Breath of life

It is a strange reversal, when you think about it. Jesus is out of the tomb, risen from the dead, on the loose in the world – and the disciples? Hiding behind locked doors, prisoners of fear. I imagine them in a dark, cramped room, with little air, little conversation. Nobody has remembered to get something to eat, but nobody really feels like eating anyway. I wonder how long they’ve been in there.

Mary has told them, “I have seen the Lord!” She has shared with them the words of the Risen One. But her Easter message clearly hasn’t connected. John doesn’t say they didn’t believe her or that they didn’t know what her words might mean. They just don’t show any signs of life. One of the stories about the apostles John didn’t write down, but one I like to visualize in my mind, is about Mary pulling her hair out in frustration: all she had were words, and her words were not enough to break the paralysis of fear and shame, not enough to let them hear what she had heard, and see what she had seen.

Then Jesus came and said, “Peace be with you.” The first word of the Risen One to the gathered disciples was peace. The last time they had been together, that night before he was crucified, he had told them, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”[1] And now Jesus stood among them and spoke peace into their troubled, fearful hearts. He showed them the wounds in his hands and his side, and his presence transformed the dark, tomb-like room into a wide-open space of joy and laughter. Jesus was once again the center of their lives, and their fear melted away.

“Peace be with you,” he said, not, “Shame on you, you sorry bunch.” He didn’t say, “OK, friends, we need to talk,” but, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” In the blink of an eye, they began to know themselves as sent ones, and they began to remember the world, not as a frightening threat, but as the object of God’s love. Only moments ago, they had been little more than lifeless bodies in a tomb—now they were a community with a mission, sent by the Risen One.

In the book of Ezekiel, the prophet looks at a valley full of bones, and the Lord asks him, “Mortal, can these bones live?” And the Lord tells him to prophesy to these bones, to speak to the bones and say to them, “O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”[2] In Ezekiel’s vision, the bones represented the people of God in exile: lifeless, dry, dispirited and discouraged. I imagine Mary must have felt like she was talking to a pile of bones when her words couldn’t break through the pall of fear that lay on the other disciples. But now Jesus was in their midst and he breathed on them and they received new life. This small band of fearful men and women, held together solely by habit, shame and fear—now they were the church, commissioned and empowered by the living Christ, born into living hope. Can these bones live? We will see; the mission of Christ continues, with his disciples serving in his name, telling the story, forgiving sins, bearing fruit—until the peace of Christ fills earth and heaven.

Since the days of Mary and the other apostles, frightened disciples could be church because the Risen One keeps breaking in on us, breathing on the white bones of our lives, leading us out of our tombs, and entrusting us with gifts for ministry in Jesus’ name, for the life of the world.

The resurrection isn’t merely something that happened to Jesus two millennia ago, but rather something that began with him, something that continues with those who hear the word of life. It is the transformation of our old, tired world into the new creation. It is the breath that brings life to dry bones. It is the dew from heaven that renews the earth. It is the wind that blows our little boat to the future of fulfillment.

Thomas wasn’t there when Jesus came. That makes him one of us, one of the many who weren’t there that night. And all we have is what Thomas was given, the words of witnesses. “We have seen the Lord,” the other disciples said to him, but their words, much like Mary’s before, didn’t land, didn’t click, didn’t trigger an eruption of joy. He didn’t know whom or what they thought they had seen, what apparition might have fooled them. He needed to see for himself, and more than see. “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.” He needed to see, he needed to get close, he needed to touch. Thomas wanted proof—not some elegant argument about the general possibility of bodily resurrection, but tangible proof that this Risen One was indeed Jesus, the One who had died on the cross. He didn’t need more words, he had to see for himself, he needed to get close enough to touch the body.

A week later the disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. I find that remarkable, because many people hesitate to express their need for something more tangible than words for fear of being labeled spiritually challenged, but Thomas didn’t hesitate—and he didn’t go home. When they came together, he was there with them—with his questions, with his doubts, his needs. According to this gem of a story, the community of disciples consists of those who have seen and those who have not—and no one is pushed out or forced in; they’re together.

And now the scene repeats itself, solely for Thomas’s sake, we suppose. Jesus comes and stands among them and says, for the third time now, “Peace be with you.” He turns to Thomas and, far from rebuking him for his stubborn insistence on something more tangible than words, says, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” And Thomas responds, “My Lord and my God.” In the Gospel of John, the one who doesn’t settle for repeating the words of others but holds on for his own experience of the Risen Christ, makes a confession of faith unlike any other in the gospels.

Many in the church have remembered Thomas as the doubter par excellence, and those in positions of power love bringing him up whenever uncomfortable questioners need to be quieted. I don’t think we should label him a doubter, though. To me, he’s one who insisted on resurrection faith rooted in experience, rather than the authority of an individual or a group. One who insisted that the risen Christ of our proclamation is still recognizable as the Crucified One.

The Gospel of John opens with exalted language,

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.

Close to the end of the Gospel, it is Thomas who utters the final words spoken by a disciple, affirming the confession of Jesus as Lord, in the presence of Jesus, crucified and risen.

At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus calls his followers to come and see, and that call doesn’t change now that Jesus is present through the Holy Spirit. We are called to come and see. On Easter morning, the disciple whom Jesus loved came to the tomb and saw the linen wrappings; then he went inside, got a little closer, and he saw and believed. Mary Magdalene had seen angels at the tomb, but they had no comfort for her; then a stranger spoke her name, and she recognized Jesus and believed. The disciples believed when they saw the risen Jesus, and they rejoiced, “We have seen the Lord!” Thomas believed when he saw Jesus and heard him speak, and he moved from questioning the testimony of Mary and the other disciples to adding his own voice to theirs.

We weren’t there when the disciples huddled together in fear and confusion, and Jesus came and gave them peace, and Thomas wasn’t there either. And when the Lord came and stood among them a second time a week later, we suppose it was for Thomas’s sake, but not solely for his sake. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe,” Jesus said to Thomas, for all of us to hear. The blessing of life in fullness is not just for those who have seen what they saw, but for all who have come to believe what they believed: that in the life of Jesus, the life of God is revealed. We have not seen what the first disciples saw, but we have heard their witness. And we follow the call that comes to us through their word and the work of the Holy Spirit.

And we continue the mission of Jesus Christ, seeking to embody his peace and forgiveness, linking arms with any who work for justice and peace in God’s beloved world. We believe, not because we have seen, but because Jesus continues to break in on us, breathing on the white bones of our lives, leading us out of our tombs, and sending us. We believe in Jesus, because he so fiercely believes in us. And so we practice resurrection until the peace of Christ fills earth and heaven. And we add the testimony of our lives to the great cloud of witnesses, declaring what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of life.[3]

[1] John 14:27

[2] Ezekiel 37:1-14

[3] 1 John 1:1

Easter people in a Good Friday world

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary (she may have been Jesus’ mother[1]) had followed Jesus all the way from Galilee. They were among the women who had come with him from Galilee, who followed him, because in his presence a world where the poor are the blessed ones was tangibly near. They hungered and thirsted for righteousness, and when they were with him they were filled. Jesus had shown them a world where love embraces all, even the enemy. A world where all who mourn are comforted. They witnessed how he touched and healed the sick, broke bread with friends and strangers, and declared God’s forgiveness to people stumbling under the yoke of sin. Somewhere along the way, they had begun to believe that the kingdom of heaven had indeed come near, and that he embodied it.  They looked at Jesus and they saw the whole creation held by divine grace and infused with God’s mercy. He had awakened a dream in their hearts, the dream of a redeemed world. And on Friday, after Judas had betrayed him, Peter had denied him, and the rest of the Twelve had deserted him, on Friday, they were still there, watching his life drain from his body. And they watched Joseph of Arimathea as he wrapped Jesus’ body in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his own new tomb. He then rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and went away. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the tomb.[2] The funeral was over, and everybody but the two Marys had gone home.

We live in a Good Friday world. In Matthew, death-dealing human authority seeks to suppress God’s purposes from the beginning of the story. Herod’s  response to the news that a new king had been born was to kill Bethlehem’s children.[3] And when the religious and imperial authorities at last succeeded in their quest to kill Jesus, they had soldiers seal the tomb and guard his body, to make certain he stayed dead, buried, and silent.[4] “Go, make it as secure as you can,” the governor said, as though armed guards in the cemetery could keep the kingdom of heaven from bathing the world in divine light.

We know we are living in a Good Friday world. We know that life is fragile. We know that in this country, the idolatrous cult of the Second Amendment is better protected than the lives of our children. We know that peeing in a fellow legislator’s chair won’t get a representative expelled from the Tennessee legislature, or being convicted of domestic assault, or admitting to sexually assaulting high school girls they coached, or exchanging racist and sexist texts with staff members—no, but speak out on behalf of the victims of gun violence and demand legislative action, and do so out of order, and you will find yourself expelled in the name of “decorum.”[5]

We are living in a Good Friday world, but as Easter people we know that the voice of justice cannot be silenced. We know that the will of God for life to flourish in true community cannot be broken. Thomas Reese writes,

Holy Week is not just a single week in the year. Rather, it is the daily life of millions of people around the world who suffer because their consciences tell them to live and work in ways that political and religious authorities find objectionable. They, like Jesus, suffer and die because of their commitments to justice, freedom, peace and love.[6]

Martin Luther once said, “If I were God, I’d kick the world to pieces.”[7] Thank God, he isn’t. The God we know in Jesus Christ is out of the tomb and on the loose, kicking to pieces anything that would keep the world from fully living the life God has given it. The two women went to see the tomb, but they walked into an earthquake of cosmic proportions: it was the rumble of God kicking to pieces the chains of death, and breaking down the walls of fear and despair.

