The Sharper Image

Revelation 19 by Daniel Harrell

It is odd that one of the most hopeful seasons on the Christian calendar begins in the midst of the darkest days of the year. There are reasons for this. As you may know, Christmas itself was a relatively late addition to the Christian calendar. It was not celebrated until the 3rd century; not until the expanding church began to domesticate competing pagan rituals by assimilating them into its religious life. As the contemporary American church regularly incorporates popular music into worship or secular business and marketing strategies into outreach; so the early church turned elements of ancient winter solstice Saturnalia into Christmas garland, mistletoe and holly wreaths. This pillaging of paganism explains why many Protestant Christians wouldn’t touch Christmas until the late 18th century. Massachusetts technically outlawed it until 1859. Protestants continue to bewail the residues of heathen revelry embedded in Christmas, not to mention the commercialism that demeans its true meaning.

We could just move Christmas to the spring and thereby dissociate it from retailers’ year-end profit reports. According to most scholars, Jesus was probably born in March anyway. Moving Christmas to the spring would cut down on some of the commercialism and alleviate a lot of the darkness. However, you’d have the problem in some years of Jesus being born one Sunday only to then rise from the dead the next Sunday on Easter. Some years Jesus could conceivably even die and rise before being born. That could get very confusing. Either way, I don’t think you’d want to move Advent to the spring. Although these four weeks on the church calendar have come to serve as a ramp-up to the Nativity; originally, Advent was intended to remind the church of Jesus’ second coming. Advent emerged in the 6th century as a wake-up call to bleary-eyed believers who had grown too complacent in their spiritual lives due to Jesus’ delay. Dusted off and assigned to Advent were those Scriptures labeled apocalyptic—passages from books like Zechariah, and like this morning’s from Revelation. Read Revelation and you realize it’s best to schedule apocalyptic preaching during days with limited sunlight. Its characteristic doom and gloom remind us that all is not yet right with the world. It’s why we light the candle of hope.

Regrettably, apocalyptic talk too often descends into debate over prophesy predictions and the meanings of metaphorical signs. It is puzzling to read Revelation when the points of reference remain so ambiguous. Still, for the earliest Christians who first heard it, apocalyptic assurances of evil’s demise (themselves reiterations of Old Testament assurances) provided necessary courage with which withstand brutal Roman persecution. Drawing imagery from the prophet Daniel, Jesus promised in Matthew: “At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the peoples of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory.” Why do all the earthly peoples mourn at Jesus return? Because of what the Son of Man’s power and great glory imply. In this morning’s passage from Revelation, you get a glorious Jesus not gliding in on fluffy white clouds, but an avenging Jesus galloping in on a stormy white stallion, a broadsword protruding out of his mouth. Jesus promised this too. “Do not think I have come to bring peace,” he said, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” So much for peace on earth and goodwill toward men. No wonder visions of sugarplums took over Advent. Who wants to kick off the Christmas season with visions of violence?

We are bothered by the dissonant images of Jesus on a cross forgiving his tormenters, and this Jesus on a horse making meat of his tormenters. But then we read of Wednesday’s horrific terrorist attacks in Mumbai, or of the Taliban using water pistols to spray acid on young schoolgirls in Kandahar, or of women brutally raped and children forced into battle on both sides of the Congolese civil war, or of a five-year-old dismembered by his father in Lynn. Such atrocities beg for vengeance, as did those atrocities suffered by early Christians under Roman tyranny. One of the more harrowing pictures in Revelation that I’ve mentioned numerous times is that of those saints murdered for their faith huddled under the heavenly altar in chapter 6, begging God to avenge their blood. For them, finally getting to chapter 19 and having their unrepentant perpetrators cut down by Christ was nothing short of rapturous. It’s why they sing Hallelujah!

For those of you heading to Symphony Hall or Jordan Hall to hear Handel’s Messiah this Advent season, take these images of Revelation 19 with you. After all, this chapter was Handel’s inspiration for his Hallelujah chorus. The fourfold hallelujah sung in these verses respond to another heavenly chorus in chapter 11: “The kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever.” The bringing together of heaven and earth as Christ’s eternal kingdom is a two-sided coin, or in keeping with the metaphor here, a double-edged sword. On the one side is reward for God’s servants, “for those who reverence his name, both small and great.” On the other side is destruction “for those who destroy the earth.” Both are good news for the faithful, and it is their voices that resound in heaven and on earth. There’s that place in the Hallelujah chorus where all the parts sing back and forth to each other to represent the back and forth between heaven and earth. It climaxes with the declaration from verse 6: “for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.” We never tire of hearing it. And then, with heaven and earth both purged of their evil (the beast and false prophet all having been dumped into a lake of fire with Satan soon to follow), heaven and earth join together as one. Verse 7: “the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready.”

