Do You Love Me? A Sermon on John 21:1-19

“Do you love me?”

There are so many ways to ask that particular question.

There is the tentative, newly-in-love lover… holding his breath, hardly able to ask for fear he’ll wither up and die if the response is not what he’s hoping for.

There is the angry, betrayed lover… wondering what has happened to this love, what has happened to this relationship, demanding to know what to expect next.

There is the playful child, trying to distract mommy or daddy from those tasks that seem so very interesting and important to them.

There is the friend making a request that they know may push at the boundaries of friendship—a room for a couple of months, a loan, a job.

There is the parent, fearful, perhaps pushing at the boundaries of their own pride and dignity, asking the now grown child what they can do to help now that the caretaking shoe is on the other foot.

“Do you love me?”

The composers of the musical “Fiddler on the Roof” put these words in the mouth of the protagonist, Tevye. His world has just been turned upside down by his daughters breaking age-old tradition by choosing their own husbands, rather than allowing the matchmaker to find them spouses. His daughters say, “I love him, Papa.” Tevye turns to his wife Golde—they were brought together by the matchmaker, after all—and he asks her: Do you love me? To which she responds, “Do I what?”

“Do you love me?”

These words are in Jesus’ mouth this morning, in this third successive week of resurrection appearances by Jesus courtesy of gospel of John. It’s odd to find ourselves back in John’s gospel, because, do you remember how last week’s reading ended? As if it were really, really the ending of the gospel? John wrote (and we read),

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name. ~ John 20:30-31

That sure sounds like the end of the gospel to me: Cut, print, it’s a wrap! But, intriguingly, there’s more—another chapter beyond that chapter with a pretty final-sounding ending. It’s as if John suddenly remembered something so vitally important, he said to himself—oh, I can’t leave this out, I just can’t. Whatever it is, it seems to have something to do with Simon Peter. And so another chapter begins. “After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias [that is, the Sea of Galilee]; and he showed himself in this way.” After all the excitement and confusion of Easter morning—Mary and Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved—and then the further excitement and tension of Easter evening—the disciples minus Thomas, frightened and hiding out—and all the tension and doubt of the appearance one week later—Thomas, and his declaration, “My Lord and my God!”—well, it’s as if it’s all just a little too much for the disciples. Any of you who have ever been a witness or participant in a major life transition knows at least a bit what this feels like. After the birth, or after the death. After the wedding, or after the separation and divorce. Sometimes, you just need to do something that feels normal again. Simon Peter announces, “I’m going fishing.”

Peter. Peter, whose biography reads, in part, “Said to Jesus, ‘I will lay down my life for you,’ only hours before he denied three separate times that he even knew Jesus.” Peter whose head and heart must be filled with the most fascinating and difficult maelstrom of memory and regret, elation and hope. Peter tells the others, That’s it. I’ve had enough of whatever this is and has been. I’m going back to something I know, and know well. I am going fishing. And the other disciples, hard pressed to come up with a better idea, tag along.

Except, you don’t really tag along fishing. You don’t just go along for the ride. And, unlike our experience with fishing poles and streams, you don’t have much opportunity to relax and daydream while waiting for that nibble. Fishing with nets on the Sea of Galilee is something that requires serious concentration, and even more serious strength. It requires well-coordinated team effort.

Peter and company set out in a boat, fully aware of all the above—after all, this is what they do, or did, in the days before Jesus beckoned them along the Way. But their efforts, their teamwork, their patience, their strength—all is for naught, apparently, because they don’t notice even the slightest ripple on the water all that long night.

Night on the Sea of Galilee. What do the disciples do that long night while the fish are not swimming into their nets? Do they need to be silent so as not to scare away the fish? And if they are silent, are they all lost in thoughts that are pretty much identical? Or can they simply not stop themselves from murmuring to one another, again, all the events of the past weeks? Are they too lost in quiet conversation to notice a silver fin when it does slip quickly through the water?

Morning comes, at last, and with the light they can see that a man is standing on the beach. Once again, just as before, they don’t know him. They don’t recognize him. The risen Jesus is different. They don’t understand that it’s Jesus, not until his explicit instructions on where to cast their net yields a staggering bounty of fish. And then they see, and then Simon Peter—the one who was trying to get away from it all to begin with, the one who, perhaps, had the best reason to want to get away—Peter jumps into the sea to swim, as fast as he can, to Jesus’ side.

“Do you love me?” It’s later now. They’ve eaten a breakfast of bread and barbecued fish, and the hard work of waiting and then hauling is making them, perhaps, drowse in the warm morning sun. And Jesus asks Peter—or Simon, as he calls him, harkening back to the early days, when they were just beginning to know one another—he asks, “Do you love me?”

And Simon Peter, perhaps grateful to have the opportunity to say it, and say it to Jesus’ face, says, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” It’s a relief, after all that denial and obfuscation and hanging out and hiding out. It’s a relief to be able to say it, to be able to make it plain: I love you. “Feed my lambs,” Jesus says. And we might assume that he would be satisfied.

But Jesus is not satisfied, because he asks again. Now Jesus sounds a little like that tentative, fearful lover, as if he’s saying, “Really? Do you really love me?” And Peter replies, again, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” “Tend my sheep,” Jesus says. Is he satisfied now?

Evidently, not. Jesus needs to ask one more time. Peter feels hurt, we are told. But Jesus asks anyway. “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” You know, Peter replies. You know. You know everything. Of course I love you. And Jesus nods, Yes, I know. Now. “Feed my sheep.”

Do you love me? What is this strange exchange all about? Is it about Jesus’ need? Or is it, maybe, about Peter’s need? Peter is given an opportunity to affirm his love for Jesus once for each time he denied it before. And along with the opportunity—to heal the breach, to unring the bell, to un-say the words (even though we can never really un-say the words), he is given his commission, his call. It’s as if Jesus is saying, alright Peter, now that we’re past that—now that you and I have no more unfinished business—it’s no longer about us. It’s about them. Feed them. Tend them. You know what to do.

This odd epilogue chapter seems to want to say something about the leadership of the early church. It seems to want to place that leadership squarely in the hands of Simon Peter, even at the same time it acknowledges his frailty, his humanity, all the things people might ponder when considering who they want as their leader.

But in the end it’s not about Simon Peter. In the end, it’s about the flock whose care has been given into his hands. It’s about their call. It’s about our call. It has been said (by Rob Bell) that the church is at its best when it gives itself away. So a chapter of John’s gospel whose point is to tell us who Jesus left in charge ends up being, instead, about the church’s responsibility towards God’s people. And that is where the Easter message comes home to you and to me.

Do you love me? Feed my sheep. Blessing is always instrumental. (Thanks again, Rob Bell!) When God blesses us, it is never so that the blessing will end there: as if God says, I’ll bless this one, but not that one. That’s not how it works. If we are blessed by God, whether with faith or fortune or gifts or gratitude, the intention is that we become a conduit through which the blessing flows. Peter receives this immeasurable blessing of being able to affirm his love for the Lord he denied. He receives his assurance of pardon. But the blessing isn’t supposed to end with Peter. It’s supposed to equip him to bless others. Do you love me? Feed my sheep.

We are so deeply blessed, here, in this place: with an ancestry of strong, resourceful forbearers, with active and involved members who are willing and able to serve in all capacities, with a love for music and a passion to share it, with a tradition of raising up pastoral leadership from within our midst, with a gorgeous and functional physical plant, with the thriving ministries of our counseling center and our Pre-School, with endowments—the treasure of those who came before us… and the list doesn’t stop there. We are so deeply blessed. But the blessing cannot and should not and does not stop with us. Do you love me? Feed my sheep. That is the call to every one of us: that the blessing of God should flow through us to a world that is hungry, for bread and for love. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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Painting: "Pentecost" by Alexander Sadoyan.

Holy Hilarity Meditation on John 20, 19-31

In 1948 the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Santa Fe, New Mexico, sent out an urgent call to the Chicago monastery of Poor Clare nuns. Clare of Assisi founded what were then called the Poor Ladies, with the help of her friend Francis, back in the 13th century, part of a great church renewal. They are an order of cloistered, contemplative nuns. That means that, once they take their vows, it is their firm intention never to leave their monastery again, but to live their whole lives there, lives of service through prayer and contemplation. In 1948, apparently, the Archbishop felt that Roswell, New Mexico urgently needed the presence of such a group of women. And so seven Poor Clares, who had all thought they would live and die within the Chicago enclosure, boarded a train for Roswell, to found a new monastery there. One of the women, Sister Mary Frances, would eventually write a book describing their adventure.

