April 22, 2012

I John 3:1-7                            WHO WE ARE IS YET TO BE

It may have been the first test I took as an 18-year-old college student and the question was a quote from the oracle of Delphi, I think it was:  “Know thyself” – explain and expand. As a kid entering college I had scarcely a clue what my “self” was. But the professor who wrote the question was educating us to the truth that our society is rooted in large part in our Greco-Roman heritage. The bit about the “self” is so deep that we scarcely question it. We have a “self” that we try to discover. Our growing up is coming to “know thyself” and to “be yourself.” Popular psychology reminds us to “actualize” our selves. Frank Sinatra sang our anthem: “I did it my way.”

So it comes as a bit of a shock to hear from Holy Writ that “what we will be has not been revealed.” We are, instead, “children,” selves yet unformed. Maybe that explains why I’ve long passed the age of maturity and still haven’t figured out how life works! Perhaps. In any case, Scripture has quite a different view of what we call the “self.”

Here it is. Our identity, what makes us who we are, what makes you to be you and me to be me, is not located within ourselves, within this bundle of consciousness that has our name affixed. We are “ec-centric.” The center is outside ourselves, so that we are a bit odd. The center of our identity is in another, in Christ. The catechism of our church opens like this: “I belong—in body and in soul, in life and in death—not to myself, but to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.” I don’t belong to me! I can think of few claims more heretical to our culture. The center of my life is outside myself, in one we confess as Messiah. That sounds heretical because I think that I may choose to follow Jesus, I may choose to be a Christian, I may choose the way of God, but it is I who choose. Fundamentally it’s down to me (or up to me).

Let’s roll the clock back a bit to catch what’s going on when this bit of Scripture was put to parchment. We’re a generation or more out from that short period of time when Jesus gathered disciples and after he was executed, only to have his closest followers report that he had been raised from the dead as the old Scriptures had foretold. There was something about this particular human that wakened in them a sense of who they were, a life, an energy, a hope, a love, that they hadn’t known before. Here they were. They weren’t sitting down to loaves and fishes with this Jesus. It had been a while since he had walked terra firma. And still something was happening when his words were reported, when they gathered at a common meal to remember his death and resurrection. He was still alive, albeit in ways that they couldn’t quite grasp. And they knew that they were more themselves in his presence. Something was happening – not just “out there” in their world, but to their very selves. Their “self,” who they were, was centered beyond themselves.

Nor was it like the Jesus was sitting in the next pew. There was a time dimension to this. Not a memory-dimension, like I remember my father who taught me and shaped me. No, it was a dimension that was coming at them from the future. They had not only their identity outside them but in front of them.

For now they were children: “Beloved, we are God’s children now.” Maybe for them. But for us? We have children in our midst, but for most of us, we see our childhood a good distance in the rear view mirror. We’ve become world-weary. We’ve long lost our naiveté. I was talking with a person twenty years older than I the other day and as we spoke of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren we rather wistfully desired to have a bit of that childhood back. We’re not children. And I’ve been known to complain that God asks of us not a Sunday School faith, but an adult faith.

But stick with our letter-writer for a bit. What is it he’s saying about children. Two things for our consideration. The first is basic. The child is loved and so belongs. The child is not a foundling, but a child of God. That means that as God’s child you are embraced with a passion, the kind of passion of which our love for our children is but a pale reflection. And because this love originates outside you and because it wells up from the eternity that is within God, it is a love you cannot erase. This is the solid ground on which you stand. And because you are loved, you belong. You don’t have to make excuses for your presence on this earth. Like a beloved child, you don’t have to earn your place. It just is. That’s the first thing. You’re loved.

But you also are not fully formed. You are on your way to what you will become. You have the space and the time to work that out. It’s often called “play,” one of the more serious things that children are about. I had a delightful time the other afternoon as I watched our grandson Nicollo on our back patio walking about with a bit of cut-off hose. He was pretending to be a fireman, aiming the hose at imagined fires. He was trying on a grown-up life. He will try on many more, over and over. He’ll do it into high school and into college, and if he’s like most of the rest of us, he may still be doing it when he turns seventy! He is free to do so. He has a home. So he can play.

As I remarked, this may be a bit startling for those of us with childhood as a closed chapter in our autobiography. I don’t have much “play” in my life. I’ve gotten set in my ways. I’m the “old dog” who doesn’t have many “new tricks” I can try. But something happened with Jesus resurrection. Something new broke through. And believers gathered in communities woke up to the fact that the past did not lock in their future. That their “selves” were not set in habits and customs and ways of being that had already been determined. They were children again. Loved, belonging, and still awaiting who they were to be. Who we are is yet to be.

Strange as it sounds, we haven’t seen it yet, it is “not yet been revealed” as our writer has it. But it isn’t as though we don’t have a clue. My grandson doesn’t have a clue either. He doesn’t know if he’ll be a fireman or a land surveyor, a husband or a bachelor. But he does know that he will take on some role in adult life and there are lots of patterns out there. And he will begin to live into one of them as he matures. He’ll practice being a doctor or a fireman or as one who loves a woman.

That’s what we know, that when Jesus is fully revealed, we’ll be like him! And we do have a clue this side of heaven’s door. We have a clue because we have the report of who Jesus was (and is) and what Jesus is about, what he does. Let me put it to you in three bits: he speaks the truth, he loves and he governs all of history. And we know a bit of what that looks like – from the report we call Scripture, or the Bible.

He tells the truth. More pointedly, he speaks God’s truth. By that I don’t mean just that he’s the blunt sort that “tells it like it is.” You know the kind: they’ll tell you that you have a bit too much weight on you, whether you want to hear it or not. And they simply say that they’re just being honest. It is the case that Jesus pulls no punches, and his followers need not either. They can speak the difficult truth about our world. No hiding behind denials. But they, we, do so because there is God’s deeper truth, and that is that in the mystery of God’s love, this world is being redeemed. This world is not left to its own devices, devices that end up killing our seas and poisoning our air. The truth is that the stranger is beloved because the stranger is God’s child.

So we become searchers for truth, the whole truth, and bearers of truth, tellers of the tale. We can speak words of love into the terrible silence. We can welcome the stranger and the outsider. We can speaks God’s word of forgiveness because that word has been spoken to us. We’ll be bearers of the truth.

That deeper truth is, as I said, of love. Jesus is the one who loves. And so too will we love. Nor is this just anything that goes by the name, the sort of thing that has me crying at the end of movies. We’re talking about the kind of love that meets us in Jesus. This is love that puts the other first, always puts the other first. This is love, Jesus’ love, remember, that goes to the cross for the sake of those, especially those, who are his very enemies. This is the kind of love that turns the world upside down. This is the love that Paul sang about that is “patient and kind, neither jealous nor boastful.”

So that what we discover about who we are is that we are most ourselves when we are giving ourselves away! Many of you know that very well. You’ve practiced it. This often isn’t very pretty. It’s exhausting as it drains you. You set aside your own projects, the passions that make you who you are, so you think. And yet in giving you find yourself.

We don’t often keep this up. Our default is to retreat into the fortress of ourselves, of those nearest and dearest. We just do it. But that is not who we shall be. We will become like the Messiah. We’ll grow up. That’s our future. We begin practicing it now.

So we’re lovers and truth-tellers. But Scripture compels us to confess that Jesus is Lord. “King of kings and lord of lords,” we exult as we echo Revelation’s words in Handel’s famous “Hallelujah Chorus.” Jesus guides, bends, moves history – and that means the political and economic and social realities of our world – to its goal: the beloved community, the kingdom of God.

Here things might get a bit tricky. We have lots of candidates, and I mean political candidates, who are ready to take on the mantle, some explicitly telling us that they represent God’s politics. This is tricky because politics is about values and faith is about values too. Moreover, Christians do care about how society is put together and that it be put together in ways that reflect God’s kingdom. Still, it isn’t just about value but about how those values are implemented. Is it done in love? Does it respect the last and the lowest and the least? What in the world would it begin to look like to share in Christ’s rule in such a way that we do not become little tyrants justifying our own opinions by pasting Christ’s name on them?

Here’s a little example from an odd corner of the world. A few years ago a group from a place called the “Bruderhof,” a small Amish-like community, visited a church I was serving. They spoke about their common life. One matter struck me. They told how no one retired in their community. As you got into older age, your work duties lessened. Sometimes to almost nothing. But you always had some part, always played a role in their shared life. This way respected the aging, both in their diminishment, but also as contributing members. This was a gentle rule, a servant rule. How do we serve one another in public life? How do we do so in such a way that we do not put our own interests first? In such a way that no one gets left out? We have folk who serve like that now, or try very hard to do so.

We aren’t all of this yet. We aren’t the truth-tellers, the lovers, the servants we will be. But we are being shaped and formed. Here’s the question for us as we live forward from the stunning events of Easter – events, by the way, far more stunning and transformative than, say, 9/11. And the question for us as a church is: how do we shape a community, a people who foster the truth, who nurture loving people, who serve?

I don’t have the time to work that all out in the next few seconds. But let’s say that it begins in listening and learning God’s truth. In praying together, opening ourselves to each other in each other’s needs. In practicing service with one another, with those around us, with those within our own world. We can be that place where we can be drawn outside ourselves not only to welcome those who are different, but to be welcomed by them.

And to know that there is so much more before us than is behind us. That our identity, our selves are yet to be. But that as God’s children, little children even, we will become who we are meant to be, who God means us to be!

HeHe’HH

April 15, 2012

I John 1:1-2:2                                   TRANSPARENT LIFE

Thomas Edison complicated belief in God. It was the light bulb that did it. You know the old saw: “God said let there be Thomas Edison, and there was light.” When light became ours at the flip of a switch, we lost our grip on the sheer power, what was new about the report that “God is light and in him is no darkness at all.” We didn’t have to live in darkness – not if we chose not to. Before Edison – and transmission lines, power stations, and the whole apparatus – before that light had been a problem. We could light up the night, but only with difficulty – and it was a flickering light at best as it beat back the shadows. We don’t know darkness in the same way.

God as light meant that darkness no longer hid anything, God included! God as light meant that the world and life and your life became transparent. It is all now open to view. Which, frankly, may make you nervous. It does me. There are bits of ourselves we keep pretty hidden. You wouldn’t want to see me stumbling from my bed in the morning! So it’s about hiddeness and transparency.

Hidden. Here’s a benign example. Mike Wallace died this past week. We remember him as a dogged interviewer, mostly on “60 Minutes.” It’s been said that the worst words you can hear is “Mike Wallace is here to interview you.” Now lots of folk, myself included, saw Wallace as part of what some think of as a more liberal-leaning media. CBS, after all, was one of the first to expose the Viet Nam War for what it was. But it came out that Wallace had been invited to become part of Nixon’s White House. He admired and liked Nixon. Who knew? He said it wasn’t part of what he was about. It was “hidden,” if you will. Perhaps rightly so.

