Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

We are accustomed to giving much attention to the Last Supper, the meal Jesus had with his disciples the night in which he was betrayed and on which we base the Eucharist. The Gospel of John, however, in its account of the Last Supper does not include the Eucharistic words of institution, Jesus’ admonition to take the bread and wine as his body and blood. John cites Jesus saying these words much earlier in his ministry with the very strong claim that those who do not eat his body and drink his blood have no share in eternal life (John 6). In John’s version of the Last Supper the ritual activity is footwashing.

In contrast to the other gospels, John’s ends with a long and intricate epilogue in which the resurrected Jesus appears to a select and mostly named group of disciples in Galilee and cooks them breakfast. Some scholars believe that the last chapter of John is a late addition, mainly because it differs so much from the other gospel accounts. If it is a late addition, which I doubt, it still expresses the most important distinctive themes of John’s Gospel and is a kind of balancing text to the famous prologue, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

One of John’s distinctive approaches throughout his gospel is the use of symbolic allegory. So, for instance, Jesus feeds the disciples breakfast and then tells Simon Peter, their leader, to feed his sheep, meaning all the others whom Jesus loves. Jesus’ breakfast is an allegorical act defining the work of the Church. We take the sheep to refer to us, although I don’t know how you like being thought of as sheep.

Another of John’s distinctive approaches is seemingly the opposite of high allegory, namely an attention to details. For instance, in the breakfast scene he names the disciples: Peter, Thomas, Nathanael, the sons of Zebedee, and two others, one of whom is likely the Beloved Disciple whose testimony is the basis for the Gospel of John. John puts in the detail about Peter getting so excited and confused when he realizes that Jesus is on the shore that he puts on his clothes and then jumps overboard to swim back to Jesus. I love the detail that they caught 153 fish. Which one of the disciples do you supposed counted them?

Perhaps the most important detail is that Jesus is personally concerned about the disciples. The first thing Jesus says to them is, “Lads, you have no fish, have you?” When they report that he is right, he tells them where to cast the net and they haul in 153. Struggling to shore with the laden boat, they find that Jesus has already brought bread, laid a charcoal fire, caught some fish himself, and is cooking the fish for them. He asks them to come eat the breakfast. Yet apparently they hang back. John says “none of them dared ask him, ‘Who are you?’” Somehow they knew it was Jesus, yet it must not have looked like him. This problem of recognition is like the first resurrection appearance that John records, when Mary Magdalene first thinks Jesus is the gardener. In the two other resurrection appearances in John’s gospel (there are four in all) Jesus looks like himself with the wounds of his crucifixion. However we are to understand the resurrection appearances, as I said two weeks ago, following the theologian Robert Jensen, the real body of the resurrected Jesus is wherever the person of Jesus is present to us. The person of Jesus was calling them to breakfast, and when they did not come, “Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish.” He served them to allay their fear and wonder. He cared for them with a touching intimacy, tender with their confusions.

Remember that at the Last Supper he had washed the disciples’ feet, another intimate touch, and then had talked with them after dinner about love. That discussion is the founding statement of the Christian community as a community of love. Now after they finish breakfast, Jesus talks with them about love again, but in an even more intimate way. He asks Peter whether he loves him. At the Last Supper Peter had sworn his undying love and loyalty, saying that he would lay down his life for Jesus. Jesus had answered with irony, nay, with resignation and pity, “Will you lay down your life for me? Very truly, I tell you, before the cock crows, you will have denied me three times.” That is exactly what happened. Luke records that at the moment the cock crowed, Jesus who was being interrogated a short distance away turned and looked at Peter, and Peter wept bitterly.

Now imagine you were Peter. Jesus had treated you as leader of the disciples and you had thought your love for him was so great that you would follow him to death. You had been brave enough to defend Jesus with a sword when he was arrested but when the venue changed to the courthouse you had denied that you even knew him. You were not under immediate threat, you were not being tortured, no one of importance was questioning you. But you denied three times all association with the one you had professed to love to death. And he had seen it. How would you feel when Jesus was killed before you could beg forgiveness? How would you feel in front of the other disciples who had heard Jesus’ prediction of denial and had seen you do it?—the disciple whom Jesus loved was with Peter when he denied Jesus. I don’t know about you, but I would be numb with grief. I would hate myself and doubt my capacity to love at all, or do anything worthwhile. When I’m numb with grief, I go grade papers, the basic grunt business of a college professor. Peter went home to Galilee and said, “I am going fishing.” Certain other disciples went along, also distraught and with nothing better to do. They spent a desolate black night on the boat, catching nothing. They were useless. Then in the morning Jesus came to them and told them how to haul in a bounty catch. And he fixed them breakfast. He would not accept Peter’s denial nor the others’ unhelpfulness and abandonment. He came back to them with food for life. And he repaired Peter’s torn soul.

Do you love me, Jesus asked? Yes, Lord, you know I love you, murmured Peter. Then take care of my people, said Jesus. So much for the first denial.

Do you love me, Jesus asked again. Yes, Lord, you know I love you, wept Peter. Then take care of my people, said Jesus. So much for the second denial.

Do you love me, Jesus asked for a third time. “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you,” affirmed Peter, catching on to Jesus’ gift of letting him reverse his denials three times. Now you will take care of my people, ordered Jesus, with the bands of love rewoven.

Although we rarely have dramatic circumstances like Peter’s, how easy it is for us to deny Jesus. Most of us have opportunities to speak up for Jesus and his Way, and we keep quiet, or play down our own participation in that Way. Far more frequent and insidious, however, are the denials of his Way in our behavior. In our moments of religious wakefulness we know about those denials and resent them. Like Peter and his friends, we might be a little ambivalent about meeting the risen Christ.

Yet the point of the Last Breakfast is that Jesus seeks out us deniers, feeds us for the journey, repairs our broken souls, and gives us the commission to take care of those whom Jesus loved, namely, everybody. The Last Breakfast is a culminating symbol of Jesus’ Easter resurrection.

Contrast the Last Breakfast with the endings of the other gospels. Mark’s Gospel records no resurrection appearances at all. Luke’s Gospel ends in Jerusalem with a final lect
ure to the disciples about the scriptures and a commission to proclaim repentance and forgiveness to all nations. Jesus then leads them out to Bethany whence he ascends into heaven. Matthew’s Gospel ends with the disciples on a mountain in Galilee prostrating themselves before Jesus who tells them to make disciples of all nations and to teach them to obey. Instead of ascending to heaven he says that he will be with them until the end of the age. The reference to “all nations” in Matthew and Luke is a change from Jesus’ previous limitation of his mission to only the children of Israel. There is, I sense, something a bit official and almost bureaucratic about these leave-takings in Matthew and Luke, obviously intended by the evangelists to lay out a mission for the Church. The Last Breakfast, by contrast, is intimate in tone, with Jesus again serving his friends, enabling them to work again after their grief and confusion, repairing his particular friendship with Peter (and by analogy with us), and commissioning the disciples to carry on his Way. All three endings represent something authentic in the Christian tradition. Luke’s emphasizes the preaching of repentance and forgiveness. Matthew’s turns on the manufacturing model of making disciples. Both represent Jesus as something like a CEO addressing his employees. But John’s commission is to feed the people with the bread of life. “Feed my sheep” is what a lover would say who has just fed breakfast to his friends.

The lesson to draw from this is that when we deny Jesus in our personal lives with laziness and narcissism, Jesus comes to us with spiritual nourishment and lets us tell him that we love him despite our denial. Then he gives us the job of taking breakfast to those others whose personal lives are in grief and confusion. When we deny Jesus in our social lives with cruelty and exclusion, Jesus comes to us with nourishing kindness and lets us tell him we love him despite our denial. Then he gives us the job of taking breakfast to others who are grief-stricken at their own cruelty or the victims of exclusion. When we deny Jesus by complicity in unjust social and economic structures, Jesus comes to us with food for restraint and social change, and lets us tell him we love him despite our denial. Then he gives us the job of taking breakfast to others whose lives are threatened by injustice. When we deny Jesus with a politics that makes optional war on those who do not accept our economic, religious, and political values, arrogantly assuming that our military might is stronger than people’s will for self-determination, cynically supposing that we can attack a people of God without them responding with a religious devotion to martyrdom, Jesus comes to us with a breakfast of humility, and lets us tell him we love him despite what we’ve done to those people he’s asked us to feed. Then he gives us the job of sacrificing our economy to the generation of our children’s children to pay for peace and reconstruction.

Our future at this moment seems as confusing and unexpected as the future must have seemed to Jesus’ small band of disciples gathered for the Last Breakfast. But they knew that nothing they could do by way of denial or flight could stop Jesus from offering them a breakfast of new life and a chance to restore their love. We know that too, for it has been the job of disciples through the ages to feed those whom Jesus loves down to our own time. The Church at its best is the Last Breakfast of Christ. It is the meal at the beginning of the day. Now our job is to feed those who are in grief or confusion, who suffer cruelty or exclusion, are victims of injustice and war, including those who hate us and deny our good intentions. In our humility, may we be worthy of the Christ who appears among us feeding his flock. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 04.25.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Allelujah, Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed! This is the central affirmation of Christianity. Its metaphoric sweep is broader and deeper than any specifics about Jesus. Concerning what they believe happened to Jesus, Christians contradict one another in many ways. Many Christians simply don’t care much about the specifics of Jesus. And yet all agree that the meaning of Easter is that new life comes from the bleakest of circumstances, even death, and that this new life is available to us, our hope. If Easter were only about Jesus and not about our own hope, it would not be so central to Christianity.

The metaphoric sweep of life from death encompasses far more even than Christianity, and is symbolized in other ways than Jesus’ resurrection. All the great and small religions in climatic zones with distinct changes of seasons celebrate the new life of spring emerging from the death of winter. Some religions focus on the celebration of the season itself. Others celebrate founding events in the springtime, such as Passover. Ancient paganism celebrated the dying and rising of gods. Our late-modern urbanized societies are less close to the land, less immediately conscious of the spring thaw making our livelihood possible. Yet even in Boston, prayers for the coming of spring after a hard winter are second only to prayers for the Red Sox. More than that, in Boston, hope for the Red Sox’s new season is our central sacrament in the pan-religions celebration of new life from death.

Because we have hope that new life can come from death, we have hope even when people we love have died, we have hope in the face of illness, we have hope for careers despite failures, we have hope to improve spiritually, we have hope to gain health, to build strength, to lose weight, to slow ageing, we have hope for our families, for our friends, for our enemies, we have hope to improve our neighborhoods, our schools, our local governments, we have hope to conquer racism, we have hope to lessen poverty, we have hope to respect our environment, we have hope for courage to engage our time, we have hope to overturn prejudice against ethnic and gender minorities, we have hope to ban unfair discrimination from our laws, we have hope to understand cultures that are threatened by our own, we have hope for peace in central Africa, Palestine, and Northern Ireland, we have hope that the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq will soon govern themselves, we have hope to remove the grounds for terrorism and to stop the terrorists, we have hope to stop making war, we have hope for the justice of our economy, we have hope for the honesty of our government, we have hope that the Red Sox will win the World Series this year! It is a metaphysical condition of the cosmos at our scale of things that new life is possible in the worst of conditions, even death, or the Yankees.

