clods if we didn’t smell it in the air and rejoice. That’s what this fourth Lenten Sunday has long been called: Laetare Sunday, from the Latin “laetare”, rejoice, the first word of the psalm in the old Roman rite.
Mothering Sunday is another of its nicknames. Tumble back to the 16th century, and you’d find people keeping this as one of their very few holidays. Domestic servants were given the day off to return to their mothers and, with them, attend worship in their “mother churches”, the hometown churches where they’d been baptized and raised.
“Refreshment Sunday” is yet another of this day’s names. Back when Lent meant forswearing meat and dairy products, people were ready by this Lenten midpoint to kick back and be bad… simnel cakes, bacon, and two eggs over easy, please. No accident, that today’s collect asks God to “evermore give us this bread”, even if what’s meant is metaphorical and spiritual, the true bread, Christ.
Real bread has been baked for us, this Lent. Diana Elvin and Elvy O’Brien have been our bakers, so far. I’m hoping there are more bread bakers among you who’d like to provide communion bread for future Sundays. While we may have grown attached to those wafers the nuns make for us, it’s a nice change to get our hands and our taste buds on real bread. Someone has said that the church demands no greater leap of faith than when she asks her people to believe that those wafers are bread.
Speaking of belief, what’s going on in the Book of Numbers with Moses ordering a bronze serpent to be held up on a pole? There was just never a dull day in those days of old. Don’t expect a neat answer to this one. And why even bother? Well, there’s Jesus in John’s Gospel telling us, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
Snakes do not make out well in the Bible, do they? Like dragons, they represent evil and the devil. It probably didn’t help their reputation in ancient Israel, that certain neighboring nations had a religion that worshiped snakes. Commentators say that what’s going on in today’s story is that Israel is co-opting that pagan religious image, showing their neighbors (while also showing any backsliders in Israel who might have been tempted to practice snake worship) showing everyone that Israel’s God was greater than the pagan snake-god.
So this was supposed to be a kind of wilderness evangelism. Because of the loyal love of Israel’s God, who faithfully kept the covenant promises made to the patriarchs and matriarchs, if any of those Israelites in the wilderness were bitten by snakes, they simply had to look to the pole in Moses’s hand and they would live.
As far as I can see, it’s open season for efforts at making sense of this story. The commentators don’t seem any too confident in their explanations. And the point in even trying is to catch what our patron St. John has in mind when he revives the image.
I figure that what Moses decided to do was to make it impossible for his people to deny that they had a problem, a problem that could unite them. He put a bronze snake on that pole because live snakes were nipping at their ankles, everybody’s ankles. He put on that pole a graphic image of their problem. I think he knew that this strategy could unite them at a time when something more vicious than snakes was feeding on them.
So far the only thing that was uniting them was their anger and their fear. Remember that these former slaves had taken the biggest gamble of their lives when they stepped off that river bank and followed Moses out of their status quo as mistreated slaves in Egypt, into freedom in a new land that God promised (through Moses) to be flowing with milk and honey. It didn’t take them long to discover that in a long wilderness march, you run out of food and water. Back home in Egypt, they at least had food and drink. The longer and the harder their journey, the more they complained bitterly (even when they were saved from hunger and thirst by the providence of God), sinking into the worst of human nature as “children of wrath”, to borrow a phrase from our second lesson.
How bad did this get? Every time God sent blessing, God’s people cursed. Water for their thirst? Moses found them a well by a rock—it wasn’t enough. Food for their hunger? Migrating quails literally fell on their camp, and a vegan option, manna, condensed on the foliage overnight—they found that menu boring and literally beneath them.
Finally, God is said to have taken a desperate measure to restore perspective: having opened to them all the native resources of the land, God wondered what it would do for their outlook if they noticed one more example of the abundance of God’s creation: the prodigious supply of snakes in that wilderness. It might also be said that God was indulging in a bit of heavenly retribution—but that would suggest that a grumbling people had reduced Yahweh to a grumbling God, and that should alarm us, that people should have such wrathful power.