Hidden. Here’s something that gets a bit closer to what Scripture is about. Last Monday, the day after Easter, this preacher didn’t want to do very much. I was too exhausted even to go anywhere. So I went to the library and picked up a copy of last year’s movie The Tree of Life. It’s a difficult movie, and one that you would either love or hate – or so is my guess. At the center of the story is a young boy growing up in the South, the son of a stern father. He has two brothers. We see the maturation of a little boy, with all the delight, but also all the questions, all the hurt, all the pain. At one point, he commits a very minor crime; he enters a neighbor’s house to look around and he steals a piece of a woman’s underclothing. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t do anything with it except try to get rid of it. But he considers himself tainted, bad. He can’t figure out why he does the things he does. At one point he has his beloved brother put his finger over the end of his BB gun, just to test his trust, and then fires the gun! My point is that all this stuff goes into the young boy’s life. And it remains there into his growing up. It remains in a dark place, a hidden place. It isn’t transparent to him. The film goes on to show how it becomes transparent in the light – and it is light – of the sheer love of God. Hidden. What of yourself, what of myself is hidden? What child is still rattling about inside us, a child we keep well hidden, even from ourselves, because we haven’t resolved, and we can’t resolve, the struggle?

Hidden. It’s the old story. It’s the story of Adam and Eve. You remember it well, I know you do. At some point one of them did something they shouldn’t have done. And shared it with the partner. And things went wrong. When God came looking for them, the God to whom their hearts were open, with whom them could delight unafraid, when God came looking, they hid. They were ashamed. They were ashamed of their nakedness. That is, they were ashamed to have all of themselves put on display. This wasn’t just because they had a bit of flab about the waist. Or because it’s shameful not to have your clothes on in public. But because naked means you’re hiding nothing. And now they had something to hide. There was something wrong with themselves.

Hidden. What do you keep hidden? What do I keep under wraps, perhaps so far under wraps that I couldn’t tell you if you asked me. It’s too traumatic. You know that victims of trauma often suffer a sort of amnesia. If you’ve been in an accident, or been in a hospital intensive care unit, your mind will protect you from events you can’t handle emotionally. So while it’s there in the computer somewhere, you don’t have the software to call it to mind. What is hidden?

God is light, and that means that all is exposed. Which makes us nervous because perhaps like the first couple we are ashamed. But something happened since, something about Jesus, that we “might have fellowship” with him as our apostle has it. We are transparent, and God welcomes us, as we are.

Here’s what it looks like. A minister colleague reflected with a few of us the other day how he almost cashed it in, quit, after a few years in his first parish. It was a difficult parish; it had eaten up a string of ministers. But my friend was a rookie and he contributed to the difficulty. He tried to get out by applying for a chaplaincy, but there were no vacancies in that area. In near despair he took some time off and in that time spent some hours with God. As he put it, he said to God that the two of them, God and himself, needed to start over. He didn’t know where to turn or what to do, but they needed to begin again. He was lost in his own darkness. But that was the turning point. It was as though a burden was lifted. No, he put it this way: the stone was rolled back from the door of the tomb, and light began to pour in. God had a way forward. He was not alone in his own darkness.

God is light. That means not only that God shines a light on us, and makes us transparent, but that God’s own self is transparent. God lets us see into God, and seeing into God one sees that there is no darkness there. That is to say there’s no “catch” with God. God doesn’t have a hidden agenda, isn’t trying to get us on board to use us in any way. This is a “free lunch.” I don’t know about you, but I occasionally get an offer on my computer for something free. I’ve only need to pick up my winnings. But I know full well that there’s a catch, there’s something behind it all. So we’ve protect ourselves from our own naiveté. We become skeptics. We’ve internalized the Better Business Bureau’s slogan, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” But with God there is no backside. It’s sheer love, all the way down, as far as our human eye can see.

Through the door of the tomb, the light now streaming in, you see the heart of God. And what do you see? You see the cross. Recall that the risen Jesus carries the wounds of the nails in his hands and a hole in his side from the sword. This is not about gruesome detail; it is the very love of God before us. It is the “blood of Jesus,” which is a way of talking about the fact that God enters the horror and the dying of our lives. That God does indeed shine a light on all the dark corners, the corners we want – and even need – to keep hidden. But that God’s love is such that God shoulders the responsibility for it all. The cross does not say, “Well, the world’s a mess, but that’s OK because down deep it’s really good.” No, the cross says, “It’s a mess alright, and it’s not OK. It’s not OK that children go to bed crying of hunger while others live in luxury. It’s not OK that families fall apart because they can’t work hard enough or can’t find work at all to keep decent shelter. It’s not OK when I keep part of myself hidden away, because that means that true communion, true fellowship is not possible.” No it isn’t OK, but I, God, will bear the burden of it all so that we can go forward, all of us, loved.

When that happens the light goes on. And a couple things happen. The first is that not only can you see more clearly, even as you are seen, but you are lighter in another way. Life isn’t so heavy. Do you ever feel your body tighten up? Often that’s stress, and stress happens when you’re carrying a heavy load. Life can be a slog. You’ve got responsibilities. You have to answer a number of places: family, job, school. To say nothing of living with yourself. But when God lightens life, it becomes lighter. You can stand a little taller. The weight is lifted. “Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden,” the Lord invites.

The second thing that happens is that you begin to see differently. You begin to see the world not as a threat but as a promise. This isn’t a “rose-colored” glasses sort of thing. It’s not as though what was awful is really, down deep, good. It’s no better. In fact, you see it in its true awfulness. But against this you see it as loved by God. That God won’t let it go, hasn’t let it go. Nothing is hidden. The bad isn’t hidden any longer. But you can bear to look at it because you see it through the door of the empty tomb. The stone has been rolled back; light pours in.

We can be honest. We don’t have to put on airs. We don’t have to be good enough. There’s an old tradition in Reformed churches known as “home visitation.” Ministers and elders would visit each home in a parish. The intention was pastoral. Could the church, in the person of its most mature leaders, be of help at the place where people really lived – family and school and business? It was a good idea. But what happened? (I know this because my father, the preacher, used to do this). What happened was that the family got all gussied up. You shoved the dirty laundry behind closed doors. You strictly instructed the kids to behave and don’t, at the pain of near death, don’t say anything about anything that’s wrong! We need to be good enough for God, let alone anyone else.

But no. “If we say we have no sins we deceive ourselves….” Our apostle isn’t being judgmental or moralistic here. He isn’t “down” on people, this being a bad old gospel about an angry God wanting us to straighten up. This is about being loved, and loved all the way down so that we are transparent to God and to one another. We don’t have to hold back. So we have the “prayer of confession” at the beginning of our worship. Again, this isn’t to beat ourselves down, to crawl before God submissively. It isn’t even because we’re in that state when we walk through the doors on a Sunday morning. It’s a ritual act. It’s what we’re about in all our life. God welcomes us into the light where we don’t have to hide a thing because we are already loved. That doesn’t mean for a moment that we don’t have to change our ways, that everything is fine. No, it’s that it is loved. And loved we allow ourselves to be drawn into new ways of being.

And not only for ourselves, as astonishing as this is, but this Jesus is the expiation for sins for the whole world! That means that this Jesus bit isn’t about our souls and heaven, our souls and living life. That’s pretty wonderful already. But the whole world is involved in this – the world in its struggle and pain, the world well beyond our own borders, beyond nation and tribe. Nor does this mean the whole world as each “comes to Christ.” It’s much larger than this. God’s light shines through all of creation working on it to transform it into the light of God’s love.

Here’s an exercise for you this week. Take a newspaper, or take the evening news on television, or look it up on your computer, or read it on your smart phone while commuting home in the evening – however you get your news. Take that and allow the light of God to shine on it. Because you live in the fellowship of the light, you can do so! Because you aren’t carrying the burden, you can do so. Allow it to be seen for what it is. It isn’t all good. But are the people loved by God? Can you see even the rascals and the rapscallions, those in prison jump suits pictured in the Bergen Record, can you see them as children of God?

No more fear, no more shame, no more recrimination, you can see it all! The cross opens God’s heart. The empty tomb lets you see that such is the truth – for the whole world.

April 8, 2012

Mark 16:1-8                          INVITATION TO LIFE

Today we stand on the threshold of a new world. It’s breath-taking if frightening. And it’s an invitation to live fully and deeply, to live the life God has had in mind for you from before you drew your first breath. Will you accept the invitation and cross the threshold?

It’s a scary prospect, that’s true. Listen again to the Easter gospel. Gospel – good news – but it sounds a bit off if you listen closely. We’re hearing Mark’s version and he ends his gospel, what he announced in the first sentences of this book as “good news,” with frightened women. The last words of the gospel are “they were afraid.” Not tambourines and choirs, but terror. What kind of good news is this? This is so unsettling that the earliest church had to add to the gospel to get a happier ending!

But they needn’t have. The women coming to the tomb were frightened because the world as they knew it didn’t stay put. They were in a strange land where they didn’t know the rules. Things didn’t fall together. They were about business in the world as they knew it. Women tended to the dead, and dead meant dead!

What’s it like to enter a new world? I remember as yesterday what it was like when my parents dropped me off at Central College where I was to begin collegiate life. I had been looking forward to that day for as long as I could remember. It was leaving the old high school behind, a time of awkward stabs at growing up. College would be a new life, life free from old constraints, life filled with possibilities. When my parents drove away, I was scared to death. I didn’t know anyone. It was real now, but I didn’t know the rules. It wasn’t as though I’d landed on another planet; it was still three meals a day and dirty laundry. Still, it was strange and new and frightening. I had crossed a threshold.

The women had crossed a threshold. It wasn’t as though their dead friend had somehow escaped death’s clutches, reappeared, and they could go back to the way things were. There is no body. As we celebrate this glorious holy day we often miss the fact that there is no witness to the resurrection itself. We don’t see Jesus emerge from a hillside tomb. What we get is an empty tomb, an absence. Yes, we confess the resurrection of the body, and we have stories of Jesus’ bodily presence. But there is no body here. This is no defeat of death and going back to ordinary life. “He is not here,” the strange young man told them. “He is going before you to Galilee.” He is going back home.

