Colonial Church Blogma Dogma

The Fish Story

2012-01-24T09:05:00.001-06:00

Jonah 1

by Daniel Harrell

Epiphany, whichcommemorates the first revelation of Jesus to Gentiles (the Gentiles in thiscase being the magi), is the perfect time of the year to think about outreachand mission. Inasmuch Jesus was sent to the world as the embodiment of God, sothe church is sent as the embodiment of Jesus to love and to serve and to growhis kingdom. Tonight at our potluck dinner we’re excited to share a newoutreach initiative we’re thinking about. Outreach is the only reason that thechurch remains on earth. Everything else we do is just a preview of heaven. Granted,the earthbound nature of mission does make it rough. It was deadly forJesus—and for much of the New Testament church and many Christians since. Askany missionary, and if they’re honest, they’ll have all kinds of adversity totell you about. The same goes for any Christian who steps it up and steps outfor the sake of the gospel. Just try to do what Jesus says: love an enemy,serve the poor, speak the truth, share the gospel, forgive an abuser, give awaymoney, fight for justice—you’ll find it can be a tough way to live.

It was hard for the OldTestament prophets too. Moses got blasted constantly by his own people. Elijahwas hunted down by the government and put on a hit list. Jeremiah was exiled toBabylon. Daniel got tossed into a lions’ den. No wonder that when the word ofthe Lord came to Jonah he ran for his life. God told him to go at once toNineveh and forecast its doom on account of their wickedness. Nineveh was thecapital of Assyria, the ancient nemesis of Israel’s northern kingdom. Sort oflike Green Bay is to Minneapolis. Any good Hebrew would have delighted in theirdownfall, just as every good Vikings fan relished the fall of the Packers lastSunday. But Jonah said no. Admittedly, if my intent is to preach about missionand outreach, Jonah is an odd choice. Consider it a bit of unfinished waterbusiness—if you’ll recall all those sermons last fall. I did leave Jonah’swatery adventure out of the rotation. Consider it also a foretaste of Easter.Comparing himself to Jonah, Jesus said: “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly ofthe great fish, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be inthe heart of the earth.”

Given Jonah’s disobedience and cowardice, it is strange to haveJesus make the comparison. Jonah reminds me more of that cruise ship captain inthe news this week. Reportedly wanting to show off his $450M ocean liner to gawkerson shore, he steered off course, hit a reef and ruptured the hull of his ship.As water gushed in and the boat listed, passengers panicked including thecaptain who abandoned ship for the safety of a lifeboat. Or as he explained it,he accidently tripped and fell into alifeboat when the ship tipped to its side. A furious Coast Guard officerradioed the captain to get his butt back on board—using an Italian bad wordthat is now available all across the country on handbags and espresso cups. OneItalian newspaper claimed the episode contrasted the “two souls of Italy” —oneof them represented by a “cowardly fellow who flees his own responsibilities,both as a man and as an official” and the other by a man who works to get thecoward to do his job.

Jonah is the only OldTestament prophet to flee his responsibility. The only one to refuse anassignment. The only prophet to reject a direct command from God. Like anemployee who skips out early to avoid an unwelcome assignment, or a soldier whogoes AWOL to avoid following an order, Jonah flees the word of the Lord. He runsin the opposite direction from Nineveh to the seaside city of Joppa where hefinds what was known as a “Tarshish ship,” the ancient equivalent to a modernday ocean liner. We read that Jonah “paid his fare”, but the Hebrew actuallysays he “paid her fare,” meaning hebought the whole boat. He didn’t want this cruise ship making any stops alongthe way. Of course being a prophet and knowing the Lord as he did, it’s difficultto imagine where Jonah thought he could hide. As the Psalmist sings, “Where can I go from your spirit?Or where can I flee from your presence? … If I take the wings of the morningand settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there… your hand shall holdme fast.” What for most reads as a psalm of consolation was for Jonah a psalmof calamity. He knew he was doomed.

Like any defied boss or disobeyed commander, the Lord couldnot countenance such insubordination on the part of his prophet. So God hurled a hurricane at Jonah’s boat, so furiouslythat the experienced sailors on board feared for their lives. They started hurling cargo overboard and praying toevery god they could think of. Jonah, meanwhile, was somehow sleeping belowdeck. The picture reminds me of the young son of friends who would fall fastasleep every Fourth of July once the fireworks commenced. It was how he dealtwith the stress. It also reminds me of Jesus asleep in a boat as a storm ragedand threatened to sink his disciples—experienced sailors too. Like the sailorswith Jonah, the disciples screamed at Jesus demanding to know why he didn’t seemto care that they drowned. What did they expect Jesus to do? The same thing thesailors and their captain expected from Jonah: “Wake up! Say a prayer! Maybeyour God will spare us a thought so that we do not perish.” Of course, Jonah,like Jesus, knew exactly how to stop the storm—Jesus much more directly, ofcourse. This may also explain why each slept so soundly.

In ancient times bad weather was always somebody’s fault,so the sailors drew straws to see who was to blame. Once Jonah drew the short one,the sailors pounced on him for corroborating evidence: “Why has this awful storm come down on us?” they demanded.“Who are you? What is your line of work? What country are you from? What isyour nationality?” Jonah tells him he’s a Hebrew prophet. That he works for theGod of heaven who created the sea and the land. And that he’s shirking hiswork. Leaving the scene. Hopping a lifeboat. Gone AWOL. Hearing this, thesailors became even more afraid. “What have you done?!” they shriek. You workfor the God who made the ocean and you think you can escape God on the ocean?What kind of dumb prophet are you? They demand to know how he plans to placatehis God, and Jonah tells them to throw him overboard. And what, make thesailors guilty of murder on top of harboring a fugitive? I always wonder whyJonah didn’t just dive in himself. But another way to read this is for Jonah tosay, “Hand me over to the Lord.” Jonah finally surrenders.

Why couldn’t Jonah havejust had them turn the boat around and take him to Nineveh? Wouldn’t that havemade God happy? Like when Jesus tells that parable about two sons, each directedto go work the vineyard by their father. One son says yes, but then he doesn’tgo. The other son says no, but then changes his mind and obeys. “Which of the two did the will of his father?” Jesus asked.The answer was the second son, whom Jesus commends. But apparently Jonahwould rather die than change his mind and obey. The author has yet to revealwhy—though if you’re curious you can skip ahead to chapter 4. Jonah says that he worships the Lord,but his actions betray a duplicity. The contrasting behavior of the godlesssailors further the indictment. They pray while Jonah sleeps. They fear theLord, Jonah rejects the Lord. The sailors are willing to do whatever God wants,as soon as they can figure it out. Jonah knows exactly what God wants, butcannot stand to be a part of it.

I was sharing with the Friday Morning Men’s Group this weekhow I ended up as a minister. I heard the call at a fraternity party of allplaces. But then again Jesus was something of a party guy. I can’t exactly say whathappened. I hadn’t been drinking. I just got this sense that ministry was forme. I confirmed the notion with a couple of friends and mentors, and by thenext afternoon had dropped my business major and picked up religion and Greek. Myfraternity brothers were horrified. They’d thought me to be rather normal. Butinstead I was throwing away a budding and creative career in graphic design andmarketing for sake of pot luck suppers and committee meetings? They did have apoint. You don’t have to go to seminary or work in a church to do the work ofthe Lord. If anything, the Kingdom of God could probably do more, missionallyspeaking, with fewer pastors and more Christians viewing themselves as“ministers” in other vocations. As the apostle Paul exhorts us, “Whatever youdo, work at it with all your heart, working for the Lord and not for people.”When our jobs are done before God, they have their own integrity apart fromanything else they might accomplish, for the labor itself brings glory to theLord. I could do whatever career I wanted for the Lord. Had I been drinking?People do make a lot of decisions when in their 20s that we really shouldn’t beallowed to make.

Maybe my fraternity brothers were right. So I delayed goingto seminary, just to be sure. I could still do plenty of ministry in themeantime. In fact, I’d been invited to lead a small group as part of a Christianfellowship conference. Unfortunately, the conference fell on the same weekendas my university graduation. But the girl I was dating was going to theconference, and delaying seminary was going to give me more time to spend withher. So I decided to have the university just mail me my diploma. My parentstried to talk me out of it; said they at least deserved a moment in the sun forputting me through school, but I’d made up my mind. Besides, in addition tobecoming a pastor, God also told me that this woman could be the one. So my mommade me a cake with a little plastic graduate figurine on top and I ate a pieceand that was basically it.

Up at the conference, thewoman for me decided I wasn’t for her. I think she said God told her that. Shewas up for marrying an ad exec, but what woman in her right mind would ever optto be a preacher’s wife? Rejected, I went back home to live with my parents whoinformed me that if I was going to live with them I would need to pay rent. Withextra money each week if I wanted laundry. So now I needed to make some money. Itried my hand at the only thing I could find: selling dictionaries and Biblestory books door-to-door.

My first day on the job Icalled on a mobile home and was greeted by this lowly housewife who politely agreedto hear my pitch. I was in the middle of it when her husband drove up in hispick-up, saw my car, came bursting through the door, caught me showingdictionaries to his wife and went full vent into a violent and jealous rampage.“I oughta kill you,” he shouted. He let loose such a string a expletives that Icouldn’t help but suggest he might like one of my dictionaries, just to amendhis vocabulary. Instead he went for his shotgun which was my cue to leave. Needlessto say I didn’t sell a single book. I drove home to discover that the postmanhad unceremoniously delivered my college diploma into our mailbox. I pulled itout and stared at it and then it hit me: the best years of my life were nowover. College was finished, my girlfriend was gone, my parents were charging merent, my friends had moved on to lucrative careers while I had crazy husbandspointing shotguns at me, a pathetic peddler of books trying to make money for seminaryin order to become a minister. Just throw me overboard and put us all out ofour misery.

The sailors finallyconcede, but not without first praying to the Lord they’d never met and begginghim not to hold this deed against them. Again, the pagan sailors display morereverence than Israel’s prophet. “Do not make us guilty of innocent blood;” they pray, “for it is you, O LORD, who has done as it pleasedyou.” Jonah knew this too. The sailors pitched him overboard and the stormstopped. Like with the disciples in the boat with Jesus: the storm terrified themall right, but Jesus stopping the stormscared the crap out them. Like the disciples, I imagine these sailors turningwhite as sheets, their eyes a-bug and their mouths agape as they say,“Oh-my-God!” Which really is the point of both stories.

And yet despite Jonah’sdisobedience, God won’t let him drown. Instead, “the LORD provided a huge fishto swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days andthree nights.” If the book ended here, you’d conclude that “to swallow” is thesame as “to eat.” It wasn’t good enough for disobedient Jonah to drown. Godwanted him digested too. But knowing the rest of the story, we know that whatlooked like Jonah’s demise was in fact his salvation. Which is why Jesus tieshis own death to this story. And also why early Christians used the fish as asign of their faith and stuck fish shaped bumper stickers on the back of theirburros. Jesus called his resurrection the “sign of Jonah.” Even though Jonahrejected the Lord and disobeyed his commands, God saved him anyway. We’re leftwith this question: If salvation was the outcome of Jonah’s disobedience, whatwill things be like when he finally decides to obey?

For me it meant finallygetting to seminary and into ministry where despite plenty of hardship, I’vecome out with more than my share of joy. I’m very grateful man for whom God hasgranted all sorts of grace as I’ve shared the lives of his people in this greatmission we know as the church.

Aswe will see with Jonah, the grace that saves us does not absolve us ofresponsibility. But neither does it bully us into obedience. I like how thefifteenth century mystic, Julian of Norwich envisioned grace as courtesy rather than coercion; as invitation rather thanimposition. “Grace works with mercy,” she said, “by lifting up, rewarding, endlesslysurpassing all that our loving and our travail deserves, spreading abroad andmaking plain the high abundance and largesse of God’s royal Lordship in hismarvelous courtesy. … ” she said, “He comes to us, to the lowest part ofour need. For he despises nothing of what he has made. … he surrounds us sotenderly while we are yet in our sins.” And even when we, like Jonah refuse theembrace, grace still surrounds us like a mighty ocean, until finally, graceswallows us whole and we really can’t refuse it anymore.

About That Widow's Mite

2012-01-12T09:39:00.000-06:00

Mark 12:41-44

by Daniel Harrell

Epiphany, whichfor church calendar devotees commemorates the Magi’s visit to Bethlehem notonly stretches out Christmas (falling as it does on January 6), buthistorically ranks right up there in importance with Easter and Pentecost.Epiphany was celebrated not because three kings or wise men (actually we haveno idea how many there were) traversed afar. Epiphany was celebrated becausethe Magi were not Jewish. Theirmeeting Jesus constituted the first revelation of Christ to Gentiles. This isof monumental importance to the Church because the church grew to be comprisedalmost totally of Gentiles, in fulfillment, ironically, of Old Testamentprophecy. That the Magi bore extravagant gifts of worship to Christ signifiedtheir immense gratitude to God for reaching out beyond the bounds of Israel’scovenant to include even them. When it comes down to it, for all Christians ourgiving is ultimately an act of gratitude and worship. We see it with the Magi,we see it presumably with thissacrificial gift from a destitute widow who drops two copper coins in theTemple treasury.

The familiar account of the widow’stwo coins—or as the King James renders it, the widow’s mite—has become so familiar because of its frequent use asa shining example of sacrificial giving. Unlike the pompous rich folks in theTemple who sauntered up to the offering box and dumped over gratuitous sums ofcash out of their surplus, this poor widow gave everything she had to live on.Jesus calls attention to her sacrifice presumablybecause that’s how we should all act when it comes to our money. Presumably she exemplifies Jesus’teaching elsewhere about loving the Lord with all thatyou have; about how you can’t serve both God and money, about how wherever youput your treasure is where your heart is, about how you’re not supposed toworry about what you eat or wear because God will provide for your needs, abouthow the kingdom of God belongs to the poor and how if anyone wants to follow Jesus you have to denyyourself and lose your life to do it. It’s not that the widow’s two cents were really going tohelp the church make budget, but if everybody would follow her example, churchfinances would be in spectacular shape. It’s what makes this passage such afavorite for Stewardship Sundays.

Of course tofollow the widow’s example would make your own personal finances a spectacular mess.Which is why I keep saying presumably inregard to the widow’s mite. Is destitutepoverty for all what Jesus intends? Some might say yes. After all, in anotherpassage from Mark that often gets pulled out for Stewardship Sundays, Jesustells a rich man, “Go, sell what you own, andgive the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come,follow me.” It interesting to note, however, that Jesus does tell the rich manto give it all to the poor, not tothe church. So much for universal destitution. And so much for church stewardship.Not that it matters. The rich man was so shocked by Jesus he walked away withoutgiving anything. He was not going tosell all his possessions to follow Jesus. That was too hard to do. A lot harderthan it was for the poor widow. After all, two cents didn’t buy much more then than it does now.Why not give it all?

It’s like the retiree down to her finalquarter in Vegas. She might as well take one last shot at the slots. Maybeshe’ll hit the jackpot. Or better, like the person at the end of her rope whofigures she might as well give God one last shot. What more does she have tolose? Jesus did say, “If God so clothes thegrass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven,will he not much more clothe you—O ye of little faith?” Fine, I’ll show alittle faith. Let’s see what God can do. Who knows, maybe once she got backoutside, she discovered a whole pocketful of money—like Jesus miraculously madeappear in that fish’s mouth when he needed cash to pay his own taxes. Or maybethat rich man had a change of heart and decided to give all his money to heranyway.

You know,when you actually read this morning’s passage, you’ll see that Jesus doesn’texactly approve the poor widow’ssacrificial gift. All he says is that she “put in more than all those whocontributed out of their abundance” because “she put in all she had to liveon.” Was this a good thing? Most commentators insist that the her simple pietywas a powerful contrast to the scribe’s pomposity and to the rich people’s moneyparade. Surely Jesus approved. The children’s version of the widow’s mite that Dawnand I read to our four-year-old Violet concludes, “This story shows what ourGod thinks about the gifts we bring/ To help our church and missions too, tohonor Christ the king.” The children’s version goes so far as to have the nowdestitute widow holding her dependent child by the hand—a child who will nowhave to go without food because her mother gave their last dime to the church. Wasthis what Jesus intends?

Flip back fivechapters in Mark and you’ll find Jesus letting loose a scathing indictmentagainst the scribes and Pharisees for the way they hoodwinked poor people intogiving when their own personal needs or the needs of their families were atstake. Jesus says, “Moses gave you this law from God: ‘Honor your father andmother,’ and ‘Anyone who speaks disrespectfully of father or mother must be putto death.’ But you say it is allright for people to say to their parents, ‘Sorry, I can’t help you. For I havevowed to give to God what I would have given to you.’ In this way, you let themdisregard their needy parents. And so you cancel the word of God in order tohand down your own tradition. And this is only one example among many others.”

You don’t evenhave to go back five chapters to see how mad all this makes Jesus. You don’teven have to go back five verses. Look at the context for the widow’s mite—bothhere and in Luke where the story also appears—and what you discover is it followsdirectly on the heels of Jesus lambasting the scribes and Pharisees again, thistime for bilking poor women out of whatever dower they inherit upon theirhusband’s deaths. “Beware of these teachers of religious law!” Jesus warned, “Forthey like to parade around in flowing robes and receive respectful greetings asthey walk in the marketplaces. And how they love the seats of honor in churchand the head table at banquets. Yet they shamelessly devour widows’ houses,cheating them out of their property, and then pretend to be pious by makinglong prayers in public. Because of this, they will receive the greatercondemnation.” Here in Mark and in Luke, Jesus condemns ministers for “devouringwidows’ houses” and then points outthe widow, a severely disadvantaged and vulnerable member in ancient Jewish society.All she has left to her name is two cents which she gives entirely to the Temple—doingwhat she thought she was supposed to do because that’s what the teachers of thelaw told her to do. Her house has now been completely devoured. It’s like theelderly grandmother of a friend of mine who was conned into handing over mostof her social security check each month to some huckster preacher she watchedon TV because he said he was doing God’s work. She said, “He preached that if Itruly believed I should give all my money to his ministry and I’d be blessed.” Howcould Jesus ever approve of that?

Far from providing a pious contrast tothe pompous conduct of the scribes and the rich; this story darkly illustratesof the dangers of misguided devotion (thanks to Addison Wright for insights). The vulnerable widow was swindled by thereligious leaders to donate as she does. Jesus condemns the ill-advised valuesthat motivated her action, and he condemns the people who conditioned her to doit. Read on in the verses immediately afterthis and Jesus condemns theentire Temple system, labeling it corrupt and doomed to destruction. The disciplesmarvel at the magnificence of the Temple itself—which people’s offerings hadgone to construct and maintain. They tell Jesus to check out the impressivestones and the beautiful architecture, to which Jesus replies, “Yes, look atthese great buildings. They will all be completely demolished. Not one stonewill be left on top of another!” How is it possible to feel inspired by thewidow’s offering now? Not only was her contribution totally foolish, thanks toher being manipulated by the ministers, but given the future of the Templeitself, her gift was a total waste.

Obviously this has turned into a trainwreck of stewardship sermon. How to salvage it? Let me try by suggesting to youwhat may in fact be the main points of this passage; namely, four reasons notto give or pledge any of your money to this church:

First: If your giving is in any way coercedor manipulated by ministers who have every motivation to manipulate you sinceour salaries are paid by your generosity, do not give or pledge any of yourmoney to this church.

Second: If your giving is in any way motivatedby a misguided sense of religious guilt or shame or fear whereby you worry thatGod will condemn you harshly for not forking over enough, do not give or pledgeany of your money to this church.

Third: If your giving in any way threatensyour ability to feed your family, pay your bills or keep a roof over your head,do not give or pledge any of your money to this church.

And finally: If your giving in any way comeswith any implicit strings attached, or if by giving you seek recognition orapplause for being such a generous person, do not give or pledge any of yourmoney to this church. The church does not want your money—at least we’re notsupposed to, not under circumstances or motivations like these.

There’s this beautiful stonecongregational church near Boston that I used to bike past all the time. It’scalled Wellesley Hills Congregational Church, and I was reading about they hadlaunched a recent stewardship campaign in order to raise $100,000 to renovatetheir rundown Sunday School space for kids. Their pastor, Matt Fitzgerald, turns out to be a Minnesota native. He grew up in Duluth and livedfor many years in the Twin Cities with his family and is familiar with ColonialChurch. I found this out after emailing him on the heels of reading his story. Asthe stewardship committee stuffed the last pledge card and licked the finalstewardship campaign envelope to go in the mail, a knock came at the officedoor. It was a Hollywood movie scout. Having seen their beautiful church, hewas ready to give them $10K to shut down for three days so that his companycould film a wedding scene from an upcoming Adam Sandler movie. The movie plotinvolved a teenager who gets his schoolteacher pregnant with the wedding scene takingplace several years later, when the offspring of this illicit union is a grownman getting married. The scene had something to do with the guy punching aguest who wouldn’t shut off his cell phone or something. Or maybe the ministerpunched him, I don’t know.

Anyway, Matt wrote how he had seenenough Adam Sandler movies to know they can be pretty funny sometimes, if notpretty ridiculous. And making space for that particular kind of ridiculousnessin his somewhat stodgy sanctuary did make him smile a bit. Not only that, but $10Kwould get the stewardship campaign off to a nice start. It’s not like they’d befilming on a Sunday. So sure, he thought about saying yes. But then heremembered what a pain it was to rent out the church for anything— there were always spills, odd requests, demanding guestsand insurance riders to worry about. All the clean up afterwards. At best hischurch was good at being a church—they didn’t do much else that well, certainlynot as a site of a major motion picture. For better or worse, Matt describedhis church as a classic mainline, main-street, tall-steeple,in-bed-with-the-larger-culture kind of place. But he couldn’t see his church asa Hollywood kind of place. “I am not the sort of Christian who would boycott amovie (I might even wind up watching this one),” he wrote. “And we could usethe money. But the church I serve is not mine, and I found myself wanting toprotect its true owner from the world.” He said no.

So the Hollywood scout upped hisoffer to $60K. That’s $20K per day just to use the building.

Now according to congregationalpolity a pastor has the authority to turn down money, but Matt wasn’t sure he hadthe authority to turn down this muchmoney. So he called a Congregational Meeting. At the meeting, most of thecongregation turned out to be pragmatic types—with a few Adam Sandler fans toboot. They thought it would be fine to take the money. Congregationalists don’tbelieve the church to be the building. It’s the people. Besides, times weretight. This unexpected windfall would be a huge help to the kids of the church.They’d get a brand new Sunday School wing. And the renovation would make thatpart as beautiful as the rest of the building. Why look a gift horse in themouth?

However a small number of themembers, five to be exact, thought the gift horse looked more like a wolf insheep’s clothing. They felt very strongly that no matter how lightly thetreatment might be, their church should not be involved in a story that getslaughs from the sexual exploitation of an adolescent. The Congregation Meeting wentround and round about this for several hours, desiring to reach a consensuswhich for Congregationalists signals the confirmation of the Holy Spirit.Unfortunately they weren’t getting confirmation. And it appeared as if theywould have to settle for a lack of consensus—albeit one with a nice payoff. Bymajority rule, they’d take the money and try to patch things up with the peoplewho were offended afterwards.

But just then one of the deacons, onewho supported taking the money, stood up and said, “Look—it seems as if sayingyes to this offer is going to hurt some members of our congregation. Not mostpeople. Obviously not the majority. But some people. So I guess the questionisn’t about a movie. It’s about us. Is $60,000 worth hurting a part of our community?”

Five minutes later the congregationvoted unanimously to turn down the Hollywood offer even though most of themthought it was OK to accept it. They went from polarized to selfless in amatter of seconds. Matt the minister wrote, “I have mouthed unanswered prayersinviting Jesus to join our meetings dozens of times. I have interrupted agendasto speak confidently about his presence when he is nowhere to be found. Thistime I kept my mouth shut, and he walked right in.”

Finishing Work

2012-01-03T09:06:00.002-06:00

Philippians 1:3-12

by Daniel Harrell

Happy New Year. We beginagain. And Merry Christmas too! Clearly with the hymns we’ve sung this morningwe are still officially in Christmas. Eight maids-a-milking to be exact.According to the church calendar, Christmas runs until January 5, which I thinkis great since Christmas is an exponentially better holiday once you get past December25. It’s been nice not to having to travel this year—though we did miss timewith our families back east. A number of you were worried about that. You’d askwhat we were doing for Christmas, and we’d reply how we were just staying put.You’d then assume that meant we had family coming out here, but we’d say nope,just us. The something like a mild panic would appear across your face. “Canyou have Christmas without family?” And then, uh-oh, “does this mean we shouldinvite the Reverend over to our house for Christmas?” I understand the panic.Having the Reverend show up at your house for Christmas dinner is not likehaving Santa Claus. You have to be on your best behavior for both of us but atleast Santa brings presents.

Had we traveled to North Carolinawhere my family abides, we would have gathered at my grandmother’s house forsome fine, gut-busting southern cooking. The highlight would have been mygrandmother’s roast turkey and cornbread dressing soaked in a sweet lard-enrichedgravy. Like drinking butter only better. You could feel your arteries hardenwith every morsel. It’s good eating. As it was we stayed here and as I need mesome roasted something for Christmas to be Christmas, I roasted a goose that Ishot out by the pond here (I’m kidding about that last part). If you’ve everroasted a goose you know that it puts off a lot of fat—making for some seriousgravy—just like my grandmother’s. We put out an all call on Facebook and aroundthe church and delightfully ended up with two other Christmas-orphaned familiesat our table. They ate up that goose too—especially the ten-year-old boy who didhis best impression of Tiny Tim. I’m surprised he didn’t sprout feathers givenall the poultry he consumed.

Dawn and I were talking about howmuch we enjoyed this entire Christmas season—the gatherings, the beautifulchurch services, the lights, even the lack of snow. It was just like NorthCarolina. And yet I’m still amazed with how abruptly everything coems to a haltevery December 26. “Joy to the world” and then back to work. Everybody startsfretting about year end finances and gift returns and getting to all thosethings you put off until “after the holidays.” There’s some momentary hope fora new year—except that you have to make resolutions and try to keep them morethan a week. And of course the Iowa Caucuses are on Tuesday. So much for peaceon earth. Was this what it was like that first Christmas?

Take the shepherds. Didyou ever wonder what happened to them after the herald angels sang and they gotback from the manger? What do you do once you’ve seen a Messiah? Luke tells usthey ran to town and amazed everyone with their report, but afterwards wepresume they went back to their fields to keep watch over their flocks by nightagain. There wouldn’t be much action on the Messiah front for another thirtyyears. Were they discouraged? Concerned? Worried that they had imagined thewhole thing? Christmas can sometimes be that way. Which is why it’s good thatthere’s a verse in the Bible like Philippians 1:6—“theone who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day ofJesus Christ.”

It’s one of the best loved verses of Scripture. I remember receivinga framed, cross-stitched rendition of Philippians 1:6 many years ago. Itwas crafted for me by an old girlfriend as her way (I think) of reminding methat I had plenty of room for improvement. It’s a great verse for New Year’s Day. January 1^stdraws out our deep longing for the future and a commitment to change, to workharder to make it happen this time or fix it so it won’t happen again. And yethaving tried and failed so many times, most of us refrain from New Year’s resolutionsbecause we know we can’t keep them. Better to just avoid the disappointment. Butaccording to Philippians 1:6 you don’t have to try so hard anymore. God’s doingall the work. He has you covered.

Paul embedded this verse within anextended salutation wherein he thanks the Philippians for their monetarysupport. He describes this support as their sharing or “partnership” in thegospel, a translation of the Greek word koinoniawhich we typically translate as fellowship.Koinonia means to have all things incommon; it’s where we get words like community and communion. Koinonia was epitomized in the book of Actschurch where no one had any tangible needs because everything was communallyshared. In this way fellowship is connected to stewardship, which we willemphasize next Sunday. Remember to bear your pledge cards for 2012 to church aswe partner in the gospel once again together as a community. We will givebecause God gave to us. He brought us into community with himself asparticipants in the gospel of grace and if you have truly experienced grace,then you know how impossible it is to hoard it. You have to give it away. Paulprays for the Philippians that their love and grace may overflow more and more.Grace is what makes the church the church.

The koinonia of Philippians 1 is certainly economic. The life andmission of the church always requires financial support, therefore God spurs our givinguntil his return on “the day of Jesus Christ.” However, for Paul, the only NewTestament author who uses the word koinonia,partnership or community also goes beyond resource sharing. For Paul any koinonia of material resources derivedfrom a deeper koinonia of Spirit. InGalatians, Paul speaks of the right hand of fellowship (koinonia), which we extend to each other whenever we pass the peace.More than a handshake, the right hand of koinoniatangibly acknowledges our common bond through the Holy Spirit. In 1Corinthians, Paul speaks of communion as our koinonia in the body and blood of Jesus. More than bread and wine,communion tangibly acknowledges our fellowship in Jesus’ death and resurrection:His dying and rising will be our dying and rising too. No longer fearful of anycondemnation because of our sin, the communion table assures us that we willrise to feast with Jesus as sure as eating my grandmother’s turkey on ChristmasEve. God who began his good work in us will get it done.

Specifically described as God’sgood work yet to be completed, Paul’s emphasis is plainly on the future. Hisreference is to God’s saving work, whichwe all know takes a lifetime. Christians might customarily speak of somebody getting saved, but in reality we’re justas much people in the process of beingsaved. Like Peter who sank when he tried to walk on the open sea, our troublesand doubts still overwhelm us and drag us down too.

Paul penned Philippians from aprison cell, with no guarantee of earthly release. Which is why he describedGod’s good work as not yet completed. But unlike our own familiarity withunfinished work, there’s no question that God will not finish what he started. Godoperates from the future where the end has already happened. His good work is already a good job to be fullyrevealed on the day Christ comes back. His good work is as good as done.The focus of Christian hope is not on the future but on God for whom the future is present; the focus is not our creaturelydestiny but on the God who destinesus; we no longer worry about the end, but trust in the God who draws us toward hisglorious ends. This is all that really matters, Paul writes. Our hope for acertain future makes the present immensely livable.

So instead of spending the rest ofyour New Year’s Day trying to make resolutions you know that you’ll break, trustGod instead. Practice your resolutions as if they’re already kept. Paulencourages the Philippians and us to be pure and blameless not because we couldif they tried, but because in Christ we already are. This is true even when wespectacularly fail because then we get to show what genuine repentance andresurrection look like. To be Christian is not to be flawless, but honest andhumble and brave and full of grace.

