Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

Pentecost Sunday celebrates the occasion described in our reading from Acts when the Holy Spirit came upon Jesus’ disciples as they were gathered together shortly after his death and ascension. The Greek word for Spirit also means wind and breath and, according to Acts, the Spirit came with the sound of a mighty wind, with tongues of fire resting on the heads of the disciples. A tongue of fire, like wind symbolizing the Holy Spirit, is the official symbol of the United Methodist Church. Pentecost itself was a Jewish holiday celebrating the giving of the law, the Torah, to Moses. The disciples were in Jerusalem, which was filled with Jewish pilgrims for the festival of Pentecost from all over the Roman Empire. Being filled with the Spirit, the disciples were able to speak to each group of pilgrims in the language of their homelands. Our text lists the languages and homelands.

Scholars have pointed out that this speaking in many languages was very different from the glossalalia or “speaking in tongues,” using nonsense words that later characterized some Christian communities, for instance, Paul’s congregation in Corinth. Rather, the Pentecost language phenomenon was intelligible communication.

In our gospel text from John, Jesus predicts that the Holy Spirit would come to his believers after he had been glorified, that is, after he had been killed, raised, and drawn into heaven. Jesus likens the Spirit to rivers of living waters, not fire or wind this time. He called himself the water of life. The general context for this speech of Jesus was the Jewish festival of Booths that commemorates the Exodus wandering in the wilderness, and the specific context, the last day of the festival, remembers the occasion when God provided water from a rock to save the parched Israelites: hence Jesus’ image of the water of life. This festival also celebrates the anticipation of the Messiah to save the people. Peter’s sermon, quoted in our text from Acts, cites the prophet Joel’s proclamation that the Holy Spirit would be poured out “upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” This would happen on the “day of the Lord,” that is, when the Messiah comes.

In the New Testament and in the Christian interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Holy Spirit is closely associated with Jesus as the Messiah. In John’s gospel, Jesus says the Spirit will come to the disciples after he is gone to guide and sustain them, to interpret to them the meaning of his life and the direction of theirs. Christianity is a Trinitarian religion because it believes that, just as Jesus is God in some sense, so is the Holy Spirit. We baptize and bless others and ourselves in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And yet! And yet, the Holy Spirit has never been received comfortably within the Christian Church. In the first centuries of the Church, the debates about the sense in which Jesus was divine were fierce and brought to resolution in creeds long before much was said about the Spirit at all. You remember in the Apostles’ Creed, God the Father is declared to be the Almighty Creator of heaven and earth, and a whole paragraph is devoted to Jesus’ conception, birth, death, and resurrection. Then in the last paragraph the Holy Spirit is mentioned without definition in a list that includes also “the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” Later in the Middle Ages the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches separated over a dispute as to whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from the Father and Son together. This was not an edifying dispute, and theology of the Holy Spirit has more or less languished ever since.

The Holy Spirit has played a somewhat larger role in the piety of the Eastern Orthodox Churches than in Western Roman Catholicism and mainline Protestantism. The reason for this has been the Eastern emphasis on sanctification, which those churches call “theosis,” or becoming more God-like. The Holy Spirit is the source of sanctification. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, picked up the emphasis on sanctification, and with it the importance of the Holy Spirit. This distanced him from the mainline Lutherans and Calvinists who emphasized the acts of Jesus Christ in the past and in eternity, but without much enthusiasm for the freedom of the Holy Spirit in the present. Because the Holy Spirit reinterprets the Bible in the present for new occasions, the Wesleyan emphasis distances that movement from the literalist fundamentalists as well. The Wesleyan movement and its influences includes the Nazarenes, Pentecostals, and Charismatics as well as most African American religious sensibilities that emphasize the movement of the Spirit. Poor people with little investment in established institutions, and uneducated people who have no formal liturgies or biblical learning, are rightly drawn to religious practice that emphasizes the Spirit’s present reinterpretation of things, making all things new. Those who have little to lose are especially responsive to the Spirit, which is often resisted by people grounded in the past.

You can see why the Holy Spirit is vaguely threatening to established churches. As new wine does not fit into old wineskins without bursting them, a Spirit-filled people does not fit into old forms without relativising them. When new circumstances seem to be ill-served by the old church structures, by the old liturgies, by the old theological expressions, by the old interpretations of the Bible and of the mind of Christ, people trusting in the Spirit are willing to try new ways.

Of course, the discernment of spirits is difficult and never infallible. To distinguish the Holy Spirit from the spirits of ambition, power, greed, lust, and nostalgia is not easy. For this reason a critical connection with the past is always necessary. Spiritual judgment about contemporary innovations should always be guided by analogy to the innovations of the past that proved to lead to the Spirit’s marks of justice, joy, love, mercy, and peace. Yet think how drastic some of those past innovations have been! Think, for instance, of the invention of the Christian movement out of the Judaism of Jesus’ time, as recorded in Acts. We need to be ready in our time for drastic innovations in the evolution of Christianity.

Mark just how the Holy Spirit is dangerous, however. Permit me a moment of metaphysics, if you will, while I say what I think all those symbols of the Holy Spirit are getting at. John says that Jesus is the incarnation in human form of the Logos, the structures of things, or that which makes things harmonize into structures. The Spirit is the creativity of God within the world that builds up those structures. The creativity of God also destroys structures to build others. As you have heard me say many times, the immensity of God’s creativity that builds up and then destroys to build more is wild. The Big Bang and the rush of cosmic gasses to form suns, which in turn flame out as supernovas, have no regard to the human scale of things. The fragile structure of the human habitat is a wonder of creativity and it is subject to the other forces of creativity that will destroy it one day. The wild God is fecund beyond measure and the manifestations of the Spirit’s creativity in human experience are also wild. Any settled human structure is in danger from the wild Holy Spirit. The Spirit makes churchmen and churchwomen nervous! You can see why Paul was so nervous, in our text, to insist that the Spirit is one, when all those manifestatio
ns—wisdom, knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, miracle-working, prophesy, discernment of spirits, speaking in tongues, and the interpretation of tongues—seem to be going off in different competing but compelling directions.

The Spirit of God’s creativity means something a bit different on the human scale from what it means on the cosmic scale. Although human beings are free to ignore or reject the point, we live in a world surrounded by obligations to do better rather than worse. Our habits and institutions should embody those virtues I mentioned earlier, justice, joy, love, mercy, peace, and many others. Our sanctification depends on embodying them in ourselves, so that they add up to divine creativity on a human scale. The Holy Spirit comes to us as the creativity always to do better than we do now. Come to us, the Holy Spirit also is the creativity to deconstruct, destroy, and give up those things that hold us back. Sometimes this is extremely painful, especially when we remember what a glory it was to achieve in the first place those things that now hold us back. The Holy Spirit makes Christ present to us as judge. Destruction of those we love is incomprehensible to us, even when it makes room for others: such suffering and grief are in themselves gifts of the Holy Spirit, ambivalent as that is to human judgment.

With danger signs all about, the message of Pentecost, nevertheless, is to live dangerously. With all due care to test the spirits, we are urged to trust the Spirit in its creative urgings. When our community’s hidebound structures entrench poverty and injustice, let us call for the Spirit to give us new directions and a new energy; let it destroy our fears and investments that reinforce evils. When our family relations and friendships feed on domination and unwarranted dependencies, let us call in the Spirit to destroy those bad ties and lead us into freer loving relations. When our personal prospects seem blocked or confused, let us call down the Spirit to show us how to possess more aptly the mind of Christ, and how to dispossess ourselves of the expectations that lead nowhere. When our souls are mired in sin, panic, and self-hate, let us call up from their depths the Holy Spirit that can create in us clean hearts and destroy the things that bind us.

Some Christians believe that what counts is what God did in the past with Jesus. I say that does not count unless the Holy Spirit can make that happen today with us. God’s creative transformation is not less powerful today than in Jesus’ time, and our spiritual practice gives us the teaching and example of Jesus to discern the true spirit of creative transformation. We might think we languish with a society where nothing can be done about injustice, with personal relations that starve as well as feed, with personal stories that are dead ends, with souls we would deny, even with a religion of the past that is nostalgic at best and boring at worst. But that is illusion. The Holy Spirit of God’s creative love, which began the cosmos with a mighty blast and turns swarms of cosmic gasses into garden worlds like ours, pours through our lives like a mighty river surging through underground caves to burst forth in fountains of transformation. Come Holy Spirit and lead us to the crosses that destroy our evil and bondage! Come Holy Spirit and raise us to new lives in which our own creative efforts are more like God’s own! Come Holy Spirit and groan in us a new and true prayer that our lives together host the God who would live incarnate among us. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 05.15.2005 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Our gospel text today lies in the middle of a long passage running from chapter 13 to chapter 17 in which John the Evangelist recounts Jesus’ conversation with his disciples at the last supper, beginning with Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. Scholars call this the “Farewell Discourse,” and it is far longer than any other conversation recorded by John or the other gospel writers. John’s text was written about 60 years after the events it records, and of course we have no way of knowing how accurate it is to the actual conversation. Matthew, Mark, and Luke say almost nothing about that last conversation except remarks having to do with the blessing of the bread and wine from which we take our Eucharistic ritual, something John omits to mention. John’s intent was to give a kind of theological summary of Jesus’ sense of his mission and directions for the disciples. So he selected sayings of Jesus, or perhaps his own paraphrases, that add up to this theological statement as understood by John and his community. Whether Jesus actually said these things in this order on this occasion is not the point, although in many other respects John is the most historically accurate of the gospels. The Farewell Discourse is edited with John’s understanding of Jesus’ theology, the most comprehensive understanding we have in the New Testament. This Discourse is the Jesus we know through the earliest witnesses.

Our text for today is the part of the Farewell Discourse in which Jesus says that, if the disciples love him, they will keep his commandments. Notice that the motivation for keeping the commandments is that the disciples love Jesus, as he has loved them and taught them to love one another. All this comes, Jesus says, because God the Father loves him and them, and Jesus’ work has been to demonstrate this love. Under ordinary circumstances, we might think that the proper motivation for keeping the commandments is simply that they are obligatory. Or if we are selfish, we might think that the motivation is to get some divinely bestowed reward or avoid punishment. For Jesus, however, the fundamental phenomenon of the faith, the most important religious reality, is love. His disciples, whom we now call Christians, are supposed to take this love as the grounding context for all Christian life. When they, or we, do this, Jesus says that we have the Holy Spirit as an advocate and guide for how to live in a world full of troubles.

