Conversations from Downtown DC's Calvary Baptist Church
Okay, it’s really a synagogue, not a bar. But there will be two rabbis and me next Monday night at Sixth & I Synagogue, along with journalists from The Washington Post and The Atlantic, all together to have a conversation about female clergy. I hope you’ll consider coming out and joining us; the panelists are wonderful and Sixth & I is a great place. Read more about the event here.
Although I was required to take both Old Testament and New Testament Survey courses in college, I can tell you without a doubt that most everything I know about the stories of the Bible came from Arch books.
And it’s a good thing for those Arch books, for they inspired more than one very holy Halloween costume, among other things! (That’s a long story for another time…).
They also taught me stories we don’t hear too much in worship. As you know, around here we follow the Revised Common Lectionary, a three year cycle of scripture passages used to guide worship by much of the Christian world. And not every single thing in the Bible is included in the RCL. For example, in the RCL over a three year period, there are 84 different passages from the Gospel of Luke and only 2 passages from the book of Daniel, a small book in the Minor Prophets that tells the famous story of Shadrach, Mesach, and Abendnego in the fiery furnace. Remember that?
Daniel in the lions’ den? No?
Would you like to borrow my Arch books?
The book of Daniel is a story about exile, when Jerusalem was sacked and the Israelites were carted off to Babylon where they struggled to maintain their identity and culture as a people, and their understanding of Yahweh as their God. There’s a lot of drama in the book of Daniel, including but not limited to lions and fiery furnaces. But I wanted to read you part of the story, from Daniel chapter 3 (since this part NEVER appears in the lectionary readings):
King Nebuchadnezzar made a golden statue whose height was sixty cubits and whose width was six cubits; he set it up on the plain of Dura in the province of Babylon. Then King Nebuchadnezzar sent for the satraps, the prefects, and the governors, the counselors, the treasurers, the justices, the magistrates, and all the officials of the provinces, to assemble and come to the dedication of the statue that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up…. When they were standing before the statue that Nebuchadnezzar had set up, the herald proclaimed aloud, ‘You are commanded, O peoples, nations, and languages, that when you hear the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, drum, and entire musical ensemble, you are to fall down and worship the golden statue that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up. Whoever does not fall down and worship shall immediately be thrown into a furnace of blazing fire.’ Therefore, as soon as all the peoples heard the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, drum, and entire musical ensemble, all the peoples, nations, and languages fell down and worshipped the golden statue that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up.
That’s right. The king built a shiny statue and decided it would make him feel a little better about all the different people he’d captured and was trying to integrate into society there in Babylon if everybody, uniformly, practiced and believed the same exact thing. So he made a rule that everybody had to bow down to his statue as soon as they heard the trumpet blast.
And I suppose that it calmed King Nebuchadnezzar’s fears about different opinions among the people and any potential dissention in the ranks when he gave the command for the trumpets to blow and then looked with satisfaction out of his palace windows and saw all the people—everybody—bowing down in unison before the statue he’d put up.
Now, really, even if you hadn’t heard this little piece of the story of Daniel before today, this narrative from ancient Babylon shouldn’t sound to unfamiliar to you and me. In every human society ever there have been movements (some more successful than others) to insure conformity. We human beings seem to feel more comfortable when we all know the score, when everybody is on the same page, when we don’t ever need to worry about any kind of challenge to the status quo.
But just read the book of Daniel…or, head down to the National Holocaust Museum…and you’ll quickly remember that imposed conformity like this has horrific and disastrous results…
…which might lead you and me to scratch our heads when we read the Gospel lesson for today, which is a continuation of Jesus’ Farewell Discourse, part of the Gospel of John that we’ve been reading over the past few weeks in worship. The little portion we heard today is from John chapter 17, which is known by biblical scholars as the High Priestly Prayer. It’s a prayer of Jesus that occurs in the book of John immediately before Jesus and his disciples head out to the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus is betrayed and the events of Holy Week begin to unfold (also deftly covered in an Arch book, FYI).
This is a beautiful prayer in which Jesus, who knows what’s ahead for his disciples, prays for them…and even prays for those who would come after them (us!). He prays for protection and comfort…and he prays for unity. Listen again: “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one…. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one….”
Now, there’s no coincidence that these words of Jesus’ prayer were included in the Gospel of John. Remember that the Gospel accounts were written long after the events John’s writer was recounting, and well into the establishment of the first church. And, as you’re aware from reading any of the Epistles of the New Testament, there was anything BUT “one-ness” in the first church. Squabbles over how to do just about everything were dominating the time of the church’s leaders, and they were desperately trying to figure out how to create communities that reflected the unity Jesus was talking about, instead of a group that looked like a bunch of children misbehaving. They were communicating to the world around them that they were, if not completely crazy, then at least not very much fun to be around.
In other words, the church’s internal conflicts were not doing much to advance the message of Jesus.
Hmmm, 2000 years go by and nothing much changes, does it? We Christians don’t get along much better today than they did in the early church, often because some among us would read the words of Jesus here and cry foul! See what Jesus says right here?!? We HAVE to believe the same things. We HAVE to practice our faith in the same way. We HAVE to understand God through a uniform rubric. We HAVE to value conformity in order to live the message of Jesus. He says it right here!!
Right?
Well, I’m not so sure. I do feel sure that when Jesus prayed that they and we might be one, he was praying for unity…but unity is far different from conformity.