I think Moses put that snake on his pole because it was the very best and most accurate image he could find to represent not God’s anger, but theirs, his people’s. Were they so angry, so blinded by their complaining, that they didn’t watch where they were stepping, didn’t watch out for one another, didn’t even pay attention to a far worse danger than having to eat leftovers? “Remember the snakes, people!” his rod and staff said, loud and clear. “And remember the power of your own attitude to adversity. It will either carry you through this time of great danger, or it will lay you low. Poisonous attitudes pose a greater risk than poisonous snakes. Try gratitude.”
Does anything carry over from this treatment of Moses’ story to John’s revival of it?
The “lifting up” that must happen to the Son of Man refers to what the church calls the Passion of Christ—his life, his death, his resurrection. His life, his public ministry, lifted up out of obscurity the outcast people of Palestine, in fact the marginalized and ill-treated “little ones” of all times and cultures, lifting them up while casting down the mighty, rendering all people equal in God’s sight. This radical movement he initiated set him on a collision course with the dominant powers of his world, this world, and he freely chose to ride out that collision as he was lifted high upon the cross, punished and executed by the collaborating powers of both state and religion. That neither, nor both, could silence his Word and terminate his power and defeat his love is shown in his being lifted up, raised, from death. And beyond, the fellowship he created constantly lifts him up in Word and sacrament, in servanthood and the practice of his kind of love. All of this lifting up is best symbolized by the cross, which (however partially) unites Christian people unlike anything else.
What was a shameful instrument of death has become a potent sign of the enduring power of loyal love. Like the curative sight of Moses’ pole, the cross of Jesus invites us to stop grumbling about our own little piles of thorns—or our big ones-- and gain perspective.
The cross that has Jesus’s body nailed on it urges us to watch where and how we walk, that we not add to the breaking of Mary’s heart, or the wounding of the Body of Christ, but bind ourselves to God by an attitude of reverence for all life.
The cross that has on it Jesus’s transformed body freed by resurrection, robed as a priest and crowned as a king, draws us to measure the riches of his grace that saves us for good works through God’s church and in God’s world.
And the cross that has no body on it shows no less where loyal love has gone and wants to go still, all-embracing by its cross-beam and joining earth to heaven by its pole.
Like the pole of Moses’ making, the cross of Jesus makes it obvious to us, and undeniable, that we have a problem. We live in a world that resorts to violence, a world where death appears to have the last word. The cross displays what the grace of God can make of violence and death. Like Moses laying claim to a symbol of worldly power and redeeming it for higher purpose in the service of God, Mother Church lays hold of the cross, converting it from representing brutal capital punishment and brazen death, freeing it to stand for the greatest love that calls us to look to it and live.
To look up to the cross of Jesus is to let our attitudes be reshaped to a gratitude that is itself the antidote to venoms that inflame human hearts. It is the sign of the cross that restores in us the divine likeness in which we are made, by which our world is remade in God’s new creation.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
The Power of Loyal Love
Scripture for the 3rd Sunday in Lent includes Exodus 20:1-17; I Corinthians 1:18-25; and John 2:13-22
The story of Jesus overturning the tables of the money-changers and sellers of livestock in the temple precincts—here’s a Gospel event I’ve never seen as the subject of a stained glass window. Have you?
Imagine it. All those coins falling to the pavement. Tables tumbling at odd angles. Terror in the eyes of the animals. Shocked faces, as peoples mouths are left gaping.
I wonder if we know what to make of this one, how to display it in our gallery of Jesus moments.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke locate this spectacular temple protest near the end of our Lord’s public ministry. We’re accustomed to imagining that this strategic disruption of the status quo uniquely fueled the fires that would consume Jesus.
But John places this event right near the start of Jesus’s ministry. What a way for Jesus to make his mark! Unlikely he would have lasted as long as he did, says one commentator, if this is how he starts his itinerant preaching. Likelier, John moves the story up front because it serves his purpose as evangelist and theologian. What has immediately preceded this story is the transformation of water to wine at the wedding feast in Cana. Revealed there was the grace and glory and abundant new life on offer in Jesus Christ. What follows in today’s portion is the challenge and threat to the existing order posed by that new life. These two stories, back to back, create a kind of Gospel in miniature: God’s self-revealing in Jesus erupts at a wedding feast in Galilee. It is with humanity that God delights to dwell. Not so much the temple, not the ecclesiastical-industrial complex, not the hierarchy-bound ritual-blindered blood-soaked sanctuary made with hands. No, God is more the open-country village-life type who identifies with the kind of loyal love that is at the heart of a wedding feast.