God is the one who begana good work among us and it is God who will bring it to completion. Christian hope is based on his work inus, not on ourselves or our own ability. Christian hope fosters no illusions ofhuman self-improvement. As opposed to optimists who look on the bright side anddeny the effects of evil and sin, Christian hope understands that any real hope cannot found itself upon humanpotential or wishful thinking. Christian hope sees the effects of evil and sinfor the tragedies they are, but then translates them into what they really are by the power of the cross. Suffering,rather than meaningless pain or just desserts, translates into meaningful redemptionand reinforced character. Death, rather than a terrifying end to be feared, becomesthe gateway to life. Christian weaves life’s tragedies into the necessarypattern of resurrection, pointing toward that day, when by grace, all things willbe made new.

And because God will do this, thegood end is as sure as my grandmother’s turkey on Christmas Eve—even when I’mnot there to enjoy it. Actually it’s even surer than that. The fact is, mygrandmother stopped roasting turkeys a few Christmases ago. After 50-someChristmases, she turned 80 and decided she was tired frankly of cooking. Thatfirst year without her turkey and dressing was spent at my aunt’s housefeasting on fried chicken wings and cold shrimp and pork sausage balls. Iunderstood, but I was really disappointed. Christmas just wasn’t the samewithout a big bird from the oven. So when Dawn and I got back to Boston, thefirst order of business was a trip to the grocery store. I needed me some roastedsomething for Christmas to be Christmas.

Since we were still technically in Christmas when we returned, liketoday, there was still time. However when I went to the poultry case, all theystocked were these 20 pound monster turkeys which would have meant 10 pounds ofmeat per person (that’s me and Dawn, Violet thinks turkey are fowl—ba-ba-boom).But turkey was tradition and the grocery store was running a special ($7 offwith my shopping card), so I figured why not? I lugged the bird to thecheck-out line and watched to see the discount beep on the screen above thecash register, you know the one that displays your “savings” once they scanyour card. However the turkey discount never appeared. So I called thecashier’s attention to this discrepancy and showed her the tag on the turkey,fully expecting to receive the $7 discount to which I was entitled. She said,“You know what this means?” Sure, I said, it means I get $7 off my turkeyanyway. “No,” she informed me, “if it’s notin the scanner it means you get it forfree!” Wow! Merry Christmas! I gave her a high-five and left with a totallyunexpected, unmerited free 20-pound bird just like Scrooge’s gift to theCratchets on Christmas morning.

OK, so obviously this is anexperience in search of something to illustrate, so here it is: God who beganHis good work among us will carry it to completion by the day of Christ Jesusas sure as turkey at Christmas however that turkey shows up. Because it is Godwho does it, it does get done. But because it is God who does it, it doesn’t alwaysget done is ways you expect. It gets done through suffering and death, throughtragedies and troubles, through endings that transform into beginnings, throughgrace you receive though you never deserve it. God always finishes what hestarts and therefore we confidently hope. Our koinonia in the body and blood of Jesus points to our koinonia in Christ’s death andresurrection as well as our koinoniain a free Christmas feast that promises to last into eternity.

River of Life

2011-12-14T11:18:00.002-06:00

Revelation 22:1-17

by Daniel Harrell

Advent, meaning coming or arrival first appeared in church liturgies not as a Christmas ramp-up, but as a Judgment Day wake-up. By setting its sights on Jesus’ second coming instead of his first, Advent affirms that line in the Creed where Jesus “will come to judge the living and the dead.” Christ will come to right the wrongs of injustice and exalt the humble. Christ will come and make all things new. Advent counters the rampant despair and cynicism common to life in an unjust world, while at the same time fighting against any backsliding and backbiting common among Christians who’ve decided that Jesus isn’t really paying attention. “Keep awake,” he warned in the gospels, “for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. If the owner of a house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

Not that Jesus is coming back as a burglar—just unexpectedly like one. And he’s coming back soon, he said—three times in this chapter of Revelation alone. But given the delay, some 2000 years and counting, some prefer to translate Jesus as saying, “I am coming back quickly,” to emphasize the suddenness over the soonness. Any talk of Jesus coming back at all inevitably leads to Revelation, a book everyone says they want to read until they actually start reading it. You’re attracted to its vivid imagery, symbolism and predictions: Those crazy creatures that look like nothing found in nature—multi-faced animals with wings and eyes in places you’d never want them to be. There’s the numbers that don’t quite add up and funny looking angels with scrolls and lamps and bowls and horns that do battle against evil mythical enemies with bizarre names like Gog and Magog who end up cooked up into a final grim supper of burning flesh, the carrion of evil eaten by the victors. It can get pretty gruesome.

Nevertheless, Revelation has inspired countless sermons, works of art and musical compositions from the mighty Hallelujah Chorus to the tender strains of It Is Well With My Soul. It has also fueled social upheaval and sectarian religious movements which were founded and then foundered on what were thought to be surefire decipherments of Revelation’s secrets. Frenzied Biblical prophecy bloodhounds with rapture-ready sun roofs, eager not to be left behind, scrutinize every geopolitical development, technological advancement and social crisis for clues as to the exact time of Jesus’ arrival (this despite Jesus’ own insistence that nobody but God knows the date). Others, mocking these misguided efforts, display snarky bumper stickers such as: “In the event of rapture, can I have your car?” Confusion over Revelation’s meaning proves so exasperating that in the end, most people are all too happy to put it back on the shelf. Martin Luther thought that it shouldn’t even be in the Bible.

Of course taking Revelation out of the Bible doesn’t really remove it. Just about everything Revelation foretells first appears some place else. Turn to Isaiah or Ezekiel or Daniel in the Old Testament, or the gospels or Peter and Paul in the New, and there you’ll find practically all of Revelation’s themes. For instance, Jesus’ own glorious return finally fulfills Daniel 7, which is stocked full of bizarre animals and complex numbers and judgment thrones and plenty of fire. Daniel sees a son of man riding in on clouds who’s crowned King of kings and Lord of lords—as Jesus himself reiterates in the gospels. Revelation adds the “soon” part—which for those checking their watches is a problem. Given the delay, concerned timekeepers suggest “soon” to mean Jesus coming back in the crises of life or at the point of each individual’s death. But applying this to Revelation just complicates everything more. I think a better solution comes from St. Peter who insists how “with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” I like that God waits as long as it takes in order that all might believe.

However waiting for all to believe doesn’t mean that everyone will. Patience has its limits. Even at the end there remain those outside the Pearly Gates: “dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and lives lies;” that is, everyone who refused to take a bath in the blood of the Lamb. Jesus promises to “repay according to everyone’s work,” the evil and filthy as well as the holy and righteous. This is why Luther wanted to hit the delete button. Where’s the justification by faith alone? Do you show up at the Pearly Gates only to have Peter pull a fast one and ask for your resume? While you can do nothing to earn God’s grace, you still must do something to show you’ve received it. Jesus was clear that you can’t just call him Lord and then refuse to do what he says. You can tell a tree by its fruit, Jesus said. Your treatment of the poor and sick and hungry and imprisoned will show what you think of him. Right in line with the holidays, turns out that Jesus is making a list and checking it twice too.

Revelation labels his list “the Lamb’s Book of Life,” and its contents are those whose lives bear good fruit, by grace. The new covenant God promised in Jeremiah promised to write the law on your heart so you’d know what is right to do by heart. But since that might not be enough, God promised through Ezekiel to provide you with a new heart. What salvation demands, God provides. “Let everyone who is thirsty take the water of life as a gift,” says the Spirit, who is the Spirit of Jesus. As he said to the woman at the well, “Whoever drinks the water I give him never thirst. The water I give will become a spring of water within welling up to eternal life.” Water and spirit go together—what flows in must flow out. Eternal life is not just about getting your name in the book. Eternal life has to be lived. Jesus said, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart, out of your gut, shall flow rivers of living water.’”

We’ve talked a lot about water this fall, and here in Revelation all the streams converge. The sea—that satanic abode of chaos, disorder and darkness that appeared at creation—has swallowed up Satan and dried up itself. In its place there’s the river of life flowing from “the throne and the Lamb,” meaning from Jesus himself. Abundant fruit-bearing trees of life line the banks, reminiscent of Ezekiel’s miracle river flowing from the Temple of God modeled after heaven itself. It’s a Temple that never got built, you’ll recall, because in heaven there’s no need for a building to house God’s presence. There’s no need to shield his glory from sinners. God’s creatures no longer hide their faces in shame and seek refuge in the shadows. Instead, washed clean, we freely step into the light and look on God’s face. The Old Testament warned that nobody could see God’s face and live, a danger that mandated the high priest to identify himself with God’s name stamped on his forehead each year as he annually stepped into the Holy of Holies to make atonement. However in heaven there is no more atonement and no more fear. Everyone wears the name of God on their foreheads here.

The Lord makes everything new, so much so that we probably should call the end times the new times, or even better, thegood times, given what finally transpires. There’s no more death or mourning or crying or pain. No more terminal illnesses, no more incurable diseases, no more fatal accidents or funeral services. No more dysfunctional families or broken relationships. There’s no more problem of evil because there’s no more evil. God allows no more suffering because there is no more suffering to allow. There’s no need for sun and moon anymore because the glory of God provides all the light—a light that so shines in the darkness that darkness becomes as day.

It’s literally heaven on earth. Unlike popular depictions, we don’t die and go to heaven. A huge slice of heaven comes down to us. John writes how he “saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.” The new Jerusalem is both a place and a people, or more specifically, the redeemed of Christ are the place where God now dwells. So sure is this future that Revelation speaks of it as having already happened. John writes, “I saw the Holy City (past tense), coming down out of heaven from God.” Christ has already come by his spirit to live in us. Eternity has already started. You might say we’re in the final descent. All that awaits is a safe landing and that joyous, never-ending reunion.

I don’t know how many of you travel for the holidays. Living away from North Carolina as long as I have, I’ve flown home for Christmas countless times. I always love how folks gather at the security entrance to welcome their loved ones, arms outstretched with ear to ear smiles. Unfortunately, with security being what it is these days, it can take a while to get from the plane to those welcoming arms. Many of us will remember how they used to let people through security gates without a boarding pass. Family and friends could be there to greet you as soon as you appeared out of the tunnel. I loved the way you used to pop right out then right into those open arms. I loved it so much that it made me sad for people who had nobody waiting for them at the gate. So sad, in fact, that as a teenager (living as I did in a rather boring town), a bunch of us kids, for fun, would go out to the airport to greet lonely people as they came off their flights. We’d stand there with wide grins on our faces, waving and looking until we spotted someone who had nobody there to welcome them home. We’d walk up to these perfect strangers, our arms outstretched, and give them a big hello and a hug, telling them how happy we were that they had arrived safely, and how was their trip, and have a great day in our boring little town or wherever your final destination may be. They’d look at us all confused—“do I know you?”—and no doubt thought us crazy, and yet nobody refused the hug, overcome as they were by our spirited welcome. After their initial confusion, they’d usually hug back, say thank you and then leave the terminal with a shake of the head and smile on their faces—smiles I’d like to think they passed on to others.

OK, it was a weird thing for a bunch of kids to do (we’d probably get arrested for it these days), but it’s really no weirder than anything you read in Revelation. And it’s no weirder that anything you read about Christmas either. Sure, Mary and Joseph don’t have to deal with multi-headed animals and other crazy creatures, bowls and blazes and beasts and bad math, but there are plenty of angels and heavenly trumpets and shining stars. There’s Mary getting pregnant by the Holy Spirit—like anybody was going to believe that. And then there’s God showing up as a baby in a feed trough amidst poverty and scandal and threats from a homicidal, anti-Christ monarch. There’s dreams and forced holiday travel and side trips to Egypt, just so that prophecies can get fulfilled. And this is all without mentioning how the rest of the story turns out, what with a man walking on water and raising the dead before rising from the dead himself. Oh, and then promising he’ll fly back down someday soon to wipe out all the evil and death and despair and dysfunction and greed and sin that presses so hard against any peace on earth and goodwill among people. The only way to keep the weird stuff out of Christmas is to keep your Bible shut.

I was reading this past week about the ever-popular Charlie Brown Christmas Special that’s on TV every yuletide season. CBS commissioned the special in 1965, to be written by Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schultz, who included a scene where Linus reads from the gospel of Luke. Schultz was told that “You can’t have the Bible on television,” but he did it anyway, absolutely appalling the CBS executives. The special opened with Charlie Brown moaning about how Christmas was coming, “but I don’t feel happy.” What kid says that? It got worse. There was jazz music. And no laugh track. Wobbly kid’s voices. Charlie Brown constantly criticizing the crass commercialism of the Christmas season. And worst of all, Linus reading the Bible on an empty stage and proclaiming that’s what Christmas is all about? What would the sponsors think? The CBS execs declared it a flop and said they would air the film once (since they’d been promoting it for weeks sight unseen). But then they would consign it to then can, never to see the light of day again. Of course it was a huge hit. Almost half of the nation's television viewers watched in 1965. It won an Emmy. And we’ve been watching every year for the past 46 years. Of course if you watched this year you’ll notice they shortened the special again—to make room for more commercials.

In the end, if you read the Bible, the final answer to reining in the greed that drives Christmas commercialization, or to redeeming the dysfunction that drives relationships apart this time of year, or to righting the wrongs of injustice and ending the evil that takes no break for the holidays—the final answer to life’s troubles and sin does not lie in better television or in our ability to make a better world, but in God’s power to make a new one. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Jesus says. “And I am coming soon, soon, soon.” To which the Spirit and the bride say, “Come on then.” And for all who weary and thirsty, including ourselves, we say it too: “Amen. Come Lord Jesus.”

Walk on Water

2011-12-07T11:09:00.001-06:00

Mark 6:45-52

by Daniel Harrell

Advent means arrival, but it might as well mean to wait. Advent waits for sunlight to reemerge out of darkness and for Christ to be born once again. Historically speaking, however, Advent has always waited more for Christ’s second coming than for his first. Advent showed up on church calendars to point toward that day when God’s kingdom fully comes and all things are made new. In the meantime, with the resurrection providing the down payment, we occupy in-between spaces. Ours is a kingdom not yet. But it’s a kingdom already here too. Christ has come, and Christ will come again.

In the meantime, our waiting, while on the one hand joyful, it’s not always what you expect. You come to church looking for an Advent Wreath and get five candles in fishbowls instead (come to church and see it!). Waiting can be unexpected and uncomfortable. Ask any expectant mother. In-between space can be distressing too. Ask anybody who’s in-between jobs, or in-between relationships, or in-between treatments. Ask Jesus’ disciples here in Mark, stuck in-between shores in the middle of the ocean in the middle of the night, on a boat getting slammed by howling headwinds. Straining against their oars, all they could do was wait for the storm to subside, for the sun to rise, for land to appear. The last thing they expected was for Jesus to show up walking on water.

We’ve spent our Sundays this fall looking at water in the Bible—which is why the Advent fishbowls. We’ve looked at the chaotic waters of creation all the way to last week’s living water from the well of life. This Sunday’s amazing water story is so familiar that it no longer amazes much anymore. We simply take for granted that Jesus walked on water or he wouldn’t be Jesus. We take it for granted like drinking water out of a tap. Not that everybody can take drinking water for granted. Nearly one billion people still lack access to safe water. It’s estimated to cost only something like $20 billion dollars to make clean water available to everyone without it. I say “only 20 billion” because we Americans spend $450 billion dollars on Christmas every year. For a number of seasons a movement known as the Advent Conspiracy has challenged Christians to bypass a few useless Christmas gifts and give the money to relief organizations working to provide clean drinking water. Astronauts living in the International Space Station get plenty of fresh water—delivered by rocket ship, at a cost of $42 thousand dollars a gallon. If we can get drinking water into orbit, no thirsty human community is out of reach. Though I should mention that the water’s gotten a lot cheaper on the space station. Now on board is a recycling system that turns urine, and even sweat back into drinking water.

If such human ingenuity has the capacity to get clean water to all who thirst, maybe we can figure out how to walk on water too? I ran across out this video promoting a new sport based upon Jesus’ watery feat. It’s called Liquid Mountaineering.

Before these blokes came along, the only living thing capable of running on water aside from water bugs and Jesus (who walked) was a basilisk, also known as the Jesus Lizard [show photo]. You’ll find them in rain forest rivers and streams. Two Harvard biologists calculated that in order to mimic this lizard, a person would need to run about 67 mph. Jamaican runner Usain Bolt, the fastest man on the planet currently, can only manage about 23 mph. How did these liquid mountaineers do it? They used a submerged dock. Some fancy camera work. That’s right, a shoe company faked the video to sell water repellent shoes.

You’re not surprised, but admit it, you’re a little disappointed. You wanted to believe but you knew it was too good to be real. The disciples knew it was too good to be real too. There was no fancy camera work or shoe companies to blame in the first century, so the only explanation was a ghostly one. It was the middle of the night in the middle of the ocean and in the middle of howling winds—what else but a ghost walks on water? The disciples screamed when they saw Jesus coming. Was this why Jesus intended to pass them by? So as not to scare them? Or had he simply grown annoyed by their faithlessness and wanted to teach them a lesson?

I asked my Wednesday night sermon study group what wasn’t familiar about this familiar story, and they said it was this last line of verse 48: “Jesus intended to pass them by.” How do you explain that? In the preceding verses, Jesus graciously (and miraculously) feeds five thousand hungry people, then sends his disciples ahead in a boat so he can have a few minutes to himself, sees that they’re in trouble at sea (which at night at that distance was some serious eyesight), immediately responds by miraculously stepping out onto the water, comes close enough to terrify them, only to then walk by them and leave them to drown? It hardly sounds like the Jesus we know.

Of course the good news is that Jesus doesn’t pass them by. He tells them, “Take heart, fear not, it is I.” You hear “fear not” a lot at Christmastime. In the Bible you hear it whenever God passes by. The verb isn’t about avoidance but about full disclosure. Jesus wanted to show his disciples his true identity. Mark throws out all sorts of clues. Jesus doesn’t go up to pray on just any mountain, but on the mountain—mountains were always the place God showed up in the Old Testament. Jesus says “it is I”, which is the same as saying “I AM,” the name God used for himself atop Mount Sinai. There’s wind and rough water, which as you should know by now is typically the setting for divine intervention. It was the wind of God over the rough waters of chaos that led to creation. It was the wind of God over the floodwaters of Noah that led to the ark’s rescue. It was the wind of God on the Red Sea breakwaters that led Israel to safety and doomed the Egyptian army. “To pass by” was what God did for Moses back in Exodus on a mountain in a storm so that Moses might catch a glimpse of God’s glory and believe.

In Mark 4, Jesus calmed his first storm, which also freaked out his disciples. He asked them why they were so afraid and did they still have no faith. They responded by asking each other, “Who is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” Jesus answers that question here in chapter 6. He passes by on water in a storm so that they might catch a glimpse of his glory and believe. But the disciples still don’t get it. Mark says its because “they didn’t understand about the loaves,” which refers back to feeding the 5000. What didn’t they understand? The only other time that so much bread appeared out of nowhere was when God fed his stranded people with manna in the desert. Wink, wink. But like their Israelite ancestors who could never get it either, the disciples’ hearts were too hard. Their skulls were too thick. People don’t walk on water. Jesus must be a ghost. He can’t be the Son of God.

Ironically, in Mark’s gospel, the only ones who ever recognize Jesus to be the Son of God were ghosts—evil spirits and demons. And in Mark’s gospel it’s a 1] Gentile 2] woman with a 3] demon-possessed daughter (three strikes in first century Jewish culture) who’s the first human to call Jesus “Lord”. There is something about being an outsider that makes it easier to see the real thing. I once read this book about a Christian and an atheist who went to church together. They met when the atheist auctioned his soul on eBay as sort of a joke, only to have the Christian buy it for 500 dollars. But rather than make the atheist convert (if indeed that were possible), the Christian made the atheist go to church and give some honest feedback.

The atheist observed how odd it was to go to churches and be asked to greet the people seated around you. “Why do you have to tell people to talk to each other?” he wondered. “Shouldn’t Christians naturally care about each other enough to greet one another without being told?” He went on to share the story of a buddy of his strung out on cocaine who came to Jesus and got clean. The buddy said all these Christians surrounded him and loved on him and really looked after him. But then when he relapsed six months later, he was too ashamed to tell his new Christian friends. Turns out he was afraid they might think him a hypocrite and kick him out of church—as if grace had a statute of limitations. I can empathize. I’ll hesitate to confess my own screw-ups sometimes because I’m not so sure that forgiveness is always out there. Or maybe I hesitate because I can be unforgiving myself. Even though God forgives me every time.

How much grace does it take to believe in Jesus? How many miracles does he have to do? Mark says the disciples “didn’t understand about the loaves.” So what did Jesus do? He miraculously fed 4000 more people one chapter later. He then gets back into a boat with them, but packs only one loaf of bread for the trip. Wink, wink. What did the disciples do? They argued over who forgot to bring enough bread. Seriously? They’d now seen Jesus feed over 9000 people with just a few slices and they’re worried about running out of bread? Some scholars suggest that the disciples didn’t want to impose on Jesus to fed them too because performing miracles seemed to irritate him so. But it’s not feeding hungry people that ever irritated Jesus. It’s their thick heads and hard hearts. He says to his disciples, “You have eyes—can’t you see? You have ears—can’t you hear? Don’t you remember anything at all? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?” “Twelve,” they replied. “And when I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?” “Seven,” they replied. And Jesus said to them, “Do you not yet understand?” Despite the exasperation, a ring of expectation appears. The disciples do not understand—not yet. But they will. Maybe Jesus’ question isn’t so much a rebuke as it is an invitation.

In Matthew’s take on the story, Peter accepts Jesus’ invitation to try walking on water himself. He does not yet understand—but he’s willing to try. Peter said, “Lord, if it is really you, command me to come to you on the water.” So Jesus said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water toward Jesus. But when he saw the strong wind and the waves, he got scared and started to sink. He cried out, “Lord, save me!” And Jesus immediately reached out his hand and grabbed him, and said to Peter, “You have so little faith, why did you doubt?” Then they climbed back into the boat, and the wind ceased. This time, everybody in the boat worshiped Jesus, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

Maybe the reason the disciples get it in Matthew and not in Mark is because Matthew was one of the disciples and didn’t want to look so bad. Why highlight your thick-headedness any more than you have to? Of course even the disciples’ faith at this point wasn’t enough to keep them from deserting Jesus once the crucifixion trouble started. It wouldn’t be until the Holy Spirit broke through their thick heads that they’d have enough faith. Jesus had to do that miracle too. But isn’t that how grace works? On the cross, Jesus gave himself for us that he might give himself to us—depositing his own spirit deep inside our thick heads and hard hearts—so that we can finally believe.

Body of Water

2011-11-21T13:50:00.001-06:00

John 7:33-52
by Daniel Harrell

The Defense Departmentemploys a group of analysts who specialize in scrutinizing religious languageand behavior in order to authenticate terrorist communications. These Arabicand Islamic theology scholars recently recognized language in one terrorist screedto be subtly derived from the philosophy of a late 13^th centurySyrian religious leader who declared jihad on fellow Muslims. ThisSyrian philosophy is the sort of thing Muslim insurgents might read to justifytheir own attacks on fellow Muslims in places like Iraq, Afghanistan or now inSyria itself. This helpful ability to understand ancient doctrine and itscurrent implications has been labeled “forensic theology.” It’s been used topinpoint groups or individuals who pose the greatest threats to nationalsecurity.

In a way the Pharisees ofJesus’ day were forensic theologians. Experts in Hebrew theology and Mosaic law,they specialized in scrutinizing religious language and behavior. Not only didthey adjudicate authentic conformity to the Law, they pinpointed thoseindividuals and groups who posed the greatest threats to Israel’s nationalsecurity. To them, Jesus was especially dangerous. His sacrilegious speech andrabble rousing warranted arrest. So they sent the Temple police out to pick himup. Yet Jesus cagily eluded their grasp—without actually going anywhere. Hesaid: “I will be with you a little while longer, andthen I am going to him who sent me. You will search for me, but youwill not find me; and where I am, you cannot come.” The Jewish leaders could only scratchtheir heads.

If you’ve done much reading in John’s gospel, you know it to beloaded with irony. Here the Jewish leaders wondered where Jesus thinks he’sgoing that they would be unable to find him. They mockingly surmised about hisgoing to teach Gentiles, an absurd notion for any rabbi claiming to be sentfrom Israel’s God. Jews don’t talk to Gentiles. But ironically the gospel did extend to Gentiles who embraced itin ways most Jews refused. Jesus also declared that his time was short. Thiswould have been welcome news to the Pharisees who were so eager to be rid ofhim that they plotted his death. But killing Jesus only spelled their own demise.After rising from the dead and sending His Spirit, Jesus became more vitallyand universally present than he ever was while walking the earth.

The Pharisee Nicodemus (of John 3:16 fame) shows up to ask whether legallythey could judge Jesus without a hearing. Again irony is at work: Those whodemanded strict adherence to the law were not themselves obeying it. The restof the Pharisees cut Nicodemus off and accused him of “campaigning for thatGalilean.” “Examine the evidence,” they demanded, “See if any prophet evercomes from Galilee!” But, of course Jesus was not from Galilee, as anybody’swho’s ever read the Christmas story knows. Not that the pretentious Phariseeswould taken the time to check—they were so sure they were right.

I was out in Boston this week for a faith-science discussion that metat the Harvard Faculty Club. I have so say that Harvard does pretentiousnessbetter than anybody. I miss it. Anyway, on my way back I stopped off in the Loganairport Men’s Room. A woman came barreling in behind me, her bags confidentlyslung on her shoulder. She looked at me and gave me this sly grin, thencondescendingly asked, “Still having trouble telling an M from a W?” Naturallythere was no need for me to respond. I only had to wait. 3, 2, 1… I’m so surethat the entire terminal heard her scream. Certainty can be a dangerous thing.

The commoners who heard Jesus speak were not so sure—though they allagreed Jesus was somebody special. Some hoped he might be theMoses-like-Prophet-to-come promised by God in Deuteronomy. Others hoped he wasthe King David-like-Messiah-to-come promised by Isaiah and Micah and others whowould restore Israel’s political and national fortunes. Even the Temple policewere inspired. “Never has anyone spoken likethis!” they said. The forensictheologians berated them for coming back empty handed. The temple police acted as naïve as theignorant, unenlightened rabble whom Jesus also hoodwinked. Only fools believe.Which ironically, is also true. As the apostle Paul wrote, a former Phariseehimself, “God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise; God chose whatis weak in the world to shame the strong.”

The context for all of this was the Jewish thanksgiving-like Feast ofTabernacles; so named for the tents or “tabernacles” built to commemorate ancient Israel’s trek across the desert ontheir way to the Promised Land. Jews, then as now, camp out in temporaryshelters to remind themselves of God’s promise of a permanent housing in theface of fleeting earthly life. I remember an observant Jewish neighbor of minein the city who would pitch her tent in the middle of a parking lot, abandoningthe comfort of her condo in good Tabernacles tradition. Later I watched as asuburban gentleman erected a tabernacle on his back deck; only his opened upinto a posh living room. I couldn’t help but feel that he was cheapening theintent of Tabernacles. I also couldn’t help but mention this out loud in hispresence—in a joking way naturally. Knowing that I was a Christian, he cameback at me with four simple words: “plastic blinking nativity scenes.” Goodpoint.

Of course the main point of Tabernacles was not toremember Israel’s time in the desert (they didn’t spend forty years wandering around as a reward for good behavior). The main point of Tabernacles was to remindhow in time God will usher his people into a new heaven and a new earth whereHe will abide with them forever. On second thought, maybe that tent on the deckdid prove more apropos; inasmuch asit was connected to something better. Tabernacles envisions that day when allof our temporary, shabby shelters will be shed; a day when redeemed creationwill thrive in sync with heaven.

Tabernacles coincided with the grape andolive harvests and included rituals geared to promote harvest success. Prayersfor needed rain were prayed in grand liturgical fashion. On seven days of theeight day festival, and seven times on the seventh day, a priest would carry agolden flagon down to the pool of Siloam (where legend held that angelsstirred the water). Then with a flagon full of water, the priest would lead apomp-laden parade back up to the Temple complete with singing, palm-waving andtrumpets. When the priest reached the altar, he’d circle it seven times and pourout the water as a sacramental entreaty.

Needless to say, theseprayers inferred more than plain rain. As we have seen over and over this fall,water is more than water in the Bible. At Creation, water was the chaos overwhich God’s spirit spoke light and life into being. With Noah’s flood and theRed Sea, water was God’s justice against evil. In the desert, the water Mosesdrew from a rock proved God to be faithful even when his people weren’t. Ezekiel’smiracle river of life pouring out from the Temple into the Dead Sea forecastGod’s redemption of all things. Here at the Feast of Tabernacles, water poured outin the Temple stirred memories of God’s faithfulness in those originaltabernacle years which stirred hope for the future. “On that day,” Zechariahdeclares, “living water will flowout from Jerusalem…The LORD will be king over the whole earth. All nations …will go up to worship the LORD Almighty, and to celebrate the Feast ofTabernacles.”

Imagine the energy andexcitement this feast inspired; especially for people currently oppressed underRoman occupation. If but for a moment, their minds were free to dream of thatday when their suffering would be washed away, their storehouses filled, theirjoy complete and all their prayers answered. Picture being in the midst of allof this intense expectation, enraptured by the celebration, filled withpassionate longing for God’s salvation. Add the promise of a new Moses whosingle-handedly saved an enslaved people from tyranny. Mix in an ardent thirstfor a King David-like warrior in whose presence all nations would cower. Whipall of this up to a fervent pitch—only to have some homeless, working-class, dingyex-carpenter stand up and shout: “It’sme! I’m the one you’ve been hoping for!”

Seriously. That’d be likesomebody who’d prayed her whole life for prince charming, who’d packed a hopechest full of baby clothes, who’d for years wistfully waited for Mr. Right toappear, only to reach her Quarter Life crisis and have some homely, good fornothing Mama’s boy waltz up and announce, “Hi honey, I’m home. Your prayers areanswered.”

But what if it turned outto be true? Wouldn’t that be ironic?