Think for a minute about the group for whom Jesus was praying that night…! Some were rough-hewn fishers who’d spent their lives in manual labor. Some were educated tax collectors and government leaders. Some were women, oppressed by a society that would never accept them as equals. Some had only the desire for power and prestige; some had a desperate longing for affirmation and relationship. Like any collected group of human beings on the planet, the disciples came to the task of following Jesus from different life experiences, diverse perspectives, even radically varying convictions about their faith. There was no conformity there, and Jesus was not about the business of imposing a value of conformity on the first disciples.
Notice he didn’t pray, “Father, silence the questions among them, and grant that they may always agree…”.
No, he prayed for them…and he prayed for us…that we would do the hard, hard work of relationship, of messy engagement with each other, so that the world would know that DESPITE our differences, we come together in unity to proclaim a Gospel of love and reconciliation to the world around us. It’s not conformity…it’s a unity with integrity.
What does this mean? What does this mean for a community like ours? Well, it means that we welcome and nurture diversity among us…we don’t have to be alarmed if we hold differing opinions, if we don’t understand each other, even if we offend one other.
It means when we encounter conflict or discord, we listen to one another and we prioritize the health of our relationships and our community over our own preferences and even our own comfort.
It means the transference of the Gospel message of love and peace, of justice and reconciliation is always our first priority, its communication an endeavor we undertake with our whole lives joined together in all our diversity for a larger purpose.
You recall in the sequence of events that night of Jesus’ Farewell Discourse, the disciples had celebrated the Passover together. They’d gathered around a table. Some in the group sat at opposite ends of the table, just to keep the peace. Nobody really wanted to talk to Judas, who’d begun to act a little suspicious by then. Peter was (predictably) the loudmouth at the table, telling stories everybody had heard about a million times. And John, such a teacher’s pet, of course grabbed the seat right next to Jesus and watched everything he did with rapt attention, trying (as ever) to get on his good side.
And as the evening with all the predictable joys and tensions that come whenever you get a group of people together, came to a close, Jesus picked up a loaf of bread and a cup of wine and invited them to remember why they were there. They didn’t know exactly what he meant when he said the words, “This is my body broken for you…this cup is the new covenant in my blood…” but you know that they felt something strong and true as they offered the bread and wine to each another.
In that moment, in spite of all their differences, together they ate and remembered the unity of conviction that drew them together and held them connected.
And for that moment, anyway, they changed from a rag tag group of individuals staring confused at the task ahead of them…to a band of disciples, focused with purpose and unified in conviction.
John wanted the first church to remember and relive the first disciples’ experience. And perhaps in the memory of that meal even we can truly know what Jesus meant when he prayed for our unity. For Christian faith, the life of a Christ-follower in the community, is certainly not about conformity. But it is a unity, a beautiful unity that seeks to be part of God’s biggest hopes and dreams for our world.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran theologian who lived and worked in Germany during World War II and who was executed by the Nazis for his resistance to their regime, said it very well. He wrote: “Christian unity is not an ideal which we must realize or actualize. It is rather a reality created by God in Christ, in which we may participate.”
And we, you and me, together in this place, are not tasked with creating a standard to which we must each conform. Rather, we’re invited to gather around the table, to take the bread and the wine together, to join our voices in worship, to put our hands to the task of healing our world…all of this, even in our diversity…especially in our diversity…participating in God’s work of healing our world.
Together.
United.
Amen.
I’ve been getting a lot of comments these past few weeks about the length of the worship services recently. Mostly from the nursery workers. We work very hard to plan worship that lasts about an hour on Sunday mornings, but sometimes, it’s true, we go over a little. I was thinking our services may have run a bit longer than usual because during the season of Easter we’ve had the opportunity to hear your amazing personal resurrection stories, in addition to some incredible music. But as I’ve received comments about this the past few weeks I realized–you know, most of the elements of our worship are pretty fixed. There’s nothing that can really be adjusted except…hey, wait a minute. Maybe all these thoughtful critiques are mentioned to me, as I have direct control over one element of the service every week…the sermon!
Pastors, especially Baptist pastors in my observation, are perpetually characterized as universally long-winded because of some of our colleagues who do things like use the phrase, “And, in conclusion…” before continuing with the last forty-five minutes of the sermon. (A microphone is a powerful thing.) But I guess even the most succinct among us sometime go on longer than we should.
I’ll try not to do that today, but I would like to point out that going on and on for far longer than necessary is exactly what Jesus does in the part of the book of John where today’s Gospel reading is found!
The lesson today is from John chapter 14, and it’s part of Jesus’ Farewell Discourse. It begins back in chapter 13 when the Apostle Peter begins to suspect that something’s up, and asks Jesus in confusion: “Where are you going?” and concludes with Jesus’ prayer and commissioning of his disciples in chapter 17. Four chapters! Throughout all of these chapters Jesus keeps saying, in various ways, “I’m going away, you can’t follow me, don’t be upset.” He never actually uses the phrase “And, in conclusion,” but Jesus was being a bit like one of those Baptist preachers who go on and on (you know those kind!), because it took an awfully long time for him to finish a sermon with a pretty simple message.
Maybe Jesus kept going because as he spoke, all he could see was the look of terror on the disciples’ faces and he wanted to say something–anything–that would comfort them.
The way that the writer of John tells this part of the Gospel story paints the picture of a group of scared, disorganized disciples who, though they’d followed Jesus around for almost three years by now, had little or no understanding of what was actually happening and about to happen in the life of Jesus. They seemed confused (as usual) about what Jesus came to teach them, even in these final moments as Jesus struggled to get one last tutorial in before everything unraveled. They could hear Jesus talking about leaving but they couldn’t seem to get their minds around that reality. The change ahead of them seemed overwhelming and crippling, even.
