Coming home

I was in Capernaum a few days ago. Then, after a stop in Nazareth and a night in Tel Aviv, I came home. It’s good to be home. It’s good to have a place to call home and come back to.

As many of you know, I was in Israel with a group of seven Jewish leaders and nine Christian clergy from Nashville, and the trip was all I hoped it would be and more. Our immersion in the beauty of the land and its many layers of history and memory was brief, but deep. I knew at the end of our first day in Jerusalem that I wanted to come back.

I came home Thursday night after spending more than 24 hours on planes and in airports. The flight from Tel Aviv to Newark, New Jersey took eleven hours. Our bodies fly through the air at almost 600 mph, but our souls, our capacity to integrate all we have touched and seen and heard, tasted and smelled and learned, our souls take more time. I arrived Thursday night, but I’m not quite here yet; my soul is still catching up.

On Tuesday I was in Capernaum, the home base of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee, and I walked among the ruins of a synagogue built on the foundations of a synagogue from the time of Jesus, and across the street was a church, built on the foundations of earlier churches, and the bottom layer of rocks belonged to a house, the house of Peter and Andrew, according to tradition.

In chapter 3 of Mark, we read that Jesus went from the synagogue to the lake, and from there up the mountain with the twelve, and then, it says in verse 20, he went home. Home has to be one of the strongest words in any language. It was good for Jesus to be home, I imagine; to sit in his favorite chair and put his feet up; to look out the window and see the familiar view. Where do you imagine Jesus went when it says, he went home? Didn’t he say, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head”?[1] Other English versions of this passage stay closer to the Greek by translating, ‘he entered a house.’ Capernaum was the home base of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee, and the house he entered may well have been the house of Peter and Andrew, just across the street from the synagogue. Going there at the end of a long day of healing and teaching must have felt like coming home, but once more such a crowd gathered round them that they had no chance even to eat. The house sat like an island in a sea of people who wanted to be near him, people who were drawn to Jesus because of his power to heal and forgive. And then his family showed up; his mother, his brothers and sisters, outside. The people who had been with him the longest, the people, presumably, closest to him, the people who knew him best; and they were there not out of concern for his well-being, that he may not be getting enough sleep or may not be eating right, no, they had come to get him, to restrain him, if necessary. “He is out of his mind,” they said. His own family did not recognize the power at work in him. They thought it was madness and had come for an intervention. They wanted to take him back to the life before his baptism, back to the familiar routines untouched by the proclamation of God’s coming kingdom, back home, we might say, or what they considered to be his home.

And they were not the only ones who didn’t quite know what to make of his work and words. Religious experts from Jerusalem were watching the scene and making their comments, accusing him of being in league with the master of demons, alleging that his work and words were sorcery and black magic. Like his own family, they did not recognize the power at work in him to be the power of God. His teachings, his actions were too disruptive.

His family and the scholars from the city were not slow or blind; they, like us, were living in difficult times, and like us they wanted to maintain what little stability was left in their domestic and religious life. And Jesus was rocking the boat. He was healing and liberating folk from all that kept them captive to powers other than the love and mercy of God, and he did it regardless of who they were or where they came from or what day of the week it was – there was no proper order to it; his words and actions seemed extravagant and reckless, frightening even to some. They were not slow or blind; they were living in difficult times and they wanted to hold on to what they knew, and protect what little normalcy and peace they had. Jesus was too disruptive; to them his power felt like chaos. “He is out of his mind,” his family said; “he’s fighting demons with demons,” the scholars from the city concluded. The presence and work of God in Christ was not unambiguous, and what was liberating and healing to many, looked like madness or even the devil’s work to others. Again, they were not slow or blind; they did not know what to make of the disruptive presence of Jesus to whom the wounded and the oppressed were drawn.

Mark paints a scene for us. It’s a little house with Jesus in it, and around it a throng of people, the mess of humanity in all its diversity, beauty, and imperfection; people of all ethnic backgrounds and political convictions, people on crutches and on stretchers, poor and rich; all of humanity with our hopes and our fears, our flaws and our dreams, with our hunger and thirst for life, and we’re pressing in at the doors and windows, aching to be near Jesus and to touch the hem of his cloak. The only ones to remain on the edge of the scene are the ones who have made up their minds because they already know what’s best for the family and for religion, and in their world Jesus must be restrained. In their world, the disruptive presence and work of God needs to be kept under control.

Jesus was at odds with his family and in conflict with the religious authorities, but not because he was a young man with wild ideas. Jesus identifies himself as the thief of God who has come to plunder the strong man’s house. He has tied up the strong man and now he’s ransacking the place. Jesus is the thief of God who has come to rob the biggest thief of all. Life belongs to God, not to the master of demons, the whispering liar who sows the seeds of lovelessness that grow into thickets of sin in which our true humanity is lost. Jesus has his eyes on the strong man’s house, a house as big as the world, and on us who are tempted to believe that living in the strong man’s house is as good as it gets. Jesus ties up the strong man, demon by demon, fear by fear, lie by lie, and leads the captives to freedom, leads them home.

Mark paints a scene for us; it’s a little house with Jesus in it. It was first seen in a village on the western shore of the sea of Galilee, but since then people have found it in communities around the world. It’s where Christ’s power to heal and forgive resides. At times we may be standing outside with those who say he is out of his mind; he his beside himself; he’s completely out of it, they say, and there’s truth in their confusion. Because his life, in contrast to ours, revolves entirely around the will of God, and the whisperer of loveless lies can’t get a handle on him. “He is out of his mind,” they say and we, at times, with them, and there’s truth to it, because Jesus is completely in sync with the mind of God. “He is beside himself,” they say and we, at times, with them, and there’s truth to it, because Jesus doesn’t fall into our self-absorbed ways and doesn’t think of himself outside of his relationship with God. He entrusts himself completely to the flow of love and grace and offers with reckless extravagance what he receives.

A crowd is sitting around him and pressing in at the doors and windows, aching to be near him, and they say, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside asking for you.” And he looks at all the humanity sitting around him, all of us wounded ones, all of us lost ones in the thickets of sin, all of us with our hunger for life that is really life and not just death’s prelude, and he says, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” Jesus sits in the midst of those who long for healing and freedom, and where Jesus is present, God speaks and shines and rules. The beauty of his mission is that the closer we draw to him with our desire to touch and be healed by his wholeness, the closer we draw to each other. And the closer we draw to the reality of suffering and longing in each other, the closer we draw to him and the wholeness he brings to creation.

There’s a little house with Jesus in it; it was first seen in a village on the western shore of the sea of Galilee, but since then people found it in communities around the world. It’s where Christ’s power to heal and forgive resides. It’s a little house that’s big enough for all of us; it’s home.

---

[1] Matthew 8:20; Luke 9:58

Israel Day Seven - Nazareth to Tel Aviv

The final day of our Israel trip took us to Mount Precipice in Nazareth, a flourishing community of Israeli Arab Muslims and Christians. From the top of the cliff we enjoyed the spectacular view of the Jezreel Valley and Mount Tabor. Yes, everywhere you step here, a biblical story pops up.

When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because he has anointed me
        to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
        to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’” And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

Mount Tabor rising ("like a belly button," according to our tour guide, Doron) fromt the Jezreel Valley.

From Nazareth we drove to Netanya for a short, but most interesting meeting with Shachar Zahavi, Founding Director of IsraAID, a non-profit NGO working in disaster relief and sustainable development. Check them out, they're doing great work from what I've heard and seen so far.

From Netanya it was just a short trip to Tel Aviv where I ate the best falafel ever for lunch, before we went to the Yitzhak Rabin Center, both a memorial to this "soldier in the army of peace" and a Israeli history museum. We took time to tour the exhibit and then had our closing session in one of the class rooms there. We were asked to name what we were bringing back to Nashville from this trip. Each of us had been asked to take two "boxes" with us when we first started our journey, one with a gift just for us personally, the other with a gift for our respective communities. I'll talk about these when I get home. I want to close this post with a poem by Yehuda Amichai, written in stone at the end of the exhibit hall at the Rabin Center, in Hebrew, Arabic, and English:

The Place Where We Are Right
by Yehuda Amichai

From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the Spring.

The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.

But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plough.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.

Here's to the whisper of hope. L'chaim.

Israel Day Six – Golan and Capernaum

This morning we drove up to the Golan Heights, bordering Syria and Lebanon, for a view of the abandoned city of Kuneitra and a nearby UN outpost. Our guide talked about the Yom Kippur war of 1973 and the debate within Israeli society since then over whether or not to keep the Golan Heights, e.g. for strategic reasons. We then drove to the hills overlooking the Hula Valley where, from the perspective of former Syrian fortifications, we discussed the security challenges before the Six-Day War.

From there we continued to Banias, better known among readers of the New Testament as Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus asked the disciples, “Who do people say that I am? Who do you say that I am?” We learned much from our tour guide about the role the location played in the Roman empire in Jesus’ day.

We returned to Lake Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee, for lunch at St. Peter’s Restaurant, and then drove to Capernaum to visit the remains of a synagogue from the 2^nd century C.E. (under the ruins of a synagogue from the 5^th century) and the layered remains of several churches just about across the street, churches that were built, as many archeologists believe, over the site of Peter’s house. This is a real possibility since synagogues and churches frequently were built on the location of former synagogues and churches. This is why archeologists wonder if perhaps there might be remains of a 1^st century synagogue under those from the 2^nd century one.

Our next stop was the Mount of Beatitudes, a beautiful hill with a spectacular view across the lake. We heard again Jesus’ words of blessing from Matthew 5, and I know that I will return in my mind to this view of the lake every time I hear those words again in the future. The landscape, the hot desert sun in Judea, the lush green around the lake, the view from the Mount of Olives to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem – those are all impressions I will take with me and that will continue to shape my imagination and my thinking about Scripture.

We ended the day with a group conversation to continue to process our experiences; we had had several of these during this week, but this one was memorable because we met in the bomb shelter of our hotel. It was a stark reminder of the long road to peace for God’s children on all sides of the many borders in this region. Conflict management is not enough.

Israel Day Five – Jerusalem to Sea of Galilee

Yet another incredibly rich day of learning. It began with a text-study at Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, where Jamie Salter helped us explore the Zionist movement through biblical texts and writings by Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha’am.

Then we drove to Kafr Adummim, a settlement in the West Bank, about 15 minutes outside of Jerusalem, where a young Israeli woman welcomed us and talked about her hopes for a peaceful future for Jewish and Arab Israelis and Palestinians. From her perspective, there’s no alternative to real proximity between the groups in shared neighborhoods, schools, and towns where people get to know each other from a young age; but the opportunities for that to happen are decreasing rather than increasing. She didn’t express much confidence in the current political process, though, but rather in the many, often small efforts by individuals and groups that organize cultural programs, children’s camps, etc.

Our next stop was Qumran, famous among Bible scholars for the discovery in 1947 of the oldest known manuscripts of all Old Testament writings (all except Esther and Nehemia) and other texts. We had lunch there and enjoyed the spectacular view of the Dead Sea and the mountains of Jordan.