But this God has a message for the ecclesiastical-industrial complex, and Jesus the messenger delivers it, exposing himself to the fiery backdraft.
It is not his message that simple abuses to the temple sacrificial system must stop. Perhaps that theme is there in Matthew, Mark, and Luke when they report Jesus railing against how the temple has become a den of robbers. But no, John’s Jesus says that the temple system has become a marketplace ruled by business-as-usual, a Charles Schwab investment office at each entrance. John has Jesus deliver a penetrating bunker-busting message: the entire temple sacrificial system must end.
And it is only John who reports Jesus’s words about destroying the temple. While he means the temple of his own body, his figure of speech has a double edge. John, last of the four Gospel-writers, has woven into his Gospel prescient words of Jesus that help the church make sense of the devastating obliteration of the temple by Roman armed forces, late in the first century.
When the temple is gone, something will take its place. That will be the Spirit-infused risen Body of Christ that has passed through the obliteration on Calvary, then burst the boundaries of Roman force, leaving an empty tomb to testify that no stone edifice can contain the divine.
When the temple is gone, something will take its place. That will be the Spirit-infused risen Body of Christ, the church, the community of people unified by loyal love, both his and theirs: united by the loyal love of Jesus Christ crucified and revealed by Easter light to be the power of God and the wisdom of God, and bound together by the loyal love of disciples, apostles, and countless ordinary people made extraordinary by having hitched their wagons to the star of God’s foolishness that is wiser than human wisdom, God’s weakness that is stronger than human strength.
Across this nation now, a large and growing number of congregations have to face the foundation-shaking challenges of merger and closure, requiring them to discover what will take its place, when the temple is gone. We don’t have far to look, to see our sister churches on the front lines of transformation, wondering what they are becoming. Are their water-barrels half empty or half full? Are they called to hold their own, or is God calling them to pour themselves out and so become fine wine?
Churches that are closer to these issues of life and death have much to teach congregations that seem insulated and secure. All churches need to hear the stories of congregations facing the loss of sanctuaries made with hands, while finding their security not in temples of stone and wood, but in the loyal love of Jesus Christ crucified and risen, showing itself in their experience of spiritual community and flesh-and-blood outreach.
The cleansing of the temple. That’s how today’s Gospel event is remembered by name. But, as we have seen, that emphasis comes more from the other three evangelists, whose message was more along the lines of summoning the religious community to clean up its act.
John’s Jesus has gone for the jugular. Rearranging the deck chairs will do nothing to change the course of our temples, which need more than cleansing. They need the power and wisdom of God; and, if I may add to St. Paul’s words, our temples need the pleasure of God—that is, we need to care, to know, and to commit our resources to what pleases God.
What that is hovers above us and within us in the radiant vision of the prophet Micah, whose timeless questions and answers must have been ringing in John’s mind as he wrote the words we heard today.
“’With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’ He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:6-8)
Not the cleansing of the temple. The recovery of the temple’s primary purpose. The turning upside-down of the temple’s agenda, to serve the world and not the ecclesiastical-industrial complex, to convert a hierarchical system into a servant community that lifts up the lowly and puts the mighty to the task of washing feet and feeding the hungry. The tables are turned, announces Jesus at the start of his brief public ministry in John’s Gospel. And the water barrels are no longer for keeping: they are to pour out the rich wine of God’s new creation.
“The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing…” Well, aren’t we all? “…but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
Not the power of magical intervention, demanded by people needing signs and wonders to reveal God; not the power of holding the right philosophy or getting it right theologically, expected by people who believe they can think their way to God.
The message about the cross is the lasting durability of loyal love, foolish and weak from the standpoint of imperial powers, but the very cornerstone of the kingdom of God and the compass of the church.
(Gail O’Day’s commentary on John’s Gospel, Volume IX of “The New Interpreter’s Bible”, was helpful in preparing this sermon.)