It’s been a long time coming. Throughout the Old Testament and New, the prospect of a happy marriage between heaven and earth, between God and his people had been dashed due to Israel’s persistent infidelity. Given the choice between self-sacrifice and self-gratification, it’s always easier to choose the latter. To follow God, to follow Jesus, demands that you turn the other cheek, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who mistreat you and even lose your life for the gospel―things that in this life tend to get you little more than two bloody cheeks, a doormat for a backbone, more mistreatment and an early grave. Disincentives to be sure, except that in Revelation, these things make up the fabric of your bridal gown. Verse 8: “‘Fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to wear.’ (Fine linen stands for the righteous deeds of the saints.)” Specifically, these righteous deeds were the outcomes of “holding to the testimony of Jesus” (verse 10). The Greek word for testimony is martyr. Martyrs do not go around looking for ways to die. They simply hold to the testimony of Jesus and refuse to let go. Chapter 14 described them as those who “followed the Lamb wherever he went.” The rest is out of their hands.

Following Jesus can still bring trouble. Dawn recounted to me her family’s evacuation from Angola during the civil war that ransacked that country back in the early 1990’s. Rebels had moved into the area surrounding the mission hospital where Dawn’s dad worked as a surgeon. They left behind the Angolan hospital administrator, a fellow Christian named Ruben, who took it upon himself to guard the hospital from looters so that its equipment and supplies could remain for the wounded and war refugees. One day a couple of armed rebels burst in on Ruben and demanded that he turn over the hospital supplies or they would kill him. Ruben said no, the supplies were not theirs to take, this was God’s hospital and the supplies belonged to the Lord. Furious at his resistance, the rebels hauled Ruben out back to shoot him, only to have him not resist death, but raise his arms and commit his spirit to God in their hearing. The rebels couldn’t believe that this dead man’s last words, instead of a plea for leniency, were prayers to a God who clearly was not going to save his life.

Jesus was clear that to follow him meant taking up you own cross too, and for many, such crosses remain literal. In America, they tend to be less lethal. If anything, in America taking up a cross typically only means you die a social death. Whether this makes you happy or sad, I don’t know, but I do know that for some, even social death can be too much to bear. I remember a woman in my office some years ago who despaired how believing in Jesus was no fun anymore. Her family and her co-workers all thought she was crazy and treated her like she had some infectious disease. Moreover, the good deeds she did—being honest and moral, serving others first, tithing her money—these things tended to blow up in her face leaving her exhausted and bitter. Her honesty only got her in hot water, her morality left her devoid of dates, putting others first got her taken advantage of and tithing made her poor. I reminded her how the Bible promises that “if we share in Christ’s suffering we shall also share in his glory.” I even went so far as to remind her how Jesus himself said “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven.” This wasn’t exactly what she wanted to hear. “Rejoice and be glad when people insult you?” Let’s be honest, a person can only take so much gladness.

Banking on heaven doesn’t always make up for hardship on earth—especially once you get a gander at heaven. Revelation promises your marriage to the Lamb alright, but do you remember what the Lamb looks like? Forgetting the seven horns and seven eyes for a second, the thing that startled even John the writer of Revelation was that the Lamb had been butchered and bloodied. Just as on earth, Jesus appeared in heaven as Isaiah foretold: “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” It’s hard to be glad about marrying that. Which may be why, like the ugly duckling who morphs into a beautiful swan, the bloodied little lamb gallops into Revelation 19 decked in white and riding that gallant white stallion. His eyes blaze like fire and his head is crowned with royalty. The despised and rejected Lamb, weak and mortally wounded, returns more valiant than any Prince Charming. He is King of kings and Lord of lords. Hallelujah!

And yet the signs of his sacrifice do remain. Verse 13: “He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood.” Many scholars assume that the blood is the blood of his enemies. They assume this based on Isaiah 63 where we read of one who “has trodden the winepress and trampled the nations in anger and trod them down in wrath; their blood spattering [his] garments, and staining all [his] clothing.” But since the final battle with his enemies has yet to occur in verse 13, other scholars assert that the blood on Christ’s robes is his own, undeniably identifying the white rider as the same Lamb of God slain for the sins of the world. Riding in tow are the armies of heaven on their own white horses, all clad in fine linen, white and clean. Some say these are angels, riding to battle with Jesus. But again, others assert these are the saints themselves, those who by holding to the testimony of Jesus received from God their bridal garments of white. In chapter 7, these saints were identified as “those who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me,” Jesus said. “Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven.”