We know we are living in a Good Friday world. Sooner or later, one way or another, we all stare at the massive stone that secures the tomb where our soul has been buried, together with our hope. Everything, it seems, collapses into this enormous black hole. Sooner or later, one way or another, we all stare at the stone and we feel abandoned by God or that there is no God to abandon us, just the predictable cruelty of the Good Friday world where might makes right.

But today we sing. Today we sing with joyful stubbornness against the world as we know it. Today we sing the song of the world to come. We sing because on this mother of all mornings the guards of death shook for fear and swooned, and two broken-hearted women heard an angel speak,

“Do not be afraid, I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’”

Jesus is risen; death could not hold him. We are living in a world where the way of Christ, the way of the cross doesn’t end in the tomb, but has been powerfully affirmed by God as the way of life. “Good Friday is at the center of this world,” said Jürgen Moltmann, “but Easter morning is the sunrise of the coming of God and the morning of the new life and is the beginning of the future of this world.”[8] God knows we are living in a Good Friday world, but it is a world recentered in Easter hope:the one whose life was a gift of compassion, healing, and forgiveness, has been raised from the dead. Jesus was betrayed, denied, and deserted by his friends; he was tortured, mocked, crucified and buried, but God raised him from the dead. And the resurrection changed more than the body of Jesus and the hearts of his disciples: the resurrection redirected the course of creation from death to life.

The women met him when they ran to tell the disciples that he had been raised. “Do not be afraid,” he said to them; “go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” With death defeated and the way of Jesus revealed as the way of life, there is nothing to be afraid of. Ordinary women and men are now free, as followers of Jesus to live, imagine, and proclaim the kingdom of God.

Mary and Mary are the mothers of the church, apostles to the Apostles. They ran to proclaim his resurrection, but they didn’t run because they had seen him; it was the other way round. They saw him when they trusted the words of an angel who spoke to them at the tomb. They saw him when they trusted those words enough to turn around and wonder, “What if?” They knew the reality of death, they knew the darkness of shattered hope, but by the grace of God they found the courage to take the first step. What if God did raise Jesus from the dead? Then the triumph of the powers that want Jesus dead is not final. If Jesus has been raised, the myth that any and all paths end in the tomb is shattered. If Jesus is risen, the light and life of the world will illumine even the remotest depths of the universe.

We know we are living in a Good Friday world, but this morning the two Marys stand in our midst, laughing and crying, out of breath from running, telling us to go to Galilee; telling us to make room for faith the size of a mustard seed, just enough to take the first step on the way. “Question your old certainties,” they say, “the tomb is empty, and the guards of death are like dead men. The rulers of the world thought they were finally finished with Jesus, but Jesus isn’t finished with the world—his mission continues. Make room in your over-certain hearts for a little subversive resurrection faith—Jesus is on the loose in the world, and you will see him. Kindness and mercy are not lost causes in these violent times. Forgiveness makes the world larger, selfless service bears fruit. Your struggle for justice and your work for peace in the name of Christ are blessed. Go to Galilee; follow him on the way; listen to him, and you will see him.”

Rep. Justin Pearson certainly heard what the two and multitudes after them declared. “Oh, we have good news, folks!” he said on Thursday.

We’ve got good news that Sunday always comes. Resurrection is a promise, and it is a prophecy. It’s a prophecy that came out of the cotton fields. It’s a prophecy that came out of the lynching tree. It’s a prophecy that still lives in each and every one of us in order to make the state of Tennessee the place that it ought to be. And so I’ve still got hope, because I know we are still here, and we will never quit![9]

We live in a Good Friday world where the guards of death make the tomb as secure as they can, but that’s all they can do. Christ is risen.

[1] See Judith Jones https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/vigil-of-easter-3/commentary-on-matthew-281-10-7

[2] Matthew 27:55-61

[3] Matthew 2:1-18

[4] Matthew 27:62-66

[5] See Holly McCall’s tweet from April 6, 2023. https://twitter.com/jhollymc/status/1644132005175590912

[6] Thomas Reese, SJ https://religionnews.com/2023/04/04/christ-continues-to-be-crucified-in-todays-world

[7] Frederick Buechner http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week633/feature.html#right

[8] Jürgen Moltmann, Cole Lectures at Vanderbilt 2002; Jürgen Moltmann, Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, Passion for God: Theology in Two Voices (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 84.

[9] https://www.democracynow.org/2023/4/7/justin_jones_tennessee

Humble courage

Every year, at the beginning of Holy Week, we hear Paul’s Christ poetry from Philippians, and this year is no exception. We sit with the words, listening for the word of God, the word that speaks to our grief, our rage, our numbness. “Not again,” we whispered and howled on Monday, again. What does this terror do to the souls of our young ones? What does dose after dose of trauma do to them, to us? What can we do to break the pattern?

Every year, at the beginning of Holy Week, we hear Paul’s Christ poetry from Philippians. He uses poetic speech to illustrate for us the way of Jesus, a pattern of thinking and living which the church is to embody for the sake of the world. “Live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ,” Paul tells the church, “united in spirit and mind, side by side in the struggle to advance the gospel faith.”[1] Side by side in the struggle – that resonates with me this week. Side by side in the struggle to more fully embody and live the pattern of Christ.

Paul emphasizes unity, describing it as being “of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.”[2] I have little doubt that already among Paul’s first-century audiences there were those who thought, “Oh, I’m all in favor of everybody being of the same mind, as long as we come to full accord around my mind.” I have a hunch that’s why Paul included having the same love. Unity of mind can still go hand in hand with coercion or exclusion, where they belong to our unity only if they come around to thinking the way we think. Having the same love ends such patterns of domination, because in love the focus of attention is on the other—the child, the lover, the neighbor, the stranger. The focus is on them and their need, their perspective, their hope. And so Paul urges us to do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit. “In humility regard others as better than yourselves. Look to each other’s interests and not merely your own.”[3]

Humility was not considered a virtue in Roman society. Roman culture was built, much like ours, on the pursuit of status, and it valued force and competition. You move up, and you cultivate networks of people who can help you move up even higher. You don’t look back. You press on, your eyes on the next rung of the ladder. You push hard for your interests.

We know the pattern. In 25 states, you don’t need a permit to carry a handgun—three years ago, that was the case in only 16 states. “That has been the most rapid expansion of gun rights at the state level that we have seen,” a professor specializing in firearms law said. And Tennessee may lag behind every other state in the nation in providing stable foster care, but our legislature competes at the highest level when it comes to expanding gun access.

In recent years, … the Tennessee State Legislature … [has] passed a series of measures that have weakened regulations, eliminating some permit requirements and allowing most residents to carry loaded guns in public, open or concealed, without a permit, training or special background checks.[4]

In 2021, Representative Andy Ogles, whose district includes the Covenant School, posted a Christmas photo of his family posing with assault style rifles. You’ve all seen it. Asked this past week if he regretted posting the picture, he said, “Why would I regret a photograph with my family exercising my rights to bear arms?”[5] Quick to point out “my rights,” Mr. Ogles seemed unwilling to consider the rights of children to go to school without fear for their lives and the lives of their friends and teachers.

In 2020, gunshot wounds became the leading cause of death among children and teenagers in the U.S., replacing auto accidents, which was the biggest threat to their lives for decades prior. “Firearms account for 20% of all child and teen deaths in the U.S., [including assault, suicide, and accidental shooting] compared to an average of less than 2% of child and teen deaths in similarly large and wealthy nations.”[6] It clearly isn’t life-giving when we each focus solely on “my rights,” without consideration of the needs, interests, and rights of others. “Look to each other’s interests and not merely your own,” writes Paul. “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” Let your doing, thinking, and speaking be transformed after the pattern of Christ.

According to Paul’s poetic declarations, Jesus enjoyed the highest status imaginable: equality with God. But his life showed that he did not regard his status as something to be held onto at all costs or used to his own advantage. Jesus humbled himself. Holly Hearon observed, that

the primary contrast [in this passage] lies … between the form of God and the form of a slave. In terms of the social hierarchy of the ancient world (much alive in the world today), the contrast could not be more extreme. God is the one who reigns above all other rulers, before whom every knee in heaven and on earth and under the earth bends… In between God and slaves are many social strata, each one serving those above while also being served by those below. A slave, however, only serves.[7]

A slave only serves. Paul is not glorifying self-degradation, though, or blindly affirming societal arrangements of power and status. His point is that our salvation comes by way of love’s humble invasion of the world’s deep brokenness. Jesus came down, all the way down, nothing but the will of God on his mind, compassionate, vulnerable, and utterly faithful.