The story of Jesus overturning the tables of the money-changers and sellers of livestock in the temple precincts—here’s a Gospel event I’ve never seen as the subject of a stained glass window. Have you?
Imagine it. All those coins falling to the pavement. Tables tumbling at odd angles. Terror in the eyes of the animals. Shocked faces, as peoples mouths are left gaping.
I wonder if we know what to make of this one, how to display it in our gallery of Jesus moments.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke locate this spectacular temple protest near the end of our Lord’s public ministry. We’re accustomed to imagining that this strategic disruption of the status quo uniquely fueled the fires that would consume Jesus.
But John places this event right near the start of Jesus’s ministry. What a way for Jesus to make his mark! Unlikely he would have lasted as long as he did, says one commentator, if this is how he starts his itinerant preaching. Likelier, John moves the story up front because it serves his purpose as evangelist and theologian. What has immediately preceded this story is the transformation of water to wine at the wedding feast in Cana. Revealed there was the grace and glory and abundant new life on offer in Jesus Christ. What follows in today’s portion is the challenge and threat to the existing order posed by that new life. These two stories, back to back, create a kind of Gospel in miniature: God’s self-revealing in Jesus erupts at a wedding feast in Galilee. It is with humanity that God delights to dwell. Not so much the temple, not the ecclesiastical-industrial complex, not the hierarchy-bound ritual-blindered blood-soaked sanctuary made with hands. No, God is more the open-country village-life type who identifies with the kind of loyal love that is at the heart of a wedding feast.
But this God has a message for the ecclesiastical-industrial complex, and Jesus the messenger delivers it, exposing himself to the fiery backdraft.
It is not his message that simple abuses to the temple sacrificial system must stop. Perhaps that theme is there in Matthew, Mark, and Luke when they report Jesus railing against how the temple has become a den of robbers. But no, John’s Jesus says that the temple system has become a marketplace ruled by business-as-usual, a Charles Schwab investment office at each entrance. John has Jesus deliver a penetrating bunker-busting message: the entire temple sacrificial system must end.
And it is only John who reports Jesus’s words about destroying the temple. While he means the temple of his own body, his figure of speech has a double edge. John, last of the four Gospel-writers, has woven into his Gospel prescient words of Jesus that help the church make sense of the devastating obliteration of the temple by Roman armed forces, late in the first century.
When the temple is gone, something will take its place. That will be the Spirit-infused risen Body of Christ that has passed through the obliteration on Calvary, then burst the boundaries of Roman force, leaving an empty tomb to testify that no stone edifice can contain the divine.
When the temple is gone, something will take its place. That will be the Spirit-infused risen Body of Christ, the church, the community of people unified by loyal love, both his and theirs: united by the loyal love of Jesus Christ crucified and revealed by Easter light to be the power of God and the wisdom of God, and bound together by the loyal love of disciples, apostles, and countless ordinary people made extraordinary by having hitched their wagons to the star of God’s foolishness that is wiser than human wisdom, God’s weakness that is stronger than human strength.
Across this nation now, a large and growing number of congregations have to face the foundation-shaking challenges of merger and closure, requiring them to discover what will take its place, when the temple is gone. We don’t have far to look, to see our sister churches on the front lines of transformation, wondering what they are becoming. Are their water-barrels half empty or half full? Are they called to hold their own, or is God calling them to pour themselves out and so become fine wine?
Churches that are closer to these issues of life and death have much to teach congregations that seem insulated and secure. All churches need to hear the stories of congregations facing the loss of sanctuaries made with hands, while finding their security not in temples of stone and wood, but in the loyal love of Jesus Christ crucified and risen, showing itself in their experience of spiritual community and flesh-and-blood outreach.
The cleansing of the temple. That’s how today’s Gospel event is remembered by name. But, as we have seen, that emphasis comes more from the other three evangelists, whose message was more along the lines of summoning the religious community to clean up its act.
John’s Jesus has gone for the jugular. Rearranging the deck chairs will do nothing to change the course of our temples, which need more than cleansing. They need the power and wisdom of God; and, if I may add to St. Paul’s words, our temples need the pleasure of God—that is, we need to care, to know, and to commit our resources to what pleases God.