From there we drove to Kasser Al Yahud, the spot on the Jordan where according to Christian tradition Jesus was baptized by John, the same spot where according to Jewish tradition the Israelites crossed over the Jordan River into the promised land and where the prophet Elijah ascended to heaven. I was glad to see the Jordan with a little more water flowing than in the recent past when agricultural water use had reduced it to a polluted creek. Apparently the Israeli and Jordanian government agreed on a restoration plan that was successful.

We continued to drive northwards along the Jordan Valley, through Tiberias, to our final destination, our hotel on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

Israel Day Four - Bethlehem

I knew it's complicated, but it's even more complicated than I imagined. We began our day with a presentation by Col. (res.) Benzi Gruber, Deputy Commander of an Armored Corps brigade of the Israeli army; he talked about the ethics of military action and dilemmas in the field. Then we took a short bus trip to view the security border from a hill, on the Israeli side, just opposite of Bethlehem and Beit Jala, and heard from our tour guide about the history of its origins. Near a checkpoint we met our second guide, a Palestinian Muslim journalist who talked to us about growing up in East Jerusalem and the impact of the "security barrier" on Palestinians; in Bethlehem we saw how they live in the towns and camps behind the wall/fence. We stayed in Bethlehem for lunch and to visit the Church of the Nativity (both of them, the politics of memory are complicated) and the souq. After lunch we heard a brief presentation by the Executive Director of the Bethlehem Development Foundation, a Palestinian Christian, who also talked about the challenges of life so close to the city of Jerusalem and yet so distant from it because of Israeli security concerns. One of the most troubling issues was brought up by our Israeli tour guide, who told us that his kids didn't have any encounters with Palestinian children; this can only deepen the estrangement between the two groups. We returned to the hotel to gather around the big table to process the information, our questions and concerns. "I knew it's complicated, but it's even more complicated than I imagined" was a kind of tagline for me for the day, and it turned out to be so for most of us. We left the room with a sense that the loss of easy answers because of the complexities of the issues is a good place to begin the crucial work of hope and change. After dinner at the hotel (maybe I should mention again that the food here is fantastic, on both sides of the fence) we walked through the streets for a couple of hours to enjoy the cool of the evening. 

تصبح على خير Good Night! לילה טוב

Israel Day Three - Jerusalem

Today began with the spectacular view from the Mount of Olives, across the Kidron Valley, to the Temple Mount with the iconic Dome of the Rock glistening in the bright morning sun. We walked through the ancient Jewish cemetery, via the Dominus Flevit Church (Latin, "The Lord wept"), all the way down to the bottom of the valley to the Garden of Gethsemane.

The landscape and the rocks we walked on and touched made a deep impression on me, much deeper than the buildings that had been erected at various times over the past centuries to commemorate particular moments from the gospels. To imagine that Jesus walked across this hill from Bethany had a greater impact on me, just like the ancient olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane did more to connect my soul with the past than the church that was built there. However, I walked into the Church of All Nations just as a priest was celebrating the eucharist, and I joined the congregation in saying the Lord's Prayer. I have long liked to remember that we join with those who have gone before when we pray with Jesus, "Our Father..." Saying this prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane I felt in my bones the bond of divine love that makes us one.

We walked up to the old city, through the Lions Gate, and followed the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The church has a great history and has brought forth many stories that will make you scratch your head (and, no, I won't begin to tell them, because it's way past midnight again and I need to go to bed...).

We ate lunch in the Armenian Quarter, before meeting Hana Bendcowsky, Director of the Jerusalm Center for Jewish Christian Relations, who introduced us to the fascinating variety of Christian traditions in the city. Then we continued our history hike and visited the Garden Tomb, another site beside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where Jesus might have been crucified and buried. Again, the sites built to commemorate particular events weren't nearly as helpful for connecting me with those events as the landscape and the city as a whole.

We wrapped up the day with dinner at the hotel and a walk (yes, another walk!) down Ben Yehuda Street, a pedestrian mall where people old and young were enjoying a lovely, cool evening. We looked at lots of tschotschkes, but I couldn't decide what to buy to bring back. Perhaps tomorrow?

I'm listening to Craig Taubman sing Hashkiveinu, a lovely prayer for bed time.

Grant that we may lie down in peace, Eternal God, and awaken us to life.
Guard our going forth and our coming in and bless us with life and peace, from now and to eternity.

Israel Day Two - Jerusalem

What a day. Today I realized that I would have to come back to this land, to this city. We began the day with a session with Rachel Korazim who not only gave us a framework for understanding the challenges of remembering the Holocaust, but insight into the challenges the diversity of Judaisms present for Israeli society. 

We then visited Yad Vashem and our group leader had to come and get me after a what seemed like only moments, because the group was waiting and I was only about half-way through the exhibits. I want to walk through these exhibits again at my own pace. The Children's Memorial alone was one of the most powerful experiences of any kind I have ever had.

View from the Holocaust Memorial Museum to the land - l'chaim.

From Yad Vashem we walked up to the National Military Cemetery on Mt. Herzl to recall landmark events in modern Israeli history in which these soldiers gave their lives and visit the graves of Theodor Herzl, Golda Meir, and Yitzhak Rabin.

After a short break at the hotel, we went to the Western Wall, part of the ancient temple complex, to witness the energy and joy as hundreds gathered for prayers to welcome the Sabbath. As the Jewish prayers came to a close, the Muezzin's call rang out from two minarets that are part of the same ancient temple complex, and on our way back I looked across the Kidron valley to the Mount of Olives with Gethsemane and the Dominus Flevit church. I've known for so many years that this city is home to all Abrahamic faiths, but to stand in that reality, feet on the ground, ears and eyes and heart wide open is knowing of a different kind.

Our group was invited to the home of Chaya and Hillel Lester for a beautiful Sabbath dinner with singing, poetry, stories, laughter and tears, wonderful food and wine, and it's past midnight here, and I really shouldn't be writing anyway, it's Sabbath, after all. So, good night and good Shabbes!

עושה שלום במרומיו 
הוא יעשה שלום עלינו 
ועל כל עם ישראל 
ואמרו, אמרו אמן. 

יעשה שלום, יעשה שלום 
שלום עלינו ועל כל ישראל 
יעשה שלום, יעשה שלום 
שלום עלינו ועל כל ישראל.

May the One who makes peace in high places,
make peace for us 
and for all Israel, 
and let us say, Amen.

Israel Day One - Jerusalem

We landed on time at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv this morning a little after 10 a.m. (2 a.m. in Nashville). We were pretty tired from the long flight, but were so excited to be here, we just ignored it. After meeting our tour guide, Doron, and our driver, Avi, we got on the bus.

Our first stop was at Neot Kedumim where we each planted a tree - citizens and visitors have planted more than 50 million (!) trees in Israel in an effort to restore and protect the land. The prayer we offered ended with the words, "Look down from thy holy habitation, from heaven, and bless this land that it may flow again with milk and honey."

Then we drove on up to Jerusalem where we stopped on a terrace overlooking the Mount of Olives and the old city; I took some pictures, but the sky was hazy from sand and dust, so I didn't get the pretty tourist shot. Looking over the city, we listened to Psalm 137 and recited the Shehecheyanu, a benediction spoken when tasting a fruit for the first time in the season, when moving into a hew home, at the beginning of the Jewish holidays, and on many joyous occasions, such as our initial arrival in Jerusalem!

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הַעוֹלָם שֶׁהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְּמָנוּ וְהִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְּמַן הַזֶּה׃

Baruch ata adonai eloheinu melech ha'olam, shehecheyanu, v'kiyamanu, v'higiyanu lazman hazeh.

We give thanks to you, Lord our God, Ruler of the universe, for giving us life, for sustaining us, and for enabling us to reach this moment of joy.

For lunch we got our first taste of Israel's version of Mediterranean cuisine - wonderful salads, bread, roasted vegetables, grilled chicken, lentil salad, and watermelon, it was delicious. Then we checked into our hotel with just enough time to brush our teeth before we met with Paul Liptz of Tel Aviv University and Hebrew Union College, a social historian who gave a very informative talk about societal and economic realities in Israel that added great details to the reading we had done in preparation for the trip; his entire presentation was built around questions we had submitted a couple of weeks ago.

I look forward to going to bed soon. Tomorrow will be a full day, beginning with a meeting with Holocaust scholar, Dr. Rachel Korazim and a visit to Yad Vashem.

God's vision, God's initiative

Imagine you turn on the news one night and the lead story is about a festival on the streets of Jerusalem. You see parades, musicians, and dancers, every food truck imaginable, and thousands upon thousands of people from Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, you name it, celebrating the end of violent conflicts across the Middle East. Then the news anchor transitions to the next big story: the floating island of trash in the northern Pacific that has been collected and filtered out of the ocean and recycled; coral reefs around the globe are thriving, and CO₂  levels in the atmosphere have dropped below 300ppm. Imagine you turn on the news and no child has been abused or abducted, no spouse murdered, no neighbor robbed, and there wasn’t a single person on the whole planet who went to bed hungry. You try the channel changer, but it’s the same story across the entire spectrum of broadcast and cable news: peace everywhere you turn. It blows you away! A gust of joy is rushing into your home through every screen of every size, through every speaker and window, a gust so powerful it knocks over your easy chair and you find yourself lying on the floor, laughing and crying because it’s all so good, so very good. Unbelievable? The question is, how concrete do you allow your vision of the whole world redeemed and restored by God to be?

Luke paints a scene with Jerusalem at the center. The last thing the risen Jesus had told the disciples was, “Stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” They had no idea what exactly they were waiting for and what it would feel like to walk around dressed in power and what sort of power it would be. But devoting themselves to prayer, they waited. While they were waiting they had a nominating process, and they elected Matthias to take Judas’s place as one of the twelf apostles; it was all done in the proper sequence and order. And then it happened. It started with a sound like the rush of a violent wind that filled the entire house, and then it burst into tongues like firy flames, one resting on each of the disciples, and all of them began to speak in languages none of them had ever learned, and the house could not contain all that. A crowd gathered and they were bewildered, because each heard those Galileans speaking in their own native language. Empowered by the Holy Spirit, the disciples spoke of the mighty deeds of God, and their speech was heard in the languages of every nation under heaven.

At this point, Luke adds a list feared by every man and woman called upon to read Scripture in public worship on Pentecost Sunday. We know how to say Egypt and Libya, Arabs and Asia, but that’s about it; the rest are like trying to say the names of Icelandic volcanoes or Georgian weight lifters. The really curious thing, though, is that those names don’t just give you and me a hard time; the world’s finest New Testament scholars continue to wrestle with what to make of them. Jacob Myers writes about “Luke’s wonky list of Pentecost observers gathered in Jerusalem – a motley patchwork of Elamites, Cretans, and Arabs sewn together with folks from Egypt, Lybia, and Rome!” Elamites? The Elamites had been nearly wiped out by the Assyrians in 640 B.C., and the Medes had been nonexistent as a distinct ethnic group for over five-hundred years![1] What are Elamites and Medes doing in 1^st-century A.D. Jerusalem? The question is, how concrete do we allow our vision of the whole world redeemed and restored by God to be?

