Sleeping Gardeners

Margie Quinn

It has been exactly a year since I joined this community and I’ve learned a lot. Some of you take classes in mixed martial arts. Some of you are prolific musicians. Some of you have the hook-up to free tickets to Vanderbilt sporting events. Some of you have gone through yoga teacher training. Some of you are published authors. Some of you have countless flamingos decorating your front lawn. 

One common thread that seems to run through many of your stories is that many of you have found respite here after growing up in a church or attending one more recently that insisted on a dogmatic, authoritarian way of living out your faith. I’ve heard the words “hell, fire and brimstone” tossed around. I’ve heard of the pressures to perform bible exercises, to remain pure, to get saved, and to avoid what some Christians have deemed a “lukewarm faith.” 

What is a lukewarm faith? I read a book in college that described it in a few ways. One quote that stuck with me was, “Churchgoers who are lukewarm are not Christians. We will not see them in heaven.”

No pressure, but according to this line of thinking, those of us who rarely share our faith with our neighbors or who think about our life on earth more than our eternity in heaven, those who equate our “partially sanitized lives” with holiness, or who love our things but rarely give to the poor in a truly sacrificial way…we are lukewarm. 

I had my own season of trying desperately to make my faith more of a “boiling hot” than lukewarm by reading my Bible every day and attending church every Sunday and Wednesday. I sought purity and moral perfection, evangelized to friends, especially Jewish friends with whom I feared wouldn’t get to heaven, and even questioned the holiness of my friends of various sexual and gender identities. I even told my boyfriend at the time that he wasn’t holy enough. My love for others and myself became conditional. My faith life became a rigid practice in avoiding sin for fear of not receiving salvation. “You’re either walking toward Jesus in everything you do,” my pastor said to me, “or you’re walking away from him.” No pressure. 

Call me a heretic, call me a little too reliant on God’s grace, but this understanding of the gospel feels impossible for me to live out. 

This morning in our text, Jesus, a guy who spoke in wild parables that mostly perplexed his followers, speaks to a group who are huddled around him, who ask him about these elusive stories he keeps telling. So he offers them one after the other, trying to describe to them something he keeps calling the “Kingdom of God.” 

And in a parable only found in the gospel of Mark, we get a pastoral account from Jesus. He speaks about farming to a group of fishermen and offers this: the Kingdom of God is like someone who scatters seed on the ground, and then sleeps a bunch. The seed grew and the scatterer doesn’t even know how. The earth “produces of itself,” which in Greek is where we derive the word “automatic.” The earth is worked by God alone, this means, without human effort. The earth produces of itself, the stalk then the head, then the full grain and when it’s ripe, the scatterer goes back to harvest it because it’s ready. 

I read this thinking that the Kingdom of God is like a sleeping gardener, who can put the seed in the ground but can’t do anything about its growing; a sleeping gardener, who trusts in the process of growth rather than tamper with the seed, coming back time and time again to check on it, spraying it with pesticides, drowning it with water. The gardener, who may not understand the process, waits patiently for a growth beyond his control to occur. 

Hearing this parable, I feel a deep exhale. I feel my shoulders sag and my brow unfurrow. I feel, once again, the sting of grace, in which my efforts to “do faith right” only prevent me from witnessing the kingdom at work. 

Perhaps in my eyes, the Kingdom of my God is like a church that implements new programming, and then counts week after week to see if membership increases based on these efforts. 

The Kingdom of my God is like an employee, who refuses to take a sick day for fear that their work will falter, that no one will be able to pick up the slack. 

The Kingdom of my God is like a parent, who monitors their child’s academic or athletic progress, anxiously hoping to prevent their child from mistakes, failure, or embarrassment. 

The Kingdom of my God is like an activist, who posts relentlessly on social media and shows up to every organized event, holding themselves and others in strict expectations for doing justice correctly—not allowing for rest or self-reflection, to let their hearts break before they put their shoes on to march. 

The Kingdom of my God is like a choir in which no one takes a breath in between notes, not trusting that their fellow singers will carry the tune in between their breaths. 

My Kingdom requires so much from me.  That Kingdom heaps on more and more pressure. It tells me that I can’t do anything lukewarm, that I must remain vigilant, watching the seed, scooting it closer to the sun, repotting it, measuring its progress…that I can’t possibly “Let Go and Let God.”

I so often fail to trust God’s grace in my life. I fail to believe that God continues to work in mysterious, unseen ways that don’t depend on my faithfulness or insight. And yet, as A.J. Levine notes in this parable, some things need to be left alone and sometimes, we need to get out of the way. 

Which doesn’t mean that we are exempt from planting seeds. The Kingdom grows only from someone getting up, grabbing the seeds and planting them in the ground. It does mean that we are not responsible for how or when they grow. 

Yeah, that’s the Kingdom–a pure gift that requires us to sleep a little as it flourishes. It’s a Kingdom in which we have so little to do with Christ’s nearness to us that we can actually rest because the spiritual growth and intimacy with God arises as naturally as seeds growing and not by force or perfection. What a relief. 

A sneak peek into the next chapter tells the story of Jesus calming a storm. The storm rages and the boat is swamped with water. The Disciples are freaking out! They look toward Jesus and what is he doing? Sleeping. Resting. Trusting. He gets roused and woken up and says, “Be still now,” and says, “Why didn’t y’all have faith in me?” 

This morning, can you trust that you alone are not responsible for the growth of God’s kingdom? Can you believe that your faith is not dependent on how much you accomplish, how closely you monitor your seeds, how desperately you try to tend to them in the “right” way. Can you notice how God’s grace abounds, that the harvest comes when you are resting? 

 The earth’s got your back. Take a load off. Get some sleep. 

Amen. 

Going home

Thomas Kleinert

The scene in Mark opens with beautiful simplicity: Then he went home. It sounds odd as an opening line; it’s meant to be heard as a transition: Jesus had gone from the synagogue to the lake, and from the lake up the mountain with the twelve, and then, it says, he went home.

Home is a word heavy with notions of comfort, safety, and peace. Home is always a good place to go to; if it’s not, it’s no longer home, or perhaps not yet. Home brings to mind familiar faces and things like a table, a chair, a bed; a window and the way the view changes from morning to evening, season to season; the smell of a blanket; the sound of the rain on the roof; even the distant hum of the interstate.

Where do you imagine Jesus went when it says, he went home? Didn’t he say, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head”?[1] Other English translations of this passage render it, “then he entered a house.” Capernaum was home base for Jesus’ ministry in Galilee, and the house he entered may well have been Peter’s house, across the street from the synagogue. Returning there at the end of a long day of healing and teaching may have felt like coming home — except that again such a crowd came together, as Mark tells us, that they could not even eat. The house sits like an island in a sea of people. They are drawn to Jesus, want to be near him. Word has spread about his teachings, his power to heal.

And then his family shows up: his mother, his siblings; the people who have been with him the longest; the people, presumably, closest to him; the people, presumably, who know him best. Do they? Who knows you best? Perhaps you do, but then perhaps you don’t, because you can’t know yourself the way others know you, unless they tell you in ways you can hear, which is rare, but I’m getting distracted. Jesus’ mother and his siblings show up, and they are convinced he has gone out of his mind. You may be constructing a scene in your mind where they are concerned for his well-being, where his mom is here to say, “Son, have you lost your mind? Come on home now, eat a decent meal, and get some sleep. You’re wearing yourself out.” But that’s not what’s going on here. They have come to tie him up, to restrain him. It’s the exact same word used later in the book when Jesus is arrested.[2] His family are here for an intervention; the plan is to pick him up and take him back to Nazareth, in chains if necessary. They want to take him back to the life before his baptism, back to the familiar routines untouched by the voice from heaven, declaring, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased;”[3] back to the life before the Spirit’s descend and the disruptive proclamation of the nearness of God’s reign. They want to take him home, don’t they?

And they are not the only ones who don’t quite know what to make of his work and words. Scribes from Jerusalem have been watching and listening; they represent the authority and theological wisdom of the temple establishment. Their pronouncement that Jesus is a satanic agent and not a divine one, recognizes power at work in him, but they have determined the power is perverse. It’s the most damning assessment they can offer.[4] I am reminded of Isaiah’s warning cry, “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!”[5]

Mark’s readers know from earlier encounters that the demons themselves know who Jesus is: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”[6]

Our life together gives rise to great things, inspiring accomplishments and moving ideas, but also to systemic corruptions and horrific acts of violence. In Mark’s world, such baffling outcomes and the anonymous forces driving them are identified as demonic. They are evil powers, and they are incredibly resistant to being seen and named and driven out. Karl Barth wrote that demons “exist always and everywhere where the truth of God is not present and proclaimed and believed and grasped, and therefore does not speak and shine and rule.”[7] But Mark shows us, or perhaps I should say, the Holy Spirit shows us with Mark’s testimony, how in Jesus the truth of God is present, and how in him this truth speaks and shines and rules.