Fast forward to 1973. I am a bored seventh grader who is roaming the house, in the days before computers and iPods and text-messaging and DVD’s. I am disgruntled, and in need of something—anything!—to read. My mother picks up Sister Mary Frances’ book and places it in my hand. And I can’t put it down. I am absolutely gripped by this story. And I didn’t even know the parts about the spaceship and the aliens—she never mentions that stuff. What was it that so enthralled me about this book? Was it the romance of the cloister—living as a bride of Christ? Was it the promise of life close to the earth, reading about the nuns growing and canning all their own vegetables (no small feat in the desert climate of New Mexico)? Or was it this: The book is called “A Right to be Merry.” That title comes from a quote of Saint Francis. He was under fire because of his unusual rule of silence. Most monasteries, then and now, had a certain period of the day in which silence was mandatory. Francis’s and Clare’s monasteries had this feature as well. But the reason they was under fire was this: their rule of silence allowed laughter. When asked about it, Francis said, “My poor ladies have as great a right to be merry as any in the world!”

A life lived with the confidence that the love of God gives us a right to be merry sounded good to me when I was twelve years old, and it still sounds good to me today! And so, today, we join with churches all over the world in proclaiming today, the Sunday after Easter, Holy Hilarity Sunday! Also known as Holy Humor Sunday, or Bright Sunday. The tradition began in the third and fourth centuries, in response to the writings of the church fathers—Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostum, Augustine of Hippo—all of whom agreed that God had played a tremendous joke on the devil by raising Jesus from the dead. God had a cosmically wonderful sense of humor.

But just think what an uphill battle it is in some folks’ minds—the idea that church can be a place for joy and laughter, the idea that God’s marvelous actions in and through and beyond history give us something worthy of the greatest belly laughs. There is a story about a pastor who spotted Groucho Marx in a hotel lobby- a man who was clearly a pastor, decked out in his clerical collar. He rushed over to Groucho, grabbed his hand to shake it, and said, “Thank you, Groucho, for bringing so much joy into the world!”

“Thank you,” Groucho replied, “for taking so much joy out of it.”

That is what we’re up against. And, frankly, the most recent headlines to do with all things church are no laughing matter. The church of Jesus Christ is a divine institution that has been given into human hands, and… sometimes, we don’t do the greatest job with it. Sometimes, the proper posture of the church is on our knees, begging the people’s forgiveness.

I want to suggest something that may sound somewhat radical—or, at the very least, somewhat strange. The first step towards being a properly repentant church may just be learning to take ourselves a little less seriously. Lightening up. People who can’t laugh at themselves are often the very same people who don’t know how or when to say “I’m sorry.”

Let’s take today’s gospel lesson as a case in point. When our lesson begins, it is the same day as it was last Sunday—it is Easter, that first resurrection day! The disciples—the friends and followers of Jesus—have just heard the astonishing news from Mary Magdalene and Simon Peter and that annoying Teacher’s pet—I mean, the disciple whom Jesus loved. They’ve heard that the Lord is alive! So naturally, they are holed up in a room with the doors locked tighter than a drum. So, apparently their logic is, The Lord is alive! Let’s go hide.

And, one can only imagine Jesus, standing outside that very locked door—Jesus, who was not held at bay by the stone in front of the tomb, a massive stone which probably weighed about as much as that Ford F-150 in the parking lot. Jesus, whose body apparently is not entirely subject to the same rules and regulations as ours now that he is risen. Jesus, who—whoops! Is inside. Standing right there, in front of them.

Saying, Peace. Salaam. Shalom. Which, I take to mean, rather than “Peace be with you,” something more like, Now that I’m here, peace is with you. So, you can all stop hyperventilating. It’s going to be ok. And then Jesus gives this very fallible group of people—remember all the hiding, the running, the abandoning? Remember Maundy Thursday, when our Tenebrae enacted something very much like rats fleeing a sinking ship with each passing reading, with each dimmed candle? Surely there is no greater evidence that God, and Jesus, are the funniest beings in the universe than this: To this group is given the job of forgiveness. To this group, which has a lot of explaining to do, whose members have probably been having nightmares of remorse all weekend long, is given the amazing responsibility of bringing forgiveness to a world that is wracked with anguish and guilt. Our God is a funny One.

There’s something else funny about this story: Thomas gets this adjective forever affixed to his name, an adjective which actually gives a parent or two pause when choosing names for their newborns. Doubting. Doubting Thomas. And that is so, so unfair. That is unfair because all Thomas wants is what all the other friends of Jesus have already gotten: a front row seat at the resurrection.

To dwell on Thomas as a “doubter” is, I think, to miss something sweet and subtle going on in his part of the story—something that is actually aimed at us. The point is this: for those of us who come later—who come to faith slowly, or painfully, or with many twists and turns, or with questions that still remain unanswered— in Thomas we have a friend, an ally, a patron. In Thomas, we have someone who says “I’m sorry” with astonishing flair: “My Lord and my God.” In Thomas we have someone who, like us, gets to say “Oops,” and have our ears turn red when it turns out Christ is standing right next to us, wounds gaping.

And that happens so, so often. Every day, in fact, we have opportunity after opportunity to see Jesus Christ risen from the dead. This is not a metaphor. He is quite clear with us. “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” (Matthew 25:35-36) Every day we have countless opportunities to look Jesus in the eye, and to blush at the fact that we didn’t recognize him right away, and to say, My Lord and my God.

So let us be merry! Let us be glad and rejoice! For we follow a risen Lord of whom it has been said,

"This was no gloomy Messiah. We know that children were attracted to Jesus, and flocked to be near him. In any age, children are never attracted to melancholy or stern grumps. It was clear that Jesus was the antidepressant of the early Christians." (Malcolm Muggeridge)

So let us give thanks for that Lord who was the antidepressant of the early Christians. (Maybe we can figure out how to put that on our sign out front.) Let us be thankful that we are in the season of Easter, when the whole of creation conspires to urge us to joy and merriment, and that we have as great a right to be merry as any in the world. Let us be thankful for Jesus, who says to us, “So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” [John 16:22]. And, “Let us then be thankful that, when the Gates of Heaven swing open, mixed with the celestial music there is the unmistakable sound of celestial laughter.” (Malcolm Muggeridge) Thanks be to God. Amen!

The Missing Maundy Thursday Meditation

Oops! Forgot to post this.

“A Love Story”
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
Maundy Thursday
April 1, 2010

The more I read scripture, the more I read the gospels, the more I am convinced that the whole thing, from start to finish, is a love story. The love affair of God with humanity has its beginnings in the poetry of Genesis, a God who creates, not because of a deficit or loneliness or neediness within God (and, let’s be frank, that’s how many of our own love stories seem to begin), but because God is love, and God contains an excess of love and a longing to lavish it on someone, something. And that someone, something, has its beginning as a mud pie, and then has life breathed into it, and then turns out to be you, and me. And so it begins: God loves us; we are loved.

Tonight’s gospel passage says it all again. Jesus is at the Passover celebration: Passover, the ancient Jewish feast of liberation, the story of God’s hearkening to the anguished cries of God’s beloved children and responding with power to bring them to wondrous freedom. And Jesus is at this celebration with his friends—his own, the passage calls them—and he knows what lies ahead. He knows it is his last night with them in the old, familiar way, the way we can be at the table with those friends who know what is on our mind before we speak it, the ones who know that a joke is about to come out of our mouths by the glint they see in our eyes. Jesus knows it is the end of something powerful, even as it is the beginning of something glorious. Here he is with his own, those he has loved. And he must do something with them, and for them, to try to help them truly come to terms with the nature of his love for them.

So, oddly, he gets a towel and a basin, and proceeds to kneel in front of these friends, his own, and to wash their feet. We talked about this not too long ago. Washing feet was a common enough practice in the dusty middle-eastern climate. Still, it was an action most often performed on oneself. The only person who would wash the feet of another was a slave. And this is why at least some of Jesus’ own balk. This is why they are outraged. They have been following this Jesus for three years, and they have taken on the yoke of his teaching, and they have called him Rabbi and Lord, and your Rabbi or Lord does not wash your feet. It is just wrong. I don’t know if we can really bring to mind a modern day parallel. I was going to suggest that it was as if the president of IBM would come to the home of the entry-level programmer and—I don’t know, de-frag her computer? Or maybe change the oil in her car or clean her broiler? But as US citizens we like to believe that we live in a class-free, or at least a class-mobile society, so I don’t think any comparison can have quite the punch of the original. Suffice to say: Jesus’ friends were stunned. They were appalled.

And they go back and forth with Jesus on it, or, more accurately, Simon Peter does. No, don’t do that. Oh yes I will. No, really, don’t. Oh yes I will. OK, then, do it this way, so I can be marginally less appalled. No, I won’t do it your way. I’ll do it my way. I’ll be a slave for you.

I’ll be a slave for you. What an astonishing thing for this Lord and Rabbi to insist to his own. What an astonishing thing for the one who is one with God in heaven, as John reminds us frequently, that same God who is responsible for the rescue of the Hebrew slaves being celebrated by this little gathering. I’ll be a slave for you. I’ll serve you. I’ll wash you. And unless you let me do these things… well. Just let me do these things.

Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. And in the end he needed to demonstrate in a vivid way the form that love would take. It would take a self-negation, a self-emptying that no one had ever before associated with their Lord, or their Rabbi, or—how is it even possible?—their God. Just let me do these things for you. This is what love looks like. I am giving you an example—one you’ll remember, if only because you are so appalled. This is what love looks like. Now, go do this for one another.

The gospel of John is the only gospel that doesn’t talk about what happens during the meal—when Jesus says “Take, eat, this is my body,” and “Take and drink, this is my blood.” John doesn’t dwell on that, I suppose, because that aspect of the supper was already so well known and established by the time this very late gospel hit the presses. But John explains something about the supper that is absolutely vital for us to understand. The meal is both for us and not for us. It is for us in that it exists to bring us together, and to remind us of our connection to Jesus and to one another, and to impress upon us that it is God who nourishes us, first, last and always. But the meal is not only for us, most profoundly. The meal is not only for us, and we cannot afford to forget that. The meal exists so that we will be strengthened for service. The meal exists so that we will be given the courage and the will to make ourselves servants, even slaves for others. This is what love looks like: a meal given to nourish, so that we can, in turn, nourish others. This is what love looks like: allowing the One with all power to serve us, so that we can, in turn, serve others. This is what love looks like, as God designed it from the very beginning: an endless dance of giving and receiving, in which the joy is in the dance.