In Luke’s picture, the disciples of Jesus asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” They were ready then to see their deepest hopes fulfilled, but now the outpouring of God’s Spirit expands their limited scope of vision along with ours. God’s redemptive and restorative work extends not only to the ends of the earth in geographical terms, or from Pentecost into the future in historical terms, but also into the past to include Elamites and Medes and every tribe and nation under heaven.

“Whoa, preacher, easy now,” some of you might be thinking. “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth – that we can see, that we can trace on our maps, the spread of the good news into Asia and Africa, Europe, the Americas and Australia – but into the past? I don’t know, preacher, what did you put in your coffee this morning? We hear words like perplexed, bewildered,  and amazed in the text, and that is what we are, baffled, more than puzzled, blown away.” No wonder some of the observers concluded the disciples were drunk. But Peter said no. “It’s only nine o’clock in the morning,” he said, which was such a weak point, he should have skipped it and go straight to reciting the bold prophecy with Joel’s name on it. In the last days God’s Spirit would be poured out upon all flesh – not just chosen people, note just male people or church people, but all people – male and female, young and old, slave and free. All would have visions. All would prophesy. All dreams would be given voice. God’s Spirit would blow through all our carefully constructed boundaries of culture, ethnicity, and language not to eliminate them, but to weave us together into a unity of life where all are at home. And this was the beginning. Pentecost was the eruption of God’s vision for the world: resurrection writ large, all of creation transformed into new creation, all of life redeemed. The church wears red on Pentecost, because the passion, the fire and light of God’s Spirit is now loose in the world, claiming us as Christ’s own, inspiring and empowering us to live into that vision as his witnesses.

Many of us are worried about what is becoming of the church in the United States, what will be the future of our ministry here in Nashville. The ground is shifting under our feet; our governance models are eroding; our buildings are too large and inflexible; and our habits still reach deeper than our imagination. But today the church wears red. Today the church around the globe celebrates our beginnings in the movement of God’s Spirit in the world. Jesus told the disciples who didn’t know yet how to be witnesses of the risen Lord to stay in the city and wait until they had been clothed with power from on high. And devoting themselves to prayer, they waited. They didn’t hang around and do nothing or whatever they felt like doing or what they knew how to do because they had done it for years, they waited, tuning their hearts and minds to the movement and vision of God. And on the Day of Pentecost a mighty wind blew through the house on a backstreet in Jerusalem where they had come together and gave them everything they would need to change the world: not money, not a set of bylaws and a lectionary, not even ordained leadership, but the breath and Spirit of God. This is where the church begins, again and again, with God’s initiative, because the risen Christ needs a body in the world.

I wonder if perhaps our observance of Pentecost is a lot more subdued and understated than what we do around Easter and Christmas, because it is so much easier to celebrate what God has done for us and for all in the incarnation and life of Jesus, his death and resurrection, than to celebrate what God intends to do with us for the sake of the world. We turn on the news and nine times out of ten we don’t like what we hear and see, because it reminds us what is wrong with us and the world. But this is the world in which we live and raise our children, and for all that is wrong with it and with us, it is God’s and so are we. And that is why things don’t have to be or remain the way they are.

Paul writes that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now, waiting with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. And we too groan while we wait for redemption, and we are not alone, for the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know how to pray while we wait, but the Spirit intercedes for us and for the whole creation, with wordless groaning, with sighs too deep for words. The groan you hear coming from deep inside of you when you are reminded yet again how ugly we can be to each other and how mean, and how difficult it is for us to communicate freely and honestly, and how thoughtless self-absorption, greed and hatred appear to gain ground in human affairs every day instead of going away – the groan you hear then is yours as much as it is God’s. It comes from the place where life that longs for wholeness encounters the God who is making all things new and who is calling men and women, young and old, people of privilege and people from the margins to participate in that healing work as members of the body of Christ in the world.

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[1] Jacob Myers http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1296

Us and the promise of God

Luke tells us a very funny story, easily one of the funniest in all of scripture. The disciples were having a conversation with Jesus when suddenly he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. What are we supposed to visualize here? Jesus floating up like a helium balloon or zipping skyward like Iron Man? Then there’s the moment when the disciples are standing there, gazing up to where they last saw Jesus, when suddenly two men in white robes appear and ask them, “Galileans, why are you staring up toward heaven?” It’s a perfect Monty Python moment just waiting for a hilarious punch line to pop.

It’s so easy to dismiss the scene as too fantastic for our sober minds and not quite fantastic enough for our imaginations shaped by Hollywood’s power myths and their mind-blowing special effects. At a church in Kansas City, worship on Ascension Day calls for special props. Hours before the service, five or six people show up and begin filling up balloons. They pump hundreds of white balloons full of helium gas and stuff them into an enormous bag made of bedsheets. Eventually the pile of white fabric is transformed into this big fluffy thing, and with a few deliberate pushes by the prop artists, a cloud begins to take shape. The volunteer cloud squad pins the only remaining opening shut and releases the magnificent cloud to float about the sanctuary. It dips and rises over worshipers, moving wherever it wants to go. Some years the cloud takes on unruly behavior, accepting a few too many ceiling fan currents, and divebombing the candelabra. There have been cloud squads who decided to tether the gigantic white blob with ten-pound fishing line and walk it around the sanctuary like Snoopy in a Macy’s parade. All eyes, of course, are on the visual prop. Most of the worshipers tilt their heads skyward for much of the service, and the net effect of this soaring-cloud routine are stiff necks and pinched nerves.[1] Not exactly what the risen Lord envisioned for his disciples.

Luke’s story won’t tickle our funny bone, though, when, rather than watch the scene from a distance, we enter it. What we discover is the disciples moving through yet another season of change and loss. For forty days – in biblical lingo that means a good long time – Jesus had presented himself alive to them, appearing to them and speaking with them about the kingdom of God. His painful absence after his death on the cross had turned into the new life of his confusing and joyful resurrection presence, but just when they thought they knew him again like they hadn’t known him before, just when they thought their world was now ready for God’s kingdom to come in fullness, he slipped away again. No wonder they looked intently to where they had last seen him.

Now the scene is not funny at all, but heart-breakingly familiar. “One thing is for sure: there is no sense of absence where there has been no sense of presence,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor.

What makes absence hurt, what makes it ache, is the memory of what used to be there but is no longer. Absence is the arm flung across the bed in the middle of the night, the empty space where a beloved sleeper once lay. Absence is the child’s room now empty and hung with silence and dust. Absence is the overgrown lot where the old house once stood, the house in which people laughed and thought their happiness would last forever.

Where do you turn when your sense of God’s presence suddenly vanishes? Where do you turn when the visible becomes invisible, the tangible, intangible; the answer, a question; the presence, an absence? Luke tells us that Jesus didn’t go away, but that he ascended to heaven. Paul tells us that God raised Jesus from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion.[2] That’s all about a Jesus, but what about us? What are we supposed to do?

Jesus says to us, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses.” The absence will again become powerful presence, and we will be witnesses of the love that has found us, we will be messengers of reconciliation, truth tellers and ambassadors of the Lord’s reign to the ends of the earth. “You cannot miss what you have never known,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor, “which makes our sense of absence—and especially our sense of God’s absence—the very best proof that we knew God once, and that we may know God again.”[3]

Our gaze is stuck on that spot behind the cloud where we last perceived God’s presence in the person of Jesus, and the angels gently redirect our attention down to earth. It’s no use looking up if we want to see him. He will come to us. Our attention needs to be where his attention was when he walked on the earth. On the margins of our communities where life is far from flourishing. On the poverty of purse and of spirit that drains us of life and keeps us from recognizing each other as brothers and sisters. Our attention needs to be directed by his, and to the degree that we know what Jesus notices, we act, and to the degree that we don’t fully know where he wants to direct our gaze, we wait. He will come to us. We will be clothed with power from on high.[4]

Or so he told them, so he told the few who would become his apostles. But those were different times, simpler times, we imagine. They didn’t have Pew polls relentlessly reporting the declining numbers of believers; for them, then, it was just natural to believe in the promises of God and they, of course, weren’t nearly as busy as we are—or so we like to think. Annie Dillard wrote beautifully about this odd assumption:

A blur of romance clings to our notions of “publicans,” “sinners,” “the poor,” “the people in the marketplace,” “our neighbors,” as though of course God should reveal himself, if at all, to these simple people, these Sunday school watercolor figures, who are so purely themselves in their tattered robes, who are single in themselves, while we now are various, complex, and full at heart. We are busy. So, I see now, were they. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead—as if innocence had ever been—and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been. There have been generations which remembered, and generations which forgot; there has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even one day.[5]

No need, then, to paint the past in a rosy glow, whether it’s the days of the apostles or the years of innocence after World War II when tall steeples went up like grass after a spring shower. There is no one but us. There never has been. Us and the promise of God. Us and the promise that we are not on our own, but that God is at work in the world. Us and the promise that we will be clothed with power from on high and be just right – just right, you and me, just right to participate in Christ’s continuing mission to the ends of the earth.

We have our VISTA event today, immediately after worship. As we look back to evaluate and look around to assess and look ahead to make plans, the biggest challenge will not be our goal to be done by 2, but rather to let the angels gently redirect our gaze from the place where we last saw God powerfully present to the places where Jesus calls us to be present. The biggest challenge will be not just to use our best wisdom and judgment, but to trust the movement and work of God’s Spirit in the world and to offer ourselves to be part of it.

Paul tells us that God raised Jesus from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion. Far above doesn’t mean far away. The movement of God is not away from the world, but deeper into its brokenness in order to heal and redeem it. The movement of God is not away from us, but always to us and through us to the world. Christ reigns far above all rule and authority and power and dominion opposed to God’s kingdom, and we have the privilege to let our lives be a witness to this reign. There is no one but us. There never has been. Us and the promise of God.

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[1] See Peter Marty, “Up, up and away,” The Christian Century, May 15, 1996, 543.

[2] Ephesians 1:20-21

[3] Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine (Boston: Cowley, 1995), 76.

[4] Luke 24:49

[5] Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 56-57

Visiting Israel

I will soon be visiting Israel. This is a journey I have wanted to make for decades, but I could never figure out how. I knew I didn’t want to go as a tourist or on a family vacation or as part of a Christian travel group. I knew it would have to be something like a pilgrimage; I wanted to see with my own eyes and give thanks for the flourishing of Jewish life after the Shoah. Under Nazi rule, my people attempted to kill all European Jews and, Lord have mercy, almost succeeded. This “almost” has deeply shaped my life and my faith, and I have long wanted to walk and pray in the streets of Jerusalem. I just didn’t know how to let it be the journey it needed to be.

And then, just a few weeks ago, my friend Rabbi Mark Schiftan invited me to go with him on a trip for Christian clergy and Jewish leaders, planned and coordinated by the Jewish Federation of Nashville. I felt honored, humbled and blessed, and after carrying the invitation with me for a few days, I told him I would love to go.

Our group, nine Nashville Christian clergy persons and seven Nashville Jewish leaders, will board our flight early in the morning of May 27, my 55th birthday. We will visit Jerusalem, a kibbutz near lake Kinneret, the Golan heights, Nazareth, Tel Aviv and many sites along the way. We will have conversations with academic, political, and military leaders. We will pray and study Scripture together. We will share meals, including a Shabbat dinner, and we will talk about our impressions. We expect to return to Nashville on June 4th, transformed in ways none of us can predict.