And they were worried. Panicked, even. You can’t blame them, really.
We are blessed in this congregation with several members who have reached quite notable anniversaries of their own births. For those of us still in the first half of a century, we can look to some of you who are, say 80!, and learn some lessons about living long and well. There are, of course, several key factors that indicate long life, including some of our favorite things like diet and exercise.
But studies on aging show that one of the major predictors of life expectancy is a person’s ability to deal in a healthy way with change. You know, take the curve balls life throws your way with grace and accommodation. Still, when it comes to change, I’d bet that most of us are not fans. Change is hard; it pushes us to grow and stretch in ways that are not always comfortable. Change usually involves loss and certainly some fear. There’s much about any kind of change that is out of our control and, very often, not to our liking. Change is hard.
The disciples were feeling it in those moments, and Jesus could see it. So you can’t really blame him for letting his sermon get out of hand. He was trying to comfort them!
So after going around and around and around, trying to make his point but not seeming to get it across with any level of clarity, Jesus tried one last time. “I’m going away, you can’t follow me, don’t be upset.”
(Panic, panic, panic!)
So Jesus explains to them that they won’t be alone; that an advocate is coming; that God will not abandon them. And then he leaves them with the best blessing he has: peace.
Peace, to cover their confusion. Peace, to soothe their anxiety. Peace, to ease their fear. Peace, to give them courage.
And he’s not just saying it offhand, the way we ask each other how are you? As a greeting but don’t really want to know…. This peace Jesus is giving them in this moment is a real, tangible thing, something divine, a gift from God to hang onto tight when change washed over them like a tidal wave in the days and years ahead and they wondered if they’d ever be able to live faithful lives of discipleship at all, much less keep going for one more day.
When I was 19 years old, I saw something I had never seen before in my entire life. First the first time ever, I saw a woman preach a sermon. As you might guess, that experience changed my life and started me out on a journey that has led me to have control of this very microphone today…! That first woman I ever saw preach became a pastor to me, and when I left that church to go to seminary and begin my own training to someday be a pastor, she called me into her office and said “I want to give you something.”
She handed me a blanket, of all things. It was a brightly colored, scratchy woven woolen blanket with crazy fringe all around the edges. She told me that this was her blessing for me as I went into the future ahead of me. Personally I thought it was kind of a strange “going to seminary” blessing myself, but she explained. In the days ahead when things are hard, when you forget who you are and what you’re called to do, when you question your purpose and your commitment, when you can’t see where God is…this blanket will remind you. Wrap it around you, let it keep you warm, put it right where you can see it to remind you that you’re not alone.
In every seminary apartment, study carrel, and office since then, that scratchy woolen blanket has held a prominent place. Next time you stop by my office, see if you can find it. It’s there, right where I can see it…where I can walk past it and run my hand over it, or lay it on my lap while I study. It’s a tangible little piece of promise I can hang onto. Maybe you have something in your life, given to you by someone you love, that tangibly helps you remember their blessing on your life?
Well, this is exactly what Jesus is doing here in his way-too-long sermon. Peace, he called it. Something tangible. Not like the peace that the world gives, thoughtless and fleeting words spoken off-hand, impermanent and temporary, lacking in substance and heft. No, this is something real, something to hang onto as tight as you can, when the waves of change rush over you and the winds of life blow this way and that…when people you love die and life is shaken to its very core…when you have a hard time remembering who you are and what you believe…when chaos and uncertainty are the order of the day, and when you can’t see what’s right ahead of you.
Even if it took him an extra long sermon to get there, I’m glad he took the time. In the days that followed those disciples’ lives would be ripped apart; they needed a peace that was tangible, something they could walk past and touch, or wrap around themselves in dark moments of doubt and pain. And we do, too.
Peace, Jesus said. My peace I leave with you. Not the kind of peace the world talks about…but real, tangible, abiding peace. Hang onto it; hang on tight. Don’t let your hearts be troubled, and don’t be afraid.
“I’m going away, you can’t follow me, don’t be upset.”
And, in the meantime…peace.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
It’s good, I think, to always be learning something, no matter how old you are. I’m finding that living with high school students is a good strategy for making that happen. Based on what I’ve seen in recent years, it seems to me that curriculum has come a long way since I was in high school, when we never studied anything nearly as interesting as the teenagers in my house seem to study!
Recently we had a discussion at dinner about reading assignments for English classes. One assignment was a classic short story by Shirley Jackson called The Lottery. After hearing the thoughtful analysis and spirited discussion that sprang up around the dinner table in response to a recounting of the story (which I had never heard of, despite my very fine high school education), I decided to find out a little more.
In 1948, The New Yorker published The Lottery, a short, nine page story that would become the most controversial short story in the New Yorker’s. The simply told tale covers a ritual lottery in a sunny, rural town. But what starts out bathed in warmth and charm grows eerier and eerier, until the horrific purpose of the lottery is revealed in the story’s final paragraphs.
You can read it yourself, but I’m going to just go ahead and tell you what happens: every year, that sunny little town holds a lottery in which heads of families all come up front to draw a card. There is one card in the box with a black dot; the others are blank. The family who draws the card with the black dot comes to the front, and every member of the family then draws a card from a stack. The member of the family who draws a card with a black dot is then stoned to death by the whole town. It was tradition: the way they had always done things, and the general opinion of the town was that things were better if they stayed status quo. Nobody questioned the lottery…until they drew the card with the black dot. The terrible closing paragraphs recount the woman who had drawn the card with the black dot protesting the unfairness of the whole system she’d been participating in her whole life, now that she was the victim. The story ends as everyone picks up a rock to start throwing. It’s a stunning, gut-wrenchingly short commentary on society and human behavior.