“Whenever the unclean spirits saw [Jesus],” Mark reminds us, “they fell down before him and shouted, ‘You are the Son of God!’ ”[8] Jesus’ mother and his siblings were not slow or blind, nor were the religious leaders from Jerusalem. Like us, they were living in complicated times, and like us, they wanted to maintain what little normalcy they felt was left. And Jesus was rocking the boat. Without permission, he forgave people. He taught with authority. He freed folk from the powers that were holding them captive, and he did it regardless of who they were or where they came from or what day of the week it was — there was no proper order to it. But there was power in his words and actions, and to some all of it seemed extravagant and reckless, to others, it was frightening. They were not slow or blind; they wanted to protect and hold on to what they knew. And Jesus was too disruptive; to some his power felt like chaos. “He is out of his mind,” his family said. “He’s fighting demons with demons,” the religious leaders concluded. The presence of God, in the life and work of Jesus or his followers, is not unambiguous. What is utterly life-giving and liberating for many, can appear like madness or even the devil’s work to others.

What can we do? Mark paints a scene for us. It’s a house with Jesus in it, and around it a throng of people. It looks like humanity in all of its beauty and weirdness, so many ethnic backgrounds, such curious political convictions, people on their knees, people on stretchers, the wounded and the oppressed, the overworked and the underemployed, all of us with our flaws and our dreams, with our thirst for life for ourselves, for each other, and we’re pressing in at the doors and windows, aching to be near Jesus and to touch the hem of his cloak.

The only ones to remain on the edge of the scene are the ones who already know what’s best for the family and for the people and for religion; in their world, Jesus must be restrained. In their world, the disruptive presence and work of God needs to be kept under control. But is has been too late for that since before they tried.

In his parable, Jesus identifies himself as the thief who has come to plunder the strong man’s house. He has tied up the strong man and now he’s ransacking the place. He’s the burglar who has come to rob the biggest thief of all: Life belongs to God, not to the master of demons. Not to the whispering liar who sows the seeds of lovelessness that grow into thickets of sin where demons thrive.

Jesus has his eyes on the strong man’s house, a house as big as the world, and on us who are tempted to believe that living in the strong man’s house is as good as it gets. Jesus has tied up the strong man, and demon by demon, fear by fear, lie by lie he’s dealing with the strong man’s minions, and leading the captives to freedom.

Mark paints a scene for us; it’s a house with Jesus in it. It was first seen in a village on the western shore of the sea of Galilee, but since then people have found it in communities around the world. It’s where Christ’s power to heal and forgive resides. At times we may be standing outside with those who say he is out of his mind, and there’s truth even to that misperception, because the life of Jesus, in contrast to ours, is entirely in sync with the will of God. And because his life is entirely in sync with the will of God, those who eat at the strong man’s table and worship at the altar of lies have already lost. Jesus never thought of himself outside of his relationship with God. He entrusted himself completely to the flow of love and grace, and he continues to offer what he receives with reckless, disruptive extravagance.

A crowd is sitting around him and pressing in at the doors and windows, aching to be near him, and they say, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside asking for you.” And Jesus looks at all the humanity sitting around him, all of us wounded ones, all of us lost ones, all of us thirsty ones, longing for life that really is life and not just death’s prelude, and he says, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

Jesus sits in the midst of those who long for healing and freedom, and where Jesus is present, God speaks and shines and rules. The beauty of his mission is that the closer we draw to him with our desire to be healed by his wholeness, the closer we draw to each other. And the closer we draw to the reality of suffering and longing in each other, the closer we draw to him, and the more fully we participate in doing God’s will.

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

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

[2] Mark 14:1, 44, 46, 49

[3] Mark 1:11

[4] Matt Skinner https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-10-2/commentary-on-mark-320-35-3

[5] Isaiah 5:20

[6] Mark 1:24

[7] Karl Barth, CD III/3, 529; quoted in Placher, Mark, 66.

[8] Mark 3:11

Made for the Sabbath

Thomas Kleinert

Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.

Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and asked for time off for their people. “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, so that they may celebrate a festival to me in the wilderness.’” Pharaoh said, “Who is this Lord, that I should heed him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and I will certainly not let Israel go.” There were cities to be built, store houses to be erected, bricks to be made. “Why are you making the people slack off from their labor? Back to work!” Pharaoh shouted, and that same day he commanded the taskmasters, “Don’t supply the people with the straw they need to make bricks like you did before. Let them go out and gather the straw for themselves. But still make sure that they produce the same number of bricks as they made before. Don’t reduce the number! They are weak and lazy, and that’s why they cry, ‘Let us go and offer sacrifices to our God.’ Make their work so hard that it’s all they can do, and they pay no attention to these deceptive words.”[1]

In Pharaoh’s mind, talk of rest was talk of unrest; talk of worship and sacred time was talk of wasted time, and slaves honoring any Lord before him or beside him — who had ever heard such a thing? Deceptive words, sprung from idle minds! Crank up production! Keep them busy! Let them gather their own straw, and don’t you lower the brick quotas!

It was the clash of two economies — God’s Sabbath economy and Pharaoh’s economy of oppressive, relentless, and exhausting toil. In God’s economy, Sabbath is the crown of creation, the end and fulfillment of all work. In Pharaoh’s economy, Sabbath is a waste of time. In God’s economy, human beings are made in the image of God, persons of dignity, and partners in caring for creation. In Pharaoh’s economy, human beings are the work force.

Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.

The Sabbath is not merely a day off for “recharging the batteries.” The Sabbath is a day of remembering who and whose we are. It is an observance that helps us live into an order of time in sync with God’s own creative and redemptive work. It is an invitation to enter into God’s rest, and to get a foretaste of the completion of creation. “Rest in peace” is what we often write on each other’s grave markers, but it’s more than one final wish. “Rest in peace” is what God does on the seventh day and what we are meant to do, and God will not rest until we and all of creation have been set free from all that keeps us in bondage.

How does one observe the Sabbath, and how does one keep this holy day holy? “Jewish liturgy and law say both what should be done on Shabbat and what should not,” writes Dorothy Bass.

What should not be done is “work.” Defining exactly what that means is a long and continuing argument, but one classic answer is that work is what- ever requires changing the natural, material world. All week long, human beings wrestle with the natural world, tilling and hammering and carrying and burning. On the Sabbath, however, [they’re commanded to] celebrate the created world as it is and dwell within it in peace and gratitude.[2]

The debate over what should and should not be done on the Sabbath began generations before Jesus was born, and people long struggled with how to receive this gift of God. The prophet Amos attests that eagerness to get past the Sabbath is not a recent development. “Hear this,” Amos writes, “you who trample on the needy and destroy the poor of the land, saying, ‘When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain, and the Sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale?’”[3] Why let Sabbath memories disrupt valuable market days? Why let talk of divine purposes and God-given human dignity disrupt the selling  of goods and services to consumers? Again Dorothy Bass, commenting on our own situation,

Work, shopping, and entertainment are available at every hour. As a result, work and family life are being thrown into new and confusing arrangements … as the United States moves steadily toward a 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week, 365-days-a-year economy. Meanwhile, the free time people do have comes as fragments best fit for [screen-scrolling]. It is not the lack of time but rather its formlessness that is troubling in this scenario. One can see human lives becoming ever more fully detached from nature, from community, and from a sense of belonging to a story that extends beyond one’s own span of years.[4]

Fragmentation. Formlessness. Isolation. Exhaustion. “Sundays, once sacred days of worship and rest for Christians, are increasingly crowded with work, home responsibilities, and children’s activities. We need rest but wonder how to fit it in.”[5]

Sabbath in the Suburbs is the title of a book about one family’s attempt at observing Sabbath while balancing two careers, three young children, and the pressures of managing a household. The parents negotiate what Sabbath means to them, and they set intentions for their family’s observance. Rest takes real effort. After their own rules trip them up, the family decides to turn Sabbath into an adverb: if the trip to the grocery store on the Sabbath can’t be avoided, they will do their shopping “Sabbathly,” i.e. slowly and mindfully.[6]

Sabbath is hard, whether you’re a two-career-three-kids suburban family or a single-parent-three-jobs-no-car-high-rent family. Sabbath is hard and vital. The debate over how to keep the Sabbath is not just for religious nerds; it goes to the heart of how we imagine, live, and protect human life.

Jesus insisted, and his good news insists, that the Sabbath is more than a day of religiously observed work stoppage. According to Mark, he began his ministry on the Sabbath, at a synagogue in Capernaum, and folks were astounded, for he “taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” A man was there who was possessed by an unclean spirit, and Jesus told it to leave the man alone and get out, and it did, screaming and hollering, but it did. And no one challenged him for driving out unclean spirits on the Sabbath. People were amazed.[7] Some of them began to understand that Sabbath needn’t be about making lists of what to do and not to do, but, above all, about remembering that God wills our release from any forces that enslave, bind, and burden us.