I heartily welcome all of you who are here or listening on the radio, not because you are may be dedicated to the community of Jesus, but because you are celebrating spring, the resurrection of life from death, and the ever-recurrent hope that our intractable griefs and obstacles can be overcome. When Martin Luther King, Jr., said “I have a dream that someday . . .,” he was expressing his bigger-than-Easter faith. Christianity is but one way of symbolizing that hope which defines the human spirit under pressure.

Let me turn now, however, to the specifically Christian way of having that faith and hope. Christianity is based on the cosmic drama of creation and redemption. I have been preaching through Lent on the vastness of creation and how to understand that in terms of our own knowledge now. Whatever else might happen in the rest of the cosmos, on Earth human beings have become faulty creatures, symbolized by the Fall. Human faults are of many kinds, and I listed some of them a moment ago in respect of which we have hope for repair. The chief fault, however, is that people are estranged from God the Creator who gives them a world filled with joys and troubles. The proper relation to God was symbolized by the Covenant between God and Israel, according to which those who are pure and holy in terms of the Covenant can approach God. That was symbolized as approaching the Holy of Holies where God is. Alas, people constantly break the covenant, and as a result cannot approach God. As a restorative remedy, the Torah, particularly the book of Leviticus, specifies sacrifices that people can have made by the priests on their behalf to repair specific breaches of the covenant, thereby restoring their readiness to approach God.

In Jesus’ time, however, the system of Temple sacrifices to enable a proper relation to God was widely perceived as not working. For one thing, out of political necessity to keep the Temple functioning those who managed the Temple had to be collaborators with the Roman Empire. The Sadducees, mentioned in the gospels, were the “party” associated with the Temple and their collaboration with Pontius Pilate in the trial of Jesus illustrates what was probably a widespread political reality. Many people felt that under these circumstances the practice of the religion of Israel had become lax and corrupt. Some extreme groups, such as the Essenes, attempted to live apart from the larger society altogether. Preachers such as John the Baptist and Jesus began reform movements within the larger society, preaching repentance and a purer practice of the relation to God. The Pharisees were a group or movement that supplemented worship in the Temple with a quasi-independent religious life centered in local synagogues, advocating an earnestness about keeping the law and a personal piety centered in the family. When the Temple was destroyed a generation after Jesus, the Pharisaic movement, loosely defined, became the default center of Judaism because it could flourish without the Temple, though always remembering it. What we know as Judaism today is descended from the Pharisees and associated reform movements within Second Temple Judaism. Jesus’ own teaching was within the general orbit of the Pharisaical reform movement, contrary to the impression you might get from the gospels that depict the Pharisees as debate partners with Jesus; it was something of an in-house debate.

Jesus preached not only a critical message, as seems to have been the case with John the Baptist, but also a very hopeful message. His followers had great expectations on Palm Sunday, and were devastated by his death on Friday. When the tomb was reported empty on Sunday, the disciples suddenly paid attention to some of the strange things Jesus had taught, hard lessons they had refused to understand, such as that the first shall be last and the last first, that it’s easier to relate to God if you are a loser than if you are a winner, and that he himself would be killed and rise again. Then the disciples began seeing Jesus here and there. Many of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus are strange. Often his close disciples don’t recognize him at first, as Mary Magdalene in our gospel mistook Jesus for a gardener, or the people on the road to Emmaus walked with a man most of the day before recognizing him as Jesus when he broke the bread at dinner. I don’t know whether you think that Jesus’ resurrection means his corpse was resuscitated, a point that has been debated for centuries. Some people would say that Mary mistook a real gardener for Jesus. I myself do not believe the issue is important because the disciples found the person of Jesus in whomever they saw and believed to be Jesus. The theologian Robert Jensen says that Jesus’ resurrected body is wherever his person is to be found, which is why we can say that the communion elements are the body of Christ, or the Church is the body of Christ. The point is, Jesus lived again for the disciples,
and later for Paul, and they were profoundly transformed by that. How so?

Remember in our gospel text Jesus tells Mary Magdalene not to touch him because he had not yet ascended to God, but was about to do so. The early Church’s profound transformation came with its understanding of the ascension. Think what it means. First, the ascension means the possibility of approaching God without the Temple. Second, Jesus himself was able to approach God that way. The book of Hebrews calls Jesus our High Priest who goes into the heavenly Holy of Holies for us. Third, Jesus goes to prepare a place for the disciples so that they too can approach God. Fourth, Jesus sends the Holy Spirit so that the disciples can live in right relation to God in the midst of their struggles in ordinary life. This in effect is a total restoration of the Covenant, and Jesus’ death symbolically is the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. Its importance is not to appease an angry God but to perfect and transform the covenant relation of Israel to God. Within twenty years of the beginning of the Christian movement, the apostle Paul generalized this point to say that Jesus made it possible for Gentiles, not only Jews, to inherit the covenant promises made to Israel. Jesus makes God cosmically accessible to everyone, and the Holy Spirit helps us live in right relation to all that.

Understanding this, the first disciples were transformed from what Paul called “old beings” living under the broken covenant to “new beings” who were rightly related to God. Jesus had taught that the right relation was to love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. Participation in the new covenant, extending the old, is to be a lover of God and neighbor. The idea of becoming a lover is easily generalizable, like new life from death; in fact, becoming a lover is new life from death.

So the early Christians cultivated loving communities as well as devotion to the love of God. What does it mean to love your neighbor? It means to be kind in all ways. But more important, it means to help you neighbor become a better lover, a new being. Thus began the particular history of the development of Christian communities around the globe and down through history to us. Its glory is that the resurrected Christ is seen in the persons of the saints, in our sacraments, teachings, good works, and in the Church itself as the body of Christ. Its shame is that our Christian communities have so often failed to embody Christ. For both cases, the risen and ascended Christ is judge over the Church, accessible through the Holy Spirit in our imaginations, and discriminated by our minds in careful discernment of spirits. For nearly two thousand years, Jesus has lived in the Church’s imagination and grown as Lord of the Church, creating lovers and reconciling people to God, addressing issues the young Galilean could never have imagined before the resurrection.

The good news is that there is a power abroad in the Churches that makes new beings of us, that makes us God-lovers and lovers of one another. Loving God and one another we can face death as the price of life. We can engage the vital and sometimes intractable issues of our watch with genuine hope. That power is the person of Jesus raised from the dead into countless bodies around us, lovers all, ascended into heaven as our eternal host in God, king of the universe who makes possible our life before God, historical pioneer and perfector of the Christian movement, the dear friend who can live in our hearts, the savior who embraces the worst of us, and when we fall again, embraces us again, the Way to come to God, the Truth of God’s justice and mercy, the Life whose substance is love. These symbols of Jesus are the Christian’s ways to engage God in gratitude for the creation, in humility before the creator, and in love that embraces all the Creator’s creation. If only in part, we have felt this gratitude, we have knelt in humility, we have loved this love. I tell you, like the disciples waking up at Emmaus, in this we have seen the Risen Christ! Allelujah! Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed! Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 04.11.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Palm Sunday has an irony that can hardly be borne. Jesus entered Jerusalem like a king, riding a young donkey, which was supposed to symbolize a triumphant king in peacetime. His disciples formed a large courtly retinue. The people spread palm branches before him and shouted praise. By the following Friday he was dead, rejected by the people of Jerusalem who chose the life of Barabbas, a murderer and insurrectionist, over his and abandoned at least temporarily by even his own closest disciples. If ever there were a failed coup, this was it.

Let us not mistake the seriousness of this point. The people who welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem did indeed treat him like a legitimate king, a descendent of David, who would free Israel from the Romans and establish it as a sovereign kingdom under his own leadership. What Jesus himself really thought about that, we do not know, but he surely did let the people believe that. After finishing the ride into Jerusalem he went straight to the Temple, according to Luke’s account, and drove out the people who made a profit on selling animals to be sacrificed, a kind of cleansing that asserted his own royal authority over the Temple. Whether this Temple incident really happened during his last week or at the beginning of his ministry, as the Gospel of John says, its effect was to convince the Roman governor and the Chief Priests, who had a delicate collaboration, that Jesus was challenging their authority. They expressed no fear of some vague spiritual authority in Jesus. If that were their worry, they would have arrested his major disciples too so as to squelch his religious movement. The civil and priestly leaders were worried only about his rival political authority, which might be given him by the mob of people already upset by the Roman occupation.

The disciples too were expecting a royal victory for Jesus, according to Luke. Remember how they argued about which of them would have the highest status in Jesus’ kingdom. Jesus told them that they would be something like viceroys in his government, each judging one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Pitiful as it seems in contrast to the power of Rome, the disciples on the last night carried swords like a royal bodyguard and attempted to defend Jesus by force when he was arrested. Jesus had asked them to arm themselves before leaving the Passover supper, knowing that the authorities were looking for him.

All of this royal revolution business came to nothing. The Roman authorities stamped out the little threat Jesus posed by arresting and summarily executing him. His disciples abandoned resistance and went underground. Lest we think that the resurrection reversed Jesus’ political fortunes, remember it did not. The resurrection-appearances of Jesus to his disciples constituted brief stops on the way of his ascension into heaven, however you interpret that. Jesus left the field of earthly political combat, and the movement he started remained small and politically weak until it became the established religion of the empire under Constantine three centuries later.

Now perhaps Jesus himself did not intend a political kingdom. Perhaps his popularity as a teacher and healer was exploited by others who did want such a kingdom. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus told Pilate that his kingdom was not of this world, and that if it were his disciples would still be fighting. In Luke’s account, Jesus coyly refused to admit to being the king of the Jews, saying only that “you have said so.” When Jesus was baited about paying taxes to Caesar, he took a coin, pointed out Caesar’s image, and said to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s, effectively separating political from religious authority and ducking the issue. When his enemies tried to get him to say something seditious to the authority of either the Temple leaders or the Romans, he wiggled out. Of course the gospel accounts we have of all this were written a full generation after the events, and the writers were trying to deal with the fact of the devastating end to any political aspirations Jesus’ early movement might have had. We simply do not know what was in Jesus’ own mind.

Nevertheless, the early Christians drew a clear moral from the events: the authority with which we should be most concerned is God’s authority, not that of political power based on force of arms. When Christians do become engaged in political affairs and exercise political authority, as we should, the power to be sought should not be force of arms but the power of peacemaking. Within the New Testament itself, there is no clear ground for an absolutist pacifist position. I read the New Testament position to be that those with power have the responsibility to protect those without power from harm. This was an elementary meaning of the notion of the messiah from the Hebrew Bible. Having said this, we need to acknowledge Jesus’ consistent preachments to overturn the ordinary worldly power relations. The first shall be last and the last first. The greatest, our text says, meaning the elders, should be like the youngest. The leader is the one who serves, and the Gospel of John illustrated this with the story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.

For us Christians today, reflecting on the triumphal entry into Jerusalem and the utter collapse of that project, several conclusions follow.

First, political dominance by force of arms is not a Christian project, however much that might seem tempting to those who have enough arms to overthrow their oppressors. Should they have enough arms to do that and more, we can be practically certain that they would quickly assume the role of oppressors themselves.