So it is this world. The resurrection isn’t into the “shadowlands,” a heaven that exists just beyond our perception, a “sweet bye and bye” where souls gather. It is this world where the sun comes up and where otters play on the banks of rivers. It is a world of bodies. Galilee, home, is a real place firmly planted on terra firma. And it’s not quite the same place. It’s been, it’s being, transformed into the world that God intended. It’s a world with deeper color, a world of beauty, and of truth too. It’s a world where you can trust. It’s a world where you can live and breathe without fear, without anxiety. It’s what Jesus called the kingdom of God, the blessed community, a commonwealth of God’s Spirit. And you’re invited.

You’re invited to cross the threshold and explore that world. When I pulled myself together, that college freshman more years ago than I care to admit, I could begin to explore the college, to take tentative steps to new friendships, to dip my toes into fields of scholarship I didn’t know existed, to stretch into a new world. OK, that’s pretty small potatoes compared with what is before you today.

Take Peter’s sermon we heard read this morning. Peter, the apostle on whom Jesus said he would build his church, Peter represents the community entering this new world. Two things about this sermon signal something new. The first is that this sermon is to the Gentile, the outsider. They knew God’s people as those chosen by God as Israel. Their world respected boundaries between the inside and the outside. There were very good reasons for this. Now, however, those boundaries no longer obtained. The world they were entering crossed boundaries and the stranger was welcomed, the outsider. This is a life where we are not safe because we protect our borders. We are drawn into a community that welcomes the outsider. That will be life without fear. Who’s the outsider? What does this new community look like?

All that is based on the second feature of Peter’s sermon, his conclusion. This is what is true: “…everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” Now, most of the time we hear this as a “conditional.” Believe in Jesus and you get, as your reward, forgiveness – which sounds rather like a ticket to heaven when you die. What we miss is this. What we miss is the sheer good news of it all. What we miss is the new world.

Pay attention to just what forgiveness is. It doesn’t work like this. One fine morning you cut me off with your car. I’m having a good morning. The kids are fine, the wife has given me a terrific good morning kiss. I’ve had my morning workout. So I wave you on – it’s OK. I forgive you. But that isn’t forgiveness. Neither is it when you’ve done something more serious, you’ve hurt me or someone close to me. And I’ve worked it through and we can live beyond it. That isn’t quite it either. Forgiveness has to do with guilt, and guilt is not about guilt feelings. Guilt is that something has happened, I’ve done something. And I can’t erase it. I can’t take it back. I must carry that responsibility with me as long as I live. You may forgive me, but you can’t erase it. We can’t turn the clock back.

But what if there is a new reality where God leads us, where the guilt is removed once and for all. We don’t know how to live in that world. We know the world of tit for tat, of legitimate demands for justice – legitimate, hear me. We know the world where we struggle to come to terms with life gone wrong. And we’ll adjust as best we can.

What if there is a new world? There is forgiveness for those who believe. Not because they’ve figured out how to think impossible things are true – that the resurrection could, just possibly, maybe, happen. No. But have been drawn into this new world, begun to explore it. Have stepped off the cliff for a moment, and discovered that they are no longer in Kansas, but in a world where God has something new in mind.

Easter is not the end of the line, not the destination. When I began to travel Dutch railways, I began to get some inkling of the language, if only to make sure I got off at the right stop! I learned quickly that when the conductor said that this is the eindbestemming, he meant it was the “final destination.” We were going no further. Sometimes we treat Easter as though God has reached the goal. God did it; we’ll receive eternal life. We can throw the big party. We can collect our reward when we draw our last breath. But that isn’t quite how it works out. Easter is only the beginning. Remember the Biblical story. Pentecost is yet to come. The Spirit is yet to be poured out. The Spirit that is life, life for you and me as we go forward. Easter is an invitation to a new life where you have only begun.

It is an invitation. This is not the faith as a threat. Too often we present the faith as a threat. Believe or else. Straighten up or else. Believe or go to hell – or keep living in the hell that is your life. And if you believe, you must believe in just a certain way. But Easter is not a threat. It may be threatening because we don’t want to go there. But it invites you into a new world where yes, you will leave your old world behind, old habits, old ways of being. We’ll leave behind our habit of blame and recrimination, of dividing the world into white hats and black hats. Yes. But we’re invited into something new. Something so new that even in death, even at the worst, there is life, God’s life, life that invites you to go with Jesus to Galilee, go meet Jesus in your home, this world, and see it filled with color, joy, and life as if for the first time!

April 1, 2012

Mark 11:1-11                        THE PROBLEM WITH PALM SUNDAY

The problem with Palm Sunday is that it begins a week that will not turn out well.  The problem with Palm Sunday is Friday next. Of course those participating in the little parade outside Jerusalem didn’t have a clue what awaited them. They, of course, didn’t even know it as “Palm Sunday.” It was just the first day of the week.

Palm Sunday presents us with a problem and a challenge. It also offers promise, a promise greater than we had anticipated. But the only way to the promise is through the problem.

This is what would happen: all that Jesus’ followers knew about their world would be taken apart. The world they knew, the predictable world, the world as they knew it, the world that makes sense, the world that they had made – that world had to come apart. What they held as true and right would die on a cross, die in the shame of a guilt so deep that the death penalty was the only answer.

It had to do with a “king.” Now, this will be a problem for us and we’ll return to that in a bit. But it was a problem for Jesus’ world because they had certain expectations of what a king was to be. And Jesus would turn those expectations upside down and inside out.

We begin with what we’ve come to call the “triumphal entry.” In fact, what happened was neither triumphal nor was it, as Mark tells it, even an “entry” (Jesus doesn’t enter Jerusalem until after the parade). What took place was more like street theater. They rounded up a donkey, mounted Jesus on it, then made like the triumphal coming of a king into his city. The donkey was not without thought; we have Scriptural echoes that the king who would restore Israel would come riding on a donkey. We recited those verses as we opened worship this morning. In any case, this bit of theater was designed to show that yes, the king was coming, the king who would restore Israel to its former glory. There’s “morning in Israel.”

Street theater, though, is dangerous stuff. It’s humor, but the kind of humor that pokes fun at the established power. It holds up what is going on for the ridiculousness which it is. Art Buchwald (some of you remember him? The humorist who used to write a daily newspaper column) – Buchwald was once asked where he got his material. “I read the morning paper,” was his answer. Humor pokes the hole in the bag of wind that parades as public policy. So it can be dangerous. It shows certain claims, certain ways of being, as empty.

It deconstructs the ruling narrative. That’s a mouthful and a half! Let me explain. We live by narrative, or story. A couple weeks ago the Sunday Times ran a column where the author noted that Americans have become tribes that live by competing narratives. The liberal narrative is that once upon a time the great majority of people suffered from societies that were unjust, unhealthy, repressive and oppressive, that that society’s task was to restore human dignity and equality through modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies. Much has gone well, but there is more to be done. The competing conservative narrative is that once upon a time America was a shining beacon to the world. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They “subverted our traditional values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way.” Those are narratives, and they run deep, and they evoke passion. They may do so for you! My point this morning is not that one narrative or the other is correct. It’s that narrative describes our lives. I will return to another, deeper, narrative that describes our common and individual life in a few moments.

But first notice that Israel had a narrative running, a story, a history, that they expected to unfold. They anticipated a king like old David. That king would return, toss out the occupying Romans, and restore the Temple. It would be a king as we heard it described in the 72^nd Psalm: the king brings justice to all—rich and poor like, cares for the poor, feeds the hungry, removes the oppression that comes with inequality and the like. That’s what it meant to be “Messiah,” or Christ – the title (it’s not Jesus’ second name!) means the “anointed” one, and the one anointed is anointed to be king.

That’s what those who stood along the way as Jesus and his donkey lurched forward toward Jerusalem’s gate expected: “Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is coming!”

Except. Except that this will not be a king like the world knows kings. Jesus’ followers could do the street theater bit. They may even believe, like our “occupy” folk, that the theater itself would expose the hypocrisy and the hollowness of those who rule – the Romans – and those who collaborate – Jewish priests and their ilk – for what it’s worth, and the whole thing would collapse, and Jesus could move in to take their place.

But it doesn’t happen. What happens? What happens is that power does what power does. It shows who’s boss. By Friday, this same Jesus would not be sitting in power, but at the sharp end of power’s ultimate weapon: death. This is no king. This is an ordinary human being who may have pretensions, but they’re only that, pretensions. He’ll give way to what, and who, really counts – power.

So. He doesn’t fit. He doesn’t fit the story. The narrative remains. Israel can still expect its Messiah, but Jesus isn’t it. He can’t be it. He’s dead.

So Jesus is wrong. The parade was a nice diversion. What we call “Palm Sunday” was a false starter. Unless…. Unless Jesus was right. Unless he was, and is, the king. If that’s the case, then he shatters the ruling narrative. If that’s the case, then how they saw the world, how they had the world put together, all comes apart.

And Jesus rules now – without power! Or at least without the kind of power that we think, we’re sure, makes the world go ‘round. Of this Jesus a very early Christian hymn would sing that: “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave….he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” (Phil. 2:6-8) This king rules not by force, but gently. The lamb is on the throne. This king enters even death, and there abides with his people. This king fulfills the psalm in ways that are simply not possible – but real because he rules not from a throne, not from a castle, but from a cross among criminals of the worst sort.

This kind of king, this Jesus, throws the ordered world into confusion. It will be a confusion that will mean salvation. But first it takes apart all that they had so carefully put together at great cost.

I have just tried, with some success I hope, to put the events of the “Jesus parade” into the context of its time. We might be able to “get” how these events disturb at a deep place as it calls the narrative that describes their lives into question. That leaves us with a problem, and the problem for us, too, begins with the “king,” but it’s a different problem. Because “kings”? What do we  know of  kings? We don’t know kings. Royalty is something that belongs to the “old country,” another country. Royalty looks rather like fodder for People magazine, wealthy, folk who don’t have to worry about ordinary living like the rest of us mortals. We don’t tend to think of kings and queens as representing in their bodies the identity of a people or nation. We don’t think of them as our Psalm thinks of them: as bearing the responsibility for the physical and spiritual welfare of all the people, beginning with the least and the last.

In fact, in our narrative, we overthrew the king. We declared independence from the king. We celebrate the independence every year. We revel in it. But it goes deeper, because in declaring independence, we claimed the sovereignty of the people. We, collectively, became the king. We are in charge.

Let me delve just a bit deeper into our own narrative past – and present. There has been a lot of flurry over whether the founding fathers were Christian. They probably were. Most people were in that era, at least nominally so. But they were also children of the Enlightenment (“We hold these truths to be self-evident” is the beginning of an enlightenment document). And that era, what we call the “Enlightenment,” proclaimed the freedom of the individual from the bonds of whatever claimed to rule. So it’s “think for yourself.” It’s build your own world. It is the sovereignty not just of the people, but of every person. We have become king! And that’s the problem, because the king Jesus replaces is – us!