We hope for the blessings of friendship and learning, for the planting of seeds that will make us more faithful to God’s vision of peace, and we ask for your prayers.

I know in my bones this is the trip I’ve been waiting for.

The Lord reigns

O sing to the Lord a new song,

for he has done marvelous things!

The psalmist invites us to sing, and what do we do? We ask one of us to open the good book and read the words for us. The psalmist invites us to sing, and what does the preacher do? He steps into the pulpit and speaks.

[Preacher sings] Am I the only one who thinks that’s curious and more than a little incongruent? [Continues, to the tune of HYMN TO JOY]

Curious, curious, no one’s humming,

no one’s chanting to the Lord;

Shouldn’t we all sing together

faithful to the word of God?

Shouldn’t we be singing, clapping,

dancing to the tune of love?

Saints on earth all joining voices,

praising God with saints above!

O sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things. Marvelous things call for marvelous songs. The wonders of God’s overflowing love call for hearts overflowing with gratitude and praise.

We celebrate Mother’s Day, thankful for all the ways the life-giving and sutaining love of God has touched and shaped us through our mothers.

The life of God is love overflowing, bringing forth new life in and through us, around us, and sometimes despite us. The Lord has done marvelous things. Look around. See the faces. Remember the stories. Imagine the journeys. The daily routines and the great moments. Look around. The Lord has done marvelous things. Sing to the Lord a new song!

Ours is a singing faith. When Israel, on their journey to the promised land, escaped Pharao’s slave catchers, the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing. And Miriam sang to them: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.”[1] Miriam and the other women established a pattern of praise for God’s people: Sing to the Lord, for the Lord has done marvelous things. The Lord has brought us up, out of the land of Egypt. Sing to the Lord! The Lord has made covenant with us at Sinai and given us the commandments of life. Sing to the Lord! The Lord has brought us into a good land, flowing with milk and honey. Sing to the Lord! The Lord is the maker of heaven and earth, whom sun and moon and stars obey. Sing to the Lord! The Lord has saved us from our enemies. Sing to the Lord! The steadfast love and faithfulness of the Lord are from everlasting to everlasting. Sing to the Lord!

The destruction of the Temple and the exile in Babylon was a devastating experience of loss for God’s people, but even then the songs did not cease. The Lord’s judgments are right. Sing to the Lord!

Hope flourished among the exiles when the prophets spoke of a way the Lord would make in the wilderness. And then they began to return, and it was the Lord’s doing, and it was wonderful in their eyes.

O sing to the Lord a new song,

for he has done marvelous things:

The Lord has made known his salvation;

The Lord has revealed his righteousness in the sight of the nations;

The Lord has remembered his steadfast love and faithfulness to the house of Israel.

The psalm has the familiar pattern of praise, but the radical newness of the moment of redemption and return pushes the language of praise to global and cosmic levels.

All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.

Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth;

break forth into joyous song and sing praises.

God’s righteousness has been revealed in God’s dealings with God’s people. Every instrument is claimed and used to make a joyful noise, because the Lord reigns. The Lord’s faithfulness endures forever; and the Lord’s power to save extends to all.

Let the sea roar, and all that fills it;

the world and those who live in it.

Let the floods clap their hands;

let the hills sing together for joy at the presence of the Lord.

The mighty waters offer thunderous applause while every living thing and every speck of dirt has its part in a cosmic symphony of praise. The Lord reigns and the Lord is coming to judge the earth.

The psalm is a song of gratitude mingled with bold expectation; those who sing it take the wonders of liberation and redemption already accomplished as an earnest of the full manifestation of God’s mercy in judgment, when God’s just rule will be established throughout the world.

The Lord will judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with equity.

The psalmist challenges us to see God’s judgment, not as a matter for private celebration by the righteous and, correspondingly, dread for the wicked, but rather as the occasion of cosmic jubilation: The righteousness of God will set things right. Few of us are inclined to rejoice at the prospect of judgment, but this song of praise invites us to examine our preconceptions and embrace judgment as a promise rather than a threat. Jubilation is the appropriate response to God’s judgment, because this judgment is characterized by righteousness, that is, by God’s abiding concern to sustain, restore, and enhance relationship with us, among us, and between us and rivers, mountains, and all living things.[2] The song of the redeemed includes the whole creation. God’s righteousness is a passion for wholeness.

Ours is a singing faith. Another Miriam, Mary the mother of Jesus, when she was pregnant with the promise of God, sang of the Mighty One whose name is holy.

The Lord has shown strength with his arm and has scattered those with arrogant thoughts and proud inclinations. Sing to the Lord! The Lord has pulled the powerful down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. Sing to the Lord! The Lord has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty-handed. Sing to the Lord! The Lord has come to the aid of his servant Israel, remembering his mercy, just as he promised to our ancestors, to Abraham and to Abraham’s descendants forever. Sing to the Lord![3]

As Christians, we recognize the fullness of God’s righteousness in the person of Jesus Christ. Mary’s firstborn is the salvation that God has wrought in the sight of the nations. His whole life – that is, his life and teachings, his death and resurrection – is the passionate assertion of God’s will for the world. He is our righteousness and our salvation, and through him we join Israel in singing a new song to the Lord, for he has done wondrous things.

John of Patmos wrote in Revelation, “I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea—I heard everything everywhere sing, ‘Blessing, honor, glory, and power belong to the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb forever and always.”[4]

The Lord reigns. This confession of God’s people is an act of profound hope, and more than hope. The God who brought Israel out of Egypt and who raised Jesus from the dead has poured the Holy Spirit on all flesh so that we, in the face of injustice and every form of brokenness, have the courage to defy such realities as we live under God’s claim and sing the song of God’s reign.

Ours is a singing faith. Miriam’s song of triumph on the seashore; the psalmist’s call to rivers and mountains; mother Mary’s song of good news for the poor; and in the end the cosmic choir John of Patmos heard: “I heard everything everywhere sing, ‘Blessing, honor, glory, and power belong to the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb forever and always.’”

The Lord has won the victory over all that is opposed to God’s will. The righteousness of God has triumphed and will prevail over the powers of sin and death. The whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now, but the whole creation is already singing of its redemption. And what do we do? [Preacher sings, to the tune of HYMN TO JOY]

Mortals, join the happy chorus,

stars of morning, take your part;

love divine is reigning o’er us,

binding those of tender heart.

Ever singing, move we onward,

victors in the midst of strife,

joyful music leads us sunward

in the triumph song of life.

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[1] Exodus 15:20-21; see also the song of Moses in Exodus 15:1-18.

[2] See Ellen F. Davis, “Psalm 98,” Interpretation 46, no. 2 (April 1, 1992), 172-173.

[3] See Luke 1:51-55

[4] Revelation 5:13

Bearing fruit

Some members and friends of our congregation are in Bethany Hills for the weekend; Bethany Hills is the campground for Disciples churches in Tennessee, and we’re very fortunate that it’s only about 40 minutes from here, near Kingston Springs. It’s a beautiful place, nestled between gentle hills, covered with lush forest. There are, of course, cabins under the trees and a dining hall, but there’s also a quiet pond, fed by a happy creek, and lovely trails lead to magical places hidden in the woods, waiting to be discovered. Cell phone reception is really bad out there, which makes it the perfect place to go when you want to get away for a little while and reconnect with the  beauty of nature, with others and yourself, and with the quiet and playful side of God. Bethany Hills is an unhurried place where sun and moon and stars determine the pace of life, and a bell calls you to dinner or prayer. Some of you, I know, are wishing now you could or would have gone with them, don’t you?

Julia, Hope, and Greg have created the retreat around Psalm 1 where those are called happy who delight in the law of the Lord, meditating on it day and night. “They are like trees,” the psalmist declares, “planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper.” If you were a tree, which would it be? What kind of fruit would you want to yield? Peaches? Almonds? Apples? Cherries? Mangos? Pecans? In cultures across the ancient Middle East, the tree of life was the vine, and not just any old vine, but vitis vinifera whose fruit has been crushed for millennia to make wine. The grapevine is one of the oldest fruit crops in the Old World. Seeds have been found at early Bronze Age sites near Jericho, dating back to around 3200 BCE, and just recently, in northern Iran, archeologist dug up wine storage jars that are about 7000 years old.[1] Little wonder, then, that the first food crop mentioned in Genesis, after the flood, is the grapevine.[2] But the tree of life? Some of you may have visited a vineyard here in Tennessee or in California, and seen the rows of vines, and you wouldn’t call those shrubby things trees, would you? They’re just not tall enough to qualify. Apparently, height was not the primary concern for people in the ancient Middle East when they chose a tree of life, but rather the kind of life it gave. And besides, the grapevine is a vigorous climber, growing to a height of over 60’ if left unpruned.[3]

Quite a long time ago, I went to Kindergarten in a three-story brick building behind the church, and the entire wall facing the playground was covered completely by just two vines, growing from a sunny patch near the sandbox, all the way up to the roof. Somewhere in the middle, it must have been the second floor, there was a small balcony, just big enough for two chairs, and one of my most vivid memories of Kindergarten is a moment when I was out on that balcony with Sister Rita and there, just above the rail, almost completely hidden behind the jungle-like curtain of leaves that stretched from all the way down on the playground up to almost the clouds, I saw a cluster of little blue grapes. I had tasted grapes before, big green and black ones my mother brought home from the market, but the discovery of such delicious fruit growing right by my playground was magical. “May I eat one,” I asked Sister Rita, and she said yes. She watched as I reached over the rail, held one of the blue pearls between my thumb and the tip of my index finger, and carefully plucked the grape from the cluster. It wasn’t the juiciest grape I ever ate nor the sweetest, but for me, at that moment, that little blue pearl had the whole wonder of life in it.

When Jesus talked to his disciples the night before he was crucified, he didn’t ask them what kind of tree they wanted to be in order to lead fruitful lives after his return to the Father. Instead he told them, “I am the vine. My Father is the vinegrower. You are the branches. Abide in me.” I imagine just about all of them said to themselves, “Why don’t you abide with us? Why can’t you just stay here with us?” The events of the next few days would disrupt their lives like nothing they could have ever imagined. They would betray, deny, and abandon him, and he would be crucified. They would mourn his death and the loss of all that died with him—and then he would return to find them. He would return to bring them peace and send them.

But that night when he washed their feet, he talked about a deep rootedness amid the turmoil and the chaos about to descend on them. He talked about a connection between them, strong and life-giving and eternal. “I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me as I abide in you.” Abide he says, eight times the word appears in just four verses. Abide is such an old-fashioned word. Of the 17 uses listed in the Oxford dictionary, eight are obsolete. The word seems to belong to another time. “To abide” has to do with persevering, continuing, lasting, staying with it, being at home. No wonder the term is rare. What it means is rare, in this or any time and its absence diminishes us.[4] It diminishes us because we are being pushed further and further into fragmentation and isolation without the capacity to be and abide in a place, to be present in a moment, or to be committed to one another.