When Jesus encountered in the synagogue a man with a withered hand, his primary concern wasn’t if some of the other people in the room might perceive his actions as Sabbath violations—such things can be, and have been, and will be, debated. The good news of Jesus is about that man, and how he might be drawn into the fullness of Sabbath peace and joy. For Jesus, the Sabbath is more than an observance; it’s a reality into which God invites people, so we know freedom and fullness of life. For Jesus, keeping the Sabbath holy isn’t just about figuring out how to practice resting in peace, but about drawing all of us into that holy rest.

“The Sabbath was made for humankind,” he said to his opponents, “and not humankind for the Sabbath.” Now, this may sound like I’m contradicting Jesus, but I don’t think I am when I say, Humankind was indeed made for the Sabbath, just as all of creation was made for it. The Sabbath is the crown of creation, the seventh day when all living things share in the peace of God.

Humankind was made for the Sabbath, not for observing Sabbath rules. We were made for the Sabbath, and Sabbath rules have been made to help us remember who and whose we are and what we are made for. We were made for the Sabbath, and that’s why we can’t stop thinking about and debating what observing the Sabbath day and keeping it holy might look like for us: anything to help us remember that we’re not here to toil in Pharaoh’s brickyard; anything to help us remember that we’re here to work together in God’s mission; anything to help us remember that Sabbath-keeping is an act of resistance against the dehumanizing pressures of Pharaoh’s economy.

“Make their work so hard that it’s all they can do, and they pay no attention to these deceptive words,” Pharaoh said, and it sounds to me like he’s talking about folks who juggle two or three jobs just to make ends meet, and many months it’s still not enough to make rent and eat. Something withers when you’re forced to live like that. And something withers when you choose to work all the time and chase the numbers as though they actually affirmed your worth as a person.

“Make their work so hard that it’s all they can do, and they pay no attention to these deceptive words,” Pharaoh said. The Lord of the Sabbath is all about “these deceptive words,” and he speaks them with authority, and in his presence our withered lives are reclaimed and restored, because we are made for the Sabbath.

[1] Exodus 5:1-9

[2] Dorothy C. Bass, “Christian formation in and for sabbath rest,” Interpretation 59, no. 1 (January 2005), 29.

[3] Amos 8:4-5

[4] Bass, 32.

[5] Susan Olson, Connections, Year B, Volume 3, 51.

[6] MaryAnn McKibben-Dana, Sabbath in the Suburbs, as discussed by Olson.

[7] Mark 1:21-31

Imposter Prophets

Margie Quinn

I want you to close your eyes for a minute and imagine this scene from Isaiah 6 as if you are him. You park in the Vine Street parking lot this morning and walk into the sanctuary like it’s any other Sunday. You have arrived first, and you are alone. As soon as you enter the sanctuary, you see the Lord sitting on a high and lofty throne, about 15-feet high, and there are cherubin with outstretched wings that form a throne on which the Lord sits. All you see of God is the hem of God’s robe. It fills up the entire room. God is too gigantic to be contained in this place of worship, an all-encompassing presence. 

Then, you take in these seraphim who are singing and calling out to God. These seraphim are not little white babies with wings; they are fiery, winged serpents who cover themselves, protecting themselves from the glory of God because they know that no one can appear naked before the Lord or see God directly and live, not even these supernatural beings that guard the throne. 

They call to one another, singing “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full off his glory!” You stand there, watching the pews shake at the sound of these voices. You watch the whole sanctuary fill with smoke. 

Open your eyes. This is Isaiah’s Sunday morning. He arrives at the temple, perhaps he was dragged there that day by his parents, maybe he wanted to be there as a familiar ritual. He enters this temple filled with smoke and fire and singing and he says, “Uh oh, woe is me. I’m lost. I’m actually a man of unclean lips and I hang out with a lot of people of unclean lips and I know from what I’ve heard that I’m not supposed to see God directly.” This was actually a life-threatening situation for Isaiah to be in. As soon as he sees the hem of the robe of God fill up the temple and glimpses the majesty and the grandeur of God, he thinks, “I’m unworthy. I am the embodiment of human frailty and this is a very vast and unfathomable deity. 

Then, a fiery, winged serpent flies over to him after picking up a piece of coal from the altar with tongs and brings it to Isaiah, places it on his mouth and in doing so, releases Isaiah of all of this guilt and sin, which he admits he carries. Here, we see God’s grace and forgiveness cleansing Isaiah’s impurity, wiping away all of this guilt and sin that he feels and  preparing him for the divine call. 

Interestingly, God never speaks directly to Isaiah. God speaks to the seraphim and asks them, “Who am I gonna send? Who is gonna go for us?”

God needs someone to address these people with unclean lips because God is angry. In the previous chapter, we begin to understand the source of God’s anger. Scripture tells us that God’s people have amassed property–houses and fields and have hoarded wealth. They only have room for themselves; some own tens of acres of fields and do not share them with anyone else, not even with the poor and vulnerable who have no land. These people call evil good, and good evil. They put darkness for light and light for darkness and they put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. They deprive the innocent of their rights, they acquit the guilty for a bribe. So yeah, the anger of the Lord is kindled against his people. The longstanding King Uzziah has died which leaves a whole lot of political instability. This is where we arrive in our passive this morning–smoky, fiery, angry God. We cannot even look up and take in God’s grandness because all we get is a glimpse of God’s robe. 

So when God asks, “Whom shall I send, who will go for us?” God is sincerely wondering who can get the people back on track, who can serve as the mouthpiece of God, urging the people to turn from their evil ways, from hoarding wealth and property, from dealing corruptly and follow God’s word? Who can convince them, as chapter 1, verse 17 says, to “cease doing evil, learn to do good, to seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow?” 

This deity, who is so vast and lofty, so majestic and holy, and also heartbroken and angry, needs help.

And a voice squeaks out, “Here am I; send me!” 

“Here am I, send me!” Isaiah says this only seconds after admitting his inadequacies. Here am I…with a lot of imposter syndrome and misgivings! But you can send me. 

Isaiah really isn’t alone in his initial response of admitting all of his wrongdoings before he gets to the “yes.” You can probably think of some other guys in scripture who are reluctant to answer God’s call. Moses, at the burning bush, says, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh? I can’t speak on behalf of God’s people…I have a speech impediment. You’re lookin at the wrong guy.” God sends him anyway. 

Jeremiah, when called, says, “I really can’t speak for you, I’m ten years old.” God sends him anyway. 

Jonah is asked by God to go to Nineveh and call out the injustice there. Instead, Jonah immediately flees from his assignment, ends up in the belly of a while for three days. Yet, God calls him anyway. 

Even Jesus, God enfleshed, looks toward his heavenly parent and says, “What if you just let this cup pass from me? I don’t want to drink from it.” God calls him anyway. 

I’ve been thinking about imposter syndrome and feeling unworthy or resistant to God’s call on my life. What I’m learning is that I’m in pretty good company with these guys. In fact, I might be, and you might be, in the exact place that God wants me to be. 

My question for you and me this morning is, like the prophets, can I actually trust the glory of God enough, the sheer, unknowable, vast majesty of God to resist, disagree with or even challenge a God whose glory fills the whole earth? Do I trust God enough to actually push back and say, “I don’t think I’m ready. I think I’m too young. I haven’t seen a lot of women do this ministry thing. I’ve got a lot of guilt and sin that I don’t know how to blot out.” 

And then, like the prophets, like Isaiah, am I willing and are you willing to be receptive to God’s call anyway?  Are you willing to volunteer, even if you’ve never picked up a hammer before? To speak truth to power, even when your voice shakes? To show up to protests and pray by marching with others? To denounce oppressive systems, even in awkward conversation where you’re scared to speak up? To take that leadership position at church or work or school….even if you stutter like Moses, or feel too young, like Jeremiah, or feel guilty for all of your wrongdoings, or question your own worthiness, like Isaiah? 

Then, once you’ve been receptive to the call, are you willing to do the hard work? Because it’s gonna be hard. All of the prophets, after answering God’s call, step into a lifetime of ministry in which the people refuse to listen; people who continue to serve the false Gods of domination and exploitation and to think the prophets are crazy. Isaiah’s refrain throughout his life is to name what is: the earth is utterly broken, he says in 24:19, the hungry dream of eating and yet still wake up hungry (29: 8), the poor and needy seek water and there is none (41:17). He doesn’t back down from naming what is, despite being that guy back in that smoky sanctuary who said, “I don’t have what it takes.” This scared, reluctant man goes from panicked to prophetic simply with the touch of a coal on his lips, purifying him from all of the imposter syndrome he feels. In doing so, he continues to show up for God and say, “Here am I.” Here am I, with unclean lips. Here am I, carrying guilt and sin. Here am I, feeling lost. Here am I, send me. 

May it be so. 