The God who saves you does not save you from suffering; but he does save you through suffering. Your cross is your gown; to share in Christ’s suffering is to share in his glory. The only difference being that unlike Christ, you don’t get a sword sticking out of your mouth. It appears that God does not trust even the redeemed with loaded weapons. Vengeance remains His sole prerogative. Because our hearts and our hurts too easily deceive us, the Bible continually cautions against throwing stones or passing judgment. Just as God loves and forgives in ways that flawed human beings only approximate, so does God exact vengeance in ways that flawed human beings only approximate. His wrath is never an explosion of impulsive temper, but a righteous reaction against injustice and wickedness. “Well, exactly!” you say, “There’s nothing wrong with my anger as long as it’s righteous!” Except that any righteous anger on our part remains only an approximation of righteousness. More often than not, we pervert righteousness and justice even as we seek to do it. As theologian Miroslav Volf reminds, “the fiercer the struggle against the injustice you suffer, the blinder you will be to the injustice you inflict. We tend to translate the presumed wrongness of our enemies into an unfaltering conviction of our own rightness.”

Which is why Jesus says, “do not judge” and “love your enemies.” And why likewise Paul says to the Romans, “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; and if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.” Of course those of you who know your Bibles also know that Paul adds that “in so doing you will heap burning coals on your enemy’s head.” Some have taken this to mean, goody, by being nice I can burn his brains out. But actually this metaphor from Proverbs draws from an ancient Egyptian repentance ritual where a brazier of live coals would be worn on the head to supply the repentant sinner a constant supply of ashes to express his or her profound remorse, similar to ashes on Ash Wednesday (Thanks to Gordon for this). Burning coals are like a searing conscience; it’s that guilt your co-worker who called you a jerk now feels after you kindly give him an unexpected Christmas present. Of course it may be that you gave your co-worker the Christmas present just to make him feel guilty. In which case you are a jerk. OK, so loving your enemies can derive from mixed motives. Fair enough. But the same cannot hold true for God’s justice. God’s justice cannot be “fair enough.” It has to be textbook perfect.

Which it is and therefore why in the textbook Paul also says “Do not take revenge, but leave room for God’s wrath. As it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord.’” The anger of the Lord is always righteous, and so is his justice. Unlike popular depictions of justice, God neither dons a blindfold nor needs any scales to measure. The Lord does his justice with eyes wide open. “There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known,” Jesus warned, “Whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops. Do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell.” This is another motive for loving your enemies now. Convinced of evil’s ultimate defeat, you can already take pity on them. You can pray “God help you” and actually mean it.

Chapter 19 paints evil’s defeat in no uncertain terms. In a grim comparison to the wedding feast of the Lamb, the great supper of God also has human flesh on the menu; but rather than the righteous body of Christ, the grim supper serves up the carrion of evil: “the flesh of kings, generals, and mighty men, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people, free and slave, small and great” who chose to worship the beast. Jesus hung on a cross and forgave his tormenters, but not all of his tormenters welcomed his forgiveness. The beast, the kings of the earth and their armies make war against the rider instead. Again quoting Miroslav Volf, “Underlying the theology of judgment is the assumption that nothing is strong enough to change those who insist on remaining beasts and false prophets. We must not shrink back from the unpleasant and deeply tragic possibility that there are those human beings created in God’s image who through their immersion in evil have immunized themselves from God’s grace.”

The beast and the false prophet are tossed alive into that burning lake of fire while the rest are killed with the sword from the mouth of the rider. Some prophesy wonks assert that when John writes of armies mounted on horses and smoke rising from bottomless pits, he really refers to warheads mounted on missiles and the resultant mushroom clouds of destruction; that Armageddon is code for World War III. But Revelation’s only mention of weaponry is a single sword wielded in a most unusual way. But before you imagine Jesus taking down evil with something akin to a sharp cigar in his mouth, slicing down his enemies with the shake of his head, remember what the rider is called in verse 13. “The Word of God.”