Abiding is a key word in John, where love means mutual indwelling or being at home in each other. “Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches.” Fruitfulness is another theme woven into the text like a pattern into a fabric. Six times Jesus speaks of bearing fruit in these eight verses; our lives bearing the fruit of his life, his life bearing fruit in the fullness and wholeness of our lives. Even the words and phrases wind around each other like branches on a vine, and it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins, but the promise of fruitfulness emerges from the urgent and persistent rhythm of abide, abide, abide. “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.” My colleague, Nadia Bolz-Weber, climbed through the branches of this text, and at one point stuck out her head from behind the leaves and said, “[Vine and branches, and twigs off of branches] are all tangled and messy and it’s just too hard to know what is what. If I’m going to bear fruit I want it attributed to me and my branch. If I’m too tangled up with other vines and branches I might not get credit.”[5] She knows what she wants and she knows what we want. If it’s all about fruit-bearing, we want some credit for our productivity.

Apparently Jesus doesn’t just want to remind us of our need to be connected to him to be alive, really and fully alive. That alone is difficult enough for us independence-loving solitary trees who want to pick the best spot where we plant ourselves, thank you very much, in order to put down roots. But no, this is no Jesus garden where you find the plot you like and make it your place and start producing. Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches, and “our lives are uncomfortably tangled up together. The Christian life is a vine-y, branch-y, jumbled mess of us and Jesus and others.”[6] And that is how we bear fruit. Together. Belonging to him and through him to each other. Abiding in him and through him with each other. The jumbled mess of us and Jesus and others is where life becomes real, whole, and true. He says, “Abide in me as I abide in you,” and he abides; he hangs in with us and holds on to us. We don’t make ourselves fruitful. We simply become fruitful by abiding in him. We bear fruit not by squeezing it out of ourselves but because we are extensions of the vine, pruned by the faithful gardener-God who wants us to be fruitful.

What might the fruit be and for whom is it grown? We know how much the gardener-God loves the world. The fruit is the wine of the kingdom. The fruit is the very life of Christ saving us from getting lost in fragmented isolation and flowing through us to touch and heal the wounded, love the unlovable, and proclaim God’s power and mercy. The fruit is the communion of God and God’s people.

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[1] http://eol.org/pages/582304/overview and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitis_vinifera

[2] Genesis 9:20: Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard.

[3] http://eol.org/pages/582304/overview

[4] F. Dean Lueking, “Abide in me ...” Christian Century 114, no. 13 (April 16, 1997): 387.

[5] Nadia Bolz-Weber http://thq.wearesparkhouse.org/yearb/easter5gospe/

[6] Bolz-Weber

The Lamb is the Shepherd

We want to know Jesus. We want to know who he is; who he is in relationship to God; who he is for us; who he is for the world. We want to know who he was when he told people the good news of God’s reign in Galilee and in Jerusalem, and we want to know who he is now that he is risen and comes to us in word and sacrament, in the stranger and the prisoner, hungry and thirsty. And we don’t just want to know about him. We want to know Jesus.

John knew him and he tells us he heard him say, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.” This knowledge is not the kind one acquires by studying, but rather a deep familiarity, like that between parents and children, or the trust-filled openness between friends, or the intimacy between lovers. In John’s telling of the gospel, Jesus uses all kinds of metaphors to speak of himself and who we are to him; and the cup of language is not only brimming with rich imagery – it runs over. Jesus is the vine, we are the branches. He is the bread of life, we are hungry. Jesus is the light of the world, we are seeking a way in the darkness. He is the living water, and we are the parched and thirsty ones. Jesus is the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep, and we are his flock. Vine, water, bread, and light speak to us with incredible immediacy, but the shepherd comes to us from a very distant land. There are not a lot of sheep around these parts, these days, and most of us depend on movies or documentaries about sheep dogs or romantic poetry and paintings for familiarity with a shepherd’s world.Chances are that for a good many of us the first thing that comes to mind when we hear the word shepherd is Jesus – and the Jesus we know helps us fill the word shepherd with meaning, rather than the other way round, where the world of shepherding helps us get to know Jesus. But shepherds were common in the ancient world, and the image was all through the Hebrew scriptures: Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro when God called him to bring the Israelites out of Egypt.[1] David was keeping his father’s sheep when Samuel came to anoint him king over Israel.[2] In Israel’s imagination kings and leaders were shepherds whom God had called to guide, protect, and care for God’s people. When the rulers and leaders, in their quest for power and wealth, trampled the people, the prophets proclaimed God’s judgment and promise:

Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd; and scattered, they became food for all the wild animals.

Thus says the Lord God, I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak.[3]

“I am the good shepherd,” John heard Jesus say. “The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.” The good shepherd doesn’t run when the wolf comes, the snatcher, the scatterer. The good shepherd doesn’t run when the promise of life in fullness is torn to pieces by our sin, but lays down his life to redeem us.

In the first four centuries of the church, the image of a shepherd carrying a lamb on his shoulders was the most popular depiction of Jesus. It was painted on frescoes over baptismal fonts and next to graves on the walls of the catacombs, proclaiming the good news of the shepherd who guides and protects his own throughout all of life. And even today, when you’d have a hard time finding a shepherd and his flock out in the hills of Middle Tennessee, you wouldn’t have to go far to find a stained glass window or an old tombstone with Jesus the good shepherd. We tend to sentimentalize and romanticize the image, but still, we connect to the reality of Jesus as caring and fiercely protective and particularly committed to the weak, the injured, the strayed, and the lost. But it’s one thing to understand the image of the shepherd, and quite another to be found and carried by him. It’s the difference between knowing about and knowing the good shepherd.

In her book, Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott tells her readers about Ken, a man in her church who was dying of AIDS, “disintegrating before our very eyes,” she writes, and who had lost his partner to the same disease. A few weeks after the funeral, she says, “Ken told us that right after Brandon died, Jesus had slid into the hole in his heart that Brandon’s loss left, and had been there ever since. Ken has a totally lopsided face, ravaged and emaciated, but when he smiles, he is radiant. He looks like God’s crazy nephew Phil. He says that he would gladly pay any price for what he has now, which is Jesus, and us.”[4]

The shepherd and the flock. This is what being known and being found by Jesus looks like. But there’s more. Lamott goes on to talk about a woman in the choir named Ranola, who, she says, “is large and beautiful and jovial and black and devout as can be.” Ranola had “been a little standoffish toward Ken.” She had “always looked at him with confusion,” when she looked at him at all. Or she looked at him sideways, “as if she wouldn’t have to quite see him if she didn’t look at him head on.” Ranola had been taught “that his way of life—that he—was an abomination.” It was “hard for her to break through this.” But Ken had been coming to church nearly every week for the last year and it was getting to Ranola. “So,” writes Lamott,

on this one particular Sunday, for the first hymn, the so-called Morning Hymn, we sang “Jacob’s Ladder,” which goes “Every rung goes higher, higher,” while ironically Kenny couldn’t even stand up. But he sang away sitting down, with the hymnal in his lap. And then when it came time for the second hymn, the Fellowship Hymn, we were to sing “His Eye is on the Sparrow.” The pianist was playing and the whole congregation had risen—only Ken remained seated ... and we began to sing, “Why should I feel discouraged? Why do the shadows fall?” And Ranola watched Ken rather skeptically for a moment, and then her face began to melt and contort like his, and she went to his side and bent down to lift him up—lifted up this white rag doll, this scarecrow. She held him next to her, draped over and against her like a child while they sang. And it pierced me.[5]

How beautiful is that? Jesus can fill a hole in a man’s heart who has lost the love of his life, and this strong, gentle shepherd can free one sheep to let herself be so overcome with love for a most unlikely other that she becomes a shepherd herself, taking him in her strong and loving arms and holding him. This is what being known and found by Jesus looks like. This is what knowing the good shepherd looks like. This is the life to which we are called: to let ourselves be loved by God and learn to love each other. Knowing this shepherd changes us, in ways we have hoped and longed for, but also in unexpected ways. The paths in which the shepherd leads us are rarely the ones we drew on our life’s map when we set out on the great adventure, but he leads us toward fullness. We follow him trusting that in every circumstance we are led and protected by one who doesn’t run when the wolf comes, but lays down his life in faithfulness to God and to his own.

The lamb is the shepherd. I fear no evil. His love is the power that makes all things and restores all things. Even though I walk through the long hallway at the cancer center, you are with me. Even though darkness is creeping in from all sides, you are with me. Even though rulers and leaders, in their quest for power and wealth, trample the people, I will not lose heart. Your love has made all things, and your love will make all things whole. You lead us to the waters of baptism so that your life becomes ours. You prepare a table where enemies taste your peace and are reconciled. Your goodness and mercy pursue us, every last one of us, until we are all at home with you and with each other, so there will be one flock, one shepherd. You gather us in, Jesus, no matter how far we have strayed. Thank you.

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[1] Ex 3:1-12

[2] 1Sam 16:1-13

[3] Ez 34:3-6, 11, 15-16

[4] Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999), 64.

[5] Lamott, 64-65.

Opened minds

While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” Perhaps you’re wondering, “Didn’t we already hear this story last Sunday where the disciples are together and Jesus comes and says, ‘Peace be with you?’ Why are we hearing this again?”[1] That’s a very good question. Why would we hear the same story again? Because it didn’t take the first time, whatever that’s supposed to mean? Or because it’s so good that the church wants to hear it again and again, like a child with a favorite bedtime story that mom and dad get to tell for weeks? 

Last week’s reading was from the gospel according to John, and today’s reading comes from Luke. The stories are indeed very similar, but each is also unique in its witness; much like we are: together we tell the story of the risen Christ and with our lives we testify to his presence in the world in our own unique ways. There are significant commonalities in how we each present our witness, but there is also much room for the variety of our testimonials. By hearing a story again and anew through the telling of another witness we may discover new dimensions in the shared Easter reality of Jesus’ resurrection. Hearing the story again a week later also means we get to linger a little longer in that moment when the whole world is changed for good. It’s like we get to push the pause button and take all the time we need to look around and see how everything has become new because God raised Jesus from the dead. It takes time for the new reality to sink in and to reshape our imagination, how we look at ourselves now and at each other, how we think and act, now that Christ is risen from the dead; it takes time. “Christ is risen, time to move on,” shouts the world. All the Easter candy has gone on sale, 50% off, then 75%; the countdown is relentless, time to get ready for the next thing, no matter what it is. But the Holy Spirit whispers, “Pause,” and we get to step out of the hamster wheel of everyday; we get to take a breath and look around. We get to inhabit this wondrous and frightening moment when the Easter proclamation of the angels and the women becomes the resurrection life of a people.

It was and is a wondrous and frightening moment. They were talking about what had happened on the road to Emmaus and how Jesus had been made known to two of them in the breaking of the bread. And while they were talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified; they thought that they were seeing a ghost. They had no words, no concepts for this newness, only the startling experience of Jesus’ presence who clearly was with them, but not like he had been with them before. They saw him, they heard him speak, they watched him eat – and we get to be with them in that moment with our own confusion and doubts, our own questions and our timid imagination that pulls us back from what our minds cannot grasp. Luke uses words like startled, terrified, disbelieving and wondering to draw us into the moment where the newness of resurrection life just erupted.