Second, Christian engagement in political affairs should be directed by an aggressive campaign of strategic pacifism. By “strategic pacifism” I mean the use of non-violent techniques of the sort employed by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., to raise consciousness, to embarrass oppressors, and to force the primary issue of hypocrisy, namely, oppression disguised as benevolence. The grace in the world is so rich, and the depths of conscience are so powerful, that strategic pacifism often works. If only the Jewish and Muslim traditions contained strong elements of aggressive non-violence aimed at change for justice, the situation between Israel and Palestine in the Middle East would have been resolved long ago. They do not contain such traditions, however, and we recently have seen Israelis in a helicopter gunship assassinate an old, paraplegic in a wheelchair while leaving his prayers, not an innocent grandfather but the leader of Hamas who had sent children to their deaths as murderous suicide bombers, who in turn justify their actions with something like Nathan Hale’s sentiment, “I regret that I have only one life to give to my country,” outraged by the Israeli occupation of their land, which is deemed necessary to prevent the Palestinians from attacking Israel itself, which was planted by colonial forces that did not respect the 1300 years of Muslim culture in the land, and so forth. Violence breeds violence and the cycle escalates even in the face overwhelming military force on one side. That the United States has adopted the policy of enforcing an occupying power’s political agenda by force in Afghanistan and Iraq after seeing the power of patriotic political insurgence in Palestine, not to speak of remembering the founding years of the United States, boggles the mind.

Third, despite our best Christian efforts at peacemaking, when our own quest for power has become a mirror image of our opponents and the evil consists in the situation of violence itself, we still might have to engage in Christian battle to protect the weak. Reinhold Niebuhr was right that everyone loses in this situation, and the best alternative is the one that loses least in the m
oral scale. Public responsibility to the weak trumps personal virtue in a religion like Christianity that says the self is to be subordinated to the good of others. Glory be to God that Christianity is a religion designed for sinners.

Fourth, even the best strategy of peacemaking and reluctant war-making has no divine guarantee of success. The lesson of Palm Sunday is that even the best political legitimacy, the loftiest ideals, the craftiest peacemaking, and the most strategic mix of persuasion and force can end up on the cross. Christianity does not count on success in the terms of this world’s kingdoms. And we cannot abandon our responsibilities to this world, or draw back from making ultimate sacrifices like Jesus. Despite our best efforts, we might fail to protect the weak and secure justice.

Fifth, the Christians’ real success story has to do with binding our historical lives to God rather than winning on history’s terms. Moreover, the meaning of Palm Sunday is that we cannot relate ourselves to God without full engagement with the world. For Jesus, commitment to the world was a bitter cup. He did not want to drink the cup that God and history had given him. But had he snuck into Jerusalem rather than entering triumphantly, or snuck out of Gethsemane in the dark of night, it would have taught his disciples that the world does not matter. Jesus must have cried when he rode in triumph, knowing he would lose the world’s game. But he bound himself to God in love and turned the losing of the world’s game into truly winning the world. For, to become God’s lover in the midst of history’s confusions and alarms, its blind inertial forces and unbreakable cycles of violence and hatred, is to complete God’s creation in our local place. To be God’s lover means not giving up on the world, for God does not abandon the world. Jesus drank that cup, and so may we. When we are crucified, we each should still be able to say, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 04.4.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

On this last Sunday in Lent, the gospel switches from Luke, which we have read the previous Lenten Sundays, to John. John’s Gospel depicts Jesus as much more weird than the pictures of him in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. As we reflect upon this dinner party recounted by our text, I ask that you keep uppermost in your minds the fragrance of the perfume that filled the house. Perhaps you have not thought of perfume as a Lenten theme, but it is.

The dinner party at which Mary anointed Jesus’ feet with costly perfume took place in the house she shared with her sister Martha and brother Lazarus, on the night before his Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem. They lived in Bethany, a Jerusalem suburb. As John tells the story, Jesus’ raising of Lazarus from the dead was what brought him to the attention of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish governing council that reported to the Roman governor, who then was Pontius Pilate. Because many people were coming to believe in Jesus, at least as a miracle worker and possible messiah, the Sanhedrin feared that the Romans would take this to be rebellion and destroy the temple and city. Indeed a rebellion did take place about forty years later and the Romans did exactly what the Sanhedrin feared. The Sanhedrin resolved to kill Jesus in order to stay in the Romans’ good graces, according to John’s Gospel, and Jesus somehow knew about this. After raising Lazarus he had gone into hiding with his disciples in the town of Ephraim near the wilderness. But then as the Passover approached, he returned with his retinue to the Jerusalem area, knowing that the authorities were looking for him. The dinner party described in our text must have been a semi-public affair, and the next day Jesus entered Jerusalem riding on a donkey, which was a royal gesture. Jesus did not need prophetic powers to predict his own death, and he was inviting the authorities to come and get him. John’s account of Jesus’ arrest the following Thursday evening depicts Jesus as boldly approaching the police who had come to arrest him and asking them who they were looking for. When they said, “Jesus,” he responded, “I am he.” And Jesus seemed to be in control of everything that happened after that, fulfilling the role he understood God to have for him.

Who was this Jesus, who seemed to direct the drama of his own death? John’s gospel differs from the others in answering this question. For one thing, according to John, Jesus at this point was a mature man, a little short of fifty years old, not a young man of thirty. For another, John’s Jesus was a theologian who spoke from a God’s-eye view, not a prophet who dispensed wisdom. But most important for John, Jesus was the incarnation of the Logos, that fundamental divine structure through which everything that is made is made, as the Gospel’s prologue says. Not many preachers try to say what this means. Nevertheless, precisely because Christians believe that Jesus is the incarnation of God as Logos, it is important to think this through. Those of you, dearly beloved, who think sermons should be only uplifting stories have my permission to study your bulletin for a few minutes while I speak about the philosophical ideas involved in identifying this Jesus as the incarnation of God. The Gospel of John insists on this approach.

In the first century Jewish and Greek thinkers, and then Christian ones, often believed that the transcendent High God creates the world through a medium of transcendental structures, sometimes called Sophia, or Wisdom, sometimes Logos, which can be translated “Word” but also “Logic”. John’s Gospel begins, “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” John said “And the Logos became flesh and lived among us,” and he identified this with Jesus. The Christian doctrine of incarnation is that the Logos became flesh in Jesus. Ancient philosophy had several theories about what this transcendental structure of reality is, none of which can be taken over simply as it was today. We need a theory of the Logos for our own time that coordinates with our science and philosophy, if we are to understand Jesus as the incarnation of God.

Permit me to offer the following philosophical reflections as an hypothesis about the Logos. We have to consider what it means to be a thing: that’s very abstract, the nature of a thing as such. To be a thing is to be a harmony of elements, some of which relate the thing to other things, others of which give the thing its uniqueness and own-being. As a harmony, each thing has a form or pattern; each harmony has components that are integrated in the form or pattern; each harmony has some existential location with its own place and dates relative to other things; and each harmony has whatever value is achieved by having its particular components integrated by its particular pattern in its particular spatio-temporal location. The Logos, I suggest, then consists of the elements of harmony that are universal to every thing, namely relational and unique features expressed in form, components formed, existential location, and value. Every thing is a harmony with these elements: form, components formed, existential location, and value. This Logos is in protons and quarks, mountains and seas, astro-physical entanglements, the clash of civilizations, and the subtle nuances of human life. It constitutes the connections of things as well as their differences.

Human beings are special cases. Protons, stones, and super-novas simply have the forms, components, existential locations and values that they do, all determined by law or chance. But we human beings have some control over what we do and become. For us, it is a problem to have the right form for our personal and social lives: we call that problem justice or righteousness. For us, it is a problem how to relate to the components of our lives that we integrate with our formal patterns; do we regard those components only according their instrumental roles in our humanly important patterns, or do we need also to regard them with deference or piety for their worth in themselves? Ecological concerns have shown us that things in the world are not to be regarded only in terms of how they fit the patterns of human life, but also in terms of their own careers and values. Natural piety toward the components of our patterns is a problem. For us, although we are thrown by chance, as it were, into our place and time, it is a problem whether to engage the issues of our existential location or to devise one or another form of escape or denial. This is the problem of faith. For us, the value we achieve is not automatic but results in part from what we choose in concert with others. So with regard to value, we live in hope. Because of our freedom, human form has the ideals of justice, components of our harmonies have the status of being objects of piety, existential location needs to be engaged in faith, and the achievement of value defines our religious hope. Although it is too complex to argue today, the integration of the elements in each harmony, in its human embodiment, is love: justice, piety, faith, and hope add up to love. Love that misses any of these elements is deficient.

Now the simple human story is that we have sinned, which means that we are deficient in one, some, or all of justice, piety, faith, hope, and love. We live, and seem to be bound to live, with the wrong form, with impious abuse of the components of our live
s, with denial of our existential responsibilities, and with despair at achieving a value to be recognized in ultimate perspective. Our love is deficient. This is to be lost.

The incarnation is that Jesus comes with the right form, the right piety, the right faith, the right hope, and the right love. Jesus shows us how to be just in a world of moral ambiguity, how to be pious when tempted to turn stones to bread, how to be faithful when the crucifiers gather, how to have hope when God seems absent, and how to love when it seems our only course is to be selfish. Jesus incarnates the Logos in human form, and is the Light for us. John’s Gospel is all about this. It begins with the prologue I quoted about incarnation, and continues with Jesus calling his disciples and training them to understand how to live justly, with deference, engaging their times, hoping when defeat seems certain, and most of all loving. The drama of his raising of Lazarus, receiving the death sentence, this party with his friends, the triumphal confrontation with his foes, the arrest, crucifixion, and resurrection are concrete and singular demonstrations of the justice, piety, faith, hope, and love that set us free. His last long conversation with the disciples, on the Thursday after our text’s party, began with his washing their feet and ended with speaking about love. Jesus gathered them for the crucifixion and resurrection, and finally bid farewell by re-establishing his friendship with Peter who had betrayed him, enjoining Peter to feed his sheep. Throughout John’s account, Jesus, the Logos incarnate in human flesh, is in charge and leads the disciples and us into a new reality with God, the reality of redeemed sinners in a community of love.

The house is filled with a fragrance that brings all this to mind, from the first party at the wedding in Cana to the wake that never occurs at which Jesus would be anointed for the last time with that pure nard. Smell is the sense of memory. The fragrance of the perfume is such a delight that stingy Judas thinks it could be sold for a great price that would help the poor. The fragrance also covers the stench of death, and Jesus says we are to remember his death. The poor are always with us, but if we remember Jesus we will have the water that quenches all thirst, the bread that is true life, the abundance that is God’s kingdom. The whole of the incarnation in our friend and mentor Jesus, with its profound mystery that goes far beyond anything I have said today, is called to mind in the fragrance that fills the house. Jesus blessed Mary’s extravagance and the loveliness of the perfume because this was the last time they would all be together, and from this party they would have to remember how to interpret the wild events that were about to transpire.