Our text comes shortly after this remarkable saying by Jesus: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Most of the Farewell Discourse has to do with explicating this commandment, which serves as a kind of summary for all the other commandments of Jesus concerning justice, mercy, help for the poor, release of prisoners, opening the eyes of the blind, and the rest. Jesus was particularly concerned about the avoidance of hypocrisy and in our text calls the Holy Spirit the Spirit of Truth. We know the general content of Jesus’ teachings, which he summed up elsewhere as loving God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and our neighbor as our self. In John’s gospel, our capacity to love one another is intimately bound up with God’s love for us and our love for God, as understood through Jesus and what he did.

Now the problem with this spirituality of love is that it can become syrupy piety that makes us feel good while disguising the fact that we live in anything but loving ways. So reflect with me, if you will, on what forms love might take in our lives so that it might be the genuine center of the Christian life. I want to consider four forms of love: social love, cultural love, family love, and love among friends.

Social love might be hard to think of as love, because society is where institutions put us in touch with people we do not know personally. Of the themes of Jesus’ teachings, justice and peacemaking are the most prominent elements of social love. Justice has three classic forms. Distributive justice is the fair distribution of the world’s goods and opportunities. What fairness consists in might be debatable in some situations, but injustice in distribution is cheating and the abuse of power, about which Jesus was scathing. Our own nation’s current policies get poor marks for distributive justice, withdrawing entitlements for the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich and their wars to secure economic dominance; we also do not do well in protecting the resources of the environment. Retributive justice is the determination of guilt regarding evildoers, holding them responsible, and exacting punishment appropriate to the crime. Jesus had a prophet’s anger regarding evildoers, particularly those with social power. But paradoxically he also hailed mercy and forgiveness as the proper responses to guilt, urging the wicked to repent and amend their ways. Our justice system seems to favor those who can afford fancy lawyers and crushes the souls of the poor for whom prison seems a part of their culture. Restorative justice, the third kind, aims to reconcile aggrieved parties who have been hurt by injustice and who might continue on a downward spiral of recrimination if mutual respect is not restored. Restorative justice became popular first in South Africa where its institutions allowed the victims of Apartheit to confront their oppressors and forced the oppressors to sit and listen. Restorative justice, about which we have courses here in the Boston University School of Theology, aims to heal social wounds, and is perhaps the clearest form of social love. Peacemaking, of course, is the center of Christian activism at the social level and sets Christians in our time against our government’s policy of the use of force to get our way. War is never kind, to the winners or losers, even when it is necessary.

Cultural love is closely tied to social love and it has to do with those institutions and practices that give meaning to our lives. Our souls are formed around patterns of ethnic, linguistic, culinary, historical, and mythic identity. We have wealthy cultures and modest cultures, youth cultures and mature cultures; pity the cities that do not have the Red Sox. Our souls find meaning and fulfillment in the particularities of culture. Within contemporary Christianity, some people find meaning in high church liturgies, others in free church worship, some in classical sacred music, others in the culture of praise music. Cultures are always particular and have certain patterns that exclude other patterns. Yet the principal Christian model of love in all this is to celebrate inclusive table fellowship. Jesus ate with rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, saint and sinner. His example of the good neighbor was a Samaritan whose culture was in a hostile relation to Jesus’ own. In our time the great issues of inclusiveness have to do with racism, equality for women, full acceptance of gay and lesbian people, and overcoming national chauvinism in the clash of civilizations. A large group in America has defined the particularity of its cultural identity in terms of white superiority, keeping women in unfree roles, misrepresenting gay and lesbian people as intrinsically sinful, and caricaturing other cultures. The attempt to force this narrow cultural identity on others is an exercise in cultural hate. Cultural love seeks ways to respect the particularity of cultures while insisting that respectable cultures respect others.

Family love is the most familiar form of love in our society, though it was not always so. In Jesus’ time families were difficult economic institutions, placing
heavy burdens on women and those with no families. For us, however, marriages are supposed to be founded on love, and are the social institutions in which children learn how to love, parents learn to love children, siblings learn to love those with whom they compete, and nuclear families learn to love those others who are outside their circle. To be sure, contemporary families can be corrupted to replace genuine love with consumerist selections and rejections of mates, to put women into new forms of bondage, to make life hell for gay and lesbian children, and to teach distortion and fear of people different from oneself. How ironic that many people who oppose gay marriage do so in the name of family values, when marriage is the very thing we should offer gay and lesbian people if it is so much the institution valuing love! What kind of family values do they have in mind? Certainly not love. The forms of family love foster the flourishing of all those in the family and those outside who are affected by the family.

Doubts about the family, at least as it was structured in his time, are probably what led Jesus to say nothing good about it and explicitly to substitute his voluntary organization of friends as the primary vehicle for his commandment to love one another. His relationship with the disciples has become the model for the Church in a certain respect. Of course the Church is large enough to be a society, and particular enough to be a culture. Sometimes the Church identifies with families so much that those without families are left out. Jesus’ point, however, is that a true community of loving friends breaks through the limitations of all family, cultural, and social structures. Where social love breaks down with injustice and warmongering, the community of Jesus’ friends needs to be a counter-force. Where cultural love breaks down with exclusion and bigotry, the community of Jesus’ friends needs to create an inclusive pattern of meaning. When family love breaks down into bondage and chauvinism, Jesus’ friends need to set people free and embrace those who otherwise have no place.

Jesus called his friends together for a mission, actually a continuation of his own mission, which is to create communities of friends who love one another. To love other people is not just to have a sentiment about them, but to make them better people, which means, to make them better lovers. Love is false unless it includes justice, deference to those different from ourselves, commitment to engage the issues of our time, and taking responsibility for what we make of ourselves. To make someone a better lover requires helping them with all these things, at the social, cultural, and familial levels. This commandment to love is very daunting, is it not? Are we not then blessed to have Jesus’ example of friendship? The love in friendship is where our souls are brought into existence. The greatest hurt to our souls comes from failed friendship. The greatest power of healing is in merciful loving friendship. Our friends are with us in the peak moments of experience, and also in the depths of despair; they companion us daily. They forgive us our forgetfulness and encourage us to push always to better life. The greatest friend was Jesus whose love of the unruly disciples brought them to love one another, and whose acceptance of God’s love allowed him, and the disciples to love God in return. Is that not the reconciliation of ourselves to God and one another? Praise be to God for Jesus our Friend who redeems our life and whose Spirit can make Jesus our Beloved. Amen

posted in Uncategorized on 05.1.2005 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

I am grateful to the Reverend Doctor Gomes for the invitation to preach here today, a great honor. He is to be congratulated and envied for his sabbatical, and I sincerely hope that he is enjoying a term of refreshment in which he can look with pleasure on his accomplishments and prepare himself for the work ahead. After all, the sabbatical is the only part of the academic enterprise invented directly by God, as recounted in the Genesis discussion of creation regarding the seventh day.

Our gospel contains the famous, or notorious, saying by Jesus: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” The notoriety comes from its negative part: “no one comes to the Father except through me.” This has sometimes been taken to be a rejection of religions other than Christianity. Yet there is no evidence that Jesus had that in mind at all. In every instance, save one, of Jesus’ recorded encounters with people who were not Jews like himself, he was positively impressed with their faith and helped them just as he did his own kind. Think of his dealings with the Samaritan woman at the well, the Canaanite woman who ate the crumbs under his table, or the Roman Centurion whose boy he healed. The exception was Jesus’ encounter with Pontius Pilate, and there the issue was not religious affiliation but honest government.

The positive part of Jesus’ saying is at the center of defining the Christian Way. Those of us who are Christians take this saying as our inmost identification: Jesus is our way, truth, and life. At the same time it is a Way that can be followed by anyone who is willing to do the work Jesus did. In Jesus’ culture and time, a son was defined as inheriting his father’s estate and work. So, we infer that Jesus was trained as a carpenter because Joseph was. More importantly, Jesus defined himself as Son of God for the reason that he did God his Father’s work, as he said in our text. Luke’s genealogy of Jesus runs back through the generations and ends, “son of Cainan, son of Enos, son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God.” I’m sorry that the ancient sensibilities left women out of this order of things; yet it takes only a little modern imagination to see that daughters too can be identified through the work of the parent, even the divine parent.

Whatever other meanings might belong to the phrase, “Son of God,” as applied to Jesus in the New Testament, Jesus says in our text that he is Son of God because he does God’s work. Because of the unity of that Father-Son work, he can return to God. Moreover, because he had taught the disciples also to do God’s work, they too can return to God. This is the plot behind the discussion of Jesus returning to the Father and preparing a place for the disciples. He says that they already know the way to the Father. Flustered, Thomas says they do not know the way. Frustrated, Jesus says “I am the way, etc.,” and you have been with me long enough to know me. He says that, if the disciples do not believe in him as such, at least they can believe in the work that he did among them. I take this to mean that non-Christian people can still be in unity with Jesus and God by doing his work.

We know from the text immediately following ours, which is in the lectionary for next Sunday, that his work has been to build communities of love, with all this entails regarding justice, peacemaking, forgiveness and mercy, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, opening the eyes of the blind, visiting those in prison, hospitality to those different from ourselves, embracing our enemies, and enduring with patience all the high costs that go with loving communities. We each of us know close analogues to these works in our own situation. Many things in our country need to be changed if we are to uphold straight justice for rich corporate crooks as well as petty thieves from the ghetto, if we are to make peace rather than go to war to get our way, if we are to practice forgiveness and mercy rather than vengeance against those who lash out against us, if we are to care for the poor rather than reduce entitlements to pay for tax cuts, if we are to educate those most in need in addition to those who already come from a culture of learning, if we are to release political prisoners and those who defended their country against us when we attacked, if we are to offer God’s hospitality to all creatures instead of only those who look, think, and act like us, if we insist that no one can be regarded as an enemy without also being the object of our love, and if we are willing to endure the constant defeats in small as well as large things as we strive to live out loving communities in our families, friendships, neighborhoods, civic units, nation, and world. This is the old story of the work of the Christian Way: you know it, and we have a ways to go. Yet nothing in what I just listed as the works of a Christian, deriving from Jesus’ work, and in unity with God’s work in creation and redemption, requires that one be self-identified with Jesus or Christianity. Anyone can take on that work, which we, if not they, know is in continuity with God and Christ’s work.

Permit me to focus in more detail, however, on the meaning for Christians of “the way, the truth, and the life”. The “Christian Way,” I think, has two main forms. The first form is what I call the “Church Christian Way,” which most people identify with Christianity. However you define the Church—and I advise you to duck when professional theologians start arguing about that—it includes a vast array of institutional forms that preserve the memory of Jesus and his work, and that interpret how that work extends from his Galilean context through all the cultures of the Christian world. The Church has a rich literature and hymnody, many forms of assembly, a calendar for rehearsing epitomes of the Christian life, and many social communities in which people live the particulars of their lives from birth to work to death.