In good Gospel of Johnfashion, on the last and climaticday of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who isthirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripturehas said (referring to the Old Testament), ‘Out of the believer’s heart shallflow rivers of living water.” Jesus proclaimed himself to be Ezekiel’s river oflife. He is the Exodus Rock from which water gushed for the parched. He is the Templein whom God fully resides. Jesus embodied all of God’s great deeds of the past andhis great promises for the future. He is the body of water poured out, who giveslife to all who are thirsty, to any who will come to him and drink.

There is no life without water. Water participates in a incrediblearray of processes every minute of every day—you need it to make soup and cleancomputer chips, it drives the weather and shapes the face of the earth. Thehuman body is more than 60 percent water; it holds our body temperatures at 98.6degrees. Your body’s water-balancemechanisms are tuned with the precision of a digital chemistry lab, which is abit of bad news.
You not only don’t need to drink eight glasses of waterevery day, you cannot in any way make your complexion more youthful by drinkingwater. As author Charles Fishman writes, you cannot possibly “hydrate” yourskin from the inside by drinking an extra bottle or two of Perrier. All thatdoes is make you have to go more—albeit it in French.

Clearly this is not what Jesus meant by rivers of living waterflowing from inside you. His water flows from your heart—which John tells us hasto do with the Holy Spirit. It’s a throwback to that John 3:16 conversationwith Nicodemus where Jesus said no one can enter the kingdom of God withoutbeing reborn of water and spirit. Water and spirit go together at new creationjust like they did at creation—just as they did at Jesus’ baptism, just likethey do at our own baptisms. However “entering the kingdom of God” is not solelyabout securing a reservation for the Pearly Gates. Like in the rest of theBible, genuine thirst-quenching faith reaps well-watered fruit of that faith. Notonly will we drink in the Spirit ofJesus, but the spirit will pour outof us too.

What does it look like to have a river of life flowing out of yourheart? No doubt it looks like love and joy and peace, patience and gentleness—virtuesunderstood to be fruits of the Spirit. But I wonder if Jesus has another virtuein mind—especially given the contentiousness his Tabernacles declarationincited. To enter the Kingdom of God was to reject the kingdoms of the world.To declare yourself the fulfillment of Scripture, unless it was true, would betantamount to blasphemy. It takes a lot of guts to say all of that. It takes alot of guts to believe in somebody who says all of that. I mention it because theword Jesus uses to describe the source of living water in us is actually notthe heart, but the belly. As the King James has Jesus saying it, “whoeverbelieveth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.”

Of course we can appreciate why Bibles go with heart instead ofbelly. “Heart” does work as a synonym since the Greek word itself is aboutmotivation rather than anatomy. In ancient culture the seat of one’s motivationswas often the stomach, but in our culture, to talk about anything flowing outof your belly can come off as a bit too, well, intestinal. And yet I wonder if the word heart has suffered from overuse—like when people say, “I mean itfrom the bottom of my heart.” To be frank, “I mean it from the bottom of myheart” is probably the last thing anybody would ever say who really does mean somethingfrom the bottom of his heart.

Unfortunately, Christians who say they follow Jesus with “all oftheir heart” are often those same Christians who when confronted by that hardline Jesus draws between money and God, will say, “You don’t seriously have to sellyour possessions and give the money to the poor, just need to have a rightattitude toward them. Jesus said we’d always have the poor with us.” Or whenconfronted by that hard line Jesus gives about loving your enemies, will insistthat Jesus only said pray for them,he didn’t say speak to them everagain.

Maybe that river of life needs to flow out of our bellies. Out of ourgut. It does take courage to truly follow Jesus. It takes guts to be honestabout your faith, guts to endure ostracism from the skeptic and the sociallycareless, guts to speak honestly against injustice and cruelty when you’drather keep quiet and not draw attention; it takes guts to renounce materialismand free up your resources for the poor, guts to bypass lucrative, personalfame in order to serve other people, guts to serve without being thanked forit. It takes guts to forgive those who’ve wronged you, guts to confess your sinto those you’ve wronged, guts to work on your marriage, to hold your tonguefrom gossip, to press on when troubles make God seem distant, it takes guts, ittakes courage, to seriously take up a cross and follow Jesus with all of yourheart.

British author and Christian GK Chesterton described it, ironically,like this: “Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strongdesire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. ‘He that will lose hislife, the same shall save it,’ is not a piece of mysticism for saints andheroes. It is a piece of everyday advice … [Christians] seek life in a spiritof furious indifference to it; we desire life like water and yet drink deathlike wine.” Indeed. The water of life is ultimately wine of resurrection. It’salways served in a cross-shaped cup.

Bottled, Tap or Fermented?

2011-11-21T13:40:00.001-06:00

John 2:1-11
by Daniel Harrell

Whenever I think backon the scores of weddings I’ve been privileged to participate in, the first memoriesthat usually come to mind are all the bad things that happened. Things like thetime the bride fainted to the floor during the vows (and none of us caughther). Or the outdoor wedding where it was 102 degrees and both the bride andgroom took their vows with sweat dripping down their noses and through their clothes(and the guests left early to find air conditioning). Or the one where the couplehired a piano player to play jazz at the reception and he independently decidedthat it would be a better idea to bring an accordion. Or the one where thegroomsmen thought it would be funny to kidnap the groom and paint him with thecolors of his alma mater, indelible shoe polish, just before the weddingpictures. No matter that all of these couples ended up married and stayedmarried for more than 72 days. Looking back you still recall the weddingsmostly as social disasters. Like you would recall a wedding reception that ranout of wine—now and back in Jesus’ day too. You don’t invite guests bearinggifts to a wedding banquet and then shortchange them on the food and drink.

We’re doing waterstories in the Bible this fall, and today’s is a memorable one. Jesus saves afamily’s social standing from total disaster by changing ordinary water intochoice vintage wine. Hearing the story read, you get the sense that Jesusdidn’t really want to do it. He says it’s none of his business. But Jesus’ motherpresses him and apparently gets her way. John’s gospel doesn’t record the entire conversation, but withMary being a good Jewish mother and all, I like to imagine her saying somethingto Jesus like, “So saving these sweet people from complete embarrassment is noneof your business? That’s fine my son, to whom I gave birth in a cattle trough. Don’tworry that your father and I had to endure enormous disgrace and embarrassmentto bring you into this world since no one would ever have believed I was pregnantby the Holy Spirit. This is not your problem. You just enjoy yourself.”

Last Sunday’s plunge into Biblical water had usat Jesus’ baptism—the most importantwater event of them all. Mark’s version brought forward all of the stories we’dexplored thus far. At Jesus’ baptism there was the spirit hovering over wateras at creation, a dove signaling safety as with Noah’s ark, the presence of aJeremiah-like prophet in John the Baptist, and parallels between Elisha and Jesus—bothof whom did miraculous signs and whose names both mean “God saves.” Jesus wasbaptized in the Jordan river, reminiscent of Ezekiel’s miracle river flowingout of the Temple (a Temple which Jesus will say is himself). And finally wehad Jesus being driven by the Spirit into the desert to confront Satan—areminder of Israel’s own desert sojourn. The Israelites ran out of water there only to have Moses rescuethem by miraculously drawing water from a rock; a rock whom the apostle Paulrecognized to be Christ.

Just as the wedding at Cana doesn’t appear in theother gospels, Jesus’ actual baptism doesn’t technically appear in John’sgospel. All we get is the testimony of John the Baptist. He identifies Jesus as“the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” and says he saw theSpirit descend like a dove and remain on Jesus, and that he heard the voice ofGod claim Jesus as his Son. But there’s no mention of Jesus ever getting wet—thoughwe can probably assume it. There’s no mention of Jesus being driven into thedesert to be tempted by Satan either—though there would be plenty to tempt himlater. In this gospel, Jesus goes straight from John the Baptist’s testimonyabout him one day, to gathering a few disciples due to John’s testimony thenext day, to then showing up at this wedding “on the third day.”

John’s gospel being what it is, it’s hard not to seesomething symbolic in whatever he writes. We know that Jesus rises from thedead on the third day as the “first fruits” of the best yet to come. We knowthat the new reality begun with Jesus’ resurrection works like a betrothalbetween heaven and earth, a pledge from God to be with his people forever. Andwe know that the Bible envisions this betrothal leading to an eventual marriage.Revelation reports a Holy City coming down from God “preparedas a bride adorned for her husband.” And “God himself will be with us; hewill wipe every tear from our eyes, and death will be no more; nor crying norpain.” So sure, for John to say, “on the third day there was a wedding” couldbe a huge hint.

Or it could just be that on a third day there wasa wedding. After all, Jesus doesn’t seem especially thrilled to be here. Whileit’s clear that he was invited with his new disciples, we don’t why he wasinvited. Was this a family wedding? Did Jesus’ increasing popularity land himon the guest list? Or did his mother make him come because he hadn’t had adecent meal in days? Discussing this passage at last Wednesday night’s sermongroup, we all agreed that Jesus does seem annoyed with his mother. When thewine runs out and Mary prods Jesus to do something, he curtly responds, “Woman—what concern is that to us?” The Messagetranslation has Jesus saying, “Don’t push me.” It’s all pretty abrupt comingfrom the savior of the world. And all Mary wanted was for Jesus to save theparty.

What did she expect him to do? Having beenthrough all that we’ll celebrate at Christmas—the inexplicable conception andbirth, all the angels and shepherds and wise men, the heavenly host praisingGod that Jesus is born as Christ the Lord—maybe Mary was simply eager for Jesusto do his first miracle. Like any proud mother, she wanted everybody to seewhat a special boy he was. But miracles aren’t that easy to do. Jesus only doesseven of them in all of John’s gospel. According to the physics, to changewater to wine would require the complete rearrangement of the bond betweenhydrogen and oxygen atoms, which in water is spectacularly stable. The fierce clinginessof water molecules supplies the glue that holds most of the natural world as weknow it together. You can’t rearrange water molecules without emitting an explosionof energy capable of leveling most of Cana. For Jesus to do that meant he’dhave to absorb quite an atomic blow.

But this wasn’t why he was hesitant. As creatorof the world, he could manage molecular rearrangement. Jesus was hesitant, hesays, because his “hour had not yet come.” In John’s gospel, Jesus’ “hour” refers to hiscrucifixion, when he would absorb a blow that puts nuclear fission to shame. TheLamb of God would take away the sin of the world by taking the sin of the worldonto himself. Victory will be achieved through abject defeat. This was not howSaviors were supposed to save. In the desert, Satan mocked Jesus, tempting himto be a real Son of God and show some power. Call out your angelic army and doit right. Here at the wedding, Mary pushes Jesus to use power too, which mayexplain why Jesus was so abrupt. It’s bad enough when people we treat like gods act like people—you don’thave to be a Penn State grad to know thatanger and grief. But when a person who isGod doesn’t act like we think God should act? How can you not crucify him? Theclock would start ticking once Jesus’ true identity went public. He knew hishour would come fast.

To Mary’s credit, she submits to herson as her Lord, telling the servants “to do whatever he tells you.” Her faithin her son sets his fate in motion. Jesus eyes six stone water jars used forJewish purification rites. The Judaism of Jesus’ day, set up by the Pharisees,taught that everything having to do with eating and drinking had to beceremonial washed for the sake of ritual purity. Jesus’ ongoing gripe with thePharisees was their emphasis on externals. The Pharisees could behave as badlyas they pleased as long as their hands were clean. Never mind that Scripturesaid you needed a pure heart too.

Granted, water does more than justritually clean. Due to its stickymolecular structure, practically anything dissolves in water. It’s an amazingsolvent. The computer giant IBM operates a semiconductor plant in Vermont wherewater is used to clean computer chips. The only catch is that given the smallsize of the chips, the water used can’t just come from the tap. While tap wateris clean enough to drink, and quite refreshing in Vermont, it’s absolutely filthyfrom the perspective of a semiconductor. Minerals, ions, bacteria, viruses, andplain old bits of dirt too tiny to bother a person are microscopic boulders.You’d no more wash your computer chips in tap water than you’d ladle water fromyour toilet to make lemonade. Water is the only thing computer chips can bewashed with, but it literally has to be pure water. H₂O and nothingelse. What would happen if you drank this pure water yourself? No one reallyknows, but since absolute water is so sticky, it’d likely leach every mineralright out of your body. Sort of like Jesus would leach every impurity out ofour souls. “I baptize with water,” John the Baptist had said, “but the one whois coming baptizes withthe Holy Spirit.” You need more thantap water to get a clean heart.

Jesus takes the purification jars and has them filled to the brim.Then follows the nuclear reaction that blows everybody away: Jesus miraculouslyconverts the water to wine. And not just any wine—but reserve wine. The chiefsteward gets a sip and immediately recognized its high quality. “You have savedthe best for last!” he exclaimed—which was as much a statement about Jesus as it is about thevintage. And not only was it the best, but there was an abundance of it. Six water jars each holding twenty or so gallonsfilled to the brim: we’re talking wine enough to keep a wedding banquetjoyfully flowing into eternity. The tap water of ceremonial cleansing hadbecome the wine of new creation. Reality replaced ritual. Thy kingdom comes.

Verse 11 provides the punch lines. “Jesus did this… and revealedhis glory; and his disciples believed in him.” In John’s gospel, “glory” is God’spurview alone. For Jesus to show glory says something unbelievable about him.And the disciples find faith to believe the unbelievable. They realize that Godhas shown up in person. The Word has become flesh. This was mostly good news,except when God’s glory showed itself on a cross. When Jesus’ hour finallyarrives and the Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world by dying, it tookall the faith in the world to see the glory in that. But Mary was there, stillfull of faith in her son, the only other time she shows up in John’s gospel.And from the cross Jesus addressed her simply as “woman”, so she kneweverything would turn out OK.

Then on “the third day,” which John calls the first day with a nod toward new creation, Jesus gloriously rises asthe first fruit of what’s to come. He saved the best for last. The risen Jesusappeared to his disciples—whose faith had gotten a bit wobbly—and breathed theHoly Spirit on them, just like God breathed life on Adam in the beginning. It’sanother nod toward new creation. Jesus converts their ordinary tap water livesinto abundant fine wine. The wedding is on.

Of all the weddings I’ve beenprivileged to participate in, among the most memorable wasn’t much of a weddingat all. The couple each carried heavycrosses of personal hardship: hers an abusive family that caused her undue psychologicalstress and disorder; his an irregular heart that required surgery soon, but hisinsurance was reluctant to cover it and his job wasn’t enough to pay for it.These hardships drew them toward each other love each other, as hardships cando. They grew to love one another and wanted to get married, but presumed thatthey could never afford a church wedding. They could go to City Hall for acheap civil service, but they believed in Jesus and deeply wanted theirmarriage vows to be grounded by their faith in him. Jesus was in the businessof getting glory out of suffering. No problem, I said. We can get you married inchurch today, right now, if you like. I got the authority vested in me. Let’sdo it. (They asked if it’d be OK if they went home and showered first. Theywanted to change clothes.) But a few hours later they were back and scrubbedand ready. I escorted them into our spacious sanctuary, grabbing a member ofour admin staff on the way as a witness. I then opened the marriage book andrecited those familiar words, “Dearly beloved: We have come together in thepresence of God to witness and bless the joining together of this man and thiswoman in Holy Matrimony. The bond and covenant of marriage was established byGod in creation, and our Lord Jesus Christ adorned this manner of life by hispresence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. It signifies to usthe mystery of the union between Christ and his Church.”

This mysterious union between Christ and hischurch is the marriage of God to his people, “a Holy City coming down from heaven“prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” It isthe word made flesh who dwells among us, full of grace and truth, theresurrection of the dead and all things made new. It is“light shining in darkness” and “every tear wiped from our eyes.” It isthe glory of the Lord revealed, as of a father’s only son, for all nations tosee. I saw plenty of glory in that simple wedding that day. They didn’t need afancy reception or a truckload of gifts because they had Jesus, and he wasenough. “I came that you may have life,” he promised, “and have it abundantly.”One successful heart surgery and two children later, Jesus remains enough, justas he promised. That’s the good thing about abundance. It’s always enough.

Purified Water

2011-11-08T12:44:00.002-06:00

Mark 1:9-13

by Daniel Harrell

Our survey of water in the Bible this fall has finally landed us on the most important water event of them all: the baptism of Jesus. It’s distinct from the other water events we’ve looked at thus far, because baptism is actually one we get to dive into ourselves. Along with communion which we celebrate this morning, baptism is a central practice of our faith; it is our initiation into Christian community. Though unlike communion, baptism is a once in a lifetime experience. Baptism comes with gallons of theological significance, most of which we tend to take for granted. As Congregationalists living in Luther-land where infant baptism is the norm, most of us can’t even remember our own baptisms. The baptisms of children, while beautiful, are still treated more as ceremonial than momentous. Maybe that’s because there’s no heaven tearing open or thunderous voice booming at our baptisms—no spirit descending like a dove. Or maybe it’s because we use water instead of fire. We do take water for granted. As recently as 1955, rural Americans without running water in their homes used ten gallons a day per person to live (as compared to cows which used twenty gallons per day per cow). Today, with running water, a normal American uses a hundred gallons, and much of that, twenty gallons a day, is just for flushing the toilet.

Whenever a family brings their baby to be baptized, their major concern is not what baptism signifies, as much as whether their baby will cry. Parents go to great lengths to guard against this: plugging his mouth with a pacifier, sedating her with milk and rocking her into a sacramental stupor. Most of the times this works, but when it doesn’t, the ensuing shriek of terror at the unexpected splash can be enough to set an entire congregation on edge. It’s definitely enough to embarrass some parents into never returning to church again.

But I say let those babies scream! Screaming babies are onto something about baptism that most of us forget. More than a bath, baptism is a drowning. It’s is not so much about having your sinful self washed clean as it is about having your sinful self killed off. Jesus called his cross a baptism and the apostle Paul, writing to the Romans, asserted that to be baptized is to be crucified and buried with Christ, so that with Christ, you might be raised from the dead into newness of life.

Early Christians were very serious about their baptisms. According to the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, a presbyter and bishop in third century Rome, getting baptized required much more than professing faith and getting wet. You first underwent a severe examination of intent, which included being grilled as to the nature of your occupation. For instance, you could not join the church if you were a pimp (for obvious reasons), a sculptor or a painter (unless you swore never to create idols), a politician (again, for obvious reasons), someone who teaches children worldly knowledge, a gladiator, an actor, a soldier, an astrologer or anyone who, according to Hippolytus, “does that which may not be mentioned.”

Once your vocation passed theological muster, you’d be allowed to hear the gospel, followed by a three-year period of instruction during which you were expected to lead a virtuous life. At the end of this period, should you prove worthy, you underwent daily exorcisms to ensure purity and cleanliness from any evil spirit, leading up to a three-day fast on the Thursday before Easter. The night before Easter was spent in prayerful vigil. On Easter morning, as the first rays of the sun broke over the horizon, you were led naked into the baptismal water (typically held in a pool shaped like a coffin and always filled with cold water) where you would confess your faith and be pushed underneath. You would be held down long enough to “feel the death” after which you would emerge gasping for the air of new life. A fresh, official Christian, you were then clothed with a new white garment, anointed with oil and escorted into to the midst of the congregation where the bishop would bless you and offer you for the first time the bread and the wine of the Eucharist. Some of this we saw last week at Confirmation, which was tied more directly to baptism early on.

How does this apply to babies? Depending on your view of original sin, Christians haven’t always held that babies get a free pass. Sin has a sinister power all its own. On the other hand, infant baptism serves as the New Testament successor to Old Testament circumcision—expanded to include female and Gentile children. Baptism, like circumcision, is the signature of a community’s pledge to raise a child to be faithful to God. And because baptism is done with water that can drown you (just as circumcision was with a knife that can kill you), it’s a pledge made under the penalty of death. Jesus himself said that whoever causes a child to fall into sin would be better off having a millstone tied around his neck and thrown into the sea. So yeah, there should be crying at baptisms.

Mark’s version of Jesus’ baptism has an definite Old Testament look and feel. He starts his gospel with a citation from Isaiah that points to John the Baptist as “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord.” John’s own fashion statement—his camel’s hair clothing and leather belt, not to mention his diet of locusts and honey—brought to mind the great prophet Elijah who dressed and ate the same way. God’s last words in the Old Testament promised that Elijah would return “before the great and terrible day of the LORD.” Though he looked like Elijah, John sounded a lot like Jeremiah, warning of God’s justice and calling the people a brood of vipers. His baptizing paralleled a Jewish practice called “proselyte baptism” whereby an idol-loving Gentile pagan converting to Judaism first had to have his idol-loving paganism ceremonially rinsed off. Only here John baptizes chosen people instead of Gentiles, implying that the descendents of Abraham were no better than anybody else. They were sinners too.

In addition to the Old Testament language, Mark paints an Old Testament picture too. Here’s a rendition of Jesus’ baptism from the nineteenth century printmaker Currier and Ives, better known for nostalgic images associated with the holidays. Looking at this print, you’ll notice elements of all the water events we’ve gone over this fall. Let’s do a little review. In Genesis and the creation account, you’ll recall that “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” but already present was water over which swept a wind, or spirit, from God. In ancient creation myths, water was feared as the abode of chaos and evil. God the Father redeems peace and beauty out of the chaos and evil for the sake of creation; just as God the Son redeems life and righteousness out of death and sin for the sake of new creation.

Throw an ark in the water and you’re reminded of Noah, the floodwaters serving the sentence of God’s justice, the due consequence of taking God’s grace for granted. The New Testament writers all understood the flood to prefigure the baptismal waters. Later prophets, like Jeremiah, in whose stead John the Baptist follows, cautioned the people again. But because they insisted on doing God wrong, disasters came and practically wiped them out. But God’s anger against their sin and infidelity never rained down for the sake of destruction alone. His fury refines for the sake of redemption. Peter referred to Noah’s flood as water that destroyed the world in order to save it; the same water, he wrote, that now saves us. St. Augustine understood the wooden ark to foreshadow the wooden cross. God saves us through the waters of his justice by the cross of Jesus, which is our ark of grace. A dove gave the all clear sign to Noah, showing it was safe to disembark. At Jesus’ baptism, the dove signals that in Christ everybody’s safe.

Now there is no floating ax head at Jesus’ baptism, if you remember that sermon from 2 Kings. But there are parallels between Jesus and Elisha. The Bible refers to Elisha as not just any man, but as the man of God. Floating iron verified Elisha’s true identity. Elisha means “God is salvation,” and through Elisha God saved his people from a whole host of self-inflicted disasters. Jesus also means “God saves,” and through Christ God saves us too. Elijah anointed Elisha with a double portion of his spirit. John the Baptist—the New Testament Elijah—did the same for Jesus, anointing him with the fullness of the Holy Spirit and verified Jesus’ true identity. Elisha was the Man of God, Jesus is the beloved Son of God with whom the Father was well pleased.

Baptism’s ultimate trajectory is new life in God’s presence. In Ezekiel, which we looked at last Sunday, God’s presence was symbolized by a glorious new Temple out of which flowed a miracle river symbolizing new life. The Temple and the river turn out to be previews of heaven. The river shows up in the book of Revelation as the river of life, but by then it’s clear that the Temple is no longer a building but “the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” himself. God becomes so present to us that buildings are no longer necessary. His people are his dwelling place.

Jesus goes through the water of baptism and is confirmed to be God’s beloved son. He is anointed with the Spirit of power. He will make way a path to new life. But the first order of business for the Spirit is to lead Jesus into the desert to be tempted by Satan. So much for being God’s beloved Son. At our Wednesday night sermon group, someone pulled out that verse from Hebrews that reminds how Jesus needed to be temped like us in order to sympathize with us, and that he “learned obedience from what he suffered so that once made perfect, he could become the source of eternal salvation.” What? Was Jesus not perfect already? What did have to learn? It turns out that while the word “obedience” derives from the Hebrew verb “to hear,” it always comes tied to the verb “to do.” Jesus knew that obedience to God was a whole body proposition, but he didn’tlearn it until he did it.

This holds true for us too. Bob from our Wednesday night group told us about the birth of his daughter and how there were problems with her heart. She was rushed to the NICU where a chaplain soon showed up and asked if he’d like to have his daughter baptized. Far from a ceremonial gesture, this was every parent’s nightmare. Bob knew he believed in Jesus, but did he have faith enough to trust Jesus with his daughter? He didn’t learn it until he did it. Baptism demands all that we are. Bob gave his daughter to God. And God gave her back. This past Wednesday she started Confirmation.

Jesus went through the waters of God’s justice and into the desert of temptation just as Israel did with Moses. God saved his people and did his justice to Pharaoh’s army. God blessed his people with his spirit, who accompanied them day and night. And that led Israel into the desert where they had a chance to learn obedience too. And yet they failed over and over again. But where they failed, Jesus succeeded and became “the perfect source of eternal salvation” for all who follow him. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Our ancestors all passed through the sea, and were baptized in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.”

If you remember that sermon from Exodus, you’ll remember that though God led his people out into the desert to test them, they ended up testing him. They people ran out of water and complained to God, though the word used for complain was more like the verb to sue. It meant “to legally challenging somebody’s authority.” The people sued the Lord over their water rights! Moses responded, “Why do you test the Lord?” He then turned to God and asked, “What am I supposed to do?” What came next was truly remarkable. The Lord let his people take him to court. A rock served as the courtroom dock where the defendant stands. Moses staff was the executioner. And then God said to Moses, “I will be standing on the rock. I will be the defendant. Smite the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” So Moses’ smote the rock, in effect condemning God, and sprung forth water for the people. The Almighty Lord, Yahweh himself, pled guilty!

This is how Paul interpreted the rock in the desert as Christ. It was another foreshadow of the cross. In John’s gospel, as Jesus hung on the cross, a soldier pierced his side with a spear and water came out. The cross smote Christ, condemned God, and sprung forth living water for all people. As Paul would later explain, “God made him who knew no sin to be our sin, so that in him we might gain his righteousness.”

To be baptized into Christ makes his cross your cross. “To be baptized into Christ Jesus is to be baptized into his death.” But to be baptized into Christ’s death also makes his resurrection your resurrection. His life is now your life. So much so that God’s words to Jesus now apply to you: “You are my Son. You are my daughter. My beloved. With you I am well pleased.”

Waterfront Property

2011-11-01T11:46:00.001-05:00

Ezekiel 47:1-12

by Daniel Harrell

It’s good to seeeverybody in church today. I was concerned folks might not be back after lastSunday’s water sermon from Jeremiah—we’ve been focusing on water in the Bibleall fall. Granted, last Sunday was about a lackof water, a drought brought on by God himself in response to Israel’sunfaithfulness. Bad enough that God held back the rain. Worse that God heldback from helping his people. He refused to answer their prayers due to theirhardheartedness. But today is Reformation Sunday, so let’s reboot. Turn thepage. Pick a different prophet. Make a change. This is what God does. No, theLord doesn’t himself change—the God of the Old Testament is the same as the Godof the New Testament. What God changes is his people. By the end of Jeremiah,and here in Ezekiel, the Lord gives them a new heart and a capacity forrelationship—a new covenant not written in stone, but written inside theirsouls. Jesus speaks to this new covenant over the communion table—a covenantmade possible by his own blood shed. In Christ, God “forgives our iniquity andremembers our sin no more.” Grace marks a new beginning, it is a reformation.

The Protestant Reformersstressed grace alone as the means of new birth. Salvation is all God’s doing.You can never do anything to earn it. And yet you still must do something to show you’ve received it.Jesus said that you can only tell a tree by its fruit. The apostle Paul saidyou have to run the race to win it. So run with perseverance, the Bible says,and fix your eyes on Jesus who not only makes sure that you run well, but thatyou always win.

Jesus describes a daywhen those racers having loved their neighbors, served the poor, told the truthand worked for justice are confirmed as “good and faithful.” Dressed in whiteand anointed with the oil of victory, Jesus says to them, “Come, you who areblessed by my Father; take your prize, the kingdom prepared for you since thecreation of the world.” Call it Judgment Day, the Second Coming or the FinishLine, Christians have always affirmed, as we did today, that Jesus will returnto do justice, reward the righteous and set the world right forever. It’s ahope that shows up in the Old Testament too. It’s the ultimate outcome ofJeremiah’s new covenant, a vivid watercolor painted here in the prophetEzekiel.

Both Ezekiel and Jeremiahprophesied concerning Israel’s captivity to the Babylonians—a savage nationdevoted to slaughter and conquest. God would have saved Israel from Babylon hadthey stayed faithful. He’d chosen Israel of all nations to be his beloved, hadmoved into their neighborhood and blessed off their sandals with prime realestate, national defense and guaranteed retirement. Yet despite being graced by God’s presence—symbolized by thismagnificent Temple in which residedGod’s glory—the Israelites behaved as if they were entitled to it. Likethe prodigal son they took advantage of their father’s goodness and did as theypleased—browbeating the poor, defrauding their neighbor and engaging in animmorality so vile that even the surrounding pagan nations were appalled.

Unlike the parable of theProdigal Son, here in Ezekiel, it’s the father who took off. Just as God’spresence had been a sign of His favor, his departure became a sign of Hisjudgment. In response to his people’s shameless behavior, God packed his bagsand declared lights out for the Temple, Jerusalem and the nation. He left in aglory-filled fury, abandoning Israel to its destruction. God’s exit cleared theway for Babylon to wipe them out.

But now, here in Ezekiel’s fourth and final vision, the father returns.God comes back. His judgment had been for the sake of their salvation. The Lordflips the lights back on so that “the glory of the Lord filled thehouse.” It’s a house, a new Temple, for which Ezekiel provides eight long,detailed, even tedious, chapters of plans. While God’s return was wonderful andexciting, reading through these house plans can be brutal: “The building whosedoor faced north was a hundred cubits long and fifty cubits wide. Both in thesection twenty cubits from the inner court and in the section opposite thepavement of the outer court, gallery faced gallery at the three levels. Infront of the rooms was an inner passageway ten cubits wide and a hundred cubitslong.” It makes you want to pick up Leviticus just for fun. If you’ve ever leda Bible study that felt like it was going nowhere but you felt guilty aboutending it, pull out Ezekiel and you won’t have to worry about anybody evercoming back.