God loves us. We are loved. Love is our bounty and love is our calling. We are welcomed to this table to receive the bounty and to respond to the calling. The whole thing is a love story, from start to finish. Thanks be to God. Amen.

~~~


Image from Nathalie Kelly, borrowed hopefully.

In the Garden: Sermon on John 20:1-18

This is the day… this is the day on which it all hinges, really. This is the day on which our entire faith rises or falls, the day on which it matters or is irrelevant, no more significant than any other competing philosophy in the great marketplace of ideas. As the apostle Paul says, “…if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.” If Christ has not been raised, “we are of all people most to be pitied” [1 Cor. 15:14,19]. Either we proclaim with all our hearts, “Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!” or we may as well just close our hymnals and go home to the Sunday paper and our Easter brunches right now.

This is the day that begins in the garden. Have you noticed that a number of crucial moments in the story of our relationship with God occur in a garden? God plants a garden in Eden—God is a gardener!—and then places the newly created man and woman there, walking with them in the cool of the day. And all that disastrous business with the serpent and the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil…the willful disobedience, the agonizing confrontation, confession and banishment…it all takes place in a garden.

A garden figures prominently in the stories we have been hearing throughout this Holy Week, the gospel accounts of Jesus’ passion and death. After Jesus’ final meal with his friends, the little band heads out across a valley to a garden at the foot of the Mount of Olives. John’s gospel proceeds immediately to the arrest of Jesus. But the other gospel writers tell of Jesus’ agonized prayer in the garden called Gethsemane, a prayer raised while his friends sleep peacefully beneath the rustling leaves, inhaling the fragrance of juniper and hyacinth.

And then there is the crucifixion. John mentions, almost as an afterthought, “there was a garden in the place where Jesus was crucified, and in that garden there was a new tomb…”[John 19:41]. I confess: I had completed my second Master’s degree in theology before I noticed this detail. Jesus was crucified in a place with a garden. And there he was buried. This is the day that begins in the garden. There is a well-known Victorian poem, a fragment of which has become famous:


The kiss of the sun for pardon
The song of the birds for mirth
One is nearer to God's heart in the garden
Than anywhere else on earth.

I suspect that poet spent some time pondering gardens and our salvation history. From the creation and great expulsion from Eden, to the suffering and death of Jesus, to this morning’s encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, God’s heart does seem to be beating in a garden. It seems to be beating there for us.

It is the morning of the first day of the week, and coming to the garden tomb while it is still dark, Mary finds the stone rolled away and the tomb empty. She rushes to tell two disciples, Simon Peter and the one Jesus loved, and they in turn rush to the garden to investigate the scene. The beloved disciple believes, though it isn’t clear yet just what it is that he believes.

And then we come to Mary, weeping in the garden. Morning is breaking. Perhaps it is getting a bit lighter. The birds are awakening and beginning to call to one another. The dew is still on the roses. As she weeps, she bends over into the tomb. She sees two white-robed angels who ask her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” Her answer shows that Mary is focused on what she believes has happened. She clearly believes that the horror and cruelty of these three days has been compounded by a further cruel act: she believes Jesus’ body has been stolen. Resurrection is not a thought Mary is prepared to entertain. She expects to see a dead body, and finding it gone, she accounts for it logically. Resurrection is not logical. It’s not an option.

Alas, the angels are no more helpful than the disciples. Mary turns away only to encounter Jesus himself, standing there, though she does not recognize him, and he too asks her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” He also asks, “Whom are you looking for?” Mary supposes he is the gardener. Mary supposes he’s the gardener! Is it possible—could Jesus actually be—gardening?

Mary tells her sad tale again, hoping for a better outcome than the two angels were able to provide her. Jesus speaks, but he does not say, “Don’t you recognize me? It’s Jesus! I’m alive! Isn’t it the darnedest thing?” Neither does Jesus launch into a theological discourse on the resurrection of the body, or a scriptural explanation of how his presence here is the fulfillment of prophesies that extend back to Isaiah and beyond. Thank God, he doesn’t do any of those things. What he does takes our breath away. He says, simply, “Mary.”

Jesus calls Mary Magdalene by name. “Mary.” And it is only in hearing her name called that Mary is able to consciously admit into her wounded soul the possibility of something new, something completely unexpected and illogical. It is only in hearing her name called that Mary is able to conceive of the possibility of resurrection. It is only in hearing her name called that Mary is able to understand that in the garden, she is indeed near to God’s heart, that it is still beating, and that it is beating for her.

Maybe there is something to this idea of Jesus as the gardener. He did love to talk about seeds… seeds sown in all kinds of places…rocky soil, footpaths, the good, brown earth. He loved to talk about tiny seeds that yielded amazing bounties. Jesus loved to talk about God’s love for us in all kinds of ways that might occur to a gardener … he said, “I am the vine, you are the branches,” hinting that we are already one with him in the most organic way imaginable, that it is almost impossible to know where he ends and we begin. Jesus said that God cares for every flower, every lily of the field, despite the fact that flowers do not earn their keep, and that as beautiful as lilies are, we are even more precious in God’s eyes. Maybe Jesus was gardening that morning, as the light grew stronger and the woman in front of him wept for her lost Lord. Maybe it felt right to him, after all he had said about green, growing things, to put his hands into the good earth and work to bring something out of that darkness, as he himself had emerged from the darkness of the tomb.

This is the day on which it all hinges. This is the place where our faith hits the road or ends crumpled up in a ditch. Mary saw, and heard her name called, and believed. She encountered the risen Lord. So what did Mary have that morning that we don’t have? What do we need so that we too can experience the resurrection joy this Easter morning?

Mary came to the garden heartbroken, grieving the loss of her rabbi, her teacher, her Lord, the most important person in her life. Mary came with a profound, heartbreaking loss. Mary came, though she didn’t even know it, with a deep and burning need for resurrection. Do you come with a loss? Do you come in need of resurrection? Have you lost mother, father, husband, wife, the love of your life? Have you lost a child? Grandparent? The best friend in the world? The best teacher, boss, aunt, uncle, kin by blood or by love? Let’s face it: almost every one of us is longing for resurrection, and almost none of us would ever admit it in polite company. It’s too primal a wish; it’s too illogical. For a long time—nearly a year—I kept a pair of shoes in a bag in my closet that I had worn to my mother’s burial. It was right after a big snowstorm, and the cemetery was muddy. For a long time the dirt from my mother’s grave clung to my shoes, and I was not willing to brush it off. It’s not reasonable. It’s not logical. It’s what Joan Didion calls the “magical thinking” that occurs when you are grieving. On some level I was holding out for another outcome, for a mother who was still vibrant and full of life and not riddled with cancer. How about you? Are you still hoping for another outcome, no matter how irrational that might seem? Are you heartbroken, full of grief and loss? Thank God. You have come to the right place. This is the day the Lord has made, and you have come to the garden.

Mary asked questions. “Where is my Lord? Where have you taken him?” When a matched set of angels—angels, mind you—did not give a satisfactory answer, she went looking for someone more knowledgeable—like a gardener. Do you have questions? Are you willing to keep asking them? Are you willing to ask everyone you meet until your questions are answered, even if they are not answered in the way you expect? Thank God. This is the day the Lord has made. Welcome to the garden.

Mary opened her mind and her heart to hear the voice of her Lord calling her by name. Even though she did not know it, the voice of Jesus was the only voice she wanted to hear. And her own name—that intimate knowing of who she was, in all her grieving humanity—was the only word, whether she knew it or not. She wanted to hear it so desperately she finally admitted the possibility, despite the illogic of it all. Do you have a desire—a deep, burning, restless desire—for an encounter with the risen Christ? Do you have a longing to hear God call you by name, for God to know you intimately, a desire so great you are willing to open your heart and your mind to what cannot be proven or measured? Thank God, for this is indeed the day the Lord has made. You have come to the garden.

Friend, why are you weeping? Woman, man, child of God, what sorrow burdens your soul? Whom are you looking for? Whose heart are you seeking? There is One who has been looking for you, who has been calling you by name. There is a gardener who wants to plant the seed of resurrection faith in your heart. There is One whose heart is beating—his is risen indeed—and it’s beating for you. This is the day. This is the day that the Lord has made. Alleluia. Amen.

Given in Love: Sermon on John 12:1-8

She was a particular woman, with a particular history, and a particular relationship to Jesus. Let’s start there when we think about Mary of Bethany. It might be good to begin learning about who she was by first clarifying who she was not.

She was not, for example, Mary Magdalene, the woman named in every gospel as the pre-eminent witness to the resurrection. There is no biblical record of Mary Magdalene ever anointing Jesus, though that is portrayed time and again in film and popular imagination. But this is not that Mary.

Neither was she a sinner. Let me re-state that. As good Presbyterians, we confess that we all are sinners, that all have fallen short of the glory of God. So perhaps it would be more accurate to say “She was not known as a sinner,” or “She was not a notorious sinner.” There is a story of Jesus being anointed by a woman who is identified as a sinner. But this is not that woman.

And, of course, she is not the mother of Jesus. This is not that Mary, nor is she Mary the wife of Cleopas, as far as we can tell. So many Mary’s—in the Hebrew “Miriam”—many, probably, given that name because Herod the Great counted not one but two Mary’s among his wives. So, just as many little Diana’s were Christened in the early 1980’s, so were many young Jewish girls, in the era in which Jesus lived, called Mary.

She was Mary of Bethany, and Bethany was a village located on the southeastern slope of the Mount of Olives, just about a mile and a half from Jerusalem. She was the sister of Martha and of Lazarus, and the three of them lived together in a family unit that was comprised not of a patriarch and his offspring, or of couples and children: rather, they were a family of single siblings, a family who became very important in the life and ministry of Jesus. So important that the gospel testifies: Jesus loved Mary and Martha and Lazarus. Two gospels bear witness to the fact that Jesus was able to find himself at home in this home.

It is impossible to speak of Mary of Bethany and her particular relationship with Jesus without speaking of what happened in the days leading up to this episode. Our text mentions it casually, as one might refer to any old piece of identifying information. But it still shocks us with its power: “Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead” (12:1). At the beginning of Chapter 11 Jesus had received a note from Mary and Martha, in which they said, “Lord, he whom you love is ill” (11:3). Jesus had delayed, intentionally, going to the side of his ailing friend, “even though he loved Martha and Mary and Lazarus,” John tells us. He only started out towards Bethany after having been assured that Lazarus was, in fact, dead.

It bears saying something, before we go any further, about the particular portrayal of Jesus that we find in the gospel of John. As many of you have heard me say before, John’s gospel is very different from the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. When we are told that Jesus delays going to Lazarus until he is dead, to most of us that sounds like a shocking, nearly indefensible decision on Jesus’ part. The grieving sisters certainly question it, even condemn it. But we need to understand the ways of John’s gospel in order to appreciate why Jesus would do such a thing. The first eleven chapters of John are woven around signs Jesus performs, miracles designed to reveal the truth about Jesus’ identity. Once we understand that, we know that this decision will aid Jesus in performing his greatest sign, his most astonishing miracle, raising Lazarus from the dead. This delay, which causes such pain to those he loves, is part of a larger plan.

Well, we know what happens in the rest of Chapter 11. Jesus weeps at the tomb in the presence of this family he loves, showing that he recognizes and even feels the human cost of his inaction. And then he unleashes the very power of God from within himself, and he restores Lazarus to life.

And so the stage is set for today’s passage. A meal, a celebration, and Jesus once again finds himself at home in this home. We can imagine the merriment tinged with awe, the sense of reprieve and relief, the sheer giddiness of the festivities. I envision a room made intimate as evening falls by the glow of firelight and candlelight, by the savory smells of the meal, and by the bonds of affection that are shared around the table.

But into the room comes Mary, bearing a pound of the rarest of perfumes, oil of nard. It is made from the crushed stems of the spikenard plant, which grows only in the Himalayas, in China, India and Nepal. When distilled it becomes a thick amber-colored oil with an intense, aromatic scent. A pound of it might well make you dizzy. It might well put you to sleep; oil of nard can be used as a sedative.

Mary lavishes this costly, fragrant oil on Jesus’ feet. As you may know, it was a custom in the Ancient Near East to provide a basin of water for washing the feet to any guest who might enter a home. People walked dusty roads wearing sandals or even barefoot; it was a basic measure of comfort and hygiene. In general, though, people did not wash the feet of their guests. If you had servants, slaves, you might direct them to wash your friend’s feet. Otherwise, it was a ritual people performed, mostly, on themselves.

So here is Mary, performing an action that would only normally have been undertaken by a slave. And here is Mary, making a startling, sensuous gesture, even to the extreme of wiping Jesus’ feet with her own hair. And here is Mary, filling the room with the exquisite, even overwhelming fragrance of her action.

Her gesture is misinterpreted, of course. It is judged, naturally. (W. H. Auden said, “As a rule it was the pleasure-haters who were unjust.”) It is judged as being wasteful and even selfish—Judas mentions the poor with a bite in his tone. It is unfortunate that Jesus’ response—you will always have the poor with you—is so often used to excuse our not responding to the needs of the needy. And I don’t need to point fingers on this one, because I have pulled it out myself often enough, when I have felt that I didn’t have the wherewithal to respond kindly to one more request for assistance, for a donation, for a handout. But Jesus is not offering me any excuses here. Even the most casual reader of the gospels knows, Glenn Beck’s opinions notwithstanding, that Jesus’ stand alongside the poor is absolute, and irrevocable, and our call to do likewise is a mandate to everyone who calls himself a Christian.

But there is a time for extravagant, even wasteful gestures, says Jesus, who in just about a chapter’s time will himself kneel at the feet of his friends making himself their slave. There is a time for the extravagant fragrance of love poured out, insists Jesus, who will, himself, pour out his own life and love for humanity on the cross.

Just for fun, because I was curious, I looked up the word “fragrance” in an online bible search engine, just to see how many times it occurred in the bible. It occurs just eleven times. Six of those are found in the Song of Songs, arguably the Bible’s go-to-text for lovers of sensuous gestures. Two references are from the prophet Hosea, describing the fragrance of God’s people Israel in repentance and faithfulness. Two references are from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, describing the fragrance of life in Christ. And here, in this scene, we have the other occurrence.

The gift of Mary of Bethany is given in love. Anything given in love is endued with a particular fragrance; the rabbis said, such a gesture would fill up the world with its sweetness. I realize there’s always a risk of misunderstanding, when that much-misused word—“love”—is pulled out and thrown around. I am not, of course, talking about romantic love, though I don’t have any particular insights into the heart of Mary of Bethany. I am also not talking about “love” as a feeling, though I can of course imagine Mary’s deep sense of devotion and commitment. I am talking about love as a decision. Love as an action. Love as a verb.

When Jesus tells us, as he so often does in the gospels, to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, I don’t think he is talking about conjuring up feelings inside ourselves, though we may have some of those feelings. And when he talks about loving our neighbor as ourselves, I don’t think he means that we are commanded to warmth and fuzziness about the person next door or across the ocean. When we are commanded to love, we are commanded to take action.

I hope you have all had this kind of experience: being on the receiving end of a gesture made in love. You are in a terrible state over something real—your health, your work, your relationship, your finances—and someone says something to you that is so kindly encouraging you nearly weep. Or, you don’t know how you’ll manage the busy week you have, and someone takes a major responsibility and simply lifts it from your shoulders. Or, you are sick, and someone cares for you. You are hungry and someone feeds you. You are thirsty and someone offers you a cool drink of water. There are, or may be, feelings attached to each and every one of these situations on the part of the giver. But, in the end, the feelings are almost irrelevant. What matters is the action that is taken. Because that is what love is. Love is an action. Love is a decision. Love is a verb.

Now imagine you are a child living in a tent in Haiti, because your home collapsed on January 12 when the earthquake devastated your country. And your mother and father are dead, and maybe one sister remains alive. And there is no school for you to go to, no relatives to take you in, and even if there were, all the buildings are heaps of rubble. And now the rainy season has begun. And your just barely tolerable living situation becomes, again, unimaginably dreadful. And then, help arrives. Because somewhere, some Presbyterians held a coffeehouse on a beautiful March evening and bought more than they really needed and laughed themselves silly because they understand that love is an action. Love is a decision. Love is a verb.

She was a particular individual, with a particular history, and a particular relationship with God. Mary of Bethany’s relationship with Jesus may have begun in any number of ways—she was his student; he was her rabbi; she was his friend; perhaps he was her confidant. But the power of God in Jesus blew open and apart the categories of relationship for Mary and left her only one option: he was her master; she was his servant. She was a mourner; he restored her dead to life. She was a supplicant; he was the answer to prayer. And, in the end, he was love, and in her response, she was love.

Each of us is a particular individual, with a particular history, and our own particular relationship with God. Perhaps it begins because we are in Sunday School, and Jesus is the lesson. Or we are being taught to say our prayers, and Jesus is the one we pray to. But in the end, Jesus longs to find himself at home in our homes, in our hearts. In the end, we are called to recognize the shocking reality of the breadth and length and height and depth of his love for us, to recognize that he is love. And we are invited, in turn, to be that love, in response, so that every action, every gesture, may reveal this deep and wide love to the world. Thanks be to God. Amen.

My Brother, Myself: Sermon on Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

I wrote this sermon many years ago (12!) and have not preached it since (though I did post it here three years ago). It will be preached tomorrow.