To see how far this has gone, take a gander at the events surrounding the death of Trayvon Martin. I’m not thinking so much about the racial aspects of the incident, although the events disclose the lingering reality of a racism that continues to infect our society. Rather, the Florida law that gave rise to the incident is a manifestation of the sovereignty of the individual. It’s called “stand your ground.” You have a right to defend yourself, even with arms. It’s a wild-west world where I have to protect myself and my own. It’s about the sovereignty of the individual.

It’s driven by fear. It is the fear of being overwhelmed. Of being overcome. Of losing my autonomy. Of death. So I need to be king of my world.

So here’s the problem. If Jesus is king, then I am not. And Jesus shatters our narrative. Our American narrative! Our personal narratives! The world as I have put it together, the safe world, the world where I know and we know how it works, the world that is predictable. That world has been shattered by Jesus on Palm Sunday.

Because, first of all, I am not king and we are not king. We try it. A few weeks ago, our synod met on a Saturday morning in Belle Mead. That’s a regional gathering of Reformed churches, almost all from New Jersey. What I picked up that day was a sense of fear. Churches were no longer as strong as they were, and many were frightened of dying. We can no longer guarantee our future. It’s a real question if we ever could; but we thought we could. We want to put together a world where we are safe from death. We want to be king. But we’re not. Jesus is.

And that’s the second problem, because Jesus doesn’t behave the way we want the king to behave. We want the king to be bigger and stronger than the threats that confront us. We want guarantees, insurances, and guarantees must come in a format that we understand. We do like the big spectacle of Palm Sunday, spectacles of beauty and power. Instead we’ll get the Jesus of the cross. Jesus doesn’t guarantee the world we’ve put together.

Just there is the promise. Because Palm Sunday’s parade is the truth. Jesus is king, albeit king in a different way that we could have imagined. Jesus enters the world where our narrative doesn’t take us. He enters the place where our world has come apart. And there Jesus rules. And we don’t have to!

He goes with us into the dying places. We don’t want to go there. But we will. There’s the story of the old codger who began his last will and testament: “If I die….”  Well, there’s no “if.” We die. Institutions die. Countries are not immortal. We may deny death, ignore death, but we cannot escape it. If anything rules, death does. But it doesn’t, finally. Jesus enters the dying places. And there rules through love.

What Palm Sunday asks is for us to follow. Not because we have it together. In fact, we don’t have it together. We follow because we believe. It’s a matter of faith. It’s trusting the one who goes before us and with us. The problem with Palm Sunday is that Friday is coming. The promise of Palm Sunday is on the Friday we will not be alone. We will not be in charge. We will not be in control. We will lose all control. And the Jesus who goes to the cross will be there. And his love triumphs just there, at the cross.

That is the center of the world. That Jesus bends all of history to God’s purpose. As king the oppressed will go free. The hungry will feast. The sick will be healed. And all shall be well.

March 25, 2012

Mark 15:33-39                                  TORN CURTAIN

Jesus screams out in death. Or it sounds like a scream it is so loud. But, says our witness, it’s a cry, shouted to someone as it echoes against the city walls and across the hills. That’s his last breath. And precisely when that happens, “the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.”

It had grown dark, dark at the middle of the day, when all is the brightest. Light, the stuff life. The light that God called into being at the start of it all: “Let there be light.” Light that shone from the crib of a child in Bethlehem. The light that lets us see what is good and beautiful and right in God’s creation. Jesus is the “light of the world.” Shine, Jesus, shine. The light goes out on all creation. The light goes off and creation weeps. Creation weeps with every child that has been abandoned or abused. Creation weeps every time a human dismisses another as unimportant or uses others as means to their own end. Creation weeps when humans pollute its seas and poison its skies. Creation weeps when vengeance takes the upper hand. Creation weeps at another school shooting; when a young black kid is shot for being in the wrong place at the wrong time wearing the wrong sort of clothes. The sun goes dark. We’d have known this if we were paying attention. As the old prophet put it: “Swearing, lying, and murder, and stealing, and adultery break out; bloodshed on bloodshed, therefore the land mourns.” (Hos. 4) The land, the earth, the stuff we’re standing mourns. Now at the cross, it all turns dark.

Dark because we live in a world where we humans have lost track of our own humanity. Which is? To be human is to be human together: together with God and with one another. The solitary human is a contradiction in terms. That’s what it means to be created in God’s image: “Male and female he created them.” To be human is to live in God’s presence, to live as those who are loved and so made to love. Instead we don’t. We live lives that are separate. We build walls. We build walls to protect ourselves.

Do you remember Ronald Reagan in Berlin, sometime in the ‘80’s, at the Berlin Wall, offering the challenge? “Mr. Gorbechav, tear down this wall!” The wall was there to protect; but it divided. We’ve always done it: city walls, Great Chinese Wall, the Maginot Line. And we’re doing it still: a fence to keep the Mexicans out, a wall between the Israelis and the Palestinians, gated communities in our poshest suburbs.

Nothing wrong with walls as such. Something there is about a wall, Robert Frost taught us. They make good neighbors. It’s a task in maturation to separate from parent and family, to establish the boundaries of identity. It does have to do with safety, to protect against the threat – and there are real threats.

But walls become silos. We live in a “silo-world” where each of us walls ourselves up within ourselves, or with our own kind. I see it every time I get on a train and watch everyone staring at their hand, earphones blocking out the world. School kids walking home texting each other when And the one they’re texting is walking next to them! It’s happening even in our politics. We’re becoming tribes. If the Republicans propose something, the Democrats are against it – even if they had been for it. And with the Democrats propose something, the Republicans will start airing ads to tell us why it is wrong – even though yesterday they thought it was right. So we can no longer reason together. We’re in our own silos.

And at the heart of it all, we wall ourselves off against God. Or against this God, the God of Jesus. We wall ourselves off when we insist that God conform to our ideas and ideals. We wall ourselves off when we use God for our own purpose, to prop up our success, to help us reach our goals. We wall ourselves off from this God even when we’re being good and religious as we worship the God who fits. We wall ourselves off from this God when we isolate ourselves because we are afraid, or because we want to make ourselves king of our own little world.

As it happened, this very God, the God whose call into the void for light to appear was the song of love, this God would not rest with this state of affairs. That’s the story of Jesus. In Jesus, God enters the darkness of our silo-world. Jesus comes not only pointing the way to the kingdom of love, the blessed community. Jesus himself is God with us, drawing us beyond ourselves, welcoming us back forgiven, set free from our own imprisonment to the consequences of what we have done and failed to do. But, as the story tells us, Jesus “came to his own and his own received him not.” (Jn. 1)

That puts us at this darkest point, the darkest point of all history, of the creation itself. And here the cry. A cry of pain? Perhaps. It is the pain of all the world. It is the pain of separation. You just heard it, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This is separation at its deepest. The world cannot hold together when the Father and the Son are divided. This isn’t just any death. This is the death of it all. So pain, yes. The pain of all the world’s pains, of all the hurt you’ve ever known, bound up here in this cry.

But not pain, not finally. It is a cry of triumph. For here, at the darkest, here is victory over all the powers that want us to live in the darkness. Here where the worst that could happen – worse than we ever could have imagined – here it is not finally death, but life. And it is the torn curtain that tells us what is going on.

Let me pause for a moment and tell you why. Remember that the Temple was the holiest of all places. It was where God touched earth. You heard a bit from the book of Exodus where God describes the blueprints for the tabernacle, the Temple’s predecessor. In the Temple was to be not only a holy place, but the “holy of holies.” This was separate – kept apart – from the rest. Separate because God dwelt there. You didn’t mix God up with other things, otherwise you’d think the other things might be god. In other words, you’d start to rely on idols: the power you see in the bull is the real power of the universe. The surging passion you feel in love is the real divinity. The pictures you have in your head of what God must be like become your God. And then you’re a goner. So – separate, holy. And dividing the holy of holies from everything else is a curtain.

The Temple, the holy place. It is a place of sacrifice. We know what sacrifices are, or at least we have a Sunday School picture of sacrifice. A priest has some poor animal strapped to a stone altar and is burning it up as blood flows down its rough sides. It’s a way of practicing religious that we have thankfully left well behind. And we have good Biblical support for doing so! In fact, one way of talking about the cross is that it ends all our need to sacrifice. That’s nice.

But that doesn’t get us very far. It’s more helpful to get inside just what sacrifice was up to. We know sacrifice in a different way: the sacrifice fly in baseball where the batter gives up his opportunity to hit to advance the base runner. We make sacrifices all the time. How may of us ate our share of macaroni and cheese so that our children could go to college? To sacrifice is to give up something good for the sake of something better – that better often not for our own sake but for the sake of another.

In old Israel, the sacrifice was to make something up to God. It recognized that life had gone awry, and the upshot was life in a silo-world, life separated. The community wasn’t working as each pursued his or her own way. It may have been in crimes great or in slights small. And when that happened, they were separated from the God who longed to be with them, the God whose presence was their life even if they didn’t know it. So, the sacrifice recognized the depth of the hurt. That’s why all the blood. The sins weren’t bits of naughtiness, but were the cause of death. Nothing could make this up, except another life.

So important was the Temple. It was the heart and hope of it all. Here’s the drama of it all: Jesus cries out and dies. And we, caught in the dark, can only think of death, a final death, fini, the end. And the curtain of the temple is torn in two, top to bottom.

Yes, that’s the pain, and the victory. It’s the pain because this is God’s pain. This is the pain of the death inside God, the death of the Son. This is God who now offers the sacrifice, not Israel, not us. This is God who will stop at no cost to win back communion with the very creature who wants to live by her or himself. God brings the offering. This isn’t the resolute human who bulls his way into God’s presence, who tears open the curtain. It’s God.

We hold tenaciously to belief that there must be something we can do to make it right. Something we can do to connect with the God we’ve lost touch with. Something we can do to make up for what has gone wrong (even if we haven’t done “it”, we’ll work to make it up; we’ll make reparations). Of course we can’t. We can’t give the slaves back their lives. We can’t take back the words we’ve said. We can’t repair the hurt. But neither can we build the bridges back to God. We can’t break through the walls we have built.

So God does – at a cost we could not imagine. At a cost that we could not pay, even if we thought we could. So yes, all sacrifice does end here. And the way is thrown open for communion between God and the human. No. That’s to say it far too blandly, too generally. It’s not between the God and some human “x.” It’s between God and you in your aloneness, in your fear, in your need. It’s between God and peoples, Israel but not only Israel, it is those on the outside, all who have been left outside by whatever wall has been erected. It’s full communion with the God who is our life because God has now given everything, even life itself, at the very place where we divide and kill. The way is open.