My Wednesday night sermonsmall group was concerned. Here in chapter 47, our passage for this morning,the emphasis shifts to the landscaping, and at first glance the tedium is stillpresent: “Going on eastward with a cord in his hand, a man measured onethousand cubits, and the water was ankle-deep. Again he measured one thousand,and the water was knee-deep. Again he measured one thousand, and the water wasup to the waist.” This stream of water spilled out from inside God’s new house,as if someone had left the shower running. What started as a trickle got sodeep so fast that soon you could swim in it. And suddenly you’re like, wait aminute, any trickle that becomes a river in less than a mile and a half is a miracle trickle. Verdant trees withleaves that never turned brown bore fruit everymonth along each bank. And all of this lushness blooms in a dead desertnear the Dead Sea, barren badlands where trees don’t grow and fresh water don’tflow. God transforms both uninhabitable desert and languid sea into a abundantgarden. The Lord raises even the land from the dead.

For a people ravaged bywar and exile brought on by their own shameful mutiny; severed from God with nohope of reunion or redemption; such an unexpected and underserved paradiseushered forth hymns of joy sung with tears of relief. Ezekiel paints theirsalvation with vivid images of abundance: limitless water, boundless freshproduce, medicine for healing, fish and animal life to enjoy. It’s actuallysounds a lot like America—enough that I wonder whether Ezekiel’s vision has thepower to stir us as it must have stirred our exiled Israelite forebears.Abundance is status quo in our country. Why yearn for Ezekiel’s paradise whenyou can get fresh fruit even in the winter, medicines at the pharmacy,beautiful scenery on any day at the lake and water no further than the twist ofa spigot?

Of course such abundanceis not the global status quo—talk to those who’ve recently returned fromthe Dominican Republic, just off of America’s southern coast. Many politicalscientists assert that coming world wars won’t be fought over who controls theoil, but over who controls the water. In India, about 170 million people drinkwater every day that has been carried home by foot, one out of six people in acountry of 1 billion. That’s the number of people in the United States who liveeast of the Mississippi. It’s as if everyone from Maine to Key West, from NewYork to Chicago, from Memphis to Atlanta, relied on water that someone hadwalked to collect every day. In India, their space program made possible thediscovery of water on the moon. But even the Indian scientists and engineerswho oversaw the project don’t have running water at home. In the twenty-firstcentury, it is estimated that as many as 100 million people worldwide aremaking the water walk every day, with hundreds of millions depending on waterthat has been carried, almost always on the head of a woman or girl.

My Wednesday night groupwas quick to remind me that living here in the land of abundance doesn’t meanyou have access to it—especially in these difficult days as joblessness andpoverty have intensified. He same was true for Israel. There was plenty ofabundance available, but they had no access to it. And it was their own fault. Despiteeight chapters of magnificent, if meticulous, plans, Ezekiel’s Temple never gotbuilt. Instead, what did get builtonce the Israelites returned from their Babylonian captivity was a comparablylow-rent replacement. Moreover, according to the prophet Haggai (and laterJesus too), this lesser rendition didn’t house God’s glory the same way thatthe first one did. This was because the people soon started trashing the newTemple as badly as they’d trashed the first. The Lord said in Ezekiel thatsurely my people “will never again defile my holy name with their detestablepractices and their loathsome abominations.” But they did. Divine judgment and near-total annihilation failed to induceany lasting reform. No sooner were they restored to their land than theirwillful and hypocritical disobedience resumed. Haggai and other prophets pickup denouncing the people where Jeremiah and Ezekiel left off.

Perhaps this is anotherreason why Ezekiel’s Temple was never built. God knew better than to try andlive among people again. He knew that taking up residence in their midst wouldonly lead to their totalannihilation. Holiness cannot tolerate infidelity and injustice. So God kepthis distance. Just “describe thetemple to the people of Israel,” the Lord commanded Ezekiel. He never saysbuild it. “Let them consider itsappearance,” God said. He never commands them to purchase stone and lumber.“Just show them the plans,” he said, “that they may be ashamed of theirsins.”

How would a set of plans causeshame? Hope maybe. I had some good friends flooded out by a raging tropicalstorm in the South. The water rose waist high throughout their subdivision asthey slept. Had not their 2-year-old awoke, seen the water rising around hisbed and screamed, he probably would have drowned. As it was, they all awoke andscrambled for higher ground, salvaging a few personal belongings but basicallylosing everything else. Homeless, the four of them were shoe-horned into asmall apartment when I stopped by to visit. They recounted the dismal daysthey’d spent pouring over lost mementos and treasures, lamenting labor nowwasted remodeling their house on their limited budget, as well as time spenthaggling with insurers and government relief agencies. But just as I was aboutto conclude that their plight was an inconsolable saga of sadness with no endin sight, they pulled out this long tube of paper and grinned. Giddy, theyunrolled the source of their happiness. House plans. Blueprints. “This is goingto be our new home,” they said.

Ezekiel’s house planswere Israel’s hope too. But how would God’s plans for a new Temple ever induceshame? As a kid I lived in a house my brickmason dad built himself. I rememberthe house plans and my brother and me getting to pick out our own room. We gotto have real wood paneling and blue shag carpet, a red bean bag chair withpeace signs and beads and a lava lamp (it was far out). Six weeks later, myparents were out to dinner and I was asleep in my room. I awoke to smokeencircling around my face. Our house was on fire. I was rescued by a heroicbabysitter who yanked me out of my drowsy stupor and, along with my littlebrother, high-tailed it across the street to our neighbors’ just as the flamesburst through the roof. All of my parents’ hard work and dreams literally wentup in smoke.

But what made it worsewas that it turned out to be my fault. I had mischievously knocked over this basket of blankets myhard-working mom had folded downstairs. Goofing around, I jumped on them like atrampoline mashing them down into the hot coils of this electric heater. Thatnight, while my parents were out, the blankets caught fire. What the firedidn’t get, the water from the fire truck hoses did. And unfortunately,insurance didn’t cover everything. Some of the damage would remain. My dad andthe architect had to draw up a whole new set of plans, salvaging whatever theycould for the reconstruction. Seeing that set of plans made me feel horrible.Ashamed. I knew that the replacement house would never be as good as theoriginal. The stains that splotched my Dad’s beautiful stonework fireplace werepermanent reminders of the way things weren’t going to be now because of me.

Maybe that’s the kind ofshame the Israelites felt when they saw Ezekiel’s plans. That glorious Templewould never be built in their lifetime. The low-rent replacement they’d entereach Sabbath for worship would remind them of the way things weren’t going tobe now because of them. In the parable of the prodigal son, it’s desperateshame that turns the ungrateful young boy’s life around. He’s no longer fit tobe called his father’s son anymore—he returns to his father and asks to betreated like a slave. But his father would have none of it. Overjoyed that hisson is alive, the father puts a white robe on his shoulders and lays out aspread fit for a prize-winning athlete. The hard love that beckoned theprodigal son to feel shame was the same love that brought him back, andpresumably the same love that brought about some change in his life. We can donothing to earn God’s grace, but we still must do something to show we’vereceived it. Grace will change you. I don’t play with blankets anymore. And I’mstill really careful when it comes to electric heaters. But that’s not why myparents let me live in their rebuilt house. They let me stay because they loveme and they were overjoyed that I was alive.

The house my Dad rebuiltwas never as good as the original—but it also wasn’t the last house. Many yearslater, they built another one out in the country among the Carolina pines. Itoverlooked a river where the fishing is good, as well as the verdant green of abeautiful golf course where the trees never turn brown. The sun sparkles everymorning and it’s quiet and peaceful and better than that first dream house everwas. And I got to live there too. Ezekiel’s house plans are a preview ofheaven, a final house being built not with lumber and stones, but with you andme as living stones, made righteous by Christ. Turn to last book of the Bible,the book of Revelation and there you find “the river of the water of life flowingfrom the throne of God and of the Lamb,” and “the tree of life producing itsfruit every month; and leaves for the healing of the nations.” There’s “nolight of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be our light, and we will reignforever and ever,” overjoyed that everybody’s alive and that everybody’s home.

Come Hell or No Water

2011-10-25T11:51:00.002-05:00

Jeremiah 14:1-16

by Daniel Harrell

We’vebeen on something of a trajectory so far in our water sermon series this fall.We began with the waters of creation—all of the water that will ever will existwas present at the beginning. Thanks to the hydrologic cycle of evaporation,condensation and precipitation, the same water you drank and washed with thismorning was the same water that rained on Noah’s Ark. It’s the same water that partedand then collapsed on Pharaoh’s chariots in the Red Sea, the same water thatMoses drew from a rock in the desert to drink, the same on which Elishacompelled an iron ax head to float. We’ve moved from total water to floodingwater to drowning water to drinking water to floating water, only to arrivethis morning at no water. Minnesota does need rain, but the drought experiencedhere in Jeremiah 14 is more akin to the one that currently cripples the Horn ofAfrica where tens of thousands have died. Theoretically the Earth has more thanenough water for everybody—humans only use about 10 percent of the planet's availablefreshwater supply for all of our needs. The problem is distribution. The main reasonis weather. Water’s abundance or scarcity is intensely weather and climatedependent.

Herein Jeremiah the main reason is God. He’s angry with his people and thereforetakes away their water. They’ve broken covenant and they know it and they knowhow to fix it. Written as a psalm of lament, this morning’s passage includes a clear confession of guilt: “Ouriniquities testify against us, … our apostasies indeed are many, and we havesinned against you.” Repentance brings forgiveness. We read later in chapter 29the Lord’s hopeful promise that his people can “seekme and find me when they seek me with all their heart.” Only here their heartdoesn’t really seem to be into it. It’s like they’re just mouthing the words;going through the motions. Isn’t that enough? At least they said the words.Besides, God always responded to their cries for help. Always forgave. Alwaysloves. He has a reputation to protect. What kind of Savior could let hischosen people suffer and still be a Savior? “Why are you acting like astranger,” they pray, sounding rather snarky, “are you a tourist just passingthrough? Are you confused? A mighty warrior who doesn’t know what to do?” It’sa odd way to pray when you’ve run out of water, helpless and dying of thirst.Any contrition has given way to bad-mouthing the Lord.

Jeremiah appeared duringa particularly perilous time in Israel’s history. Despite getting to witnessGod’s mighty deeds and words firsthand, God’s people opted to place their trustin idols instead, the handcrafted deities of their enemies that weren’t nearlyas demanding as the Lord. Freed of needing to please God, they generally broke everycommandment in the book. Jeremiah tried to warn them. Never the most tactful ofprophets, he relentlessly railed against their treachery and infidelity. Helikened them to camels in heat and to lustful wild donkeys in their pursuit ofpleasure. He told them their destiny was a valley of slaughter where theircarcasses would become food for dogs.

Author Kathleen Norris,in her popular book The Cloister Walk,described spending a year in a Benedictine monastery where Jeremiah was read tostart each day. “Listening to Jeremiah is one heck of a way to get your bloodgoing in the morning,” she wrote, “It puts caffeine to shame.” She noted thatthe Benedictine monks weren’t used to being compared to camels in heat either,but that they took it pretty well. Raised eyebrows were followed by a kind ofquiet assent, as if they were thinking: well,there are days.

For the people of Judah itwas every day. What’s a prophet to do? Or say, a chaplain for that matter. Navyrear admiral Barry Black is chaplain to the United States Senate where everyworking session has opened with prayer since 1789. Black recently opened asession by praying for the Lord to infuse Senators “with a spirit ofreconciliation that will break down divisive walls, bringing harmony andcooperation. To “give them a spirit of unity and the wisdom to have respect,one for the other.” To “enable the members of this body to experience yourpresence, and to receive your wisdom. May they receive these blessings—aware ofyour counsel that to whom much is given, much is required.” We all know howwell these prayers have worked lately. No sooner does Chaplain Black intone an “Amen,”than his flock launches into its acrimonious bleating, denouncing one anotheras “enemies of progress, abusers of the public trust, and raw sewage in thegreat river of American ideas.” That the rancor persists during these direeconomic times disgusts many American citizens, leading to historically high disapprovalratings of somewhere around 82%. But that doesn’t seem to matter. The article I read regarding Senate chaplains suggested they mostly serve as the equivalent of a piece of parsley—mainlythere for the decoration.

Granted, Senators canreap what they sow—usually in the bitter fruit of electoral defeat. ArlenSpecter, the longest serving Senator in Pennsylvania history, went down to suchdefeat in 2010, in a primary no less. Among the various reasons may have includeda passing comment he made about drinking water. Senator Specter surprisingly said,“I don’t trust tap water—if I have an opportunity to have bottled water. … I’vesupported legislation to help communities have clean drinking water. But Ithink there is a natural inclination for people to want to be a littleextra-sure on their water. Where I can have access to bottled water, I’m goingto use it.” Really? A twenty year Senateveteran with stints on judiciary and appropriations, as well as on the environmentand public works committees, and he didn’t know that the United States hasamong the safest, most closely monitored water systems in the world? Americantap water system is responsible in part for extraordinary leaps in life expectancyover the last hundred years. Let’s debunk a myth: Bottled water isn’t regulatedwith anything like the scrutiny and care that tap water is. If you want to runthe risk of something funky in your water, drink it out of a commerciallypackaged plastic bottle instead of your tap.

For a United StatesSenator to say he didn’t trust tap water as safe to drink is outrageous. It’sas outrageous as the people of Judah suggesting that God was incompetent toquench their thirst. Jeremiah lambasted them over and over for losing trust inthe Lord, but he had become a parsley prophet. So useless were his prayers forthe people, that the Lord told him not to even bother anymore. He wasn’t goingto answer anyway. The verses that follow this morning’s psalm of lament containGod’s troubling reply. They’re verses I chose not to have read out of respectfor the Scripture readers. Even now I can feel my Wednesday night sermon grouptrying to wave me off. They know what’s coming.

It’snot just that God refused to answer his people’s prayers. It’s worse than that.Thus says the Lord: “Even if they fast, I will nothear their cries for help. If they give offerings I will not accept them.Instead, I will devour them through wars, famines, and plagues.” Drought’s not sufficient.The Lord will not be mocked. Israel cannot endlessly violate Yahweh andthen expect mercy to be automatic. Let’s debunk another myth: Grace has itsboundaries. God’s people want to chase after other gods and do as they please? Gofor it. The Lord will let his people suffer the hazardous outcomes of theirchoices. He’ll surrender them to their enemies. The fierce Babylonians, asavage nation devoted to slaughter and conquest, would mow Judah down and castits inhabitants into exile.

This is why Christians stay awayfrom the Old Testament. Seriously. Take Leviticus, for instance. A man gets ina fight and in the heat of the scuffle, lets loose a cussword with God’s namein it (a violation of the third commandment). Immediately the foul-mouthed manis hauled off to Moses for blaspheming the Lord’s name. Moses waits for theLord to pronounce sentence, which the Lord does, saying, “Whoever curses hisGod shall bear his sin. Whoever blasphemes the name of the lord shall be put todeath. All the congregation shall stone him.” Why does blasphemy get youstoned? Because the Old Testament places blasphemy and bad-mouthing alongsidemurder, implying that to curse is to kill. Eye for an eye—and also why you shouldstick to the New Testament.

Except that when you turn to the NewTestament, the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, Jesus makes the sameconnection between bad-mouthing and murder. He says, “Anyone who angrily insults his brother or sister will be subject tojudgment. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire ofhell.” In Leviticus, curse God andget stoned. In the Sermon on the Mount, curse anybody and burn in hell. I can see you’re really glad youcame to church today.

Ifthis is the God of the Bible, you might not want to read your Bible. Better to createyour own god, like Israel did: a kinder, gentler deity who is easier to believeand obey. Package him up like bottled water and presume that will make himsafer to drink, easier to take. There’s aninteresting University of Chicago study that found people’s personal beliefs andmoral and social stands mirror those values that they attribute to God. On theone hand this makes sense: one’s values and ethics should be informed by one’sfaith. Except that when the researchers tricked subjects into changing theirminds about a particular issue or stance, the subjects changed their faith too.They claimed that their new position was also the same as God’s—even if itdiffered from what they had claimed before. The researchers went on to run MRIson a few brains and found that subjects’ personal convictions and those theyhold about God lit up the same cerebral regions. Their conclusion was that anyreliance on a deity to guide one’s decisions and judgments is little more than "spiritual sock-puppetry."

Philosophers understood this tendency long before scientistsdid. The term “anthropomorphism,” whereby human characteristics get ascribed toGod, was coined by Xenophanes in the sixth century BC. More recently,philosophers from Rousseau to Voltaire to Mark Twain have all been creditedwith the line: “God created man in his own image and man, being a gentleman,returned the favor.”

We prefer to believe that God would never cause disaster to strike, or leaveus poor or unhappy; that God would never have anybody suffer, or withholdforgiveness, or allow evil people to triumph—because we would never do thesethings to ourselves. And then disaster does strike or evil wins or sufferinghappens, and our hand crafted faith crumbles under the weight of it all becauseour faith was never in the Lord but in ourselves, in the Jesus we made up inour minds.

This is why we need Jeremiah. He debunks the myths we’vemade up about God. Judah’s made-up faith in a Godobliged-to-forgive-and-to-save-no-matter-what allowed them to treat God’s gracewith contempt rather than gratitude, as permission to sin rather than asincentive to live righteously—as a sprig of parsley rather than a spring of livingwater welling up to eternal life. But God would not be mocked. “Thus says theLORD concerning this people: Truly they have loved to stray far from me, theyhave not restrained their feet; therefore the LORD takes no pleasure them, nowhe will remember their iniquity and punish their sins.”

MyWednesday night sermon group was quick to cite Jeremiah 29:11, an endearingverse that many have committed to memory: “I know theplans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and afuture.” What about that? I like Jeremiah 29:11 too. But let’s not forget thatit follows Jeremiah 29:10- Thus says the Lord, “When seventy years arecompleted in Babylon, then I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise.”God had plans to prosper his people, but first they had to do their time.

Babylondid invade Jerusalem, destroy the Temple and take Judah captive—all inaccordance with the will of God. But that was not the end of the story. The holyfire of God’s fury against sin and infidelity does not burn for the sake ofdestruction. Unlike its human counterfeits, divine anger refines for the sakeof redemption. The devastation that one might interpret as the epilogue toIsrael’s existence turned out to be the prologue to their salvation. Theunquenchable fire of God’s justice made way for the thirst-quenching relief ofGod’s mercy. Socially, politically, militarily, individually, the unfaithfulIsraelites had spiraled beyond the threshold of any human resource for hope orrecovery. They were as good as dead. But dead is good as far as God is concerned. It’s only those who lose theirlives that ever end up finding them. Read on in Jeremiah 29 and God’s plans toprosper come with that hopeful promise alluded to earlier—one that also echoesin the Sermon on the Mount: “When you seek me, you will find me; if you seek mewith all your heart.”

So what about my heart?How can I truly seek the Lord if my heart doesn’t really want to? Jeremiah hasan answer for that. In chapter 31, the Lord promises a new covenant—a newrelationship inscribed not on tablets of stone, but written on our hearts. “Nolonger shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” forthey shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD;for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” This is thenew covenant of which Jesus speaks over the communion table—a covenant madepossible by his own blood shed for our sins. God promises in Jeremiah that itwill be an everlasting covenant, never to be withdrawn; “I never to draw back from doing good to them,” he says,making every provision for keeping relationship with us. But at the sametime, just in case, God writes something else in us too. Thus says the Lord: “Iwill put the fear of me in their hearts, so that they may not turn away.” Thisis why we need Jeremiah. Just in case.

[Information on Arlen Specter and bottled water from Charles Fishman, The BigThirst.]

I Changed My Mind: The Sermons Are Back...

2011-10-25T11:20:00.001-05:00

For a full drink of all the sermons in this fall's water series at Colonial Church. Click here.

God Is That, But Also More

2011-09-01T15:56:00.001-05:00

Thoughts on John Kiser's Commander of the Faithful: The Life and Times of Emir Abd el-Kader

by Daniel Harrell

Part of the Patheos Book Club Roundtable

As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 nears, Christian-Muslim relations haven't improved that much. Immediate, stereotyped incriminations on the heels of the Al-Qaeda attack, stoked by two American Wars, find new energy from fears over what happens once the Arab Spring gives way to Summer. The somewhat tepid response of Americans to the Somali famine makes you wonder if it would be different if the famine occured in a less Muslim dominated area. Here in Minneapolis, the large Somali population is still viewed with suspicion by many, especially when women don traditional Muslim headscarves.

Where are the models for genuine interfaith connection and interreligious charity, especially in the face of conflict and discord? Emir Abd el-Kader drew high praise from Algerian Catholics as well as fellow Muslims, an American President and even his enemies. On what basis? On the basis of his faith in God as the God of all people and in the sanctity of human life as the gift of God. Nowhere was this more clearly evidenced that in his defense of Christians from attack by Muslims in Damascus in 1860. Having killed Christians earlier himself, he drew the distinction between Christians who invaded and sought to destroy Algeria, and those who merely professed strong faith in Jesus. For the latter, he had high regard, by virtue of his own strong faith. He wrote, "that which we did for the Christians, we did to be faithful to Islamic law and out of respect for human life. All creatures are part of God's family and those loved most by God are those who do the most good for his family. All the religions of the book rest on two principles--to praise God and to have compassion for his creatures. The law of Mohammed places the greatest importance on compassion and mercy, and on all that which preserves social cohesion and protects us from division" (p. 302).

Too often contemporary Christians and Muslims, trained to view each others as enemies for centuries, interpret points of convergence as threatening the purity and integrity of personal and collective (read tribal) belief. Easier to label the other as infidel or unbeliever than to seek peace and mutual tolerance. As a Christian, can't I affirm truth that is in Islam even if I do not affirm all that Islam teaches? Muslims regard Jesus as prophet even if they do not regard him as Lord. While that might not constitute full confession of faith, it certainly is enough to work with for the sake of the common good on earth. Moreover, can either say for sure what the full will of God is for the other? It's as a quote from el-Kader carried by a Catholic Sister read: "If you think that God is what the different communities believe--the Muslims, Christians, Jews, etc.--He is that, but also more. ... None of His creatures worships Him in His entirety" (p. xvii).

Letter L=LAST SERMON POST (Also CS Lewis)

2011-08-30T16:17:00.000-05:00

This sermon blog is moving to the Colonial Church website. You will be able to find it here.

However, Daniel Harrell will continue to post here on occasion and at www.danielharrell.com

Church Fathers Starting with the Letter L: CS Lewis
Matthew 2:1-10
by Daniel Harrell

This morning concludes this year’s installment of my alphabetical Church Fathers sermon series, this summer starting with the Letter L. You’ll remember that to be a Church Father technically means you lived during the first five centuries of Christianity, but clearly I overstep that boundary. My rationale (and annual running joke) for doing so has been that, for American Protestants at least, our sense of church history only stretches back as far as CS Lewis anyway. How apropos, therefore, that arriving at Letter L we finally arrive at Lewis, on the heels of Pope Leo the Great and Martin Luther. Most contemporary Christians have enjoyed a CS Lewis encounter—he crosses all denominations. Perhaps it was a fascination with the Chronicles of Narnia as a child, an engagement with the apologetics of Mere Christianity or The Problem of Pain during college, maybe the sci-fi fantasy of his Space Trilogy, the cleverness of The Screwtape Letters, or his insights into mythology and renaissance literature expressed in essays, letters or Lewis’ own favorite work, Til We Have Faces. Despite having enjoyed little critical acclaim—especially when compared to his good friend JRR Tolkien—the popularity of Lewis continues unabated.

Lewis is so popular in fact, that some regard his authority as almost on par with Scripture itself. For instance, many believers disturbed over author Rob Bell’s recent musings over heaven and hell were quickly assuaged once they discovered Bell got a lot of his ideas from CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce. My personal favorite is A Grief Observed which Lewis wrote following the heartbreaking death of his wife, American Joy Gresham, to whom he had been married just a few years before cancer took her. The book has helped me through the tragedies of my own life. Asking after the presence of God, as people often do in the aftermath of catastrophic loss, Lewis wrote “I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.” Lewis initially published this book under a pseudonym. Caring friends, unaware of this, gave it to him to guide him through his own grief.

Born in Belfast in 1898, Clive Stapes Lewis was known throughout his life as Jack—a name he insisted he be called at age four in memory of his dog Jacksie. Lewis possessed a rich childhood imagination, which he carried into adulthood, insisting that without it, you can’t fully understand the world. For Lewis, meaning is conveyed most powerfully through story—through the great and not-so-great narratives of history retold over and over again. Our almost four-year-old daughter Violet is currently in a phase where everyday is a recreated, detailed story involving her, our cat Briscoe and her toy bunny. They live atop hedges, scale mountains, fly airplanes and eat magic ice cream that transforms them into the color of the flavor they choose, all of which helps Violet make sense of her world. (Either that or her parents are so boring she has to jazz things up a little.) Lewis wrote, “A child is always thinking about those details in a story which a grown-up regards as indifferent. If when you first told the tale your hero was warned by three little men appearing on the left of the road, and when you tell it again you introduce one little man on the right of the road, the child protests. And the child is right. You think it makes no difference because you are not living in the story at all. If you were, you would know better.”

Lewis won a college scholarship to Oxford, which took him to England in 1916. The culture shock he experienced there was significant. “The strange English accents with which I was surrounded seemed like the voices of demons,” he said. Lewis fought and was wounded in World War I, and in the trenches made a pact with a fellow soldier to care for the other’s family should either be killed. Lewis alone survived and kept his promise. He’d given up on church at an early age—“very angry at God for not existing” he said—but once he returned to Oxford as a professor, he befriended the devoutly Catholic JRR Tolkien. Tolkien eventually coaxed Lewis back to belief, though not as far as to his own Roman Catholicism. Lewis stuck with the Church of England instead, despite his misgivings about the English. In time he became the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge, from whence he subsequently professed that there was no such thing as an English Renaissance.

Lewis had a lot to say about almost everything, his prolificacy was the fruit of his bounteous imagination and his many fascinations: from anthropomorphic animals to the stars in the sky. Lewis was a keen amateur astronomer who kept a telescope on the balcony of his bedroom. According to Michael Ward, a Cambridge University Chaplain and author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis, Lewis’ favorite object in the night sky was the planet Jupiter. According to medieval cosmology, Jupiter was the ‘best planet,’ Fortuna Major. Lewis used to tell his university lecture audiences, “Those born under Jupiter are apt to be loud-voiced and red-faced.” He would then pause before adding, “It is obvious under which planet I was born.”

Lewis lectured on medieval cosmology because he thought that familiarity with the pre-Copernican cosmos was essential to a proper understanding of medieval and renaissance literature: he repeatedly encouraged his students and readers to take a stroll under the sky at night. Looking up at the heavens for moderns, he argued, is a very different experience from what it was in the Middle Ages. These days we sense that we are looking out into a trackless emptiness, a pitch-black and dead-cold space—which is what we call it: space. In the Middle Ages, we would have felt as if we were looking into a vast, lighted concavity, a dome of wondrous luminosity and even love.

“We are inveterate poets,” Lewis wrote. “When a quantity is very great we cease to regard it as a mere quantity. Our imaginations awake. Instead of mere quantity, we now have a quality—the Sublime… Men of sensibility look up to on the night sky with awe: brutal and stupid men do not. When the silence of the eternal spaces terrified Pascal, it was Pascal’s own greatness that enabled them to do so; to be frightened by the bigness of the nebulae is, almost literally, to be frightened by our own shadow. For light years and geological periods are mere arithmetic until the shadow of man, the poet, the maker of myths, falls upon them. As a Christian, I do not say we are wrong to tremble at the shadow, for I believe it to be the shadow of an image of God. But if the vastness of Nature ever threatens to overthrow our spirits, we must remember that it is only Nature spiritualized by human imagination which does so.”

Our text for this morning is the familiar Christmas story about the star of Bethlehem. We read the passage every Christmas, but rarely go out in the winter night to look for traces of that star. Granted, the cold might have something to do with that, but not so for C.S. Lewis. To a friend he once confided how beautiful it was “on two or three successive nights about the Holy Time, to see Venus and Jupiter blazing at one another, once with the Moon right between them: Majesty and Love linked by Virginity—what could be more appropriate?”

Michael Ward goes on to note how Lewis’ delight in this old picture of the heavens (as opposed to space) was not confined to his professional life as a literary historian; he had a much more personal investment in it too. In The Turn of the Tide, a meditation upon the cosmic significance of Christ's Nativity, Lewis wrote how the entire universe waits in breathless expectancy about the coming event in Bethlehem—from the lowly cattle all the way up to Saturn in the outermost planetary sphere. When Christ is finally born:

Saturn laughed and lost his latter age’s frost,

His beard, Niagara-like, unfroze;

Monsters in the Sun rejoiced; the Inconstant One,

The unwedded Moon, forgot her woes.

A shiver of re-birth and deliverance on the Earth

went gliding. Her bonds were released…

So death lay in arrest. But at Bethlehem the bless'd

Nothing greater could be heard

Than a dry wind in the thorn, the cry of the One new-born,

And cattle in stall as they stirred.

Since the Copernican revolution, with earth no longer the center of things, the heavenly bodies had been steadily evacuated of spiritual significance until they were regarded as no more than large aggregations of rock or gas. Narnia readers may recall an exchange in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader during which Eustace is rebuked by Ramandu for claiming that “In our world a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” Ramandu replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” Lewis wrote his Space Trilogy largely to rehabilitate (imaginatively, not scientifically, that is) this traditional view. For what purpose? For the purpose of meaning. Lewis considered the cosmos to be more than merely material. For him the pre-Copernican model was, in a sense, more Christian than the Newtonian or Einsteinian versions which succeeded it because it provided a spiritual reading of materiality.

Historically, religious faith, particularly Christianity, was the loom onto which the discoveries of science were woven. It was within a Christian theological framework that scientific disclosure found its transcendent meaning. Ironically, Copernicus and Newton were devout believers and saw their work not as replacements for faith, but as extensions of it. Even Einstein gave credence to some sort of divine will at work. The idea was that the best of science and the best of theology concerted to give human beings deeper insight into the character of the universe and, subsequently, into the divine character himself. Scientific discovery was received with gratitude to the Almighty for the wonder of his creation. Scientists, alongside the psalmist, would proclaim, “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.”

This former balance between faith and science (or reason) was struck in the Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas, who building on Augustine, established a delicate equilibrium between theology (reasoning down from faith) and philosophy, or science (reasoning up from sensory data). Aquinas, unlike the Reformers who followed, taught that human senses and rational faculties, created by God, were competent for understanding reality, albeit from a limited viewpoint. The limits were filled in by theology. Aquinas asserted that God acted through “secondary causes,” creating the world according to his laws and then giving nature room to unfold within.