Every year, in time for Passover, the Roman governor moved his headquarters inland from Caesarea on the coast to Jerusalem. He brought along elite Roman troops to keep order and to quell any outbursts of enthusiasm that might turn into a governor’s nightmare. Lots of people were on the road before Passover. Imagine two processions approaching Jerusalem at about the same time. One a festive, happy throng of pilgrims, colorful and noisy, with small children, goats and sheep; the other a long, orderly column, rows and rows of foot soldiers, led by troops on horseback, with the governor at the front, riding high on the biggest horse in all of Judea. You hear the sound of drums, hoof beats and marching feet, the clanging of weapons and armor. You see banners flying overhead, golden eagles mounted on poles; helmets and weapons glistening in the sun. Rome knew how to project power. The ceremonial entry was a spectacle of intimidation.

Meanwhile, Jesus, who had walked all the way from Galilee to the outskirts of the city, told his disciples to go and get him a donkey. The prophet Zechariah declared, “Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”[8] But Matthew doesn’t quote the whole verse. He drops the big words “triumphant and victorious,” so all that remains is, “Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey.” This humble king, greeted by crowds of ordinary people, projects a very different kind of power from what’s on display on the other side of the city, and he certainly doesn’t carry an AR-15.

Jesus enters a city in turmoil. He rides his borrowed donkey all the way down Broadway, up to Capitol Hill, and down to city hall. He comes to bless and to heal, but also to confront and challenge us. Back in Galilee, he had said, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”[9] We call this week ‘holy’ because Jesus’ life on earth, and particularly his final days, reveal to us the heart of reality, and it’s not self-assertion at any cost. It’s not “my rights.” It’s divine love in pursuit of true community.

In the passion narratives of the Gospels, the emphasis is on how Christ is humiliated—spat upon, tortured, mocked, and crucified. In Paul’s poem, no one does this to Jesus. Jesus chooses. Jesus humbles himself. Jesus acts. And in emptying himself of his status, he does not give up his self—no, he gives full expression to his self in his relationship with God and with us.[10] He reveals who he is. And by raising him from the dead, God gives him—the abused, tortured, mocked, and crucified non-person—the name that is above every name. We call this week holy, because the story of Jesus reveals who God is. We look to the cross and we see love that goes all the way for our liberation from the power of sin, love that goes all the way for the life of the world.

Amid the polarization in this country, we can’t see a way forward toward unity of vision. Paul urges us to cultivate patterns of thinking and living that are shaped by the humble way of Jesus. What might that look like in the days ahead?

Former Governors Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam wrote a column in The Tennessean this past week. Both have a deep respect  for the wisdom of the late U.S. Senator Howard Baker who often told people that whenever you have two sides that are hopelessly divided, the trick is to find something, even a little thing, that you can agree on, and then build from there. In their judgment,

the assault rifle issues are at an impossible impasse, but if we disengage there for now and turn our attention instead to smaller steps, doable and still useful, there are possibilities. We could start with “red flag” laws—a way to identify people with potentially dangerous mental health issues and a legal process to remove their access to firearms.  … Another small step might be making gun owners take more legal responsibility for securing their weapons. Anyone, conservative or liberal, who believes in the value of personal responsibility should be able to agree that it is irresponsible to possess a dangerous weapon and not reasonably secure it from misuse by others.[11]

Those aren’t big steps, but in the current political climate, they would be significant steps in the right direction. And to encourage them, we can go back to the capitol tomorrow and show our state representatives how much we would appreciate any step of humble courage.

[1] See Philippians 1:27-30 (NRSV and REB)

[2] Philippians 2:2

[3] See Philippians 2:3-4 (NRSV and REB)

[4]  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/29/us/nashville-gun-laws.html

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/29/us/nashville-gun-laws.html

[6] https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/child-and-teen-firearm-mortality-in-the-u-s-and-peer-countries/

[7] Holly Hearon https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sunday-of-the-passion-palm-sunday-3/commentary-on-philippians-25-11-14

[8] Zechariah 9:9

[9] Matthew 11:29

[10] See Hearon, reference above.

[11] https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/contributors/2023/03/31/gun-law-reform-possible-tennessee-governors-red-flag-laws/70066151007/

Death no dominion

Ezekiel never has been our favorite prophet, has he? We much prefer Isaiah, especially the words we can copy straight to our Christmas cards. We also like Amos and Micah, who speak out with such passion and courage for justice for the poor. But Ezekiel? He doesn’t show up much in our Sunday school lessons or in our lectionary; he does get quoted, though, sort-of, several times by Samuel Jackson’s character in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.[1] Ezekiel is strange; some would say, he’s weird. His visions and voice are imaginative, often incomprehensible, with violent and pornographic tendencies, and his most fervent readers tend to be of the wild-eyed kind.

Ezekiel, son of Buzi, was a Judean priest, or perhaps a recent graduate preparing for the priesthood. He was part of a first wave of exiles from Jerusalem whom King Nebuchadrezzar deported to Babylon in an attempt to subdue the troublesome leadership of Judah. We don’t know much about Ezekiel’s personal life, but I imagine that as a priest he felt utterly out of place in that foreign land. You can be a teacher without a school building; you just gather your students in the living room or under the tree in the back yard. You can be a bricklayer or a weaver anywhere in the world, as long as you have your tools. But Ezekiel was a priest of the Lord whose temple was in Jerusalem, and outside of that sacred place he was a man without a purpose. His entire community had been uprooted, and they all struggled to make sense of this devastating experience.

It was in exile that Ezekiel became a prophet of the Lord. He had visions, he heard voices, in the grip of God’s spirit he traveled far, and he shared what was revealed to him with his compatriots. Ezekiel insisted that their exile did not reflect the defeat of their God by the gods of Babylon, as some surmised; no, their loss was the judgment brought down on them by the Lord, and in Ezekiel’s mind, it was altogether justified and deserved. In his reflections, there was no room for historical or geo-strategic analysis that might explain Jerusalem’s defeat as collateral damage in the conflict between the global powers of the day, Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt. In Ezekiel’s mind, it was all God’s doing, and the God he knew was consumed by wrath and bent on violence. The fire burning in Ezekiel’s belly was one few if any of his fellow exiles had ever even gotten close to. And the bad news continued to pile up, layer upon layer of loss and grief.

The word of the Lord came to me: Mortal, with one blow I am about to take away from you the delight of your eyes, yet you shall not mourn or weep, nor shall your tears run down. Groan quietly; make no mourning for the dead. Bind on your turban, and put your sandals on your feet; do not cover your upper lip or eat the bread of mourners. So I spoke to the people in the morning, and at evening my wife died. And on the next morning I did as I was commanded.[2]

Ezekiel declared that the Babylonians would breach the walls of Jerusalem, burn the buildings to the ground, slaughter many of the inhabitants, and deport the rest. And those who thought that Ezekiel was out of his mind weren’t so sure anymore when more news arrived from Jerusalem. “In the twelfth year of our exile, in the tenth month, on the fifth day of the month,” he wrote in his diary, “someone who had escaped from Jerusalem came to me and said, ‘The city has fallen.’”[3]

Everything that once made them who they were as a people, had been taken away or destroyed: the land, the temple, the city and throne of David, their proud theology of the city that shall not be moved.[4] All gone. All they had left was their exhaustion and despair.In the midst of that, Ezekiel heard a new  word—or was it the memory of one he had heard long ago?

A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.[5]

He heard this word, or half-remembered it, but who among his people could hear it? Was he ready to say it? He wrote it down, but he couldn’t say it. The words of judgment had come to him more easily. And the losses they had experienced were much more tangible than these first whispers of hope that were seeking a way to his lips, whispers of a new heart and a new spirit.

Then the hand of the Lord once again came upon Ezekiel, and the Lord brought him out by the spirit of the Lord and set him down in the middle of a valley. It was a journey into the heart of the people in exile, a journey into the depth of his own heart. Ezekiel didn’t just see a valley full of bones, he walked around in it. The Lord led him around as if to make sure he would take in the full extent of life’s absence.

Ezekiel was a meticulous diarist, noting, e.g., that the word of the Lord came to him in the sixth year, in the sixth month, on the fifth day or in the seventh year, in the fifth month, on the tenth day.[6] But Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones, unlike his other visions, does not bear a date, as Elie Wiesel noted. Why not? Wiesel suggested, because every generation needs to hear in its own time that these bones can live.Because in every generation, those who have reached the end of the miserable road that took them away from home, away from joy and life and hope—they need to hear in their own time that these bones can live. All of us in the valley of history hear some echo of the Lord’s question, “Mortal, can these bones live?” And all of us need to hear some echo of Ezekiel’s words, spoken with fantastic courage or holy madness, “O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live. … You shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.” Ezekiel was about as far away from the garden of creation as the human imagination can go, and there, in the dust where life once was, in the desert of tired despair, he spoke the word of the Lord.

And a rustling sound / as of leaves in autumn wind / started amid the dry bones. / A whisper, then a drumbeat! / They stood erect, those bones, and knitted firm! [7]

One human being, walking like the last chronicler through fields of destruction, Ezekiel spoke the words of God,

and the spirit entered the bones. / First a whisper, / then a drumbeat, / then reverberant – / a heartbeat! / They took breath once more! and / walked about! and / conversed one with another! / joyful, harmonious, / an immense throng, / the newborn, / the living![8]

The prophet spoke, and hope began to sing: Death no dominion! “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live!”