Swallowed up by life

Thomas Kleinert

Groaning is one of those wonderful words humans have found and kept that sound just like what they mean. I watched a video of a two-year old girl bending over to pick up two small toys from the kitchen floor, groaning like she was lifting weights at the gym, and finally uttering a short series of garbled syllables that I swear sounded a lot like, “Ugh, I need coffee.”[1] Stefanie, her mom, had posted the clip, commenting, “Apparently I grunt too much.” Someone else left a comment, “My granddaughter walks down the road and says ‘oooh my poor back I need to sit down…’ She’s 2!” And Jancee Dunn tells her readers,

Like many other people, I have a playlist of activity-specific grunts and gasps: When I’m heaving myself out of a chair, I sound like Rafael Nadal returning a volley; when I’m reaching for something, I release a wheezy “ooof.”

She wraps up her reflections on “the middle-aged groan” with the assurance, “If you sound like a weight lifter when you bend down, you’re not alone.”[2]

I don’t know if I have any activity-specific grunts and gasps, but I am aware that when PBS makes me watch the same Viking River Cruise commercial for the twenty-thirteenth time, the groan I utter comes from a deep place, but that groan has additional features that would require it to be bleeped on public broadcasts.

In the book of Exodus, God declares, “I have heard the groaning of the Israelites whom the Egyptians have enslaved.”[3] We are to remember that God will not put up with oppression and exploitation. “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan,” we read in Proverbs, like a wrap-up commentary on the daily news.[4] We are to remember that God will not put up with oppression, exploitation, and wickedness, nor with any other expression of sin’s rule in the world. God’s desire is for life on earth to flourish, and God acts to reclaim all that makes for life. “Because God is a God of life and blessing, God will do redemptive work, should those gifts be endangered,” writes Terence Fretheim.

The objective of God’s work in redemption is to free people to be what they were created to be. It is a deliverance, not from the world, but to true life in the world.[5]

And it’s not just people who long to be who we really are, who we are meant to be as creatures made in the image of God: the whole creation is waiting, according to Paul, because its own deliverance from futility, its own freedom from bondage is tied to ours. “The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God,” Paul writes in Romans 8, just before the passage we heard this morning; “for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”[6]

Human beings have a particular place and calling in creation. According to Genesis, we are created in the image of God to subdue the earth and have dominion over every living thing on the land, in the sea, and in the air.[7]And dominion in God’s creation is all about naming the wonders, and knowing them, and caring for them with the same attention, wisdom, and passion for life as God.

We are made in the image of God, but sin distorts our powers of naming, knowing, and caring into destructive modes of living; our dominion becomes oppressive, exploitative, abusive, wicked. We lose our place in the world, live like exiles far from home, and our homelessness impacts all. Listen to this lament by the prophet Hosea,

There is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land. Swearing, lying, and murder, and stealing and adultery break out; bloodshed follows bloodshed. Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish; together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea are perishing.[8]

Land and sea mourn, and all who live in it languish, because human beings don’t know our place as creatures made in the image of God. “How long will the land mourn, and the grass of every field wither?” wails Jeremiah.[9] And Isaiah cries, “The heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the earth.”[10]

“We know,” says Paul, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning until now.” But God is a God of life and blessing, and God will do redemptive work, should those gifts be endangered. God made a way for God’s people out of bondage in Egypt. God heard their groaning.[11] God remembered the covenant.

No cry or groan goes unheard. In the death and resurrection of Jesus, God made a way out of life’s bondage under sin and death, and opened the horizon of our hope to include the redemption of all that God has made.

Elsewhere Paul writes about our mortal bodies, “while we are in this tent, we groan under our burden because we wish not to be unclothed but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.”[12]Swallowed up by life… we know the opposite quite well. We know how what is true is swallowed up by lies, what is beautiful, swallowed up by ugliness, what is righteous, swallowed up by wickedness, what is alive, swallowed up by death. But now that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, the power of sin and death has been broken. Now we are bold to hope that all that is mortal is to be swallowed up by life. Now the Holy Spirit is being poured out on all flesh, and now God not only hears the groaning of creation and our own groaning, but groans with us in “a mixture of lament and longing.”[13]

Paul calls the Spirit “the first fruits,” which alludes to the ancient practice of bringing a small portion of the harvest to the temple to consecrate the whole. It was an offering of gratitude for the gift of the land, the gifts of sun and rain and growth; it was an act of joyful recognition that all of life is altogether God’s gift. Dedicating a portion of the harvest was symbolic of receiving all of life as gift. Paul picks up the image and reverses the direction of the offering: with the gift of the Spirit, God has given human beings a taste of the fullness to come. The harvest has begun. On Pentecost, God has given us the first glance of the world to come, the first measures of the symphony that is the new creation. We hum along, sometimes we sing along, sometimes we whisper, and we groan, in a mixture of lament and longing, and it is the very Spirit of God who kindles in us the fire of holy restlessness that cannot put up with the world as it is. First fruits—we know there’s more where that came from, and we lean into the promise. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,”[14] Paul writes, and every taste of freedom from the power of sin is a taste of the freedom to come for the whole creation; every taste of freedom from fear, from oppression and exploitation and abuse is a taste of the world swallowed up by life.

Human beings have a particular place and calling in creation. We are created in the image of God to represent God’s dominion.[15] We are here to name the wonders, and to know them, and to care for them with the same attention, wisdom, and passion God has for life. And yes, sin distorts our considerable powers into destructive modes of living—but God does redemptive work wherever the gifts of life and  blessing are in danger. In Christ, the image of God is revealed and restored, and because Christ has made us his own, we are free to live in him, and he in us. Led by his Spirit, we begin to reflect the image of God into the world—until the hills burst into song, the trees clap their hands, the land smiles,[16] the oceans dance and the rivers laugh.

Three times Paul uses the word “groaning” in this brief passage from Romans, and one of the three uses explicitly refers to the pains of woman in labor. It’s a fine metaphor, because creation is longing for new life; we are waiting for new life; and the Spirit is longing and laboring with us, with groanings too deep for words.

But the birth metaphor has also been terribly twisted by men, e.g. by the one who said, “The bomb was Robert Oppenheimer’s baby;” or by another who sounded like a dad on the phone, saying, “Doctor has just returned most enthusiastic and confident that the little boy is as husky as his big brother,” and what he meant was the plutonium bomb was as solid as the one made of uranium; and yet another man who observed the test from a distance and reported, “The big boom came about a hundred seconds after the great flash—the first cry of a new-born world.”[17] Even birth metaphors aren’t safe from being swallowed up by death. But we are bold to hope that all that is mortal is to be swallowed up by life. This is the promise of resurrection. This is the promise of the Spirit poured out on all flesh. Ours is a hope as a woman in labor hopes: panting and gasping, puffing, blowing, breathing through the pain, holding tight to a companion, fully present, and yet every fiber of her body fully extended to that moment of laughter and tears when this pain will be but a memory and everything will be made new.

[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@spritch29/video/7055839305301757230

[2] Jancee Dunn https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/well/middle-aged-groan.html

[3] Exodus 6:5

[4] Proverbs 29:2

[5] Terence Fretheim, “The Reclamation of Creation: Redemption and Law in Exodus,” Interpretation 45, p. 359; italics in the original.

[6] Romans 8:18-21

[7] Genesis 1:26-28

[8] Hosea 4:1-3

[9] Jeremiah 12:4

[10] Isaiah 24:4-6

[11] Exodus 2:23f.

[12] 2 Corinthians 5:4

[13] N.T. Wright, Romans (NIB), 599.

[14] 2 Corinthians 3:17

[15] Genesis 1:26-28

[16] See Isaiah 55:12

[17] Brian Easlea, Fathering the Unthinkable, quoted in Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 203n.5.

Fruit of the vine

Thomas Kleinert

For thousands of years, people have crushed the fruit of the vine to make wine. Grapevines are among the oldest known food crops — seeds have been found at early Bronze Age sites near Jericho, dating back to around 3200 BCE, and in northern Iran, archeologists dug up wine storage jars that are about 7000 years old.[1] According to Genesis, Noah was a man of the soil, and the first to plant a vineyard.[2] Vine and vineyard became important metaphors for Israel’s ancient poets and prophets to speak about the relationship between God and God’s people. And it’s no coincidence that cups of wine are central to the Jewish observance of Passover and to our own sacred meal, the Lord’s Supper.