Soon after the piece was published in 1948, angry letters poured in to The New Yorker. Readers canceled their subscriptions. I can understand why. The story was published right after WW2, when America was rebuilding and the values that permeated American society were values of strong national identity and the sense that conformity, of “being on the same team,” was paramount.
I think our dinner discussion the night when we talked about The Lottery was the most spirited I have seen in a very long time. For us the story raised all kinds of questions and brought to mind recent and current controversies in society. Once our family started talking, we came up with example after example of groups in society that had been treated unfairly…then turning around and doing the same thing to others…as if they hadn’t learned one thing from their own experience of exclusion and pain.
We read a familiar story this morning from the book of Acts, the story of the very first beginnings of the church. Though we don’t know exactly when the book of Acts was written, we do know that it was written during a time when the first church was trying to understand what it meant to be followers of Jesus in the world. They were organizing on the heels of knowing Jesus and stories about his time on earth, and they were struggling. Because, if the message Jesus came to proclaim was really as radical and subversive as they thought it was…well, then, how would the church actually live out the message they said they believed?
I talked a little about this time in the early church a few weeks ago, but you will remember that as the little group of disciples, a bunch of misfits embraced and emboldened by relationship with Jesus, began to grow and expand, they faced the question of whether or how their community would include others…people who were different than they were.
Remember that the original Christians were all Jews; they found their religious and cultural identity in being Jewish. And being Jewish meant being very aware of how their community had been marginalized and oppressed over and over and over again. They stuck together; they needed that conformity to survive. There wasn’t anything inconsistent in their minds with being Jews who followed Jesus; they understood Jesus to be the fulfillment of promises they had been awaiting for thousands of years.
But others in the society where they lived were hearing of the message of Jesus and expressing an interest in becoming his followers—and, members of the community. This was causing no end of distress for those original folk, who were very happy for things to continue as they had been. But, of course, that could never happen. With the introduction of other Jesus followers from outside the Jewish community, all sorts of questions arose. And the leaders of that first group of Christians were navigating waters they’d never sailed in before.
In our passage today we hear recounted the story of the Apostle Peter, a story that is told over and over in the book of Acts. Peter was a staunch Jew and advocate for keeping the new group of Jesus followers strictly Jewish. That is, they’d gladly welcome outsiders to join their group, but only if they became Jews first. Peter came to change his mind about this—radically and dramatically—and here he is in Acts 11, trying to explain to the other leaders of the movement how his mind had changed.
The issue that sparked a shift that would forever define Christian faith was an issue of eating foods that observant Jews were taught were unclean. As you know, the Levitical code followed by devout Jews includes many strict dietary rules. Following these rules helped the community define itself as separate, different from others in the society around them. Peter had a dream, in which he saw all kinds of animals, clean and unclean, and a voice telling him to go ahead and eat them. All. This experience completely transformed the way Peter viewed the inclusion of non-Jews in the first Christian community…and it was no small matter. To convince the other leaders that what he’d learned—that God makes no distinction between people, and that we who were once outsiders should now welcome in those on the outside—would be to challenge deep seated cultural and religious standards.
A little bit of history to help us understand this dynamic: Not even two hundred years before the birth of Jesus, Greek leaders made an attempt to completely annihilate Judaism altogether. Greek ruler Antiochus Epiphanes outlawed Judaism in Palestine, and to show the Jews that he was serious he took over the temple in Jerusalem and converted it to a shrine to the god Zeus. He sacrificed a pig on the altar in the holy of holies in the temple, and sent his soldiers over the countryside forcing Jews to eat pork or be killed.
These terrible events began the Maccabean revolt, in which Jews organized to preserve their community. As far as the early Christians were concerned, this was pretty recent history—the subject of stories they’d been told about the dangers of the Greeks and the utter outrage of breaking their dietary laws.
With this history, then, you can see that what Peter was saying to the other early Christian leaders was downright offensive. Not only did he want them to accept Gentile believers, he wanted them to open their minds and their hearts so together they could build a new community, all of them, so different, but together as followers of Jesus. The issue was food…but not really. The issue was really: who is on the inside and who is on the outside. Peter’s claim that God’s Spirit makes no distinctions was utterly, totally, and completely groundbreaking and radical. Many said, heretical.
“Here we go again…” I can only imagine some of you internally rolling your eyes. Seems like she’s always talking about having an open mind, welcoming those who are different. Get a new sermon already! It is true that Calvary does a good job opening our doors to people who are different, to people for whom the traditional church may not be as welcoming. So I wondered how we might this morning look at this passage a little differently to see how it might call us to reexamine our own lives…and then I noticed the Gospel passage that was assigned for today. In the passage from John chapter 13, we hear Jesus giving directions to his disciples before he leaves—part of what scholars call the Farewell Discourses in the Gospel of John. In this passage he reminds his disciples, those who are clearly and definitively on the INSIDE, to love one another…for the world, he says, will know that you are my disciples if you love one another.
It’s probably not a coincidence that we read these passages together today, because welcoming those who are different into the life of community is one thing. But once that community is formed, we stand as a beacon of hope and welcome for this world, only if we can find a way to keep on welcoming each other. Here. On the inside.