It was God who made humans from dust and breathed into them the breath of life.[9] It was God who brought Israel out of Egypt, making covenant with them at Sinai, and bringing them to a good land. And now, Ezekiel saw and declared, God would bring new life to a weary people whose bones were dried up and whose hope was lost. The spirit of God is blowing in the valley, he told any who would listen—let it breathe on you, let it breathe in you; allow it to give breath to your voice and inspire your actions. You are not cut off from the presence of God—breathe, the spirit of God is as close to you as your own breath. Breathe—this is not the end of the road.

In the Gospel of John, the reality of death is stated less poetically by Martha who says it as it is: “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Then Jesus speaks, and Lazarus emerges from the tomb. Jesus speaks the word that gives life to the dead,[10] and it begins to dawn on Martha, and on us, that Jesus is the word that gives life to the dead. In Jesus we meet the human being who embodies the life-giving word of God so fully, that the Gospel of John declares him to be the word of God—not merely a great teacher of the word, or a prophet who faithfully proclaims the word, but the very word of God living life with us as a human being.

We know the place where we say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost.” We know the place where despair presents itself as the only reasonable response to the course of the world. We know the place, and anytime we get there, it’s good to have a friend like Ezekiel who’s been there and returned with a vision of God’s insurrection against hopelessness. We know the place where nothing seems more real than death, and when we’re there, may we know in our bones that Jesus is there with us, breathing and speaking life—the life that ends death’s dominion.

[1] “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110912/characters/nm0000168 Cf. Ezekiel 25:17 “I will execute great vengeance on them with wrathful punishments. Then they shall know that I am the Lord, when I lay my vengeance on them.”

[2] Ezekiel 24:15-18

[3] Ezekiel 33:21

[4] Psalm 46:5

[5] Ezekiel 36:26-28

[6] Ezekiel 8:1; 20:1

[7] Daniel Berrigan, Ezekiel: Vision in the dust (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1997), 114.

[8] Berrigan, 115.

[9] Genesis 2:7

[10] cf. Rom 4:17

Be the light

“Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light,” the apostle writes. As far as metaphors are concerned, it doesn’t get more elemental than darkness and light. “Let there be light” were the first words spoken by God on the first day of creation, according to Genesis 1. Darkness and light are night and day, fundamental to the ordering of time and the rhythms of life.

“Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light,” writes the apostle, and we hear echoes of creation, echoes of life’s beginning. Ephesians seems to have been a baptismal sermon which was circulated as a letter among churches in Asia Minor. Unlike other New Testament letters, it doesn’t address the day-to-day struggles of a particular church, but rather the big-picture challenges of living a baptized life.

Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. You noticed that the apostle didn’t write, “Once you were in the darkness, but now in the Lord you are in the light.” It’s the same contrast, but apparently, for the apostle, it might invite the misunderstanding that baptism is merely a change of environments, a change of religious affiliation from one cult to another, with the identity of the person making the transition left basically untouched, like moving from one room to another, from one job to another. Baptism, this preacher wants the church to understand, is our transition to our true identity as God’s beloved children. Once you were darkness, now you are light. Earlier, the apostle wrote, “You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, … but God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us …, made us alive together with Christ.”[1] Once you were dead, now you are alive. Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Walk as children of light. Walk in ways that show who and whose you are. Let your life shine. Christ is your life. Be the light. Shine. Let the light of Christ shine in you and through you. And don’t be afraid, the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.

When you start to think about it, the fruit of the light sounds like a weird mix of metaphors, but less so when you consider that the light of Christ shines in and through the lives of human beings, who we are, what we say and do, and how we say and do—Christ wants to and does shine in and through all of it,

and all of it is fruit of the light for the harvest of light.

Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light—you are who and what you were meant to be, and it doesn’t matter if you hear yourself addressed as a person first or as a community, if you hear singular or plural, you or y’all: you are light. For many of us, Lent is a season when we take a closer look at our lives, when we ponder how fully and faithfully we’re living the life we have been given, when we wonder if we’re still trying to find out what is pleasing to the Lord or if somewhere along the way we’ve settled for what is pleasing to ourselves. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds of our known or perceived shortcomings; it’s easy to imagine the light as harsh, inescapable, and as somehow delighting in exposing our inconsistencies and contradictions; it’s easy to end up in a place of pervasive shame and guilt, stuck. The apostle warns us, “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness; rather, expose them”—not to the harsh light of the relentlessly chatty and relentlessly critical voices in our minds, but to the light of grace and truth. When Paul writes, “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice,” he has the whole community of the baptized in mind. “Be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” That is the light. Kindness shines in the darkness of bitterness. Compassion and forgiveness shine in the darkness of wrath and malice. That is the light.

“Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, as Christ loved us.”[2] We often treat others the way we treat ourselves, or the way we believe we deserve to be treated. Lent is a wonderful opportunity to walk intentionally under the loving gaze of God and let ourselves be loved—not for who we wish we were, but for who we are, beloved children.

At the end of today’s passage from Ephesians, Paul writes, “Therefore it says, ‘Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’“ The apostle is not quoting scripture; most scholars think the line is most likely from a baptismal hymn his initial audience would have been familiar with. “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” It’s a lovely line, whether you hear it as a thundering wake-up call with bugle blasts, or a gentle voice whispering in your ear.  Many theologians of the first centuries heard echoes of a line from Isaiah, “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you”—you can hear it too, that lovely echo, across the ages, can’t you?[3]Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Arise! Shine! Be who God made you to be! However, Isaiah was also quite aware of the masters of deception: what many call light, some will call darkness. “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!”[4] And we know exactly what he’s talking about.

We have presenters on news programs who intentionally lie for the sake of ratings, and some of us do want somebody to tell us that evil is good; and the mob storming the capitol on January 6? Those were actually groups of patriots on a self-guided sightseeing tour. We have state legislators and a governor who call the state-sponsored denial of medical care for transgender youth, protecting our children. And after the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth reported the state’s foster care system is the worst in the nation, the administration really stepped up its efforts to turn things around—by dropping a plan to dissolve the Commission. A spokesperson for the governor’s office called the effort

another meaningful step to better serve Tennessee children by incorporating important services within child and family-serving state agencies, which includes DCS. To be clear, Tennessee is not cutting services for children or families, but rather, integrating them into state government, meaning that current services will remain intact and be relocated.

“If that’s the case,” comments the Tennessee Lookout’s Sam Stockard, “we have to wonder whether the fox will be guarding the henhouse if the commission’s work is shifted into the Department of Children’s Services, which has been falling short on the job for years.”[5]

A book for young readers comes to mind. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle was first published in 1962 and has been in print ever since. It has also faced several challenges and attempted bans: it was ranked #23 on the American Library Association’s 100 most frequently challenged books from 1990-1999, and #90 on the ALA’s list from 2000-2009.[6] Only in the last decade did the award-winning young adult novel drop from the top 100 list.[7]

A Wrinkle in Time is the story of Meg Murry, a high-school-aged girl who is transported on an adventure through time and space with her younger brother Charles and her friend Calvin to rescue her father from the evil forces that hold him prisoner on another planet. The three children learn from three celestial guides that the universe is threatened by a great evil called the Dark Thing. Several planets have already succumbed to this evil force, including Camazotz, the planet on which Meg’s father is imprisoned. On Camazotz, conformity rules, and everything is controlled by IT, a giant disembodied brain. Meg, Charles, and Calvin try to fight IT, but without success. They manage to escape, but Charles remains possessed by IT, a prisoner of Camazotz. One of the celestial guides tells Meg that she has one thing that IT does not have, and this will be her weapon against the evil. However, Meg must discover this weapon for herself. And, of course, she does: her love for her brother sets him free from IT’s clutches and he becomes himself again.

Some challengers thought the book was too religious, others, that it wasn’t religious enough; I think young readers are perfectly able to come to their own conclusions. Right around the time that L’Engle was writing A Wrinkle in Time, Dr. Martin Luther King preached, “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”[8]

In 2018, A Wrinkle in Time was adapted into a motion picture by Walt Disney Pictures, directed by Ava Duvernay, and featuring Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling as Mrs. Which, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Who, the celestial guides. The movie’s promotional tagline passed on the insight of Mrs. L’Engle, Dr. King, the Sermon on the Mount, Ephesians, and Isaiah—the whole, deep, beautiful tradition: “The only way to defeat the darkness is to become the light.” So, whether you are contemplating the landscape of your heart or the world around you, let Christ shine. Be who and what you were meant to be. Be the light.

[1] Ephesians 2:1-5

[2] See Ephesians 4:31-32; 5:1-2

[3] Isaiah 60:1

[4] Isaiah 5:20

[5] https://tennesseelookout.com/2023/03/17/stockard-on-the-stump-killing-the-commission-on-children-and-youth-wont-be-easy

[6] https://bannedbooks.library.cmu.edu/madeleine-lengle-a-wrinkle-in-time-draft/

[7] https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/decade2019

[8] Strength to Love, 1963.