“Do not think I have come to bring peace on earth,” Jesus the incarnate word of God said, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” “The word of God is living and active, sharper than any double-edged sword,” writes the author of Hebrews, “it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” “He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears;” Isaiah prophesied, in yet another popular Advent passage, “but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with equity he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.” Christ’s final judicial decree—the last sentence—is this double-edged sword. On the one side is reward for God’s servants, “for those who reverence his name, both small and great.” On the other side is destruction “for those who destroy the earth.”

In both cases, good news for the faithful. The saints of God do not get to bear weapons, but they do bear witness to the outcomes, and it is this witness that gives them, and us even now, the strength and the courage to hold to the testimony of Jesus no matter what. In Angola, it gave Ruben the strength to stand up to his persecutors even though they held a gun to his head. I should tell you that Ruben did not die. His persecutors were so amazed at his courage that they couldn’t kill him. Whether this amounted to heaped coals of fire on their heads I do not know, but I do know that Ruben continues to serve God at the hospital, where I imagine he does so with a whole lot of joy.

The Weatherman

Mark 4:35-41 by Daniel Harrell

Almost everybody has a scary water story. I have a couple. My most recent occurred last summer off Halibut Point near Gloucester. I was paddling my beautifully hand built, wood strip kayak off the coast with cloudy skies but calm water. I was several miles from my launch point near Wingaersheek Beach and wanted a taste of open ocean before I called it a day. Rounding Halibut Point and heading south, I could see some darker clouds gathering in the distance, but wrongly assumed them to be too far away to be harmless. Within minutes, the winds picked up, the water started to chop and this nasty squall barreled north. I was in trouble. The Coast Guard helicopter that suddenly appeared and hovered overhead confirmed my assessment. Now my kayak is a long one, with no rudder, making it difficult to turn, especially in dangerous water. Your real problems start once you get perpendicular to a stiff wind and waves and the force hits you from the side. My heart was pounding into my throat as I thought for sure I was about to capsize. I held it together only to have this gust of wind send me sailing for a string of enormous boulders that line the shore at Halibut Point. Needless to say, unlike Jesus in the midst of his storm, I never once considered taking a nap. I did, however, like the disciples, scream to Jesus for help. These prayers of desperation did not result in the immediate cessation of the storm, however, as cool as that would have been. Instead, I paddled like a mad man and managed to make it into a nearby cove, thank the Lord, where I waited out the squall.

Why didn’t Jesus calm my storm like he did for his disciples here? I don’t know. As far as I can tell, he only does it this one time, and at least here in Mark, seems kind of irritated about doing it. Chapter 4 began, you’ll remember, with huge crowds gathered to hear Jesus teach by the Sea of Galilee. The crowds were so huge that they squeezed Jesus backwards and almost into the water. I guess Jesus (being Jesus) could have just stepped back onto the water (as he will do later), but instead some of his fisherman disciples put him into a boat they’d moored off the bank. Jesus then commenced to talk and talk about seeds: a farmer sowing seeds, a man growing seeds and finally mustard seeds, the smallest seeds around. The kingdom of God, Jesus said, is just like seeds. Some folks in the crowd had to wonder: Did I take off work to hear this? For an oppressed people eager for the return of God’s kingdom in power, hearing Jesus describe it in such tiny terms had to be so discouraging. Still, the seed metaphor fit squarely within the Old Testament prophetic tradition. Isaiah and Ezekiel both tell about God’s departure from Israel and Israel’s subsequent demise in terms of a mighty tree cut down with only a stump remaining. Yet, Isaiah promised, “as an oak tree leaves a stump when it is cut down, so Israel’s stump will be a holy seed.” “A shoot will come up from that stump; from its roots a Branch will bear fruit. And the Spirit of the LORD will rest on him.”

This was Messiah talk, but by the time Jesus actually showed up, centuries of heightened Jewish expectation made it so that a seed would no longer do as an appropriate metaphor. Israel expected a mighty sequoia of a Messiah, not some little mustard seed. No wonder so many had such a hard time recognizing that God was doing his thing in this seedy young carpenter from Nazareth. Jesus’ miracles made him popular to be sure, but they didn’t quite make him Messiah. His family thought he was crazy. The religious leaders called him a blasphemer. Those who followed him didn’t really understand what was going on. Jesus used parables to try and clear things up, but even his own disciples who he would entrust to help bring the kingdom on, even they struggled to make the connection. So in verse 35, Jesus says, “Let’s go over to the other side of the lake.” Typically in the Bible, whenever Jesus had to explain something, he often followed it up with an object lesson. It’s almost as if this whole boat ride was a set up.