However, if God operated mostly behind the scenes as the prime cause, then it wasn’t long before thinkers started wondering whether he was there at all. In time, reliance upon divine revelation gave way to human reason in its Enlightenment form, and soon after the supernatural was rendered superfluous. Nature, reduced down to its material properties, became disenchanted. Ward writes that “The world was emptied, first of her indwelling spirits, then of her occult sympathies and antipathies, finally of her colors, smells, and tastes. Man with his new scientific powers became rich like Midas but all that he touched had gone dead and cold.” This process, slowly working, siphoned away the old imaginations, much to Lewis’ dismay.

To him, modern scientists were too naturalistic in their worldview, and thus liable to the error of removing their own minds and predilections from the big picture for the sake of a presumed objectivity. They failed to realize that imagination is required in order for the world be fully known. They needed was not only larger and better telescopes, but minds increasingly aware of their own creativity. Failure of imagination de-spiritualizes the universe, Lewis believed; a fallacy of first order because the rational mind is itself spiritual and dependent upon that animating energy that saturates the entire universe—an energy which, in turn, depends upon God himself. Lewis described a universe perceived within a solely naturalistic framework to be “all fact and no meaning.”

In recent years my own interest in the interplay between science and faith has allowed me the privilege to rub shoulders with some prominent scientists for whom faith has filled out their own comprehension of reality. Francis Collins, the imminent geneticist and now Director of the NIH, attributes CS Lewis with converting his own atheism into belief, convincing Collins that the microscopic world of organic life is not random and meaningless, but infused with significance and divine beauty. At the other end of the spectrum, astrophysicist Jennifer Wiseman, Chief of the ExoPlanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory at NASA (and on tap to be our next Guelich Lecturer in 2013), argues for cosmological discovery as an instrument of worship. In the spirit of Lewis, she asserts that understanding the stars grants us a profoundly expanded view of Jesus Christ as Lord; that he is Lord of all space and time—over billions of galaxies and billions of years.

For CS Lewis, mere data could not be the determinant of the real world because the real world was a matter of data and imagination, a matter of matter and meaning—and analogically, matter and spirit. The spirit is the logos, the word who is Christ, in whom Scripture teaches “all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

However, Lewis’ goal was not to lead an observer from the cosmos to Christ. His goal was first to get them from the cosmos back into their own heads. He wrote, “The discrepancy between a movement of atoms in an astronomer’s cortex and his understanding that there must be a still unobserved planet beyond Uranus, is already so immense that the Incarnation of God Himself is, in one sense, scarcely more startling.” For Lewis, the link between mind and matter forged by human reasoning reflects the link forged between God and Man in Jesus; a link brought to light under the Star of Bethlehem, a star which was a huge ball of flaming gas—but so much more besides.

Lewis died at age 64, having refused to give the devil enough time to do as his senior demon Screwtape (likely English) instructed his apprentice Wormwood in The Screwtape Letters. Advocating for long life, Screwtape said: “seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unraveling human souls from Heaven and building up firm attachment to earth.” Lewis died firmly unattached to earth—and so he remains. “It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God,” he said, “because only the pure in heart want to.”

Church Fathers Starting with the Letter L: Martin Luther

2011-08-25T08:38:00.000-05:00

Galatians 2:16-21

by Daniel Harrell

This morning’s look at the momentous life of Martin Luther marks the second in my annual summer sermon series on the Church Fathers (and Mothers). For fourteen summers I’ve alphabetically surveyed personalities throughout Church history who have shaped the faith as we’ve come to believe it. Now to be a genuine Church Father technically means you had to have lived during the first five centuries of Christianity. Last week I offered a brief glimpse at the fifth century’s Leo the Great, one of the most significant Popes of Christendom, which is why he’s called the Great. Almost single-handedly, Leo settled the mystery of the two natures of Jesus—his full humanity alongside his full divinity—by emphasizing Jesus’ uniqueness in this regard. Unfortunately, Leo’s success amassed considerable ecclesial and political power for the papacy in the waning days of the Roman Empire, boding badly for the years to come. Medieval Christendom during what we know as the Dark Ages was rife with papal abuses of power. Granted, had the Dark Ages not been so dark, we wouldn’t be here today talking about Martin Luther. While not technically a Church Father, living as he did in the sixteenth century, no other person had a greater impact on modern Christianity—Protestant and Catholic—than this mercurial German monk.

Minnesotans know this all too well. Lutherans comprise almost 35% of the state’s population, with Lutheran influence stretching way beyond that. An unavoidable authority on Lutheran life, Garrison Keillor, writes: “Here in the Midwest, we all have long memories of suffering and pain, because, for one thing, winter is so long, and when finally it gets warm and beautiful as it is now, we try to relieve these painful memories of cold, of neglect, of suspicion, darkness, anger, Bologna sandwiches, stupidity, and butterscotch pudding with mindless pleasure in the sun while wearing as few clothes as possible. But we were not brought up to experience pleasure. It doesn’t register on us. It’s like trying to write on glass with a pencil. We get into as few clothes as possible and the sight of ourselves depresses us. Sunlight makes us gloomy. We are not Mediterranean people. We are Lutheran people. Even the Catholics up here are Lutheran. And I don’t like to generalize about Lutherans, but one thing that’s true of every single last one of them without a single exception is that the low point of their year is their summer vacation.” (Wow, so glad we moved here!)

If this indeed is a portrait of Lutherans it’s a portrait of Luther too. Revered for his courageous confrontation of medieval church power, his standing up in the face of accusations of heresy, his establishing the authority of Scripture and then making it accessible by translating it into German, his writing some of the church’s best loved hymns—adaptations, perhaps, of the secular music in his day just like contemporary Christian music does in our own—his igniting a reformation that still burns brightly; Luther did all of this despite being a man tormented by depression, debilitating self-doubt and an almost paranoid fear of God.

It started early. Trained as a lawyer and excelling as a philosopher, Luther gave it all up at age 21. Making his way home one night through a tremendous thunderstorm, a bolt of lightning struck the ground near his path. He screamed, “Help me St. Anne I will become a monk!” And he did. Possessing what one biographer describes as “a high pressure fire hose” personality of shattering intensity, Luther plunged into monastic life—praying, fasting, going without sleep, enduring winter without blankets, flagellating himself and who knows, maybe eating mounds of butterscotch pudding: “If anyone could have earned heaven by the life of a monk,” he wrote, “It was I.”

And yet none of this diminished his paranoid fear of God’s judgment. He hated opening his Bible, and having to constantly read about God’s righteousness and realizing over and over again how he could never measure up. Ironically assigned to teach Bible at Wittenberg University, Luther gradually discovered a way through his dilemma. “At last, meditating day and night, by the mercy of God, I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that the righteous [are justified] by faith. Here I felt as if I were entirely born again and had entered paradise itself through the gates that had been flung open.”

You’re likely familiar with the rest of the story—especially if you’ve seen the movie. Granted, Luther was no nearly so good looking (as the above photo shows), yet his legacy is enormous. Every Protestant stream, including our own Congregationalist one, flows from Luther’s reservoir.

Of course, Luther did not come up with justification by faith on his own. That’s always been in the Bible. It goes all the way back to Abraham. Yet just as the medieval church of Luther’s day controlled Biblical interpretation, so a group known as Judaizers tried to control things in New Testament Greece. In our text from Galatians this morning, these Judaizers—milking ancient Jewish prejudice against Gentiles—insisted that Gentile converts to Christianity be circumcised as Jews first. Though the apostle Peter (a Jew) knew better, he apparently backed out of dinner with a group of Gentile Christians so not to offend Jews who still considered eating with Gentiles to be some sort of contagion. The apostle Paul (also a Jew) was livid. He considered Peter’s actions a direct assault on the integrity of the gospel. Paul gave it to Peter in front of everyone, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews? We Jews have put our faith in Christ Jesus just like the Gentiles that we too may be justified by faith in Christ and not by doing the works of the law, just like the Gentiles.”

“This is not to say that the Law is bad,” Luther explained. “Only that it is not able to justify us. … We must understand that we are merely beneficiaries and recipients of the treasures of Christ. Now, if I could perform any work acceptable to God and deserving of grace, … why should I stand in need of the grace of God and the suffering and death of Christ? Christ would be of no benefit to me. Christ’s mercy would be of no use to me. This shows how little insight the pope and the whole of his religious coterie have into spiritual matters, and how little they concern themselves with the spiritual health of their forlorn flocks. … God never yet gave to any person grace and everlasting life as a reward for merit. The opinions of the papists are the intellectual pipe-dreams of idle pates, that serve no other purpose but to draw men away from the true worship of God. The papacy is founded upon hallucinations.

“The true way of salvation is this. First, a person must realize that he is a sinner, the kind of a sinner who is congenitally unable to do any good thing. “Whatsoever is not of faith, is sin.” Those who seek to earn the grace of God by their own efforts are trying to please God with sins. They mock God, and provoke His anger. They must repent. The second part is this. God sent His only-begotten Son into the world that we may live through His merit. He was crucified and killed for us. By sacrificing His Son for us God revealed Himself to us as a merciful Father who donates remission of sins, righteousness, and life everlasting for Christ’s sake. God hands out His gifts freely unto all men. That is the praise and glory of His mercy.”

For all his fervency regarding God’s grace, Luther remained burdened by his own unworthiness of it. Despite all the assurance about which he wrote and preached, he struggled to ever feel any assurance himself. How could he? He firmly believed that grace justified the sinner, but he also believed it did nothing to change one’s sinful nature. Back and forth it went. As biographer Martin Marty writes, Luther’s life makes sense chiefly as one who wrestled obsessively with God: God present and God absent, God too near and God too far, the God of wrath and the God of love, God weak and God almighty, God real and God as illusion, God hidden and God revealed. Luther was often paralyzed by what he called Anfechtungen, an untranslatable word often defined as those spiritual assaults that keep people from finding certainty in a loving God—attacks of doubt and near-despair sent not from the devil but, quite possibly, from God himself.

I didn’t read much about Luther until I got to seminary—Congregationalists tend toward Calvin and Zwingli as our reformers of choice (though Luther had choice words for Calvin and Zwingli too). Once in seminary, given Luther’s stature, I figured I needed to read more about him. Besides, it was a class assignment. But being something of a non-conformist (which everyone considers themselves to be in seminary—don’t ask me why), I picked up a biography of Luther by a contemporary historian that was not on the recommended reading list. It was a fascinating retelling of Luther’s life, and inspiring as well as the author wrote in soaring prose of the power and brilliance of Luther’s theology. Everything was there: justification by grace through faith; the “joyful exchange” of identities with Christ; the forgiveness of sins; the authority of the Word; and the human as “sinner and at the same time justified.” But then, at the end, came a chapter on Luther’s later years and his vicious anti-Semitism. Granted, Luther was an equal-opportunity denouncer of Jews, papists, Turks, Calvinists, Anabaptists and even other Lutherans. Moreover, his anti-Semitism was not racial as much as it was religious; he welcomed Jewish converts to Christianity. But Luther believed with the world ending soon and with so many denying Christ, Jews were basically doomed.

“I write against the Jews,” Luther said, “for a Jew or a Jewish heart is a wooden, stone devil heart that can be moved by nothing.” That was Luther being kind. Most of the language he used is unspeakable in polite company. In fact, the last sermon Luther preached, three days before he died in February 1546, was an attack against Jews. He never seemed to contemplate how contradictory it might seem to see the sufferings of Christians as a sign of God’s blessing toward those God loved, while the suffering of Jews was a testimony of God’s wrath toward those he hated. Luther’s virulent railing against the Jews reflected his times to be sure; but they were still bad enough to leave a legacy of hateful consequences in Germany for centuries.

As for the contemporary biographer recording these things, Luther’s viciousness cancelled out for him all the good Luther accomplished. In the final chapter of his polemical biography, the author summarily rejected the Christian gospel and God’s grace all because of Martin Luther. As a young seminarian, I was dumbstruck by how anybody could so clearly and beautifully articulate the gospel of Jesus to which I had staked my own soul, only to then entirely dismiss it due to the words and acts of one person—and a sixteenth century person at that. If Martin Luther could cause somebody to reject the gospel and lose their faith, how many people were going to lose their faith because of me? I descended into my own bout of Anfechtungen which led me to schedule a weeklong personal retreat (at a Catholic monastery no less) where I dutifully read the biography of Luther that was on the approved reading list.

So many years since, I’ve thankfully come to realize the real question is how anyone could have expected Luther to be other than the sinful man he was. This goes for all of us. And it goes for Jesus too; inasmuch as he bore our sins on the cross. Luther argued that to truly know Christ is not to know him in the sublime, dreamed-up idealized ways we so often conceive of Him, (and wrongly imagine ourselves as able to emulate); but rather in the lowly, weak and dying ways Jesus reveals himself on the cross, where he takes on humanity in all of its sin and shame. In this Christ we see ourselves.

Through the cross, Luther wrote, God “calls humans by their real names and not by images of their attractive appearance. He does not name them as they would wish, but as they are accepted by the boundless suffering love of God. This has far-reaching consequences: religious desire for praise and might and self-affirmation are blind to suffering—their own and that of others—because they are in love with achievement and success. Their love is love for the beautiful, which is to make the one who loves beautiful himself. But in the cross and passion of Christ, faith experiences a quite different love of God, a love which loves what is quite different. God loves what is sinful, bad, foolish, weak and hateful, in order to make it beautiful and good and wise and righteous. Sinners are beautiful because they are loved by God; they are not loved because they are beautiful.”

Though too often sinful, bad, foolish, weak and hateful ourselves; God still loves us relentlessly. He makes us beautiful and good and wise and righteous by the hard edge of grace. It is all Jesus’ doing. As the apostle Paul put it here in Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live.” Whatever is beautiful or good or wise or right about me is not me, “but Christ who lives in me. The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” And you and Martin Luther too.

Church Fathers Starting with the Letter L: Leo the Great

2011-08-16T12:22:00.001-05:00

Matthew 5:1-12

by Daniel Harrell

If you happen to know anything about the fifth century’s Pope Leo the Great (this morning’s Church Father Starting with the Letter L) then you may know about he single-handedly faced down the notorious barbarian Attila the Hun and saved the city of Rome from destruction (at least until a few years later). Labeled “the scourge of God” by the Romans, Attila and his savage army ransacked the rest of Italy and had their sights set on the eternal city. But Leo roared onto the battlefield and repelled the Huns—reportedly with the help of a few angels though I’m guessing some gold was probably involved too. The renaissance painter Raphael had this take on it. It hangs in the Vatican and was commissioned by Pope Julius II who chose to sit as the model for Leo.

Leo’s bravery in the face of danger was in part what earned him the designation as “great,” only one of three Popes in church history to enjoy such acclamation. Thinking of Leo for this morning, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a similar act of bravery I witnessed during our recent family vacation. We traveled out to Yellowstone and while in Montana (courtesy of Jim and Sue Eaton’s lovely cabin there) my wife Dawn, daughter Violet and I decided to go for a short hike on Dawn’s birthday: A hike because Dawn loves to hike, and short because Violet is three. I dropped by the Visitors Center for trail suggestions, of which there were plenty, including a relatively easy one just off the highway.

Having made our choice, we were curious about the bold-typed warning printed at the bottom of the trail map: THIS IS BEAR COUNTRY. TAKE YOUR SPRAY. Take your spray? They make bear spray? Turns out they do. I asked the Visitor’s Center staff whether this was truly necessary for such a short hike so near to the highway, and they recounted how just last week a teenager was mauled by a local grizzly, albeit in the backcountry of Yellowstone. Nevertheless, they said, best to carry spray in case. And by the way, they had some on sale. Only fifty bucks a can. it turned out, they sold Bear Spray. It cost fifty bucks a can. (Luckily, I hadn’t bought Dawn a birthday present yet. And it did come with a cool holster to carry it in.) So off we went, locked and loaded, and we made it just up to the first ridge line when hark, we heard an unfamiliar snarl. Just down in the vale we spied our own barbearian. Obviously our first impulse was to take a picture. But once the barbaric beast sensed our presence and turned toward us, action was required. Being a mama bear in her own right, my brave wife stepped up with her spray and the threat was no more. I now refer to my wife as Dawn the Great.

Fourteen years ago in Boston I began an annual sermon series during the summer on the Church Fathers, those personalities from church history who fashioned our faith and codified what we have come to embrace as orthodox Christianity. It’s managed to garner a bit of acclaim. Go to the popular religious website patheos.com, and you’ll find my weekly column “Church Father ABCs.” The ABC part is because I chose to tackle these noteworthy fathers (and mothers) a letter at a time. Of course if you know your ABCs, you’re probably wondering why 14 years only has me at the letter L. The problem was that with so many patristic heroes clustered around letter A—Ambrose, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas for instance—it took me a while to get out of there. My rationale for taking an annual peek at these people comes from my own conviction that our faith derives in no small part from the faithful personalities who’ve lived it and wrestled with it through crucial moments in church history. While we Protestants may not venerate these important people as saints, we cannot separate their contributions from our own doctrines and practice. We may hold to the Bible alone as our sola source of authority, but interpreting and obeying the Bible necessarily stands on the interpretive and obedient shoulders of past believers.

Last year was my first foray into the Fathers here at Colonial—of great interest to some, a good reason to go to the cabin for others. Having come to Letter K, we looked at the mystic Thomas a’ Kempis and existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Now patristic scholars in the house rightly note that to include a Kempis and Kierkegaard exceedingly stretches the definition of “church father.” Technically, to be a Church Father, you had to live in the first five centuries AD. But we’re American Protestants, we get to make our own rules. I do begin this year’s installment with a bona fide Father, but something of an abomination to most Protestants inasmuch as Leo the Great set the stage for centuries of abusive power exerted by medieval pontiffs. Granted, this abuse did pave the way for the Great Protestant Church Father if there ever was one: Martin Luther himself, the patron saint of all things Minnesotan. We’ll wrap up this year’s series with the patron saint of everything Narnian, CS Lewis.

As for Leo the Great, facing down Attila the Hun earned him some serious street cred. Born of aristocratic Tuscan stock, Leo ascended to the papacy in 440 AD. Now a hero and savior to the empire as well as the church, he easily expanded his pontifical influence. His greatest theological contribution was what we know as The Tome of Leo. It’s significance was its role in helping the hotly contested theological debate of that day; namely, the dual natures of Jesus Christ.

How was it possible for a human being to be fully God? On the one hand, Jesus was clearly a flesh and blood person, just like you and me. A historical figure, he was born and walked and talked and ate and did most everything else we humans do. On the other hand, Jesus was God incarnate, and thus he did things no human ever did—talked to demons, walked on water, fed multitudes, changed the weather and raised the dead. If a man is God, is he really a man? God’s not a man. And God doesn’t sin. But what man doesn’t sin? God doesn’t die. But Jesus died. How can Jesus be God?

Early Christians offered all sorts of options for making this work, from Jesus having a split personality to his being a human body with a divine soul and even one where Jesus’ presence on earth was more like a mirage. Predictably, the debate mostly involved the various sides labeling the other heretics. The Emperor convened a congressional committee to attempt a solution—you know, with representatives from the humanity side and representatives from the divinity side—to see if they couldn’t cobble together a compromise. But the committee only perpetuated the divide. It took the Emperor falling off his horse and dying—some would say providentially—before a new committee could be formed, one which history remembers as The Council of Chalcedon. Leo asserted his judgment at this Council through his Tome which stressed the importance of Jesus’ uniqueness as the one and only person ever with two natures. It may sound strange, but no stranger than the Doctrine of Trinity that understands God as three persons with one nature. Chalcedon affirmed Leo’s Tome, and Christians have tried to believe ever since; that “our Lord Jesus Christ is one and the same Son, complete in Godhead and humanity, truly God and truly man… without confusion, without change, without separation or division.”

Leo wrote, “Lowliness is assured by majesty, weakness by power, mortality by eternity. To pay the debt of our sinful state, a nature that is incapable of suffering was joined to one that could suffer. Thus, in keeping with the healing we needed, one and the same mediator between God and humanity, Jesus Christ, was able to die in one nature, and unable to die in the other. He who was true God was therefore born in the complete and perfect nature of a true human being, whole in his own nature, whole in ours. By our nature we mean what the Creator had fashioned in us from the beginning, and took to himself in order to restore it. For in the savior there was no trace of what the deceiver introduced, and we, being misled, allowed to enter. Jesus took our nature without the stain of sin, enlarging our humanity without diminishing his divinity…. One and the same person—this must be said over and over again—is truly the son of God and truly the son of man. He is God in virtue of the fact that ‘in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.’ He is human in virtue of the fact that the ‘the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.’”

Leo’s triumph at Chalcedon further entrenched his papal authority—an authority he claimed descended from St Peter himself. At the conclusion of the Council of Chalcedon, the bishops attending agreed. They cried out in unison: “This is the faith of the fathers … Peter has spoken thus through Leo ...” Leo’s consolidation of authority led to the migration of Christianity’s center from Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) to Italy, away from its heavy Greek influence to the influence of Latin logic. As the Roman Empire waned, a power vacuum opened up for this mighty migration to fill, such that the Christian church assumed an imperial power itself that endured for the next thousand years—an era ironically known as the Dark Ages.

Nevertheless, the later abuses of ecclesial power were not Leo’s fault. He used his great personal influence for much good. He died in 461, leaving 96 sermons and numerous letters revealing his passion for Jesus and the gospel. His 95^th sermon is based on this morning’s text from the Sermon on the Mount-twelve verses we call The Beatitudes. Jesus as the word made flesh came to earth after centuries of heavenly silence—there had been no word from the Lord in 400 years. Predictably, much of the preaching in the interim ended up emphasizing human wisdom rather than God’s action. When the Word finally returned in Christ, Leo wrote that “there were no thick clouds surrounding Him as of old, nor were the people frightened off from approaching the mountain by frightful sounds and lightning, but quietly and freely His discourse reached the ears of those who stood by: that the harshness of the law might give way before the gentleness of grace, and the spirit of adoption might dispel the terrors of bondage.”

However, having grown accustomed to relying on human wisdom, Jesus’ beatitudes generally have gotten interpreted as more of the same. The pure in heart get to see God? OK, be pure. The meek inherit the earth? Be humble then. Easy enough—to say that is, but not so easy to do—even when we want to do it. By contrast, Colonial’s own Robert Guelich, in his Sermon on the Mount commentary, argued that the Beatitudes should not be viewed as wisdom teachings stressing human responsibility, but rather prophetic teaching stressing divine deliverance. You’re not blessed because you mourn. You’re blessed because God comforts you. You’re not blessed because you’re hungry for righteousness and justice. You’re blessed because God fills you up. You’re not blessed because you’re persecuted. You’re blessed because God bestows his riches on persecuted people.

Leo preached that “The blessedness of seeing God is justly promised to the pure in heart. For the eye that is unclean would not be able to see the brightness of the true light, and what would be happiness to clear minds would be a torment to those that are defiled. Therefore, let the mists of worldly vanities be dispelled [by the Lord], and the inner eye be cleansed of all filth of wickedness, so that the soul’s gaze may feast serenely upon the great vision of God.” Leo employs the passive voice here to emphasize how the purity of heart is God’s doing. It is God who enables us to see Him.

And yet that God does this does not render us passive. On the contrary, God’s grace empowers us to live Christ-shaped lives. God’s Spirit in us shapes us and leads us to follow Jesus; to be devoted to the kingdom of God and to his righteousness.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled,” Jesus said. Leo preached, “This hunger is not for any bodily food, this thirst is not for any earthly drink: it is a longing to be blessed with righteousness, and, by penetrating the secret of all mysteries, to be filled with the Lord himself. Happy is the soul that longs for the food of righteousness and thirsts for this kind of drink; it would not seek such things if it had not already savored their delight. When the soul hears the voice of the Spirit saying it to the prophet: ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good,’ it has already received a portion of God’s goodness, and is on fire with love, the love that gives joy of the utmost purity. It counts as nothing all that belongs to time, it is entirely consumed with desire to eat and drink the food of righteousness. The soul lays hold of the true meaning of the first and great commandment: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole mind and your whole strength,’ for to love God is nothing else than to love righteousness.”

Righteousness is a word that gets twisted up a bit in our individualistic culture. The tendency is to confuse righteousness with something I possess for myself—something that the Scriptures actually condemn as self-righteousness. Godly righteousness, as Leo intimates, is God’s possession. To be filled with righteousness is to belong to God—and not so much individually as collectively—as the people of God, the body of Christ, the holy catholic (little c) church. Righteousness is not a state of being, but a way of living modeled after Jesus. To do right by each other, to give and love and serve, is to demonstrate our own citizenship in God’s kingdom, and that indeed his Spirit does dwell in our midst.

Therefore, Leo preached, “Let believers examine their own state of mind and carefully scrutinize the sentiments of their heart. If they find some fruit of charity in their conscious self, let them have no doubt that God is in them. And that they may become more and more able to welcome so great a guest, let them persevere and grow in mercy which expresses itself in acts of love. If God is love, charity ought not to know any limits, for nothing that is limited can contain the fullness of the Spirit, who is God Himself.”

What About Him?

2011-07-11T13:20:00.000-05:00

John 21:20-23
by Daniel Harrell

This is my last look at Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances in John’s gospel. You’ll remember from my last look, before this last look, how our Lord magnanimously restored Peter the black sheep into Peter the able shepherd. The passage crescendoed with Jesus’ imperative: “Follow me!” Because of this imperative, and others like it, many Christians have taken to calling themselves “Christ-followers” instead of Christians. It also has something to do with the perception that the noun Christian has become trivialized and besmirched due to negative associations and many believers’ bad behavior. To be a “Christ-follower” erases any ambiguity as to one’s primary allegiance. To be a “Christ-follower” is to take seriously one’s commitments to the counter-cultural commands of gospel and practice all that it preaches. To follow Christ is to trust the Lord wherever he leads, no matter the road, whatever the cost, no turning back, no turning back.

This is why I’d rather just call myself a Christian. I’m not opposed to a little ambiguity. The gospels paint a daunting picture of what following Christ looks like. A man comes up to Jesus and says, “I will follow you wherever you go.” To whit Jesus replies, “Are you sure about that? Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” Somebody else says, “I’m in Lord, but first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus says, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” To the rich man Jesus says, “Sell everything you have and give it to the poor in exchange for treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” And then to everybody, “If you want to follow me, you must deny yourself and take up your cross to do it.” For the original hearers, taking up a cross was not some metaphor for bearing life’s difficulties. Jesus said, “…you’ll be handed over to be tortured, and will be put to death and hated by all because of my name.” Jesus said that only those who lose their lives will find their lives. By which he did mean losing your life—a reality he made clear in predicting Peter’s own martyrdom.

However, according to this morning’s passage, following Christ need not always mean losing your life to martyrdom. Peter would be executed for his faith, but apparently John would live to a ripe old age—at least long enough to write his gospel. Both were faithful in their following. Not that this makes things any easier. In fact if you live a long time, it may make things harder. The admired Catholic author Henri Nouwen once wrote, “The movement from illusion to [truly following Christ] is hard to make since it leads us from false certainties to true uncertainties, from an easy support system to a risky surrender….” Nouwen’s faith forced a dramatic surrender later in his life. He gave up an acclaimed career as an Ivy League lecturer, best-selling author and counselor to the powerful in order to take up residence at a community for people with mental disabilities in Toronto. He devoted the remainder of his life in relatively quiet service to those with great need. It was a move many admired, but few emulated. Following Christ is hard to do.

Preacher Barbara Brown Taylor tells the story of a grocery store cashier in small town Georgia who wore a Roman’s 1:16 tie to work: I’m not ashamed of the Gospel was writ large all across it. (It was a necktie I presume.) You’d push your cart into line where he’d greet you with a wide, generous grin and then, showing genuine interest in how you were doing, he’d chew the fat while scanning your groceries (in big contrast to typical grocery clerks who mostly just chew their gum). After he’d totaled your bill and figured your change without the computer’s help, he’d bag your groceries, reach into his pocket and hand you a singularly wrapped lifesaver candy. Then he’d say with a wink and a tug on his tie: “You know who your lifesaver is, don’t you?”

Barbara Brown Taylor recalled how the clerk was dear, how he was earnest and how the next time she went back to the store—he was gone. She wrote, “I’m pretty sure that no one asked him to renounce his faith. The store manager probably just asked him to keep it to himself, or to save it for church where people couldn’t become so irritated by it. The man was not a threat, only an embarrassment. The tie, the lifesavers, even the unusual cheerfulness—these were too much for people who just wanted to get through the line and get home. A man who is not ashamed of the Gospel is out there somewhere looking for work which I imagine he’s done a lot of in his life. His following Christ, such as it is, takes the form of chronic unemployment.”

Granted, it’s not exactly what Jesus warned us about when he said, “you’ll be handed over to be tortured, and will be put to death and hated by all because of my name.” That would be in a place like Syria, where hundreds have given their life in opposition to the oppressive regime of President Bashar Assad. Up to this point, many Christians have been hesitant to enter the fray. While they oppose the ruthlessness of the Syrian government, they fear that the police state will be replaced by an Islamic state. They worry about a repeat of Iraq, where the Christian community has basically disappeared as a result of both persecution and exile. And yet, as one Syrian Christian has put it, “To follow Christ, to be a good Christian you have to side with the oppressed and not with the oppressors. It is scary,” but obedience often is.

Of course she and other Syrian Christians could simply deny their faith. Forsake Jesus and save their necks. Like Peter did so shamefully as Jesus stood trial and was sentenced to die, in effect double-crossing his crucified Lord. On the other hand what was Peter supposed to do? Jesus was convicted of crimes. He didn’t defend himself or refute any of the charges. Though we was able to change the weather and defeat the devil, he nevertheless let government authorities string him up. He acted as if he were guilty! He did say that once he rose from the dead they’d meet up again in Galilee, but what was Peter supposed to do with that? Rising from the dead is crazy talk. Which may explain Peter’s denials. Maybe he thought Jesus had lost his mind.

But then Jesus gets raised from the dead. And he meets Peter in Galilee. He has breakfast with him on the beach and finally gets around to discussing those denials, a topic Peter surely knew was coming. Risen and vindicated, Jesus confronted Peter with the obvious: “Do you really love me?” he asked, not once, but three times so that Peter couldn’t miss the connection. Peter replied in the affirmative each time, the third time grievously so, knowing his word meant little when his behavior hadn’t matched up. But Jesus gave him another chance. He always does. He said to Peter: “Follow me!”