And how did the peace of the risen Christ begin to rule in their hearts? He said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures. To fully grasp the newness and fullness of resurrection life, their  minds had to be opened. Our minds must be opened to take in the newness.

An illustration comes, unexpected perhaps, from the world of seafaring explorers. Elizabeth Kolbert, writing about Christopher Columbus, noted that “what finally distinguishes [him] as an explorer is his reluctance to acknowledge the magnitude of what he had found. In four trips across the ocean, he never (…) came upon anything remotely like what he had expected: not only were the people novel and strange; so were the geography, the topography, the flora, and the fauna. Still, to the end of his days Columbus insisted that Cuba was part of China, and that he had arrived at the gateway to Asia. He didn’t want to have discovered someplace new; he wanted to have reached someplace old, and, as a result, was blind to the real nature of the world he had stumbled onto.”[2] He only saw what the boundaries of his mind allowed room for, nothing more.

When the first disciples stumbled onto the radical newness of Christ crucified and risen from the dead, they let their minds be opened by the risen Lord. It was the interplay of Christ’s presence and the study of the scriptures in his presence that gave them the words and concepts to speak about the meaning of Jesus in its true magnitude.

Speaking of minds being opened, for fifteen years, Harvey Cox taught a course called “Jesus and the Moral Life” to undergraduates at Harvard. Some of his students were Christian, and many were not, but the content of the course was so compelling that their numbers kept going up until Cox finally had to move the class to a theater usually reserved for rock concerts.

In his book, When Jesus Came to Harvard, Cox tells why he initially ended his class with the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and death. The students came from a variety of religious backgrounds, he explaines, but “there was another reason why I had been trying to steer around the Easter story: Classrooms, at least the ones I teach in, are not viewed as the proper venue for testimonies. What is supposed to go on in classrooms is ‘explanation.’ But not only did I not know how to explain the Resurrection to the class, I was not even sure what ‘explaining’ it might mean.”[3] Eventually he realized, though, that by leaving out this part of the story he was not just being unfair to his students, he was “also being intellectually dishonest, a little lazy, and cowardly.” And so he decided that he would “sketch out some of the current interpretations of the Resurrection and suggest that they would have to decide among them on their own. (…) [He] set out to move from silence into at least some kind of conversation.” And when he did, he was in for a few surprises, chief among them a discovery opened to him by the witness of the prophets. “It immediately became evident that stories of raising the dead in the Old Testament did not have to do with immortality. They are about God’s justice. (…) They did not spring up from a yearning for life after death, but from the conviction that ultimately a truly just God simply had to vindicate the victims of the callous and the powerful.”[4] Resurrection hope was a thirst for justice, and the resurrection of Jesus was God’s affirmation and fulfillment of that hope. “To restore a dead person to life is to strike a blow at mortality,” wrote Cox, “but to restore a crucified man to life is to strike a blow at the violent system that executed him.” Cox didn’t ‘explain’ the Resurrection to his students, he opened windows for them to see how the proclamation of the early Christian witnesses was connected to the words of the prophets.

In Luke’s story, it is the interplay of Christ’s presence and the study of the scriptures with him that gave the first disciples the words and concepts to speak about the meaning of Jesus in its true magnitude. Luke tells it like all of this happened on the evening of the first day, but we mustn’t think that there was this crash course in “How to read the Scriptures after Easter” that quickly settled things once and for all. Yes, there was the initial moment of understanding that changed a group of confused disciples into God’s church, but the moment is ongoing: as disciples of Jesus we live in it in order to let the risen Lord himself open our minds so we see him in light of the scriptures of Israel and read their witness in light of his death and resurrection. The risen Lord teaches the church to read the scriptures properly, today as much as on the day when the women returned from the tomb with the happy news that he was alive. As Christians, we read the scriptures in the company of the risen Lord who shapes us as God’s people by opening us to the fullness of their meaning and opening them to us as nourishment for our hungry hearts and minds.

It is always good to remember that, but it is crucial after a week when our Tennessee legislators in the House voted to make the Bible the official state book. Governor Bill Haslam weighed in, as did Attorney General Herbert Slatery, and even Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey commented, “We don’t need to put the Bible beside salamanders, tulip poplars and ‘Rocky Top’ in the Tennessee Blue Book to appreciate its importance to our state.” Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris from Collierville was moved to declare, “All I know is that I hear Satan snickering. He loves this kind of mischief. You just dumb the good book down far enough to make it whatever it takes to make it a state symbol, and you’re on your way to where he wants you.”[5]

Thankfully the foolishness was stopped in the Senate, at least for this session, largely over obvious constitutional concerns; but that’s not all. The Scriptures of Israel and the church are sacred to Jews and Christians, and we won’t let the state, any state “dumb the good book down far enough to make it whatever it takes to make it a state symbol.” I don’t know what inspired Sen. Norris, but I couldn’t have said it better myself.

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[1] The gospel reading for the Second Sunday of Easter was John 20:19-31.

[2] Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Lost Mariner,” The New Yorker (October 14, 2002) http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/10/14/the-lost-mariner

[3] When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 273-274.

[4] Ibid., 274.

[5] http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2015/04/16/senate-kills-bill-to-make-bible-official-tennessee-book/25871395/#

Jesus Lives

Mary had been a widow for six months. She and her pastor hadn’t had a chance to touch base in an unhurried way, only brief conversations at the door after worship.

“How are you doing, Mary?”

“Oh, I’m OK. I miss him terribly, you know, but I’m OK. Thank you for asking.”

Then one Sunday, during Coffee Hour, Pastor Susan saw Mary standing at the table with the cookies and the banana bread and went over to ask if she wanted to sit for a moment. As soon as she approached, Mary’s eyes welled up with tears. But after a few moments, she looked around to see if anyone was nearby and then she began to whisper.

I had a terrifying experience last week. You’ll probably think I’m nuts, Susan, but I have to tell someone. You know, the nights are the worst. I hear noises in the house, and I just can’t get used to sleeping in bed alone. It must have been three in the morning and I was staring at the ceiling… you know, those endless moments when thoughts run through your mind like wild things… and all of a sudden it happened. Martin came back. Martin came back and he crawled into bed with me. He was there. He didn’t say a word. He just appeared—and then faded away. I felt such peace, and now I don’t feel so alone anymore. You don’t think I’m crazy, do you?[1]

What would you tell her? Mary wasn’t crazy, far from it. She had been given a wondrous gift. When Martin died, all her love turned into pain and loneliness, and suddenly joy returned and stayed. Wild things in her head had kept her awake at night, and then peace found a way to surround her. Let others call her crazy; we laugh with her and let our hearts sing along with the psalmist,

You have turned my mourning into dancing; you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.[2]

The disciples were far from singing that night. John tells us that the doors were locked. The room where they had gathered was dark with only just enough light for each to see the fear and confusion in the faces of the others. They still didn’t know what to make of the strange news Mary Magdalene had brought with her when she returned from the tomb, earlier that day. “I have seen the Lord,” she said, “and he spoke to me. He told me to tell you this: ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

It was dead quiet in the room. It’s a strange reversal, when you think about it. Jesus out of the tomb, risen from the dead; and the disciples, hiding behind locked doors, prisoners of fear. William James said, “Faith is the force of life, and when it is absent, life collapses.” What we see in that dark, locked room is collapsed life. Their faith had vanished. Mary had told them that she had seen the Lord, but her testimony, for whatever reason, hadn’t made the slightest difference. We don’t know if they thought she was crazy or if they couldn’t imagine just what her words might mean. I wonder if one day a gospel manuscript will be found with a couple of extra verses telling us about Mary pulling her hair in frustration. I wouldn’t be surprised: all she had were words, and her words were not enough to break the other disciples’ paralysis of fear and guilt, not enough to let them hear what she had heard and see what she had seen. It takes more than the words of witnesses to restore collapsed life.

John tells us that Jesus came and said, “Peace be with you.” The first word of the Risen One to the disciples was peace. The last time they had been together, that night when he washed their feet, he had told them, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”[3] And now he stood among them, after they had betrayed, denied, and abandoned him – Jesus stood among them and spoke peace into their troubled, fearful hearts. “Peace be with you,” he said, not, “Shame on you, you sorry bunch” or “OK, friends, let’s talk about this,” but, “Peace be with you.” They saw it was the Lord, and his presence transformed their prison of fear and guilt into house of laughter. It was Jesus. He was alive in their midst, he was the center of their lives again—again gathering them around him and centering them in his presence.

“As the Father has sent me, so I send you,” he said to them. Now they were a people with a mission. He breathed into their nostrils the breath of new life, set their hearts on fire, and sent them. What had been a little band of disciples, held together only by their memories and their fear of the world outside, was now the church, commissioned and empowered by the living Christ. For almost two-thousand years, frightened disciples could be church because God keeps breaking in on us, pushing through our timidity and giving us the gifts of peace and forgiveness to share with the whole world in his name. And the world needs the witness of the church. The world needs to know that the powers of death and fear that lock people in cannot stand against the love and mercy of God.

Thomas was not with them that night when Jesus came, John tells us. Thomas missed the whole thing.

Speaking of Thomas, I was 15 when a little red pin was becoming quite popular among members of my youth group. “Jesus Lives” it said. I finally got one at a retreat, and the following week I wore it to school.

One of the girls who never even looked at guys my age, much less talked to them, saw I was wearing a curious little something on my shirt, came a little closer to read it, and said, “O really, tell me more.” And she said it not with the bored, superior tone of older girls who seem to be annoyed by anyone’s presence but their own, no, she really wanted to hear more.

It was a great moment there at the tram stop, a great moment to talk about mercy and hope and real life, about God being on our side against everything that wants to make us less than glorious human beings … It was a great moment, but I had no words then to talk about the wide open hope these two small words represent, and I had a hard time keeping my balance because, I swear, the pavement under my feet had turned into a water bed, and all I could say was, “Oh, the pin? I got that at a retreat with my youth group.”

I never wore that pin again. I wanted more than those two words. I wanted a resurrection that was more than somebody else’s words. I wanted a resurrection I could see and touch. Much like the Thomas whom the other disciples told, “We have seen the Lord.”  And he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

A week later, John tells us, the disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Jesus came and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he turned to Thomas and said, “Put your finger here. Look at my hands. Put your hand into my side. No more disbelief. Believe!”

The Apostle Thomas is the patron saint of all who weren’t there. He was a latecomer like all of us and he takes our place in the story. He didn’t take anyone’s word for what God had done, but waited for God to act and the Risen One to make himself known to him. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe,” the risen Jesus said to him. God has ways to get through to us with new life, more ways than we can imagine.

Two more things; small, but important details for us to keep in mind: When Thomas stood up in the church and said, ‘Unless I see the marks of his suffering and touch them with my hand, I will not believe,’ he was not asked to leave. Nobody locked the door to keep him and his struggle outside; and we know that the church hasn’t always been faithful to that dimension of the gospel. There have been too many Christian communities where no one voices their questions or their struggles for fear of being excluded or declared spiritually challenged.

The second detail is related. When Thomas found it impossible to believe, he did not drop out. He came back a week later, and the church welcomed him. He remained faithful to the community of believers and was met by the risen Christ in the fellowship of the disciples. John reminds us that our openness to the presence of the living Christ has much to do with our openness for each other and faithfulness to each other.