As we conclude Lent this year, I ask that you attend to the fragrance of holiness that brings the incarnate Lord into our midst. We live in our own houses, with our own problems, not in the house of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. But if we inhale attentively, we can smell that perfume. Its fragrance will remind us that the Christ in our midst is the one who loves us and teaches us to love, with justice, piety, faith, and hope. This is not merely a clever person, but one in whom the Logos structures of creation dwell in their fullness. Because we can come into Jesus’ circle of love, we too can have his justice, piety, faith, and hope, indeed his love, that brings him to the Father. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 03.28.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Christians are supposed to be new creations in Christ, according to St. Paul. “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new.” The theme of new creation in fact pervades the New Testament, which itself is named “New Testament” to indicate this. John’s Gospel begins with the phrase, “In the beginning was the word,” which echoes the original creation account in Genesis. In the Genesis account, in the beginning were the roiling water, the divine wind or spirit, and then the divine word creating order. Matthew, Mark, and Luke have all those elements in their accounts of Jesus’ baptism. Christians have a new covenant, occasioned by Jesus. Jesus brings us a new commandment, according to John, to love one another as he has loved us. According to the book of Revelation, Christians live in anticipation of the New Jerusalem. Part of the meaning of Lent is the preparation of new members of the Christian community who will be received, some of them with baptism, at the Easter Vigil service. Entrance into the Christian community is a new life. Novelty is everywhere in Christian thinking.

Nevertheless, novelty is not everything, despite Paul’s saying that “everything has become new.” Christ is the Alpha as well as Omega. The new creation does not erase the old one and start over. Somehow it is a fulfillment of the old creation, or a redirection of it. If we think of the old creation as something to be rejected, we will lead ourselves straight into anti-Semitism, a path St. Paul sometimes took. In fact, the Christian orientation to novelty is significant because it is an imitation, a repetition, a bringing to completion, of God’s novelty in the first creation.

What can all this mean for us today with our scientific cosmology of the created order? In a strict sense, there is only one creation, the creation of the entire cosmos that includes space and time. I mentioned last week how vast this is. Because space and time themselves are created, everything within space and time is a creature. God can create anything our science and arts can discover to be real; there can be no conflict between scientific discovery and a theology of creation because science only discovers what God creates. We play out our lives within spatial and temporal history. From our temporal position now, the past is over and fixed and the future is open to many possibilities, some of which depend on us. Each moment of our temporal lives, we are local parts of God’s creative act. God’s creative act is not temporal but eternal, not in time and space but creative of them. Yet each thing within time and space is the flourishing of God’s creative act at that moment and place. As I say, in a strict sense, there is only one creation, and it is unfolding now.

How can we need a new creation, then, and how is such a thing even possible? How can we make sense of the biblical symbols of novelty within the time that is the product of the original and only creation? The answer lies in the complexity of human freedom, which the Bible symbolizes in its stories of the fall. Stars, stones, and eddies of expanding gasses are dumb creatures. They simply are what they are. Human beings learn language and, with that, self-consciousness. We take on identities in relation to society and the environment. We have orientations that guide our actions. Our self-consciousness, identities, and orientations are all in part of our own invention. We can know that the future can be actualized in many different ways and that those ways have different values. Since we can, in part, control what happens, it is our responsibility to actualize the better future. The qualities of our choices determine our own moral character. This freedom is an astonishingly complex affair, and is what sets us in worth above stars, stones, and expanding gasses.

Yet it is possible to abuse that freedom, all the while being creatures of God unfolding our lives day by day. Not only can we make wrong moral choices, we can choose to deny our created status and the relation to God this implies in any number of ways. In simple cases we merely focus too much on ourselves and lose sight of the larger connections of creation that might be affected by our actions. We forget about gratitude to the God who creates us in conjunction with the rest of the world. In more complicated ways we reject the world God gives us as unsatisfying, or filled with too much pain. Sometimes we double over this rejection so that we condemn ourselves for rejecting God, and then we get pretty close to despair. Such despair is really a perverse form of pride because we presume for ourselves God’s position to judge us. At any rate, what might have begun as simple selfishness soon, and universally, becomes a kind of bondage to the powers of the world to which we sell our souls to keep ourselves afloat. Those powers, such as money, sex, pleasure, control, aesthetic enjoyment, freedom, moral projects, and the like are all created and are all good in themselves. Yet they can become ropes that bind us and ruin our freedom.

To fulfill our human nature as created beings we are not only dumb creatures like stones. We need to exercise our freedom rightly to be in gratitude and harmony with the Creator and the created order. When that freedom has been perverted and we are in bondage, that’s when we need a new creation to untangle and fulfill the fundamental creation. The Christian life is that new creation of untangled people on the way to the fulfillment of sanctification. Individually Christians are new creatures, and collectively the Church is the corporate life of the new creation.

How should we interpret the parable of the Prodigal Son in this regard? The most obvious interpretation is that the Prodigal stands for the people who have become tangled and lost within the first creation. Like the Prodigal, people have slipped to selfishness and perhaps a youthful excitement about living freely on their own, squandering their inheritance, until they are starving. Then in desperation they turn to God who receives them back. We can read the redemptive process in Jesus as the way by which God receives them back. And we can rejoice at Jesus’ point in the parable that the Father’s love itself is a joy at the Prodigal’s return and an acceptance without rancor.

Have we not ourselves played the Prodigal’s part sometimes in our lives, perhaps in the distant past, perhaps rather frequently, perhaps even now? I doubt that I speak only for myself. As for myself I am actually an Elder Brother, prototypically so. I worked hard, obeyed my parents, did well in school, and became a professional academic and a professional minister in my early twenties. My prodigal younger brother flunked out of four high schools before graduating from the fifth, a military academy. He was in his mid-thirties before he was able to make a marriage stick, and to return to middle-class respectability and a loving family. He never returned to religion, and died in his fifties from lung cancer caused by prodigious smoking. Unlike the Elder Brother in Jesus’ parable, I never resented his success or respectability later in life. But I did resent the fact that he always had the greater share of our parents’ attention, mainly because he gave them so much more to worry about. The most ironic part of our relation was that I envied him his prodigality, his capacity to play music and not worry about making a living, his extravagant spending of what money he had and his charm in cadging more from family and friends, his love of engaging wild and diverse groups of peopl
e inside and outside his family, so often as if at a party. I envied also the fact that toward the end of his life he changed from being a “taker” to being a “giver,” with prodigal generosity. By contrast I have always been something of a giver, but grudgingly, and always also a taker, but with embarrassment and impatience at not being self-sufficient. Through my envy I too am a prodigal son, but a failed one. In the symbolic sense, I’ve never left the Father’s house, but I’ve spent a lot of time around the front door, sometimes inside and sometimes out, and have never expected a party when I go back in. Am I wrong in thinking that most people are like my brother or me, or some combination of the two?

The point of Jesus’ parable is that both brothers need reconciliation with their Father, with God, as the parable has it. The Prodigal Son turned from his Father to seek freedom and fun. The Elder Son worked for his Father, but obviously was not turned toward him in the gratitude and joy appropriate for creatures of God. If the Elder Son had been turned to his Father, he would have seen and loved the Father’s generosity to both sons. Instead the Elder Son also turned away from his Father to follow his prodigal brother with envy and resentment. The brothers respectively exhibited two common forms of alienation from God and the bounty of creation, and I fear many other forms of alienation exist as well.

The Christian message is that knowing Jesus can turn all these forms of alienation around so that any individual whatsoever can be reconciled to God the Creator. Our petty selfishness that puts us in bondage to the allures of worldly satisfaction, the extravagant selfishness of the Prodigal’s sort as well as the meaner selfishness of the Elder Brother, can be turned by the encounter with Jesus to hunger for God and to revel in God’s generosity no matter how painful our lives or how bound up our spirits have been.

Jesus was the new being who was subject to all the ambiguities and pains of life, surrounded by poor students, abandoned by them when the showdown came, crucified naked and bleeding in front of his mother, and yet never was alienated from God his creator. From the beginning he was faithful and in love with God, confident that God loved him, and at the end he commended to God his battered but purified spirit. His disciples came to understand this, and they too, in imitation of him, gained the power to become new beings. They taught their disciples, and on down the long line of redeemed sinners the new being comes to us. We too can be new beings in Christ.

A final point that turns the symbols of our texts once more: The word “prodigal” means extravagant. The Prodigal Son was extravagant in a small way, and when his funds ran out he limped back home. The great extravagance is God’s in creating the world. Our Prodigal God created a cosmos of immense dimension, from Big Bang to the Final Dissipation. Our Prodigal God gave us a garden world in a cosmos of rocks, fires, and gas. Our Prodigal God gives us freedom and a deep history with which to refine it. Our Prodigal God gives us leave to alienate ourselves from creation and with extravagant means of grace calls us back. Prodigal grace abounds in the Earth’s beauty, in the love of family and friends, in the opportunities for new life of all sorts, in the saints of the church and the sinners of the city. Prodigal grace abounds when we call to one another in love and say, “let us make lives with one another, and they shall be good.” God’s prodigal love does not let us go, it follows us to the wings of the morning, and rejoices when we return for new life. New life we have in God’s love, new life such that we become whole new beings, new life such that we can renew the world, new life such that we can bear up in joy when we have to accept our persistent failings and the world’s incorrigible evils. The new being in Christ is not a perfect being, nor is the new creation a perfect world. The new creation is a world in which we know how to love God as our beloved, and love one another as God loves us all. God’s creation of us is divine love. Our love for God, a prodigal miracle, is also divine love. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 03.21.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Our text from Isaiah is uncommonly cheery for Lent. Yet it is at the heart of Lent’s meaning. “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.” Two thousand five hundred years before the Atkins diet, the Jews knew that rich food is the stuff of divine favor. Milk, honey, wine, oil, fresh water, bread, and fatted calves advertised fulfillment in the Promised Land.

These viands were cited metaphorically, of course, to give content to God’s promise. But they worked as metaphors because they also were literally among the blessings of a prosperous and happy people. Knowing what we do today about alcohol, cholesterol and the carcinogenic effects of too much fat, we might officially prefer the metaphoric to the literal meaning. But if we can imagine Heaven as filled with pleasures that have no bad consequences, deep in our hearts we would want to dine on richly marbled hotel-cut roast beef with Bearnaise sauce, followed by Crème Brule, then chocolate truffles and baklava; cigars would be nice for the gentlemen. How I regret that this Victorian appetite was so unhealthy, sexist, and funded by the labors of others, usually conquered peoples! People in the ancient world did not have these hygienic and moral concerns about the good life.

Our text from Isaiah concludes a section that began with chapter 40 and that was written probably in the second half of the 6th century bce while the Jewish elite was exiled in Babylon. The first 39 chapters of Isaiah, which scholars call First Isaiah, were written in the second half of the 8th century bce, by someone who really was named Isaiah, the son of Amoz. The Assyrians had conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel in the time of First Isaiah, and the Babylonians had conquered the Southern Kingdom of Judah a few decades before the writing of our text. Chapters 56 to 66, Third Isaiah, were written toward the end of the 6th century after the exiles had returned to Jerusalem. Our text is the culmination of Second Isaiah, celebrating the exiles’ anticipation that Cyrus of Persia, who had conquered the Babylonians, would send the exiles home. Cyrus did send them home and for that was called a messiah. The Jews in the 6th century were overjoyed to be going home, returning to the Promised Land, a second Exodus from a second exile. Chapter 55 concludes after our reading by saying “For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of a thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.”

Isaiah was one of the most important sources of images for early Christian self-understanding. Our passage resonated with Jesus’ claim, recorded in John’s gospel, to be the water of life to which the thirsty should come, the bread of life for those who are hungry. Part of the very deep resonances in the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine is that, while they symbolize the broken body and spilled blood of Jesus, they also are the biblical signs of prosperity and happiness. Although part of the assertion of the early Christians that Jesus was the messiah came from tracing his genealogy through his father, Joseph, back to King David (the second messiah, after King Saul), another part came from analogy with Cyrus, the messiah who set the Jewish people free.