The Sea of Galilee sits surrounded by hills in a depression some 700 ft below sea level. Frequently a rush of wind and the right mix of temperatures create furious storms, something the disciples, as experienced fishermen, would have been familiar with. What made this particular storm so furious that even these accomplished sailors feared for their lives? I don’t know, but I figure if Jesus can command storms to be quiet, he can probably command the weather to whip up a big one. I think this was a faith-test. Almost every heavy hitter in the Bible had to take one, with some of the heaviest tests being liquid: Noah had the flood, Moses had the Red Sea, Joshua had the Jordan River, Jonah had a whale in the water. How would the disciples stack up? Would they have faith? It is important to remember that for the ancients, stormy seas represented chaos and evil. Jesus slept through the storm not because he was tired, but because he wasn’t scared of evil. Not so with his disciples. They absolutely freaked. They shook Jesus awake and screamed their disbelief: “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”

It’s interesting to compare this account across the gospels. In Luke, the disciples merely state the obvious: “Master, we’re drowning!” In Matthew, they show at least a baseline of faith: “Lord, save us!” But in Mark, the disciples just sound sarcastic: “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” It might be significant that in Luke the disciples do call Jesus Master and in Matthew they call him Lord. Here in Mark, he’s still just a teacher, and apparently not one who’s yet had a lot of success getting through to his students. What were the disciples in Mark expecting Jesus to do by waking him up? Apologize? Share their fear? Help bail out the boat? Hold their hands and tell them not to worry, everything would be OK? Or were they just ticked that he was sleeping so soundly while their whole world was falling apart (sort of like they would do later in the Garden of Gethsemane)? Maybe they just expected Jesus to pray. If he was as close to God as he said, couldn’t he pray and get God to do something?

But why pray and ask God to do something you can do yourself? Jesus wakes up and yells, “Quiet! Be Still!” which if you didn’t know better you’d think was addressed to the disciples. But Mark makes sure to insert the direct objects so that we’d know he was talking to the wind and the waves. And sure enough, the winds died down and the water stilled. Perhaps the moon peeked out from behind the dissipating clouds and seagull appeared for some night fishing. Jesus turned to his disciples and asked them why they were so afraid: “Don’t you have any faith in me yet?” Having heard this story so many times before, it’s easy to imagine the disciples looking down at their sandals, sheepish grins on their faces. “Yeah, you’re right. It was just a hurricane.” But try to imagine what it must have been like to witness obedient weather. Who seriously yells at the wind to stop blowing and it does? Who can talk to the sea and make it calm down? The storm terrified the disciples; but Jesus’ stopping the storm scared the crap out them. I imagine them turning white as sheets, their mouths agape and their eyes a-bug, and their lips saying: “Oh-my-God!” Which really is the point of this story.

How could God’s kingdom come through a poor and seemingly insignificant mustard seed of a man? Perfectly, if that poor and seemingly insignificant mustard seed of a man is God. The disciples ask each other, “Who is this man that even the wind and the waves obey him?” “He is the image of the invisible God,” the apostle Paul answered to the Colossians, “the firstborn of all creation. By him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.” If you were here last Sunday you heard Bishop N. T. Wright preach from this passage. He articulated it this way: “Jesus as the image of God means that God looks like Jesus.” Rather than trying to make Jesus fit your ideas about God, you need to look long and hard at Jesus and then shape you ideas about God around him. Jesus is not like God, God is like Jesus. It’s a subtle but significant shift. From now on, everything we know about God comes from what we know about Jesus. We read the Old Testament through the life of Jesus. To say that Jesus is divine does not change our understanding of Jesus, it changes our understanding of divinity. This is what Jesus meant when he said “no one comes to the Father but by me.” You can’t understand God if you don’t understand Jesus.

“God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Christ,” Paul continues, “and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” The juxtaposition is jarring. Which is why I think we have so much trouble understanding. The one who created all things reconciles all things not by force but by failure. He makes peace not through violent conquest, but by enduring violence. The one to whom nature submits, submits himself to die on a cross. Jesus said, “unless a seed falls into the earth and dies, it remains a single seed. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.” The power of God’s kingdom is the power of sacrificial, suffering love. Isaiah predicted this too, remember: “He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.” And yet people still object, insisting that God is not like this. God does not experience defeat. God does not endure injustice. God does not suffer evil. God does not die. You can’t understand God if you don’t understand Jesus.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times already: The supreme act by which God demonstrates his power is not an act of power but an act of powerlessness. He wins by losing. He shows his power by not using his power. So what’s up here in Mark? What’s Jesus doing? I find it interesting that only the disciples get to see him calm the storm. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t happen within view of the beach. Just like he explained the parables for their ears only, his display of authority over nature was for their eyes only. Why? Didn’t he want them thinking they could count on him to swoop down and fix everything whenever they got scared? No. He just didn’t want them to be afraid anymore.

