To know and be known

Thomas Kleinert

In 108 verses, James will tell you 59 times what to do, quite directly, bluntly even, some would say. “Be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger,” are good examples from early in the book. That’s good advice, and it was widely taught in the ancient Mediterranean world, almost regardless of a teacher’s philosophical background or religious tradition. “Be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger” — you can copy and paste that into any online comment thread, and nine out of ten times it will turn out to be exactly what needed to be said.

James used time-tested material. The collections in the book of Proverbs contain gems like,

Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but one who has a hasty temper exalts folly;

or

Those with good sense are slow to anger, and it is their glory to overlook an offense;

or this one,

Those who are hot-tempered stir up strife, but those who are slow to anger calm contention.[1]

James, though, doesn’t just share wisdom memes to fill up the space between the ads on your social media feed. James shares with other New Testament writings the deep desire to shape faithful communities of Jesus followers.

Be slow to anger, because human anger does not produce God’s righteousness, we read in James — and producing God’s righteousness is the point of our assemblies: right relationship with God and with each other and with all of God’s creation.

Be slow to anger, because human anger does not produce God’s righteousness. Slow to anger, it says, not, “Don’t be angry.” Sit with your anger. Question your anger. Ask yourself what’s motivating it. Talk about your anger with somebody you trust.

I’ve long loved a saying attributed to St. Augustine who probably never said it, so the words have to stand on their own, without the borrowed authority of the great teacher: Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are anger and courage: anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain as they are. Be slow to anger, don’t just let it flare up and flame out, see how it can become the embers to fuel the slow work of change.

When James urges us to “be slow to anger” we also hear the echo of God’s revelation of the divine name to Moses at Mount Sinai:

The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the name, “The Lord.” The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.[2]

James teaches that we are to become what we know God to be: merciful, gracious, slow to anger, loving, faithful. Our life together is to reflect and make known who we know God to be. Be quick to listen, slow to speak — not like hearers who forget but doers who act. Don’t worry about what to say about God, how to speak about what you know to be true — live what you know.

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: To care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

Keeping oneself unstained by the world while also engaging with it, that may require a lot of prayer, thought, and conversation… how to change the world without conforming to it[3] — but caring for orphans and widows in their distress is about as plain and straightforward as it gets. “Orphans and widows” is biblical shorthand for the most vulnerable members of our communities — families and individuals in economically precarious circumstances; folks who work every day, and still don’t make enough to pay the rent and eat; folks who don’t have access to good education, good medical care, good legal representation. Our care for them is the standard, according to James, by which the purity of our religion is being assessed — not the truthful articulation of our doctrine, nor the beauty of our worship, nor the fervor of our prayers. Not that truth and beauty, or fervent prayers don’t matter — they do, they very much do! — but only to the degree that they help us become doers of the word and not merely hearers; only to the degree that they form us for righteous living.

Much of the life of faith is aspirational. Many of us would probably hesitate to claim that we are Christians, and be much more comfortable affirming, with a measure of humility, that we try to live as Christians, that we want to follow Jesus. And yet, “When asked about the church, the first word college students think of often is ‘hypocrite’,” Laura Holmes reported years ago from the classroom, and I doubt it has changed dramatically since then.[4] There’s a sizable gap between what we profess and what we do — nothing new about that. Often we find it easier to see where others are talking the talk but are falling short when it comes to walking the walk — you know, folks like your neighbor across the street who tells you she attends a different Bible study every day of the week, and last Friday you heard her yell at the waitress because there was a lemon wedge in her water. Or the driver of the car who cut in front of me in the parking lot at Target and took my parking spot, even though I had my turn signal on, and then I saw the sticker from a local congregation on the rear window. I did bridle my tongue, but I said to myself, loud and clear, in the darker caverns of my mind, “So that is what they teach you over there?” You remember what Jesus said about all that:

Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.[5]

So, yes, when asked about the church, the first word young people often think of is one that Jesus thought of as well.

James compares our trouble with becoming doers of the word with people who take a quick glance in the mirror.  You check your hair or make-up, you make sure there’s no spinach stuck in your teeth, and off you go. The moment you turn away, you forget what you were like.