And that invites us to live in a new world, a world where we need no longer live in our silos because we must assert ourselves or protect ourselves. When Paul the apostle (or someone close to him) got around to writing that amazing document we call the Letter to the Ephesians, he too used the image of the Temple. This time he pictured the wall that separated the court of the Jews, the place where Jews worship, from the court of the Gentiles. What happened with Jesus at the cross, he writes, is nothing less than the destruction of that wall. It was, he said, destroyed by the “blood of Christ.” The division between Jew and Gentile, believer and pagan, represented the division among humans, a division begun back when brother killed brother, Cain killed Abel. The two have now become one, Paul exults, “through the cross.” (Eph. 2).

And that’s us, folks! That’s the church – not for our own sake, not so that we can enjoy communion with God as our souls go off into our little corners with God. Not at all. In fact, the church reminds us that our communion with God is only through our communion with one another. And that’s not just with those who are like ourselves. Decidedly not. It is with those who we wouldn’t invite to dinner. With those from whom we have been estranged. It is to welcome the outsider – we were the outsider (we are the Gentiles, after all). To welcome the sinner (we are the sinners, after all). It is to be gathered with the motley crew that makes us up – as a signal of what God intends for all the world! The overcoming of all the barriers that divide us – in all the world! No more tribal battles where we are one only when one side is stronger than all the others! But a union in Christ.

And when this happens, it is not the church, not a child of Israel, but the pagan, the outsider who says it first, makes the first confession: “Truly, for sure, this was God’s Son.” Here where the curtain is torn in two, here where the cry of dying rises to the heavens and echoes off the everlasting hills, here we are the in presence of God. And one another. We are made whole again. And human.

March 18, 2012

Mark 15:21-32                              THE POWER OF GOD

I invite you today to observe. Mark describes an event for us. No color commentary. No preaching. No challenge from Jesus. Just a report of an event put together from a variety of witnesses.

Not just any event, of course. It is a decisive event. There is a before and after to this event. You have a pretty good idea what that means. We say that life changed decisively at 9/11. We’re just beginning to understand what that means. But we’ve sensed that time divides to a before and after. Old-timers tell us that it was like Pearl Harbor. The world after is not the same as the world before.

The world changed – the world –  on that morning two millennia ago, when Jesus of Nazareth was executed on a hill just outside one of the city gates of Jerusalem. It was an event – so it happened at a particular time and at a particular place. You can date it. And you can date the world afterward. Everything changed. As a matter of fact, it’s the only reason you’re sitting here today. Just as surely, it’s the only reason you can face any morning with anticipation and can savor the days you’ve been given. We live in the “after.”

But what happened? In Mark’s telling, it’s a pretty ordinary event. And it’s awful in its ordinariness. Criminal executions were not rare. A certain rabbi, Joshua ben Joseph, Jesus the son of Joseph, from the upcountry village of Nazareth has been caught in the vise where the interests of the Jewish leaders meshed with those of the Roman overlord. This Jesus had offended both to the point where he was convicted of a capital crime. So we see the condemned dragging his own cross to the place where he would die. The cross is too heavy for his weakened body. So a passer-by is pressed into service to carry it the rest of the way.

Soldiers cast lots for what clothes he has on. This too is in the course of events. Executioners could appropriate the property of the dying. The problem was how to divide the spoils. So they drew straws, flipped coins for who got what. It’s the death of another miscreant. Deaths happen all the time. What’s another one? An ordinary, depressing spectacle.

Our witness marshals a number of bits that remind us of just how ordinary this dying criminal is. They are intended to mock. Executions do that. They are the clearest signal we have that this person’s life isn’t worth the remark. No hero’s eulogy for such. Their lives aren’t worth preserving – so much so that we’ll be rid of them once and for all.

Watch as the picture unfolds.

First the inscription over the cross. Written there are the words: “The King of the Jews.” Of course, anyone with a brain knew that Herod was the king of the Jews. The inscription was to be seen where the law enforcement establishment affixed the label of the crime that had been committed. This was the first century version of a deterrent. “Do this, and such is your fate.” Plot insurrection, and it will be off with your head. (Actually worse because crucifixion was a particularly slow and painful death.)

The inscription meant, of course, that this man claimed to be the king of the Jews. What presumption! And yes, it might well have to do with potential violence against Rome. There was in Israel the hope of the return of a new David, of a leader who could reinvigorate the old Israel. As it happens there were no shortage of candidates for the job. Historians know of a number of potential leaders of a liberation movement. Well, this is what happened to pretenders. This was no king. This was another deluded fanatic, now dying.

Now the deep irony is that what was meant as mockery happens to be the truth. This Jesus was the true king, and the king of the Jews at that. But to any sensible person it didn’t look that way. This was an ordinary, awful dying.

The second bit of mockery is a bit difficult for you to see if you just opened your Bibles and read this passage. It’s the presence of the two criminals. The picture is so common that it’s nearly impressed on our internal picture of that day:  three crosses. What I miss until I consult the scholars is that the Romans are adding insult to injury here. You didn’t crucify the criminal in the company of others – at least not in this way. The Romans are simply accenting the worthlessness of this hick Jew.

The third bit is there to be seen but it’s also a bit complicated. So hang with me for a bit. It’s in those passing by shaking their heads. Mark lets us hear these words: “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself and come down from the cross.” It’s the reference to the Temple.

Scholars are pretty well agreed that Jesus’ actions in and against the temple were the provocation that led to his arrest and ultimately to the sentence of death. To know why this was so offensive, you need to know how important the Temple was as a symbol to the Jews. Two things: the first is that the Temple was that place where God was present with Israel. This is where God is and is to be found. This is the very center of the earth – its umbilicus; its belly-button. The second, related, matter is that this is where sacrifices are lifted to God day in and day out. Sacrifices to take away the guilt of all that disturbs and destroys humanity; sacrifices of thanksgiving and so entered into communion with the God who is life itself; sacrifices that brought pleasing odors to God.

More than that, hope burned deep that the Temple would regain its place of prominence when God came to vindicate captive Israel. For someone to announce the destruction of the Temple was to spit on the most sacred symbol Jewish people knew. And when the leaders picked up hints that this same Jesus claimed to replace the Temple with his own self? Well, this was dangerous talk.

And of course to say that he would rebuild it in three days? Come now! You couldn’t even find a decent architect in that window of time. Of course he can’t rebuild it. He can’t even destroy it. How could he? He can’t get off this cross. He can’t do anything. He just hangs there.

Again an irony. Our narrator doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t have to, not for us as we observe the scene. Because we know that the “three days” is about Jesus’ own self, about death and resurrection. It is about the end of the Temple, because the place where God is present is not the Temple, but Jesus himself. But that is to get ahead of our story.

The scene reaches its climax in the fourth part of our scene. The chief priests and the scribes add their voices: Some savior! He cannot even save himself.  And then this: “Let the Messiah, the king of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we can see and believe.” This is no Messiah. This is a dying Jesus.

If this is the Messiah, where is the kingdom promised in the old stories? If this is the Messiah, where is the kingdom he told us was “at hand”? If this is the Messiah, why are we here in this ordinary and terrible place? If this is the Messiah, why do we still wrestle with sickness and death, with the awful political logic that those who have the cannons and the guns get to rule?

Here things get really awful. Because it isn’t just the ordinary citizen drawn to execution like all of us who are a bit fascinated by car wrecks. It isn’t just leaders of the Jews who are offended by one who violates what is right and holy. And it isn’t Roman administrators on the lookout for threats to the public order. It’s Jesus’ own followers as well, those whose hopes had been raised, those who had left all to follow him. We’re at the end of the line. Not only at the death of Jesus, but at the death of hope, the death of the future.

What then? Then it’s back to the old world. It’s back to the way things were, awful and real as they are. It’s back to a world where the fittest survive. To the world of disappointment where divorce has its day. To the world where you are on your own, the world of the individual. To the world of the 9 to 5 where you hang on for as long as you can. Maybe you can dream. But this is what dreams come to. It’s where we all come to. Death. Ordinary death.

And this event changed everything. That’s what we confess. That’s why churches still keep on keeping on. Even when churches fade away, the story keeps being told. Because it happened. And it did change everything.

So that when Paul got around to trying to get his mind around what had happened he would write this to one of his churches:  “the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.” The power of God. What’s going on?

When later followers of Jesus rubbed their eyes, this is what they saw as they looked with you on this event. They saw God. They saw not the absence of God, but God. This is where God is. This is the place where God touches earth. Not where you’d think. Not in the beauty of the Caribbean as you enjoy the cool breezes and the warm nights. Not in the corridors of power where you can make anything happen with the push of a computer key. Not even in the holy places where pilgrims chant. Nothing wrong with those places. They are wonderful and delightful. But that’s not where God showed up and changed the world. It was here, at the place of dying.

This is where God goes. This is love. Not our love, but God’s love. This is where God goes. To the places where you are most alone. To the places where blood flows. The places where God cannot be. This is a love we cannot fathom. We can only stand in awe. It is a love that saves the world. Our choir will sing it in a few minutes: “What wondrous love is this.” In the face of this love we can only sing: “We’ll sing on, we’ll sing on.”

What did they see? Paul said it. It is the “power of God.” Not where we’d expect it. This is failure, not power. We see power in “shock and awe.” Do you remember when the Iraq war began? Our television screens were filled with the terrible power of bombs and guns. That’s power. We see power in financial wealth. We see power in the ability to manipulate our world to do what it should. Power, yes, but not the power of God. The power of God is here at the place of the cross. This was the power to turn hatred to love. This was power in a weakness that could not be destroyed. This was a love that could not be overcome because it turned even death into an instrument of love.

Now this is what happens as we watch, as we observe, as that ancient scene plays out. Of a sudden it isn’t so ancient. It isn’t even past. It is God, today, and it begins to dawn that this concerns us! This is God in the breach for you – and for me. For a broken world, and for you too. This is what God is about. This is what God’s love is. Not love in the abstract, love as a sort of good-feeling toward the world. But love that enters the full darkness, there to stand with you. Not passive love, but a love that is the power to bring a kind of life we had never dreamed.

And this is the reason you can get up in the morning. Because Jesus died, you can hug your kids and your grandkids today. Because Jesus died, you don’t have to make excuses for your life. Because Jesus died, you are not alone when you sense that you are most alone. Because Jesus died, you can hope for tomorrow. Because Jesus died, the power of God is at work bringing about a new kind of kingdom, where the lost are found, the sinner is forgiven, the dead are not only fading memories, and you can savor the delight of each new day. Because Jesus died, the ordinary is no longer awful but is the beginning of a life that will deepen each day.

Can you see it?