~~~

They are all in there—I can hear the music from here, the stamping of the feet, the voices as they raise the cups in toast after toast. They are celebrating as if it were the harvest, or a wedding. I can’t go in there. I can’t go in there. If you had seen what I have seen, you would understand why.

A year ago my father was an honorable man, with not one but two sons to share his good fortune. As the oldest, naturally I had a place of honor at my father’s table, and beside him at prayers in the synagogue. After all, I would inherit the lion’s share of his estate: two thirds, as it is written, a double-portion for the firstborn. My father never had a moment’s anxiety on my account. I was there, by his side, every day from the time I left my mother’s care, learning from him: the land, the accounts, the servants. I learned how to manage his estate by his wisdom, and I gave him the honor he was due as my father. And I ate my daily bread by the sweat of my brow.

But my brother… from the day he was born you could see that his eyes never properly focused on what was right in front of him: his family, our honor. He walked about as if in a dream. Far off lands. Exotic tales of strange peoples. He saw no good in the bread that was before him on his plate, but longed for strange and alien feasts.

I remember well the day he left. He stood in front of the house, in broad daylight, in front of the hired servants, and said, “Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.” He stood there with no shame on his face, and all but told our father, “Your only use to me, old man, is as a corpse.” With his words he wished our father dead. The servants hid their faces and scurried away, so as not to look upon their master’s shame. And, in truth, something in my father did die that day… I could see it in his eyes. His younger son had killed him just as surely as if he’d driven a knife into his breast.

My father walked slowly away from the house, and gestured to a parcel of land. “There. That is your third. The servants will draw up the contracts. So be it.” And then he took his tunic between his great hands, and I thought, for a moment, he was about to tear it. And I thought, “Ah, he will tear his garments to show that this son of his is dead to him.” At least, that is as a man of honor would have seen it. But my father… he did not tear his tunic. It fell from his hands, and hung limply about him, and he shuffled back into the house.

No one said good-bye to my brother. He took his deeds and a parcel of clothing and he disappeared over a low hill.

So. Now I too was a landowner, and not just the oldest son, for my father had divided his property. The servant had handed me a deed of ownerships just as he had handed one to my brother. My father left his place as head of the household, preferring, for some months, to sleep beneath a shade tree in the garden. His ceremonial robes hung unworn inside the house, and he never left to go to the village to trade or to the synagogue to pray. He ate only such food as would sustain a child, and so took on the lean look of a hired man, even though he did no work. And I… well, I was put in the most impossible position of all.

I became the head of the household, but my father lived on. I had accepted my inheritance while my father still breathed! How could I sit in the place of honor at the table beside my own father? How could I wear his robes and trade with the merchants who knew that he had been shamed by a vile, ungrateful child? The other men of the village—they knew as well as I that my brother had marked our family as disgraced. I heard the plan they had for my brother should he ever dare to show his face again in our village. My brother would be dead within the hour he reappeared, they said. What was the alternative? That their sons be permitted to think a father could be so misused and his wicked son live on?

So my brother was a dead man. And my father was a dead man. And I was a man half-alive in my own home.

After a time my father roused himself from beneath his shade tree. He washed his face and put on a clean tunic. He stood out in front of the house, staring off at the low hill. And then he began to walk. He would set out early, before the heat of the day, and usually return in time for the meal, though not always. He would take his staff and walk in the direction of the low hill over which my brother had disappeared. When he returned, he would take his meal, saying little, but eating more now that his body was working again. And then he would sit on a little cushion outside the door, and watch. He sat there watching the horizon, the servants coming and going, every day. The sun hardened his skin, and he had only the occasional clouds for his shade.

I ask you, what am I? I am a child who has done his duty towards his father, no more and no less. If I had taken my pack and followed my brother, would my father’s grief have led him to hold this vigil for me? If my brother was all but dead—and the men of the village vowed never to let him return alive—why did my father hope for his return? Did he not have a son who loved him, who showed him honor? What am I?

Today my father went out for his usual three hours of walking. We had our meal together, as always. I saw nothing unusual—just some vagabond child off in the distance, coming over the hill as my father sat upon his cushion. No one worth noticing. I went out into the field to supervise several men who were digging a drainage ditch. I did not return until the sun had sunk low over the horizon.

When I returned I could smell the aroma of veal roasting, and I could see that the house was lit with lanterns, and I could hear the music that was playing, and the sound of the stamping of the dancers’ feet, and the voices as they raised their cups in toast after toast. I called a house servant to me and asked him to account for all these goings on.

“It was the most amazing thing master! One moment your father was seated, as always, on his cushion. And in the next he was up and running towards some beggar who we could see coming up the road! Yes, running, I tell you, his robes flapping about him! And still we had no idea what or who it was all about. And then we could see that he had embraced this beggar, and kissed him, and that he was bringing him back towards the house! And then I realized who it was. Master. It is your brother.”

My brother?

So. He has returned. And apparently the men of the village have not stoned him to death or cut his throat. Of course, once my father had kissed him, they could not. It appears that my father has taken his place once again as the head of this family, and that he has taken my good for nothing brother under his protection. So the men of the village are now raising the glass with him instead of describing his death in detail to their sons. So this is how it is.

Why is it that my father, who was so shamed, can forgive? And why is it that I, who have never shamed my father, find myself now standing outside the great feast, looking in? How can I go in?

And yet, there is my father, and he looks altogether unfamiliar to me, as if he were a stranger! Why is that so? Is it that the expression on his face is so alien to me I do knot know him when he wears it? He is smiling. He is smiling so broadly his eyes have disappeared into the deep creases on his face. He looks utterly at peace, completely happy.

And there is my brother. He looks like one who has been imprisoned, like a child who has been released from a prison. He looks as if he had suffered, truly. Gone is the face of that arrogant young man who demanded his portion of the inheritance. What remains is the face of a child. And he too is smiling as if the joy within him is too great to be contained.

My father came to me, just now, and he asked me—he pleaded with me—to come in, to raise the cup for my brother as well. “My son,” he said, “you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come back to life; he was lost and has been found.” All that is his is mine? Including this lost-and-found child, my brother?