The early Christians, however, transformed the meanings of these symbols as they applied them to Jesus. They had to do so. Our text from Isaiah makes reference to God’s promise to establish the House of David on the throne of Israel forever, and that simply did not happen. The Isaiah text speaks as if the whole nation of Israel has a messianic role, when in fact it became fragmented. Whereas most of the other Jewish sects at the time of the Second Temple waited for a new messiah like David, or perhaps a Roman Cyrus, the Christians, who were then one more Jewish sect, changed the whole meaning of messiahship and many other Jewish symbols. The other Jews sought a messiah who would establish Israel in the land and perhaps make Jerusalem the world’s capital. The Christians came to believe that the religious problem has little to do with settling in the land. It has to do rather with settling in God. We are estranged from God, like Israelites who have broken the covenant. The messiah is the one who overcomes our estrangement. The question for us in our day is how to understand this God and our estrangement.

The Isaiah text contains this wonderful, but spooky line: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” This is a highly anthropomorphic representation of God speaking. Astonishingly, what God says is that the anthropomorphic representations do not apply. God is not just a smarter, deeper thinker. God does not think in the sense that we do. God is as different as the heaven is higher than the earth. This theme runs throughout Second Isaiah, which is one of the earliest biblical books to say that God is the creator of absolutely everything, not just the heavenly king and defender of Israel, but creator of everything and Lord of all nations.

In our time, the conception of God as creator must accommodate a vastly enriched conception of the “everything” created. The universe is 15 to 20 billion years old and vaster in extent than we can imagine; it is not the small, earth-centered cosmos imagined in the first century. We understand the peoples of the world to be not only those of the Mediterranean basin, nor even those of all the Earth; God is creator of whatever rational desirous beings there are throughout the billions of galaxies, each with its own history, perhaps of sin and redemption. We understand the differences between subjective mind and objective reality, between inner personality and outer social roles, between temporal endurance and spatial location, all to be created differences. The fundamental physical and metaphysical characteristics of the world are themselves created. The Creator, then, cannot be a mind over against a world to be known, not a person interacting with individuals or peoples, not a temporal entity lasting throughout all time, or located in one place or all places: those are all creaturely traits, and can be ascribed to God only metaphorically. Because we now know something of the immensity of creation, we know that God the creator is immense. We are humbled by the difficulty of grasping the immense God in concepts derived from creation. We know that to ascribe to God characteristics that would make God a creature is idolatry. So we keep perfecting our symbols of God and then break them to keep them from idolatry.

One thing we do know, however, is that, as creatures, we are the actualized completion, the conclusions, the finish, the termini, of the divine creative act. God does not create us and then let us go: because space and time are as much creatures as we, no spatio-temporal medium exists apart from God into which we could be put. Nothing is outside of God. God’s creative act is the constituting of space-time and everything in it, in all their interwoven connections. What we are, God
creates. That we are is God’s living creative act itself, with us as the completion of the act, the breaking of the wave whose surge has crossed an infinite sea. We are the dance of the divine dancer, the song of the divine singer. God is the creating of the cosmos and we are God’s creative act as it is realized. At whatever time we are, that is God making us then. Wherever we are, that is God making us there. In all our connections to the environment, with each other, with the histories of our peoples, of the Earth, with the stars of heaven—that is God creating this network of creatures playing out their lives in space and time. No creature can be separate from God, for to be at all is to be a local part of the immense act of divine creation.

Because we are so local, however, we easily forget both our connections with others throughout this cosmos and our roots in God’s creativity. We become selfish. And then we notice that the cosmos fills our life with griefs as well as joys, suffering as well as rich food, persecutions as well as support, and with lives always short according to the cosmic calendar. So perversely we organize ourselves in rejection of the divine ground of our being. Instead of gratitude we feel anger, instead of bright attention we cultivate anaesthesia, instead of joyous humility we define ourselves by pride. We think we deserve bounty. We sell our souls to the promise of power to control our lives. We imagine the immense God to be a mere supernatural person whose good will we test, and usually find wanting. In sum, we are estranged, despite the fact our very existence is the shining forth of God’s creative act. This is quite different from literally being exiled outside of the Promised Land.

Or is it? The Promised Land for Christians is life in God’s creative act from which we cannot be removed even when we think we are. To be estranged is to be in denial about our own very existence, which we can see now to be the work of love in divine creativity. To be reconciled is not to be moved from outside God into the divine heart. It is to be turned to recognize where we already are, beloved with one another by the Creator giving us being, steadied in the divine promises that give us life however ambiguous. The messiah who turns us to accept our Creator, and ourselves as creatures is not a military king who wins land for us. It is the one who shows us how to live in gratitude for our lives within the divine life. It is the one who leads us to endure the sufferings of life so as to be at one with the fullness of life in God. It is the one who creates for us communities of shared love in which we can mature as lovers of one another and of our creator. Christians proclaim that Jesus is this messiah.

Let us then read Isaiah with a Christian revision of his symbols. “Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near.” Our creator is always here, within us and our fellows, in our mountains, rivers, seas, plains, forests, fields, highways, houses, buildings, schools, factories, hospitals, ghettos, battlefields, starvation, poverty, depression, hate, war, sickness, and death. God is never absent. Jesus says to turn and seek God in all these things. Nothing in life is beyond bearing if we bear it resting on the divine pulse of creativity. Life is ambiguous and fragmentary. Its complexities are nuanced beyond imagination and we grasp but its surface. Nevertheless, when Jesus turns us to God our gratitude and love can embrace the whole of God’s gift.

We know in this life that it is better to be full than hungry, satisfied than thirsty, rich than poor, healthy than sick, alive than dead. All these good things are worth pursuing. Nevertheless Jesus taught that there is a different kind of hunger and thirst, wealth and health, indeed life itself, than these relative things. When we are estranged, it’s hard to recognize the hunger and thirst for God; it’s hard to distinguish true wealth from mere riches, true health from a gym body, true life from more ordinary life. When we see the God in Jesus, however, our true hunger and thirst are made plain. The gospel for Lent is that the hunger and thirst for God can be satisfied by God our intimate creator. The abundance of the entire creation is our wealth, the wholeness of the cosmos is our health, the life of the Creator is our life. God’s everlasting covenant with us is that if we but turn to our Creator, God, who as Augustine said has always been nearer to us than we are to yourselves, will be accessible to satisfy our hunger and thirst.

Let us now use our Lenten discipline to put down our relative hungers and thirsts, and desires for wealth, health, and longevity. Instead let us stoke to fever pitch our hunger and thirst for God, our longing for God’s abundance and vibrancy and true life. We long for these too little and need more passion for them, an infinite passion. For the good news is that God says: “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant.” Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 03.14.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem is a puzzle. Why should he lament a city where he says he will be killed? To understand, we must put this in context. Our lesson describes an incident when Jesus had been teaching uncomfortable things. Immediately prior to our text is the parable of the householder who shut the door and would not admit his former guests who were evildoers. The householder is the messiah, and those excluded “weep and gnash their teeth” to see the patriarchs and foreigners but not themselves admitted. Jesus repeats the familiar line, “some who are last will be first, and some are first who will be last.” Our text says that some Pharisees, who apparently were supporters of Jesus, warned Jesus to get out of the territory of Herod who must have been displeased with such teachings. Though Jesus refused to be hurried, he said he would leave soon because it would not be appropriate for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem. This was in reference to his own prediction, perhaps even intention, that he be killed in Jerusalem.

Now the Hebrew Bible mentions only one prophet being killed in Jerusalem; 2 Chronicles said that Zechariah son of Barachiah was killed by order of the king; this was not the same Zechariah whose prophetic writings we have. The parallel passage in Matthew cites the murder of innocent people from Abel in Genesis to Zechariah in 2 Chronicles; in the order of the Hebrew Bible, Genesis is the first book and 2 Chronicles is the last, so the point is a generalized condemnation of murder from first to last. Jesus, I believe, was taking Jerusalem to be the symbolic center of Israel’s betrayal of righteousness and of the covenant with God. Moreover, the betrayal was bloody murder, often directed against those who, like the Zechariah in question, were prophetic critics of the betrayal. Luke represents this as Jesus’ self-understanding of his own role as prophet; remember that Luke’s gospel was written after everyone knew that Jesus was indeed killed in Jerusalem.

The lament over Jerusalem needs to be understood against the background of the covenant between God and Israel. Our Genesis text describes one of the covenant scenes between God and Abram, later called Abraham, in which the elderly childless Abram is told he will have descendents as numerous as the stars in heaven. Abram believed God, and this belief was “reckoned as righteousness,” a phrase Paul would later pick up to indicate the meaning of faith: for Paul, Abram was justified because of this faith in the promise against all the evidence (Abram and his wife were too old to have children). Abram sacrificed a heifer, a female goat, a ram, a turtledove, and a pigeon, split the larger animals in two and walked between the halves carrying a smudge pot and a flaming torch to signify the covenant in which God, because of Abram’s righteousness in believing the promise of heirs, would give his descendents the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. Many other dimensions to this covenant emerged later, and then the covenant that Moses recorded gave much more explicit definition to the nature of Israel’s special relation to God. Finally God covenanted with David to keep his family on the throne so long as Israel was faithful to this rich, multi-sided covenantal relation that defined them as a nation of priests who, when they were holy, were allowed access to God’s presence. This literally meant having representatives go into the temple’s inner sanctuaries, and figuratively it meant living close to God in all things. Most of the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible has to do with complaints about Israel not living up to its end of the covenant, consorting with alien gods, and falling into terribly unjust practices, with God promising both punishments and mercy. When Jesus said that he had come to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19), he was presenting himself as the fulfillment of this prophetic tradition. And Jerusalem killed the prophets.

The theme of covenant, betrayal, and murder of the prophets is a sore point with Americans. The first European settlers in New England were explicit about founding a new society in covenant with God. The Puritan covenant was not about a place—any place would do. It was about a way of life of justice among peoples, and individual and corporate devotion to God. Of course greed was involved in the colonies as well, with devastating effects on the Native Americans; but the greed and the Indian Wars were known to be bad, to be failures of the covenant. The greatest failure of the American covenant was the inability to handle the problem of authority for its enforcement, an ancient biblical problem. By the time of the post-revolutionary constitutional debates, the notion of covenant had expanded beyond sectarian religion to embrace the Enlightenment themes of liberty, equality, opportunity, and self-determination for all, with a complicated government of checks and balances to foster protection of the weak, and of minorities, against the imposition of the will and culture of the majority. The American constitutional covenant embraced, in principle, people from any culture in the world who wanted to enter into the covenant of a pluralistic society with a willingness to make their way amidst a swarm of diverse ways of life. It welcomed the poor by offering opportunity. For over two hundred years, successive immigrant groups have made their way to America to develop American versions of their home cultures. In nearly every instance the fabric of American cultures at the time had to be rent and re-sewn to make room for them, often with pain but nearly always successfully. The great failure, of course, was the case of Africans brought to America in slavery, a blatant contradiction of the constitutional principles at the time of its adoption, the source of a bloody civil war, and the occasion of the deepest immorality of American society since the days of Reconstruction. Now, however, racism is recognized for the evil it is and is being amended on many fronts, however far we remain from a solution. The changes of immigration laws in the early 1970s allowed millions to come from Asian and Middle Eastern lands with cultures radically different from the genteel European culture of the Founding Fathers. No one can claim now that the United States is not in principle and often in practice a pluralistic nation based on a covenant to respect liberty, equality, opportunity, and self-determination.