I remember another scary water story that happened a few years ago. A graduate student from China had found her way here to Park Street on a friend’s invitation. She started believing in Jesus and approached me about getting baptized before she returned home. She told me about her family, how they disapproved of her decision and threatened to refuse to welcome her back. She told me of other Christians she’d heard of in China who were often in trouble with the government, some of whom had been jailed for going to church. I asked whether she was scared, did she really want to go through with this, and she said sure, she was nervous, but really more excited than scared. She was excited that her faith made sense of the hardships in her life, and that her bad choices had a chance at redemption. And she was excited that God loved her, and that she could love others, including her family, even if they rejected her. Getting baptized might make her life harder, but it was also going to make it less fearful. And she wanted that. So we baptized her. She said in her testimony how she didn’t feel fear because she knew Jesus was with her. I wish I could remember her name. I do remember praying for her. But I don’t ever remember worrying about her.

Early Christian art often depicted the church as a boat amidst a surging storm with Jesus at the helm. The storms are thought to represent the persecution that Rome violently inflicted upon so many Christians in the centuries immediately after the resurrection. Whenever I look at these depictions, a few things stick out to me. First, I notice that Jesus isn’t asleep, which is good I think. Instead of sleeping, Jesus typically stands with his arms outstretched, looking just like he does in the artwork where he hangs on the cross. The second thing I notice is that the storm is never calmed—the wind keeps blowing and the water keeps churning. Jesus didn’t swoop down from heaven and stop Rome’s vicious persecution. If anything, he had only promised it was going to happen. Later in Mark’s gospel he’ll even call it a baptism. But the third thing I notice is that unlike in the story itself, in the early Christian artwork, the people in the boat never look afraid. In fact in Rembrandt’s depiction, stolen from the Gardner museum 20 years ago and still missing, it looks like Jesus and his disciples are having a small group Bible study.

The Psalmist sings, “Let those who fear the LORD say, ‘His steadfast love endures forever.’ Out of my distress I called on the LORD; the LORD answered me and set me free. With the LORD on my side I do not fear. What can anybody do to me?”

Living Leviticus on PBS

Check it out here.

TKOG=mstd()

Mark 4:30-34

by Daniel Harrell

Chalk it up to a diminishment in dexterity, or perhaps it’s just my age, but I haven’t quite been able to master the whole texting thing with my phone. Let’s just say I’m all thumbs. I recently marveled at my adolescent niece’s agility, as well as her obsession, with this cryptic form of communication. She and I have this running cribbage grudge match that stretches back several vacations; it can get pretty intense. Only this last time as we played, our game was being constantly interrupted by her vibrating phone. She was having a “conversation” with some boy out in Oklahoma, a digital dialogue that took precedence over the audible dialogue she was simultaneously having with her very present flesh and blood uncle right in front of her face. Figuring it must be terribly important stuff for her to be so rude, I got her to show me the exchange. With apologies to radio and podcast listeners, it went something like this. Allow me to translate:

Hi

Sup Whassup?

WRUD What are you doing?

NMU Not much, you?

9TV Watching TV.

WRU9 What are you watching?

~(_8^(|) The Simpsons (You have to cock your head to the left to get this.)

TTLY Totally

G2gb Got to go bye

cul8r See you later, (by which they meant about 10 seconds later when the whole cycle would start over again).

Given the obvious lack of urgency to such banter, I wondered aloud why my niece couldn’t wait until we had finished our cribbage game to reply to her cowboy. She informed me that this is not how texting works. One of the Ten Commandments of Texting (according to a recent New Yorker article) reads:

u shall b prepard @ all times 2 tXt & 2 recv

You can be sloppy and you can be blunt, but you cannot be slow. To delay is to disrespect. In fact, delay is the only disrespect. Any other misunderstanding can be cleared up by a few more exchanges. Back when most computing was done on a desktop, people used to complain about all the pressure they felt to respond quickly to e-mail. At least, in those days, it was understood that you might have walked away from your desk. But now, there is no socially accepted excuse for being without your cell phone. “I didn’t have my phone!” just does not sound believable. Either you are lying or you are depressed or you have something to hide. “I’m sorry, I have a breathing human being in the room with me?” No, I’m afraid that doesn’t cut it either. What about “I’m in church?” Unfortunately, no. If you receive a text, you are obliged to reply to it instantaneously, if only to confirm that you are not one of those people who can be without a phone. The most common text message must be:

k

Which means “I have nothing to say, but heaven forbid that you should think that I am a loser.”