Yet even on the heels of this most amazing grace delivered in a most amazing fashion, Christ’s call to follow still shook Peter a bit. It probably had something to do with Jesus predicting Peter’s own crucifixion. It is much easier to be on the receiving end of Christ’s mercy than it is to live out its implications. Peter turned and saw the beloved disciple whom tradition identifies as John nearby. “Lord,” Peter asked, “what about him?”

Scholars split over Peter’s intent. Some, pointing out how Peter and John were intimate friends, attribute anxiety to Peter over John’s prognosis. Since following Jesus would prove deadly for Peter, he naturally was concerned for his friend. That’s why he asked Jesus about him. The problem is the sharp nature of Jesus’ reply: “What’s that to you?” he said to Peter. “You follow me!” Such a rebuke presumes a different set of motives. Did Peter feel unfairly singled out? Did he want to make sure he wasn’t the only one having to sacrifice his life? Was he afraid?

Whatever it was—whether chafed at being set apart or just plain old scared—we can all relate. It is much easier to be on the receiving end of Christ’s mercy than it is to live out its implications. To follow Jesus is to trust the Lord wherever he leads, no matter the road, whatever the cost. It means losing your life—be that your literal life or your literal lifestyle. It is a move from false certainties to true uncertainties, from easy support systems to risky surrender. Henri Nouwen was right. It’s hard to do—even when you do it.

Soon after arriving in Toronto, Henri Nouwen wrote a book entitled In the Name of Jesus which focused on Jesus’ restoration of Peter in John’s gospel. Transformed by the community he served, Nouwen wrote, “The first thing that struck me when I came to live in a house with mentally handicapped people was that their liking or disliking of me had absolutely nothing to do with any of the many useful things I had done until then. Since nobody could read my books, my books could not impress anyone, and since most of them never went to school, my twenty years at Notre Dame, Yale and Harvard did not provide a significant introduction.… Not being able to use any of the skills that had proved so practical in the past was a real source of anxiety. I was suddenly faced with my naked self, open for affirmations and rejections, hugs and punches, smiles and tears, all dependent on how I was perceived at the moment. In a way, it seemed as though I was starting my life all over again. Relationships, connections, reputations could no longer be counted upon. This experience was and, in many ways, is the most important experience of my new life because it forced me to rediscover my true identity. These broken, wounded and completely unpretentious people forced me to let go of my relevant self—the self that can do things, show things, prove things, build things—and forced me to reclaim that unadorned self in which I am completely vulnerable, open to receive and give love regardless of any accomplishments.” This love, Nouwen wrote, was none other than the love of God in the name of Jesus.

While out at a pastor’s conference in San Diego several years back, I heard the late Mike Yaconelli describe how his life and ministry to teenagers was deeply influenced by Nouwen’s writing, especially this book, In the Name of Jesus. Yaconelli had this cheeky practice of tracking down authors who had impressionable impacts on his spiritual life (if they were still living) and paying them a personal visit to say thank you. So he located Henri Nouwen at his Toronto residence and made an appointment. Unfortunately, Yaconelli’s flight was delayed, he missed a connection, and was unable to let Nouwen know he’d be late—something to do with misplacing a phone number or something. He arrived at Nouwen’s home three hours late.

Having read many of Nouwen’s other books, Yaconelli was fairly familiar with what he could expect as he approached Nouwen’s door. Henri Nouwen’s grace and magnanimous love were legendary—I experienced it myself in a class I took with Nouwen in seminary. Though a class of 400, he took time to meet with each of us individually. Yaconelli would have rather been on time, but at least this way he’d get to see Nouwen’s godly love in action. Yaconelli knocked, not really expecting that Nouwen had waited around. But it turned out that he had. Toward the door came a dramatic stomping followed by a violent ripping open of the door that revealed not the love of God but the wrath of Henri. Irate, Nouwen lit into Yaconelli without mercy, without worry, without even asking what happened: “Where have you been!? Why didn’t you call?! Don’t you know you’re three hours late?! Have you no respect of others’ schedules?” A shocked Yaconelli could only yell back, “HEY BUDDY, IN THE NAME OF JESUS! OK?”

Nouwen fans will be relieved to know that he apologized and went on to share a memorable visit. But for Mike Yaconelli, it was that initial, stressful encounter that proved most memorable. Not because it tarnished Nouwen’s reputation, but rather because it reinforced how hard following Christ truly is—even when you’re doing it.

I bought a pair of shoes a month not so long ago that I thought fit but didn’t. I wore them a few times thinking I could break them in, but they were just too small. I was so frustrated because I’d paid $40 for shoes that retailed for $60 but were now going cost me $80. The store wouldn’t take back shoes I’d already worn, so I’d have to buy a second pair. I went back to the store, one of those big box shoe warehouses where the shoes are strewn all over everywhere, and found a replacement pair that fit just right. I put them on my feet and put the ill-fitting pair in the new shoebox the others had just come out of. I sat there for a moment and said to myself, “You know, these ones I’ve worn don’t look that bad. I’ve only worn them a few times. What’s really wrong with just putting them back on the shelf and calling it even?” But then my other self said, “You can’t leave them here and walk out! You’re a Christian for Christ’s sake! Go pay for the shoes!”

So I halfheartedly walked up to the cashier and told her what happened. She said, “Wow, this means you’ll be paying $80 for a pair of shoes that only costs $40. You know you didn’t have to tell me you’d worn these other ones. They don’t look that bad. Besides, nobody ever checks.” I wish I’d had a lifesaver in my pocket.

It is much easier to be on the receiving end of Christ’s mercy than it is to live out its implications. To follow Jesus is to trust the Lord wherever he leads, to the point of losing your life—or losing a measly 40 bucks. It is a move from false certainties to true uncertainties, from easy support systems to risky surrender. Following Christ is hard to do even as we do it. So why do we do it? Jesus wondered himself. Earlier in John’s gospel, after many had abandoned him because of his difficult demands, Jesus asked his disciples, “Wouldn’t you all rather go away too?” To which Peter replied, “Lord, to whom would we go? We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God. You have the words of eternal life.”

Hit and Run to Jesus

2011-07-06T09:26:00.003-05:00

Romans 8:1-4
by Daniel Harrell

A couple of years back I walked up on a dear friend distraught over sideswiping a parked car as she tried to parallel park her minivan on a city street. Regrettably, she’d left a sizeable scrape on the front bumper of the other car and was in a quandary as to what she should do about it. Huge dollars signs rattled around in her head, both in terms of repair costs but also in terms of jacked up insurance premiums. Couldn’t she just flee the scene and chalk up the mishap to “life in the city”? The damage appeared mostly cosmetic. Besides, she noted, the car was a piece of junk. What was one more scrape? The owner probably wouldn’t even notice it.

Granted, this ethical line of reasoning was somewhat dubious—especially for someone professing to follow Jesus. Still, I could empathize with her plight. If you’ve ever dented a parked car’s fender, you know the temptation to just drive away. Ruthless insurance companies and predatory body shops can be like salivating dogs over fresh meat. My propensity for extending grace did tempt me to grant my friend a pastoral dispensation and allow her to leave the scene of her crime, but better judgment compelled me to advise she at least leave a note. Owning up to your faults is the Christian thing to do. However I also informed her that the good news, at least in this instance, was that she wouldn’t have to actually write the note because the car she hit—was mine.

Her distress descended into mortification. She started apologizing profusely and pleaded my forgiveness, promising to pay whatever damages her parking blunder caused. Just send her the bill, she said. But I told her not to worry about it. My car is a junker, having endured countless bumps and scrapes due to my own parallel parking exploits. Yet my friend felt horrible. She wanted to make amends. But I assured her everything was fine. It was no big deal. She responded with genuine gratitude, thankful that if she had to hit a car that at least the car she hit was mine. That I considered it no big deal was to her an act of magnanimous grace.

Some might use this introductory tale as an illustration for the magnanimous grace of God. Rather than condemning us for our own sinful ways, God nobly considers it no big deal to forgive us without our having to pay a dime. The problem, however, is that my apparent magnanimousness was really nothing of the kind. It came as close to resembling God’s grace as I come to resembling God. True, my friend felt she’d received mercy from me, but in reality it was mercy that cost me nothing. My car really isn’t that important to me. Sure, I’d prefer people not run into it, but I own an older model precisely because I expect that they will. I wasn’t four months in Minnesota before a hit and run crunch took out a door and mirror in a suburban parking lot. But what if my friend had sideswiped my brand new Subaru instead? Would I have been equally willing to let the accident slide and pay for the damages myself? What if she had rendered my car undriveable? Or what if knowing it was my car, she had backed into it on purpose? What if she had hit me? That would have been a very big deal and forced me up against the harder realities of grace.

I don’t know whether you’ve kept up with the trial of 18-year-old Michael Swanson, the severely disturbed kid who murdered two convenience store clerks apparently for fun down in Iowa. He was convicted last week for the first murder, grinning a mocking grin as the judge read out his life sentence. What would it mean for the family of the murdered store clerk to extend grace to their mother’s killer? To declare it “no big deal”? How to forgive anyone who so monstrously robbed them of someone they held so dear? The heinous nature of this crime demanded justice, not mercy.

Christians hold that the demand for justice accords with God’s own just and righteous character, a character codified in stone, that law to which the apostle Paul referred in the passage read for you a moment ago. Most familiar to us as the Ten Commandments, the essence of God’s law is sublimely summarized by Jesus as the ethic of love. Violate love and you violate divine law, evoking, the Bible repeatedly warns, heaven’s most righteous justice. Because God is always the one ultimately violated, the penalty is always of ultimate severity. “The payback for sin is death,” Paul famously forebodes. When it comes to God’s law, there is no wiggle room. Love or lose, these are the options.

The starkness with which Biblical judiciousness is portrayed has always troubled people who confuse God’s mercy with benign indifference. For them, a permissively loving God would never condemn anyone. Yet such a depiction remains as ludicrous as the reputedly kind and loving family of the Iowa store clerk never condemning her killer. “But wait,” you say, “that family loved their mother, not her murderer. Our Heavenly Father reputedly loves us as his children—even more so. How could such love ever express the sort of wrath the Bible so fiercely depicts?” You already know the answer from your own experience. You know your fiercest anger is reserved for the people you care about most. It’s their betrayals and offenses which cut most deeply. Love and fury have never been mutually exclusive. Indifference is the opposite of love, not hate. “How can a loving God be so ferocious?” You know the answer.

Yet because fury is a function of love; the love still remains. And since we are talking about God’s love, the love remains with unrelenting ferociousness. Therefore Paul writes: “What the Law failed to do, weakened as it was through the flesh, through human defiance, God did himself.” If God was ever to have the loving relationship with sinners he so desired, He would have to make it happen. Which he did not by rendering our sin “no big deal.” That would mean he didn’t care. God did it, Paul writes, by sending his Son in a human body like ours in order that he might take on our sin and our condemnation too. For Christians the cross is the expression of God’s passion, in all its darkness and light. Justice gets done and love does too.

Which is how Paul can so boldly declare that there is now—right now—no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus. The law of the Spirit of Christ sets you free from the law of sin and death. You are free to live and to love as God intends. There is no longer any excuse for pettiness or gossip, or grudges, or deception or dissention or any of the many things the love of God stands against. Our righteousness arrives as free gift, but it survives as obedience—as faithfulness to the Spirit—which is true freedom. That’s why owning up to your faults is the Christian thing to do. Only when you get your mercy can you get your freedom and be free to love.

I had a friend with whom I would attend AA meetings once a year to present his annual medallion for sobriety. The meeting ran like AA meetings have run since their inception: first names only, an acknowledgment that you are an alcoholic, an empathetic welcome from the crowd. When I stepped up to the podium to present the medallion, instead of saying “Hi, my name is Daniel and I’m an alcoholic,” I said, “I’m a minister” to which the crowd nevertheless compassionately intoned, “Hi Daniel.” They understood. We’re all a mess.

One evening, this drunk guy crashed the meeting—slamming chairs, screaming and cursing at everybody. He tried to pick a fight with some of the guys seated quietly toward the front. You could hear a communal sigh. The speaker kept on speaking. Everybody basically just let the drunk make a fool of himself. For some reason I was surprised by this. I asked my friend about the protocol: “What do you usually do when a drunk person disrupts your meeting?” My friend cleverly asked back, “What do you usually do when a sinner shows up church? We’ve all been there. Some day he’ll hit rock bottom and when that happens, we want to make sure he always knows that help is here in this place.”

An alcoholic lives one drink away from tumbling back into his or her personal abyss. While AA does not associate with any religion, denomination or sect, its got the gospel written all over it. Person after person at the meeting described how their alcoholism robbed them of their livelihood, their marriages and children, their homes and all of their dignity. It was never until they owned up to their fault, confessed their futility and their need for God that they ever stood any chance at redemption. As every recovering alcoholic discovers, you cannot save yourself. It’s a humiliating realization, but the redemption is unbelievably sweet—a miracle was how one man described it. “Sobriety,” another remarked, “is freedom.”

Which is what Paul meant when he wrote we’ve been freed from the law’s indictment so that we might live according to the law of love. Obedience is freedom. Christ frees us from our addictions—be they to the substances we abuse or to the selfishness, pettiness, envy and anger we harbor. Christ frees us from our faults that we might enjoy the fruits of a life lived well. There’s solid rock at the bottom. So confess your futility. Get our mercy, get your freedom and get the help you need from God to faithfully love and live according to his Spirit.

Share the Love

2011-06-26T21:54:00.000-05:00

John 21:15-19
by Daniel Harrell

We return to Jesus’ third post-resurrection appearance to his disciples in John’s gospel, picking up where we left off, on the beach. Jesus’ first appearance was Easter Sunday as his disciples hid out in fear. Jesus breathed his Holy Spirit on them, though the effect was a dubious one since one week later they’re still hiding out. Jesus’ second appearance featured Doubting Thomas, who soon after became Believing Thomas. Still, viewing the dead Jesus alive twice still wasn’t enough to get his disciples busy making disciples. Instead of fishing for people like Jesus told them to do, they went back to fishing for fish. They had the Holy Spirit, but it must have been a insufficient dose. You can’t imagine the post-Pentecost disciples behaving this way. Rather than locked and loaded to go to the ends of the earth as they will be in Acts, here in John the disciples just go back to their boats.

It would be easy to chalk what looks like apostolic reticence up to pre-Pentecost realities were the same reticence not so prevalent among us post-Pentecostals too. Last Sunday we repented of our reticence to practice the spiritual gift of hospitality. I related the sad story of a family who tried attending Colonial Church for almost a year, but then left because they never felt welcomed. Many of you responded gratefully to my mild admonishment, saying we need to do better. Some of you told me of spending years here waiting for a welcome yourself—rationalizing that the wait was due to Minnesota Nice and Edina Exclusivity. But whether we’re in Edina, Eau Claire or Escondido, love defines the church of Jesus Christ, displaying itself in the ways we embrace neighbors, strangers and enemies too. Christians love because Jesus loves.

The conversation Jesus has with Peter on the beach is all about love. Peter was fishing out in deep water with the others when Jesus waved from on shore. They hadn’t caught much, so Jesus told them to try the right side of the boat. Like when they first met, the disciples hit the mother load again, a net-breaking haul of fish. The ever-impetuous Peter put two and two together, put on his clothes and then jumped into the water and made a trout-line for Jesus who had some fish frying already, along with some bread. He suggested the disciples add a few of the fish they just caught to the pan. So Peter hauled the whole net-full ashore, trying his best to make up for all of his failures.

How disappointing it must have been to have Jesus rub salt in his shame: “Simon son of John, do you really love me more than these others do?” Jesus used Peter’s formal name “Simon son of John,” the way parents do when they’re really mad. And why wouldn’t Jesus be mad? Back at his last meal on earth, Jesus had predicted how all his disciples would desert him. He said, “This very night you will all fall away on account of me, for as the prophet Zechariah has written: ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will scatter.’” Nevertheless, the ever-impetuous and proud Peter crowed, “Even if the others fall away on account of you, I never will. Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you. I will lay down my life for you.” Peter’s cocky crowing vanished with the cock crow that next morning. Named the “Rock” for his strong leadership among the disciples, Peter’s cowardly denial of Jesus left him looking more like paper mache.

We can relate. As paper mache Christians ourselves, we deny Jesus all the time—and with a whole lot less at stake. Sometimes it’s because we’re scared, sometimes because we’re embarrassed, we don’t want to be bothered or because we’re just not sure what to believe anymore. A friend recently lost a family member to cancer. Having prayed for healing—and believing healing was coming—it was horribly disillusioning when death came instead. This friend mentioned he was going to need some serious theological counseling on the other side of this. God was not supposed to operate this way. He’s supposed to cure our all our diseases and answer our prayers like we want. God knows there would be a lot less fear, a lot less embarrassment, and a lot more faith if he did operate this way. A lot more Christians too.

Sure, Peter talked big at the Last Supper. But having seen Jesus operate—all those miracles Jesus did—healing the sick, casting out demons, raising the dead and changing the weather—who wouldn’t talk big? Jesus had serious power. Bring on the Pharisees! Bring on the Romans! Bring on the world! Jesus gave Peter a heads up, but no way Peter could have been prepared for Holy Week. The savior you believed to be the way, the truth and the life gets indicted for blasphemy and treason and doesn’t even defend himself? He doesn’t say anything? Doesn’t do anything? Acts like he’s guilty? And then he gets convicted and executed? What was Peter supposed to do? Jesus said that once he rose from the dead they’d meet up again in Galilee, but you can’t take that seriously. Saviors don’t rise from the dead because they don’t die in the first place.

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus told Peter how Satan had gotten permission to “sift him like wheat.” To pick him apart. Jesus tells Peter he’ll pray for him—not to shield him from the sifting, but to turn him back afterwards that Peter might strengthen the faith of the others. The faith you have may have to fail for you to experience the real power of the risen Jesus. This was Peter’s experience. His faith in Jesus had to fail before he could truly believe.

That Jesus shows himself a third time to Peter corresponds to Peter’s threefold denial. As does Jesus asking him the same question three times. “Do you really, really, really love me Peter?” Peter had to feel all of his shame crashing back down. Unable to confess a love based upon his own track record, Peter relied instead on the Lord’s merciful willingness to see him despite it. Peter replied the third time with a plea, “Lord, you know everything (including my heart); you know that I love you.” Jesus told Peter a third time, “Tend and feed my sheep.” True faith looks just like love.

The structure of the interchange between Jesus and Peter has endured extensive examination over the centuries. You’re possibly familiar with John’s differing uses of the Greek words for “love;” namely, agape and phileo. Phileo generally denotes love for friends or family as well as a general fondness for almost any other person or thing. It is where we get our words philosophy (love of knowledge) and Philadelphia (love of the Phillies). The etymology of agape is less certain though it is the word most frequently employed in the New Testament in regard to the love of God. Consequently, when Jesus asked Peter “do you agape me” and Peter responded “Yes Lord, I phileo you,” some argue for a subtle intention on Jesus’ part to pull Peter’s love to a higher, more spiritual plane. But what’s interesting is how it was Jesus who ultimately conceded to Peter’s terminology, not the other way around. It may be that the milder form of love was all that Peter could muster at this humiliated point, not wanting to overstep his bounds again. But in truth, the distinction between these two Greek words for love is not consistent in John. In fact, in addition to the verb to love in this passage (as well as others), John also uses two different words for “know,” “tend” and “sheep.” The next time you find yourself caught up in dissecting this exchange, it’s probably best to remember that the original conversation would have been in Aramaic anyway.

However what is undoubtedly significant is the metaphor of the Shepherd. It’s a frequent Biblical image and central to understanding the mission of Christ and this commissioning of Peter. Earlier in John, Jesus declared “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. I know my sheep and my sheep know me. I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.” The metaphor derives from the vocation itself; one that required strength, devotion and selflessness. It’s much more intense than what gets depicted in those bucolic watercolor Bible paintings of shepherds.

The only actual shepherds I’ve ever encountered were in the West African deserts of Benin. These tireless men roamed the arid countryside in search of grazing fields while at the same time guarding their flocks and keeping the unruly in line. You’ve heard how dumb sheep can be—Jeff preached about it a few weeks back—and its pretty much true; which is among the reasons why the people of God are often referred to as sheep. Sheep are dense and dumb, which makes the shepherd’s job all the more difficult. Nevertheless, good shepherds persist because they love their sheep. Love is indispensable. As a “shepherd,” Jesus indicates his solidarity with Moses and David—super-shepherds who both guided God’s flock. More significantly, God describes himself as Israel’s Shepherd, making Jesus self-designation all the more momentous. However, instead of finding its culmination in Jesus, shepherding finds its continuation in the church.

Its sacrificial nature gets reiterated as Jesus predicts Peter’s future. “When you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” While this sounds something like getting forced into a nursing home, there were no nursing homes in first century Israel. Instead, “stretch out your hands” was a way to convey crucifixion. Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God—which is a way we rarely think about dying. There are some later accounts that say Peter was crucified upside down, refusing to die the same kind of death as his Lord, though this is uncertain. Jesus said, “Follow me,” which may have meant “to the cross.” But more broadly it meant “be a shepherd.” As Christ laid down his life, so would Peter in following Christ lay down his, fulfilling the promise he made in earlier, prouder days.

A shepherd’s love is sacrificial love, devoted and eager to give. The title shepherd goes mostly by pastor these days, from the Latin word to graze—which fits given the recent Duke Divinity School study showing that on average, ministry is the chubbiest profession. Our cups and plates runneth over. The good news is that we’re satisfied in our work—which makes us both fat and happy. In a Star Tribune article this week, Chris Enstad, senior pastor at Elim Lutheran Church in Robbinsdale, said “It’s a great job. Who else is welcomed into other people’s lives, from birth to death and everything in between?” However being involved so intimately in people’s lives has its stresses. Which may explain the eating. That and tater tot casseroles and doughnuts. Fruit just doesn’t convey emotion as good as cake. “At least we get to wear black,” Rev. Enstad said, “which is supposed to make us look slimmer.”

Writing in his own epistle, Peter instructed those to whom he conveyed church leadership simply to “be shepherds.” By implication he meant no less than to be like Christ among those entrusted to their care. Be shepherds, he said, not because you must but because you want to. Be shepherds, he said, not greedy for money, but because you are eager to serve. Be shepherds, he said, not seeking to control others or to exert power, but by being an example of Christ. And when Christ the Chief Shepherd appears—the one who called you and empowered you to serve in this capacity—you will receive the crown of glory that will never fade away.

The church needs good shepherds—more than it needs professional pastors. In a misprint, the Star Tribune referred to Rev. Chris Enstad as Rev. Christ Enstad, reinforcing both the Messiah Complex we pastors have as well as the pedestals we sometimes occupy. But nobody can be Jesus by him or herself. Only together can we be like Christ. We’re all called to be shepherds, providers instead of consumers, givers rather than grazers—remembering that in the early church, the willingness to shepherd each other meant that no one ever had any need; everybody was fat and happy.

Nevertheless, getting us to do this together is not easy. We forget what shepherding looks like. We’re trying to lose weight. Having learned the hard way himself, Peter wrote, “wear humility.” A more literal rendering is: “wear an apron.” It hearkens back again to that Last Supper, where as the disciples argued over which one of them was actually the greatest disciple of them all, Jesus got up, wrapped an apron around his waist, grabbed a basin of water and washed their dirty feet. Artists’ renditions of the scene never reveal the certain horror that must have accompanied the disciples’ seeing Jesus stoop to this humiliating level. Nor do any paintings of this scene suggest the shame that must have been plastered across their faces as they realized how they had missed the whole point of what it meant to be great in the Kingdom of God. Christian shepherd-hood has never been about position or authority or power or pedestals. Instead, it’s always been about people willing to give what they have for the sake of Christ’s flock, for the sake of their brothers and sisters, be they newcomers, old-timers, Ukrainians, Mexicans or Families Moving Forward. Jesus said that a good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

Who’s good enough to do this? It used to be that the biggest problem was Pharisee-types: self-righteous church folk who, thinking that they thought they had their act together, went around whacking others on the head with their judgmental crooks. But few think that way anymore. Instead, most come to church, look around and depressingly assume everybody else has their act together. You bleat sheepishly and defensively about how you’re not spiritual enough, how could a sheep as sinful as yourself ever shepherd others? But you’re forgetting something very important: when it comes to sinful sheep, the church has the same percentage in it that it has always had (somewhere around 100%). This is what makes this whole shepherd thing so wonderfully hilarious. God uses sheep as his shepherds!

And since we’re all dumb, sinful sheep, it only stands to reason that we’re all shepherds too. “I give you a new commandment,” Jesus said. “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” It applied to the disciples then. It applies to disciples now. There are no excuses, no exclusions—especially if Peter is the patron shepherd. He failed miserably when it counted most—which also made him the patron sheep. Yet it was to him that Jesus said, “Feed my lambs.” Why? Because when you fail you finally experience the real power of the risen Jesus—the radical power of his unconditional love. And having experienced that, you want to make sure others experience it too. Convinced that you’re a spiritual failure? Jesus has job for you: “Feed my lambs.”

All Together Now

2011-06-22T09:54:00.000-05:00

John 14:1-17

by Daniel Harrell

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Happy Father’s Day. Happy Son and Holy Spirit day too. Today is Trinity Sunday, always the Sunday after Pentecost, always the last of the special Sundays between now and Advent.

One of the interesting things about my former church in Boston (Home of the Stanley Cup) was the sign out front. Of all the adjectives that could have been placed on it, on that sign was the descriptor “Trinitarian.” Although “Trinitarian” smacks of polytheism to Jews and Muslims, and of celestial mathematical nonsense to others, being Christian generally equates with being Trinitarian—so much so that putting “Trinitarian” on your church sign seems redundant. However it wasn’t always this way. Long before Unitarians took over many New England Congregational churches and before Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on doors disputing the divinity of Jesus, well-meaning and faithful Christians fought over how it possibly could be that the God who is One is at the same time Three. It got so hot that it caused the first major church split in 1054 between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Trinitarian controversy fractured Protestantism too. There are still debates over the Holy Spirit and the divinity of Jesus and whether God should be Father or Mother or the more Generic Creator.

Most preachers know better than to spend a whole sermon on the Trinity. Seriously. Why pick a fight? Besides, what is there to say? Even if you believe it, it’s not like you can explain it.

Unlike the other sermons I’ve preached since Easter from John’s gospel on the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, this one comes from a passage just prior to Jesus’ death. The context is the Last Supper, which in John does read like a Last Meal. Judas has just bolted to commit his treason, and now Jesus is talking about leaving too. The rest of the disciples are all in a dither, wondering what in God’s name was going on. Jesus assures them, but then confuses them. He does that a lot.

He starts by saying “trust me,” and then goes on about being in the Father and the Father in him and going to the Father and being glorified by the Father and then sending his Spirit from the Father. It was enough to make any monotheist lose his religion. And then to make matters worse, Jesus piles on a trinity of other perennial problems that have plagued believers ever since: housing in heaven, Jesus as the only way to God, and how using Jesus’ name will get you whatever you want. Trust me, he says.

The promise of Jesus saying there’s plenty of room in “his Father’s house” isn’t really a problem. The question over the centuries is more over what Jesus is talking about. Is his “Father’s House” heaven? Elsewhere in John’s gospel his “Father’s House” is the Jerusalem Temple. But Jesus also said his body was the Temple. Is his body a house too? If you grew up on the King James Version, you’re familiar with the promise of “many mansions” and have sort of been banking on that. To have the your pew Bible translate “mansions” as mere “dwelling places” or even as “rooms” elsewhere is a serious downgrade. Bad enough that the recession caused serious downgrades on your earthly house here, do you lose your mansion too? But then again, maybe this is what happens when you pray “on earth as it is in heaven” week after week.

As for the problem of prayer, this wouldn’t be a problem either had Jesus never said, “If you ask me for anything in my name, I will do it.” But he did, here in John and in Matthew and Luke too. “Ask and ye shall receive,” he said. So you ask, but then you don’t receive. What happened? Elsewhere Jesus adds the proviso: “If you believe then you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.” Which makes sense. So you believe, then you ask—but still, nothing. “Have faith in God,” Jesus insisted, “I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done.” All right. Believe without doubt. Though that one’s a lot trickier.

Maybe I don’t get what I ask for because I’m not truly a Christian. Or at least not a good Christian. “Strive to enter through the narrow door;” Jesus said in Luke’s gospel, “Many will try to enter and will not be able.” Here he’s more explicit. “No one comes to the Father except through me.” The “exclusivity of Jesus” has been a hot topic of late due to the popularity of Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins. Rob Bell writes “Jesus is as exclusive as himself and as inclusive as containing every particle of creation.” Does this include everybody? Jesus did say there is plenty of room. But he also said “If you love me you’ll keep my commandments.” If being a Christian has anything to do with loving Jesus, then I’m in trouble. I don’t keep his commandments. Which means I don’t really love Jesus. Do I still get my mansion?

If all of this sounds a little irrational, it’s because Jesus is irrational. What am I supposed to do? A friend suggested in a recent blog post, entitled Worshipping the Irrational Jesus, that basically I have three options, two of which are honest, and the third of which is popular.

First, I can decide that my rational thoughts and the rational thoughts of others should guide me rather than the words of Jesus—and I can stop calling myself Christian. Many people I like and respect have made this choice, and it is an honest one. They call themselves atheist or agnostic or Ethical Humanist or Unitarian Universalists.

Second, I could decide that I will set aside my own conclusions (and those of mainstream society) and follow the irrational teachings of Christ. This is an honest choice too, but a very difficult one. It is profoundly humbling, hard to explain to others and may even seem anti-intellectual, if not downright foolish.

The third (popular, but dishonest) option is to somehow convince myself that Jesus agrees with me, even when he taught the opposite. Under option three, I call myself Christian while putting my own reasoning above the plain teaching of Jesus. Sure, Christ said that he is the only way to God, but what he really meant was that he was only the best way. There are many good people out there. God will make another way for them. For Jesus to be “the only way” just doesn’t make any sense.