Thanks be to God who makes ways to get through to us with gifts of new life, more ways than we can imagine. Thanks be to the living Christ who revives and inspires us with his peace and sends us.

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[1] Susan R. Andrews, The Christian Century, March 24-31, l999

[2] Ps 30:11-12

[3] John 14:27

Who will roll away the stone for us?

Who will roll away the stone for us? I heard the news on Tuesday and groaned. A Tennessee Senate subcommittee had again stopped a bill that would improve access to health insurance for hundreds of thousands of Tennesseans. Like many I had hoped that there would be a full Senate vote, but apparently not in this legislative session. I thought about Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain, again putting his shoulder to the boulder, flexing every muscle in his body to push the rock up the hill, without rest, without promise, without hope.

I heard the news of an air plane crash in the Alps and groaned. What level of despair must have gripped a man’s heart that he waits for the moment when the cockpit door closes behind his colleague and then he turns and flies an airplane full of people into a mountain?

Who will roll away the stone? It’s too large for us, too heavy. Thursday morning I heard the news about a gang of armed thugs who had forced their way into a school in Kenya. They started killing students, dozens of them, systematically and allegedly with divine sanction. Such madness, such violence; it’s too heavy, it’s too much.

Who will roll away the stone for us? That’s what the three women were saying to one another on the way to the cemetery. They wanted to anoint the body of Jesus who had to be buried with haste the day before the sabbath. Joseph of Arimathea had rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb. The women wanted to honor Jesus with a proper burial, they wanted to touch his body gently one last time after all the violence and abuse he had suffered. But who would roll away the stone? Then they looked up and saw that the stone, huge as it was, had been rolled back already.

Inside they encounter an angelic messenger who delivers the good news of Jesus’ resurrection like an administrative assistant explaining why you can’t have a quick word with the boss: “You’re looking for Jesus? Sorry, you just missed him.” If it’s Jesus they want, they will need to head back to Galilee. And the messenger sends them off with simple instructions for the disciples, “There you will see him, just as he told you.”

Now you may want a moment to sit and ponder the angel’s words and whether you believe that curious sort of thing, you know, angels and resurrection and such. But there’s no time for that now because things become much curiouser in a heartbeat. For just when we assume that the women would dash out joyfully to proclaim the good news that Christ is risen they clam up entirely, overcome by fear. Mark ends his Gospel in midsentence,

So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid …

That’s hardly a shout of victory over death. Some would say, that’s no way to end a gospel. John does such a nice job with the woman in the garden and the breakfast on the beach, and Luke has the wonderful scene on the road to Emmaus, what happened to Mark? Did somebody rip out the last page? Or did he mean to end the story in this way?

Early Christian scribes who copied Mark’s Gospel tinkered with the ending. One added just a couple of sentences, indicating that the women did as they had been told.[1] Another scribe borrowed a few details from Matthew and Luke to compose a conclusion that would leave readers reassured that things were wrapped up nicely at the end of the story.[2] But what if this strange ending is exactly how Mark wants to tell this story? What if this gospel has this unfinished feel on purpose, and not because parts went missing? What if this gospel wants to leave us hanging in midsentence with a puzzled look on our faces?

We have heard and read the whole story, from its beginning to this moment. We witnessed Jesus’ baptism where the heavenly voice declared, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” We were there when Jesus began proclaiming the good news of God in Galilee. We heard him preach and teach about the kingdom, watched him inaugurate God’s reign by healing people and breaking bread with them, forgiving their sins and driving out demons. We heard him tell us three times about his death and resurrection. “After I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.”[3] He did tell us, didn’t he? We were there when Jesus prayed in Gethsemane and the disciples couldn’t keep awake. We were there when Judas betrayed him, Peter denied him, and all the disciples deserted him. When Jesus was arrested, questioned and judged, mocked, abused and executed, we were there, because Mark took us there. We know that the women were the only ones who didn’t run away. Not until now, that is. They fled from the tomb and said nothing to nobody, for they were afraid.

Now everyone has fled, but the story is not over. We have heard it; we have read it. We have lived through its every moment, and now it’s up to us what happens next. If we want to read on, we must let our own lives become the writing. Will we trust the promise and go to Galilee? Will we go back to the beginning and follow Jesus on the way?

Not going is an option, as is silence. We can deny the whole thing, act as though it never happened, and continue to live in the Friday world where Jesus is in the tomb. Or we can begin to live in the world where Jesus is on the loose. We can head back to Galilee and catch up with him in the places and among the people where he’s at work. We can continue to immerse ourselves in the whole story in order to know where to look for him and what he may be up to. We can continue to try to fully understand that he doesn’t play the world’s violent power games, but has an authority that makes the demons scream and run. We can continue to discover that the cross was not a stop on the way to greater things, but the character of Jesus’ greatness. For followers of Jesus, Galilee now is the name for the world through which the way of Christ leads to Jerusalem. Galilee is the land of promise and faith where he is going ahead of us. Nashville is in Galilee. Every place on earth where human beings hunger and thirst for righteousness is in Galilee.

Peter, James, and John were the disciples who first followed Jesus; Mary Magdalene, Salome, and Mary the mother of James were the followers who stayed with him the longest, and all of them, Mark tells us, fled, overwhelmed by fear. But the risen Christ didn’t choose a new team. God raised those frightened men and women to live as witnesses of the living Christ. Mark doesn’t tell us that, but we wouldn’t be reading Mark if it hadn’t been so, and if it didn’t continue to be so. Bill Sloan Coffin noted years ago,

Not only Peter but all the apostles after Jesus’ death were ten times the people they were before; that’s irrefutable. (…) I believe passionately in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, because in my own life I have experienced Christ not as memory, but as presence.[4]

I believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and on many a day it’s the only thing I believe in; the world gives me more than enough reasons to become a cynic, but the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead gives me hope and courage to carry on.

Easter is not about memory, it’s about presence, disruptive and transformative presence. The gospel Mark wrote down is only the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ—the story is still unfolding with us as participants.

The women ran away from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them. If Jesus had been raised and vindicated by a mighty act of God, and if by raising Jesus from the dead God had indeed changed everything – who would they be? How would they live? Little wonder they were afraid. If Jesus is defeated, crucified, dead, and buried – it may break your heart, but it also confirms everything you have suspected about the world all along: Might makes right. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for more of everything and take what they want. But if we can open our small, fearful hearts to the promise and reality of today, new life begins to flow in.

Who will roll away the stone for us? In Mark’s story this is the last question on the lips of those who used to follow Jesus. Who will roll away the stone for us? We know that stone. It lies heavy on us. It slows us down; it blocks our movements; it suffocates our courage. It’s too big for us; nothing we can do can move this stone. This is when Mark says, “Look again and see. The stone has already been rolled back.” And the angel says, “He has been raised. He is not here. He is going ahead of you to Galilee. There you will see him.” God calls us to trust the promise and let it be our path. God calls us to practice resurrection by following the Risen One.

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[1] Mk 16:8b “The Shorter Ending”

[2] Mk 16:9-20 “The Longer Ending”

[3] Mk 14:28

[4] William Sloan Coffin, Credo, p. 28; my emphases

Jesus shall reign

They had been in Bethany the night before. At the home of Lazarus, yes, that Lazarus whom Jesus had raised from death to life only days earlier. Mary and Martha were there also, and they were having dinner.

Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.[1] The stench of death had lingered over this household only days ago, but now the fragrance of love and devotion filled everything.

Mary shows us what discipleship is. Judas thought pouring the equivalent of some $20,000 over Jesus’ feet was extravagant and wasteful.[2] Extravagant? Yes. Wasteful? No. Nothing done out of love is ever wasted. On Thursday, we call it Maundy Thursday, Jesus would wash his disciples’ feet and ask them to repeat this act of service for one another—to approach one another not as masters, but servants. He would tell them that everyone would know that they were his disciples by the love they offered in response to God’s love.[3] Mary poured out her love over Jesus’ feet. She knew how to respond without being told. She gave boldly of herself in love.

We talk about stewardship of time, tallent, and treasure, and we talk about budgets and the cost of ministry, and all that has its place; but Mary shows us the foundation of all those conversations: Mary shows us faithful discipleship in offering her love in response to God’s love in Jesus. The house was filled with the fragrance of love responding to love. And the world is waiting to be filled with the fragrance of love responding to love.

We went back to the house of Lazarus in Bethany to remember that the next day when Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, he brought that fragrance to the city. It travelled on a breeze ahead of him, and throughout the Passover crowd children were tapping their parents knees and tugging their sleeves, “Mom, Mom, what is this? It smells so good.”

“It’s the fragrance of God’s Anointed, dear, the king of Israel, he’s coming to Jerusalem.”

Their hopes, their hunger, their longing for freedom, their memories of Israel’s greatness under king David poured out of the city with them to meet him, and they greeted him like a warrior king, shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—the king of Israel!” Such joy. Such expectation. And then they saw him, riding by on his little donkey. Do you imagine they all fell silent immediately? John is telling the story, and it is John’s voice, not a voice from the crowd, telling us, “Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion. Look, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey’s colt.”And John tells us that even Jesus’ disciples did not understand these things at first. This would not be the expected coronation. The fragrance of his anointing was the announcement of a kingdom not from this world.

Meanwhile, a kingdom very much from this world was asserting its power in spectacular fashion. Every year, in time for Passover, the Roman governor moved his headquarters from Caesarea by the sea to Jerusalem. Passover made the empire very nervous. Large crowds were difficult to control under any circumstance, but add the hopeful memory of Israel’s liberation from Pharao’s yoke, the celebration of the exodus from the house of slavery to the promised land, and the situation could turn quickly from joyful worship to revolt. So Rome made its presence and power known. The governor, Pontius Pilate, entered the city riding on the biggest horse he could find in his stable. Behind him, elite soldiers on horseback, followed by rows and rows of foot soldiers; you could see banners and golden eagles mounted on poles, the sun’s bright beams reflected by helmets and the tips of countless spears; you could hear the beating of drums, the marching of feet, the clinking of metal against metal. The procession was designed to impress and intimidate. Rome knew how to project power and quell any outbursts of enthusiasm that might escalate into a governor’s nightmare. The heavy beams used to crucify the most dangerous troublemakers had already been stacked at the governor’s headquarters; Rome was prepared.

On the other side of the city, the crowd was pouring out through the gate, ready to greet their king: God’s anointed who would rally his people, organize the militias into an army, and drive out the foreign occupiers. “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—the king of Israel.” And then they saw him, riding by on his little donkey. There was a fragrance of promise about him, but he wasn’t entering the city to take over the system and put himself at the top. He came to reveal the power of redemptive love; he came to undermine and topple the logic of domination. A few days later, the two met, Jesus and Pilate, at the governor’s headquarters. “Are you the King of the Jews?” Pilate asked, and Jesus responded, more than once, “My kingdom is not from this world.” Pilate spoke and understood only the language of power and violence. He didn’t know what to make of a rebel who not only didn’t play by the rules of his game, but played an entirely different game.