As greed was the snake in the earliest American covenant, it has been a counter-theme in our national character ever since. It gathered explicit respectability in the presidency of Andrew Jackson who touted the slogan that “to the victor belong the spoils.” Greed was perhaps the greatest, though not only, component in the practice of slavery and racism, and it has fed America’s adventures in imperialism in its wars with Mexico and Spain and then in the cultivation of a global economy that insists on free trade for others and protection for American interests. Greed is a legitimate interest in a democracy, however reprehensible it might be morally and debasing to the ideals behind the covenant. Yet greed never overwhelmed the higher ideals of the covenant. The American policies after World War II that rebuilt Germany and Japan and revitalized their regions of the world, that supported the United Nations to share power with all peoples, and that bound the world together with multilateral treaties about economies and the environment, were magnificent te
stimonies to a generous American spirit. They extended the ideals of the American covenant to a conception of an entire world of freedom, equality, and opportunity, with a right of national self-determination, however compromised the ideals were in many details.

In our own time, however, it requires a prophet to remember the generosity of the American covenant. Our government advocates a global economic system that paupers nations that cannot compete and destroys cultures that are non-competitive. Our government responded to the criminal tragedies of 9/11, not with an international police action that would have been appropriate to counter an international terrorist organization, but with a bloated war on terrorism. In the name of that war we have invaded and now occupy two countries that did not attack or threaten ours. Greed, not the covenant to respect liberty, equality, opportunity, and self-determination, seems to guide our foreign adventures. At home our government’s tax policies favor the very rich while it withdraws social services from the poor that they need in order to have opportunity. On the one hand our courts are now extending the rights of liberty, equality, opportunity, and self-determination to homosexual people, as they earlier had done to women and African-Americans, all of whom had been denied those rights, inconsistently with constitutional principles. On the other hand the government is threatening a constitutional amendment to enforce one culture’s version of how those rights should be limited. Who will remind us of the covenant of liberty, equality, opportunity, and self-determination, and of the generosity of Americans toward those of lesser freedom, unequal burdens, and frustrated opportunity? Like Jerusalem, America has not always been kind to its prophets. See the memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr., in front of this church.

Jesus did not lament over Jerusalem because it would kill him, or because it had killed the prophets before him. He lamented because it had not been faithful to the covenant that made it a holy city. “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Our standing as American Christians is a complicated one. As Christians we should love all people, including those at enmity with America, and help first the least among our brothers and sisters. As Americans we have a natural desire to see America prosper in material goods, culture, and moral standing. Like Jesus, we cannot take up a condemnatory attitude toward our country, however much we might lament its current repudiation of its complicated founding covenant. Rather, our lamentation should be to take it under our wings as a hen gathers her brood. As Jesus went to Jerusalem to engage it, not repudiate it as Jerusalem had repudiated its covenant, we need to engage our country and its confusions now. Christians need to be their country’s spiritual directors, its shrivers!

So let us pray for a spirit of honest analysis of America’s policies abroad and at home, subjecting them to tests of righteousness, liberty, equality, opportunity, and self-determination. Let us pray for a spirit of courage to lift up and condemn the dross of bloated greed and power-madness. Let us pray for a spirit of power to speak these truths to those who hold power and can use it to silence prophets. Let us pray for a spirit of subtlety to understand the ambiguities of righteousness while upholding it, and to communicate this at home, in the workplace, and on the street, to strangers and even to friends. Let us pray for a spirit of humility to see where our righteousness become false righteousness and our moral certainties turn out to be foolishness. Let us pray for a spirit of faith that shows Jesus’ death to be the only saving one and that suffering on our part is not cosmically noble, only sad. Let us pray for a spirit of hope that sustains us when the enemy corrupting our covenant turns out to be our own interests and the institutions that sustain them. Let us pray for a spirit of love that keeps us engaged when we lose, that binds the love of our country to the love of all those other countries, and that never lets us think the voice of prophecy is ours against the villains because the voice of prophecy is God’s and we all are the villains loved by God.

So come to the communion table to join with other sinners grateful for God’s prophetic blandishments. Come to the table to celebrate Jerusalem’s murder that led to new life. Come partake of death’s detritus that is yeast to cause righteousness to rise wherever Christians gather for the good grace of Christ. Though our covenants be broken, yet may they ever be renewed. Though we be blinded by greed, yet may our generosity be restored. Though Jerusalem’s pride causes it to be toppled stone from stone, yet may it repent and be rebuilt. Gather at the table with those who lament our social betrayals and yet find seeds of resurrecting life everywhere. Gather with those whose love of country, neighbors, and self burns hot to purify our lives. Gather with those who pray to receive the holiness that brings us all to God. Behold God’s covenant, God’s betrayers, God’s redeemer, God’s saints, God’s hospitality, our home. Everyone is welcome at this table, gathered under God’s wings. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 03.7.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

If we had no temptations, we would not need Lent. Lent is a time to acknowledge our temptations, to do penance for having given in to them, and to steel ourselves with greater discipline to resist them. We do have temptations, we do give in to them, and we are too often too weak to resist them. So we do need Lent. The story of Jesus in the wilderness is a lesson in temptations.

The first thing to note is that Jesus was weakened by fasting for forty days. This might be an exaggeration of the actual time, because “forty” was a kind of biblical code for a long time—remember Noah’s forty days of rain, Moses’ forty days and nights on the mountain with God, and the forty years the Israelites wandered in the desert before coming to the Promised Land. Whatever the time Jesus actually spent in the wilderness, it was a long time and he was hungry and weak when Satan caught up with him.

The first temptation Satan put to Jesus, in Luke’s account, was to offer bread in return for a little cheating, namely using divine power to turn a stone to food. Many have interpreted Luke’s account to mean that Jesus had supernatural powers and could have used them, but chose not to. Of course we need bread and other necessities and are tempted to take moral shortcuts to get them. We might say that in times of truly dire necessity, a little thievery is legitimate—remember Les Miserable; we are a merciful people. Sometimes, however, we are a bit liberal with mercy toward ourselves and justify a little cheating in studies, innocent shoplifting of ideas from the internet, or vicious competitiveness so that we will get our own necessities. The habit of cheating grows from necessities to enhancements—better clothes, finer food, shortcuts at work to find leisure time. With the aid of a consumerist culture we can blur the line between necessities and luxuries so that any unsatisfied desire becomes a need whose satisfaction is necessary. Step by step we are tempted to move from cheating for self-preservation to just plain greed. We live in an Enron culture where massive cheating is taken for granted as a way of corporate life, and we are surprised when stockholders and workers are paupered by the consequences of greed. Often we don’t recognize how much we participate in such a culture until some scandal suddenly turns the lights on. Note that Jesus had nothing negative to say about bread, or even riches, per se; he said only that we do not live by them alone and, when we do, they hold us in bondage, as they did the winsome but rich young ruler who asked Jesus about eternal life. Thank God we have Lent to think these things through, repent, and do better.

Satan’s second temptation was power, which Jesus could have gained by worshipping the devil, that is, the spirit of destruction and control that was contrary to the God of creativity. If we have power, of course, we are able to get the necessities and even luxuries of life. As Faust knew, with power we can do great social good. Yet power brings more than the satisfaction of greed. Power evokes respect—glory, Satan said—and it gives control. Although there are some things we should control, the desire for control is an infinite passion. It has no natural satisfaction. Jesus declined Satan’s power and said you should worship only God. The clue, in the story, to detecting power as a temptation is that worldly power was Satan’s to give in the first place. Jesus’ response indicates that its pursuit is idolatrous. Are our fantasies about power really ways of worshipping ourselves as if we were God? Our nation has so much power now that patriotism borders on idolatry. The motivation alleged for our greed is the virtue of global capitalism in a form that benefits us before it does the developing countries. The motivation alleged for our pre-emptive wars of self-defense is panic over possible weapons of mass destruction. Yet these motivations, even coupled together and accepted as valid, seem insufficient to explain our recent national exercises of power. Is display of power for its own sake the motive? Thank God we have Lent to think these things over, to repent, and amend our ways.

The third temptation was for Jesus to jump from the Temple’s Tower to prove that he was under divine protection. He declined, saying that God should not be put to the test. We rarely have such dramatic temptations. Nevertheless many of us, perhaps all of us sometimes, conceive God to have an obligation to take care of us in worldly matters, and we become angry, or depressed, or lose our faith, when luck and nature take their mindless course. If you jump from a high place, you fall: that’s the way God made gravity. If you contract a germ you get sick: that’s the way God made life. If your loved one leaves you, your heart breaks: that’s the way God made freedom and the human heart. To expect God to work miracles setting aside the way creation works is to “test” God, to use Jesus language. Have we tested God and been disappointed so as to corrode our faith? “Do not put the Lord your God to the test,” said Jesus. Thank God we have Lent to think these things over, repent, and amend our ways.

Temptation is a creeping phenomenon. Remember the old prayer of confession? “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep:” with our eyes down on the grass in front of us, intending no evil, we follow the green rather than the proper path and get lost. “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts:” well, of course, being lost from the community with its good shepherd we are left to our own devices. “We have offended against thy holy laws:” that’s what comes from too much dependence on the devices and desires of our own hearts, and suddenly we are seriously culpable for moral misdeeds. “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done:” so much for duty. “And we have done those things which we ought not to have done:” serious transgressions are our responsibility. “And there is no health in us:” we have succumbed so far into temptation, a sickness unto death, that we have no power to stop the fall. Even though we start with small, forgivable temptations, we plummet until we are bound to endless greed, power, and self-glorification, powerless to stop.

Now we can see the special temptation in the Grand Inquisitor’s conversation with Christ. In Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov the Grand Inquisitor chastises Jesus for wanting to make people free. People are weak and in bondage to sin, the Inquisitor said. They do not want freedom and responsibility: they want bread as a magic handout, they want some power to take care of them with proper pomp and glory, and they want a divine guarantee that everything will be all right. Because people are like sheep, they should be treated like sheep. Because they have in fact succumbed to the temptations, the devil is in charge, and a proper religion should go along with the Grand Inquisitor’s authoritarian ways that provide for everything: not to do so would be cruel. Jesus was not convinced. How many of us believe, or hope, that God will take care of everything? God is not the one who “takes care of everything.” That’s Satan. God makes us free.

Think back on the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. Jesus had just been baptized and the text says he was “full of the Holy Spirit.” The Spirit, not chance, led him in the wilderness. It was an act of God that he be tempted. One of the ironies about Satan here and in other biblical passages is that, although he is a trouble-maker and a genuinely evil spirit, he is also the witting or unwitting
agent of God. To be tempted is part of the created life that we have. If we were not tempted, we would not be alive in a human way. Temptations are tests to prepare us for serious work, as Jesus was about to undertake.

Please do not mishear me on this point. I do not mean to say, nor does the Bible, that we should seek out temptations as a kind of spiritual discipline. That is a sure road to disaster. Only someone already besotted by the sin of pride would deliberately seek out temptations so as to exercise the ability to put them aside. Jesus, in his famous prayer, says “Lead us not into temptations and deliver us from evil.” Let us escape as many temptations as we can: more than enough will confront us anyway, for they are part of life.