Today we are constituting a consistory to do an impossible job. Notice that I didn’t say that they have a difficult. It has been my privilege to work with dedicated and skilled consistories in this place who do the difficult jobs of making budgets work, finding leaders for all our programs, keeping creaky buildings not only in shape but nicely so. We can do difficult things. But impossible? That’s a bit beyond our pay grade.

That said, .they will do it. Not because of who they are and the skills they possess. They’ll do it because of what God can do. We’re going to ask God to so empower them to do the impossible. Listen as we pray when we ordain and install our elders and deacons: we pray God pour out the Holy Spirit and fill each with “grace and power” for their ministry as elder or deacon. We pray God’s Spirit so to inspire them, so to fill them with energy that they can be about God’s work here. Which is? To tell the wondrous news of God’s love to a world and a people starved for love. Yes, and again yes.  But it is a news that calls us to the impossible. It is to follow Jesus. And following Jesus is not for the faint-hearted. Because there is no half-way with Jesus. No following so long as it’s convenient, or that it helps us along. It’s signing on for the whole trip. And that means the cross. That’s too much. Too much for me, anyway. So it’s impossible.

We’re in good company – or in company, anyway. We’re with Peter, the Peter who is one of Scripture’s stand-ins for the church. Peter has hung in there. He told Jesus he would. He swore it on a stack of Bibles. So he did. The others may have left Jesus, but Peter follows to the court. And then, at the last moment, he bails. And worse, he doesn’t only take a powder; he denies even knowing the man who was his heart’s companion, the man who made the hope so real Peter could touch it. He saw it and he heard it. But now, now when death threatens, he denies any connection with this dangerous way.

The story is clear, I think. We see the most dedicated, the best, who cannot walk that last leg of the journey to the cross with Jesus. Who, when the chips are down, cannot follow the call to the end. This isn’t so much a matter of accusation against us humans. I’ve heard more sermons – I’ve preached more sermons – that asked of the poor pew-sitter: “How have you denied Jesus?” This is less accusatory than it is descriptive. This is where Jesus found himself; and still does. He finally goes it alone. And going alone, he gives life in precisely those places where we see death.

Jesus’ way of salvation is through death. It is to stand in the way of threat, unafraid. And I can’t do that. “Turn the other cheek,” Jesus says. That doesn’t work for me, for us. We’ve got to be strong. We’ve got to do something to keep those Iranis from obtaining nuclear weapons. “Unless you’re ready to forgo houses and lands, to leave your homeland, all that is right and precious,” Jesus says,” you’re not ready to follow me.” Wait a minute? You mean we’re supposed to tell our neighbors that we’re to put our patriotic duty on hold for the sake of Jesus and his kingdom? That’s not going to bring them into your church, Mr. Jesus.

Here’s the impossible task for us in the church. We love the church, most of us in this room do anyway. It has nurtured us. Some of you can point out how it has done nothing less than to save your life, thoughts of the next life aside. And we’re asked to follow Jesus to the place where we have to give it up? That’s a bridge too far.

The story is clear. Finally we cannot save ourselves. We cannot, finally, make the world safe. We cannot, for whatever reason, live the kind of love that gives everything away for the sake of the homeless and the destitute. No one goes with Jesus all the way. Not even Peter. There is no hero of the faith.

Not that we can’t do a great deal! This past week I watched a marvelous film on the effort to conquer polio in the United States in the middle of the last century. It was a truly amazing feat as the nation pulled together to defeat a frightening enemy. We can do much. And we shall. But it hasn’t saved the world from itself. That only God could do, and God did it in a way we would not and could not expect.

Here’s what is so amazing in this story. Peter denies Jesus. He actively steps away from identification with this Jesus and his movement. He’s ready to deny reality, what anyone with two eyes could see: “I didn’t even know him,”  he said about Jesus. Well, you could line up the witnesses. They saw him day on day hanging out with Jesus and his band. Peter denies Jesus, but Jesus doesn’t abandon Peter.

No. It’s more stunning than that. Jesus uses Peter. The denier becomes the rock on which the church is built! The church is not built on heroes of the faith. It is not built on those who are the smartest guys (or gals) in the room. That’s not how God works. We knew that. We knew that with Abraham and Jacob and Moses and David. All of them showed colossal failures of nerve. Abraham would pass his wife off as his sister to the king for the king to have as a wife to safe his skin. Jacob was a scoundrel who had problems with truth, to say nothing of courage. David, well you know the one about David and Bathsheba, where the king commits royal murder to hide his dalliance with the beautiful Bathsheba. And God uses them for God’s purpose God used Peter, the very one who, at the end, gave way. Jesus died for Peter.

God uses sinners all. This isn’t just the case in the church. It may be just me, but this political season is particularly disheartening. Most of the candidates for president haven’t disported themselves very well. At the very least, money has distorted our democratic process. I  know this is a sense of the moment. I’m old enough to remember scoundrels aplenty in
Washington, and not only there, but in county courthouse and city hall too. I’m not about to tell you to ignore bad behavior. But here’s the wonder: God can use such to do God’s will. God uses scoundrels and sinners too to be about God’s work in the world.

That’s the point. God can do it. And God does it. And so to our consistory and their impossible job. Hear me well. I’m not calling them scoundrels and sinners; not at all! But if God can work through Peter, and if God works through all sorts, then God works through our leaders too.

So we need not be afraid. Not afraid of the daunting and joyful task of following Jesus, even when it doesn’t seem profitable or practical. We need not be afraid of speaking and living God’s truth, Jesus’ way, in a culture that is increasingly indifferent to it, or to us, a culture that tells us that it’s OK to believe what you will so long as you keep it private. And no, we need not be  afraid of ourselves and that place where we give way.

Here we are, everyday people, not paragons of belief. We’re you and I. We have given up on Jesus more than we’d like to admit. But God can do it. God can use us to do the impossible. And to do it as we work on such ordinary things as budgets and buildings, on pledge drives and Sunday School, on mission committees and flower committees. We do work on it becoming a people who in such halting ways point to the one who did go all the way, all the way to love us, to save us, and to use even us.

Pray for this consistory. Pray for us all. Pray confidently. For God can do it. God does it!

March 4, 2012

Mark 14:53-65

I carry around a picture of my grandson where he looks so angelic he could almost be wearing a halo. Most of the time, though, “angelic” wouldn’t apply. He’s a blur of sheer energy, a metal truck in each fist, climbing the breakfront in the dining room the moment you turn your back. My picture is how I want to see him, but it’s only a slice of him.

A picture. Not long ago a young man told me about the picture of Jesus done in stained glass across the front of the church of his youth. It was a picture of Jesus as the shepherd, a lamb draped around his shoulders. There was nothing incorrect about the picture; we meet Jesus as the good shepherd in the gospel story. Still, my young friend said, that Jesus had very little to do with a growing adolescent struggling with life. It was Jesus frozen in stained glass.

To picture Jesus is to judge Jesus. It is to say, “this is who Jesus is” and by omission “that is who Jesus is not.” To judge Jesus.  We’re following Mark’s story of Jesus passion, or dying. Today we are with Jesus in the judgment hall. We’re with him in the Sanhedrin, the Jewish court. It’s not our kind of court, not exactly. The court is not going to discover guilt or innocence. The decision has already been made: guilty. The fix is in. But guilty of what? They’re looking for evidence of a capital crime. They’ve got the verdict; they just don’t know the charge.

But they have some candidates. Here’s one: “He said ‘I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands.’” Mark tells us that the witnesses didn’t all agree on this. Still, we’re pretty sure from other gospels that Jesus said something like this. And it would be highly offensive. Why?

Let me put myself in the bull’s eye. I care about the church. I’ve given my life and my energy to the church. I know its blemishes. I know church-people; I’m one of them, too slow to love, too quick to judge, too lax in my commitment. It isn’t only because I think that living together as community is a good thing, even essential for our life individually and together as humans. I believe, as the creeds have all made clear, that God uses the church, so much so that the church is God’s instrument for the rescue of both persons and societies from the ravages of evil and of death. So if someone comes and says – in the name of God! – that the church needs to be taken down and taken apart, I would be offended. And more. I would see those who made such claims as dangerous to human souls, as dangerous as organized crime bosses.

And I’ve made a judgment. I’ve judged the bearer of the message. Like all judgments, it was made against certain rules, or better, norms. And my norm is deep, religiously deep. This would be about what I know as all that is right and good and holy. I would even think that it violates what Jesus taught!

What would it be for you? I don’t for a minute want to suggest that you would share my passion for the church, although you might. What would you find offensive if Jesus were to take it apart? He left some clues. “Unless you hate father and mother and home, you aren’t worthy of me.” Jesus said that. Is that one sufficiently provocative? Home and family, parents and children and siblings are good things, very good things. Perhaps it’s your work. Your work is your vocation. It expresses something profound about your very self. I hesitate to say it in the current political climate, but certain political commitments can be honorable and good. Does Jesus threaten to take it apart? It can even be patriotic sentiment, something for which you risked your life. Jesus wants to take it all apart? I don’t think so! Those are – or at least can be – good things.

We’ve made a judgment, and to the extent that it is Jesus that threatens, we’ve made our judgment against Jesus.

The trial, if a true trial it is, is going nowhere until the high priest takes matters into his own hands and asks Jesus bluntly, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” Are you the one the prophets told us would come to give us back our nation, would throw off the Roman yoke? Are you the one from the great high God himself? To which Jesus answers: yes. I’m the one.  At which the high priest reacts with horror. This is blasphemy! This is enough. They have their charge and they have the decision down cold. They’ve heard it from Jesus’ mouth.

Blasphemy. It is to mock God. To make light of God. It’s like juggling nitro glycerin. God is power, the power at the heart of all that is. You don’t play around with that kind of power. It can kill you and all around you. You respect it. You honor it. This is the Creator of the universe and the hope of Israel. For Jesus to make that claim is to spit in the face of God and so risk the fate of all around.

So they’ve judged. They’ve judged because this one cannot be the Messiah. He doesn’t fit the criteria. He doesn’t fit the picture they have, the picture they’ve built from the Scriptures that have been given them. He shatters all their notions of what the Messiah must be.

We’re back to our stained-glass Jesus. Does the Jesus we worship, the Jesus to whom we lift our praises, is this Jesus locked in the image we’ve put together? Our picture of Jesus may not be wrong; we may have gotten it from Scripture. But is it the living Jesus, the Jesus who doesn’t fit, and worse, the Jesus who challenges how we understand the world? Jesus steps out of the stain glass in which he has been imprisoned.