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I don’t remember much about my first year of kindergarten. I vaguely recall a brick building behind the church, hooks in the hallway where we hung our coats and jackets, and that I carried a brown leather satchel, just big enough for a small sandwich and a piece of fruit. One thing I remember quite vividly, though, is the wall that faced the playground: two stories high, it was completely covered with grapevines, and all the branches and leaves grew from only two vines, planted in a sunny patch near the sandbox. Somewhere in the middle up there a small balcony jutted out, just big enough for a folding chair and a book. In my memory, I’m standing in the corner of this little balcony, and Sister Rita is there, sitting on a folding chair. I’m not looking down to the playground; I’m looking at the wall around the balcony door, the jungle-like curtain of branches, leaves and twigs that covers the entire stretch between earth and sky, and I notice, just above the spot where the iron rail meets the wall, a cluster of little blue grapes. I tasted grapes before, big green and black ones that my mother sometimes would bring home from the market, but finding these little gems growing right by the playground was magical. “May I eat one?” I asked Sister Rita, and she said yes. I can see my hand reaching over the rail, and I can almost feel the blue pearl between my thumb and the tip of my forefinger as I carefully pluck it from the cluster. It wasn’t the  juiciest or sweetest grape I ever ate, but at that moment, and even now, that little blue pearl had the whole wonder of life in it.

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Jesus talked to the disciples for a long time the night before he was crucified, to prepare them for what was coming. He washed their feet so they would remember what greatness looks like and how love translates into simple, obedient action. His words conveyed comfort and assurance, when the events of the next few days would disrupt their lives and certainties in ways they couldn’t imagine. Yes, one of them would betray him, and one of them would deny him. He would lay down his life for them, but to them it would feel like it had been taken. He would return to the Father, but to them it would feel like abandonment. That night, facing the turmoil and the chaos about to descend on them, Jesus talked to the disciples about the deep reality that would continue to form them in community and sustain them: “Abide in me as I abide in you. I am the vine, you are the branches.”

Abide he said; seven times the word appears in just four verses. Abide is an old-fashioned word we don’t use much in everyday speech. Of the 17 uses listed in the dictionary, eight are obsolete. It’s like the word belongs to another time. “To abide” evokes notions of persevering, continuing, lasting, staying, being at home. No wonder the term is rare. What it means is rare, in this or any time, and, as Dean Lueking observed, its absence diminishes us.[3]

It diminishes us because without the capacity to be in a place, to be in a moment, or to be with another person, we are being pushed further and further into fragmentation and isolation. “Abide” is a key word in both the Gospel of John and 1 John, used to characterize the foundational reality of love between God and Jesus and the disciples and Jesus as mutual indwelling, as being at home with each other.

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.”

Six times Jesus speaks of bearing fruit in these eight verses. It’s a theme, not a quick comment: The life of Jesus bearing fruit in the fullness and wholeness of all of life, and our lives bearing the fruit of his life. Even the phrases wind around each other like branches on a vine: it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. But the promise of fruitfulness, the promise of fullness and wholeness emerges from the persistent rhythm of abide, bear fruit, abide, bear fruit, abide… “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”

Nadia Bolz-Weber climbed through the branches of this text, and at one point stuck out her head from behind the leaves and said, “[Vine and branches, and twigs off of branches] are all tangled and messy and it’s just too hard to know what is what. If I’m going to bear fruit I want it attributed to me and my branch. If I’m too tangled up with other vines and branches I might not get credit.”[4]

She knows what she wants, and we know exactly what she’s talking about. If it’s all about bearing fruit, we want some credit for our productivity. So tell us about trees, planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper.[5] But the image is not of a Jesus orchard where you find the spot you like, plant yourself and put down roots, and start producing. Jesus is the vine, and we are all branches, and “our lives are… tangled up together. The Christian life is a vine-y, branch-y, jumbled mess of us and Jesus and others.”[6]

And that is how we bear fruit. Together. Belonging to him and through him to each other and to the One he has identified as the gardener, we bring forth fruit. The gardener, the vine, and the branches are all three essential for the awaited harvest. The jumbled mess of Jesus and others and us is where life becomes real and abundant, because the vine is true and the gardener is good.

We don’t make ourselves fruitful, but we do choose where we want to abide. We choose where we want our soul to be at home. “Abide in me as I abide in you,” Jesus says, and risen and firmly rooted, he abides with us, providing all that is needed for blossoms to emerge and fruit to ripen.

What might the fruit be, and whose is the harvest? We know how much the gardener-God loves the world. So try this on: The fruit is the wine of the kingdom. The fruit is the love of God flowing freely, inside-out, as it has since the dawn of time. Our gifts, our financial contributions, our work, our advocacy, our prayers, our study, our service—all of it, are channels for love to flow and life to be transformed. The fruit is the love of God flowing freely from the vine to all the branches, and flowing through us to touch and heal the wounded, embrace the excluded, and love the unlovable, until the whole jumbled mess becomes finally and fully recognizable as the holy communion of life.

That’s a mighty big picture. So let me close with a simple story. It comes to us from The Brothers Karamazov:

Once upon a time there was a woman, and she was wicked as wicked could be, and she died. And not one good deed was left behind her. The devils took her and threw her into the lake of fire. And her guardian angel stood thinking: what good deed of hers can I remember to tell God? Then he remembered and said to God: once she pulled up an onion and gave it to a beggar woman. And God answered: now take that same onion, hold it out to her in the lake, let her take hold of it, and pull, and if you pull her out of the lake, she can go to paradise, but if the onion breaks, she can stay where she is. The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her: here, woman, he said, take hold of it and I’ll pull. And he began pulling carefully, and had almost pulled her all the way out, when other sinners in the lake saw her being pulled out and all began holding on to her so as to be pulled out with her. But the woman was wicked as wicked could be, and she began to kick them with her feet: ‘It’s me who’s getting pulled out, not you; it’s my onion, not yours.’ No sooner did she say it than the onion broke. And the woman fell back into the lake and is burning there to this day. And the angel wept and went away.[7]

The angel wept because love is so strong and yet so weak. The humble gift of an onion is the path from hell to paradise, strong enough to pull us all out, because even the smallest act of kindness participates in God’s love for the world. Yet love is weak when we’re afraid to let it do its work.

So don’t be afraid, abide. The gardener is good and can be trusted. The vine is true and can be trusted. The wine of the kingdom flows, and all will drink.

[1] See http://eol.org/pages/582304/overview and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitis_vinifera and https://www.penn.museum/blog/collection/125th-anniversary-object-of-the-day/7000-year-old-wine-jar-object-of-the-day-24/

[2] Genesis 9:20

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

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

[5] Psalm 1

[6] Bolz-Weber

[7] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), Kindle location 8494ff.

Shepherd-folk

Thomas Kleinert

I don’t know much about sheep. I know a little about wool and pecorino cheese, but I don’t know much about sheep. I have some faint memories of sheep grazing in fields around the small town where my family lived till I was five, and there was an airstrip nearby where they hired a herd of sheep, a dog, and a shepherd to keep the grass from getting too tall during the summer. Besides that, in my world, sheep show up in some almost forgotten movies like Babe and, of course, in the Bible. When the Lord talks about sheep, hearing his words in Elizabethan English seems most appropriate, given the inherent quaintness of the imagery:

Jesus said unto them, What man shall there be of you, that shall have one sheep, and if this fall into a ditch on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out?[1]

Chances are, not many of you have recently pulled a sheep from the ditch, whether on the sabbath or any day, but you may remember watching the clip of a boy who, with great care and effort, manages to pull a sheep out of a narrow ditch by its hind leg.[2] The sheep takes off, with high leaps that suggest pure, ovine joy—O freedom!—and plunges right back into the ditch, headfirst.

They don’t tell many stories about smart sheep. Andre Dubus remembers a summer in southern New Hampshire when his family rented a house that came with eight sheep. They were enclosed by a wire fence in a large section of a meadow by the house. “All we had to do about them,” writes Dubus, “was make sure they didn’t get through the fence, which finally meant that when they got through, we had to catch them and put them back in the pasture.

The sheep did not want to leave their pasture, at least not for long and not to go very far. One would find a hole in the fence, slip out, then circle the pasture, trying to get back in. The others watched her. Someone in our family would shout the alarm, and we’d all go outside to chase her. At first we tried herding the ewe back toward the hole in the fence, standing in the path of this bolting creature, trying to angle her back, as we closed the circle the six of us made, closed it tighter and tighter until she was backed against the fence, and the hole she was trying to find. But she never went back through the hole, never saw it, and all our talking and pointing did no good. Finally we gave up, simply chased her over the lawn, … under trees and through underbrush until one of us got close enough, dived, and tackled. Then three of us would lift her and drop her over the fence, and we’d get some wire and repair the hole.

Like myself, Dubus hadn’t had much experience with sheep until then, outside of Western movies and church, that is.

Christ had called us his flock, his sheep; there were pictures of him holding a lamb in his arms. His face was tender and loving, and I grew up with a sense of those feelings, of being a source of them: we were sweet and lovable sheep. But after a few weeks in that New Hampshire house, I saw Christ’s analogy meant something entirely different. We were stupid helpless brutes, and without constant watching we would foolishly destroy ourselves.[3]

Plunge right back into the ditch, headfirst.