James contrasts that with the look into a different kind of mirror, the word of God, which he calls the perfect law, the law of liberty. This look isn’t a quick glance in passing. It’s an unhurried look, unrushed, honest, one that welcomes with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save our souls.

Bill Coffin said, “I read the Bible because the Bible reads me. I see myself reflected in Adam’s excuses, in Saul’s envy of David, in promise-making, promise-breaking Peter.”[6] You make it a habit to let the word read you to you, and you listen with patient humility. Søren Kierkegaard, a 19th-century Danish theologian and philosopher, taught that,

The fundamental purpose of God’s Word is to give us true self-knowledge; it is a real mirror, and when we look at ourselves properly in it we see ourselves as God wants us to see ourselves. The assumption behind this is that the purpose of God’s revelation is for us to become transformed, to become the people God wants us to be, but this is impossible until we see ourselves as we really are.[7]

None of us become doers of the word simply by making up our minds; it’s all about living with the mirror of God’s revelation; it’s about learning to trust the loving gaze of God.

There’s another saying, this one attributed in various places to both the Sioux Indians and to the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, so it too will have to speak to us without the borrowed authority of Native American or Buddhist wisdom: The longest journey you will make in your life is from your head to your heart. I may have heard and know in my head that “every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above,” but when I know it in my heart, all that I do, will express this generosity. You may have heard and know in your head that God is gracious and merciful, but when you know it in your heart, all your daily actions will express both the character of God, and who you really are. We may have heard and know many things about God in our minds, but when we know in our hearts that we are fully known and loved, our life together will be the life of righteousness, to the glory of God from whom all blessings flow.

[1] Proverbs 14:29; 19:11; 15:18

[2] Exodus 34:5-6; see also Numbers 14:18; Nehemiah 9:17; Psalms 86:15; 103:8; 145:8

[3] I’m reminded of Paul’s warning to the church in Romans 12:2

[4] Laura Sweat Holmes, Connections, Year B, Vol. 3, 276.

[5] Matthew 7:3-5

[6] William Sloane Coffin, The Heart Is a Little to the Left: Essays on Public Morality (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1999), 41-42.

[7] Stephen Evans summarizing Kierkegaard’s insight as quoted by Robert Kruschwitz https://www.baylor.edu/content/services/document.php/174976.pdf

Learning from John

Thomas Kleinert

Most of you know John, Paul, George and Ringo — some of you sing along by heart, and even if their songs haven’t been part of the soundtrack of your life, you still recognize the tunes.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — that’s a different story. They each sing the gospel song, but each of them plays a different tune. Matthew, Mark and Luke can sound quite similar over long stretches, but they each include material unique to them, and where Mark keeps it swift and short, Matthew likes to linger and elaborate.

John, though, really stands out. In John, Jesus talks, a lot, and yet, there’s not a single story in all of the Fourth Gospel that begins, “The kingdom of God is like…” Reading John in my late teens and early twenties, I remember thinking, “that doesn’t sound like Jesus at all,” and I went back to the three who had shaped my hearing, back to the Sermon on the Mount, and the Good Samaritan, and the Rich Man and Lazarus.

In our 3-year lectionary, each of the three gets a year — we follow Matthew in Year A, Mark in Year B, and Luke in Year C. John doesn’t get his own year, but not a Christmas goes by without him. We can do without Mark on Christmas, but we want Luke’s angels and shepherds, as well as Matthew’s wise men from the east — and we rise to our feet in the dark sanctuary for the glorious poetry of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…” And John gets a lot of play during Lent and Easter.

In my second year of ministry with a robe on, my colleagues decided that it was my turn to read the passion story in the Good Friday service. So I read through John 18 and 19, and I groaned: How was I to read this text with its relentless naming of “the Jews” as Jesus’s opponents, leaving no room for nuance or differentiation, but slapping the same label on all of them? How was I to read this text that to me sounds like a prequel to the speeches of Hitler and Goebbels with their relentless blaming of “the Jews” for everything that was wrong in the world? I thought it best to plan a Bible study after Easter on anti-Jewish texts in the New Testament, and on Good Friday I read John’s words — but in several instances I quietly changed “the Jews” to “the people” or “the crowd.”