Oh my father… your heart is so deep, so wide! Is that because it has been broken? Can a broken heart love all the more? Then let my heart stop its straining and break so that I too might come into the fold of your love again. Can I come in? Can I let my heart break once and for all so that I too can yield to love?

~~~~~

*Information about social customs and family relationships was taken from Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels by Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg/ Fortress Press, 1992), 370-373.

Image from artist Charlie Mackesy.

The Sorrowful Mother Hen, Luke 13:22-35

I’ve been seeing a lot of Tiger Woods lately. I know you have too. It doesn’t seem to matter if we go in search of information on him or not. It just comes to us, unbidden, standing in line at the grocery store, or every time we go online and our homepage news loads. And then there’s Brangelina… there’s another couple I know more about than I really would like to. And there’s always that burning question: will Brad go back to Jen? And more to the point, would she even have him back?

I guess, we might say, all these folks have their issues. But all that tells us is that they are members of the human race. It is easier to give Tiger and Elin and Brad and Angelina and Jennifer our rapt attention than it is to do our own hard work of opening up to transformation. But that is precisely what we are invited to do in this season of Lent: to acknowledge our common humanity, and therefore our common need for the transforming power of God in our lives. We are invited to pause, and reflect, and to invite God in. We are invited to begin a journey of transformation.

Jesus is going “through one town and village after another,” our gospel passage tells us this morning, “teaching as he [makes] his way to Jerusalem” (13:22). It is fair to say that Jesus has some thoughts on transformation. At one point in his travels and teaching he has a question thrown at him by someone in the crowd: “Lord, will only a few be saved?” It’s an understandable question. Here is Jesus, offering a startling message of radical reversal, in which the poor and the outcast are suddenly the heirs of the very reign of God, and the people who are accustomed to locating themselves at the top of the power pyramid are dismayed to find themselves, according to Jesus’ reckoning, at the bottom. It is the complete opposite of what Jesus’ audience has been schooled to expect from life.

Jesus answers the question—“Lord, will only a few be saved?”—by offering a not entirely comforting parable about narrow doors and people standing outside knocking. All sorts of celebrity insiders will be kept out, but then “people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God. Indeed,” says Jesus, “some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.” (13:29-30) Jesus describes the radical, upside down reign of God, and then describes it again, just in case anyone’s having a hard time following.

At that very moment, the gospel says, when Jesus has pronounced judgment on the powers that be, some of their ranks send him a message: Get out of town. Now. Herod’s after you. And really, there’s no surprise there. Who stands to lose the most in the scenario Jesus has just painted? Jesus sends back a message so sharp and challenging, it undoubtedly increases the danger he’s in. Perhaps it even seals his fate. Look, he says, you tell that fox—a characterization that will not be lost on the subsistence farmers in the crowd, Herod the sly, Herod the cunning, Herod who goes after the defenseless and devours them—you tell that fox, Jesus says, that unlike him, I am engaged in the business of healing and making whole. While he devours I nourish. While he preys upon people, I lay my hands upon them and pray to God for them to be made free. I am not done with this work. And I am not on Herod’s schedule. I am on God’s.

Then Jesus begins a lament, so poignant you can almost hear the tears in his voice.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (13:34)

Jerusalem, Jerusalem. It’s impossible to overstate the significance of Jerusalem in the lives of the children of Israel, or in this particular gospel. By the time Jesus says these words, Jerusalem has been at the epicenter of the sacred geography of the Jews for nearly 1000 years. More than simply being the capital city of the kingdom from the time of David, Jerusalem is understood, by virtue of the temple, to be the home, the literal dwelling place of the shekhina, the Spirit and presence of God. Jerusalem, also called by the holy name Zion, is celebrated in psalms:

For the Lord has chosen Zion;
he has desired it for his habitation:

“This is my resting place forever;
here I will reside, for I have desired it.” ~ Psalm 132:13-14

By the time Jesus weeps his lament over Jerusalem, it has been occupied, defended, and occupied again. Solomon’s original magnificent temple has been reduced to ashes and replaced with a far less impressive specimen. David’s line has been replaced with the pretender Herodians, who have killed and purchased and married their way to the throne. And yet, through it all, the prophets and the people still retain a vision of how Jerusalem could and should be. When Jesus laments over Jerusalem he is weeping for its past glories, its devastating losses, and even the hopes he still has for it. Jesus is both lamenting what is, and praying for what is not yet. In the course of his lament he is offering an image of himself, his relationship to Jerusalem, as a loving, suffering, sorrowful mother—a hen, hardly the most regal or stately of birds—sheltering chicks under her wings. A hen, who, when attacked by a fox, will surely lose the fight, but may yet preserve her children’s lives. Even in his lament, even in his naming his sacrificial love for Jerusalem, Jesus is holding out hope for its transformation.

The already and the not yet. The temple no longer stands in Jerusalem. All that remains are the outer walls. Some Jews still hope for a third temple to be built, but many no longer focus their worship on this one location. For Christians, the idea that God resides primarily in one physical space on earth has been replaced by the understanding that, in addition to transcending all places and times, God resides in each one of us, that our own bodies are God’s temples. In that sense, we are Jerusalem now.

The already and the not yet. It is the second Sunday in Lent, and I am here to tell you that many of us, like Jerusalem, are but remnants of our former glory, our daily Lenten disciplines foundering on the seas of our good intentions. We’ve got issues, often having to do with the difference between where we are and where we wish we were. We wish we were lighter or we wish we were more buff; we wish we were in a stable job or we wish we were free of the workplace grind altogether; we wish we were in a quiet cocoon of rest and privacy, or we wish we were in the midst of the hustle and bustle of a large community… you get the picture. We tend to believe we only have to accomplish this or achieve that or eliminate the other thing, and voila, there will be our happiness, there will be our joy. The celebrities whose lives we follow in the tabloids might have a comment or two as to how that particular plan has worked out for them. We begin to have a creeping suspicion that, perhaps, achievement is not the path to happiness we thought it was. We begin to suspect we haven’t figured it out yet. We are still holding out for transformation.

The already and the not yet. We can feel so stuck, so mired in our issues. But sometimes we catch glimpses of the not yet, even in our own lives, and it surprises us. It’s not what we thought it was. We take a walk in the pristine, freshly fallen snow, and we are astonished at the consolation and connectedness we can feel in that moment. We take a little time to read scripture, and we are amazed at the ways in which a mirror is held up to our own lives. We clean out a closet and donate our perfectly good clothes or canned goods to those who need them desperately, and we feel lighter in a way we didn’t anticipate. We are convicted, if I may use a good, old-fashioned Christian word, convicted of our need for one another and our need for God’s grace in our lives. We begin to suspect that transformation may be more about letting go than anything else. This is the journey of Lent: a letting go, little by little, of our conviction that we know best. Our letting in, little by little, the powerful reality that God is with us already.

The already and the not yet. This is the view of reality that lies at the heart of our table celebration. Jesus tells us in our reading this morning that “people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God.” You will recognize those words as often being a part of our celebration of the Lord’s Supper. When we gather around this table, we enact in the here and now a vision of a day that hasn’t entirely materialized. In our celebration of that meal, we show a unity we often don’t feel, and we act in hope of a community we fall short of living out. And by the power of the sacrament, the “not yet” seeps backwards, by the grace of God, into the here and now.

The already and the not yet. In Lent, we’re encouraged to befriend our brokenness, we are urged to acknowledge that all is not well with our souls, and we are asked to identify with the hurt of so many people in our world. It feels a little silly to dwell on the problems of incredibly wealthy celebrities in the face of hundreds dead in Chile, 230,000 dead in Haiti, civilians dying in the offensive in Afghanistan, millions of uninsured here at home dying from preventable diseases. We would do well to ask ourselves why certain stories get all the airplay. Our common humanity binds us to one another, around the table and around the planet, and the faces that loom large on our televisions as well as the ones we never see, the faces lost in the shadows, are all in this human dance with us, here and now. It is the “not yet” we yearn for, the time when God will be at home among mortal women and men and children; that time when God will wipe every tear from all our eyes; and all the world—everybody, every body, will be the pristine, new Jerusalem. Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Greatest Temptation: Sermon on Luke 4:1-13

Sometimes, you just have to let someone else say the words for you. As a friend from cyber-space put it this week, “Water baptized on the outside; Holy Spirit filled on the inside. Jesus says, ‘Bring it on.’”[1] Which is a very nice summary of the gospel passage we’ve read this morning.

All over the world, in Christian faith communities, some version of this story is read every year on the first Sunday in Lent. Lent is officially the time during which we join Jesus in his wilderness testing, in preparation for the great celebration of Easter. Lent, in my own mind, is the time when we give in to at least one of our hungers: our hunger for a real experience of God, an encounter. If we look to Jesus, we will see very quickly that a desire for a real experience of God is always a very loud invitation to the universe and the powers of evil, to “bring it on.”

First things first. We will be reading primarily from the gospel of Luke, not just in Lent, but all year long, so know this: you need to be on the lookout for the Holy Spirit. In fact, Luke is pretty much the most explicitly Spirit-saturated of all the gospels, and it starts before Jesus is born, before he’s even a twinkle in the angel Gabriel’s eye. According to Luke, John the Baptist, the one who will be Ed McMahon to Jesus’ Johnny Carson, will be filled with the Holy Spirit [Luke 1:15]. Gabriel answers Mary’s question, “How will this be?” by saying, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you…” [1:35]. When a pregnant-with-Jesus Mary visits a pregnant-with-John Elizabeth, the child “leaps in [Elizabeth’s] womb. And Elizabeth [is] filled with the Holy Spirit” [1:41]. All this Spirit-presence, and Jesus isn’t even born yet!

As an adult, John heralds Jesus’ first public appearance with a warning: “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming… He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” [3:16]. And then the Holy Spirit baptizes Jesus in a spectacular display, complete with an appearance as a dove and a voice booming from the clouds: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” [3:22].

As if it knows the reader will be breathless at this point, a little overwhelmed by so much Spirit, the text takes a brief pause, goes on a kind of holiday by virtue of a genealogy. No Spirit, no drama, just a nice long list of begats [3:23-38]. By the end of it, we’re kind of hoping for something exciting to happen again.

If we wanted excitement, we’re in luck, because we have arrived at Jesus’ “bring it on.” We have a battle of wits between Jesus and the devil that would make a video-game aficionado proud. But before that happens, a word from the number “40.” Those of you who hang around churches for a while will start recognizing the prevalence of this number in the stories we read in the Bible. Jesus was in the wilderness, without benefit of food, for forty days. The people of Israel were in the wilderness forty years, during which time Moses spent forty days in the presence of God receiving the commandments. Elijah awaited God’s word for forty days on Mount Horeb, and if we want to reach even further back into ancient Hebrew history: it rained forty days and forty nights as Noah and his family and the animals looked out the windows of the ark. And there are more… these are just the highlights.

I’m sure you get it by now. Forty is one of those Bible numbers. It is significant. Forty, in scripture, is the length it time it takes to do something momentous, something game-changing. At the end of forty, it is complete, the world is washed clean, you are ready, you have changed your mind or been tempted enough, or even, in the case of the Israelites in the wilderness, enough of you have died so that God can do something useful with the rest of you. Forty is a number of completion, of 180 degree turnarounds. “Forty” is long enough for the big stuff to take place.

And so, back to the big stuff. Jesus is in the wilderness where, for the entire length of time, the whole forty days, he is being tempted by the devil. The Greek word used for “devil” here is diabolou. It means, literally, one who throws stuff around. One who messes things up, brings chaos... that’s what the tempter does. [2]

Jesus withstands temptation for forty days until, apparently, the devil pulls out three temptations that are so notable, they have been recorded here, for us.

The first temptation is a no-brainer, if we think about it for half a second. Jesus has been without food for forty days: anyone who wanted to compel him to do much of anything would probably settle on food as the most obvious enticement. Only, let’s be clear: Jesus isn’t being tempted by food per se. The devil doesn’t show him a 5-course gourmet dinner and say, You can have these if you give me something or do something for me. Instead, the one who throws things around throws down the gauntlet: “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus isn’t being tempted by food. He’s tempted to do a trick to persuade the devil of his identity. Given the Spirit-soaked nature of Jesus… the dare is just shocking. It’s offensive, like asking the creator of the universe to do a card trick.