In 2010, novelist Anne Rice posted a comment on Facebook that sent ripples across the Christian world. She wrote: “I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.”
I think Anne Rice’s comments about the church are reflective of so many who have tried church and quit…even some of us…because of the way Christians behave toward one another. And while we can make radical and prophetic statements about accepting people on the outside who are different than we are, the truth is that our fundamental and often most difficult work of accepting others happens right here. In these pews. Where we sit each week, each one of us holding to our opinions and positions and beliefs and, sometimes, being unable or unwilling to do the hard work of reaching just across the aisles to bridge ideological, political, religious, traditional gulfs that can undercut our community and prove to the world what it has always thought about us: those Christians can’t even accept each other. How could they ever accept me?
In Elkhart County, Indiana, there is a corner at the intersection of county roads 11 and 38, where, on three of the four corners of that intersection stand churches. Three Mennonite churches on three of the four corners. They are all Mennonite churches—churches in the free church tradition like ours. Every one of those congregations practices Mennonite spiritual values like simple living and service to all in the name of Jesus.
But, you see, one of them is a really old school Mennonite church. None of their members drive cars or use electricity; they come to church in horse and buggy and dress exclusively in plain dress.
Across the street are the “black car Mennonites”. They drive cars, but they are all plain black. The church building is wired for electricity, but it’s a simple white building, no frills. The people who attend don’t wear traditional plain dress like their neighbors across the street, but they dress pretty simply.
And catty corner is a large, new Mennonite church building in whose parking lot are parked all different kinds of cars of many different colors. People of many different ethnicities attend this church, wearing all different kinds of clothing—some even wear jeans!
It’s easy to hate on the Mennonites, but as I was reading about this with outrage this week I suddenly stopped. Do you know that just across the street from the front doors of this sanctuary is another Baptist church…Greater New Hope Full Gospel Baptist Church. And I wondered when I read about three Mennonite churches within spitting distance of each other…and two Baptist churches practically across the street from one another…perhaps both illustrating for the world what the world already believes about us. Those Christians can’t get along with each other; they’re a fractious bunch of posers who don’t practice what they preach. What about that would ever want to make me be part of who they are?
And so, this challenge to welcome everybody has to begin right here, with us. Before we worry so much about the church welcoming others, outside…perhaps we should do the hard work of learning to live in gracious embrace…of each other.
I imagine that some of you are listening to me this morning and wondering: “Hmmm, I wonder who is not getting along??” The truth is that I think pretty much everybody is getting along around here these days…but even in good times, when our community is positive and energy-filled, permission-giving and gracious, there are times when we don’t understand each other…when we offend each other…when we hold different positions and when we’re tempted to build groups within our group, to exclude others in the very place where we who were once excluded have been welcomed into full community.
And it never hurts to stop and take stock of our practice as the community of Christ in this place. Because building the beloved community takes work and attention and commitment so that here, among this group, we truly and honestly reflect the radical inclusion and welcome that was Jesus’ intent for the whole world.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said it well (though he EXCLUDED women here, I note…): “The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opponents into friends. It is this type of understanding and goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.”
May it be so in our world…and may it begin within these very walls.
Amen.
I’m tired of writing pastoral blog posts in response to horrible, tragic things. I wrote something like that here…and here and probably some other places, too.
The thing is, there’s only so much you can say about such events. Even those of us who like to express ourselves with words run out of them.
Especially in situations like these.
Because when terrible things happen, like what happened in Boston (and New York and Virginia and Newtown), mostly I just want to curl up in a ball and withstand the inevitable process of horror->curiosity->relief->guilt for feeling relieved that’s running through me…you know the routine.
I’d like to think I can summon some meaningful words, but very often I’m too preoccupied with trying to make any kind of sense of it for myself; it seems too hard to take on the challenge of trying to speak words of comfort for everybody else.
Worse, for those of us who peddle hope and resurrection, events like these cause dismay and discouragement rise up and color the air around us. I feel like I say all the time, “Come, let’s build a better world together! Let’s usher in God’s best hopes for our world! Let’s change things, even when it seems like things can’t change!,” and when something like this happens (AGAIN) I begin wonder if I even believe my own self anymore.
So this time around I’m not going to write anything much. Instead, I’ll lean on the real professionals, those who have deeper wells to draw on. Here are some thoughts from Anne Lamott.
Frederick Buechner wrote, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
But it is hard not to be afraid, isn’t it? Some wisdom traditions say that you can’t have love and fear at the same time, but I beg to differ. You can be a passionate believer in God, in Goodness, in Divine Mind, and the immortality of the soul, and still be afraid. I’m Exhibit A.
The temptation is to say, as cute little Christians sometimes do, Oh, it will all make sense someday. Great blessings will arise from the tragedy, seeds of new life sown. And I absolutely believe those things, but if it minimizes the terror, it’s bullshit.
My understanding is that we have to admit the nightmare, and not pretend that it wasn’t heinous and agonizing; not pretend it as something more esoteric. Certain spiritual traditions could say about Hiroshima, Oh, it’s the whole world passing away.
Well, I don’t know.
I wish I could do what spiritual teachers teach, and get my thoughts into alignment with purer thoughts, so I could see peace and perfection in Hiroshima, in Newton, in Boston. Next time around, I hope to be a cloistered Buddhist. This time, though, I’m just a regular screwed up sad worried faithful human being.