What shall we drink?

I remember the sound of water on the land. I spent a couple of weeks hiking in the Italian Alps last summer, and I remember moving through magnificent mountain landscapes, most of the time immersed in some combination of bird song, wind, and water, water everywhere—dripping and trickling between rocks, gurgling in brooks, and thundering over boulders. I remember the sound of water and the delicious taste. One moment stands out: I had crossed over a pass, my water bottles were empty, and I was getting thirsty. I followed the narrow trail down, and eventually I came to a spring whose water filled a granite trough, bigger than a bathtub, to overflowing, and I drank. And I didn’t just drink a little water; I felt like I was drinking the mountain itself. I was drinking the essence of that place and that moment, and I felt like I had never tasted anything like it before (and you can’t bottle that).

I remember how my thirst prepared me to receive the fullness of the gift. Thirst can be a blessing—but of course that’s not all it can be. Israel remembers asking, “Is the Lord among us or not?” They were thirsty and an inch away from full-throttle panic. “One hundred hours. That’s … how long a human body can typically survive at ‘average’ temperatures without access to water,” writes Anathea Portier Young.

Today’s Sinai Peninsula averages 82°F in May and 91°F in June. For those same months, average high temperatures are 95°F and 104°F respectively. In such extreme heat and with exposure to sun, the timeline for survival shortens considerably.

She quotes a scholar who has written The Biology of Human Survival: Life and Death in Extreme Environments: “At 90°F survival time with limited activity easily can be decreased by a factor of two.” So instead of a hundred hours, you only have fifty. Now take into account that your activity is far from limited, since you’re “walking long distances in the day time, carrying [your] belongings, tents, and small children, and wrangling livestock along the way.” And it’s quite reasonable also to take into account the possibility of higher than average temperatures when, according to the author of The Biology of Human Survival, “sustained high sweat rates can reduce estimated survival time without drinking water to as little as seven hours, or approximately the time it takes to walk twenty miles.”[1] One unusually, but not impossibly, hot, day was all it would take to finish God’s people; because at Rephidim, there was no water for the people to drink. Israel remembers asking, “Is the Lord among us or not?” They were thirsty and an inch away from full-throttle panic, and we know they were not being unreasonable.

“Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart,” Moses said to them at the end of the long journey, before Joshua led them into the promised land.[2] Only in retrospect did the long way become a test. They were formerly enslaved people who had escaped the house of slavery, but they still carried Egypt as a memory in their bones, they still bore the burden of Egypt as a mental state. More than once, they weighed their oppressed but viable lives as forced laborers in Pharaoh’s brick yards against the dangers of the long way through the wilderness. Only in retrospect did they come to see the long way as a test: God was committed to their liberation, but were they?

The testimony of the witnesses about those years is consistent. “We failed the wilderness test,” they tell us. “We had doubt in our heart and fear and little faith.” The testimony of the witnesses is consistent, and they didn’t edit the desert scenes to make themselves look a little better; they didn’t cut the grumbling, the quarreling and complaining, because to them, remembering meant remembering the truth and not some white-washed fiction. “We forgot what God had done,” they told generations to come.

We forgot the miracles the Lord had shown us,
who divided the sea and let us pass through it
and made the waters stand like a heap;
who led us in the daytime with a cloud,
and all night long with fiery light;
who split rocks open in the wilderness,
and gave us drink abundantly as from the deep,
making streams come out of the rock
and causing waters to flow down like rivers.[3]

We failed the test, I hear the wilderness wanderers say, but the promises of God were still new to us then; we were still in our growing-up years as God’s free covenant partners, we still had everything to learn. We failed the test, but we began to trust the faithfulness of God, and tell it, so that every new generation would put their trust in God … and not be like their ancestors, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not steadfast, and whose spirit was not faithful to God.[4]

Beginning with the wilderness wanderers, every generation passed on the stories to their children and grandchildren and urged them to remember. And they didn’t commission working groups for the beautification of the past and the smoothing of the record. They declared, we have failed again and again in our life as God’s people, but God has been faithful and true all the way. We failed to remember God’s promise and the commandments of life, but God remembered us. We failed to live as God’s people, but through our failure we came to know the wideness of God’s mercy.

In the stories of Israel’s wilderness wanderings, complaining and quarreling are recurring themes: Trapped between the sea and Pharaoh’s soldiers, the people said to Moses, with a good pinch of dark humor, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt?”[5] Yet soon they marveled as God made a way out of no way.

Then at Marah, they couldn’t drink the water, because it was bitter, and the people complained to Moses, “What shall we drink?”[6] And God showed Moses a piece of wood to sweeten the water.

Then they ran out of food, and again they complained, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”[7] And the Lord gave them quail and manna to eat.

Then the water gave out altogether and the people quarreled with Moses, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst? Give us water to drink.”[8]

Israel’s testimony was born in a long struggle against oppression, against hunger and thirst, against fear and despair and amnesia, the long struggle for a life of justice in covenant with God. Israel’s trust in God was found at the end of their strength, at the very edge of what they could bear: where nothing’s left to lean on but the promise of God. “Go on ahead of the people,” God said to Moses, “and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” And so he did, and the people drank.

God never failed us, the wilderness wanderers told their children. We escaped from the house of slavery. We had food to eat and water to quench our thirst. No one had more than they needed, no one too little. God was faithful, and we learned to be faithful to each other. Not that we never failed each other again; God knows we did. But in the wilderness, we drank God’s word like our life depended on it, and we have been sustained by this living water ever since. God’s presence and promise is water for our deepest thirst.

Water is essential for life to flourish. And because water is essential for all living things, and water connects all living things from the cellular level to oceans and atmospheric rivers, water is also one of our richest metaphors. And so we learn to say with the Psalmist,

As a deer longs for flowing streams,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.[9]

And at the same time, we also try to fully grasp that access to clean water is precarious for billions of people, and that the next war may not be fought over oil, but over water.[10]

When Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well, he asks her to give him a drink. It is wonderfully ironic that the giver of living water is himself thirsty, asking for the most basic and most precious gift. To the woman, he’s little more than a curious man without a bucket, but soon she’ll recognize the face of Christ in the stranger. He needs what only she can give, and she needs what only he can give. This is how intimately connected God and humanity are, writes Osvaldo Vena: “A thirsty Messiah and a resourceful woman … find out that they need each other,”[11] and life-giving water flows—from her to him, from him to her, and from them to us. In giving and receiving, we come to know the faithfulness of God and learn to be faithful to each other. May we drink deeply from this spring.

[1] Anathea Portier Young https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-exodus-171-7-11

[2] Deuteronomy 8:2

[3] See Psalm 78:11-16

[4] Ps 78:7-8

[5] Exodus 14:11-12

[6] Exodus 15:23-24

[7] Exodus 16:2-3

[8] Exodus 17:3

[9] Psalm 42:1-1

[10] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210816-how-water-shortages-are-brewing-wars

[11] Osvaldo Vena https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-john-45-42-3

Sojourners of the promise

It was on a morning after it had snowed in Nashville, when I saw the picture. It was taken from inside the house, through the open front door. There is snow on the ground, and you can make out the outline of a door mat, dusted with barely an inch of the winter wonder stuff. You also notice the crisp imprint of a dog’s paw—just one. Somebody in the house must have thought the dog might want to go, might need to go, or should perhaps go anyway, just in case, but the dog said no—in the unequivocal body language of a single paw pressed briefly into the thin layer of wintry precipitation and quickly withdrawn. The puppy was willing to try, but decided it wouldn’t take another step. It was cold and wet out there, and inside it was cozy.

Leaving can be tough. The Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” The words are very specific about what he was to leave behind, and quite vague about his destination. Do you remember a time when you had to pack up and go? Allison and Jared are filling up boxes, a thousand decisions about what to take and what to sell or give away. Leaving takes effort. Pulling up the stakes and loosening the lines that had held your tent taut for so long, and watching it collapse, it takes effort. Allison and Jared and the boys know where they’re headed, but the unknown can be overwhelming. Do you remember when you found yourself on the road in mom’s old car or in the U-Haul truck or the station wagon with the kids in the backseat? Others talked about this moment as going to college, or getting married, or being between jobs, or starting over, but you couldn’t tell if you felt like an adventurer, an explorer, a pilgrim, or a refugee—you looked out the window at the passing landscape, carried by currents of excitement, fear, and hope.

Perhaps you recall that moment when you arrived, or you thought you did. You were beginning to feel settled, you had started to put down roots, and then the whole world changed in an instant when the phone rang and they told you that your best friend from college had died in a climbing accident; or your parents called to tell you they were getting a divorce, and what seemed like a reasonable thing to do for two adults who had grown apart turned out to be so painful and hard. And you pulled up the stakes and rolled up your tent and you found yourself on the road, again. Where would you set up camp next and for how long? Who would be there with you? And who would you be at the end of the journey? The Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” We always seem to know what we’re leaving behind; the rest is unknown. Warsan Shire is a British writer born to Somali parents in Kenya who grew up in London. She knows about leaving, and I trust her voice when I try to comprehend the reality of the millions of people of all ages around the world who are leaving home on foot, by car or train or bicycle, crossing the sea in overloaded rubber dinghies, crossing mountains, rivers, jungles, borders, and deserts, on the way to a better life for themselves or their children. These are lines from her poem, Home.[1]

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
…
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
…
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
…
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying leave,
run away from me now
i don't know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

The voice Abram heard—he knew it to be God’s. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” The story doesn’t say it wasn’t safe there anymore in Haran. It doesn’t say Abram’s herds couldn’t find pasture there anymore, or that the wells had dried up, and he had to pull up the stakes of his tent and move on. Abram and Sarai and his brother’s son, Lot, left Haran because Abram heard a call.