Life for us all tempts us to panic about possessing things. Even when possessions are necessities of life, they should not define life for us. Jesus was very hungry, but he did not need bread: he was deliberately fasting. Precisely because hunger and desire are natural, they will tempt us to give them misplaced importance. Our very freedom to live before God as responsible in ultimate perspective requires that we face, and face down, such temptations.

Life as such leads us to seek power, for how else can we carry out responsibilities? Yet the acquisition of power is so seductive that we can pursue it beyond measure—never enough power! We honor and glorify our little power supplies, and soon we are worshipping not God but ourselves. Actually, it is not ourselves that we worship: people who succumb to the need for power, paradoxically, are internally weak and need the power to give themselves substance and identity. Rather, we worship the sources of power: as Satan said, Jesus could have all power and authority to do good if only he would worship Satan who had the power and authority to give. Like most people seduced by Satan, we think we do it for ourselves when in fact we are serving a hidden master. Because the hidden master is the promise of power without regard for direction and measure, it is a chaos of blind forces, an unleashing of mindless spirits. If seduction by possessions leads to a panic of desire, seduction by power leads a pandemonium of powers beyond our control.

Life as such presents endless occasions to test God’s goodness, and to demand it. A deep paradox lies in the fact that because every bit of life comes from God, our gratitude for life itself should be infinite. At the same time with life come also the dangers, shortcomings, sufferings, and death that are as much a part as the beauty, love, opportunities, health, and new beginnings. If our idea of God is small, we expect God to run the world as our ideal parents would, with constant provision for every need and defense against every threat. Should our parents give us a stone instead of bread, we would say they don’t love us. To think that way is to test God. If our idea of God is as immense as Jesus’, however, we know that the grace of creation is enough, even with its dangers, pains, and death. The immense God’s love is proved in the Christ who teaches us to embrace the suffering and death in life as the way properly to embrace the divine immensity. Although we cannot help being tempted to test God with a demand for proof of love, we can nevertheless follow Jesus in setting that temptation aside. Maturity means that we take responsibility for engaging life as it comes, not as we wish God would make it.

I have two final points. First, when Jesus met Satan in the wilderness, he knew something was up. For us, temptations come more subtly, like greener grass to grazing sheep; and then before we know it we are enslaved to greed and power, and angry with the God who we think has not done enough for us lately. Be careful.

Second, although Jesus’ fasting might have made him hungry and weak in a physical sense, it made him strong in a spiritual sense, strong enough to withstand the temptation to become the kind of false messiah his people, his friends, and the Grand Inquisitor wanted. Although our Lenten fasting is a pale imitation of Jesus’ wilderness discipline, it is a strong help as we engage the life of temptation in order to love the God who gives it. May Lent be a proper wilderness for us all.

I pray then for a wilderness of life to expose our civilized cover-ups. Let us be as sheep without a shepherd who have to be alert to their own strayings: then we can give ourselves to a Shepherd who demands that we be free. I pray for a wilderness in which the devices and desires of our own hearts become fully known to us: then we can be free to bring them to perfection. I pray for a wilderness where God’s right is starkly before us: then, like Jesus, we can will the right or the fall with our own free souls. I pray for a wilderness where no sophistications becloud our doing what we ought and not doing what we ought not: then we can present ourselves to the One who calls us as disciples ready for instruction. I pray for a wilderness in which our sickness unto death is revealed and healed in fasting and penance: then we can give our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength to the One who leads us through death to resurrection. Church, we have entered into the Lenten Season as into a wilderness. May our temptations be seen as clearly as Jesus saw Satan and our responses be as faithful as Jesus’ own resolution. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 02.29.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Moses, more than any other figure in the Hebrew Bible, was familiar with God. Others had their encounters with God, received a divine word or had visions, but only Moses made a habit of it. The tradition is that after his great meeting with God on Sinai, when God delivered the law of the covenant, Moses was so transfigured that his face shone in an uncanny way, and that this happened at his many subsequent meetings with God. He took to wearing a veil when he was with ordinary people because they were frightened of his transfigured radiance.

Paul’s interpretation of this in his second letter to the Corinthians, that we read, is extraordinarily problematic. His point there is that God’s Mosaic covenant with Israel is only temporary, and is replaced by the new covenant in Jesus Christ. Moses wears the veil, according to Paul, not to cover his own radiance, but to keep the Israelites from seeing the end of their own special covenant. Then Paul switches the metaphor to say that the veil covers the minds of the Jews even in his day so that, with hardened hearts, they do not understand Moses. With Jesus Christ, however, the veil is taken away and God’s glory can be seen as in a mirror. The Holy Spirit is God taking away the veil so that people step by step can be transformed or transfigured into the glory of the Lord.

This is one of those horrendous passages responsible for the canker of anti-Semitism that has infected Christianity, erupting in the horror of the Holocaust in the last century. Paul in this text says that the Mosaic covenant with the Jews is annulled by the new covenant in Jesus Christ, and that the Jews are blinded as by a veil, because of the hardness of their hearts, and do not see this. Christians very early concluded from this that the Jews were evil for not becoming Christians. The tradition that the Jews in their evil blindness killed Christ and should be punished for that has led to great wickedness. Martin Luther, for instance, bought this line of thinking, and so does Mel Gibson if you believe the previews of his Passion film to be released this week. Traces of this anti-Semitism are found in the Gospels, especially John, which were written after Paul’s time.

Paul was not consistent on this point, fortunately. In other writings, for instance the letter to the Romans, he does not say so plainly that Christianity supercedes Judaism—“supersessionism” is the name of the doctrine that Judaism is annulled with the advent of Christianity. Instead, Paul’s general Christology is something like this. In the Mosaic covenant God promised the people of Israel that they would be a nation of priests with access to God’s presence if they were clean and holy. The sacrifice rituals of the Mosaic covenant prescribed how to atone for sin and become clean, and worthy once again to approach God. In Christ, according to Paul, those promises were extended to the Gentiles. The sacrifice of Jesus did for all Gentiles what the Mosaic sacrifices did for the Israelites. The Jews had their law and Jesus extended to the Gentiles its power of making people worthy to approach God. Most Christian theologians now say that Christianity does not supercede Judaism but that both are equal, with Christianity serving the Gentiles. Biblical scholars have also made clear that it was the Romans, not the Jews, who crucified Jesus, and for political reasons, not for reasons of religious conflict. I concur in both of these points.

In our 2 Corinthians text, however, Paul contrasts the law of the Mosaic covenant, which is ineffectual he says, with the transfiguring Spirit that comes from God with the new covenant. This is a very dangerous thing for Christians to believe about Jews and themselves, and we have to look into the matter of transfiguration and the veil more deeply.

The story of Jesus’ transfiguration in Luke has parallels in Matthew and Mark, though not in John. According to all three, Jesus climbs a high mountain to pray with Peter, James, and John. The disciples are “weighed down with sleep,” so it probably is a night-time prayer vigil. But they don’t succumb to sleep. As if through a veil of sleepiness they see Jesus transfigured to shine like Moses, and joined by Moses himself and Elijah. This is clear, post-Pauline, evidence of the solidarity of Jesus and his Way with the recipient of Israel’s covenant, Moses, and its chief enforcer, Elijah. The disciples hear Jesus, Moses, and Elijah discussing Jesus’ immanent death in Jerusalem, although they do not understand it any better this time than when Jesus had told them about it before. (The other gospel accounts do not mention the topic of the conversation.) Suddenly the disciples come fully awake and Peter feels—what shall I say--a Methodist need to do something, so he proposes building three small huts or shrine buildings for the transfigured trio. No one takes him up on that. As Moses and Elijah move off, a terrifying holy cloud settles over them, another kind of veil, and God’s voice comes out of the cloud to say, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him.” They stay on the mountain all night and go down the next day.

One obvious function of this story recounted in three of the gospels is to equate Jesus with Israel’s heroes, Moses and Elijah, as all having divine blessing. The title “Son of God” probably did not have the metaphysical meaning in Luke’s gospel that it did for Paul who believed that Jesus was literally a divine being from heaven. Luke’s genealogy for Jesus, for instance, traces him back to “Enos, son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God.” God’s power and work passes to the human beings he creates, and Jesus, like Moses and Elijah, was transfigured with extraordinary divine power. When Jesus and his disciples went back down the mountain next morning, Jesus boldly cured an epileptic victim that his disciples had not been able to help. He explained their failure as lack of faith, but it was a particular kind of faith that had unusual power: when Jesus healed, he felt power going out of him.

Now we can return to Paul’s 2 Corinthians text, setting aside its anti-Semitism, and attend to its basic point, namely, that Christians act with great boldness because they are being transformed, or transfigured, by the Holy Spirit. Listen to Paul’s triumphant words: “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.” Though not with the suddenness and completeness of Moses, Elijah, and Jesus, we are proceeding, degree by degree, to be transfigured into the image of God’s glory that we see in the mirror. The image, of course, is Christ Jesus.

Having worked our way through this briar-patch of biblical texts, what does transfiguration mean for us? I suspect it does not mean an unusually shiny face. When my mother had a shiny face, she dashed off to powder her nose. The shine on Moses, Elijah, and Jesus was the way the people saw God’s power in them.

How do we embody God’s power in a transfigured way? One obvious way, according to our texts, is by helping people as Jesus helped the epileptic man. The point of that story, however, is not just the healing. Jesus was bold in healing where the disciples had been timid. How do we become bold in doing God’s work?

Paul said, we become bold by degrees through the working of the Holy Spirit. That’s a good thing, because most of us are far more timid even than Jesus’
unsuccessful disciples. Most of us wouldn’t dare to try to heal an epileptic. Of course, we now know a lot more about disease and do not put epilepsy or any other of the sicknesses that plague people down to possession by spirits. Without testing our boldness at all we can contribute to churches and hospitals, and to the United Way, to help cure the sick.

Many of the ills of our society, such as the blight of poverty, oppression of the weak, alienation of the marginalized, superstitious bigotry, the worship of greed, and the flattery of the powerful who bring death and destruction to weak nations that offend them, are conditions about which we can do something. In Jesus’ time it was not believed possible to change basic social structures and habits. Jesus took slavery and poverty to be permanent conditions and merely suggested mercy and charity as ways to ameliorate their worst effects. We now know that significant structural and habitual elements of society can be changed to bring about a more just state. Without testing our boldness we can simply vote the right way and be helpful.

Of great spiritual concern are the corrosive attitudes that corrupt even religion. When I was a small child, Jews were almost unknown in my part of town and were held in superstitious contempt. After World War II many Jews came into our community, and because we knew them, and because we had seen the murderous effects of anti-Semitism, we came to imagine them as like ourselves. When I went to high school, the schools in St. Louis were segregated because people could not imagine white and black people living and working together; Brown versus Board of Education changed all that my sophomore year and after many years we now can hardly imagine a racially exclusive school. When I was married it was unimaginable and illegal in many states for people of different races to marry, although four years later that was changed and now mixed-race couples are unexceptional. Now many people are all astir at the prospect of gay marriages because they cannot imagine them, having images only of heterosexual marriages. But with the thousands of gay weddings being performed in San Francisco these days, and the subsequent publicity, images of gay married couples are becoming commonplace. In time, not a long time, the current stir will seem foolish and the rules against gay marriage will seem as arbitrary and unfair as those against miscegenation and common schooling of the races. Without daring to test our boldness, we can wait for that to happen. It is possible to survive and do good as timid people.