The second form of the Christian Way, by contrast, is a Cultural Way and consists in struggling to understand our secular situation in Christian terms, to discover what Christian terms mean in our situation, and to learn how to be faithful to Jesus’ work in secular life. People in this second way might also belong to a Christian congregation and identify with the Church, but that is not their center of gravity as it is for people who are on the Church way. This second, Cultural Christian Way, relativizes the Church as one institution among many, and activates faith outside it. One thinks of poets such as T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Geoffrey Hill whose work has been the leading edge of Christian thinking but who have not been thinking only in and for the Church. The theologian Paul Tillich was a bit like this, thinking for the world rather than the Church, and he is held in suspicion by many Church theologians for that fact. I suspect that in a university such as this, though not of course in Memorial Church this morning, many people work predominantly on the Cultural Christian Way rather than the Church Christian Way.

Jesus is the Way and the Truth. To speak of Jesus being the Truth supposes something like the following. Merely to fall into a category to find an identity is one thing. To fulfill that categoreal identity by being an exemplary or fully realized member of the category is quite another. For instance, many coloratura sopranos have sung, but Lily Pons and Joan Sutherland were true coloraturas. Many baseball players have played, but Babe Ruth, Stan Musial, and Ted Williams were true players. There are many Christians like ourselves who identify with taking on Christ and his work, and yet most of us are
schlubs. The true Christians are the saints.

That Jesus is the truth for Christians means that Christians are in transition to become more like him, more Christ-like, more fully integrated into God’s work in the world, more effective in it, more emptied out into it. This transformation deepens and ramifies the symbols of Christian piety. Consider the Lord’s Prayer by reflecting on the creation by virtue of which God is called Father, and see it to encompass a universe of vast age and extent, violent beyond imagination, indifferent to human needs save in the fragile environment of the third planet out from Sol on the edge of a minor galaxy. Our life-world is an engine of consumption, micro-organisms eating smaller ones and in turn being eaten by larger ones. Species live on other species and are prey in turn, finally vanishing to extinction when their habitat no longer tolerates them. The blood of human beings has about the same saline proportion as the seas from which our slime-mold ancestors emerged, and we bear the genes of fish, frogs, snakes, and tigers, as well as the sensitivities of the founders of human civilization. So when we pray the Lord’s Prayer in transition to greater spiritual depth, the meaning of “Our Father who art in heaven” is that God is the Father of all that, a wild, fierce and destroying Father as well as the Father of justice and human order. Moreover we are part of all that creatureliness down to the saltiness of our blood, the snake in our genes, and the lives of others in our diet. The truth of Christ is not the tame stuff we tell our kids. The truth of Christ is the awesome, wild, and often unbalanced character that is able to stand in the divine winds of cosmic blasts, to stare down the abyss of suffering and fiery glory only poets can imagine, to love the God who leaves us nailed to crosses, to take up the work of our Beloved whose precious loving communities heave atop the tectonic plates of brute force, passion, blood, and poetry. Did you ever wonder why the central ritual of Christianity is a cannibal rite in which we symbolically eat the flesh and drink the blood of our Founder? It is because nothing any tamer could present the awesome depth of the Truth of Christ into which we would be transformed.

Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. That Jesus is “the Life” pulls together many different senses in which the image of life is used in Christian scripture. In Genesis God breathed into the clay doll and Adam became a living being. In Deuteronomy God set the choice between life and death and urged the people to choose the life of obedience that would lead to prosperity and flourishing of Israel. In Ezekiel God re-knit the dead dry bones and breathed life into the people of Israel so that they would again be united and flourish. Jesus repeatedly brought the dead back to life, although they were not necessarily better off spiritually than before they had sickened and died. On the other hand people might be physically alive and yet spiritually dead, when the Holy Spirit summons them to new spiritual life in Christ. Jesus’ resurrection from physical death introduced a new level of spiritual life as fellowship with God, characterized by the symbol of the Ascension, and yet Jesus claimed already to have had that fellowship in his last supper with the disciples prior to his death, and said that with the Holy Spirit they too could have that fellowship of resurrection to life with God within this life. To follow Jesus’ Way in our work, to press on toward him as the wild Truth of our lives, is to inhabit a life that combines and intensifies all these senses of Jesus as the Life.

Jesus’ term for this in John’s gospel is “eternal life.” Eternal life embraces the future but is a quality of present life. Eternal life incorporates the past, adding life to the inanimate, overcoming death in present abundant life. Yet the abundance of eternal life is not like worldly prosperity—often quite the contrary: its signature, after all, is the cross. Jesus’ Way and Truth lead to participation in the eternal abundance of God’s life. Jesus said, “the Father and I are one.” We can imagine only the tiniest slice of the eternal abundance of divine life, but even this little includes the winds of cosmic blasts and the abyss of suffering and fiery glory. It includes also within our ken the fierce fecundity of God’s creative love that throws up countless galaxies, swarms of species, and rivers of power for healing and new chances. While on Jesus’ Way and living in his Truth, we reflect back this divine cosmic love and then receive again our love returned and magnified, ever more creative, then share it out with others, receive it back and send it yet again in new directions. God’s eternal abundance is a living engine of creative love in which we share through every pulse of loving God and neighbor. We love and are loved more than we know. By taking Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, we know the way into the divine Father, just as Jesus said in our text. With love’s powers we bear up under all trials and enter ever more deeply into the wild abundance of divine immensity. This Way, Truth, and Life are open to all. But thanks be to God for our Rabbi Jesus Christ, who shows us the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 04.24.2005 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Our three texts today are embarrassing, each in its own way. The passage from Acts presents the most idealized image of the early Church that you can imagine. A community of over 3000 people devoted themselves to learning from the apostles, fellowship, common Eucharistic meals, prayer, miracles, pious awe, sharing everything in common, spending much time in the Temple, enjoying one another with glad and generous hearts, praising God, and gaining the respect of the people, with the result that the community continued to grow every day. Who of you who has spent any time in church at all would believe this unalloyed evangelistic success? This is an odd passage even for the Bible. It follows immediately upon a passage in which Peter berates sinners to save themselves by accepting Jesus as the Messiah, and it is followed by a long story in which Peter and John get thrown into jail for healing and teaching in the Temple, texts which are much more typical biblical narratives. Then the next thing that happens is that two new converts try to cheat the rule of owning everything in common by keeping some of the proceeds of their property and they are struck dead. The ideal community does not last long. In fact, our idealized text is embarrassingly like a Hallmark Card version of church history.

The text from 1 Peter is embarrassing in two ways. The first is that the lectionary editors start the passage with the second sentence of the paragraph. The first sentence reads: “Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh.” The call to endure suffering really refers to the suffering of slavery, which our editors try to hide from us. While this text is not exactly an endorsement of slavery, it certainly is a refusal to criticize it even when the slavery is torture. The second way this passage is embarrassing is that it seems to say that suffering itself is good, and that because Jesus suffered, we also should suffer. This text has been cited to justify abuse of women who are supposed to feel good about the suffering they bear. The sentence immediately following our passage says: “Wives, in the same way, accept the authority of your husbands, so that, even if some of them do not obey the word, they may be won over without a word by their wives’ conduct, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives.” The image of brutal men being tamed by the docile suffering of their brutalized women is a deep embarrassment. Like slavery, the debased status of women was part of the general Roman society of the time and we have rejected both on Christian grounds.

The gospel text from John is embarrassing because it likens us to sheep. Sheep are very stupid. They keep their nose down and wander from the path. Sheep need shepherds or they get lost. We surely are not so stupid and dependent, are we? To suggest that Jesus is a shepherd is strange imagery too. Except for the story of shepherds coming to praise his birth, he never dealt with them. Jesus was a town boy whose family was in the building trades. His friends were fishermen, and the activities of his childhood and youth were shaped by the fact that the Romans were building a city close to his hometown. The local economy was devoted to supplying that construction effort. Jesus was far from the pastoral life that dominated the imagery of the older Hebrew Bible. I suggest we just get over the embarrassingly unflattering suggestion that we are sheep and Jesus is a shepherd and ask what the text is about.

The text is about abundant life, of course. Jesus says he is the way to abundant life, and uses two images for this. To reach abundant life is like going through a gate. Jesus likens himself both to the gate itself, and to the gatekeeper. What is striking about our text, however, is the repeated juxtaposition of Jesus as the proper leader to the thieves and bandits, that is, the false leaders that will take the lambs to slaughter. Jesus, the true shepherd, will lay down his life for the sheep, a reference to the crucifixion; but the hired-hand shepherd will flee when the wolf or thief comes.

Who did Jesus have in mind as the thieves and bandits? Our passage comes right after Jesus’ encounter with the Pharisees who refused to believe that Jesus had healed the blind man, and who badgered both the man and his parents to renounce Jesus. Those were the bandits he was referring to, people in his own religion, the Judaism of his time, who were dishonest, sneaky, and manipulative. Those Pharisees, remember, threatened the formerly blind man’s parents with excommunication from the Temple if they testified to Jesus, so they kept quiet; their son did not keep quiet, and the Pharisees did throw him out of the Temple. That was hypocrisy. The objects of Jesus’ attack in our passage were the corrupters of religion.

Abundant life, therefore, means true and honest religion, which Jesus defined as doing the work of God the father. What is that work? Doing what Jesus did when he claimed that he, like everyone to whom the word of God comes, is a son of God. Read the rest of John, chapter 10, for this argument. So what was it that Jesus did? What was his work, which he claimed was divine work? The gospel of John makes it very clear that Jesus’ work was to create communities of love that have a double effect. One effect of loving communities is to overcome the alienation among people that manifests itself in hatred and injustice. The other is to overcome the alienation between God and people that manifests itself in our sinful rejection of God and God’s work. This is to say, Jesus’ work was to bring about communities of love of neighbor and love of God. The consequence of Jesus’ work is redemption. Its content is life abundant. Jesus’ work is the gateway to redemption and life abundant, which he often called eternal life.

Jesus brought four things to his work. One was his positive preaching about how to live as friends and lovers together. Regarding our human communities he preached justice and mercy, care and forgiveness, peace-making and humility, all as conditions for love. Regarding our friendship with God, Jesus preached prayer, study of the scriptures, and mutual help through traditional means of grace for the attainment of intimacy with God. We all know these familiar positive points of Jesus’ teaching. Can we not take these as virtues for our own lives?