Jesus isn’t playing. There are more important things than bread. “One does not live by bread alone,” he says. Jesus is quoting Deuteronomy. He’s just quoted half the verse, though. “One does not live by bread alone,” it begins, and then continues, “but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD” [Deut. 8:3]. Jesus tells the tempter that what matters, what gives life, is the very breath of God. The Holy Spirit.

The devil escalates things. He leads Jesus to a place where he can instantly see “all the kingdoms of the world.” This is all mine, he says. And it can be all yours. All you have to do is worship me. I have all the power. I have all the authority. I can give it to you if you give me some respect.

This is such a rookie move on the devil’s part. As if Jesus would fall for that line—that anyone besides God has all power and authority and can dispense it at will. Jesus comes back at him with more Deuteronomy: “It is written, ‘worship the Lord your God, and serve only him’” [Deut. 6:13]. The devil, so far, is getting nowhere with Jesus. Jesus knows too well, both who the devil is and who he, himself is.

Finally, the devil takes Jesus to the Temple, an important site in Luke’s gospel. The whole gospel begins at the Temple with the story of Zechariah, and then circles back and returns to the Temple again and again. There’s good reason for that. The Temple is the holiest of all places for Jesus, for all good Jews of his day. It is the place where the shekhina, the very presence of God—God’s Holy Spirit—is believed to dwell. And the devil seems to be catching on to something that motivates Jesus, what makes him tick. The devil is not a total idiot. He embellishes the next temptation by mirroring back to Jesus the same kinds of words Jesus has been saying, like someone who’s taken a basic course in effective communication. He invites Jesus to jump from the highest point of the temple, if he is the Son of God, for “It is written,” the devil says, repeating the same words with which Jesus rebuffed his two earlier attempts. “It is written,” and the devil quotes those wonderful comforting words we read this morning from Psalm 91, about how God will care for the faithful [4:10-11]. Now the devil is throwing scripture around, a clever move on his part. But he is no match for Jesus. Jesus answers, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test’” [4:12] And just like that, the devil is dismissed… until he tries again, later, which we know he will. Because he is the devil, after all.

The devil is no match for Jesus. That’s not to say the temptations aren’t real, aren’t tempting insofar as they go. But Jesus has something powerful in his favor. He knows who he is. Now, I don’t necessarily mean by that that he knows he is the Son of God in any different sense than anyone in this room is a son or daughter of God. Whether he is fully aware of his unique relationship with God at this point, I couldn’t say. But he knows he is a Son of God, he knows the reality of an experience of the Spirit. He knows that he is fully God’s, and that God has set him on a path he must walk. The greatest temptation for Jesus isn’t food or power or even testing the hand-eye coordination of hosts of angels. The greatest temptation is for him to walk away from who he was meant to be.

In his book Velvet Elvis, Rob Bell talks about a personal crisis in which he came close to walking away from his life. He was ready to walk because he was so overwhelmed with the many roles he had taken on, the many things he had said “yes” to when he should have said “no.” Finally a therapist told him his issue was a simple one. Bell says,

I was anticipating something quite profound and enlightening as I got out my pen.

[The therapist] said this: “Sin.”

And then he said, in what has become a pivotal moment in my journey, “Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it.” [3]

Our job is the relentless pursuit of who God made us to be. Anything else is sin. And we need to repent of it.

Jesus’ job, and he understood it well, was the relentless pursuit of who he was meant to be. We could fit, maybe, 200 theologians in this sanctuary, and they could tell us 200 different definitions of who they think Jesus was meant to be. But that doesn’t matter. What mattered was who Jesus believed God meant him to be. And that meant saying yes to some things—to people’s requests for food, for healing, for teaching, for forgiveness—and it meant saying no to certain other things—such as demands that he be this or that kind of messiah, patriot, leader, or Son of God.

Our job is the relentless pursuit of who God made us to be. Anything else is sin. And we need to repent of it. This statement, this deep truth, has a way of putting everything into perspective. And we will be tempted away from this pursuit, I can guarantee it. Whether we call it “the devil” or “the power of evil” or even something as benign-sounding as “life in this world,” I guarantee you the universe will resist our efforts to be who we were meant to be and to be in communion with God. If nothing else, it’s inconvenient for lots of people if we suddenly realize that we need to stop doing some of the things we’ve been doing, and start doing other things. People don’t like it when we start saying “no.” I read this week that “saying no is a more difficult spiritual practice than tithing, praying on a cold stone floor, or visiting a prisoner on death row.”[4] But as we learn from Jesus’ three firm “no’s”, it’s an essential practice if we intend on engaging in that relentless pursuit of God’s plan for us.

It is Lent, and our hunger for God is every bit as real as our hunger for bread. What matters, what gives life, is the very breath of God. The Holy Spirit. That same Spirit is as available to us now as to Jesus then. Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to fervently, relentlessly breathe in and out that Spirit, to walk with confidence into the wilderness of discovering who and what God meant us to be, and to encounter Jesus along the way. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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[1] Wesley White, “Luke 4:1-13,” Kairos CoMotion Lectionary Dialogue, .
[2] Thanks to the Rev. Viktoria Berlik for this insight.
[3] Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006), 114-115.
[4] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2009), 125.

'Toon courtesy of ReverendFun.

Ash Wednesday Meditation

Barbara spent part of her ministry as a coordinator of Christian Education in a local parish. Every so often, she polled her congregation to see what kind of Adult Education programs they wanted. The answer was always the same: they wanted Bible study. Every time she asked, they told her in no uncertain terms that they wanted to study the Bible. There was this odd thing that happened, though. When she actually arranged for professors from a local seminary to come to the church to teach classes on the Bible, attendance was never good. In fact, it was poor. Again she would conduct her surveys, and again they would insist that they wanted Bible study. “Finally,” she says, “I got the message. ‘Bible’ was a code word for ‘God.’ People were not hungry for information about the Bible. They were hungry for an experience of God.” [i]

This story resonates for me this Ash Wednesday. I have my pre-conceived notions of Lent, and what it means, precisely. The call to the disciplines of prayer, fasting and almsgiving; journeying into the wilderness with Jesus, who wandered for 40 days, or perhaps with the people of Israel, who wandered for 40 years; the long weeks of walking towards the cross (without benefit of a chocolate fix when things get really tough), and the burst of light and reprieve that is the resurrection. All these things mean Lent to me, and Lent means all these things. But underneath the disciplines and stories and practices there is one truth at the heart of Lent: we want an experience of God. Lent, with all these possibilities laid out like tasty offerings on a buffet, seems to promise an opportunity for just that.

“Therefore,” says the author of the letter to the Hebrews, “since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us…”

As we pause at the threshold of Lent, I want to suggest a few simple ideas for us to ponder, and they are all, in turn, suggested by this opening verse of our reading.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…” In the letter to the Hebrews, the cloud of witnesses is comprised of biblical giants—everyone from Abel to Noah to Abraham to Moses and beyond. These are people who have had God tap them on the shoulder while they were going about their daily business, interrupting their lives, saying things like, “Hey, Noah, I know you’re 600 years old, but do you think you could build this enormous boat out of gopher wood and pack, oh, hundreds of thousands of species in it? Before it rains?” These are people who were watching their flocks when a nearby bush spontaneously burst into flame and began speaking with the voice of God, who then told them the divine name was an imperfect verb, meaning something like “I will be who I will be.” This cloud of witnesses, these are people who have had an experience of God. These are people whose faith we can look to, people to emulate.

I have my own cloud of witnesses, and I suspect you do too. Mine are Mary Magdalene and Therese of Lisieux, who showed me different visions of what it meant to be enthralled with Jesus; H., the priest who first invited me on a retreat in high school and suggested I might consider opening a bible if I wanted to know more about Jesus; my mother J., who, as a lifelong pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic was a little nervous about the bible thing, but who for her part showed me what it was to pray through pain. And there’s my friend J., who fearlessly looked outside her own faith tradition and found a home and a path as a Jewish convert; and my friends K. and M. and M. and C., all of whom are following Jesus bravely and creatively every day; my professor C., who made me fall in love with John Calvin, of all people, and my other professor D., who wept when he read us fragments of ancient Hebrew poetry. This is my cloud of witnesses (actually, a very small segment of it). I know you have your own. Who are they? Who are the people in your life who have had an experience of God? Who are your mentors in this pursuit? Perhaps, this Lent, our first discipline could be remembering, thinking of them. That’s the first thing.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely…”

It gets tricky here, especially for those of us who have tried to use Lent in the past as a cover for what really were attempts at dieting. So let’s get that out of the way: the author is not speaking of laying aside that kind of weight. The weight here seems to have some connection to sin. First things first, and the Bible could not be clearer on this point. One does not need to be sin-free in order to have an experience of God, and thanks be to God for that. If my dalliance with John Calvin taught me anything, it was that we are all sinners—God’s beautiful and broken creation, every one of us. That doesn’t disqualify us from having a God experience.

So, surrounded by our cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside those things which weigh us down, and the sin that clings to us like a staticky skirt in the winter. We talked in Bible study this week of the rabbit trails our brains can follow—the kind of thinking that can weigh us down, keep us from being truly free, the hateful self-talk. Just think of the ways we can talk to ourselves—how we can be far worse, far more cruel to ourselves than we ever could be to someone else. How many of us have called ourselves stupid? How many of us roll our eyes at our own mistakes and say, “Typical!” How many of us begin sentences to/ about ourselves with “I could never…” or “I can’t even…”?

Could we just put that down? Could we give that up for Lent? That weight of self-hatred, and put-downs, that weight of treating ourselves in a way that would appall God—that does appall God! God who loved us before we were even born. God who loves us now, with the kind of love that would, literally, die for us? God who says, “Come as you are”? Jesus said the second greatest commandment is “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” How can we even get working on loving our neighbor if we are spewing a constant stream of venom at ourselves? Perhaps this could be our second discipline this Lent. Lay it down. Lay that weight down. That’s the second thing.

Surrounded by our witnesses… the people who inspire us with their experience of God…

Lighter now because we’ve laid down that weight of self-hatred…

What else is there to do but run? “Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us…”

Almost thirty years ago a film came out about the summer, not the winter Olympics. “Chariots of Fire” told the true story of the British men’s track team that competed in 1924. One of the members of the team was Eric Liddell, a devout Scottish missionary who ended up in an ethical dilemma when the race he was supposed to compete in was scheduled for a Sunday, the Sabbath. At one point a fellow Christian is trying to talk him out of competing altogether, dismissing it as trivial in the face of Liddell’s faith. But he resists, saying “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.”

What race is set before you? By which I mean, what is it that God made you to be or do, that fills you with the sense of God’s pleasure in you? What fills your heart with joy? … which is one of the sure marks that it is a place or an activity where you are catching a glimpse of God—an experience of God. Running with perseverance doesn’t have to mean feeling like the sprinter who has suddenly been forced to run the marathon. Where do your joy and God’s joy intersect? Perhaps the pursuit and practice of that could be our third Lenten discipline.

Why not make this Lent a time when we pursue an experience of God with the ardor of a lover? Why not assume that we already have all the tools we need to make this possible? A great cloud of witnesses, in the sacred pages of scripture and in the sacred pages of our own lives… a real sense of lightness from the weight of sin and doubt we can lay down and walk away from… a conviction that the call to the life of faith is also a call to find the joy God has in store for us. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Cambridge and Boston: Cowley Publications, 1993), 47.

Shining Faces: Sermon on Exodus 34:29-35

So, no, I don't talk about the film "The Shining" in this sermon. Though there was an early draft that included a line about being chased through the hallways of the Overlook Motel by a madman... as an example of things that might make your face shine. Yeah. Sanity prevailed.