If you haven’t heard, e-mail is so 2006. Texting is quickly becoming the way to communicate. Somewhere in the area of three billion people own cell phones from which are sent more than a trillion text messages each year. Granted, a trillion messages on the vast sea of language is hardly a ripple. But such insignificance only displays texting’s power as all the more remarkable. This past week’s election of Barack Obama as president is attributable in part to texting. Cell phones greased the enormous network of volunteers and contributors that fueled Obama’s victory. One Republican strategist described Obama’s election campaign as an “army of grass-roots activists trying to change the world in 160 characters or less.” Having given up on getting people to turn off phones during services, churches are integrating texting into worship. One church invites folks to text questions during the sermon(!). Since it’s assumed you’re going to be texting someone anyway, why not the preacher? Another church texts reminders of upcoming events and prayer requests (though the actual prayers themselves should remain verbal). A youth pastor strategically texts the 350 kids in his youth group at opportune moments such as weekday mornings before school, during lunch hours and on those late Saturday nights when they’re most vulnerable to temptation.

WWJD?

“Most of the people I hang out with are glued to their cell phones,” the youth pastor says.

As this is the closing Sunday of our missions conference, are there suitable missions strategies for texting? In many developing countries it costs less than a penny to send a text. Most people don’t pay for a monthly plan but buy their time as they go. You can send a hundred texts for the price of one phone call. It could be a very quick and economical way to spread the gospel:

J+ 59 (Jesus Christ Loves You)

Though you would have to get everybody’s cell phone number first.

Since as far as we know, Jesus did not have a cell phone, we can’t know whether he would have advocated texting as a missions strategy. However, we do know from tonight’s parable that he did advocate using seemingly insignificant means toward world-changing ends. Since last Easter I’ve been working through the sayings of Jesus recorded in Mark’s gospel, the words printed in red in some of your Bibles. I decided to do this due to a popular book entitled Red-Letter Christians, by Tony Campolo, who argues that Jesus’ words carry political implications, appropriate for this election year. Jesus preached the Kingdom of God as a clear indictment against the oppressive kingdom of Caesar―but he didn’t use much by way of political rhetoric to preach it. Instead he used botanical rhetoric, no doubt disappointing those who would have preferred some scary fire and brimstone instead. For the third time in a row, Jesus compares the kingdom of God to little seeds, with tonight’s comparison to the smallest seeds in Jewish proverbial thought: mustard seeds. Had Jesus used a cell phone, he could have texted it like this:

TKOG=mstd ().

The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. So what? Jesus goes on to describe how mustard seeds grow into the largest of garden plants with branches big enough for birds to perch. But again, so what? Not much if all you hear is the botanically obvious. But hear it politically and you realize Jesus says much more. The image of a mighty tree in which birds perch traces back to the Old Testament book of Ezekiel where the prophet spins his own parable of God lopping off a “tender sprig” that would grow to rule the earth. If you’re familiar with Old Testament metaphors then you know “tender sprig” is code for Messiah. Ezekiel portends a potent Kingdom, albeit one with humble beginnings. Unfortunately, centuries of heightened Messianic expectation made it so that a twig would no longer do. Israel expected a mighty sequoia of a Messiah, not some mustard bush. Jesus’ corrective here was intended to readjust expectations—but only in regard to the Kingdom’s origins. As in Ezekiel, the kingdom’s outcome would still be a mighty tree in which birds would nest―birds being symbolic of all nations coming into God’s shade. The word Jesus uses for “smallest” in verse 31 is the same word he uses elsewhere when he talks about the least being the greatest. Here he applies it to himself.

Jesus was no towering sequoia. He was a tender twig. An apparent nobody, a mustard seed of a man whose defeat and death, and death-defying resurrection, changed the world. “On the mountain heights I will plant him;” said the Lord in Ezekiel, “he will produce branches and bear fruit and become a splendid cedar. Birds of every kind will nest in him; they will find shelter in the shade of his branches. All the trees of the field will know that I the LORD make the low tree grow tall and flourish. I the LORD have spoken, and I will do it.” In Matthew and Luke, Jesus has the mustard shrub turn into a tree to make the Ezekiel connection clear. This parable is a parable of hope. God’s power is manifest in weakness. The least becomes the greatest. As our guest preacher for next Sunday, Bishop NT Wright, puts it: “God will redeem the whole universe; Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning of that new life, the fresh grass growing through the concrete of corruption and decay in the old world. That final redemption will be the moment when heaven and earth are joined together at last.”