The second component of Jesus’ work was his skilled denunciation of hypocrisy. Again and again Jesus exposed the corruption of the institutions and teachings of his own religion by hypocritical leaders. He attacked the selfishness that led to the exploitation of the poor and powerless, a selfishness that decorated itself in the trappings of righteousness. This denunciation of hypocrisy was one of the principal offenses that got him in trouble with the authorities. Is it not incumbent on us, too, to name hypocrisy when we see it, particularly in our religion?

The third component of Jesus’ work was actually helping people usually by healing the sick and demented. He took sickness and sin to be symptoms of a broken world that needs redemption. The healing of these is itself a sign of God’s work to complete and redeem creation. We too can be healers of sickness and restorers of sinners to grace, can we not?

The fourth and most important component in Jesus’ work was his own loving and winsome person. People who met Jesus loved him. Not everyone, of course, not those caught in the bonds of hypocrisy. But sinners loved him because of his own manifest love for them. Rich people loved him, poor people loved him, flagrant sinners loved him and the very righteous, whose only fl
aw was an inability to release their possessions, loved him. He worked so hard with his disciples, teaching and reproving them, but always loving them; and they loved him in return. Read the 14th through 17th chapters of John to see how Jesus’ love brought his disciples to be a community of love and friendship with one another and with God. Jesus’ disciples know the voice of their Lord, as the sheep know the voice of their own shepherd, because they love that voice, and love the love in that voice.

Our own spiritual lives are good if we fervently pursue justice and mercy, care and forgiveness, peace-making and humility, all these virtues that make for positive loving communities. Our spiritual lives are better if, in addition, we go through the purifying fires of rooting out hypocrisy. Hypocrisy in our institutions, our leaders, and friends, is dangerous to reveal. Hypocrisy in ourselves is painful to reveal. Yet we cannot face God without the honesty to admit who we are, save by the welcoming mercy of God that overlooks our self-deceptions and simultaneously shines light upon them. Jesus taught that our temptations to hypocrisy are Satanically inspired. In matters of honesty, our spiritual lives include a war against the Enemy.

Our spiritual lives are even better if, in addition to the positive virtues of love and the ruthless unmasking of hypocrisy, we actually do something to help people. Jesus taught that service to others is essential to spiritual life. The virtues proper to a loving community are hollow, in fact hypocritical, if they are not practically expressed in feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoners, making peace, deconstructing the structures of oppression, and building a more just world. Devoting our lives in service to others in the name of God is essential to our spiritual lives.

Our spiritual lives are filled to abundance, however, if in addition to all these we are in love with Jesus. Christians find eternal life most abundantly in loving Jesus. Although we are at some distance from Jesus compared with his immediate disciples, we can hear his voice in the Bible. We can feel his love in our contemporaries who are filled with the love of Jesus. We can cultivate our imagination in meditation and prayer to understanding how Jesus could love us personally. We are each unique, with our own situations and personal relations, our own stations and ambitions, our own foibles and sins, our own gifts and dark secrets. To understand the love of Jesus for us personally, we need to imagine him addressing each part of us, companioning us in our peak experiences, bearing us up in our deepest sins and failures, working with us day by day. This imaginative life of sharing love with Jesus is the heart of Christian spiritual life. All our virtues, our truth-speaking, and good works feed into this spiritual imagination of divine friendship. The power of that spiritual imagination opens us to God. For, the love we find for ourselves in Jesus our friend is the love God has for us. And as we reciprocate that love in our love of Jesus, we learn to love the Creator who gives us this world.

Now we can understand the passage in 1 Peter about suffering. Our world is full of suffering, and that is among the gifts of God: not all gifts are happy ones. But by enduring the sufferings of life we learn to think with Jesus how he loves us and how we love him, and thus we learn better how to love God. And as for that embarrassing idealized view of the church that could not last, it serves as an ideal by which we test the fruits of Christian love. We measure the depth of our understanding of Jesus’ teachings, our grasp of his critique of hypocrisy, our commitment to his work, and our mutual devotion and friendship, when we see the effects of our spiritual life tending toward that ideal. That ideal sketches the fruits by which increasing abundance of life is measured.

Though we balk to think of ourselves as sheep, we do know the gate to abundant life. We know Jesus, the gatekeeper, and can respond to his call. Although the shepherd takes us over demanding paths of virtue, confession of hypocrisy, and works, it is his winsomeness that attracts and leads us. What I have called the knowledge and love of God in imagination is what the tradition has called the work of the Holy Spirit. Jesus the Christ, the Good Shepherd, is alive with us in God’s Spirit. It is our privilege, and great happiness, to follow him. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 04.17.2005 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Hallelujah! Christ is risen. Hallelujah! We are risen. Hallelujah! The nations are risen. Hallelujah! The Church is risen. Hallelujah! The world is risen. Hallelujah! More is risen from death and decay than most of you had imagined when you came this morning to celebrate the Easter resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This holiday of resurrection focuses on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that humble man who spoke the truth about justice and hypocrisy in the wrong places and failed to duck when the political forces of stability and accommodation in Jerusalem lashed out to keep the peace. The week before, Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem, acclaimed by a crowd as a royal descendent of David the Messiah King, a crowd that hoped he would restore Israel’s sovereignty and the justice of its internal administration. But Jesus aimed to be no king. He did not gather an army. He addressed no political matters. He claimed no Davidic royalty over against the House of Herod. He aimed to be a teaching Messiah, and his teachings those four days after Palm Sunday exposed the hypocrisy and compromises of the Temple leaders and some Pharisees, making him no friends. In the last days he gathered his friends close and pointed out that what he had done was to make them friends with one another, his friends, and God’s friends. His Messianic goal was the humble one of creating communities of lovers, whose virtues consisted in making those whom they love better lovers. His love is based on justice, mercy, piety, faith, and hope, and that love is the actuality of the reconciliation of humankind and God.

Uniting people in reconciling love is a humble task compared with conquering enemies with shock and awe. Yet it is much more difficult. History has seen empire-builders by the score, far too many, in fact, and embarrassingly close to home in our time. But the risen Christ’s little communities of love have grown and lasted, while every empire has fallen. Each act of Christian kindness is a witness to the humble Christ’s resurrection. The exact nature of Jesus’ resurrection and his appearances to disciples are inconsistently stated in the gospels and have been debated ever since. Nevertheless, their effects are evident everywhere that his ongoing love and mercy uplift the poor, free the oppressed, give sight to the blind, and make someone a better lover. Resurrection only makes sense against the presumption of death, and we have seen much death around us. Therefore we shout Hallelujah when we see death reversed in new life.

The author of our text from Colossians points to another resurrection, namely our own. This may come as a surprise, because at most what we expected for ourselves today is an occasion to wear Easter spring finery. Colossians, however, says that to be baptized in Christ is to die with him to the life of sin and already to be risen with him at the right hand of God. Now if you take literally Christ’s heavenly journey with us to the right hand seat next to God, then obviously this is a mistake. We are still only a hundred yards off Commonwealth Avenue. But I think the talk of sitting at God’s right hand is a brilliant metaphor, and the reality to which it points is our own state of being free from sin and ready to go with new life because we have accepted the humble man Jesus as our Messiah. Of course, we also live in ordinary life and continue to have the bad habits we had before. Colossians goes on to list fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, greed, idolatry, anger, wrath, malice, slander, abusive language, and lying. We do these and worse things, but we do not have to: we are not in bondage to them. Colossians says to clean up our act and behave like properly resurrected people. You think you are stuck? Forget it. You have the merciful power of God that raises people to new life coursing through your veins. If you don’t have enough, take more! [Gesture to Communion Table] Hallelujah! We are risen.

The nations are risen too. Peter’s speech recorded in Acts begins, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” He goes on to say that the liberation begun by Jesus in Israel is extended to Rome and then to all the world. What Peter had in mind was that people from all nations could be accepted into the Christian Church, that membership was not limited to Jews. But what he said was more powerful: all are accepted who fear God and do what is right. There are Pagan and Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist, Confucian and Daoist ways of fearing God, each in its own way, and not only Jewish and Christian ways. Justice is commonly defined among religions, even though there are significant cultural variations. God’s resurrecting power works in all.

This should be a great relief to us because the nations of the world in our time are a mess, including our own. Jesus’ complaints about hypocrisy and injustice among the religious and governmental leaders of his time apply equally well to the nations in the Islamic world, the Marxist world, the world of South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. Nevertheless, all these governments can be redeemed. They can be resurrected with less warmongering, less graft, less injustice and prejudice. Hallelujah! We can begin again, even though this requires the slow deconstruction of habits of belligerence, arrogance, greed, inattention to the poor, and oppression.

There’s new life for the Church too. How in the world can the Church be the living Body of Christ when it is made up of people such as ourselves who retain so many of the bad habits of the flesh, as St. Paul delighted to complain ? Is the Church only an institution? So often the Church worries about its institutional self, about increasing its membership, sustaining its continuity, teaching the next generation, competing with alternative institutions, when these concerns seem to be opposite to the obligations of the Body of Christ. The Body of Christ is to serve the world, teaching justice and mercy, reconciliation and love, and to cultivate the life of love among its members. The Church’s institutional organizations are only instrumental ways to perform that service, that teaching, that new way of loving life. The resurrection means that we do not have to cling to institutions that are instrumentally dead. The Church always has new life and can find new wineskins to culture that life. As a Church of the resurrection we do not have to worry about institutions that are failing in numbers and vigor if we preach the word and serve the world in other ways. As a Church of the resurrection we most definitely do have to worry about institutions that claim the Christian name and yet lack the fruits of the spirit—peacemaking, help for the poor, release for the oppressed, stewardship for creation, depth of spirit, courage, joy, and love. Vigorous and growing institutions do exist that, in the name of the Risen Christ, preach war-making, inattention to the poor, curtailment of prisoners’ rights, exploitation of God’s natural creation, fear for the loss of their parochial culture, bitterness about people different from themselves, and hatred of those they deem enemies. The resurrection Church leaves that religion of death behind. No Christian need be stuck there. Hallelujah!

Of course, the world of nature is risen today too. Perhaps the most ancient religious rite of humankind is the celebration of the Earth’s tilting to meet the sun from which light and life come. Longer days and shorter nights are reasons for joy. Spring means renewal of life: new flowers, new crops, new lambs, and a new baseball season (to speak to the interest of Bostonians). Easte
r is the Christian’s version of the spring festival of which every religion has some version, tied as it is to the Jewish spring festival of Passover. The power of spring to symbolize new life in every domain goes beyond Christianity and all religions to quicken the hearts of the Scrooges, secularists, and anti-religion people. In spring we understand that even the passing of the generations makes way for new generations. In its deepest and broadest meaning, none of us can deny the resurrection of life from death for very long, no matter how we grieve some death or other. The entire world is witness to this resurrection.