We look at the scene from the other side of the cross, from the other side of Jesus’ resurrection and his ascension to the throne of God. We have heard the witnesses, we have seen glimpses, moments of great clarity when we knew that this servant’s love reveals the heart of God. Jesus shall reign, we sing as we watch him riding by on his little donkey.

Jesus shall reign where’er the sun

does its successive journeys run;

his kingdom spread from shore to shore,

till moons shall wax and wane no more.

Jesus is riding on, past the churches with the big steeples, past the office buildings and the shiny bank towers, past the university campusses and the corporate headquarters, and the court house, and just watching him ride down West End and Broadway we realize how much we depend on him to redeem us from playing Pilate’s game.

To Jesus endless prayer be made

and endless praises crown his head;     

his name like sweet perfume shall rise

with every morning sacrifice.

There it is again, there it is still, the sweet perfume, the fragrance of love responding to love. And Jesus is riding on, but before he turns left to ride up to Legislative Plaza and Capitol Hill, he turns right and rides around Music City Center, wondering about the NRA and its firm grip on the imaginations of our legislators, and we wonder, too, because we’re the ones proclaiming that he shall reign.

Blessings abound where’er he reigns;

all prisoners leap and loose their chains;        

the weary find eternal rest,

and all who suffer want are blest.

That’s a good hymn to sing over in those parts, you know, over by the Mission and the Campus for Human Development, but not only in those parts. All of us carry a measure of weariness, all of us long to rest in the love of God, long to live in a world where Jesus reigns.

I want to talk a little bit more about a world where prisoners leap and loose their chains. Right now, the chains that tie prisoners to their past are heavy and strong, even after they have been released from prison. Landing a job is no small feat. Aside from figuring out where to sleep, nothing is more worrisome for people leaving prison than figuring out where to work. And finding a job is not just a matter of learning to stand on one’s own two feet again, or wanting to contribute, to support one’s family, and to add value to society at large. Finding a job allows a person to establish a positive role in the community, develop a healthy self-image, and keep a distance from negative influences and opportunities for illegal behavior. And beyond all that, most state parole agencies require parolees to maintain gainful employment, and failure to do so could mean more prison time. So finding a job is crucial, but it’s harder than it needs to be. Nearly every state allows private employers to discriminate on the basis of past criminal convictions or even arrests without conviction. It’s understandable; employers are cautious, they want to avoid hiring somebody who may pose a risk to their business, to their other employees, or their clients. The church wouldn’t hire a nursery worker with a conviction for child neglect and abuse, and a business owner wouldn’t want a bookkeeper with a criminal record of embezzlement and fraud. Rebuilding trust takes time, and it may be better for somebody with a child abuse conviction to seek employment in other fields such as construction or transportation, or perhaps bookkeeping. But many ex-offenders have difficulty even getting an interview, because of the box on job applications in which applicants are asked to check “yes” or “no” if they have ever been convicted of a crime. And it doesn’t matter if the crime had anything to do with the job they applied for. In too many cases, ex-offenders’ applications will automatically go to the bottom of the pile or be tossed out. Those men and women may be out of prison, but they’re still chained to the past.

In the early 2000s, groups in San Francisco and Boston began urging local governments to remove questions about convictions from job applications so that people can be judged first on their qualifications. Their past convictions would still be considered, but not until later in the hiring process, when an applicant has been identified as a serious candidate for the position. And then he or she would have a chance to talk about their record face to face, instead of being reduced to a label. Today there are 14 states, the most recent one being Georgia, and more than 90 cities and counties that have adopted such fair chance policies. The executive order signed by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R) in February states that “such policies allow returning citizens an opportunity to explain their unique circumstances in person to a potential employer.”[4] There’s an effort underway here in Nashville through a charter referendum to remove questions about criminal convictions from the initial application stage for Metro government jobs, and you can support the effort this morning by being one of the 6,847 voters whose signatures are needed to put the referendum on the ballot.

Jesus is riding into the city to reveal to us the power of redeeming love. Asking a city to consider removing a box from a form is nothing spectacular, but it may open windows for the restoration of community. It may open windows for the fragrance of redemption to spread.

---

[1] John 12:3

[2] A day laborer’s wages for a year of work (300 denarii), calculated with a minimum wage of $7.25/hr., would be between $17,400 and $26,100, based on an 8-12 hour workday.

[3] John 13:35

[4] https://gov.georgia.gov/sites/gov.georgia.gov/files/related_files/document/02.23.15.03.pdf

Renounce and embrace

If you want to see Jesus, where do you go? You can go to a museum or find a big, glossy art book, or you can watch a movie to see pictures of Jesus. But you’d probably know the entire time that you’re looking at actors and models, not Jesus himself.

You could read all you can about Jesus and create your own mental image of him; that’s like seeing him, in a way, although you could never be quite sure how much of yourself has gone into your picture of him. If you want to see him in person, where do you go?

Dr. Who fans among us will suggest a short trip on the Tardis to Nazareth, Jerusalem or Capernaum, except that you’d have a hard time giving the time-traveling doctor the proper coordinates since the gospels contain only a very rudimentary calendar.

It was on Passover, John tells us, in Jerusalem, when some Greeks came to Philip and said, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” People had been talking about him. Over in Bethany, they said, only days ago, he raised a dead man from the tomb, and he was dead for sure, he had been in that tomb for four days. People were interested, people were curious, and Jesus’ opponents said, with worry in their voices, “Look, the world has gone after him!”(12:19). And as though to prove them right, some Greeks came to Philip and said, “We wish to see Jesus.”

Did they know they had found one of his first followers, or were they just happy to have bumped into a man with a Greek name who could perhaps speak Greek and give them directions they would actually be able to understand?

It’s a curious scene, as so often in the gospel of John. He tells us that Philip was from Bethsaida, a detail we could easily look up ourselves in the first chapter, but he never tells us whether these Greeks got their wish. Philip told Andrew, and then he and Andrew went and told Jesus, and Jesus’ response, Jesus’ response leaps out of the story and addresses every last one of us.

“The hour has come,” he says, “for the Son of Man to be glorified.”

This is where you go, if you want to see Jesus. To the word that speaks of his glorification in his death. But what kind of glory is that? Where is the radiance of life, the splendor of the light of the world in that? Let’s sit with the word and our questions for a moment. Let’s sit together and meditate on this scripture, not just because it’s a good thing to do. I don’t know if I’ll ever be old enough to preach a decent sermon after reading John, so meditative reflection is the best I can do.

Jesus tells us a parable.

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

In giving its life, the single grain doesn’t become lifeless, but rather fruit-bearing fullness of life. Later in the unfolding story of his final days, Jesus talks about branches that bear much fruit because they are connected to the vine. Jesus’ life bears fruit in the lives of the people who abide in him. His life-giving, selfless love multiplies in the life of all who believe in him, all who serve and follow him.

The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the witnesses tell us – the glory of life and light, of grace and truth, love and compassion. With all that he is and does in the world, Jesus embodies divine love for the world, the same love that unites him and the one he calls Father. These relationships are his life. Now the hour has come for the Father to glorify his name and for the Son to be glorified in death and resurrection, to reveal the unbreakable bond of their love and give birth to the church, the community of  his friends who continue to embody divine love in his name. The Word became flesh, and on the cross, the gracious movement of God’s incarnation into the world is not ended or simply reversed, it is consummated in the hour of Jesus’ free, surrendering love. The Jesus we encounter through the gospel of John lays down his life in sovereign love for God and his friends. His death is not the tragic end of a beautiful life, but the complete gift of his beautiful life for the glory of God and the life of the world.

Those who love their life lose it, but those who love life (like Jesus lived to love) will find eternal life in communion with God. Those who hate their life in this world are not life-haters, but rather men and women who renounce life shaped by the categories of the world and embrace the life that Jesus’ gift of love makes available.

Renounce and embrace. The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified, and it presents the world with an urgent choice: Will we respond with faith to the invitation to find life in communion with God? Or will we cling to the promises of the ruler of this world?

Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.

The world and its ruler will sit in judgment and condemn Jesus to death by crucifixion. He must die because domination, violence, and death are the world’s ways under the ruler’s reign, and all that does not fit must be eliminated. Jesus does not fit. There’s no room in the ruler’s world order for fearless truth-telling or self-less service or table-flipping temple-cleansing. Jesus can’t be silenced. Jesus can’t be bought. Jesus must die.

“If my kingdom were from this world,” Jesus tells one of his judges, “my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over.” But his kingdom isn’t from this world. His kingdom is the end of this world. He refuses to fight. He refuses to respond in the ruler’s own violent terms. He lays down his life and dies.

He lets the world have its way with him. He dies as though the devil were in charge, but the devil doesn’t know that Love makes of the cross a throne. The devil doesn’t know that death has no power over the Word of life. And that is how what looks for all the world like the judgment of Jesus is in truth God’s judgment of this world and its ruler. Jesus, lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to himself. Love makes of the cross a throne, and from the throne the king of grace and truth draws all people into communion with God. Women, men, and children from every tribe and nation are drawn into the community of believers, a community that participates in God’s reconciling presence and work in the world, giving testimony with our words and actions to the light and life we receive from the crucified and risen Christ.

Where do you go, if you want to see Jesus? You follow him. “Where I am, there will my servant be also,” he says. You let yourself be drawn by him. You let yourself be drawn more deeply into the kingdom of God. You renounce and embrace, again and again. You renounce the ruler of this world and embrace the life of Jesus. The moment is always now, again and again. You renounce the logic of violence and embrace love. You let yourself be drawn by him, knowing that he won’t draw you around the world’s hatred, around the world’s rejection, around the cross. He draws you to the cross, into the hatred and rejection he faced with love. You let yourself be drawn, trusting that the bonds of love cannot be broken, knowing that the world wouldn’t hate the disciples of Jesus if they belonged to the world. You let yourself be drawn by the one to whom you belong, the Word of life. The world will hate you; you will encounter forces of evil just as he did, and you will be asked, in each encounter, to completely surrender, as he did – not to evil, never to evil, but to God. The way of life in Christ is the complete surrender to God’s love.

Prayer Vigil During Holy Week

Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week, the final week of Lent. During this week, the church is immersed into the final days of Jesus' earthly life and ministry, particularly the meal he shared with his disciples on the night before he was betrayed and his judgment and execution the following day.

We will have prayer services in the sanctuary on Maundy Thursday (April 2) and Good Friday (April 3), each beginning at 6 p.m.

Jesus said to the disciples, "Keep awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial," when he himself was praying in Gethsemane. We will keep a prayer vigil from 7 p.m. on Maundy Thursday to 6:00 p.m. on Good Friday. We have divided the hours into segments of 30 minutes, and invite members and friends of the church to pray during those hours. Please add your name to our vigil schedule. If you wish to come to the chapel or sanctuary to pray, please let us know so we can make the necessary arrangements. 

The youth have made votive candles from Christmas candles we lit to celebrate Jesus' birth. Now we will each light one while we pray and reflect on Jesus' complete gift of his life. We will have the candles available for you to take home this coming Sunday and at the conclusion of the Maundy Thursday service. If you are unable to come to church then, please let us know and we will gladly bring a candle to your home.

On Good Friday, those of us who are able to come will bring our candles to the sanctuary for the concluding prayer service.