We’ve looking forward to Bishop Wright’s visit next Sunday. He’s pretty famous as far as preachers go. Maybe you’ve read one of his gazillion books, seen him on the news or on the Colbert Report. He’s speaking at all four services, so it’s a great opportunity to invite a friend to church who may be interested in Christianity. Hopefully at the 6pm he’ll be taking questions after his talk in order to get a bit of a dialogue going. We were even thinking about letting people text their questions, you know, since asking them in public might be too intimidating. According to that same New Yorker article, one attraction of texting is that it avoids dreaded face-to-face, or even voice-to-voice exchanges like you have over the phone. Many people don’t like having to perform the amount of self-presentation that’s required for a personal encounter. They don’t want to deal with the facial expressions, the body language, the verbal cues or the obligation to be witty or interesting.

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I know, “you’ve got to be kidding,” but it’s true. So true that we were thinking it might even make sense to have Bishop Wright just text over his talk from England. It would be more efficient, faster and cheaper too. So much so that it makes you wonder why we don’t just text sermons every Sunday; why we don’t adopt texting as a missions strategy, and why God didn’t use it as a strategy himself. Putting a cell phone in the hand of everyone in the entire ancient world might have been a bit much (since he’d have to create phone companies and build towers and calling plans too, even though there would have been no dead zones). Being God, surely he could have texted the gospel in the clouds or bore it directly into people’s brains.

JOHN 3:16

God could have avoided dreaded face-to-face exchanges, the body language and the obligation to be witty or interesting. He wouldn’t have had to deal with Pharisees or any sinner for that matter. But instead, God so loved the world that he came in person. And not just as any person, but as a poor and humble person, one who as least of all was accessible to all. It wasn’t cheap. Jesus gave his own life in order to give us life. And it hasn’t been fast or efficient either. God brings on his kingdom patiently in ways that look small and insignificant―using mustard seeds like you and me―people who touch rather than text. Real people are the way the gospel gets spread. Just as Jesus came as God in the flesh, so we, the church, exist as Jesus in the flesh, the body of Christ on earth, living good news of God’s grace in all that we say and do everywhere we do it. The flags that surround you represent all the places Park Street Church does this―as real people, church planters, doctors, translators, teachers, prison workers and businesspeople—in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Yemen, Thailand, China, India, South Africa, Mozambique, Kenya, Cameroon, Sudan, the Czech Republic, as well as here in the United States where we support those who share the gospel on college campuses as well as those who work among the poor on the streets.

It’s not cheap. Last year it cost upwards of 1.8 million dollars, all of it given in mustard seed fashion by week to week. We pull it off because we all pull together to do it, just like churches are supposed to. However it is a challenge. I read a recent sociological study about how twenty percent of committed Christians in America, the ones who go to church weekly and say they live like Jesus daily, 20 percent of committed Christians give nothing, no money to the work of God on earth. Zero.

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Zip. According to the same study, the rest of us who do give only give something like 3%.

OMG

Even though Jesus warned us not to store up our treasures on earth and to be generous toward the things of God, we mostly spend all of our money on ourselves.

: O

Do you know what we could do if committed Christians in America simply obeyed the Bible and gave a measly mustard seed of their money (which by the way is all God asks)? If just the committed Christians tithed

10%

there would be an extra 46 billion dollars a year available to fund, for example, 150,000 new indigenous missionaries; 50,000 additional theological students in the developing world; 5 million more micro loans to poor entrepreneurs; enough food, clothing and shelter for all 6,500,000 current refugees in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East; all the money for a global campaign to prevent and treat malaria; resources to sponsor 20 million needy children worldwide.

If simple texting can change the government of the United States, simple tithing can do even more. As the study concludes, “Reasonably generous financial giving of ordinary American Christians would generate staggering amounts of money that could literally change the world.”

I want to give you a chance to be reasonable tonight. Each year we ask our members and regular attendees to pledge money to missions so that we can do what God calls us to do as his church on earth. Our primary calling has never been to serve ourselves but to serve the world, starting here in Boston and stretching to the ends of the earth. Make a pledge to missions.