What that is hovers above us and within us in the radiant vision of the prophet Micah, whose timeless questions and answers must have been ringing in John’s mind as he wrote the words we heard today.
“’With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’ He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:6-8)
Not the cleansing of the temple. The recovery of the temple’s primary purpose. The turning upside-down of the temple’s agenda, to serve the world and not the ecclesiastical-industrial complex, to convert a hierarchical system into a servant community that lifts up the lowly and puts the mighty to the task of washing feet and feeding the hungry. The tables are turned, announces Jesus at the start of his brief public ministry in John’s Gospel. And the water barrels are no longer for keeping: they are to pour out the rich wine of God’s new creation.
“The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing…” Well, aren’t we all? “…but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
Not the power of magical intervention, demanded by people needing signs and wonders to reveal God; not the power of holding the right philosophy or getting it right theologically, expected by people who believe they can think their way to God.
The message about the cross is the lasting durability of loyal love, foolish and weak from the standpoint of imperial powers, but the very cornerstone of the kingdom of God and the compass of the church.
(Gail O’Day’s commentary on John’s Gospel, Volume IX of “The New Interpreter’s Bible”, was helpful in preparing this sermon.)
Thursday, March 8, 2012
The Power of Faith
Scripture for the 2nd Sunday in Lent includes Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38
Nothing is simple in the Book of Genesis. For one thing, whenever a pivotal story is told, it is told twice, and with noticeable differences between the two tellings. In our Lenten series today, Diana Elvin will help us explore the two creation stories that are told, back to back, consistent in their central message that God made and loves the created order, but inconsistent as to how it all happened.
Perhaps we just shouldn’t be surprised that the foundational book of the Hebrew Bible regales us with two versions of watershed events. Consider it basic training for Christianity that presents its anointed holy one Jesus Christ not in one Gospel, but in four.
In today’s portion from Genesis, we hear the second of two stories about the covenant God made with Abraham. If you found something missing in today’s version, namely all that real estate in Canaan that Israel was promised by God, you’ll find that’s in the earlier version, a chapter or two earlier. And the other big difference is that in the first version, it looked as if Sarah’s maidservant’s son Ishmael was going to be the heir apparent to God’s covenant promises, but by the time of this second version (13 years have passed), Ishmael no longer has such hopes pinned on him. Maybe he had become such a difficult teenager that he’d burned his bridges—we just aren’t told. So the drama intensifies as God promises to Abram and Sarai (as they are still called) a son of their own who will bear the family standard. As part of the deal, they’re given new names—not major changes, but subtle ones. Abram becomes Abraham and Sarai becomes Sarah… but don’t expect me to tell you what the differences mean. The language experts say they don’t know, except that the newer names sound less Semitic and more Aramaic, and the point (probably) is that this elderly couple is expected to live up to their new names—which (probably) mean “exalted father” (Abraham) and “princess” (Sarah). And, by the way, the fact that Sarah gets renamed means that God—this time—is including her in this new version of the covenant. Given the tenuous place of women in patriarchal societies, this is a big difference between the two versions. Maybe it’s proof of evolution, and evidence that behind every patriarchal society stands the matriarchal presence that knows how to get things done.
What’s worth keeping from all this? How about a lively sense of what old age is for? If it isn’t dramatic enough, getting called out at age 86 (first version) to play a key role in helping God form a new nation that will bless all other nations, imagine it happening again at age 99 (second version)! There’s a lot of laughter in the background of both stories. In an age when there were (probably) no little pills to help things along, a lot was being asked of Abraham—and Sarah. As St. Paul reflects on their stories several hundred years later, he observes that the God in whom Abraham and Sarah believed “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Hoping against hope, Abraham believed that he would become ‘the father of many nations,’… (so) He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead… or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.”
Well, then. Let’s hear it for the power of faith and the virtue of glorifying God! But lest we get lost in fantasy about old age, virility, and fertility, let’s take home the message that becoming elderly in no way disqualifies—and may in fact uniquely qualify—a person when it comes to helping God bless other people. It’s common to say that elderly people have in their toolkits wisdom, perspective, a certain regard for the little things that manifest caring, and the ability to see the forest for the trees.