David Nirenberg, in his great study of anti-Judaism in the western tradition, writes,

The most sharply drawn sketch of the Jew as enemy comes from the fourth gospel, the one “according to John.” This is the gospel most explicitly focused on the Jews (the word itself occurs some sixty-seven times in the text, far more than in all the [other Gospels] combined). It is also, of all early Christian texts that have become canonical, the one most thoroughly saturated by the theme of enmity.

In this gospel, we “see a cosmic battle taking shape, one in which word, light, and life confront world, darkness, death, and the Jews in a struggle to the finish.”[1] At the same time, though, John makes abundant use of the Hebrew Bible, quoting it directly or alluding to it, and interpreting some of its key characters and symbols, as well as drawing on other Jewish sources and practices. Because of this, “John’s Gospel has been called the most Jewish and the most anti-Jewish of the Gospels.”[2]

Not even once is the term “the Jews” used to refer to Jesus’ disciples who are certainly Jewish with regard to their ethnic and religious backgrounds, and Jesus himself is called a “Jew” only once — by the Samaritan woman at the well, who wonders how Jesus, a Jew, would ask a Samaritan woman for a drink.[3] Adding to the sharp contrast, Jesus calls Nathanael not a Jew, but “an Israelite in whom there is no deceit,” and Nathanael in turn declares Jesus to be “the King of Israel” — an acclamation repeated by the happy crowds who greet Jesus as he enters Jerusalem before his final Passover.[4] “The effect,” writes Adele Reinhartz, “is to distance the reader from any group designated as [the Jews].”[5]

Who are the people who reject Jesus, persecute him, seek his death, and persecute his followers? John’s answer is consistent throughout: the Jews.[6] Those who believe in Jesus are associated with light, life, spirit, salvation, and God — and those who do not accept him, “the Jews,” with darkness, death, flesh, damnation, and Satan.

And yes, you heard it, in John 8:44 Jesus says to his Jewish audience, “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires.” Surely our Jesus wouldn’t say anything like that…!? Not the Jesus we know — but there it is, printed in red, as they say. “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires.” The word hits me in the pit of my stomach like rock that’s been tumbling down the mountain for hundreds of years, crushing faith, crushing compassion, crushing the lives of so many Jewish human beings, and still rolling on — unless I decide, it stops here.

On August 11 and 12, 2017, when white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, for their Unite the Right rally, somebody took a picture of one of them. On his right shoulder he carries the Confederate flag, with his right hand clutching the pole, and in his left hand he holds a poster. “Jews are children of Satan” it says, written in black marker, and he’s even added his source, John 8:31-47, like its a memory verse from Sunday school.[7]

On October 27, 2018, a gunman attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing eleven people and wounding six. Last year he was sentenced to death, and I will not speak his name. I mention him because he regularly posted anti-Semitic threats, memes and conspiracy theories on Gab, a social media platform that proudly promoted itself as a haven for free expression that major social networks wouldn’t allow. His user profile at the top of the page stated, “jews are the children of satan.”[8]

Almost 2000 years of Christian proclamation did not prevent this hateful appropriation, mostly because few Christians ever tried. From early on, the dichotomies between spirit and flesh, light and darkness, truth and falsehood, grace and damnation began to be projected on the opposition between Church and Synagogue until the Jewish people became the embodiment of all that is unredeemed, perverse, stubborn, evil, and demonic in the world. The association of Jews with Satan became pervasive, especially after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire: theological claims were translated into imperial law that excluded Jews from the body of society, and the Church’s theological negation of Jewish existence found expression in political terms.[9]

In medieval art, “the Jew’s affiliation with the devil might be signaled by placing him in hell, perching a demon on his shoulder, giving him subtly beast-like features, wrapping a snake around his eyes, having him give an obscene kiss to a cat, or depicting him with a goatee, tail, and/or horns.”[10] And those depictions didn’t remain hidden away in the margins of hand-copied volumes, they were widely distributed, beginning with early modern prints, copied from generation to generation, an unbroken chain from the anonymous illustrator of a sacred text in some European monastery to the anonymous member of the Goyim Defense League printing flyers for his trip to Nashville.

How do we read a text that quickly evolved into a tool of terror? Clearly, “Jesus said it and that settles it” is not only lazy, but irresponsible.