We’re in chapter 12 of Genesis, and the stories leading up to this moment begin with beautiful meditations on the promise of life. In the beginning, there is the wondrous word that calls all things into being, heaven and earth, light and life, creatures great and small—swimming, jumping, flying, crawling, growing, singing, roaring life. And God saw that it was very good.

Most of the stories that follow, not very good. It’s a miniseries about the fracturing of relationships with Adam and Eve and the serpent, Cain and Abel, the flood, the ark, and the tower of Babel, and amid the threatening chaos, the desire and determination of God to see life flourish. After Babel, the whole human family had come to a dead end. The sun still rose every morning, yes, and the rains still fell, but life was not what God intended it to be.

The Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” Where fractured trust had spread, fullness of blessing was to erupt. God spoke words of promise, but the first word was go. Leave the world you know, and become what I will make of you.

I will — five times this divine commitment is repeated in these four-and-a-half short verses, promising to give what human beings crave: well-being, security, prosperity, prominence. “The promise provides,” writes Walter Brueggemann, “exactly what the people of Babel … tried to form for themselves and could not.”[2] The promise cannot be had without the promise-maker.

We may want to know what made Abram so special. And how he knew it was God who was speaking to him. We may want to know what thoughts went through his mind, what questions he had, and whether he discussed any of this with Sarai. The story isn’t interested in any of these questions. The focus is entirely on God’s initiative to overcome the fracturing of relationships in creation, beginning with one human being. The focus is entirely on God’s promise and call and Abram’s response. And Abram doesn’t speak a single word in this encounter; he gives his answer with his feet. He and his household became migrants for the sake of the promise, resident aliens sojourning among other peoples.[3] And as sojourners of the promise, they became the ancestors of Israel and of all, as Paul insists, who entrust their lives to God’s call and promise.

It has always been important for God’s people to remember that we are a people on the way, not necessarily geographically, but in terms of who we are and where we are going. We are a people who live into the divine promise. Remembering that we are a people on the way is particularly important when nativism, nationalism, and “us first” is written on so many closed doors. “The simple fact of being a human being is you migrate,” I heard a man say on the radio. “Many of us move from one place to the other,” he said.

But even those who don’t move and who stay in the same city, if you were born … 70 years ago, [and] you’ve lived in the same place for 70 years, the city you live in today is unrecognizable. Almost everything has changed. So even people who stay in the same place undergo a kind of migration through time.[4]

The pace of change in our world and its depth are profoundly disruptive for many, just about anywhere you turn these days. Fear is rampant, not only among those who leave home just to survive, but also among those who are afraid to let them in. It’s easy to forget that we are all migrants, which makes it all the more important for the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, the sojourners of the promise, to remember that we are all on the way, that we are becoming the people God wants us to be, all of us.

“Of all the things in the world,” wrote Jim Mays many years ago, “we are most interested in those to which we can attach the possessive pronoun—my family, my home, my possessions, my plans, … my life.”[5] In that constellation of interests, God’s call creates a crisis. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Our response determines whether we live with and for the promise or against it; whether we hold on grimly to the present ordering of our world and our vision, or find the courage to step out on faith toward hope.

[1] See full text at https://www1.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/mission/mandm_assets/2016workshop/Home.pdf

For audio by author, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=182&v=nI9D92Xiygo&feature=emb_logo

[2] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Interpretation, a Bible commentary for teaching and preaching), (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1982), 119.

[3] See Genesis 12:10; 17:8; 20:1; 21:23, 34; see also Hebrews 11:8–9.

[4] Mohsin Hamid http://www.npr.org/2017/03/06/518743041/mohsin-hamids-novel-exit-west-raises-immigration-issues

[5] James L Mays, “God has spoken,” Interpretation 14, no. 4 (October 1, 1960), 420.

Trust and suspicion

We heard two stories on this first Sunday in Lent, one taking place in a garden, the other in the wilderness. The garden is a place of lush life, the home of the first man and the first woman. Together they represent humankind, named, in Hebrew, after the soil from which we were made: earthlings, all of us.

“Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” we were reminded on Wednesday as we had ashes rubbed on our foreheads, and some of us heard echoes of the words spoken by the grave, where we commit the body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We are earthlings, we belong to the earth and to God our creator.

In the story from Genesis, three gifts are mentioned: The first is the bountiful garden that is our home and our purpose; we are here to serve its flourishing, to inhabit, explore and enjoy it. Our second gift is the freedom to eat of every tree. And the third gift is a command. The two are presented together in the first words of God addressed to humanity: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” Life as God intends it comes with limits. According to the story from the garden, to be human is to live with our God-given purpose, in God-given freedom, and within God-given limits.

Then there is another voice, asking a question: “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” And what unfolds from there has, unlike any other conversation in Scripture, shaped and reshaped our views about moral freedom, men and women, sin, shame, guilt, sex and work. It’s a conversation that for hundreds of years has been heavily commented, annotated, and footnoted, and some of the commentary has not been life-giving, especially for women. In 1 Timothy 2:11-15, for example, we read:

Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.

The apostle seems to assume that his readers will agree when he confidently declares that “the woman was deceived” and that “Adam was not.” I’m not convinced. If deception did actually occur in the garden, the two of them together fell for it; Adam was there with her, after all, but he didn’t speak up until later when he became the first in a long line of many men to point the finger at Eve. And if Adam didn’t speak up in what has been characterized as such a critical moment in the relationship between God and humankind, one could make the argument that men should be the ones learning in silence rather than silence the voices of women.

Another footnote with a long afterlife identified the serpent with the devil, even though the story says that the serpent was just that, a serpent, one of the animals of the field God had made. It was a part of God’s creation, not some cosmic intruder bent on disruption. The serpent was crafty, yes, perhaps cunning, possibly wise, but not evil.

You may think that a talking snake is curious, but it’s not the first story you’ve heard that has talking animals in it, is it? I find it much more intriguing that this is the first conversation humans have that is not with God, but about God. In a way we’re witnessing the beginnings of theology. “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” the serpent asked. No, of course not; we know that, and Adam and Eve know that. What we don’t know is if the crafty serpent knows it as well, and so we wonder if the gross overstatement in the question is merely an innocent mistake or a way to sow suspicion about God’s motives in establishing boundaries for human life.

The woman corrected the serpent, stating that it was only the fruit of the tree in the  in middle of the garden that was forbidden, and adding that God said, “nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.”

“You will not die;” the serpent replied, “for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The serpent tells the humans something God didn’t tell them, and so the word of the serpent puts the word of God in question. Did God  keep something back? Why didn’t God tell them the whole truth about the matter? Does God really have their best interest at heart or is God jealously protecting divine privileges? Suddenly the words and motivations of God are in question along with the larger matter if the creator of life can be trusted when it comes to what makes for the flourishing of life. What will the humans do?

Here’s what they don’t do: They do not turn to God for answers, and they do not turn to each other to talk about the questions the serpent’s words have raised. Instead they turn to the tree and its promising fruit, and they take and eat in silence. And nobody dies. The serpent had told them the truth; perhaps not the whole truth, but it certainly had “correct information about the garden’s trees and the consequences of eating from them — information that God either did not know or did not reveal to the humans.”[1]

We are earthlings, created in and for relationship with the earth, with each other, and with God, but few of our relationships are simply programmed into our genetic code. Our relationships with other people and with God are complex, and they are rooted in trust. The story of the humans in the garden and the serpent allows us to think about what happens when mistrust and suspicion creep in: suddenly there’s estrangement, soon shame and blame thrive instead of joy, and life in the garden is put on a trajectory away from communion with God. Death creeps in—not in the form of mortality, our mortality is part of life—death creeps in in the breakdown of the relationships that make us who we are, make earth a garden, and make life what God intends it to be.

The other story this morning takes us to the wilderness. The forty days of Lent are patterned on Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. It was the Spirit who led him there to be tested, immediately after his baptism. By the river, the voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved,” and again, as in the garden, after God has spoken, there’s another voice. Jesus is famished, and this voice says, “Since you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”

The voice belongs to the devil. Nothing is said where he came from, nothing is said of his looks or if he can be seen or smelled. What matters here—and perhaps the only thing that matters—is the fact that the devil speaks. And what he suggests is utterly reasonable: You’re hungry. You’re the Son of God. Go ahead, make yourself a little bread.

The wilderness is not a place of quiet retreat for Jesus. It’s a landscape for sorting out what voice to be attentive to, what voice to trust: the voice from heaven or the voice from who-knows-where-it-came-from.