In the Bible, shepherding is a metaphor for good governance, for attentive leadership that seeks to serve the flourishing of life in community. Psalm 78 proclaims the hopeful dimension of this vision,

The Lord chose his servant David, and took him from the sheepfolds; from tending the nursing ewes God brought him to be the shepherd of God’s people … With upright heart he tended them, and guided them with skillful hand.[4]

Prophets like Ezekiel provide a much different, much more sober perspective of Israel’s shepherd-kings: they feed themselves, not the sheep; they don’t strengthen the weak; they don’t bind up the injured; they don’t bring back the strayed; they don’t seek the lost; they rule with force and harshness; and so they scatter the sheep.[5]

When Jesus declares, “I am the good shepherd,” he announces that he has come to seek the lost and bring back the strayed, to bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, so that all would live in safety, and no one would make them afraid.[6] This shepherd doesn’t run when the wolf comes, far from it — he lays down his life for the sheep and takes it up again, so they may have life, and have it abundantly. This shepherd subverts royal visions of power and serves but one goal: to gather us into a community of deep friendship with God and with each other. ‘One flock, one shepherd’ is the name of that vision in John.

We don’t see much of that unity; we see flocks of all shapes and sizes, mostly made up of sheep that look alike, bleat alike, and smell alike. And some of us think that being scattered isn’t so bad. There’s something for everyone—isn’t it wonderful?! And a growing number of us have convinced ourselves that the ideal herd size is actually the flock of one: The Lord is my shepherd. He makes me lie down in green pastures and leads me beside still waters, and other sheep just make life in community so much more complicated. But the good shepherd keeps reminding us,

“I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.”

We may think that it’s all about them growing in likeness with us, but Jesus’ shepherding project is about all of us growing in likeness with him, becoming a community of deep friendship with God and with each other.

In her book, Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott introduces us to Ken, a man in her church who had lost his partner to AIDS and was dying from the same disease, “disintegrating before our very eyes,” she writes. A few weeks after the funeral, Ken told them that “right after Brandon died, Jesus had slid into the hole in his heart that Brandon’s loss left, and had been there ever since [and] … that he would gladly pay any price for what he has now, which is Jesus, and us.”[7]

“I am the good shepherd,” says Jesus. “I know my own, and my own know me, just as the Father knows me, and I know the Father.”[8] This knowledge is not the kind you need to do well on a test. Thisknowledge is something like a deep familiarity, something very much like love, a trust-filled openness and intimacy.

Lamott describes Ken’s face as “totally lopsided…, ravaged and emaciated, but when he smiles, he is radiant. He looks like God’s crazy nephew Phil.” This is what being known and found by Jesus looks like. This is what knowing the good shepherd looks like.

Lamott tells us about a woman in the choir named Ranola, who, she says, “is large and beautiful and jovial and black and devout as can be.” And Ranola had “been a little standoffish toward Ken.” She had “always looked at him with confusion,” when she looked at him at all. Or she looked at him sideways, “as if she wouldn’t have to quite see him if she didn’t look at him head on.” Ranola had been taught “that his way of life—that he—was an abomination.” And that’s not something you just let go of like you drop a t-shirt in the box for Goodwill. But Ken had been coming to church nearly every week for the last year and it was getting to Ranola.

So on this one particular Sunday, for the first hymn, the so-called Morning Hymn, we sang “Jacob’s Ladder,” which goes “Every rung goes higher, higher,” while ironically Kenny couldn’t even stand up. But he sang away sitting down, with the hymnal in his lap. And then when it came time for the second hymn, the Fellowship Hymn, we were to sing “His Eye is on the Sparrow.” The pianist was playing and the whole congregation had risen—only Ken remained seated... and we began to sing, “Why should I feel discouraged? Why do the shadows fall?” And Ranola watched Ken rather skeptically for a moment, and then her face began to melt and contort like his, and she went to his side and bent down to lift him up—lifted up this white rag doll, this scarecrow. She held him next to her, draped over and against her like a child while they sang. And it pierced me.[9]

This is what being known and found by Jesus looks like. This is what knowing the good shepherd looks like. This is the life to which we are called: to let ourselves be loved by God and learn to love each other.

At the end of the Gospel according to John, Jesus asks Peter, “Do you love me?” Three times he asks him, and three times Peter replies, “You know that I love you.” And three times Jesus responds, “Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep.”[10] This curious exchange underlines how loving Jesus and caring for others go hand in hand. And it suggests that loving Jesus, listening to the voice of Jesus and caring for each other, the sheep of God’s pasture become indistinguishable from apprentice shepherds.

James Rebanks comes from a long line of shepherds and he wrote about the trials and the beauty of the shepherd’s life.[11]

You need to be tough as old boots... The romance wears off after a few weeks, believe me, and you will be left standing cold and lonely on a mountain. It is all about endurance. Digging in. Holding on… You’ll need the patience of a saint, too, because sheep test you to the limit, with a million innovative ways to escape, ail or die.

Who knows how many sheep he pulled out of the ditch, only to watch them leap off and plunge right back in, headfirst.

The apprenticeship period for a shepherd is…  about 40 years. You are just a “boy” or a “lass” until you are about 60: it takes that long to really know a mountain, the vagaries of its weather and grazing, to know the different sheep, marks, shepherds, bloodlines, and to earn the respect of other shepherds. This isn’t just fell walking behind sheep with a dog friend – it requires a body of knowledge and skills that shepherds devote decades to learning.[12]

In other words, this apprenticeship is a lifelong project; which sounds about right. Walking with Jesus, listening to his voice, growing in mutual knowledge and love, we become for each other what he is to all of us—we become shepherd-folk, committed to each other’s flourishing.

[1] Mt 12:11 ASV

[2] https://youtu.be/T-Wc8vluyp0?si=Zn-efKtgMJZm-oZ2

[3] Andre Dubus, “Out like a lamb,” in: Broken Vessels: Essays by Andre Dubus (1991)

[4] Ps 78:70-72

[5] See Ezekiel 34:2-6

[6] Ezekiel 34:16, 28

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

[8] John 10:14-15

[9] Lamott, 64-65.

[10] John 21:15-17

[11] James Rebanks, The Shepherds Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape (New York: Flatiron Books, 2015)

[12] James Rebanks https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/agriculture/farming/11569612/Are-you-hard-enough-to-survive-as-a-shepherd.html

Peace be you

Thomas Kleinert

Nancy and I were waiting for our Uber driver Friday night, just outside TPAC, when suddenly Margie and her mom walked out, and after a second, we realized that we had all just been in the same theater and seen the same show, The Color Purple. And saying “seen the same show” doesn’t even get close to describing the experience of having witnessed a powerful musical performance that moved us to tears, made us laugh out loud, and had us jump up from our seats, more than once, for a standing ovation. We already knew the story. Some of us had read Alice Walker’s book, all of us had watched the 1985 Steven Spielberg movie as well as last year’s outstanding musical adaptation directed by Blitz Bazawule. But Friday night was different. Outside on the sidewalk, we joked about getting the word out that anyone who’d been to Polk Theatre on Friday could sleep in on Sunday morning since they’d already been to church—except that we only got to watch the communion picnic at the end, instead of joining the cast on stage.

Now we’re all here together this morning; you didn’t sleep in, and some of you may have had a déjà vu moment during the Gospel reading. Didn’t we hear that very story just last week? About the disciples together in a room and suddenly Jesus standing among them, saying, “Peace be with you?”[1] Are we in some weird Groundhog Day loop? Or are we actually meant to hear the same story again? Maybe because ‘it didn’t take the first time,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean? Or because the story is so good that, like children at bedtime, we want to hear it again and again, for weeks, for the peace of hearing it?

I think it may be a little like The Color Purple—you’ve read the book, you’ve watched the movie, but then a group of people does something with the story that draws you in completely and turns you from an audience member into a participant. It’s no longer the same story, because now, you’re in it. Last week was John’s take on what the first witnesses had passed on, and today’s reading is Luke’s take on the same material. Both of them, of course, along with generations of witnesses and preachers, hope that, when we leave, we’re no longer just a gospel audience, but participants in the story of Jesus, folks who jump up from their seats and step onto the world stage, ready to live this story inside out.

Hearing the story again a week later means we get to linger a little longer in that moment when the whole world is changed for good. It’s like we get to push the pause button and look around and ponder what God has done in raising Jesus from the dead. It takes time for the new reality to sink in and reshape our imagination, how we look at each other now, how we see ourselves, how we think and act, now that Christ is risen from the dead; it takes time.

“Christ is risen, time to move on,” shouts the world. The Easter candy has been on sale, 50% off the first week, then 75%. “Clear the shelves to make room for whatever comes next, no matter what it is, as long as it sells.” The witnesses whisper, “Pause,” and we get to step out of the hamster wheel. We get to take a breath. We get to look around. We get to ponder. We get to inhabit this wondrous moment when the words of the women, dismissed as an idle tale, become the resurrection life of a people. We get to inhabit, really inhabit, and not just fly by, this moment when the first witnesses were “gathered together in bewilderment, astonishment, and incredulity.”[2]

They were talking about what kind of day they’d been having, the messy mix of feelings, reports, and unbelievable statements.