But then neither does the Trinity—which may help explain the irrationality of Jesus. After all, wouldn’t it make sense for a God who abides in ineffable mystery to say things that leave us scratching our heads? If you can’t explain the Trinity, how can you expect to explain everything the Trinity says? The good news is that Jesus promises help: an Advocate, a Comforter, a Counselor, the Spirit of Truth. Later in John, he’ll promise that the Spirit of Truth will guide us into all the truth. Yet here he describes the Spirit of truth as one “whom the world cannot receive,” an admission, perhaps, that Jesus knows all this sounds irrational too. No wonder theologians struggle so to make sense of the Trinity.

That we embrace the Trinity (despite its irrationality) derives from Jesus’ teachings but also from the understanding of the earliest Christian communities. In Romans 8, the apostle Paul describes our new life in Christ by speaking of God the Father, Christ, the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ interchangeably. He writes, “If the Spirit of God lives in you, you are controlled by the Spirit. If Christ is in you, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, God, who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his spirit who lives in you.”

Infused by the Spirit at Pentecost, the first believers discovered spiritual gifts for strengthening and growing the church. These spiritual gifts bore spiritual fruit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness and self-control—evident to all whom came in contact with them. This fruit is meant for the sake of others--which makes sense given that the chief commandments Jesus calls us to obey are to love God and love our neighbor—including strangers and enemies too (neighbor means anyone “near by”).

The Trinity’s three-in-oneness stresses love as God’s chief character trait. God is love, but not by himself. To only love yourself is narcissism. We all need somebody else to love. But why three rather than two? St. Augustine argued that because God’s love is perfect love, it rises to the level of personhood, personally binding Father and Son together in perfect unity. But God’s love is not constrained by the Trinity. It unavoidably and lavishly overflows in search of more to love. This is why creation happened. God so loved that he made the world. And then he so loved the world that he sent his Son to save it and then his Spirit to make it new.

The great 18^th century New England theologian Jonathan Edwards (after whom we’ve named our former Youth Ministry offices down the hall) put it this way: “Love is the principal thing that the gospel dwells on when speaking of God, and of Christ. It brings to light the love eternally existing between the Father and the Son, and declares how that same love has been manifested in [most every] thing.” From quark to quasar, from bacteria to baboons, everything comes from the same place and is related to everything else. Creation is a Trinitarian portrait of both unity and diversity. Spread people onto the canvas and God’s relational character emerges in even stronger relief. As God exists in face-to-face relationship with himself in community, so he crafts people in his image to enjoy relationship with him and each other.

The Bible describes humans as created in God’s image, which from very early on was understood as humans in relationship (it was not good for man to be alone). This is why the church is so important (and why we’re called the bride of Christ). Nobody can be the image of the Trinitarian God by his or herself. God is love, and thus the same Spirit who unites God to himself in Triune love is the same Spirit who lovingly unites God to us and us to each other as participants in the Trinitarian dance. Because love is of God, it should look among Christians on earth as it does within God in heaven. And it should show itself not just in the ways we love each other, but in keeping Jesus’ commandments, it must show itself in the ways we love God and in the way we love strangers and enemies too. To refuse to love, to neglect to welcome the stranger or seek peace with the enemy is to refuse to love the Spirit—a move some might call blaspheming the Spirit—which Jesus labeled the unpardonable sin.

While I don’t want to go that far (and I’m sure Jesus agrees with me—option three), I do want to suggest this: If we do not love—tangibly, demonstratively, hospitably, affectionately, compassionately, sincerely, sacrificially, and mercifully as Jesus loved—then we really shouldn’t be so bold as to call ourselves a church. A social organization or a community group or a country club, perhaps, but not a church. Or at least not a Christian, Trinitarian Church.

During his day, Jonathan Edwards witnessed entire communities transformed by a wave of the Spirit historians refer to as the Great Awakening. But even then, Edwards grew suspicious whenever people attested to individual conversion experiences but failed to exhibit any change in disposition toward other people. Edwards cut against these personal, individualist tendencies by denying that any individual had privileged access to God. Jesus may be the only way, but that makes Jesus special. Not you. You might say you’re a loving person, but who you are is not what you say. It’s what you do. If others don’t experience you loving them, then you’re not a loving person. Unfortunately, such stern talk got Edwards fired. So I think I’ll stop now.

Pentecoastal

2011-06-15T09:31:00.000-05:00

John 20:19-23

by Daniel Harrell

I should mention that this blogpost title is not a misprint, but a rather lame attempt to play on the word “Pentecostal” by acknowledging that John’s rendition of the giving of the Holy Spirit occurred near the beach: ergo Pentecoastal. Pentecost celebrates the birthday of the church; it should feel like a day at the beach. Unfortunately, Happy Pentecost! doesn’t quite carry the same ring as Merry Christmas or He is Risen, does it? It’s too bad, really. Pentecost, originally the Jewish Feast of Weeks, was celebrated as a Christian high holy day long before Christmas ever made the rotation. It’s Pentecost, not Christmas, that gets the red vestments. Perhaps the tepid treatment Pentecost receives has something to do with Pentecost itself, what with its mighty wind, floating tongues of fire and subsequent miraculous speaking and hearing. That’s the way the Spirit blows in the book of Acts. But even though virgin births and resurrections are just as miraculous, for some reason they don’t seem quite so weird. Perhaps the Trinity’s third-person/second-class-treatment is due to the Holy Spirit being too, well, spiritual. It’s easy to conceptualize God as Father and Jesus as Savior, but how to conceptualize the Spirit? Up in the air? A breath? A blaze? A bird?

My family used to have a bird, this parakeet named Geronimo that would rest on your shoulder and accompany you wherever you went. To school, to work, around the block; it didn’t matter. Geronimo would come along—maybe flapping around on occasion or jumping onto your head—he was always there. However, other than eliciting strange looks from passers-by and pooping on your shirt now and then, Geronimo’s presence on your shoulder had little effect on your actual life. Sometimes it seems this is what the Holy Spirit feels like. Despite a faith that teaches us that our lives have been infused with the very life of Christ, we Christians tend to treat the Holy Spirit like that pet bird—the Paraclete as parakeet if you will (or a dove to keep with the Biblical imagery). In those moments when we do notice its presence, it’s often with annoyance. The pangs of conscience, spiritual compunction, guilt, Christian responsibility—why do we bother hauling that bird around if all its going to do is poop on us?

At a recent preachers conference I attended at Central Lutheran downtown, many of the speakers bemoaned the demise of the American church. Attendance is down, interest is down, budgets are a mess, there aren’t any young people, nobody cares. Blamed for the decline were the usual suspects: cultural instability, moral laxity, loss of respect for the Sabbath, the proliferation of the Internet, kids’ sports programs and better brunch options. However one speaker challenged us preachers to look at our troubles theologically. He insisted that whatever is happening to the American church, God must be doing it. He then cited a verse from 1 Peter: “the time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God.” Maybe the decline of the American church is the fault of the church. Great. More guilt, more spiritual compunction, more Christian responsibility.

I was thinking about this on the way to my car, when I saw the sign in the parking garage that said the Lutherans only accepted cash. All I had in my wallet was three dollars. Knowing that parking downtown would likely cost more than that (the Lutheran church is suffering financially too), I cursed the Lutherans for not accepting cards and pulled out my phone to locate a nearby ATM, which was five blocks away. Cursing my bank, I started hoofing it over to Nicollet Ave, when this guy steps into my path, a wily grin on his face. He says his name is Clarence and that his car has been towed and, he’s not looking for a handout, but if I can give him 16 dollars, he can get his car out and get home. Being the good pastor I am, my first thought was, sure buddy. I know a hustle when I hear one. Of course I also know the story of the Good Samaritan. And I did just come from a preachers conference. Compunction. Guilt. Christian Responsibility.

I tell him I’m trying to get my car out too, and that I only have three dollars. He tells me he knows where there’s an ATM. Thanks. So we walked together and talked, me asking him all of the qualifying questions to make certain that he’s legit, just like Jesus would want me to. We got to the bank and I had Clarence wait outside. I got out two twenties. He’d told me he only needed 16 dollars, but seeing my 20, he mentioned he sure could use some bus fare too. Whatever. Of course when I get back to the Lutheran parking lot, turns out that the cost for parking was only three dollars. Thanks bird. Pooped on again.

Jesus said, “As I have loved you, so you must love.” OK, but what about the resentment I feel the whole time I’m doing it?

Another preacher friend officiated a funeral for an old Catholic high school buddy who mercifully had died after a long bout with cancer. Among the many former classmates gathered was a woman understandably embittered by an episode at this school so many years prior; she had been abused by one of the priests. Although such reports fail to shock us much anymore, they do infuriate, and this woman was still bent on retribution—even though the priest had been defrocked, lost his job and done some time. In the midst of recounting her woeful tale for what must have been the millionth time, my friend was stunned to notice that over in the corner sat this former priest she loathed so deeply. He had shown up for the funeral. By dreadful happenstance, my friend interrupted the woman to say, “Don’t look now, but there he is.”

The woman did not hesitate. Two decades of well-nursed bitterness took over. She stormed over to where her perpetrator sat and confronted him with a ferociousness that brought the entire room to heel. Duly stunned, the former priest arose and hurried for an exit utterly humiliated. The woman too soon left in tears. The encounter did not vindicate her as she must have fantasized it would.

Did she have another option? For those who follow the crucified Christ, the call of the cross is always forgiveness. It is the Christian thing to do. Grace is intrinsic to our faith, nowhere more so than this side of Easter. But let’s be realistic. Forgiveness can be feel like another load of spiritual bird doo. Sure, if our perpetrators were repentant, then perhaps forgiveness feels easier. Yet in many cases, little repentance is ever forthcoming. It’s not that we Christians don’t appreciate grace. It’s just that the grace we appreciate is the grace we receive. Jesus loves me, this I know. The rub comes once I’m forced to acknowledge that Jesus also loves those I hate; a rub chafed raw by his insistence that I love them too.

Thankfully, here in John’s Pentecost account, Jesus understands. The resurrected Christ, himself a victim himself of religious abuse, breathes on us a breath of fresh air: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; but if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

Finally! The spirit of God allows me to dump on somebody else. Up to this point, extending forgiveness had only come with a warning: fail to forgive and God will not forgive you. It’s a warning nestled disturbingly snug in the middle of the Lord’s prayer and driven home in that haunting parable of the servant who refused to forgive his debtors as he had been forgiven his debts. The servant’s ruthlessness got him thrown into prison and tortured. “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you,” Jesus warned, “if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” However now some options have opened up. Apparently the risen Jesus has relaxed his position. Caution has given way to caveat: “if you do not forgive another their sins, then God does not forgive them either.” Happy Pentecost!

Until now, the Bible had affirmed Jesus’ sole authority to dole out grace on earth (a validation of his unity with the Father). But by giving the Spirit, Jesus extends this authority to his disciples. Did Jesus truly intend for this cowardly bunch to be the arbiters of who passed through the Pearly Gates and who went straight to H-E-double hockey stick? What went through the disciples’ minds when they heard they had been given such power? What would have gone through yours? Being the good pastor that I am, the first thing through my mind would have putting together been a hit list.

Yet I doubt the disciples thought so vengefully. They were the ones who had sworn up and down that they were ready to die for Jesus, that they would never deny Jesus, that they would always stand by Jesus. But once Jesus needed them most, not only did they deny him; they betrayed him, fled and cowered behind bolted doors, scared for their lives once that they heard that Jesus was loose. He rose from the dead. What was he going to do to them now? If anybody needed grace, they did. And grace was what they got. Despite bolted doors, Jesus popped in and pronounced peace instead of the expected doom. He showed them his hands and his side, the irreversible consequences of their treachery—but now the signs of their redemption. Again he said, “Peace!” A standard Hebrew greeting became a statement of fact. Though these so-called friends had denied and abandoned him despite vowing never to leave or forsake, Jesus outrageously forgave them. And not only them, but the perpetrators of his execution too, even as he hung to die.

Like a shepherd who leaves 99 perfectly good sheep to go off and search for a single wayward one; like a foreman who pays even the last laborer showing up at quitting time the same as the rest who worked all day; like a King who throws a soirée and fills his banquet hall with outcasts and sinners; like a Father who loves his reckless son even though his prodigal squandering depleted the family trust fund—Jesus outrageously loves and forgives those who’ve done nothing to deserve it and everything to dodge it.

If you’ve ever truly experienced God’s grace, then the outrage of forgiving others does lessen. Despite their new power, I seriously doubt the disciples compiled personal hit lists because their new power was from the spirit of Jesus. Just as God had breathed life into Adam at creation, so Jesus now breathed new life into his disciples. They were new creations. As the apostle Paul put it (having experienced grace himself), it was no longer they who lived but Christ who lived within them. They were “transformed into Christ’s likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”

The context is the mission of Jesus—the total reconciliation of people to God. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you,” Jesus said. Jesus was God embodied. By the Spirit we are Jesus embodied: the body of Christ sent to the world to give grace to all people.

OK, maybe not all people. Let’s be realistic. Maybe God can love everybody, but he can’t forgive everybody. There are some seriously bad people out there—some so bad that not even repentance can do the trick.

Remember the story of Jonah? God sent him on a mission to some seriously bad people—the insufferably sinful Ninevites. God didn’t send Jonah to give them grace. God sent Jonah to give them hell. But as averse to being judgmental as he was to being gracious, Jonah took off in the other direction, only to be hauled back to work by a big fish. A whale of compunction. Guilt. Christian responsibility. Jonah lumbered into Ninevah, mustering the minimal obedience: “Forty days from now Nineveh will be destroyed” was all he said. Yet the response was like some Billy Graham Crusade on steroids! Every single wicked Ninny from the king to the peasant came forward at the altar call just as they were.

Then the real story started. God saw Nineveh’s repentance and had compassion. Jonah saw God’s compassion and was furious. “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled; for I knew that you were a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and ready to forgive and cancel your plans to punish!” Here we thought Jonah fled because of the harshness of the sermon God commanded him to deliver, but in fact Jonah fled because he suspected all along that God was not going to follow through! “Vengeance is mine” says the Lord, but what if the Lord decides to show mercy instead?

For the woman at that funeral service, what compounded her fury was not merely that her abuser still walked the earth, but that he still walked it with the gall to show up at this funeral. Who did he think he was? Though his sin had forced the loss of his vocation and reputation as well as years of shame; it had also forced him to receive help. He was making attempts at new life empowered by the faith he had forsaken so many years before. His presence that day was an effort to live out his redemption. The grace of God exhibited its transformative power. But the woman was furious.

Yale theologian Miroslav Volf writes how, “Forgiveness flounders because I exclude my enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners. But no one can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long without overcoming this double exclusion—without transposing the enemy from the sphere of monstrous inhumanity into the sphere of shared humanity, and herself from the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness.” The spirit of Christ in us is the breath of Christ crucified for the sins of the world.

So then what did Jesus mean by “if you do not forgive…?” A difficult saying to be sure, yet in light of Christ crucified, it is not permission to withhold grace. If the Holy Spirit in us in the spirit of Jesus in us, then forgiveness is our only option. Yet there remains a seismic difference between grace not offered and grace not accepted. It is the latter, I think, to which Jesus points in this difficult saying. Because grace is gift, it is given and not forced. As gift, it can be rejected by those to whom it is offered. However as gift it cannot be withheld by those who have received it. The Spirit may come with no strings on the front end, but there are obligations afterward. “As the Father sent me,” Jesus said, “so I send you.” “As I have loved you,” Jesus said, “so you must love.”

To remember your own forgiveness by God does lessen the outrage of forgiving others. But the outrage never goes away. You still feel the anger sometimes. The unfairness. The injustice. But maybe this is a good thing. Grace is unfair and unjust. That’s why we call it grace. Maybe you should regard the anger you feel at forgiving as a sign that you’re giving the real thing. The cross of Christ is the ultimate in unjust love. The Spirit of Christ is the power to love likewise.

Breakfast in Heaven

2011-05-31T14:45:00.001-05:00

John 24:21-29
by Daniel Harrell

I’m continuing my survey of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances in John’s gospel this Eastertide with a fish story. Moving to Minnesota, I knew I had landed in a fisherman’s paradise when the program on talk radio as I drove across the state line was about catching muskies. By contrast, a journalist I knew in Massachusetts once published an op-ed rant on catch-and-release fishing. He wrote of being appalled that people take thrill in “dragging a fish through the water by a barbed hook in its mouth…. No one would throw Fido a Milk-Bone with a hook hidden inside and then, when the barb had pierced his mouth and he was trying violently to shake it loose, drag him to a place where he couldn’t breathe. Anyone who did such a thing would be condemned for his brutality. Is it any less brutal to do it to a fish? … any sport that depends for its enjoyability on forcing an animal to fight for its life is wrong. Wrong for what it does to the fish. Even more wrong for what it does to the fisher.”

Man, I wish I’d had this article in hand as a kid whenever my Dad would drag me out of my bed at 2:30 in the morning to go fishing with him. My father is as avid an angler as they come. I sometimes wonder whether the main reason my parents had me was so my dad would have a fishing partner. That’s what he wrote in my baby book. One single sentence on the day I was born: “Now I have a fishing partner.” It was brutal: The getting up in the dark, the liver pudding sandwiches for lunch, the tangled lines, the hooks in trees, the too-often meager results, the sunburn, the mosquitoes, the numbing boredom, the obsessive insistence of trying just one more spot before quitting, the giddiness my Dad expressed at even the slightest nibble. Dad loved just being out on the water while all I wanted to do was drown myself in it. He eventually got fed up with my whining. So he and mom had my brother. Of course my brother turned out to love fishing just like my dad and they’ve been best friends ever since. Not that I’m bitter.

I was reading in the Star Tribune this week about bow fishing—how guys go after carp with a bow and arrow. That might have been cool. Though down South we probably would have just used shotguns.

As I got older I grew to appreciate fishing’s positive effect on my father—whatever that meant for the fish. When life’s stresses and strain started to weigh on him, he’d respond by simply saying: “I’m going fishing.” He found incredible solace and strength on the lake—as I imagine many in this congregation are doing as I speak. Going fishing provided some perspective with which to face life’s troubles. You obviously see where I’m going with this. Simon Peter and his disciple buddies were fishermen too—though for them it was an occupation if not also an obsession. The stress and strain Peter experienced over the course of that first Holy Week were starting to weigh on him—the fear, the guilt, the bewilderment, the amazement. Thus in verse 3 of our passage, Peter announced; “I’m going fishing.” Thomas, Nathanael, James, John and two other disciples announced that they were going too.

Simon Peter was fishing when Jesus first found him and called him to follow. Jesus was preaching on the beach and noticed Peter and his friends minding their boats. As the crowd increased, Jesus imposed upon Peter to allow him use of his boat so to address the multitudes that pressed him toward the water. After the sermon was done, Jesus turned to Peter and suggested he cast his nets one more time. Peter replied that the day’s results had been nil; nevertheless, perhaps the rabbi knew of an untapped honey hole. Few fisherman can resist one more cast. Besides, what could it hurt? Why not do it if only to appease this popular preacher. But then the nets filled to almost breaking capacity, and Peter realized this preacher to be no petty parson. He said, “Go away from me Lord, I am a sinful man.” To which Jesus responding, “Do not be afraid. From now on, you’ll be catching people.” And with that, Peter stopped fishing for fish.

That is until here after the resurrection. You’ll remember the risen Christ first appeared to his disciples as they hid behind locked doors for fear of the Jewish religious leaders. Matthew suggests that they had been accused of stealing Jesus’ body. The extra-canonical Gospel of Peter reports that they “were being sought by the authorities as malefactors and as wishing to set fire to the Temple.” But as I mentioned last Sunday, I bet they were afraid of Jesus too. During their master’s greatest need, they had been cowards and traitors. If Jesus was strong enough to conquer death, what was he going to do to them? No wonder they locked the door. Yet when Jesus popped in, he pronounced peace rather than doom upon their treachery. Moreover, he breathed his Spirit on them and sent them out to be apostles.

And yet eight days later they were still hiding. Perhaps this was for Thomas’ sake—hoping recreating the scene would compel Jesus to make another appearance. Whatever the reason, at least they no longer tried to hide now. But unless being an apostle means something other than what it meant (namely, one who is sent to fish for people), going back to fishing for fish is hardly what we would have expected these Spirit-infused disciples to be doing at the end of John’s gospel.

Now this may have to do with the way every Christian reacts to what fishing for people implies; namely, the E-Word. Evangelism. Talking about your faith to unbelievers. Catching heathen for the kingdom. Granted, dropping a net on unbelieving and unsuspecting friends usually comes off more like dropping a bomb. I know that whenever I tell people I attend church, never mind that I work at one, the responses I get can range from quizzical curiosity to outright hostility. Of course, Jesus said that’s how it would be. At the same time, it is odd that we interpret catching people as evangelism since to catch a fish is to kill it (first century fishing was not yet a sport). Then again, it was Jesus who said that “The kingdom of God is like a net let down into the lake that caught all kinds of fish. When it was full, the fishermen pulled it up on the shore. Then they sat down and collected the good fish in baskets, but threw the bad away. This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Maybe this was why the disciples went back to fishing for fish. Judgment Day scenarios can be pretty scary—even when they don’t occur as predicted. Others suggest that the disciples were just hungry—they did have to eat. If they were anything like my father, they may have needed that mental break, some male-bonding time, some peace and quiet. However, since fishing was their former occupation, chances were that they simply went back to the only thing they knew how to do without Jesus. True, he had given them his Spirit, but it must have been only a partial supply. You can’t imagine the disciples after receiving the Holy Spirit at Pentecost behaving this way.

It would be easy to chalk up what looks like apostolic reticence to pre-Pentecost realities were the same reticence not so prevalent among us who stand on Pentecost’s other side. Endued with the fullness of Christ’s Spirit just like the disciples at Pentecost, many of us still resemble this gospel version. Oh there are some days when you’re feeling fully inspired—juiced and fervently unashamed, evangelistically bold, sacrificially generous and prayerfully diligent: You know, like when you’re fresh back from a mission trip, or after a powerful piece of music at church, a great Bible study, a fabulous sermon. But life always finds its way back to the usual. Back to the real world. Back home. Back to the old job.

Was this why Jesus showed up on the beach? I imagine his arms waving as he tried to get his disciples’ attention (though I always wonder why he didn’t just walk out there). The disciples squinted but couldn’t quite make out who it was. The stranger yelled out, “Had any luck boys?” “Naw,” they yelled back. “Well,” the stranger yelled, “try the right side of your boat!” Note that Jesus did not say, “What are you doing back at your old job?” or “Get out of that boat and get busy converting people!” If they were shirking their responsibility, Jesus did not condemn them for it.

Since no fisherman can ever resist one more cast, the disciples took the stranger’s recommendation, tossed their nets starboard and—deja vu—they were unable to haul the net in because of the large number of fish. John put two and two together and said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” The impulsive and elated Peter immediately—to the confusion of all who’ve read this since—threw his clothes on (he’d been stripped down to his shorts for work) and then threw himself into the water. Perhaps he hoped he wouldn’t sink this time. Whatever the reason, there’s no confusion as to the direction he swam. Peter made a trout-line for Jesus.

Jesus had some fish frying already, along with some bread. He suggested the disciples add a few of the fish they just caught to the pan. So Peter hauled the whole net-full ashore—153 fish in all, we read. And Jesus said to them, “Come have breakfast.”

Since John’s gospel has a propensity for shrouding the profound within the pedestrian, scholars and preachers have never been able to resist trying to sort out the symbolism. For instance, why were there seven disciples present? Seven is emblematic of perfection and completion. John also makes a point that the nets did not tear. The word tear is the Greek word schism. Could that be a comment on church unity? And what about serving bread with the fish? Jesus declared himself the bread of life. There’s the Last Supper and bread as Christ’s body broken, and the feeding of 5000 where bread and fish make up a miracle. Early Christians used the mark of the fish as a sign of their identification with the risen Lord. Fish spelled out in Greek is an acrostic meaning “Jesus Christ God’s Son and Savior.” Fish adorn bumpers of Christian’s cars in our time. One blew past me in traffic and cussed at me just the other day.

And what about that number 153? St. Jerome argued that 153 was the number of fish species Greek zoologists ascertained existed in the entire world. 153 thus meant the church was to catch people from every nation. St. Augustine adopted a mathematical approach speculating that because 153 is the sum of the numbers 1-17 consecutively, the number 17 was therefore important. Were there not 10 commandments and 7 gifts of the Spirit? 9 choirs of angels and 8 beatitudes? 10 Lords-a-leaping and 7 swans a-swimming (OK, so that wasn’t Augustine). There are plenty of other ideas—but it starts getting a little ridiculous. If your tendency is to get bogged down in such deciphering, please don’t miss the main point of this story; namely, that Jesus showed up. The crucified dead and buried Jesus in his resurrected flesh. We should never grow so accustomed to this that we take for granted its enormity. As you may remember the apostle Paul writing in 2 Corinthians, “the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus, and will bring us all into his presence. This is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.”

On the other hand, don’t get so caught up in the resurrection’s enormity that you lose the simplicity of this story. Jesus showed up on the beach and cooked breakfast for his friends. He could have walked out to the disciples or even floated out to them on clouds surrounded by angels if he wanted to—but I suspect he’s reserving the big splash for later.

In the meantime, Jesus’ ordinary appearance encourages us to keep on the lookout for him, not only visibly in the eschatological sense, but in the ways he shows up in the usual places of our ordinary lives —especially on those days when we’re feeling more like gospel disciples than Pentecost apostles.

I finally decided to give fishing another go a few years back. A good friend invited me to join in on a little excursion off Cape Cod in search of striped bass. My gut reaction was to make up some excuse—visions of my tortured childhood dancing in my head. But instead I determined to overcome my childish ways and “be a man.” I still had to get up at 2:30 AM. Yet gratefully, there were no liver pudding sandwiches, no trees in which to snag my line, no mosquitoes and no numbing boredom—probably due to the fact that I spent most of the day throwing up into a bucket. Here was something which I had never experienced in all of those early mornings out on the lake with my father—seasickness. My friend chartered a small skiff with which we navigated the heavy swells of Buzzard’s Bay, not unlike riding one of a roller coaster at the State Fair for six hours after eating six pronto pups. What began as mild dizziness soon gave way to stomach-churning disorientation. My noble attempt at “being a man” now looked downright idiotic. Why did I subject myself to something I was so bad at? Somehow between appointments with the bucket, wanting to camouflage my humiliation, I did manage to throw out my line. Suddenly as I was reeling in, the line jerked. I yanked and accidently hooked this sweet monster of a bass which ended up being the catch of the day; accomplished, my friend remarked, with one of the lowest catch per cast ratios he’d ever seen. We grilled it and ate it that night on the beach. Delicious.

Now while my big fish story should not be confused with the disciples’ miraculous catch, it does provide one more parabolic reminder when it comes to keeping on the lookout for Jesus. You might want to pay particularly close attention during those times in your life when troubles come and you’re called on to do the things that are hard to do.

Just last Sunday, you’ll remember Hanneke Cassel and Chris Lewis playing fiddle and guitar as part of our worship. What you may not know was how we went home after church last Sunday night to discover that Chris’ parents and family home were in the path of the

massive, historic tornado that tore through Joplin, Missouri. We glared at the television and scoured the web for information as Chris frantically tried to locate his parents. He found them, thankfully, but finding Jesus in all the wreckage seemed less likely. As always, the question most instinctively ask was where was Jesus before the tornado hit? It’s a needless question. Obviously the Lord is not in the business of preventing natural disasters these days. He is, however, still in the resurrection business, and as such he’s been showing up all over Joplin. The vast outpouring of help and prayer has humbled Chris and his family. As difficult as their situation is, theirs is the story of thousands of others all around them. Consequently, a beautiful solidarity has emerged, an eagerness to be involved in each others lives; a desire to love and care in ways that would not have otherwise happened. As one Lutheran pastor wrote, “There is incredible loss and sorrow, and the church is here to witness as the body of Christ with the people of Joplin.”

The same has happened in North Minneapolis following the tornado that hit there last Sunday. Many of you have already given and pitched in to help. Christian organizations Urban Homeworks and the Salvation Army have been inundated with gifts and offers to the point of having to turn help away. It feels ironic that people come together this way only during times of hardship and tragedy. But that’s how resurrection has always worked. [And that’s why the adjectives out of so many mouths on the other side of these tragedies nevertheless have been words like “blessing” and “grace” and “hope” and “thanksgiving.” Without a trace of irony but with every trace of redemption, Chris’ parents went so far as to say that the love and compassion they’ve received “has blown them away.” “This is all for your sake,” Paul wrote, “so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.”

[To send a note or aid to Chris’ parents, you can do so at this address: Don Lewis/PO Box 1325/ Joplin, MO 64802]

Fingers of Faith

2011-05-26T09:20:00.000-05:00

John 20:24-29

by Daniel Harrell

In Lewis Carroll’s children’s classic, Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen advises Alice in Wonderland to practice believing six impossible things before breakfast each morning to assist with her disbelief. Every Sunday, Christians would do well to heed her advice. It’s why we sometimes say the Apostle’s Creed. In addition to Jesus rising again from the dead, you also have his being born of the virgin Mary, ascending into heaven, coming again to judge the quick and the dead, the holy spirit, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. That’s eight impossible things right there.

Granted, we might have eliminated Jesus’ coming to judge the quick and the dead as impossible had he returned yesterday like he was supposed to. By now you’ve heard, read or saw posted around the Cities that Jesus was due back on May 21. According to calculations by the folks at familyradio.com, if you take the Bible’s equating of one day to a 1000 years, multiply that by the seven days in Genesis 7 that God gives Noah before sending the flood, extrapolate that God was actually talking about Judgment Day; then subtract 4990 (the year of the Flood BC) from 7000, and then subtract 1 more to account for there being no year zero in the switch from BC to AD, you’re then left with 2011 AD. The math is a little more complicated to get to May 21 at 6PM, but since it didn’t happen, it doesn’t really matter. Though that tornado watch last night was foreboding. (And now that I mention it, I also notice a number of people aren’t here this morning.) I’ll admit to being a little disappointed. Even though I don’t think that the Bible teaches an airborne rapture, that could have been fun. But frankly, I’m more surprised than disappointed. I’m surprised that his latest forecast of the end of the world created the media circus that it did. It’s not that the media believed it would happen. The story was that so many people actually did—this despite Jesus’ insistence that none of us can know the day or hour of his coming.

I wonder what the coverage would have been like had Jesus shown up. In Matthew’s gospel, if you’ll remember back a few Sundays, the risen Jesus appeared to his supposedly faithful disciples only to have some of them doubt it anyway. It was a little embarrassing.