The resurrection of Jesus is special to us Christians, however, because we see Jesus to have gone through the worst death: untimely, ruinous of his work, agonizing, humiliating, unjust, undeserved. From this we know that the resurrection message is that our projects’ defeat as defined by the world is never the final word, that whatever we suffer for the causes of Christ can be borne, that there is always hope for our community and nation, that the Spirit will always find new ways in the Church, that the very violence of cosmic creation from the Big Bang to the Final Dissipation is the eternal receptacle of the transient glories of life, and that even our own frailty, sicknesses, and inevitable death are not as important as the new life we already touch. Let our souls sing with St. Paul’s familiar song: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . .No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Hallelujah! Christ is risen. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 03.27.2005 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Palm Sunday is commonly represented as a triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, riding on a donkey, which was the ceremonial act of a king. The crowd hailed Jesus as the Son of David, saying “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” The familiar story is told in the 21st chapter of Matthew, verses 1-11. We know that the crowd was hoping for a messiah as David has been, a king with the military skill and power to deliver Israel from the Romans.

We have seen a great deal of triumphalist thinking in recent politics. America’s government has cast the country into the messianic role of saving the world for democracy. But America’s messianic self-understanding is not that of a teaching messiah like Jesus. It is more that of a fighting messiah like David who conquered a lot of territory in his time, or like Cyrus the Great of Persia who conquered a great deal more territory and was called messiah because he sent the Jews back to Jerusalem from their exile. The American messianic mission has led us to conquer Afghanistan and Iraq whose former governments opposed our democratizing plans for them. We’ve threatened Iran and North Korea, whom our President has linked with Iraq as the “Axis of Evil,” and seem surprised when they want to develop nuclear weapons to keep America at bay. Our government is convinced that it can triumph over any country that stands in its way.

Jesus’ triumph, of course, was very short-lived. He offered no armed resistance to the Romans, nor did he collect any army as David had. After his Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem he spent the next four days teaching, mainly in the Temple, and going each night back to the suburb of Bethany, most likely to stay with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.

What Jesus taught in those days, according to Matthew, had little or nothing to do with politics, the Roman occupation, or insurrection. In fact, that was the time he said to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. Jesus teaching was occupied with God, though with a special twist. His teachings those days seemed to focus on hypocrisy in religion, on the sorry performance of those claiming to represent his religion, and on the blindness of the people to God in their midst. Remember the “Seven Woes” from Matthew 23? “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. . . Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. . . Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ‘Whoever swears by the sanctuary is bound by nothing, but whoever swears by the gold of the sanctuary is bound by oath.’ … Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. . . . Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. . . Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. . . . Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous, and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets. . . Therefore I send you prophets, sages, and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town, so that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth.” That’s all a quote, and it is not the kind of preaching calculated to win friends among the powerbrokers of Jerusalem: by the end of the fourth day Jesus was arrested and by the end of the fifth he was dead. So much for messianic triumphalism!

Jesus, I should hasten to add, was not ranting against Judaism. He was a Jew himself and was attacking some leaders of his own religion whom he thought were viciously hypocritical. Jesus never attacked any one else’s religion, only those whom he thought corrupted the religion of Israel. We need to take care that our own religious leaders are not hypocrites, that none of them attacks other religions without seeing God in them, that none whitewashes the tomb of American jingoism with the peacemaking words of the gospel, that none supports the pursuit of greed with the good and worthy name of Christian missions, that none speaks well of the corrupt leaders in the corporate world because they contribute heavily to churches, and that none mislead simple people with simplistic theologies. Can we guard against such hypocrisy among ourselves? We have not done well so far.

When Jesus was dragged before Pilate, he did not bluster like an aggrieved rebel. Nor did he posture like a king claiming a throne unjustly denied him by the Roman Empire. He was humble. He said hardly anything. He let the words and actions of his betrayers, accusers and judge speak for themselves. And they did. For two thousand years the name of Judas is associated with perfidy. The leaders of the Temple wanted Jesus dead because they believed he threatened the stability of their relation with the Roman occupation forces. and said it is better that one innocent man die than that the nation be destroyed. Ironically, this promoted, though it did not justify, two thousand years of anti-Semitism, one of the most grievous sins of Christianity. Pontius Pilate is still the epitome of corruption in government, knowing what is just but lacking the courage to carry it out when justice has a price. Even without the resurrection, Jesus the humble teacher won that confrontation on Passion Week. Judas, the Temple leaders, and the Romans failed to do the truth. Jesus spoke the truth, and lived the truth. For all he suffered—Jesus’ Passion means he suffered passively what others did to him—Jesus conquered.

Paul put the point starkly in his great hymn in Philippians. Jesus aboriginally has the form of God. That means, in the conceptions of his age, that he dwelt in the highest heaven with God and had the body and mind appropriate to that heaven. But Jesus then descended to earth and took on the form, not only of a human, but of a human slave. “And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Why should we confess that Jesus Christ is Lord? Because he is a political lord, a king? No, he wasn’t. Because he beat the Romans? No, he didn’t. Because he established the perfect justice of Isaiah’s messianic expectation? No, the rabbis were right that things were no better in the next generation. Jesus is Lord because humility of his sort is the stuff of divinity. To speak the truth and accept the consequences is to be humble. To stay with the truth when it costs pain and life itself is to be humble. To be obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross—is to be humble. To hope that one’s judgments will win out in the world and yet see no divine intervention to make it so, forsaken on the cross at the point of death, crying, Why? Why?, and then saying to the absent Father, “Into your hands I commend my spirit,” that is the humility of God.

As we enter into Passio
n Week, let us have the humble humor to see that our best vehicle is a donkey, not a Humvee. We will not convert the world to democracy by destroying non-democratic governments and installing our own. That only leads to resistance. We can try humbly to convert the world by speaking the truth about the culture-shaking responsibilities of democracies, and inviting others to those responsibilities. Democracy destroys cultures based on tribal or other community allegiances by insisting on the individualism of one person, one vote; democracy destroys cultures that separate gender roles and class distinctions. Many cultures have much to lose by adopting democracy, and will always lose if it is imposed upon them rather than chosen by them. We need the humility of truth in advertising, even if we ourselves are convinced that democracy is worth the cost. We can not force a messianic Christian culture on America by saying that God blesses America more than any other nation, by saying that corporate greed is really an expression of freedom, by saying that religious bigotry is upholding standards of humanity, by saying that racial and gender prejudice are justified by the Bible, by saying that exploitation of the environment is proper stewardship, or by saying that neglect of the poor is what they deserve. Yet people have said in recent months that jingoism, corporate greed, bigotry, prejudice, and environmental exploitation are just what the gospel ordered if we can disguise how they are named. We can try humbly to expose and correct those evils by learning and speaking the truth.

You all know that Passion Week is not like opening Christmas presents. Beginning with that cheap and shallow patriotism of the people who threw palms in Jesus’ path, to his angry attack on the money-changers in the temple, to his parables and woes about hypocrisy, to his betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion, it was a downhill week. By the Sabbath of Holy Saturday, God was off resting, the disciples were hopeless, and Jesus was just dead. There is no guarantee for us that our humble efforts to be peacemakers will succeed, that our invitation to choose democracy will be heeded, that our exposures of hypocrisy in our own religion and culture will go unpunished. The power of evil forces is very great, no less strong now than in Jesus’ time. We should expect humility to be crucified. But the more it suffers, the stronger it gets. The more the arrogance of might and hypocrisy strike at the humble, the more their evil is exposed. The humbler we are, like Jesus, the more God is incarnate in our efforts and we are worthy of the glory peculiar to the Lord of Humility. Humility has a power passing the intrigue of Judas, the political compromises of the Temple leaders, and the mighty imperial weakness of Pilate. There is power in humility, the power of God. If you want to know what humility is worth, not its power but its worth, come back next week. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 03.20.2005 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

The three texts of our scripture today have given rise to three different, and perhaps problematic, theologies of the relation of spirit to flesh. We are fleshly people, evolving in nature with needs and appetites that fuel human society. Yet we are spiritual people in our relation to God. If we are not well-related to God, our spiritual lives are poor. Ideally, our spirit is supposed to be infused with God’s spirit. In fact, the most fundamental theme of Christian redemption is that the Word of God takes on human flesh and walks among us. We do not have to go to God. God is incarnate in and among us. The Christian approach to spirit is not to find it above life or in the bye and bye, but in the very flesh of life. Yet Christian incarnationalism is very difficult to grasp, and when grasped, it is still difficult to swallow.

The dry bones text from Ezekiel is one of the most vivid images in the whole Bible. One of my earliest memories is of a men’s quartet in my church in St. Louis singing, “Them bones, them bones, them dry bones.” The connection of the thigh bone to the hip bone was my first conscious awareness that human anatomy is more than skin deep. Imagine Ezekiel surveying that ancient battlefield of dry bones and calling upon them to come together with a great rattle, then grow sinews, muscles, and skin. But they were only bodies, like the doll God made out of mud according to Genesis 2. God had to breath his breath, or spirit, into Adam to make him a living creature. God tells Ezekiel to call in the divine breath to give living spirit to the army of newly enfleshed dead men. When the divine wind comes at his call, the people come to life.

The point of Ezekiel’s text, however, was not a parable about God breathing life into otherwise inanimate bodies, as in the Genesis account. Rather, his point was that Israel had been defeated and scattered in exile like a beaten army, and that God would recall Israel home. Ezekiel was rather harsh in his reasons for Israel’s defeat: they had to do with Israel abandoning God and pursuing sin and idolatry. God was behind their defeat. But God would also redeem them as a people and bring them back to the Promised Land. In Ezekiel’s text, God does not directly reassemble the bones and breathe life into them; rather, he has Ezekiel cause all this by “prophesying.” I suspect that Ezekiel saw a significant role for prophets such as himself in the redemption and re-establishment of Israel.

We Americans today might not identify much with ancient Israel’s sorry state, for we are still the nation that dictates to others. Many of us believe, however, that Ezekiel’s indictment of Israel might have some application to us. Where is our godly commitment to peacemaking, to putting the poor and oppressed first, to policies that heal those afflicted with diseases such as AIDS, to feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and freeing the prisoners? Why do we make war out of anger, set our foreign and domestic policies to feed the greed of the rich, and back away from multilateral treaties that would require some restraint from us to protect the environment and establish international law? Where did we get the idolatrous idea that we should impose our political polities on people who do not choose them? Ezekiel sounds a warning to which we should listen. He also promises hope that, no matter how far we fall, and how much we suffer the consequences of greedy belligerence, God can redeem the nation. Those who despair should remember that the bones did come together, grow flesh, and receive the divine breath of life.