I suggest two things. One difficult but real. The other real but wondrous. The first thing I suggest is that we are more like the judges in the Sanhedrin than we’d like to admit, or than I’d like to admit anyway. Not that we’re ready to drag Jesus to the cross. But that we have our view of what is good and right. And we may not be wrong! And even then! Even then Jesus doesn’t stay put, doesn’t stay in the stained glass, but comes to take our carefully constructed world apart. Not because we are so bad, but because that’s the way reality is. It is confusing and dangerous. We’re waltzing in the dark, unknowing and unsure. And when push comes to shove, we’ll save our own skin – most of us anyway. That’s difficult, but it’s real.

But that’s not all. And that’s not the end of the story. Just as real is this. Jesus enters the difficult place and there leads us to something more wondrous, more hopeful, than we could ever have known or dreamed. He not only takes the temple apart, stone by stone. He builds another; we don’t know what it will look like but it will be better than one we can put together with all our genius and all our skill and all our effort. He is the Messiah of God. He does restore a new Israel, a new people, free from Rome’s yoke, and Britain’s yoke, and the master’s yoke, and the corporate yoke, free from all that’s got hold of you, and free even from the yoke you put on yourself with your own demand to be super-human. This is real, more real still.

So I welcome you to this table, to this meal with the crucified Jesus. Here we walk into our unknown future. We walk forward into those places where we’ve lost all the markers. Where our carefully constructed Jesus doesn’t meet us, but the real Jesus, the living Jesus, who sometimes takes us in his arms, sometimes smacks us in the head, sometimes commands us to go forward and sometimes commands us to wait and watch and pray. This is the Jesus who walks with us to the cross, into the deepest valleys, but who never, ever, leaves us nor forsakes us, and ever walks beside us and before us.

This is the man of sorrows, the one who is broken on the anvil of human cupidity and dishonesty, of willful human ignorance and pride and greed. This is the Jesus of the cross. Who is also the Son seated at the right hand of Power. That is, all of history will bend to his way of love. And, as our old catechism put it, the judged is the judge. And thank God! For our judgment leads to the cross. To wars and to a greed that starves schools of money and the hungry of food. Our judgment leads to death. His judgment leads to life.

This is a new way, a way that looks all wrong to me, and perhaps to you too. But it is the way Jesus leads us. This is hope beyond our hope. This is love beyond our love. And this is joy beyond enjoyment. Here, at this table, is your future and my future, nothing less than the salvation of your soul – and more, the salvation of all the world!

February 26, 2012

Mark 14:32-42

Children often ask the best questions. Most likely because they haven’t learned that they shouldn’t ask them. “Daddy, why is Aunt Polly so fat?” the little boy asks with Polly sitting across the table. So it was in a children’s sermon one Palm Sunday when I almost casually used the words “Good Friday.” One bright young scholar, no weeds under her feet and knowing full well that that Friday was about a crucifixion, and if she had never seen one, she knew it wasn’t good, asked: “Why do we call it Good Friday?” Why indeed?

I will push the question a bit harder. We call the first four books of the New Testament – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – gospels. They are the announcement of good news, the greatest good news the world could ever have received. And yet they dedicate more precious ink and parchment to the events of Jesus’ last days, his dying than they do almost to the rest of Jesus’ life. Why? Some scholars have described the gospels as essentially the “passion story with an extended introduction.” What’s going on?

Well, there is something about Jesus’ dying, and about how he died, that is good news. God does something through events so terrible we can hardly contemplate them; God does something that does nothing less, we confess, than save the earth (the earth!) from destruction. And God will make real what we call the God’s own kingdom, the reign of God, not only in the sweet bye and bye, but in the here and now, on terra firma. In fact, God so loved the world that God gives up everything to save it from itself – to save us from ourselves.

To see just how this works, we are going to take some time the season of this Lent to listen afresh to the story of Jesus’ passion and death as Mark tells it. We begin, indeed as Scripture’s story itself begins, in a garden.

But let’s back up for a moment and see just how we got here, and then how Jesus got to that garden. We have just concluded that season of the church year we call “Epiphany.” It is the season of light. Jesus has come into the world as the light of the world. “Shine, Jesus, Shine,” goes the popular praise song set best in Epiphany. In Jesus’ light we see God’s intentions for the world. Jesus comes to welcome the last and the least, the broken of limb and the broken of heart. He opens the table to all comers, reversing the place cards and putting the servants at the head table. We see God ushering in a new world. Something there is about Jesus that gathers crowds. He speaks to our deepest joys, deeper than we knew. We know now that God intends good for this tired and weary world, welcoming even sinners back into the fold. This is good news indeed. The light shines.

Then we run into the wall that is Lent. It turns out that not all is light after all. We are at a dead end. Dead indeed, for death darkens the days. God’s new world that had seemed so possible, so filled with hope, hits reality. The world is far darker and more dangerous than we thought. And if God is making a path, it isn’t going in straight lines.

So here we sit. Something wondrous has wakened in us in Jesus’ call. And we’re in a world where reality doesn’t conform to Jesus’ kingdom intentions. And worse: we don’t conform either.

Perhaps we’re not so removed from the experience of Jesus’ disciples. They had followed Jesus this far. He had wakened in them a new hope. But they are about to enter a place of great danger. It was all about to come to a terrible end. When Jesus gathered them for that meal we call the “last supper,” he told them that he would be betrayed. And worse, that when push came to shove, when the soldiers came to arrest him, they would all abandon him.

What happened that this Jesus who seems so innocent has become such that he needs to be eliminated? What is there about this Jesus movement that makes it a threat, so dangerous?

If Jesus did no more than teach how to be a better person, or how to love your neighbor he wouldn’t be a problem. If Jesus did no more than to teach how one must live to enter eternity after you die, they wouldn’t be after his life. If Jesus did no more than start a religion where “love your neighbor” was the deepest and primary goal of life, there would be no cross. If Jesus taught us how to live our interior life, there would be no Gethsemene.

But Jesus did threaten. The movement Jesus started would challenge the powers that be – Rome. As history turned out, Rome was right to be frightened of Jesus’ way. Rome is long gone; Jesus’ followers aren’t. But it didn’t just challenge Rome; it challenged those who promoted the way of Israel. Not because Jesus was against Israel; his movement was to restore Israel. But he did so in a radically new way. Jesus’ way so called into question the ways of the world that the world could not tolerate him – or his followers.

It is under the shadow of this danger that we enter the garden with Jesus. He takes his three most trusted disciples with him to pray. Jesus is distressed. That’s the first observation I want to make on this little scene. Mark’s story is clear that Jesus had a pretty good idea what was going to happen when he got to Jerusalem. In fact, the gospels have Jesus telling his disciples three times that a bad end awaited him in Jerusalem. So Jesus knew. That didn’t mean that he found the prospect acceptable. So he’s going to spend some time with God talking this over. He takes some serious time with God in prayer. Listen to what he says: “Father, for you all things are possible.” God, you can do the strangest and most wondrous things. So you can work out what needs to be worked out without the pain and horror that I’m facing. If that’s the case, then can you find another way? Jesus is not a stoic martyr, gladly facing death because he knows that his death will advance his cause somehow. He is human, no less human than you or I, a human frightened by the prospect of torture and death.

But if Jesus is distressed, what about the disciples? Jesus asks them to wait a bit, but to “stay awake.” Stay awake. The time is fraught. It is crisis time. Stay awake. Perhaps it’s to keep alert for the approach of the guards. They would show up at the end of our scene. Stay awake. You are my companions on this journey.

Stay awake. And what do they do? They go to sleep. That sounds odd. They’re so exhausted from the day’s events that they can’t keep their eyes open? No. Why do we sleep? There are times when we sleep because we don’t want to be awake. We sleep because we are avoiding the reality that faces us when awake. Sleep is a form of denial.

They sleep because they cannot follow Jesus into this danger zone. This is too much. They have followed Jesus this far, but they cannot imagine the cross. If you recall the story, Peter, bold Peter, spoke for them all when he refused to listen to Jesus when Jesus told them that the cross awaited him. When Jesus told the disciples they would all leave him, Peter countered: “No. Not me. They can all leave you but not me.” It wasn’t as though Jesus hadn’t told them. When Jesus turned toward Jerusalem, he told them, plain as day the text has it, that if they were to follow him, they had to be prepared to take up the cross. The Jesus way leads to this. No, they’re not ready. So they fall asleep.

My guess is that it isn’t just an arrest they fear. They sleep while Jesus prays. Jesus’ prayer is an uncomfortable place. It is a prayer that wrestles with God. It is a prayer that dares to ask God to go another way. It is a prayer that opens all the way to the depth of fear. And it risks a response from God that we don’t want – and maybe even can’t abide. Some time ago I mentioned in a class that one might get angry with God. One lovely student quickly retorted: “I couldn’t do that.” God was not a place you could go with all your vulnerable humanity open to display. True prayer can be a frightening place. We’d rather sleep.

Perhaps the disciples slept too because they didn’t want a Jesus, the one who is their hope and their joy, didn’t want a Jesus who wavered before God. They wanted a hero Jesus. Perhaps.

Still, I think that at the deeper place, they slept because they could not face what was ahead, and that was death. The death of Jesus, yes. The death of a companion and a friend, yes. But, more profoundly, it is the death of the dream. The death of the hope. The death of the future. The death of the project of the kingdom of God that Jesus had announced. The darkness was too great. They could see no way forward.

And it would break them. Stay awake, Jesus said. But they can’t and don’t. Three times Jesus tries it, and each time they fall asleep. They can’t stay awake. “Simon, Peter, stay awake so that when your time comes you won’t fall to the temptation to give up.” But Peter doesn’t, and he will succumb. We know the story.

We are the story. It’s the human story. It’s the story of the church, after all, the church as the followers of the disciples. We have joined the Jesus movement. We have “heard the joyful sound,” and we’ve gathered in churches for generations to sing the hymns. I’ve been in great gatherings where gospel hymns ring out, even in those new sorts of services where the drums and banging and the guitars strumming and everyone is on their feet praising Jesus. We love the Jesus who welcomes the little children, the Jesus who welcomes the broken and the lost. We resonate with the shepherd Jesus bringing the lamb home over his shoulder.

But we don’t do so well when we enter the garden with Jesus. Oh, I’ve heard many of my friends say that Jesus triumphs, that we needn’t enter the dark and difficult place because Jesus is about light and life and victory. But that’s just another way of being asleep.

Followers of Jesus will find themselves with Jesus at the end, in danger. It has happened time and again when the Jesus way doesn’t conform. When followers of Jesus refuse to take arms in defense of country, say. When followers of Jesus asked whether the leaders of his church were honest to Jesus’ desires. When followers of Jesus refused to countenance the buying and selling of human flesh as slaves. When followers of Jesus practice forgiveness in a world that celebrates vengeance. At such times, they were not welcomed and will not be welcomed in this world.