There is amazing love and grace in people’s response to the killings. It’s like white blood cells pouring in to surround and heal the infection. It just breaks your heart every time, in the good way, where Hope tiptoes in to peer around. For the time being, I am not going to pretend to be spiritually more evolved than I am. I’m keeping things very simple: right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe; telling my stories, and reading yours. I keep thinking about Barry Lopez’s wonderful line, “Everyone is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together; stories and compassion.”
That rings one of the few bells I am hearing right now, and it is a beautiful crystalline sound. I’m so in.
I’m not much of a television viewer, but recently I began watching the first season of a show that debuted on NBC last season. I was a little behind, as usual, but at the suggestion of a friend I watched the first episode of the first season of SMASH. Well, I will just admit here that after that first episode, I was hooked.
The story begins with a play writing team struggling to come up with their next big hit. They want to write a Broadway play about an iconic figure in American history…someone whose fame and tragic life mesmerized the public in real time and could mesmerize the public again, through a musical hit on Broadway (and, apparently through a television series about the musical…). During that first episode they are brainstorming and they hit on the most obvious person about whom to write their play: Marilyn Monroe, of course!
The season unfolds with all the drama and intrigue of writing, casting, and producing a Broadway play, but the part of the show that makes it so interesting is the constant theme of Marilyn Monroe’s life, as the characters struggle with the same problems and experiences she had in her own life. That shared experience is entertainment worthy because in our culture Marilyn Monroe is iconic.
I thought about her and about my addiction to SMASH (just FYI, the second season is not that great) when I looked at our lectionary texts for worship today, because today we hear a story of conversion—a story of coming face to face with the reality of resurrection and having your eyes opened. Wide.
And you could say that the story we read from the book of Acts this morning is the iconic story of conversion. That is, were you to ask most anyone in my profession, for example, “When you think of conversion, which story in the Bible comes to mind first?” It’s Paul the Apostle, who was also called Saul, whose conversion story—his glimpse of resurrection—is told by Luke, the writer of the book of Acts, with much drama and intrigue.
Paul, or Saul (as he was called then), was a Jew of the highest pedigree. He had an excellent religious education and a bright future ahead of him as a leader of the temple. He was also a Roman citizen, so he had the best of both worlds. And he was a person whose practice of his religion was zealous and intense.
In fact, he was such a committed adherent to his faith practice that you could call him a Fundamentalist. He was worried about this new sect of folks who called themselves followers of Jesus Christ, or The Way, and he was determined to do everything he possibly could to root them out.
If you were to go back in the book of Acts a little before the passage we heard read today, you would learn that Luke sets the stage for a character of Paul’s stature by telling a terrible story about the stoning of Stephen, during which Paul held the coats of those who were doing the stoning. Paul was so convinced that his way of believing was the right way that he was engaging in terrible acts of violence and oppression toward those who were Christians.
In fact, the way Luke tells it, Paul had taken this cause on as kind of a personal crusade. He was “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord,” Luke tells us, and he’d secured letters of introduction to the synagogues in nearby Damascus, where he was headed to repeat what had happened with Stephen.
In the pivotal scene, a light from heaven flashed around him and Saul fell to the ground. He then heard a voice from heaven asking him why he was persecuting Christians…and you know the rest. Paul was blind for a few days and led to Damascus, where one of the followers of The Way, Ananias, was told to go and welcome him to the early church. The passage is a little bit humorous, as Ananias wants nothing to do with Paul—and why would he? Paul was blind physically, but he was also blinded in a more profound way—he was so limited by what he had understood about God that he was using God to endorse terrible, violent behavior.
Eventually Paul became a foundational figure in the life and establishment of the first church. In fact, he started many of the first churches and wrote more of our New Testament than anyone else, laying the groundwork for most of the theological underpinnings of this new movement. And it was in this moment of conversion that he glimpsed resurrection, and his limited and constricted view of the world became wide and embracing. In a very dramatic way, Paul had his view of God totally changed; his blind conviction became true purpose.
But while we heard this iconic conversion story of Paul shifting from blind conviction to true purpose, we also met in our texts today another one who experienced conversion a little later in the book of Acts. Peter, who, as you heard was kind of at loose ends after the whole resurrection situation and went back to his old life of fishing because he didn’t quite know what to do, also experienced a conversion.
To understand this in the light of Paul’s conversion we need to do a little bit of digging into the history of the early church. After Peter finally got his head around the idea that being a follower of Jesus continued after resurrection, he became a leader in the early church, welcoming many, many converts to The Way. Peter, a devout Jew, was of the mind that Christian faith—or following in The Way—was an extension, or fulfillment of Judaism. As such, he was happy to invite new converts to join The Way, but in his view they needed to become Jews first before they could join up.
As Paul made his recovery from his dramatic conversion experience on the road to Damascus, he became a leading voice within the church advocating for a new group of followers of The Way, who were not Jews, but Gentiles. Paul was of the opinion that the message of Jesus was for everyone, as he makes clear in his letter to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, but all are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).
Peter and Paul disagreed, and they became opponents. It was the first ever church conflict, and these two vehemently disagreed until Peter himself had a conversion experience—a dramatic dream—where Peter changed his mind and came to believe, like Paul, that the way of Jesus should be offered to anyone who wanted to believe. For Peter, it was a powerful conversion experience, where he glimpsed resurrection in his own life and his view changed: from blind conviction to true purpose.
At different places in their journeys of faith, both ironically from within established faith traditions: conversion.