Paul’s text tells a darker story. For him the term “flesh” did not symbolize God’s creation, which was pronounced good. For Paul “flesh” symbolized a commitment to sensuality, especially sexuality, that fails to put sensual impulses in their places. He probably recognized that sex in its place is good, although he does not say that. Acquisition of wealth is good if distributed with charity. Eating and drinking are good if not done to excess. The flesh is good if infused with the spirit. In Paul’s rather dour world-view, however, sex, productive work, eating and drinking, and other ordinary functions of life typically become addictions. He frequently characterized sin as bondage, as addictions are matters of bondage. He pictured human beings as so addicted to the things that otherwise are healthy needs and purposes that they lose their health and become ends in themselves, binding us in slavery to sin. Recent theologians often fault Paul for denying the goodness of creation by harping on how human beings have distorted it. Because of Paul, the Christian tradition has little good to say about sex except for its utilitarian function of reproduction, little good to say about marriage except that it can keep you out of adultery, and little good to say about enjoying life except as a foretaste of a better life to come. Paul looked for a quick ending of the present age and a flight from it to be with Jesus without much attention to the redemption of the flesh in this life. We can fault his theology of creation, perhaps.

But was he not right in so much of what he said about our bondage to the flesh? And did he not say also in our passage that, “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you”? Paul did proclaim the incarnation even if he was reluctant to say much about how the indwelling Spirit of God might improve our mortal bodies of flesh.

John’s Gospel is the opposite of Paul’s in this respect. For John, Jesus was all about the loveliness of the flesh, of this life. To be sure, there is a high symbolic structure to John’s Gospel. The raising of Lazarus is the last and most spectacular of the miracles that Jesus performed, beginning with the simple, almost frivolous one of making wine out of water at the wedding in Cana. The miracles all were to show the power of God to be manifest in the world in ways most people missed. Jesus’ own resurrection was the crowning demonstration of the Lordship of God within the world. The raising of Lazarus was also the incident that set the government and temple authorities out to get Jesus. But pay attention to the loving details of the story.

The story begins by establishing that Jesus loved Lazarus as a friend, along with his sisters Mary and Martha; the other gospels never indicate that Jesus had friends, only disciples. The other miracle healing stories all have to do with first encounters, not with a pre-existing love. Then the story says that the sisters sent to Jesus who was in hiding because his enemies had tried to stone him. Jesus’ felt their need of him but with great reluctance stayed back so that sick Lazarus would die before he can go perform a miraculous healing. Jesus apparently wanted him to die so that he could raise someone from the dead, not just cure an illness. Notice Jesus’ intense dialogue with his disciples about all this, especially with Thomas. When Jesus finally came to Bethany, Lazarus had been in the tomb four days; folk religion of the time believed that souls of the dead stayed near the body for about four days and then left, meaning that after four days Lazarus was as dead as dead can be. Friends of the family from Jerusalem were consoling the sisters.

As he approached, Martha ran to meet Jesus with a somewhat incoherent speech about how he could have helped if he had been there earlier. Jesus told her that Lazarus would live again, which she interpreted to mean that he would rise at the last general resurrection. Jesus replied that he himself, there in the flesh, was the resurrecti
on. Martha, better at managing things than at theology, ran back for Mary, the contemplative one. Mary fell down at Jesus’ feet in worship and said Lazarus would not have died if Jesus had been there. At this point, Jesus’ high resolution to let Lazarus die so he could demonstrate divine power wavered. He broke down when he saw the sisters’ grief, and that of the mourners. “See how he loved him,” said the people.

When the group arrived at the tomb, Jesus broke down again. And then he called Lazarus, whose body was in a state of decay, to come out of the tomb, to come back to them, to live again. This was not a fancy resurrection to a celestial body, as Paul imagined it in 1st Corinthians. This was a call back to the flesh. It demonstrated God’s power, but not for a general resurrection of the dead. It demonstrated God’s power to bring Lazarus back to this life. Lazarus was deeply loved, by Jesus, his sisters, and the crowd. And they wanted him amongst them again.

John’s gospel is startling with its complicated theological representations of the drama of divine power, of Jesus’ sometimes outrageous claims about himself, and its apparent approval of using people’s suffering to demonstrate divine power. Yet the genius of the gospel is that it illustrates those things with the intimacy of personal love. John’s Jesus had a social life; his conversations are recorded as well as his speeches. Jesus weeping over Jerusalem in the other gospels was a symbolic act. Weeping over Lazarus was the squeezing of his heart. John says that the power of resurrection came to a man who broke down at the pain caused by what he had to do. The mighty power of God’s spirit dwelt in a man whose flesh loved, laughed, grieved, and wept.

The lesson for us is not that we should go out and attempt miracles. Rather we should love, laugh, grieve, and weep. We should not buffer ourselves against human contact. We should not pass up opportunities to enjoy friends and celebrate life’s moments. We should not fail to cultivate family and friendships, entering emotionally into all their affairs. We should not fail to bear one another’s burdens. We should not protect ourselves from grief. We should not hold back tears or protect our hearts from being broken. For it is in the intensity of open, loving, intimate personal life that we can receive God’s spirit and be truly spiritual people.

God’s spirit is not something blown into us from the outside, as Ezekiel might have thought. Our flesh with its loving, weepy sensuality should not be suppressed until covered by the Spirit, as Paul might have thought. By making our flesh supple, full, porous, and open to life’s intimacies we welcome the Spirit of God and can live intensely as we were created to be in fleshly form before God our creator, judge, and lover.

In John’s gospel, Jesus insists that his great work has been to make his disciples friends with one another and with him, and through him with God. He instructs them with his new commandment, to love one another as he has loved them. We Christians are still obligated by that commandment, to love with the fullness of incarnation. When we do that, we bear God’s Spirit and have our own true spiritual nature.

Moreover, I am pleased to tell you, friends, that when we engage life with divinely passionate love, miracles do happen. We might not make wine from water without benefit of grapes, but we can make bounties happen for the humble of the earth. We might not cure the blind by putting mud on their eyes, but we can cure them many other ways. We might not raise the long-dead but we can prevent many deaths and with sufficient love keep the memory of the dead alive for those to whom they are bound in heart. With love we can open the eyes of the spiritually blind. With love we can comfort the oppressed and dismantle their oppression. With love we can make peace where others would make war. With love we can feed the hungry and cloth the naked. With love we can break the bonds of sin and open the doors of the prisons so that all might be free. With love we can gather the people exiled in alienation and unite them as loving friends. The flesh of loving intimacy among friends is the perfect vehicle for God’s Spirit.

My friends, let our prayer be that we inhabit our own flesh with such vigor and gratitude that it becomes the natural dwelling place of God’s spirit in all we are and do. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 03.13.2005 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Some people say that “seeing is believing,” by which they mean that the testimony of the senses is far better than hearsay, or even than reasoning that is subject to error. Our texts from 1 Samuel and John, however, suggest that we ordinarily see what we already believe, that our sight is guided by our expectations. Genuine sight needs to get beneath the appearances governed by our expectations.

In the case of Samuel’s search for someone to anoint as the new king of Israel, everyone expected him to pick Jesse’s first son, Eliab, because he was big and strong, rather like King Saul, the first anointed king who subsequently had been rejected by God. But God said to Samuel about Eliab, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” We look on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart. How true! At the Lord’s urging, Samuel rejected all the other sons of Jesse, save the last and least, David, who had been left to tend the flocks. Samuel anointed David to be the next King; the word for the anointed one in this sense was the Hebrew cognate of “messiah.” King Saul was the first “messiah,” for he too had been anointed. But David better fulfilled the ideal of the kingly messiah, uniting Israel after Saul’s death, defeating its enemies, and extending its territory to its greatest extent; he was a mighty warrior and a brilliant strategist, defeating both external enemies and armed rebellions among his own people. In Jesus’ time, the Pharisees and others hoped for another messiah on the model of David, someone who would drive out the Romans and re-establish the power of the Israelite or Jewish nation. Jesus obviously was not that kind of person, and so was rejected by those who hoped for another David.

Before leaving the story of David, however, it is worthwhile to recall that he was a complex character. Although ultimately uniting the twelve tribes of Israel and giving identity to a unified nation, David early had a falling out with King Saul and formed his own mercenary army that worked for the Philistines for a while. With that army he conquered Jerusalem, which belonged to a Canaanite people called the Jebusites. That is why Jerusalem is called the “City of David,” because he conquered it with his private army, not with a levy of warriors from the twelve tribes of Israel like the army of Saul. This made Jerusalem a good neutral capital, not a town owned by any of the tribes, though it was in the territory of David’s own tribe, Judah. As an individual, David was a sexual predator, sending Bathseba’s husband to his death so that she might be his. David’s family was filled with intrigue, with his wives and sons plotting against one another to determine his successor. His children were involved in rape and incest, as well as outright rebellion in the case of Absalom whom David loved dearly. David was a complex, deeply flawed human being, just as we are, only with kingly proportions. His greatest virtue, however, was that he danced before the Lord, both literally and figuratively. When he sinned he repented. When he made mistakes he sought the Lord. When he won battles, he credited God. When he governed the state, he did it for God. What he learned in his long life, he learned from living before the Lord. Despite all his mistakes and sins, he died with a wise son to succeed him and a healthy kingdom to pass on. Who would have seen this God-intoxicated world-beater, this voracious consumer of life’s loves and opportunities, looking at young David standing before Samuel, ruddy, with beautiful eyes, and handsome, almost a feminine creature in comparison with his brothers? Only someone who could see beyond the expectations of appearances into the heart.

John’s story of Jesus and the blind man is a far more complex case of seeing beyond expectations. John has an elaborate theme of visibility and invisibility, sight and blindness. As Jesus and his disciples were walking along they encountered the blind beggar. The disciples asked whether the man was born blind because of his own sin or because of that of his parents. The connection of blindness to sin has a powerfully ironic twist at the end of the story when Jesus said “’I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’ Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are we?’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, “we see,” your sin remains.’” In other words, if they had not claimed understanding, they would not be accountable for sin.