Nevertheless, it is not possible to be a Christian for long and still be timid. Of course you are accepted in any condition of despair, depression, self-hate, or timidity. Just get on board the train when it slows by Sinner’s Grove. You can fall off as many times as you want, and always get back on whenever you want. But so long as you are on that Christian train, by degrees the Spirit will make you daring. Are you timid because you are sick of body or mind, and weak? The Spirit will bring you into a healing community in the company of those who will make you strong. Are you timid because you are poor, marginalized, oppressed, the victim of bigotry, a bigot yourself, greedy, power-mad? The Spirit will show you the riches of God’s creation in which every person is at the center, free, proud, and forgiven. Are you timid because you feel deprived of rights and dis-empowered? The Spirit will show you the power that is yours in Christ, that dwarfs all others and gives hope despite failure and frustration.

In the Christian community the Spirit shows us Jesus to make us bold in the face of disease, bold in the struggle against poverty, oppression, alienation, superstition, bigotry, greed, and power-madness, bold in the face of attitudes that corrode our religion and culture. Though often complicated, we usually can discern moral direction, and can become bolder. When our efforts are defeated, the Spirit shows us Jesus on the cross and we get bolder. When defeats threaten our lives and loves, the Spirit shows us Jesus rising in triumph and our boldness becomes holy. When we are shocked at the loneliness of life, the Spirit shows us Jesus with the Church and we are surrounded by witnesses. When we despair at the state of our souls, the Spirit shows us ourselves embraced by Jesus and we are transfigured to be bold to act decisively, bold to speak truthfully, bold to think freely, bold to sing heartily, bold to forgive, bold in mercy, bold in confession, bold in praise, bold in joy, bold in peace, bold in kindness, bold in faith, bold in hope, bold in love, and bold to pray: Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 02.22.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Few occasions exist in which it is a comfort to read Jeremiah. He was the ultimate complainer, though he had good company with most of the other prophets. He gave his name to the fire-and-brimstone sermons of early American history that we call “Jeremiads.” Nevertheless, today Jeremiah brings a word of comfort. For we live in a time of great wild forces over which we have little control, and we need something to trust. Once upon a time people could trust their families to keep them safe and economically supplied. For most of us, that is no more. In some poor countries such as Rwanda, even having a family sets you up to lose in clan warfare. Americans put great trust in education as an institution that trains and increases the power that individuals and communities might have. Yet in most American cities, including ours, the educational institutions are so unequal that the rich get farther ahead and so many of the poor just drop off the charts. Americans have trusted the federal government to support the poor during times of economic hardship, to protect the environment from destruction by greedy exploitation, to protect us from the ravages of war, especially unnecessary war, and to protect our honor among nations, yet on all these fronts things are getting worse fast. Americans have trusted themselves individually, with a fierce pioneering independence and yet, as Jeremiah said, the human heart is perverse. In sum, Jeremiah said, “cursed are those who trust in mere mortals.”

Jeremiah’s solution, of course, is that we should trust in God. Psalm 62 says: “For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall never be shaken.” Surely it is good Christian piety, Jewish and Muslim piety too for that matter, to trust only in God, knowing that human institutions and individuals are not trustworthy. Yet when we back away from the piety of this sentiment, the picture is not clear. Two items of unclarity are mixed together: how do we imagine the God in whom we should trust, and just what trust is about.

I use the verb “imagine” advisedly, because we think of such things as the God in whom we trust in terms of images. The Bible and the Christian traditions have many images of God. Last week I spoke about Isaiah’s vision of God as a huge man set on a kingly throne the hem of whose robe filled the Temple, a very anthropomorphic image, like that of God the warrior who leads Israel out of Egypt. Some Christians imagine God as a kindlier, gentler version of the Grand Old Man in the Sky, while others continue with Isaiah to imagine God as a judgmental king.

Counter-images of God in the Bible seem to be deliberate deconstructions of the anthropomorphic images. For instance, when God descends on Mount Sinai to deliver the commandments to Moses the finite environment almost breaks apart, not being able to contain the Holy One of Israel. The mountain shakes violently and a sound as of mighty trumpets rises and rises and rises. The foot of the mountain is roped off so people will not come close and be destroyed.

Then there are images of God as creator of the entire world, higher than the distinction between light and dark, form and chaos. John goes so far as to say that God is love, not a being who loves but love itself. The early Christian theologians quickly noted that God as creator transcends any distinctions, creates time and space, and is not to be represented in images or concepts except through symbols that don’t quite apply. The author of Colossians, for instance, says that Jesus Christ, the incarnate logos, is the first visible image of the invisible, that is unimaginable, God.

Without being frivolous, let me characterize this spectrum of images in the following way. Toward the anthropomorphic end of the spectrum we have a small God who can play roles as a finite character in the story of Israel, or in our own stories. Toward the transcendent end we have an immense God, where “immense” means not only very large but immeasurably so. “Immense” means not-measurable, hence not describable except in carefully controlled symbols. The Christian theological tradition by and large, and rightly to my mind, has said that the real God is the immense one, not the small one. The images of the anthropomorphic God are mere metaphors, and we should be very careful with them, however important they are in many areas of religious life; the images of the immense God are serious efforts to grapple with a profound mystery.

The meaning of “trust” in God is obviously correlated with the spectrum of images of God. When we imagine God in anthropomorphic ways, thinking of God as an agent separate from us, within time and space, and interacting with the rest of the world, playing roles in our histories and lives, trust means expecting God to do things for us. Sometimes we imagine God to behave like a righteous king governing history, rewarding the good and punishing the evil, with a little mercy thrown in for the penitent. The Bible tells the story of God covenanting with Israel. Other times we imagine God to be interacting with us like another person, responding to prayers like a good big person would. The news about these images of the small God is very bad, I fear. The good people are not always rewarded and the evil are not always punished. God’s promises to Israel as the chosen people, interpreted in strictly historical terms, have not been fulfilled—quite the opposite. David’s dynasty has not been kept intact. Jesus did not return in the time-frame the Bible laid down. Good people, even innocent children, sicken, suffer, and die, despite our deepest prayers. However much parts of the Bible suggests that some finite God runs the universe like a righteous kingdom, that is empirically false, and other parts of the Bible admit that. We cannot trust some small God to make us secure, to reward moral behavior, or to control history according to some preconceived and promised plan. Instead we ourselves need to work directly to make our own families, institutions, governments, personal characters, and skills trustworthy. However faulty they are now, they can be improved. This is our public and personal moral responsibility. And we cannot hope for more in the management of life as it is played out in time. If our only images are of a small God, trust is vain, and the only realistic course is practical atheism.

Trust in the immense God is a different matter. Here we relate to the eternal creator of space, time, and history, the creator of all things that can be conceived to act within the historical cosmos. The question of trust in the immense God is not about safety or success as measured by the temporal unfolding of our lives, by “the world,” as the New Testament calls it. Trust is about whether we are sustained so as to be fulfilled in relation to the immense God. Here is the very heart of the Christian gospel: within time we should expect troubles and crosses, as well as such benefits and satisfactions as we can secure by luck and our own limited means: within the eternity relating us to the immense God we are resurrected to a richer sense of life than temporal life affords. The cross and resurrection are the defining themes of the Christian Way. As we approach Lent and Easter we shall ponder these themes often.

What does it mean to trust the immense God? It means that God’s eternal creativity within which we already and always live, move, and have our being gives us the power to live rightly and in fulfillment before God. Nothing in the world can prevent that if we trust that creativity and use th
e power. To live rightly before God requires living justly: we always have the power to seek justice and commit our substance to it, even if justice cannot be achieved fully and every apparently just pattern also has its injustices. The world can prevent success but it cannot destroy our search for and commitment to justice, which is righteousness. To live rightly before God requires living with pious deference to every creature, appreciating its value regardless of how it might be reduced to merely instrumental value for human life: our ecological environments, our clans, and our primitive passions are all due the piety of deference even when we order them for higher purposes. The world cannot destroy our piety, though it is easily lost through our own thoughtlessness. To live rightly before God requires living with the faith that our own situation can be engaged with courage, no matter how painful, frustrating, ephemeral, and distasteful. We do not have to pretend to be rich, beautiful, and in Shangri La, nor to complain about being poor, bald, and cold in Boston. The world cannot destroy our faith to engage our actual lives, it can only make them vain by worldly standards. To live rightly before God requires organizing our lives with the hope that we can achieve something of value ultimately considered, something that makes a contribution to the divine life. The world might frustrate our hope to achieve what we want, but it cannot deny us the hope itself and its organizational power for our lives.

Righteousness, piety, faith, and hope are the virtues for living before god, and together they add up to something more, however fulfilling they are on their own: they add up to love. Love seeks the best for its object, appreciates its object for its own value, engages the object with full devotion, and organizes itself so as live with its object in a way that enhances the good of all. Any love that lacks such righteousness, pious appreciation, faithful engagement, or directing hope is deficient in obvious ways. No matter how poor and incompetent we are, by our very created existence we can live with righteousness in pursuit of justice, with piety in deference to the worth in each thing, with faith in our situation, with hope to live before God well, and with love in the image of God. The world cannot take these away.

Whom do we love? God and our neighbors, of course, and the whole created realm. The particular shape of loving neighbors comes from just who your neighbors are, especially those who are your enemies. There is no such thing as righteousness in general, only justice for these people, no piety in general, only deference to these things, no faith in general, only engagement with your situations, no hope in general, only your path with these pilgrims. Love is of the particulars.

God is the greatest particular, the singular creator of this crazy universe, who gives you your sunsets and flowers, your songs and dances, your successes and failures, your odd friends, your resolute enemies, your pains, your ills, and your death. God, your vastly fecund creator, gives you your life, threaded with others through a cloth of only unique strands that bears all risings and ceasings, all starts and stops, all joys and pains, all births and deaths. The immense God is not some small deity dedicated to doing only nice things. Loving the singular creator of your existence is hard. Loving your enemies is necessary practice for loving the God of Immensity, because whereas your enemies only might kill you, God surely will in the end.

To be a lover, loving our God, loving the persons, friends, and enemies of our neighborhood, and loving the whole of creation that we can know, is to be in concord and consent with God’s own act as creator. To love is to be in harmony with God, the completion and fulfillment of the divine creative act, and it is to add a harmony lacking when love fails. The whole of Christian discipline and practice is aimed to create communities and individuals that image God as creative lover. God gives us the power to love in the gift of our creation itself: no matter how much we suffer and lose by worldly standards, we always can love. That God creates us with the power to love no matter what, is what we can trust for the good of our very being, despite all the troubles of the world that crucify us.

One final thought. When we do trust the God of Immensity and move on toward perfection in love, the knots and tangles of our fights with life fall away and the powers of divine fecundity move through us like music. We move with the flow of creation rather than against it and have more patience for righteousness, more perception for piety, more courage for faith, more energy for hope, and more wild passion for love. Although our lives will still be filled with troubles as well as joys, and have many dry times, trusting God and loving in consent to creation we shall not be like “a shrub in the desert” or “live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.” We “shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.” Trust our immense God, our creator and eternal home, and despite everything you will have abundant life here and now. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 02.15.2004 at 11:00 am