~~~

I want to talk to you this morning about joy. And terror. I want to talk to you about the kinds of things that make our faces shine, those moments when we think our hearts will burst, they are so full: We catch sight of someone we love across a crowded room. Someone we respect assesses our work and gives us a hearty “Well done.” Someone places our child in our arms for the first time. Of course, our faces can shine for other reasons as well. We can have shining faces as a result of terror. Things like: We are skiing down the grand slalom at speeds approaching 60 miles/ hour. We are confronted by someone who is very angry. Or even this: someone places our child in our arms for the first time. When we talk of shining faces, we are usually speaking of those moments when we experience the extremes of what it is to be human, which, also, sometimes, are the moments when we are closest to an experience of the divine. We call these mountaintop experiences.

“Moses came down from Mount Sinai. As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God” [Exodus 34:29]. Why exactly was Moses’ face shining? Was it joy or terror or some potent mixture of the two? My seminary professor of Old Testament talked about the way the Israelites understood the holiness of God. He called it radioactive—powerful and terrifying, something most sensible people wanted to stay far away from. Like the lion Aslan in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” God is good, but God is not safe. We can expect to come away from encounters with God altered. We can expect to be filled with fear, even as we’re filled with joy. (Kind of like falling in love.)

This is actually the second time Moses has come down from the mountain bearing the tablets of the covenant. Do you happen to remember what happened the first time he came down? The first time he found the people had formed a calf out of gold they had collected from one another and melted down, and they were worshipping that thing as a god. What could be safer and more controllable than a make-it-yourself god, handcrafted from grandma’s jewelry? After that fiasco, Moses returns to the mountaintop and finds that God is willing to give the law again, anew, and sends Moses back down… but this time, Moses’ face is changed. It is shining. Now, I ask again, why is it shining? Is it joy? Is it terror? Or is it some potent mixture of the two? Whatever the reason, we can know one thing: this God whom Moses encounters is not safe, not controllable. That’s why the people stay away from Moses for a while: they can see on his face evidence of the terrifying power of the God they worship. Ultimately, Moses decides to veil his face after these encounters, so that the people won’t be disturbed by his new look.

I imagine it might have been tempting for Moses to just leave the recalcitrant Israelites behind, and simply remain up on that mountain with God. Why not stay there, in deep communion with the Holy One, forever and ever? No more melted bracelets to deal with, no more god-as-craft-project. Well, I imagine he didn’t because that is not what God calls Moses to do, or calls us to do. God gives Moses the covenant and sends him back down the mountain, and in doing that, God claims the people as God’s own. God gives Moses the covenant and sends him back down the mountain, so that the people can have the guidance they need to live in harmony with one another and with God. God always sends us back down the mountain again, because the mountaintop serves the purposes of the valley and the plain. Moses’ shining face has a purpose, and that is to convey the holiness of God to the people in a usable form: the laws and promises and commitments that will bind them together as God’s people, forever.

There is joy and there is terror in the mountaintop experiences of our lives, those moments when, for better or for worse, we bind ourselves to other human beings so that, together, we might carry out God’s purposes. Sometimes we do these things very formally: we dress in special clothing, and there are officiants presiding over the events, and someone takes pictures. Sometimes we do these things quietly and without fanfare, with words unspoken but still clearly understood. And the challenge, always, is to walk the middle path between the joy and the terror of these commitments, knowing that these experiences are no more controllable or safe than God is. Thank God, that God promises to be there with us, to help us, to see us through.

In a few moments we will be inviting a young couple to bring their daughter to the baptismal font. This is one of those moments, for this couple. They have already bound their lives together with one another and their baby daughter, and now they take steps to ensure that her life is inextricably woven together with that of the church, the body of Christ. But the fearful and joyous mystery for them and for us is that Christ has already come down the mountain to claim this child for his own. In a sense, in presenting their daughter for baptism, this couple simply acknowledges the work God has already begun in her. Not to mention the work God has already begun in all of us, preparing us for this newest member of Christ’s body. We are already, every one of us, bound together for the work Christ calls us to do. God has already committed us into one another’s care. Today is the day we recognize and celebrate that commitment.

This is the kind of day that makes all our faces shine. Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. Let every shining face we meet remind us that God binds us together in community, God entrusts us into one another’s care, and God walks beside us as we walk with one another. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Icon: Moses and the Burning Bush, found at Christ in the Mountains.