And while they were talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified; they thought that they were seeing a ghost. 

They had no words, no concepts for any of this, only the startling encounter with Jesus who clearly, suddenly was with them, but not like he had been with them before. Luke uses words like startled, terrified, disbelievingand wondering to draw us into the moment where the newness of resurrection life just erupted. We get to be with them in that moment, we get to bring our own wonder and confusion, our doubts and questions and hesitation. Is it a ghost, an apparition? Is it the wishful fantasy of a group of grieving followers?

“Do you have something to eat?” Jesus asks. It’s one of the most basic requests a human being can make. It’s the question thousands of children in Gaza and Sudan ask their parents. This question and a morsel of food are what makes ‘peace’ more than just a word. This question and a piece of broiled fish turn the trauma of violent loss into communion. “Do you have something to eat?” — Yes, we do, here, have some more. At the home in Emmaus, the guest became the host, and the risen Lord was made known to the disciples in the breaking of the bread. In this scene, the Lord of life is a hungry beggar, and we begin to see who he is when we give him something to eat. It begins with a simple response to the most basic human need.

He said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.”

The Risen One is present, but he speaks about himself in the past tense. There is continuity here, physical, embodied continuity, but it’s far from an obvious or self-evident continuity. Luke writes, Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures. Our minds must be opened to take in the newness, to begin to perceive and comprehend its scope and meaning. Nothing is self-evident here, neither the body nor the scriptures, but the Risen One himself opens eyes and texts and minds.

Opening minds can seem like the biggest challenge imaginable, especially when you find yourself surrounded by people with thoroughly closed minds who won’t budge, even when you carefully present your best case with great patience. Elizabeth Kolbert, writing about Christopher Columbus, noted “his reluctance to acknowledge the magnitude of what he found.

In four trips across the ocean, he never… came upon anything remotely like what he had expected: not only were the people novel and strange; so were the geography, the topography, the flora, and the fauna. Still, to the end of his days Columbus insisted that Cuba was part of China, and that he had arrived at the gateway to Asia. He didn’t want to have discovered someplace new; he wanted to have reached someplace old, and, as a result, was blind to the real nature of the world he had stumbled onto.[3]

When the first disciples stumbled onto the radical newness of the crucified Jesus risen from the dead, they didn’t see much of anything until they let the risen Lord open their eyes and minds, and the scriptures. It was the interplay between Christ’s presence and his guidance in the study of the scriptures that gave them the words to speak about the meaning of Jesus in its true magnitude for the life of the world.

Harvey Cox used to teach an undergraduate course at Harvard, “Jesus and the Moral Life.” Some of the students were Christians, and many were not, but apparently the content of the course was so compelling that Cox had to move the class to a theater usually reserved for rock concerts. And what theologian doesn’t quietly dream of rock star status? In his book, When Jesus Came to Harvard, Cox talks about why he initially ended his class with the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and death. The students came from a variety of religious backgrounds, he explains, but

there was another reason why I had been trying to steer around the Easter story: Classrooms, at least the ones I teach in, are not viewed as the proper venue for testimonies. What is supposed to go on in classrooms is ‘explanation.’ But not only did I not know how to explain the Resurrection to the class, I was not even sure what ‘explaining’ it might mean.[4]

Having taught the course a few times, he began to suspect, that by leaving out this part of the story he was “being intellectually dishonest, a little lazy, and cowardly.” And so he decided that he would “sketch out some of the current interpretations of the Resurrection and suggest that [the students] would have to decide among them on their own.” But when he began his sketch, he was in for a big surprise. He had his mind opened by the witness of the prophets.

It immediately became evident that stories of raising the dead in the Old Testament did not have to do with immortality. They are about God’s justice.… They did not spring up from a yearning for life after death, but from the conviction that ultimately a truly just God simply had to vindicate the victims of the callous and the powerful.[5]

Resurrection hope was a thirst for justice, a hunger for righteousness to be real on earth as it is in heaven—and in raising Jesus from the dead, God affirmed and fulfilled that hope. “To restore a dead person to life is to strike a blow at mortality,” wrote Cox, “but to restore a crucified man to life is to strike a blow at the violent system that executed him.”

We’re all of us “slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared.”[6] But the Risen One is among us, opening hearts, opening minds, and never tiring of guiding our feet into the way of peace.[7] Somebody may ask, “Do you have something to eat?” and you may invite them to lunch and great joy may erupt. You hear Jesus say, “Peace be with you,” and it sounds just like, “Good morning.” But then, a week later, you hear him say it again, “Peace be with you,” and it sounds like he’s shouting across the whole world and across all ages, and what you hear is, “Shalom, all y’all! Nothing will stop the peace of God from reigning over earth and heaven!”

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

[2] Joseph Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV. The Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 1572.

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

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

[5] Ibid., 274.

[6] Luke 24:25

[7] Luke 1:79

Resurrection Scars

Margie Quinn

In second grade, a boy who will remain nameless gave me the chicken pox. The youth of today don’t know about the chicken pox, but many of us can remember the incredibly itchy and contagious virus that takes the form of little pox that decorate one’s skin. I had an abnormal case in that most of the pox showed up on my face; on my eyelids, in my ears, even on my lips. I probably had over fifty pox on my face alone. They itched, so I scratched them, and as a result, I had quite a few scars when it was all said and done. 

The scarring on my face was so prominent that my parents reached out to a plastic surgeon because, with good intention, they didn’t want me to be bullied. 

When I was in fourth grade, they drove me to Atlanta to have plastic surgery. The surgeon did a procedure that involved a lot of needles. I expected to wake up in the morning with a smooth face. Instead, I woke up to the same, scarred face. The surgery hadn’t worked. So, we went to another plastic surgeon. Somewhere in this process, we didn’t pursue another surgery. 

I still have those scars. They have faded a little bit with time, but I can still remember my embarrassment at camp dances when a boy would ask to dance. All I could think about was how close to my face he was, how he was probably fixated on the pox dotting my face. And still, when I babysit young kids, they’ll ask me about them. I didn’t love or want the scars. I would have liked to wake up the morning after the surgery with a face that was…flawless. 

In our scripture this morning, we are finally reunited with the resurrected Christ. Jesus is risen indeed, and even though Mary has told the disciples that very morning that she has seen the risen Lord, they are huddled together behind a locked door, terrified for their lives. This Easter vignette doesn’t look like what I had imagined. There’s no fanfare in the streets but  a group of guys still unsure that what the scriptures had said could be fulfilled, that radical Love really could conquer the death-dealing Empire. Fear still holds them captive. 

Even so, Jesus finds them where they are, stands with them in the midst of their fear and offers them peace. Somehow, they still don’t get the memo because even though he is standing there saying, “Peace be with you,” there is no “Oh, hey! It’s you!” in scripture. No recognition. So, he shows them his hands and his side. Then they rejoice, scripture tells us. Then they see the Lord. 

It takes Jesus showing his scars in order for the Disciples to believe that he is who he says he is. Except for Thomas. Thomas wasn’t in the room for the first resurrection appearance. He was out picking up the pizza or taking a nap and missed the big show. When he gets back together with them, they tell him that they’ve seen Jesus. But Thomas says, "Unless I see the marks 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.” 

Thomas gets such a bad rap. As Lydia said to me this week, “the guy had bad publicity.” He’s frozen in time as “Doubting Thomas” as if we all deserve an immortalized nickname for that one thing we did that one time. To me, Thomas was just being honest about what he needed from Jesus. He, fairly, wanted to see what the Disciples had already witnessed. 

Thomas needs to see the scars for himself. 

Thomas needs to see the scars for himself. Thomas doesn’t ask Jesus to turn water into wine or raise someone from the dead. He doesn’t ask Jesus to recite the Lord’s Prayer from memory or get a voice from Heaven to speak. No, he asks Jesus for a different kind of proof: 

Show me that you have lived. Show me that you have died. Show me that in new life, you haven’t forgotten. Show me that you are still you. 

Thomas asks the right question, the one I would never think to ask. I would be way more concerned with Jesus proving his divinity to me, not his humanity. 

All I need to see from you in order to believe, Thomas says, is proof that you still hold the stories, the markings, and the memories of the life you shared with us. That the painful, human, tactile, grounded part of your journey matters just as much as your resurrection matters. 

The first thing Thomas wants to see in order to believe is Jesus’s wounds, is the proof of his suffering, is the solidarity of pain, is the markings of fear, a fear that Thomas and the disciples have a lot of at this point. 

This isn’t a Doubting Thomas. This is a Determined Thomas, a Defiant Thomas, a Thomas who knows not to trust a pristine, white-washed, smoothed-over gospel but who wants, needs to see the Lord, wounds and all. 