And the time comes when find ourselves at a dead end. There are the times when we are at a dead end with ourselves. We can’t ‘fess up to who we are or what we’ve done. We are in a dark place, the place that is ourselves. So we fall asleep. It’s the human story.

The time comes when death throws everything into confusion. When we lose all that is dear and precious. We don’t want to think of such things, so we avoid thinking of them. We go to sleep. We don’t stay awake. It’s the human story.

This doesn’t sound so good, does it? We’re headed into the dark story of the passion. But it’s not the end. We haven’t even heard the end of Jesus’ prayer. “Yet not what I want, but what you want.” Jesus was distressed. He wrestled mightily with God. And yet he goes forward. Jesus goes forward into the place of dying. As the scene ends, his disciples disappointing him for a third time, he says, “Let’s get going. Look, my betrayer is coming.” Jesus goes forward.

Jesus goes ahead of us. Jesus enters the dangerous place, the place of death and worse, the place where betrayal is the order of the day, human betrayal. Jesus leads the way we don’t want to go. This is the Jesus who doesn’t deny the darkness. This is Jesus who doesn’t find a way around those who would destroy all the hope. This is the Jesus who follows God’s way into the darkness. And there, as our brother, as our companion, there to find the way to hope.  There, where all is lost, there all will be found.  Even when we’ve given up. When we’ve fallen asleep. Jesus doesn’t stop. God is at work. Jesus goes ahead. Jesus is already there for us, and with us, and yes, waiting for us. And that is good news. That is one reason, today’s reason, why this is gospel indeed.

February 12, 2012

Mark 1:40-45

“Jesus could no longer go into a town openly.” Why not? I’d always held the romantic, and naïve, notion that Jesus couldn’t enter the villages because his popularity made it impossible for him to move through the crowds. They couldn’t find a synagogue with sufficient pews. They were lined up like at Lourdes waiting for the healing. Giant fans trying to find a place along the parade route last Tuesday morning. Turns out I was probably wrong. No surprise.

It is more likely that Jesus couldn’t be seen entering a village because it was too dangerous. He was too dangerous. He was, in fact, subversive. I use that term because it might startle you, make you perk up your ears. I also use it because it was true. He was killed after all. And he was killed because he was seen as a threat – to both the Jewish establishment and the Roman government alike.

But I need to explain this a bit. Maybe more than a bit! I am subversive if I become a part of your community, fully sharing your values, and then turn those values on their head. I become a teacher because I love teaching children. So I become part of a school; and school is about educating children. But say that I educate them to think for themselves and they do! And they turn against the administration of the school. I have subverted them, and the school from the inside. I will not be thanked and I won’t be welcome.

If recent Jesus scholarship is right at all, the story goes something like this. Israel lived in expectation of the coming of God to vindicate God’s way in the world. The result would be the restoration of the Temple, God’s victory over pagans (that’s the Romans, among others), and the establishment or re-establishment of the people of God. Jesus, like John his predecessor, would have sounded like a prophet who announced the coming of that kingdom – the “kingdom of God” we heard Jesus proclaim as just around the corner at the outset of Mark’s gospel. Jesus would not only tell of that kingdom in sermons and parables, but would begin to live it out.

Except, that he subverted the story. That is, he took what was familiar and made it not only strange, but offensive at the same time. Here’s how he did so, or how Mark tells the story anyway. The law taught Israel, the Torah taught, that is, God taught that it was crucial for the community to distinguish between what is clean and what is unclean. This wasn’t just God being arbitrary. The distinction was there for the health and safety of the community. This would be not unlike the requirement that medical personnel wash their hands before dealing with a patient. It’s a matter of life and death.

Mark shows a Jesus who violates that distinction, who won’t observe proper boundaries. In fact, it’s almost as though Mark shoves that picture in our face. We heard last week that Jesus touched the hand of a sick woman; that’s to violate the boundary doubly. The sick are unclean. Later in Mark we can read the story of Jesus raising a dead young girl as he touches her. Again that violates the boundaries. The dead are unclean, the young girl is unclean.

But nothing makes it as clear as our story of Jesus’ healing of the leper. The leper was unclean par excellence. The leper was outcast and with good reason, or so it seemed at the time. His disease was so highly contagious that lepers were required to do a sort of self-quarantine. They could not live in society. They were outcast. So much so that they had to announce their approach so that the innocent could get out of the way.

It may be more graphic to think of the unclean from the perspective of what today is sometimes called the “ick” factor. What makes you turn away in disgust? Here’s a graphic description of an encounter with a leper from Fred Buechner in his near-classic novel about the eleventh century saint, Godric. Godric meets a leper on the road one day. He stops to help the poor soul. He leans down to help the leper to his feet and we read:

As I bend down, it turns to face me. Then I see it has no face.

I can’t say if it was a man I kissed or maid or why I kissed at all. I’ve seen them make the sick eat broth by holding it so close the savor draws them on. Maybe misery has a savor too so if you’re near enough, sick though you be with sin, your heart can’t help but sup. In any case I closed my eyes against that foul and ashen thing that once was  human flesh like mine and kissed its pain. When it reached out to me, I fled till I was far enough away to puke my loathing in a ditch.

“Ick” indeed.

And it’s worse. It wasn’t just as though you could catch something from lepers that would mean your slow and painful death. You would yourself become unclean and so become a danger to those around you. You now are cut off, isolated. You don’t belong because you’re dangerous.

Dangerous. Jesus became dangerous because he consorted with the unclean, and in so doing he became unclean himself. So you didn’t want to let him into town. With that what had sounded so promising – Israel back on its uppers and God on the divine throne – turned sour. Jesus has become subversive.

Something is happening. Jesus is resetting the boundaries. He is reconfiguring human community in such a way that the outsider is welcomed on the inside. And the outsider is the one whose presence in our midst would be considered dangerous. It could rub off. It could not only call all that is right and good into question, but it could change our world so that we couldn’t recognize it any longer.

Which is precisely what would happen. Jesus would gather around him – children! Well, we like that picture, don’t we. He would tell stories where the Samaritan is the hero, and to get close to that we have to talk about religious folk we don’t like very much as being the good neighbor (perhaps a Muslim community center near ground zero). He would consort with sinners; that’s eating and drinking with the child molesters and the Bernie Madoff’s. Paul put it in a language that sounds so Biblical we don’t hear it: “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female.” And in this day and at this time, I dare to add: there is neither gay nor straight. We all belong to this new community, the community where the boundaries are shattered open outward.

Jesus would become the outsider – for the sake of the outsider. No, it’s stronger than that: Jesus would become unclean for the sake of the unclean. Jesus would become dead for the sake of the dead. To violate the boundaries to let the outside in and, get this, to put him or her at the head table at the banquet!

In a minute, I’m going to ask who you think the outsider is in our world. But first I’ll pause and ask: maybe you feel that you are on the outside. It might be a matter of shame. Is there something about yourself that makes you feel shame? Shame is a powerful and destructive emotion. It tells you that you don’t belong. That you should be shunned because association with you will bring shame on those who befriend you. The shame you feel may be because of something you’ve done. Or it may be because you’ve been made to feel ashamed – of the color of your skin, of a handicap that limits you, of a disease that others find repulsive, of a parentage that doesn’t fit, you don’t look like you should – think of how we think of ourselves when we’re overweight. Shame puts you on the outside. And it’s worse because you’re sure it’s your fault.

Jesus doesn’t obey the norms of a safe society, even of a moral society. Jesus reaches out to embrace you, to welcome you into a community that says: “you belong with me.” Even if it puts Jesus at risk. Love risks. Love risks everything.

Now I’ll ask: who is on the outside? Because if you’ve been on the outside you’re a bit more sensitive. You look around and wonder: who else is left out? Who else is treated as though they don’t belong because they’ll contaminate the gene pool? Who is treated as though they don’t belong? Whom do we want to keep arm’s length?

We could start with the homeless, those forced to live on the street, bussed to the edge of town as was a recent policy in the city, or ushered to the city limits in towns like ours. It could be Muslims whom we will allow but whom we’ll keep an eye on, and certainly won’t get very close to. For me it could be those whose political values I find just plain nuts, or Christians whom I find have become captive to ideology. Who do I, whom do we, hold on the outside?

Here’s what that means: Jesus will be a problem for us! Jesus is dangerous because he pushes us beyond our boundaries. No, it’s worse, he welcomes people inside that we’re not so sure belong outside. The church has wrestled with Jesus as a problem from the very outset. Over and again we set barriers where Jesus wants doors. Over and again we gather with our own kind, with friends like ourselves. For good reason. We’re afraid.

At this point in the sermon you might expect me to get sermonic and urge you – us – to a greater openness. That as followers of Jesus, it’s our task to cross the boundaries, to enter the world of those who are different, who are “other.” Or at the very least to welcome the other inside our doors.  And not simply to give them a place in the pew (and hand them a pledge card), but to allow ourselves to be changed by their presence. To be willing to risk contamination, to risk being changed, to dare to die that we might live. You might expect me to do that. But I’m not going to.

Instead I suggest something more radical – and more real. Because, you see, Jesus isn’t about telling us to go “build the kingdom of God” as though he gave us the blueprint and his Spirit gives us the inspiration. As it happens we can’t pull it off anyway. Every attempt has ended not only in disaster but bloodshed.

The question before you, the question to your life, is not whether you’re ready to extend yourself, as difficult as that may sound. The question is: are you prepared to live in the world that Jesus has already prepared? Jesus has already begun to break down the boundaries. Jesus has embraced the unclean. He has brought the outsider in. And he welcomes you in, too. Are you ready for this new world? It’s there, it has begun to dawn.

It’s there in dribs and drabs in the church. We haven’t got it in the church; we aren’t at the kingdom place yet. But God uses the church as a sign. After all, we are the sinners! We were the outsiders. We are the lepers. We may not “get it” fully, but we confess it. This afternoon, our classis will gather in this sanctuary to reflect on the Belhar Confession. A confession is the church’s way of responding to God by saying what we understand God to be about in the world. This confession declares in part that God is in the world bringing together that which is separated – the clean and the unclean. And the church reflects this in its unity. It goes on

This unity must become visible so that the world may believe that separation, enmity and hatred between people and groups is sin which Christ has already conquered, and accordingly that anything that threatens this unity may have no place in the church and must be resisted.

Jesus has begun a new world where the unclean are brought inside. The one place where he expects this to happen in his church. He invites you to live in that new reality. It will mean a change in your life. It will mean shifting who you are to conform to this new reality. Are you ready to live that reality, one of radical hospitality, where you are welcomed, and so is the neighbor who before was such a stranger? Are you ready?