But the Abraham and Sarah stories show that something more is required, for old age (and any age) to connect with the missionary drive of God. St. Paul teases it out when he observes, “it all depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all… descendants.”
Packed into that rich statement are several insights. The whole enterprise of life, from God’s primeval creation of this biosphere to God’s new creation of a new heaven and a new earth through the self-offering of Jesus Christ, all rests on grace. For that reason, the primary way that we human beings may contribute to the enterprise of life is by the exercise of faith, trust. And the beneficiaries of our contributions to life are not to be limited to our own tribe, family, denomination, party, or persuasion. All of these insights Paul harvests from the stories of Abraham and Sarah, which makes me think that a deep trust in the grace of God is the most useful tool in the toolkit of old age (or any age).
There’s one more thing to take away from the Abraham and Sarah saga, and what St. Paul makes of it. This is especially pertinent in a season when the Anglican Communion has called her members worldwide to recognize that we and our planet are in crisis, requiring us to rediscover a proper stewardship of our environment.
Paul casts the story of this elderly couple as an example of God bringing about a new creation. He says that the God Abraham and Sarah believed in is the God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” This is God’s generative nature, not confined to the start of our universe, but woven into the web of being is this leaning into new life that allows God to be known as the one who says, “Behold, I make all things new.”
But, to do that, God requires old people-- and young people, and middle-aged people-- who are willing to unsettle their lives as radically as Abraham and Sarah, who moved at a great age not into assisted living, but into unmapped territory as they left their ancestral home in what is now Turkey and migrated west towards the Mediterranean coast of Canaan. God requires people willing to be stirred out of retirement, out of comfort zones, out of age-old assumptions and entitlements, to become stirrers of a new creation, a new society, new ways of being in the world.
God required of Jesus of Nazareth a degree of commitment unique among human beings, but not inherently different from what God needs from us all, the faith and trust we’ve seen in Abraham and Sarah, the kind that will commit the whole of life into the hands of God.
As Jesus displayed and expressed this deep trust, willing to embrace the worst that human nature and human society could dish out, his own disciple Peter took him aside and scolded him for exaggerating the risk, over-stating the challenge, and frightening the weak. This was no longer a private conversation, for we’re told that Jesus turned and saw his disciples nearby, near enough that he knew that loud Peter had been heard, anxious Peter seen. Whereupon Jesus rebuked Peter for being short-sighted, self-absorbed, and timid.
However we understand the plight of our planet, however we would advocate going about repairing the damage, addressing the plundering, and protecting the endangered, our scriptures put before us today the sharply opposite examples of Abraham and Sarah at their best, on the one hand, and of Peter, on the other, at his worst.
What story will be told of us? What does God require of us now? Among the choices we have, how will we recognize and make the very best ones we can?
Nothing is simple in the Book of Genesis. For one thing, whenever a pivotal story is told, it is told twice, and with noticeable differences between the two tellings. In our Lenten series today, Diana Elvin will help us explore the two creation stories that are told, back to back, consistent in their central message that God made and loves the created order, but inconsistent as to how it all happened.
Perhaps we just shouldn’t be surprised that the foundational book of the Hebrew Bible regales us with two versions of watershed events. Consider it basic training for Christianity that presents its anointed holy one Jesus Christ not in one Gospel, but in four.
In today’s portion from Genesis, we hear the second of two stories about the covenant God made with Abraham. If you found something missing in today’s version, namely all that real estate in Canaan that Israel was promised by God, you’ll find that’s in the earlier version, a chapter or two earlier. And the other big difference is that in the first version, it looked as if Sarah’s maidservant’s son Ishmael was going to be the heir apparent to God’s covenant promises, but by the time of this second version (13 years have passed), Ishmael no longer has such hopes pinned on him. Maybe he had become such a difficult teenager that he’d burned his bridges—we just aren’t told. So the drama intensifies as God promises to Abram and Sarai (as they are still called) a son of their own who will bear the family standard. As part of the deal, they’re given new names—not major changes, but subtle ones. Abram becomes Abraham and Sarai becomes Sarah… but don’t expect me to tell you what the differences mean. The language experts say they don’t know, except that the newer names sound less Semitic and more Aramaic, and the point (probably) is that this elderly couple is expected to live up to their new names—which (probably) mean “exalted father” (Abraham) and “princess” (Sarah). And, by the way, the fact that Sarah gets renamed means that God—this time—is including her in this new version of the covenant. Given the tenuous place of women in patriarchal societies, this is a big difference between the two versions. Maybe it’s proof of evolution, and evidence that behind every patriarchal society stands the matriarchal presence that knows how to get things done.