A week later, in the midst of his Resurrection Tour, Jesus gives him a response. The disciples are again in the house, this time with Thomas, and Jesus comes back for him. It has been a week, Jesus is probably trying to cover a lot of ground before he ascends to heaven and yet, he comes back for him. Meeting Thomas at his point of need, Jesus says to him, “I heard what you needed, I walked all the way back here for you, so put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.” Thomas answers, “My Lord and my God.” 

The Easter season sure is pretty, with flowers blooming and light shining through the darkness. But I’m here to tell y’all that I don’t trust a resurrection without scars. I don’t trust a body that doesn’t tell a story. I don’t trust a Savior who doesn’t see my wounds and say “Hey, me too.” Or as the poet Mary Oliver writes, “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” 

I need the risen Lord to share in my woundedness in order for me to believe that he is who he says he is. I just do. I need Jesus to laugh with me as I show him my calloused feet, torn up by years of wearing cleats playing the sport I love. I need him to chuckle with me as I point to the scar on my left ring finger, where I tried to cut the breasts off of a Barbie doll in elementary school, my first act of feminist defiance. I need him to trace his finger over the scars on my face and just beam and say, “There is no one else who looks like you do.” 

And I need him to share in my not so visible wounds, too. I need him to nod with me, with understanding in his eyes, as I describe my anxiety.. I need him to hug me as we talk about losing the people we love. I need him to clasp my hand as I tell him about my shame, about the wrongs I’ve done and the ways I’ve come up short. 

My scars aren’t going anywhere. The ones you see and the ones you don’t. By Jesus taking the time to visit Thomas, by exposing his own scars, he gives Thomas and me the abundant grace of a God who comes back for us, who looks at us, wounds and all, and says, “Me too. I lived, too. I suffered, too. And I rose, too, carrying all of it with me…all of your wounds with me. Even though it is Easter and love abounds, it doesn’t mean that I have forgotten the pain you’ve had and have. So, touch my wounds, and see me. Because I will always come back for you.” That is the scarred, wounded, freeing gospel news this morning. 

May it be so. 

Light and life

Thomas Kleinert

Today is the best and first of days: the tomb could not hold the Lord Jesus captive, and new life has begun for all of creation!

Mary Magdalene was among those standing near the cross on Friday, and this morning she was the first to come to the tomb, early, while it was still dark. She had spent the sabbath who knows where, who knows how. I doubt it was much of a sabbath. A day of numb silence, a long day of waiting for time to pass, not a day of holy rest, but a day of mourning, a day of exhausting grief. And Mary wasn’t just sad. She was angry, furious at the world and the powers that rule it with selfish ambition and such unspeakable violence. How long had it been — a few months maybe? — since Jesus had given her the courage to believe? To imagine the contours and the nearness of a world where the hungry are fed, where the blind see and the lame dance, where masters kneel and wash the feet of servants, and all who mourn are comforted? She had allowed this man to awaken hope in her, bold, boundless hope. Because of him, she had begun to lean into a world of divine possibility: the possibility of forgiveness, the possibility of belonging to a community shaped by love, the possibility of life in fullness for all, young and old, brave and timid, friend and stranger, rich and poor.

And now he was dead and  buried, just like that. John tells us it was early in the morning, while it was still dark, that she came to the garden, alone, and no, there was no dew on no roses. There was only the unfathomable void that had swallowed up light and life like a black hole. All Mary had were her memories — and the tomb where Joseph and Nicodemus had laid his body.

She came by herself — she wanted to be alone, I suppose, or she could have asked one of her friends to come with her. And then she saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. Talk about a black hole — all she saw was this gaping mouth of death. All she could see was yet another layer of loss. She ran back and told the others, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb.”

“It matters little what we see when despair takes hold,” writes Jonathan Walton. “We will interpret all reality through this prism.”[1] They have crucified my Lord. They have extinguished the light of his luminous presence in the world. And now they have taken even his body. They have managed to make his absence unbearably complete. It was as though the predawn darkness became even darker for Mary.

John seems to think we could use a little comedy now. We get the interlude with the curious footrace between Peter and the other disciple, and who got there first, and who saw what first, and who was the first to believe, and then, how the two of them, get this, how the two of them went home. It’s like we get this close to joy erupting in the garden — but no, the two went home. The news of this morning breaks both slowly and suddenly.

Mary stands outside the tomb, weeping, and now she bends to look inside, and she sees two angels. “Woman, why are you weeping?” they ask her, and yes, they sound a tad insensitive. Had Mary any strength left in her, I imagine she would say to them, Why am I weeping? Why aren’t you? Haven’t you been paying attention? Don’t you see what is going on here? Don’t you see how they take away everything that is beautiful, destroy anything that is promising, and pile up only ugliness and lies on every side, solely in the name of power? How can you not weep when they have extinguished the light of the world? They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.

The angels say nothing. And now John turns to comedy again, with a moment of mistaken identity. Mary turns around and she sees Jesus standing there, but she does not see him.

“Woman, why are you weeping?” The stranger sounds just like one of the angels. “Whom are you looking for?” he asks. She thinks that perhaps he’s the gardener, while some of us are wondering what he is wearing, since John was so very careful to tell us that all the grave clothes were still in the tomb.

“Sir,” she says, “if you have carried him away, please tell me where you have laid him.” You almost want to step in and say, Mary, can’t you see? No, she can’t, not yet, all she can see is what the narrow vision of her despair allows her to see.

According to John, seeing the risen Lord is not about showing up at the right tomb at the right time. On the night before his arrest, Jesus told the disciples, “A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me.” 

“What does he mean by this ‘a little while?’” they wondered, and he responded, “You will weep and mourn, you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy. I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice.”[2] This is what happens here in the darkness before dawn. Jesus sees her, but she doesn’t see it’s him until he speaks her name, “Mary!” And when the Risen One speaks her name, everything changes: light and life return to the garden. “Rabbouni!” she says, light and life in her voice, and joy and confidence and hope. Marilynne Robinson writes,

The old ballad in the voice of Mary Magdalene, who “walked in the garden alone,” imagines her “tarrying” there with the newly risen Jesus, in the light of a dawn which was certainly the most remarkable daybreak since God said, “Let there be light.” The song acknowledges this with fine understatement: “The joy we share as we tarry there / None other has ever known.”

“How lovely it is,” Robinson continues, “that the song tells us that the joy of this encounter was Jesus’ as well as Mary’s.” How lovely, indeed, to be reminded that the joy of the resurrection is mutual, ours and his, the joy of the relationship between those whom Jesus loves and sees and those who trust him with their lives. I’m particularly grateful for Robinson’s comments about this little song, because she’s opened a door for me:

[F]or a long time, until just a decade ago, at most, I disliked this hymn, in part because to this day I have never heard it sung well. Maybe it can’t be sung well. The lyrics are uneven, and the tune is bland and grossly sentimental. But…

And here she opens the door:

I have come to a place in my life where the thought of people moved by the imagination of joyful companionship with Christ is so precious that every fault becomes a virtue. I wish I could hear again every faltering soprano who has ever raised this song to heaven. God bless them all.[3]

This, of course, is not just about an American song from 1912. She reminds me, and perhaps you as well, that the point of our companionship with Christ is to encourage every faltering voice to raise their song to heaven. The stories of Jesus’ life and ministry, of his humble birth and cruel death, his radical hospitality and boundless compassion, and his resurrection from the dead — all these stories “tell us,” Robinson declares,

that there is a great love that has intervened in history, making itself known in terms that are startlingly, and inexhaustibly, palpable to us as human beings. They are tales of love, lovingly enacted once, and afterward cherished and retold—by the grace of God, certainly, because they are, after all, the narrative of an obscure life in a minor province. Caesar Augustus was also said to be divine, and there aren’t any songs about him.[4]

A little while, and you will no longer see me, Jesus told us, and again a little while, and you will see me. His vision of life awakens hope in us, and we all know how the powers of this world destroy and bury such hope. We mourn with Mary, we weep with her, we seek answers, we plead, we run back and forth, and much of what we see is ambiguous — although I must say, there’s no ambiguity about a Caesar wannabee selling Bibles to pay his mounting legal fees.

A little while, Jesus told us. Remember, nothing and no one can extinguish the love that makes us one with God and with one another. No tomb can hold the light and life of Jesus. The Risen One sees you, and you will hear him calling you by name, and you will see him. He promised not to leave us orphaned, and he has kept his promise.

Easter is the mother of all Sundays, the mother of all days, because the Friday darkness could not overcome the light. So let us be brave in our joy and lean into a world of divine possibility: the possibility of forgiveness, the possibility of belonging to a community shaped by love, the possibility of life in fullness for all, young and old, straight and queer, brave and timid, friend and stranger, rich and poor. Let us sing with Mary and encourage every faltering voice to raise their song to heaven.

[1] Jonathan Walton, Connections, Year B, Volume 2, 192.

[2] John 16:16-20

[3] Marilynn Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 125-26.

[4] Marilynn Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books, 127.