Here we sit in church and perhaps you are wondering what conversion has to do with us. The truth is that we are constantly coming face to face with the reality of resurrection, if only we will open our eyes. When our perspectives change, even we will see that there are times when we are blind to the transforming reality of resurrection. Nevertheless, like Paul or Peter, we can open our eyes to the message of Jesus Christ and be changed from a view of the world that is rigid and exclusive to one that is vast and embracing. We’re invited, over and over, to open our eyes and change: from blind conviction to true purpose.
Just a few weeks ago the news broke that Megan Phelps-Roper and her sister Grace, granddaughters of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps, publicly announced their departure from the church. For those of you who may have recently been living on another planet, Westboro Baptist Church is an independent Baptist church known for its extreme ideologies, and especially their positions against gay people. The church is best known for its regular and media-attracting protests in public places, holding prominent signs that spew hateful slogans. A few weeks ago, Meghan Phelps, who grew up in the church, published an online statement entitled “Head Full of Doubt/ Road Full of Promise,” in which she announced Hers and Grace’s intention to leave. I intended to excerpt it here, but I’ve decided to read the whole statement. It reads:
“’There’s no fresh start in today’s world. Any twelve-year-old with a cell phone could find out what you did. Everything we do is collated and quantified. Everything sticks.’”
Don’t act surprised that I’m quoting Batman. At WBC, reciting lines from pop culture is par for the course. And why not? The sentiments they express are readily identifiable by the masses – and shifting their meaning is as easy as giving them new context. So put Selina Kyle’s words in a different framework:
In a city in a state in the center of a country lives a group of people who believe they are the center of the universe; they know Right and Wrong, and they are Right. They work hard and go to school and get married and have kids who they take to church and teach that continually protesting the lives, deaths, and daily activities of The World is the only genuine statement of compassion that a God-loving human can sincerely make. As parents, they are attentive and engaged, and the children learn their lessons well.
This is my framework.
Until very recently, this is what I lived, breathed, studied, believed, preached – loudly, daily, and for nearly 27 years.
I never thought it would change. I never wanted it to.
Then suddenly: it did.
And I left.
Where do you go from there?
I don’t know, exactly. My sister Grace is with me, though. We’re trying to figure it out together.
There are some things we do know.
We know that we’ve done and said things that hurt people. Inflicting pain on others wasn’t the goal, but it was one of the outcomes. We wish it weren’t so, and regret that hurt.
We know that we dearly love our family. They now consider us betrayers, and we are cut off from their lives, but we know they are well-intentioned. We will never not love them.
We know that we can’t undo our whole lives. We can’t even say we’d want to if we could; we are who we are because of all the experiences that brought us to this point. What we can do is try to find a better way to live from here on. That’s our focus.
Up until now, our names have been synonymous with ‘God Hates Fags.’ Any twelve-year-old with a cell phone could find out what we did. We hope Ms. Kyle was right about the other part, too, though – that everything sticks – and that the changes we make in our lives will speak for themselves.
Megan and Grace”
Like Paul…and Peter…Megan and Grace have opened their eyes. They’ve seen resurrection, new life, and it has shifted their world on its axis…changed everything for them.
Perhaps you and I haven’t had conversion experiences quite as dramatic as these, but if we open our eyes to see resurrection around us, if we allow our perspectives to be shifted from the limitations we impose on the possibilities of God’s love for us and for the world, we may suddenly find that we, too, are converted…that our blind conviction becomes true purpose instead.
And this is, truly, resurrection.
Amen.
Christ is risen!
Christ is risen, indeed!
In the small community of Swift Creek, South Carolina, it is an annual tradition for the entire town to show up at the cemetery very early on Easter morning for an Easter sunrise service. While the rest of the year, the Presbyterians and Baptists and Episcopalians worship in their own church buildings across town from each other, every Easter Sunday morning before dawn everybody gathers in the pitch dark to worship together while the sun gradually rises over the surrounding hills.
One year, just like every other year, all the Christians in town (which, as you might imagine, is a group of pretty much everybody who lives in Swift Creek, SC) crowded into the small town cemetery, standing around awkwardly, waiting for that beautiful moment when they would all sing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” while the sun came up with the stunning visual reminder of resurrection.
As they stood there in the dark, the typical service unfolded. The music minister from the Lutheran church led the first hymn, the Baptist preacher prayed. The service went on as planned, until it was time for the sermon—which was the responsibility of the Methodists that particular year. But it was still dark, so the Methodist minister went to his car and found a flashlight, then tried to hold it while juggling his sermon notes. After the sermon someone else prayed, they sang a final hymn, and another one of the town’s preachers gave the final benediction to bring the service to a close.
Awkwardly, when the last “Amen” was said, it was still dark; the sun had not even started coming up.
Turns out Easter was very early in March that year, before daylight savings time, and the sun would not even begin to come up for another whole hour. The people of Swift Creek, SC came out to celebrate resurrection in the dark, and when it was over they trudged back to their homes…in the dark.
If I ever consent to leading an Easter morning sunrise service, which is highly unlikely, I will be sure to double check what time the sun is supposed to rise. But I thought the story of the Swift Creek ecumenical Easter morning sunrise service was fitting for us today, because for all the lilies, beautiful new Easter clothes, bunnies and triumphant music, the truth is that sometimes Easter comes and goes and we are still in the dark.
We want resurrection, but we don’t know how…or what…to believe. When we look at the world, when we look at our lives…we can see that that darkness of death are so very real. And, if we find ourselves in that place this morning, we are not alone. The same was true for all of Jesus’ friends that first Easter.
The way Luke’s gospel tells it, the women saw Jesus die, so naturally they thought the same exact thing you and I would have thought: that death is real, and that they needed to drag their tired and grief-worn bodies out of bed to attend to the realities of death–embalming a body.