In response to the disciples’ question about who was responsible for the beggar’s blindness, Jesus denied that any one was responsible. But he did say that the man’s blindness had a purpose, namely, to set Jesus up for an important public miracle, demonstrating the work of God. Now you and I might not approve of this conception of a God who makes a man suffer blindness from birth to adulthood just to demonstrate Jesus’ divine powers. We do not believe that illness has a purpose, for punishment or anything else, although of course we can give meaning to illness. At any rate, Jesus gave the blind man sight, without even being asked to do so, by the way. The man’s neighbors were incredulous. The Pharisees asked how he had been healed and the formerly blind man gave them just the facts: he put mud on my eyes, and washed, and I could see. When asked where Jesus was, the man said simply that he didn’t know, which was true.

The Pharisees then got into a theological wrangle. One side said that Jesus must be a sinner because he worked on the Sabbath, while the other side said that he could not do such miraculous healings unless he were from God. Then, strangely, they asked the formerly blind man what he thought about Jesus, strange because the man had been blind all his life and worked only as a beggar, not a likely theological consultant. The man said Jesus was a prophet because of his power to heal. Not believing in miraculous healings, the Pharisees then decided that the man could not have been blind previously. But his parents confirmed that he had been. The parents, however, expected to be thrown out of the temple community for not agreeing with the Pharisees, so they sent them back to talk with their son. When the Pharisees told him that Jesus must be a sinner, the man said he didn’t know about that. What he did know was that he had been blind and Jesus gave him sight. When the Pharisees annoyed the man, he suggested wryly that they must want to be Jesus’ disciples because they kept questioning him about Jesus. He then said that, if they were right about God listening only to the righteous, then Jesus the healer must be from God.

Both the Pharisees and the man’s parents were blinded by their expectations, the former by their theological expectations, the latter by expectations of retribution from the Pharisees. Even Jesus was a bit callous toward the blind man by treating him as an occasion for a revelatory miracle, although when he heard that the Pharisees expelled the formerly blind man from the temple he sought the man out and declared his identity as the Son of Man or messiah. Jesus gave the man not only sight but a new home when both the temple and his parents failed him.

The one person in this story who had perfect sight was the blind man. He knew who he was, a blind beggar, and had no expectations. He accepted Jesus’ gift of sight with gratitude, and told the story of it with no embellishments. Unlike his pa
rents, he saw through the confused and hypocritical Pharisees with fearless steadiness and irony. He learned who Jesus was only when Jesus told him, not from any religious expectation, although he always understood his healing to have been divinely caused. When he realized who Jesus was, he worshipped him.

Would we not be blessed to have the sight of the blind man?! With no ego expectations of grandiose righteousness or self-excusing victimization, we would know just who we are without illusions. We could accept the demeaning status of having to beg without being demeaned by it. We could accept sudden and unexpected blessings, such as serious healing, with gratitude and equanimity. We could tell others the truth, saying what we know and admitting what we do not know, without having to embellish the truth with hopes and disappointments. We could take the consequences of the truth without fear, knowing that whatever is comes from God. Best of all, we would not hate God because of the pain in our lives and we would not love God because of the good in our lives. Rather, with the blind man’s sight, with his ascetic lack of expectations, we would love God for God’s own sake when we meet him. We would delight to discover that the person who heals our disabilities and dispenses grace is also the Son of God. We would see through to God as found in the least of our brothers and sisters.

My friends, I know that it is customary to see God primarily in terms of what God can do to us or for us. Fear of divine wrath on the one hand and hope in divine promises on the other are the doorways of most religious views, if not the substance of most religion itself. Yet those are only appearances, too human ways of seeing, because they really are about us, projections of our fears and desires, rather than about God. Like God, we should strive to see beyond the appearances into the heart of individuals, human affairs, and God. We might see beyond the handsome, ruddy boy with beautiful eyes to the soul of a hero of humanity. We might see beyond the hypocritical intrigues about religious righteousness to the humility of true repentance and gratitude. And we might see beyond God “for us” to the true God to whom the only real response is worship. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 03.6.2005 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

For those of us who shape our Christian lives somewhat by the liturgical calendar, the move from Transfiguration Sunday, whose astonishing transfiguring experiences we celebrated last week, to the first Sunday of the penitential Lenten season might seem a rough jolt. Yet I think it is not so. The question that remained at the end of our consideration of transfiguring experiences was how to tell the destructive, death-dealing ones from those that engage God in ways that lead to or enhance salvation. The answer I sketched briefly last week was that the transfiguring experiences, however weird, need to be set in an interpretive context in which they can be seen to engage God in a true way. The experiences do not interpret themselves. By themselves they might be bizarre and meaningless; they might be destructive hallucinations. But grasped within the context of a richly lived Christian life, they can be instruments for engaging God more deeply.

Suppose you are very poor, near to starving and you fear you are indeed starving. You begin to hallucinate. The recurrent hallucination is that the Devil comes to you and tells you that you are the omnipotent Child of God and that all you have to do is command the stones and they will become bread. This hallucination becomes an obsession every day your efforts to find food reach the eleventh hour. So in weak desperation you go to your spiritual advisor for help. (Everyone has a spiritual advisor, I trust.) Your advisor asks you whether you are indeed the Child of God, as your hallucination says, and you answer cynically, “how could I be so hungry if I were?” “But are you the Child of God?” “Well, the Bible says I am,” you say. “If you could change the stones to bread,” the advisor asks, “would you?” “Oh, dear God yes,” you mutter. “Does being the Child of God mean you have miraculous powers?” “No,” you say, “there is nothing special about my powers.” “Then what does it mean that you are the Child of God?” the advisor asks. “The Bible says that God’s entire creation is for the benefit of God’s children,” you answer. “So then,” the advisor says, “have you been to the soup kitchen to eat? Have you gone to the shelters to sleep? Have you gone to social services for welfare? Have you applied for medical benefits? Have you gotten job training? Why are you starving in the midst of all these?” Now you confess with understanding, “this vision of magical powers to turn stones to bread tempted me to a grandiose pride that turned me away from God’s plenty and support all around me. I succumbed to the temptation to believe that as a Child of God I am supposed to be God, though I would have fed only myself. Now I understand and am so sorry.” Your spiritual advisor says, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. You are forgiven. Now seek out your God’s graces.”

The spiritual advisor transported the transfiguring vision of the temptation to grandiose powers of turning stones to bread into the larger context of divine grace. In that interpretive context the vision heals the disengagement from God and opens us to the plenty around us. The people whose starvation cannot be avoided because there are no soup kitchens, sleeping shelters, welfare systems, medical aid and job training, suffer from our failure to do God’s obvious work.

Suppose that you are a sincere and faithful Christian, but a risk taker. Suppose you are a student who believes that God won’t let you fail and so play too much rather than study enough. The reason for your belief is a transfiguring cartoon fantasy of God’s angels on your shoulders to give you the inspired answers on the test. (Perhaps this was prompted by some television shows?) Or suppose you are in business and see a great opportunity that also entails the possibility of losing everything; buoyed by a vision God’s angels protecting His own, without counting the cost you leap at the opportunity, daring God to let you fail. And you fail. In despair at flunking out or losing your entire fortune you go to your spiritual advisor and say, “Jesus! Where was God when I needed him?” The advisor asks, “Wasn’t it your responsibility to study for the exams? Wasn’t it your responsibility to calculate how much you would be willing to lose for the possibility of gaining the business advantage?” “Yes,” you say, “but how can God let his faithful servants be so destroyed?” “Why do you put God to the test?” asks the advisor. “Do you think God to be so small that you can manipulate providence to your advantage? Is God not the creator of the other students who study much harder and the other business people in the competition?” So you confess that you are selfish in wanting the vast impersonal processes of creation to be bent to your own ends. “No, not only that,” responds the advisor, “you need to confess your lack of faith that makes you always put God to the test. You need to confess that you do not have faith to engage the actual world God gives you, with precisely the tests and opportunities of your life. You need to confess that, in putting God to the test, you have been fleeing from the actual life God gives you in which you might not always be a winner and come out on top, in which all you can do is try your best. Why put God to the test when it is you whom God has under examination?” “Yes, I see,” you say. “Jesus, help me live my life”

The transfiguring vision of divine protection, which so many of us have in various forms, tempts us to avoid life and belligerently reject the God who gives us that life. But interpreted precisely as a temptation, that vision stokes the faith and courage to accept even broken and bedraggled lives with gratitude to God.

Suppose you are a political leader of a powerful country and are deeply committed to bringing world peace, establishing universal justice, eradicating hunger, and installing democracy in every nation. Then you have a transfiguring vision that you can impose these goals if you devote yourself to the acquisition of dominating power and wealth. It is not enough to try your best with the resources at hand, because God knows people can undermine peace, subvert justice, starve others to fulfill their own greed, and use government to enrich their own pockets. Your pursuit of dominating power and wealth to do good becomes an infinite passion because you never have enough. Any bombs that are not yours can be used against you; any competitive centers of wealth can buy off your success. Though you sell your soul to the sword and the dollar, the Lord of those earthly powers turns up as the god of chaos and you are mired in un-winnable wars in a global economy that outsources your resources. “Lord Jesus!” you cry, “I was trying so hard to establish your kingdom! Why won’t the lion lie down with that . . . lamb!?” “My friend,” your spiritual advisor says, “it is God who makes lions and lambs. God’s people often think they have to fight about things in order to get justice for themselves; one people’s hunger leads to violence that starves others worse; and no one trusts democracy if they think there is a chance they can get dominating power and wealth by themselves. Are you not the villain here?” “But Lord,” you say, “I have sacrificed my allies, my honor, my self-respect, and my sense of due measure in order to acquire the power to control things for the good. I cannot stop worshipping the promise of power, and I hate that, and myself.” “My friend,” says Jesus, “worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” “How can I break the hold of the promise of power to worship God,” you plead, “without allowing th
e possibility of more violence, injustice, hunger and tyranny? I’m holding back the sea with my hand in the dike as it is! And I hate what I’ve become too much to ask for the pardon to worship God.” “You do not have to merit pardon to worship God,” says the Lord. “The ever-creating love that courses through those whom you think you need to control runs in your veins too. Your temptation is not really to the chaotic sources of possible power, as you believe, but to bondage to that possible power. You need the bondage. You tell yourself you want to control things for the good: but in fact you are terrified of control that can never be perfect, and want to escape responsibility, and flee to the excuse of Satan’s bondage. Give it up! Just do the best you can. Respect God’s dignity in all the others. And worship the God who creates you more than able always to make worship of God a possibility for your infinite passion. Repent and do it!” “Thank you, Lord Jesus,” you say.

Temptation exposed to the context of God leads not to fall but to God.