But as I mentioned then, I like that the disciples had their doubts. If the disciples can have post-resurrection doubts with Jesus standing right in front of them, any misgivings I harbor sight unseen are no problem. The truth is that doubt has never been a problem for Jesus. To him, it’s not the amount of faith that matters as much as the direction it’s aimed. If a mustard seed’s worth of faith will move a mountain, then obviously it takes a whole lot less to save your soul. Even weak faith is strong as long as it’s faith in Christ.

Faith and doubt often travel in tandem; though there are exceptions. Among my favorite memories is of a woman named Kelly who proudly declared she could never point to a time in her life when she did not believe in Jesus. She vividly recalled how at age six— already having been a believer for as long as she could remember—she heard the story of Jesus’ baptism by John in her Sunday School class and wondered why that happened. Doing what six-year-olds do when they need to know something, Kelly asked her Momma. She said, “Momma, why did Jesus get baptized?” Her Momma responded that Jesus wanted to show that he was a good Christian. So Kelly said, “Then I want to get baptized too.” So Kelly’s Momma marched her down to see the pastor of their Baptist church and Kelly told her pastor how she wanted to get baptized. Convinced she was ready, the pastor immediately scheduled her for the very next Sunday. They don’t call themselves Baptists for nothing.

Sunday arrived and Kelly proudly waltzed down the aisle to the front of the church. She wore one of those glorious, bleached white baptismal robes and ascended the steps to the mighty water that flowed in the big baptistery that sat at the center of the sanctuary—modeled after the River Jordan itself—with the pastor waiting hip deep. Kelly tiptoed toward the water and down onto the first step. The pastor stretched out his hand. He seemed a long way away to Kelly (it was a big pool and she was only six). The water started to soak into her robe and she thought, “maybe I should try to try to swim for it” (though she could only dog-paddle) By this time the white robe had started to puff up all around her, but then it filled up and turned into a cotton anchor. Kelly slipped and sank like a rock. The pastor quickly yelled out the baptismal words—“Father! Son! Holy Ghost!”—and then snatched her out of the water before she drowned. Kelly came up snorting and sputtering but still believing and still strongly to this day. She told me, “I tried to doubt once. I said to Jesus, ‘Maybe you don’t exist,’ but then I thought, ‘yes you do.’”

That such childlike faith so easily dispels “gloomy clouds of doubt” is a testimony to Jesus’ admonition that we practice faith like children. However we all know that even the brightest sunshine sometimes gives way to ominous weather fronts. There are days when faith moves mountains, yet there are other days when it barely gets you out of bed. Gloomy clouds return. We believe, but we also hesitate and question. We confess, but we also qualify our confessions with provisional asides. We trust, all the while guarding our hearts against disillusionment and unmet expectations. Ours is the plea of that desperate father who needed Jesus to heal his daughter, “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.” For most of us, faith and doubt travel in tandem.

But not for Thomas. Mislabeled “doubting Thomas,” he is the patron saint of adult-like faith. He demanded evidence. He wanted proof. You’re familiar with the story. Jesus’ frightened and disloyal disciples are huddled in their hideout behind locked doors, John tells us, for fear of the Jews—though I imagine they were a little scared of Jesus too. They’d messed up pretty bad and now Jesus was loose (like he said) and likely ticked off too. Jesus found them despite their locked doors, which only scared them more, only to then predictably pronounce peace rather than dreaded doom upon their disloyalty. What’s weird, however, was that eight days later the disciples were hiding out again. Were they still scared? Or were they just trying to recreate the scene from the previous Sunday night hoping to conjure up another showing for Thomas’ sake? John doesn’t tell us where Thomas was the first time around. But score him points for having the guts to venture outside while the others took cover.

Throughout John’s Gospel, Thomas is never portrayed as the timid sort. Back in chapter 11, Jesus told the Twelve about the death of his friend Lazarus and the pending miracle that awaited them once they traveled to his graveside. The disciples asked, “Are you sure you want to go back there? The last time you went there they tried to stone you!” But Jesus replied, “We’re going so that you might have faith in me.” Recognizing his master’s resolve, Thomas stepped up. He said, “Let’s go too so that we may die with him.” The man was no coward. In chapter 14, Jesus was describing how he had to depart from the earth in order to go and get heaven ready. “You know the way to the place where I am going,” Jesus said. But Thomas answered, “Lord we don’t know where you are going so how can we know the way?” Jesus countered, in what proved a prelude to tonight’s episode, “Thomas, I am the way and the truth and the life.” Thomas wasn’t the only disciple who had no idea what Jesus was talking about; but he was the only one gutsy enough to admit it.

Upon missing Jesus’ resurrection debut, the other disciples were eager to tell Thomas how they had “seen the Lord!” However Thomas was adamant, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.” This is how Thomas got his “doubting” reputation. But if the word commonly used for doubt in the New Testament means what it means, namely hesitancy or tentativeness, then Thomas was no doubter. He was an all-or-nothing/no-nonsense kind of guy. He did not hesitate. He was not tentative. He emphatically refused to believe without seeing Jesus for himself.

So Jesus showed up again saying the same things he said when he popped in on Easter (since it obviously needed to be said again if the disciples were ever to get up and get busy being apostles). But then he turned to Thomas and said: “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side.” Jesus serves up Thomas’ own words back at him verbatim. Taking for granted that seeing the risen Jesus for the first time was shocking enough, hearing him repeat your exact words even though he’d been nowhere near when you said them must have done a number on poor Thomas. Maybe this was why there’s no report of him taking Jesus up on his offer to touch. Jesus then said, not “stop doubting,” but literally, “Stop not believing and start believing” as if each required the same amount of effort.

Which they did. For just as emphatically as Thomas had declared his refusal to believe, so now did he emphatically pronounce his faith: “My Lord and my God!” This was no minor leap of faith but an enormous launch from worshiping Jesus as the risen rabbi to venerating him as verily God himself. It’s doubting Thomas who utters the supreme Christological declaration of the entire fourth Gospel. Doubting Thomas makes courageously clear that one may now address Jesus with the same language with which Israel addressed Yahweh.

Unimpressed, it seems, Jesus responded with what reads like a mild rebuke: “You only believe because you have seen.” Yet as up to this point in John’s gospel, what other kind of faith in Jesus had their been? The only one type of true belief that had been possible was a belief in the visible Jesus. It was only after the bodily resurrection and the ascension, where the presence of Jesus becomes one of invisible presence through the Spirit, that a new type of faith emerged. Namely, a faith that believes without seeing. As the author of Hebrews would famously write, “faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” “Blessed, Jesus said,” are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

More than wishful thinking, more than hoping for the best; faith is spiritual sight. Its childlike variety is not naïve imagination but confident trust in a trustworthy Savior even though we do not see Him with our eyes. Human experience acknowledges, empirically as well as philosophically, that there is more to reality than what we see. I once spotted a blind woman walking downtown with her guide dog, a Labrador Retriever. Unfortunately, the dog must have been a rookie because it kept aiming the woman into a trash can which was really irritating her. She ordered him to straighten out and I chalked the event up to a quirk in the dog’s training. However a few minutes later as I returned from an errand, I was frantic to see that the guide dog had mistakenly halted the woman in the middle of oncoming traffic. Fortunately the woman—even though she could not see—nevertheless knew the reality. She yanked her dog safely across the street over to the other side.

Faith knows the existence of reality; a truth that resides deep in our souls that often counters everything we would have otherwise have expected. For Jesus to be Lord and God, meant that Christ had staked his claim on the world. But such a claim looked absurd. What sort of Lord would ever die on a cross and then select such a loser-band of misfit nobodies with which to conquer the planet? Yet by faith, Christ’s claim as well as his means of implementing proved completely realistic. The least ended up as the greatest. Within just a couple of generations the Roman Empire itself proved to be no match for the apostolic train. There was more to reality than anybody imagined. And there still is—as long as we’ll have the faith to believe it.

In his most recent book, Why Jesus?, Bishop William Willimon writes, “God’s great rescue operation for a fallen world is Jesus Christ. The great end of that venture is the Kingdom of God, that time and place when God, at last, gets what God wants. Many want a better world, a closer, more heightened sense of God’s nearness and God’s rule, but it is one thing to anticipate such a time and place; it is quite another actually to look at this lowly Jew from Nazareth, the servant, and believe that, in him, the kingdom has come—even now.” “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed;” Jesus cautioned, “do not say ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is already among you.” By which he meant, “I am king—your Lord and your God. With all the impossible things we believe already, it is not so impossible to believe this too.

A Dubious Rising

2011-05-02T08:27:00.000-05:00

Matthew 28:1-17
by Daniel Harrell

How many of you were up early for the Royal Wedding on Friday. Tea and scones? We had it on DVR. And yet it was somewhat troubling to enjoy since at the same time I had in my hand a newspaper with all of those horrible pictures of tornado devastation from Alabama. Hundreds dead and thousands homeless. On the one hand the morning media obsession with the royal wedding almost to the exclusion of the tornadoes’ destruction seemed so inappropriate. And yet on the other hand, as I listened to the gathered congregation sing hymns in the majestically soaring Westminster Abbey, built to anticipate heaven, and heard the Archbishop of Canterbury intone those ancient words of Scripture and prayer, all designed to remind us of how marriage is founded on faith and modeled after our relationship with Jesus—for better or worse—and how this event carried for so many the symbol of so much hope for new life and the future, just as our own faith in the resurrection carries our hope for new life and the future—and knowing Southerners as I do, that even in tornado-torn Tuscaloosa, those that could have would have found a way to catch a glimpse of the dress to lighten their sadness just a bit—maybe the troubling tension we felt is similar to the tension we’re supposed to feel between this fallen world and the real world to come.

I told a story not too long ago of a university chaplain whose daughter Amy, a freshman at the university, was tragically killed. As parents, the chaplain and his wife were tortured with grief. Amy had sung in the University Chapel Choir. The choir members, distraught themselves, nevertheless insisted they sing at Amy’s funeral. In order to assist them with their grief, and to prepare them for their funereal performance, the University Health Services sent over a grief specialist who assured them of the necessity of their sorrow and encouraged them that their grief-work was progressing right on schedule and that really, it was good to grieve and accept death. At the funeral, however, the students in the University Chapel Choir (never ones to respect authority) stood and sang defiantly, raucously from the Easter portion of Handel’s Messiah: “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive!” According to the inconsolable chaplain, Jesus showed up that day and death slinked off campus, his great victory party ruined by a choir, that while it could not refuse death, could refuse to fear it or revere it.

It was a compelling testimony to the power of resurrection hope. Many in my congregation were moved when I first shared the story. However, someone also walked up and asked whether it really happened. What kind of question was that? OK, so preachers are known to embellish at times, but c’mon, “did it really happen…” I don’t know… It should have!

Afterwards I wondered, do things actually have to happen to be true? We read the parable of the Prodigal Son and take for granted it was just a story. But the grace about which it teaches is true. Can the same be said about the resurrection? A few years ago the Discovery Channel reported the finding of Jesus’ bones. It made a big splash. Yet they forgot to mention that these bones had in fact been discovered back in 1980. Why did it take more than 25 years to make the news? Because it wasn’t news. The burial cave wasn’t extraordinary and the names on the bone boxes were very common for that period. That they echoed the names of the Holy Family was purely coincidence.

But what if they had found Jesus’ bones? There are plenty who wouldn’t have been surprised. People don’t rise from the dead. Some say what really happened was what Matthew himself reports: Jesus’ enemies had the disciples swiping Jesus’ body and orchestrating what would’ve turned out to be the biggest hoax in world history—a remarkable feat given how dim-witted the Gospels persistently portray this bunch. Others insist that Jesus never really died on the cross, but only passed out. Buried in an unconscious state, he came to three days later and pushed aside a 2000-pound rock. There’s the Mirage Theory (everybody was hallucinating together at the same time), the Mislocation Theory (they had the wrong tomb), and even one that has Jesus being eaten by dogs, sort of a “Lost Homework” theory.

Postmodernists assert that such explanations are only necessary for people stuck in limited Enlightenment mindsets bound by their need for empirical verification. Things don’t actually have to happen in order to be true. There’s plenty of significance that eludes scientific scrutiny. That’s fine, but I’m still not sure why anybody would want to be a Christian if Jesus is still lying out in some Jerusalem graveyard. I tend to side with the apostle Paul on this one. If Christ was not actually raised from the dead, then Christians are basically just a bunch of idiots.

Not that some of us aren’t idiots already. I got an email from that university chaplain’s office after posting the story about the death of his daughter. Someone had read my sermon online and called to offer their condolences. The email read, “Our university chaplain does not have a daughter who was killed. In fact, he does not have a daughter named Amy. Was wondering where you did your research for this?”

Uh, research?

OK, some things actually do have to happen to be true. Still, many Christians in church on Easter doubt the resurrection ever happened. Most Christians as it turns out. According to one recent poll, 54% of professing Christians do not believe the thing that makes Christianity, Christianity. Is this surprising? Not necessarily—not when you read this passage from Matthew’s gospel.

Most of it you’re familiar with. Women go to the graveyard early in the morning to pay their respects. Earthquake. Angels. The massive stone covering the tomb removed. Nobody’s home. The macho guards? They’ve fainted. The ladies? They’re cool. A little freaked out, but holding it together. The angels ask the ladies what they’re doing in the graveyard: “Jesus isn’t here. He has been raised, just like he told you.” The angels send the bewildered women off to preach the first Easter sermon—no small thing in a culture where women were decidedly second-class. No self-respecting ancient author looking to invent a best-selling gospel would have included women so prominently. On their way they bump into Jesus. They grab his feet. I guess they didn’t want him getting away again.

Jesus tells them not to be scared. He reiterates the angels’ instructions: “Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee.” In Galilee, they all meet Jesus on a mountain, since in Matthew’s gospel all the really important stuff happens on mountains. “The disciples worshipped him,” Matthew writes, but then somewhat surprisingly adds, “some doubted.” That’s a line you may not have remembered.

Now, to be fair, each of the gospels has its doubters; the most famous being Doubting Thomas. In John’s gospel, Jesus popped in on the hiding disciples to gave them the good news of his resurrection in person. But Thomas was out getting groceries or something. He refuses to believe what the others report unless he sees for himself. So the risen Jesus pops in again and tells Thomas to check it out: “See my hands. Poke your finger in my side. Stop doubting and believe.” There’s no record that Thomas ever sticks his finger in Jesus’ side but he does believe. Jesus responds, “You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” A clear message for the rest of us.

In Matthew’s gospel, however, we get a different kind of doubter. The disciples who doubt aren’t the ones out getting groceries, but the ones looking at the risen Jesus standing right in front of them. Perhaps not wanting to embarrass anybody, Matthew doesn’t name names. And I should add that Matthew’s word for doubt is different from the one used for Doubting Thomas. Thomas’ doubt was outright disbelief whereas what we have here is more akin to hesitation. But still, why the hesitation? It is a little embarrassing. Since the next verse says that Jesus “came to them,” maybe they hesitated because Jesus was still far away—though not so far away that they failed to recognize him enough to worship him. Maybe “the some” who hesitated were not some of the disciples, but some hangers-on who had yet to get with the program--except that Matthew specifically says “the eleven.” Maybe Matthew’s pen slipped? He meant to write “believed” and mistakenly wrote “doubted”? Heck of a slip. Basic Bible translation guidelines insist that the harder the passage, the more likely it is to be original since some later copyist would have already tried to fix it.

But why fix it? I say leave it like it is. If the disciples can have post-resurrection doubts with Jesus standing right in front of them, then why any reservations of our own are nothing? If the disciples hesitate to believe when they see Jesus, then the rest of us who struggle to believe sight unseen are home free. How do I know? Because in the ensuing verses Jesus sends out his doubting disciples to make more disciples. “Go and baptize people in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit and teach them to obey everything I taught.” How about that? Jesus doesn’t say, “OK guys, let’s deal with this doubt thing first. I can’t send you out to start a major world religion if you’re not sure of it yourself!” No, the disciples doubt and Jesus says “go spread the good news!”

Doubt has never been a problem for Jesus. The only problem is when doubt becomes an excuse. Every now and then I’ll get into a conversation with someone considering Christianity that goes something like this. I’ll ask, “Why don’t you just believe in Jesus?” The person I’m ask will start listing hesitations: “I’m not a good enough person yet,” or “I want to get my life in order before I start getting serious about God,” or “I don’t want to be a hypocrite,” or “I haven’t read the Bible cover to cover yet, you know, done the research,” or “I need more proof,” or “I’m waiting until I get married and have kids,” or “what if the story’s not true? The last thing I want to do is believe something that could be wrong. I’ve got to figure these things out.”

But Jesus never showed up to anybody who had everything figured out. He never showed up to anybody who had their life in order. If you’ve already got it all together, Jesus is probably not for you. And he’s probably not for you if you’re a good enough person either, whatever that means. Jesus is for people who’ve got nothing together, whose lives are a mess and who have every doubt in their ability to be good on their own.

Doubt has never been a problem for Jesus. To him, it’s not the amount of faith that matters as much as the direction in which it’s pointed. If a mustard seed’s worth of faith will move a mountain, then obviously it takes a whole lot less to save your soul, as long as you’re aiming at Christ. The only other time this word for doubt gets used in the Bible is earlier in Matthew. It’s where Peter tries to walk on water after seeing Jesus do it. After a couple of steps toward Jesus, Peter freaks and starts to sink. He screams out, “Lord save me!” and Jesus stretches out his hand and saves him. “Why’d you doubt?” Jesus asked. Peter’s like, “Why do you think?” And then they get back in the boat. Later, Peter really makes a mess of things but still gets named chief of the church. That says something too.

Jesus is probably not for anybody who can walk on water by themselves. Jesus is for doubters and fearers and strugglers and sinkers and losers and grievers like you and me. People like those who attended that university woman’s heartbreaking funeral. That’s right, it happened. I did my research this time. A young woman named Amy was tragically crushed and killed by a bus. And yes, her parents and classmates were devastated. And yes, the University Health Services sent over a goofy grief specialist whom the choir ignored as, yes, they defiantly sang “Hallelujah!” in the face of death.

Only the young woman who died was not the chaplain’s daughter. I got that part wrong. Unlike Matthew, my pen did slip. Nevertheless, the university chaplain was present. He was there, he saw what happened. Just like the women in the graveyard that first Easter morning saw what happened. Just the like the disciples who encountered Jesus atop that mountain but couldn’t believe their eyes. And just like the billions of believers ever since who’ve been pulled out of the water by encounters with a risen Christ they’ve never seen with their eyes—including the survivors of horrible tornadoes who I guarantee you are in churches this morning, along all those who help them in Christ’s name. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe,” Jesus said. And blessed are those who doubt too.

The Triumphant Return

2011-04-27T11:35:00.000-05:00

1 Samuel 6:13-7:1
Easter Sunday

by Daniel Harrell

Any preacher will tell you that the hardest sermons to preach are at Christmas and Easter. It’s not that the Christmas and Easter events themselves are hard to preach about. What makes preaching Christmas and Easter sermons so hard is that everybody already knows how the stories turn out. This being the case, you’d think that if people were going to skip church, today would be the Sunday to do it. I take for granted that nobody woke up this morning wondering, “Gee, you think they’ll find the tomb empty this year?” But instead, even with the Easter story now in its 2010th season of syndication, people pack out churches today more than any on other Sunday. Of course it could be that you’re thinking, “Hey, a predictable sermon beats a bad sermon.” At least if you go to church on Easter you know what you’re going to get.

But not this Easter! At least not here at this Church. That’s right, if you’re visiting with us here at Colonial you are in luck. No resurrection reruns for you. As you’ve already heard, instead of empty tombs, dazzling angels and befuddled disciples, we’re bringing you a cart, two cows, five golden tumors and five gold rats. Oh, and the Ark of the Covenant too—which if you ever saw the Indiana Jones movie you know is almost as exciting as Easter.

What made the Ark so exciting was that it represented the actual, palpable presence of God Almighty among ancient Israel. As long as the Ark was around you never had to ask “where was God?” His glory filled it up. The Ark was a gold covered box, carried by poles containing the Ten Commandments inside—that’s the Covenant part. Atop the box sat the mercy seat, a replica of God’s heavenly throne. Wherever the ark went, God was there too.

Now on the one hand, having God in a Box sounds terribly humiliating—makes you wonder why God did it. But on the other hand you have to admit it also sounds terribly convenient. So convenient in fact that you can now purchase your own personal deity online, handily stored in a small comfortable container. There’s a website (of course) called “GOD-IN-A-BOX.com” where you can select characteristics from a list of well-known divine attributes—keeping those attributes you like, while dispensing those less-becoming of how you think a deity should behave. The website guarantees your GOD-IN-A-BOX^© to [quote] “work in the exact same way as gods do in general and your satisfaction is virtually assured. Your personal GOD-IN-A-BOX^© can be tailor-made to suit your every need, designed to help you make your life more comfortable and to take some weight off your shoulders.”

One virtually satisfied customer named Sue liked hers. She wrote, “I used to think my god wasn’t really listening to me when I prayed but after I got my GOD-IN-A-BOX^© I’m absolutely sure I’m being heard.” Ed Jr., added, “You won’t believe how much my life has changed after I got my own GOD-IN-A-BOX^©. Now, since my god has attributes that fit my lifestyle, I don’t have to worry about going to hell anymore.”

This would be so funny if it weren’t so sad. For the ancient Israelites, having God so tangibly present should have been a good thing. It should have meant joy and blessing and security and hope. Freedom from fear. It should have motivated them to live better lives. It should have made them grateful. But human nature being what it is, it wasn’t long before their gratitude gave way to entitlement. God’s presence was treated as insurance rather than incentive; a cover for bad behavior rather than catalyst for change. With the Ark in their hand, they figured they had God all boxed in.

I’ve spent the entirety of Lent in 1 Samuel 4-6—as hard as that is to believe. Just in case you’ve missed out, forgotten, or been glazed over by the whole thing, a brief review is in order: The ancient Israelites found themselves up against their longtime nemesis, the nefarious Philistines—the epitome of all things evil. Presuming God in a Box was theirs to control, the Israelites rolled the Ark of the Covenant out onto the battlefield, rightly expecting instant victory. After all, God always triumphs over evil. Right? But instead, to everyone’s utter bewilderment, God lost. Israel’s army went down to catastrophic defeat, and the Ark was captured and hauled away, leaving the Israelites without hope. The glory of the Lord was gone.

What are to make of this? It’s one thing in the face of catastrophe to ask “where was God?” It’s quite another thing to account for catastrophe when God is manifestly present. Israel’s arrogance may explain the army’s defeat, but how do you explain God’s defeat? Could it be that Almighty God is in fact not so mighty? Is He not in control? Or does He not care? Can He not be trusted? Or even worse, are death, defeat and failure parts of his plan? What kind of God responds to evil by subjecting himself to ridicule and humiliation?

The evil Philistines buried the defeated Ark deep within the shrine of their personal deity, a ugly stone statue named Dagon (I have a picture but didn’t want to scare the kids). The Philistines ceremoniously ridiculed and humiliated God by situating the Ark subserviently beneath Dagon’s idol. But here’s the Easter part. Early on the morning of the third day, the Philistines returned to Dagon’s shrine fully expecting to find the Ark as it had been left, displayed in submissive defeat. Just like those weeping women who came to Jesus’ tomb, fully expecting to find Jesus as he’d been left: dead and buried, displayed in submissive defeat himself. But again, to everyone’s utter amazement, a reversal had occurred. The women discovered the stone covering Jesus’ tomb rolled away, and the Philistines discovered the stone idol of Dagon rolled off its pedestal, broken into pieces before the Ark of the Lord. God’s glory was back with a vengeance.

In the case of the Philistines, the vengeance came in the form of tumors and rats. Just as the Lord plagued the evil Egyptians in another movie (I think it was on last night), so he stuck it to the wicked Philistines. Frantic, the Philistines concluded that the Ark had to go. On the advice of their religious leaders, they packed it up with gold molded to look like tumors and rats. An odd recompense to be sure, but nevertheless one that unmistakably cried uncle. They then loaded it all on a cart pulled by two milk cows with no driver. It didn’t need a driver because the Lord himself drove it home. God demonstrated his own relentless determination to be back among his people. Despite their long history of resistance and arrogance, God never could give them up because he loved them. He has a thing for sinners. The downtrodden Israelites looked up to see coming a fairly modest victory parade of two cows, one cart and one Ark. But as anyone bereft of hope knows, the return of hope, no matter how modest, is a sight like nothing else. They erupted in praise and welcomed God back into their lives. They never expected nor deserved such grace.

Yet shockingly, the Israelites’ exuberance quickly gave way to arrogance again. They misinterpreted God’s grace as license to go back to the way things were before. They presumed that the return of the Ark meant that its power was theirs again to control. Some went so far as to peek inside and bask in the glory—which you Indiana Jones buffs know is a bad idea. The LORD “struck down seventy of them” as a consequence, leaving the survivors traumatized. “Who can to stand before the LORD, this holy God?” they asked, followed by, “How can we get rid of him?” The Philistines didn’t want Him, and now neither did his own people. His glory was simply too hot to handle.

So God abandoned the Ark and decided to show up in person instead. Human like us, flesh and bone. It sounds terribly humiliating, but God did it to demonstrate his own relentless determination to be back among his people. Despite their long history of resistance and arrogance, God never could give us up because he loves us. He has a thing for sinners. The Lord’s coming in person was initially greeted with exuberant palm-waving—following Jesus always seems like fun until you read the fine print. Once everybody realized God hadn’t changed—that he still desired obedience and holiness—it wasn’t long before they wanted to be rid of him again, this time by hanging him to die on a cross. Could it be that Almighty God is in fact not so mighty? Is He not in control? Or even worse, are death, defeat and failure parts of his plan? What kind of God responds to human sin by subjecting himself to ridicule and humiliation? Precisely the kind of God we gather to worship on Easter. Through his own death in Christ, God kills our resistance and our arrogance, he buries our hostility and sin. And then by raising Jesus from the dead, God redeems death itself, and suffering too, so that we don’t have to be afraid of anything anymore. He gives us joy.

The weeping women who showed up at the tomb that first Easter fully expected to find a dead body. Jesus was gone and their despair was complete. Suppose that instead of an angel, their minister was there, wanting to comfort them with that kind of canned comfort we so often lamely dole out. Suppose the minister said, “He’s gone to a better place.” Or “his spirit will live on in the hearts of those who loved him.” Or “we have to just move on and make the best of it.” It’s hard to make good Easter music out of any of that. Nothing much worth coming to church for.

I had a chance to visit a longtime member of our congregation in the hospital last week. Feeble and frail, her spirits were strong, especially at Easter, she said. Because the night before Easter was when her husband of many years had died. I asked her to please explain, and she described how she woke up on that Easter morning years ago with no idea what to do now that the love of her life was gone. Her son talked her into coming to church. It was Easter. And she figured, why not? So she came to this church, as a visitor, and sat through the service where the preacher probably preached the actual Easter story. On her way out she was enthusiastically accosted by our pastor Jeff Lindsay, as many of you have been likewise accosted over his long tenure here. A wide grin on his face, he beamed, “Happy Easter, welcome to Colonial Church! The Lord is Risen! How are you this wonderful day?” And this weeping woman replied, “I’m actually quite sad, for you see, my husband died last night.” “Well, then you came to the right place,” Jeff replied, without missing a beat. He enveloped her in his arms, prayed for her and gave her the only assurance that makes today worth coming to church for.

The despondent women arrived at Jesus’ grave with the stone rolled aside, an angel sitting on top, his legs dangling in delightful disdain toward all the canned ways we deal with death. A wide grin on his face, the angel beamed (quite literally I’m guessing—the gospels describe his appearance like lightning and his clothing white as snow). The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; I know who you are looking for! Jesus who was crucified, right? But He is not here. He has been raised! Just like he said. He told you so!”

He has been raised. The passive voice is crucial here. Jesus didn’t get himself up because dead people can’t do that. Human beings do not survive death. Death annihilated us. It is our end—unless God does something. And God did do something. The women saw it. The disciples saw it. Hundreds of others saw it. And billions more have had their lives—and their deaths—changed by it. God raised Jesus. And the assurance of Easter is that God will raise us too.

That the angel sat on the stone intended to keep Jesus down was a witness to God’s triumph. Here in 1 Samuel, the Ark of the Covenant sat by a stone too, as a witness to God’s triumph. We read that the stone remains as a witness—serving the same purpose as all stone monuments do. Monuments mark and remind of important events, to make sure that they’re never forgotten. But alas, the stones are gone. So is the Ark. And so is Jesus’ body. But the witness—the witness remains rock solid. As the apostle Peter put it, an eyewitness to it himself, all we who have been changed by the resurrection are “living stones.” We are rock solid witnesses to the effects of resurrection in our own lives: diseases healed, marriages restored, relationships reconciled, sins forgiven, enemies loved, the poor fed, hardships and suffering endured with joy, grief eased, hope assured, fears gone—all in advance of our own resurrection made real by Jesus who was raised from the dead.

Is the resurrection for real? It’s a question asked every Easter by believers and skeptics alike. In our modern age of scientific fact, how can a man dead for three days possibly be raised back to life? He cannot—and we cannot—unless God does something. And God did something. What God did—and does—resides at the center of our faith; a faith that gets us to church on Easter, even on the day after we’ve lost the love of our life and our despair is complete. Or maybe I should say especially on that day.

Is the resurrection for real? Kara Root, a local writer, answers this way:

It had better be real. 

As real as the contractions that ripped new life from my body. 

As real as the rattle that strangled life out of his. 

I’ve no use for a spiritual resurrection. 

If Hope 

for the drowned, damaged, disfigured, disowned, 

is emotional ease, 

if the pain of flesh and bones 

is answered with mystical comfort, 

if Guns are stronger than god, 

then count me out. 

But tell me that Death Loses, tell me that Life Prevails, 

and not in the abstract, 

but in pulsing blood, flowing tears, thumping heart, 

then the Resurrection 

is Hope 

for us all.

I like that. Resurrection is hope for us all. I also like the simple way our Scripture passage ends, literally taking this message home. It says that the people of the Kiriath-jearim came and took up the ark of the LORD, and brought it to the house. Again God demonstrates his own relentless determination to love us. He comes home with us. And because the resurrection is real, he stays with us forever.