Exhausted and worn from days of crying and nights of restless worrying, they’d come to the tomb that morning with their spices and oils to give him a proper burial. It was their duty; it was what you do when somebody dies because, as we know and as they knew: death is real.
Luke tells us that they came to the tomb where they had left his body just a day before, and the heavy rock that should have kept him untouched had been rolled away. The stone cave was gaping open, and Jesus’ body was gone.
The women were terrified, confused, as they peered into the cave and saw two men dressed in glowing garments who acted like the women shouldn’t have been surprised in the least to find Jesus gone. But they were. Why? Because death is real—it happens all around us all the time.
Then the women heard the men witness: “Why are you standing here looking confused? If it’s Jesus you’re looking for, you shouldn’t be surprised that he’s not here. He told you what would happen, back when you were hiking the hills of Galilee together—don’t you remember? Now, head home. He is risen!”
The women remembered. When they heard the witness of the men in the tomb, they remembered what Jesus said about resurrection.
So, they quickly left, as any of us would do, and they hurried to where Jesus’ other disciples were gathered, waiting for news from the tomb. Breathless, tripping over each other maybe, they poured out an account of what they had seen and they tentatively dared to mention what the men in the tomb had said—remember what Jesus told us? The women bore witness to a miracle, turning everything they knew about the human experience on its head. Death is real–they’d seen it with their very own eyes.
But it’s not the end.
When they heard the women’s witness–their resurrection story–the men weren’t so sure. But at least one of the men started thinking back. With the witness of the women to guide him, Peter remembered what Jesus said, how his life and his teaching led them all to hope for what didn’t even seem possible before. So, tentatively, Peter went next to confirm what the women said. Having heard their resurrection story, their witness, Peter had to go see for himself, because he, like everyone else, only knew what they knew: that death is real.
And thats how resurrection made it’s way into the world that morning. Unlike the other stories of resurrection in the Gospel accounts, Luke’s story doesn’t say that anyone instantly believes. There’s no Jesus, appearing just in the nick of time to help them overcome their doubt. There’s no moment of clarity in which everybody’s perception is overturned.
No, it happens gradually, as the story is told, over and over. First the women, stumbling to the tomb in the dark, encountering resurrection through the witness of the men in the tomb…then the women going to the disciples, telling their story of resurrection to a doubting group of Jesus’ followers…then Peter, struck by the women’s witness, heading to the tomb. It all started there, this witness to resurrection.
And, shortly after Easter day, the disciples all started bearing witness, going around telling this incredible story of Jesus’s death…and the miracle of his resurrection. They told the story over and over in the weeks that followed and little groups of people began to form, telling each other the story of resurrection again, bearing witness to God’s presence and the hope of life over death.
And slowly, slowly as it did that first Easter morning, resurrection became reality for people who needed to know the truth of God’s work in this world: that death is real…but its not the end.
And what about us? Here we sit, 2000 years after that dark Easter morning, when the story unfolded and the first ones who experienced resurrection had the courage to bear witness to it. If we listen to their witness, we’ll begin to remember, if we try, that resurrection runs through our lives, all the time. God is well at work in this world and in our lives, each one of us has a resurrection story to tell, a story that helps us know and remember that while death is real, it is not the end.
One of my favorite resurrections stories in modern literature happens in Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Color Purple. The story of sisters Celie and Nettie is told in the form of diary entries and letters, and the story begins with Celie, a poor uneducated young black woman in 1930s Georgia, who has been the victim of abuse her whole life long. Celie is forced into a marriage against her will, to an abusive husband, and Celie and her sister Nettie go to live with him. Things get really bad, and Celie pleads with her sister Nettie, dearest person in her pain-filled life, to leave and go to the home of a local pastor to make a new life for herself. Nettie leaves in a heart-wrenching goodbye, all the while promising to write to Celie.
The time passes, and no letters arrive.
In her hopelessness and despair, Celie begins to believe that Nettie has died. After all, what other scenario would make any kind of sense? There was no word from Nettie; there was no evidence she was still alive; it’s likely that the pain and horror of the lives they lived had just gone and swallowed her right up.
Then, one day, Celie finds a packet of letters Nettie has written over all these years, letters hidden by Celie’s husband who preferred that Celie live in the hopelessness and desperation.
Pulling the precious letters from their envelopes, Celie could hardly believe that Nettie had been alive all this time. Her words of love poured from the pages, like a soothing balm on a broken life. Just the thought, just the possibility that it might be true, changed everything for Celie. She read the final letter in the stack:
“Dear Celie,” Nettie wrote, “I know you think I am dead. But I am not. I been writing to you, too, over the years, but your husband said you’d never hear from me again and since I never heard from you all this time, I guess he was right. There is so much to tell you that I don’t know, hardly, where to begin…. but if this do get through, one thing I want you to know: I love you, and I am not dead.”
Today we’re confronted with the question of whether we have the courage to take our own tentative experiences of resurrection…the ways in which we know God is real and at work in this world and in our lives…and bear witness of that reality to the world.
Because sometimes Easter morning comes and goes in the dark, and, confronted with death and despair on all sides, we feel unable to remember the Easter miracle of resurrection.
But here’s what we have to remind us: we have their stories of resurrection…and your story and your story and my story and your story… that we bring as we stare together at a gaping, empty tomb and bear witness to the miracle of Easter: that death is real…but it is not the end.
Can I get a witness?
Amen.