What’s worth keeping from all this? How about a lively sense of what old age is for? If it isn’t dramatic enough, getting called out at age 86 (first version) to play a key role in helping God form a new nation that will bless all other nations, imagine it happening again at age 99 (second version)! There’s a lot of laughter in the background of both stories. In an age when there were (probably) no little pills to help things along, a lot was being asked of Abraham—and Sarah. As St. Paul reflects on their stories several hundred years later, he observes that the God in whom Abraham and Sarah believed “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Hoping against hope, Abraham believed that he would become ‘the father of many nations,’… (so) He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead… or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.”
Well, then. Let’s hear it for the power of faith and the virtue of glorifying God! But lest we get lost in fantasy about old age, virility, and fertility, let’s take home the message that becoming elderly in no way disqualifies—and may in fact uniquely qualify—a person when it comes to helping God bless other people. It’s common to say that elderly people have in their toolkits wisdom, perspective, a certain regard for the little things that manifest caring, and the ability to see the forest for the trees.
But the Abraham and Sarah stories show that something more is required, for old age (and any age) to connect with the missionary drive of God. St. Paul teases it out when he observes, “it all depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all… descendants.”
Packed into that rich statement are several insights. The whole enterprise of life, from God’s primeval creation of this biosphere to God’s new creation of a new heaven and a new earth through the self-offering of Jesus Christ, all rests on grace. For that reason, the primary way that we human beings may contribute to the enterprise of life is by the exercise of faith, trust. And the beneficiaries of our contributions to life are not to be limited to our own tribe, family, denomination, party, or persuasion. All of these insights Paul harvests from the stories of Abraham and Sarah, which makes me think that a deep trust in the grace of God is the most useful tool in the toolkit of old age (or any age).
There’s one more thing to take away from the Abraham and Sarah saga, and what St. Paul makes of it. This is especially pertinent in a season when the Anglican Communion has called her members worldwide to recognize that we and our planet are in crisis, requiring us to rediscover a proper stewardship of our environment.
Paul casts the story of this elderly couple as an example of God bringing about a new creation. He says that the God Abraham and Sarah believed in is the God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” This is God’s generative nature, not confined to the start of our universe, but woven into the web of being is this leaning into new life that allows God to be known as the one who says, “Behold, I make all things new.”
But, to do that, God requires old people-- and young people, and middle-aged people-- who are willing to unsettle their lives as radically as Abraham and Sarah, who moved at a great age not into assisted living, but into unmapped territory as they left their ancestral home in what is now Turkey and migrated west towards the Mediterranean coast of Canaan. God requires people willing to be stirred out of retirement, out of comfort zones, out of age-old assumptions and entitlements, to become stirrers of a new creation, a new society, new ways of being in the world.
God required of Jesus of Nazareth a degree of commitment unique among human beings, but not inherently different from what God needs from us all, the faith and trust we’ve seen in Abraham and Sarah, the kind that will commit the whole of life into the hands of God.
As Jesus displayed and expressed this deep trust, willing to embrace the worst that human nature and human society could dish out, his own disciple Peter took him aside and scolded him for exaggerating the risk, over-stating the challenge, and frightening the weak. This was no longer a private conversation, for we’re told that Jesus turned and saw his disciples nearby, near enough that he knew that loud Peter had been heard, anxious Peter seen. Whereupon Jesus rebuked Peter for being short-sighted, self-absorbed, and timid.
However we understand the plight of our planet, however we would advocate going about repairing the damage, addressing the plundering, and protecting the endangered, our scriptures put before us today the sharply opposite examples of Abraham and Sarah at their best, on the one hand, and of Peter, on the other, at his worst.
What story will be told of us? What does God require of us now? Among the choices we have, how will we recognize and make the very best ones we can?
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