Jesus responds, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ” Jesus doesn’t argue with the tempter; he simply states what he lives and what we are made to live. Bread is nutritious and delicious. Bread is good. Bread is essential, but a human being doesn’t live by bread alone. Jesus is famished, yet he doesn’t pay attention to his hunger; his attention is tuned to every word that comes from the mouth of God.

But the devil isn’t done yet, and he is quick: Speaking of God’s word, he says, consider Psalm 91. Jesus finds himself on the top of the temple and the devil quotes Scripture, chapter and verse:

He will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.

Since you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. Go ahead, live by God’s word and jump. Throw yourself into the arms of the angels. Consider the publicity you could get with a stunt like that. The whole world will know you. Show them who you are. Jump.

But Jesus doesn’t. “It is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ”[2]

Finally the devil takes Jesus to a very high mountain with a view of all the kingdoms of the world. “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” What’s at stake in this wilderness test is what kind of power rules the world: Is it the devil’s empire of one throne to rule them all, the dream behind every imperial dream and every imperial war, or is it the kingdom of God?

Jesus tells the devil to be gone, and he begins his ministry in Galilee, a servant of God’s reign. That was and is the point. Jesus’ response to every test was to refuse the tempter’s suggestion that he could be so much more than human—if he just stepped away from the relationships that made him who he was. But Jesus walked his path in complete trust and obedience to God.

The temptations didn’t end in the wilderness. Jesus had wilderness moments throughout his life, when he was exhausted, hungry, frustrated, tired, and lonely, but mistrust or suspicion never crept in, and he remained true to  God, true to all of us, and true to all of creation. And the power of this faithful love broke the power of sin and death.

We are earthlings, created in the image of God, made for communion with God. We’re invited to live these forty days with less of what we don’t need and a little more of what we know we do. Call it a fast; some of it may become a habit for life. Less scrolling up and down screens, and more strolling under trees. Less spending and more giving. Less attention to voices that pull us away from God’s covenant of love, and more attention to the One who has made us and claimed us as beloved children. Have a blessed Lent.

[1] Cameron Howard https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-215-17-31-7-3

[2] Deuteronomy 6:16

Salt and light

“You are the salt of the earth.” Jesus says it like he fully expects us to know what he means. But we don’t; his assertive pronouncement makes us wonder, and perhaps that’s the point.

“You are the salt of the earth.” It’s a statement of fact, an affirmation. Jesus doesn’t say, “You must be the salt.” It’s not a matter of trying. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in The Cost of Discipleship, “It is not for the disciples to decide whether they will be the salt of the earth, for they are so whether they like it or not, they have been made salt by the call they have received.”[1]

We love the taste of salt, it’s in our genes. Our bodies crave it, because they cannot function without it. In addition to helping maintain the right balance of fluids, salt helps transmit nerve impulses, and it allows our muscles to work properly. Unrefined salt contains just about everything you find in a bottle of Gatorade, except artificial color and flavor. Unrefined salt is a convenient package of sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium, as well as other vital minerals. It is as though we carry in our bodies an ancient memory of the sea, and as long as we have a tiny dose of the ocean in us, we thrive. Salt is in our blood, sweat, and tears. “You are the salt of the earth” — does he mean essential like that for the world’s wellbeing?

Salt has been, for thousands of years, one of the most widely-used food preservatives, especially for meat and fish. The ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians traded salt fish and salt from North Africa throughout the Mediterranean, and salt roads crisscross all continents, except Antarctica. The soldiers in Rome’s armies were paid with salt allotments, called salaria in Latin, and many of us still work for a salary. Salt was precious, and pressed into cakes it was one of the earliest currencies in the world. Salt has been a crucial ingredient in just about all known human cultures, and it is no surprise that it gave rise to a variety of symbolic uses.

Because of its use as a food preservative, salt came to represent permanence and protection. In ancient Israel and among its Near Eastern neighbors, a pinch of salt was eaten by the parties to agreements and treaties. Sharing salt expressed a binding relationship. In Israel’s scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, the expression “covenant of salt” illustrates the permanent nature of God’s covenant with God’s people. We talk about “rules written in stone” or “iron laws,” but God’s covenants are “covenants of salt,” based in a living relationship of partners who have bound themselves to each other.[2] “You shall not omit from your grain offering the salt of the covenant with your God,” we read in Leviticus, “with all your offerings you shall offer salt.”[3] There certainly was the notion that salt would purify the gift to make it acceptable as a sacred offering, but the pinch of salt served as a reaffirmation of covenant fidelity.

The preservative power of salt may have been the reason behind its becoming the substance of choice to ward off evil forces in general. I remember a grandmother on the Italian side of our family, who would throw a pinch of salt over her left shoulder, muttering a well-worn prayer whenever she felt she needed to keep the devil away. Cultural anthropologists are quite confident that mothers began rubbing their newborn babies with salt thousands of years ago to protect them against evil spirits, as mothers and midwives continue to do to this day in many parts of the world. But I can’t help but wonder — when a mother in Israel rubbed her infant with salt, didn’t she also rub that little one, head to toe, with the covenant promises of God? She may have put a grain of salt on her child’s lips to keep evil out, but didn’t she also do it to give her little one a taste of God’s faithfulness? I like to think she did, and that salt — that wondrous, precious substance — never meant just one thing, but gained ever new layers of meaning, from generation to generation. There still is an expression in modern Arabic, “there is salt between us,” meaning, “we are like family, we are close friends.”

Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth.” He says it to those who have been summoned to follow him on the way of grace; and he says it right after declaring, “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” Our following him on the way will evoke rejection and defamation, he says, even persecution — and he tells us to rejoice, because we are on the way with him. “You are the salt of the earth,” and for ages his followers have heard him affirm, You are precious. You are essential. You bring healing. You add flavor and zest to the world. You embody divine hospitality and friendship. The earth cannot be without you. We may feel like there’s nothing wrong with adding a little religious icing to the world’s cake, but he tells us what we are: the salt of the earth. Not sugar, not syrup, but salt. A community of followers that adds a particular, essential quality and flavor. People whose life together is vital for the wellbeing of the earth.

You are the salt of the earth. We live in a culture that is incredibly creative, but more and more of our collective attention seems to revolve around consumption and entertainment, and not around building strong communities. There is plenty of hostility toward the gospel that calls us to live as members of one household, and in our context, none of it comes in the form of outright persecution. It’s more like an endless loop of commercials: friendly faces, beautiful images, great music, and clever lines inviting me 24/7 to believe that life really is all about me. We are surrounded by powerful alternatives to covenant living, and we are constantly being enticed to embrace them—rather than living our lives as those who have been summoned to follow Jesus. Rabbi Shai Held commented on today’s passage from Isaiah:

So much of human religiosity comes down to a hoax we try to perpetrate on God. ​We’ll give You worship​, we say in effect, ​and You just mind Your own business. Your place is the church, the synagogue, or the mosque; butt out of our workplaces and our voting stations. You’re the God of religion, not politics or economics.

And God laughs. ​If you want to worship me,​ God says, ​you’re going to have to learn to care about what I care about—and who. And as the Bible never tires of telling us, God cares about the widow, the orphan, and the stranger; the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden. If those people don’t matter to us, then God doesn’t really matter to us either. That’s Isaiah’s message.[4]

Isaiah reminds us that God desires a people who undo the knots of injustice and break the yokes that are keeping their neighbors from walking erect, a people who share their bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into the house and clothe the naked — instead of worrying, Jesus adds, about what they will eat or drink or wear.[5]

In our world, the forces of privatization and fragmentation are winning against the social solidarity implicit in covenantal faith. But God’s imperatives speak against selfish preoccupation with our own needs and passions, declaring again and again that we are members of one another. And it’s not only God’s imperatives. Jesus addresses us in the indicative, “You are the salt of the earth,” and we know one thing for sure: We have been summoned to a holy purpose. We are good for something. We are meant to add something essential.

And the same Jesus who, speaking of himself, said, “I am the light of the world,” says to his followers: “You are the light of the world — in your whole existence, provided you remain faithful to your calling. And since you are that light, you can no longer remain hidden, even if you want to."[6] Being the light of the world is not optional. It is simply who and what we are when we follow Jesus: His light infuses our actions, our speaking and thinking, and it shines forth from all that we are and do, to the glory of God. We are the light because we have been lit — not for our own sakes, but for the sake of the world.

I have a deep desire to understand where we are and how we got here — a fragmented and fragmenting church in a fragmented and fragmenting world — and what this means for us as followers of Jesus and servants of God’s reign. I want to understand the forces that divide and polarize people around the world, the forces that drive us away from each other and into isolation. I want to understand, but that’s not the one thing necessary.

Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.” And in each of these bold declarations, the ‘you’ is plural. That may well be the most important detail to hear these days: Amid all that is fragmenting us, there is a hidden ‘us’ being addressed and called forth by Jesus. The one thing necessary is that we follow him.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 130.

[2] Numbers 18:19; 2 Chronicles 13:5

[3] Leviticus 2:13

[4] Rabbi Shai Held https://www.christiancentury.org/article/living-word/august-25-ordinary-21c-isaiah-589b-14

[5] Matthew 6:25

[6] See Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 131-132.