Suppose you and your beloved are strolling in a garden when, with a blinding flash, a very skinny theologian approaches you and says, “Faust, let me tempt you with this fruit. The old wives’ tale is that it is poison, but millions of people have eaten it for thousands of years and lived to tell the tale. Those who eat it learn God’s ways to tell the right from wrong. And see how beautiful it is! ” Your beloved, who is a better theologian, replies, “You clever angel of dark light, you can’t trick us out of gratitude to God and obedience to Creation’s givens for us. We’ve tasted that fruit time and again. The first time it tasted like life-giving food and we forgot the source of true nourishment. The first time our new wisdom about right and wrong brought only shame and we forgot it was God’s wisdom. The first time it was beautiful and delicious by itself and we forgot what beauty truly signifies. Forgetting whence we came, and where we were, and what things ultimately signify, we found ourselves left with only a greater hunger, a shameful self-consciousness, and a beauty that was only a reflection of ourselves. Over time, however, with much pain and sacrifice, we have come to see that the fruit is forbidden only when we forget the God who placed it in the garden. Through many hard lessons, and repeated revelations through our fog, we have come to see the fruit as a sign of God’s loving nurture, God’s obliging tasks for us, and God’s beauty more glorious than a natural polish. So, we’ll take the fruit, and thank you for it.” “You’ll what?” says Satan. “This temptation will make you mine, not God’s!” “Oh, no,” you say. “My beloved showed me that a love willing to go to death for love’s sake transfigures temptations into testimonies to divinity. Your trials are our spiritual exercises. Your temptations lead to our freedom. Your fruit’s alluring beauty reflects God’s glory. Share your fruit with us, it is so beautiful.” “Damn!” cries Satan. “Come with us,” say you and your beloved in unison.

Lent’s lesson is that God’s redeeming power is so great that even the fiercest evil forces can be transfigured to reflect God’s glory in justice and mercy. Good things can be transfigured to reveal God when we see them in the context of our approach to God. Bad things can be transfigured the same way. But it is so much harder to engage God with bad things than good things that we need the sweat of Lent to work things through. The temptations of grandiose fantasies of power, of obsessive demands to be loved, and of passions for dominance fueled by self-hate, are fiendishly difficult to transfigure into humility and love before our divine beloved. With the companionship of Jesus, however, our Lenten discipline can do that work. I invite you into that grand transfiguration in which the world is made holy. Amen

posted in Uncategorized on 02.13.2005 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

The Feast of the Transfiguration, which is the formal name for this Sunday in the liturgical calendar, celebrates one of the more weird events in Christian history. After Peter had declared that Jesus was the Messiah—six days after according to Matthew and Mark, eight days for Luke—Jesus took Peter, James, and John up a mountain and was transfigured before their eyes, his body and clothing becoming radiant. Moreover, the disciples saw him talking with Moses and Elijah. Peter offered to make temporary shelters for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, an offer not taken up. Then a bright cloud came over the mountain and a voice spoke from the cloud saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him.” The disciples fell to the ground, and Jesus came over and touched them with instructions not to be afraid. When they looked, Moses and Elijah were gone.

What does this mean, besides a physical transformation that computer graphics could easily duplicate today, right down to the appearance of Moses and Elijah? Part of the meaning lies in the reference to Moses. Our text from Exodus recounts Moses going up Mt. Sinai to receive the Covenant; on the peak God’s presence is like a bright cloud that cannot be approached but through which God blesses the people. When Moses went back down the mountain, his face was transfigured to shine so brightly that it frightened the people. For Christians, Moses brought the first covenant and Jesus the second or new covenant. Matthew’s transfiguration passage affirms the continuity of the covenants from Moses to Jesus, thus running contrary to those who believe that Jesus’ covenant was a rejection of Moses’ covenant rather than a continuous supplement.

Another part of the meaning of the transfiguration comes out in Peter’s eye-witness recollection of the event, in the Epistle this morning. Peter referred to the transfiguration as a counter to the charge that Jesus was something like a pagan god, filled with magic. However magical the transfiguration was, Peter said he was there and saw it. Moreover, he saw Moses and Elijah, both long dead. This demonstrated to him the resurrection of the dead. Not only was Jesus raised, he would come again, just as Moses and Elijah came again. The transfiguration was thus a foretaste of resurrected life.

Yet another part of the meaning of Jesus’ transfiguration is that the disciples saw Jesus as approved by God. The voice, which the people took to be God’s, identified Jesus as God’s son in whom God was well pleased. These were the same words heard when Jesus was baptized by John. At the baptism, Jesus was transformed. At the transfiguration, the disciples were transformed.

What does all this mean for us today? I doubt many of us take this as a literal happening that somehow proves Jesus’ divinity, although that is how the story was taken for centuries. To our skeptical minds it seems too much like a dream, and Luke actually says that the disciples were falling asleep when the vision came.

Let me ask you, however, whether you have ever had experiences in which your world suddenly was transfigured and shown to be vastly more profound, astonishing, and divine than you had thought. When I was thirteen, my high school English teacher was talking with me about religion after class and remarked, “You know, Bob, that God is not in time.” I was astonished by that remark, astonished to have encountered a totally new and unusual thought, astonished that I understood it, and astonished to see suddenly into the intellectual world in which I knew then I would live the rest of my life. When I was a college student I worked in a Boy Scout camp as chaplain in the summers. One night, as I lay on the deserted parade ground looking up at the star-filled night sky, suddenly I saw through that vision to an infinity of creation incomprehensibly old and vast in which I had my own particular place, a divine meeting ground of the infinite and the finite, or more prosaically, of God and me. Later in college I came to the sudden realization that the pastor of my church when I was in high school had been a saint, not just the kindly man who brought me into ministry, but a saint; what a transfiguration of my adolescence that realization was, to have been in the presence of a saint! In graduate school I was working on the philosophical problem of divine creation and one day, confused and in emotional and intellectual agony, I knelt by my rickety chair to pray —dirty yellow in the pseudo-Danish Modern style. Suddenly all my thinking fell together and I grasped my complex theory of divine creation like a vast name of God and that name let my prayer engage God as I had never before: I perceived God as creator. And so came more little transfigurations. About a dozen years ago I was visualizing Jesus as a revelation of God and pictured him running up a hill, nearing the verge, with a crowd including myself running behind him, knowing that when we topped the verge we would see God. Again and again we ran up, never reaching the top. At last we followed Jesus over the brow of the hill and I fell into a comprehension of how God contains the present, past, and future all together, not in time but in the creation of time, a divine life infinitely more dynamic than our passing of days within time. The intellectual theory, of course, was my own construction, but the transfiguring experience was to think and feel God through it. To this day it takes me about three hours to think or meditate myself into grasping that complex idea plus the visualization of Jesus that allows me to engage God by that means, and I very rarely have that much concentrated time. But every time, it is a transfiguration of my experience.

I wager that many of you have had transfiguring experiences in which something ordinary and everyday suddenly becomes luminous to reveal something extraordinary and life-transforming. Astonishing sunsets, the primeval heave of the ocean, transcendent music, the birth of a baby, someone’s touch at the right time, the bottoming out of despair, a sudden strange empathy with people to whom you are not connected: most of you have had personal experiences that set you outside the ordinary and give you a temporary new grasp on reality. Not all transfiguring experiences are happy and uplifting, to be sure. The world in which my wife and I lived was radically transfigured when our daughter died in infancy and we have spent nearly forty years coming to terms with that. Some people’s worlds are transfigured by madness, which is disconnected from the rest of reality. Theologians such as Paul Tillich call these “ecstatic” experiences, moments of ecstasy that figuratively make us stand outside ourselves in a new reality; “ecstasy” literally means standing outside oneself. Experiences such as these are little transfigurations.

How do we cope with these little transfigurations? They usually do not last long and they get submerged in ordinary reality when we come back down the mountain. When Jesus went back down in the morning he had to plunge right in to deal with a botched healing that his other, less than competent, disciples had attempted in his absence. Often we do not understand our transfigurations at the time, as the disciples did not understand Jesus’ transfiguration until after his death and resurrection. Sometimes these experiences are so delicious that we classify them as aesthetic and lift them out of life into irrelevance. Or they are so terrifying and horrible that they are dangerous to our sense of secure ordinary reality, and we try to deny, repress, and forget them. Few of us have grand life-shattering mystical experiences. Mostly we get along rather with small passing ecstasies
to which we might give little or no importance.

Friends, let me suggest that we cope with our transfigurations as windows through which to see God and what is ultimately important. Those transfigurations become like ideas or signs by which we can discern realities that are opaque to us without those signs. Like an NMR machine that creates a television picture of your insides out of perturbations in a magnetic field, these transfiguration experiences are signs that make it possible for us to engage what ordinary experience hides. These transfigurations give us the language, the images, the tools, with which we can recognize and relate to extraordinary dimensions of reality. By their means we can interpret aspects of reality that otherwise we would miss.

The transfigurations of life are engagements with the depth dimensions of reality. But they themselves need to be understood as interpretations engaging reality. If we look at the experiences themselves, taken out of their interpretive roles in engaging ultimate matters, they can be silly or just madness. Perhaps they are only dreams, fictions, intellectual constructs in my case. Ecstatic experiences can be caused by epilepsy, or LSD, or whirling in a circle, and they mean nothing in themselves. Nevertheless, if we cope with them, not in themselves, but as parts of existential acts of engaging things deeper than the ordinary, they can become the symbols that throw us together with those deep matters. The literal meaning of “symbol” is “to throw together,” to engage. Like all matters of the Spirit, the problem is to discern the spirits to see whether these transfigurations are of the Holy Spirit. The long run test is whether they lead to the life of love, peace, and graciousness. The short run tests have to do with whether they give meaning to our lives as genuine engagements with reality’s ordinarily hidden depths. Part of the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, or of our task of holiness, is to find ways to live with the blazing colors of the extraordinary reality of our wild God at the same time that we live with the muted colors of ordinary life within which we lie under obligation and without which life would be chaos.

I invite you, therefore, to treasure your transfigurations, meditate on them, ask what you might learn from them. Let them be a lesson that our ordinary thoughts paint reality with dull colors so that we can deal with the practical dimensions of life. The transfiguring experiences teach us that God’s blinding colors truly can be seen and loved, if only for a moment, and only with weird images that ordinary life cannot stand to take seriously.

Many of us have seen this pita bread and port wine transfigured into the body and blood of Jesus. Truly, this is sometimes a vision, not just a doctrine. Perhaps we have also peered beyond to the next window and seen the body and blood of Jesus transfigured to be God’s merciful purification, God’s food, God’s love, God’s depth, God’s glory. I invite you to trust your transfigurations and, like the disciples, to wait upon the understanding of them. Come to this mountain-top meal. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 02.2.2005 at 11:00 am