Love builds up

Somewhere in Rome, in a building dating back to ancient times, is the earliest known picture of the crucifixion; some believe it may be from the 2nd century CE. It’s not a devotional image, but a graffito scratched on a wall, showing a man with a donkey’s head strapped and nailed to a cross. Next to the cross is a human figure, and scribbled below it, “Alexamenos worships [his] god.” Presumably one of Alexamenos’s buddies, perhaps a fellow-slave, had created the graffito to make fun of him and his god.[1]

In our sanctuary, there’s a cross on the table, and the outline of a cross in the baptistry window. In the world of Paul and the early church, a place of worship was the last place you would expect to see a cross. Imagine coming into a church and being faced with a large picture of an electric chair or a lynching noose. You find the thought shocking? That’s the kind of shock first-century Jews and pagans would have experienced. If you don’t find it shocking, perhaps even worthy of prayerful reflection, it’s likely because your imagination has been shaped by the gospel of the crucified Christ.

Crucifixion was generally regarded as the most degrading and shameful of deaths in the Roman repertoire of execution.[2] It was a form of public torture, generally reserved for slaves and those who resisted the authority of Rome. The crucified person was often denied burial, with the corpse left on the cross to rot or as food for scavenging wildlife.

Crucifixion was an obscenity not to be discussed in polite company. In a speech defending a Roman senator against a murder charge for which the prosecutor was not only seeking the death penalty, but apparently suggesting crucifixion, Cicero sought to sway the jury, declaring, “The very word ‘cross’ should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen, but from his thoughts, his eyes, his ears.”[3]

Paul, of course, did the exact opposite: he held up the cross for all to see, in all the cities where his mission took him. The cross was at the center of his proclamation, and he did all he could to make it the center of life in the assemblies of the believers. Paul’s gospel was an insult to the sensibilities of educated men and women: he proclaimed Jesus, God’s crucified Messiah. To Jews, his proclamation bordered on blasphemy; to non-Jews, it was just foolish nonsense.

Jews demand signs, Paul writes. And don’t we also want God to do big and spectacular things, something on the scale of parting the sea or turning down the planet's temperature? Something like a grand-slam final where Jesus is on the court against all the forces that oppose God’s will and purpose, and he dominates the game, and the whole world is watching and cheering as he wins in straight sets? Instead we look at him on the cross, beaten and forsaken by all.

Greeks desire wisdom, Paul writes. And don’t we also want the gospel to be philosophically elegant and aesthetically pleasing? Don’t we want the TED talk that blows us away? Instead we hear the gospel of the crucified Messiah. We look for power, and weakness is given. We want wisdom, and foolishness is given. But in the community gathered around the cross, in the community being shaped by the love of Christ, his humble service, his deep compassion, and the courage of his vulnerability are recognized as the fullest expressions of God’s power and wisdom.

The word of the cross doesn’t fit the mold of what we know and how we know; it shatters it. Paul quotes from Isaiah,

The Lord said: Because these people draw near with their mouths and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me and their worship of me is a human commandment learned by rote, so I will again do amazing things with this people, shocking and amazing. The wisdom of their wise shall perish, and the discernment of the discerning shall be hidden (Isaiah 29:13-14).

Paul wants us to see that the cross of Christ was the shocking and amazing act of God who chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; who chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; who chose what is low and despised in the world, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. No more boasting in our wisdom, our might, our wealth, our power.

With his opening reflection on the cross of Christ, Paul is laying the foundation for his argument against elitist attitudes that are fracturing the Corinthian community. One of the issues was about supper: should believers eat food that had been presented as an offering in a pagan temple? Serving that kind of food was common practice at dinner parties, especially when meat was part of the menu. Some believers said, “No big deal; we know there’s only one true God, and those idols are no competition. We can eat anything we please: Christ has set us free.” But there were also those who worried they might fall back into pagan ways if they didn’t stay clear of pagan practices; so they stopped eating meat altogether, just to be safe. Given Paul’s own faith and robust theology, you’d expect him to side with those who act boldly in Christ-given freedom. But he doesn’t. “Knowledge puffs up,” he writes, “but love builds up.” (1 Corinthians 8:1)

In the community that embodies and proclaims the power of the cross, building up comes before personal liberty. The love and faithfulness of God, revealed in the cross, is to shape the love and faithfulness among us, and our witness in the world. Love builds up.

“Building up” takes on fresh urgency when yet another black man has been beaten to death by police. And when we hear the news from Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, and we continue to turn the names of towns and schools into shorthand for mass shootings. “Building up” takes on fresh urgency, but many feel drained by the violence, exhausted and helpless, numb.

Jillian Peterson and James Densley teach criminology and criminal justice. In a recent column, they listed one-sentence details from profiles of the suspected or convicted perpetrators of more than 150 mass shootings in the United States. They had created the profiles from news reports, public documents and their conversations with the shooters’ friends, colleagues, social workers and teachers.

He was accused of threatening to kill his roommate.
At least seven killed and one injured in Half Moon Bay, Calif., on Jan. 23, 2023

He believed his family tried to poison him.
At least 11 killed and nine injured in Monterey Park, Calif., on Jan. 21, 2023

One of his only friends died from a heroin overdose.
Seven killed and 46 injured in Highland Park, Ill., on July 4, 2022

It goes on like that, a sad line and a statistic, a startling line and a statistic, over and over, more than 150 times. These events have become more frequent and more deadly over time. The professors write,

This is no coincidence. The killings are not just random acts of violence but rather a symptom of a deeper societal problem: the continued rise of “deaths of despair.” This term has been used to explain increasing mortality rates among predominantly middle-aged white men caused by suicide, drug overdose and alcohol abuse. We think the concept of “deaths of despair” also helps explain the accelerating frequency of mass shootings in this country. Many were socially isolated from their families or their communities and felt a sense of alienation. … Most chose not to ask for help when confronted with hardship, like a breakup or being fired from their job. They chose mass shootings as a way to seize power and attention, forcing others to witness their pain while attempting to end their lives in a way that only they controlled.

At first Peterson and Densley employ medical language, suggesting that “we must treat the underlying pathologies that feed the shooters’ despair.” But the work isn’t for experts only; we must, they say, “find ways to reduce social isolation.”

It’s no small thing to knock on a neighbor’s door with a plate of cookies. It’s no small thing to call a friend you haven’t seen in a while; to write a note, or give a ride, or listen. I want you to remember that sending notes to students at West End Middle is no small thing, and eating supper with Room in the Inn guests, and praying for God’s wisdom to inspire us, and welcoming every person as God has welcomed us.

Allow me to return to the peculiar wisdom of the cross. I want to return because so many of us do feel drained by the violence, discouraged, and numb. I just finished reading a novel about Peter Abelard, one of the great theologians of the 12th century. Toward the end of the book, Peter, in disgrace and despair, is trying to find a measure of peace in a remote, little hermitage. Thibault, one of his former students, is living with him. One day, they’re coming back from fishing, and they hear a tiny cry, like a child’s cry of intolerable anguish, coming from the woods behind them. They rush in the direction of the cry and find that it’s not a child, it’s a rabbit caught in a trap.

The rabbit stopped shrieking when they stooped over it, either from exhaustion, or in some last extremity of fear. Thibault held the teeth of the trap apart, and [Peter] gathered up the little creature in his hands. It lay for a moment breathing quickly, then in some blind recognition of the kindness that had met it at the last, the small head thrust and nestled against his arm, and it died.

It was that last confiding thrust that broke [Peter’s] heart. He looked down at the little draggled body, his mouth shaking. “Thibault,” he said, “do you think there is a God at all? Whatever has come to me, I earned it. But what did this one do?”

Thibault nodded. “I know,” he said. “Only—I think God is in it too.”

[Peter] looked up sharply. “In it? Do you mean that it makes [God] suffer, the way it does us?”

Again Thibault nodded.

“Then why doesn’t He stop it?”

“I don’t know,” said Thibault. “... But all the time God suffers. More than we do.”

He points to a fallen tree beside them, sawn through the middle.

“That dark ring there, it goes up and down the whole length of the tree. But you only see it where it is cut across. That is what Christ’s life was; the bit of God that we saw. And we think God is like that, because Christ was like that, kind, and forgiving sins and healing people. We think that God is like that for ever, because it happened once, with Christ. But not the pain. Not the agony at the last. We think that stopped.”

Peter asks him whether he means that “all the pain of the world, was Christ’s cross.” And Thibault says, “God’s cross… And it goes on.” For a moment, Peter is baffled, and then he exclaims, “Oh God, if it were true … it would bring back the whole world.”[4]

The wisdom of the cross is God’s persistent, vulnerable love that will not let us go. May it fill our hearts and continue to shape our life together.

[1] For more information about the image see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexamenos_graffito

[2] James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 209.

[3] The Speech In Defence of Gaius Rabirius, sec. 16, in The Speeches of Cicero, trans. H. Grose Hodge, The Loeb Classical Library (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927) 467.

[4] Helen Waddell, Peter Abelard (Chicago, IL: The Thomas More Press, 1987), 262-265.