The Gospel of John was written in response to a deep crisis and conflict. The destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans in 70 CE was a traumatic event that necessitated a profound reorientation of Jewish religious life. Priests, Pharisees, surviving nationalists, and other Jewish groups, including Christian Jews, were struggling over religious identity and power. With the Temple gone, Judaism was forced to reconstitute itself around a different center, and the Torah, the Jewish Scriptures, became that center. The places where Scripture was studied and taught, the synagogues, now took on more importance. To the Jews who believed in Jesus, those same Scriptures also were crucially important, and they studied them carefully, because to them, Jesus was the fulfillment of God’s promises “according to the Scriptures.”

In the Gospel of John, there are repeated references to Christians’ being cast out of the synagogue — and most likely that’s a reflection of the fear and lived experience of John’s community.[11] Sometime in the last quarter of the first century, a rupture with the synagogue occurred. Prior to that decisive break, members of John’s community were able to hold together their participation in the liturgical and cultural world of Judaism and their faith in Jesus. Once it had occurred, they “understood themselves to be outcasts,” people whom the emerging Jewish mainline “no longer considered to be Jews, a community forcibly removed from its roots and the symbols that formed its identity.”

The wealth and depth of Jewish scriptural allusions and themes in John clearly show that the Fourth Evangelist is not antagonistic to Jewish traditions. No, on the contrary, he is antagonistic to the political forces that have attempted to cut his community off from these traditions.

Outnumbered and without political resources at their disposal, John’s community “had no power to take any actions comparable to their own exclusion from the synagogue. …Their only ‘power’ rested in the force of their rhetoric, in their ability to denounce those who had excluded them.”[12] And in John’s gospel, Jesus gave voice to their anger and their pain, affirming that they belonged to him, and therefore, to God — exclusively.

Our situation as believers in Jesus today is obviously very different, and has been for hundreds of years, but it’s just been so very convenient to adopt John’s language about “the Jews” as a dark mirror for all that Christians are not:“the Jews” are blind and can’t properly read their own Scriptures, but we  see; “the Jews” refuse to hear the Shepherd’s call, but we know and follow his voice; “the Jews” cling to earthly things, but we abide in spiritual truth.

It’s time we learn a better lesson from John. In our own struggles for “the soul of America” and the largely fear-driven battles over who belongs and who doesn’t, perhaps we can learn from the Fourth Gospel and ask ourselves what Gail O’Day considers the “primary question”:

Is it necessary to exclude others so absolutely and hatefully in order to establish community identity?[13]

Paul the Pharisee and Apostle, writing before the destruction of Jerusalem and the predominance of gentiles in the church, never aligned the Jews with Satan. He also struggled with the relation of the developing Christian community and Judaism, but he envisioned a beloved community emerging, not from within fortified walls, but from the breaking down of barriers. So, rather than defining each other out, why don’t we see who we might become together by letting each other in?

[1] David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 78; my emphasis.

[2] Adele Reinhartz, in: The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation (United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 2017), 152.

[3] John 4:9

[4] John 1:47, 49; 12:3

[5] Reinhartz, JANT, 156.

[6] John 1:11; 5:16; 8:40; 16:2

[7] https://x.com/ianbremmer/status/896423542727872512

[8] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robert-bowers-gab-pittsburgh-shooting-suspect-today-live-updates-2018-10-27/

[9] Gregory Baum, in the introduction to Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (United States, Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1996)

[10] Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (United States, Henry Holt and Company, 2014), 7.

[11] John 9:22; 12:42; 16:2.

[12] Gail O’Day, “The Gospel of John,” in: The New Interpreter’s Bible, 9:493-865 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), 647-648.

[13] O’Day, 650.

Standing together

Thomas Kleinert

A lectionary is basically a reading plan for public worship: Certain texts are assigned to a congregation’s weekly gatherings and holidays. The practice has its roots in ancient synagogue worship, and, to this day, is shared by most synagogues and many churches. The intention is to reflect the full breadth and depth of the biblical witness over the course of a year or, in the western tradition of the church, three years. Each Sunday is allotted a reading from the Old Testament, a Psalm, and passages from a Gospel and one of the Epistles.

The result represents a pretty comprehensive selection—but there’s still plenty left to be read and studied between Sundays, or skipped for another day. From the book of Judges, over three years, we only get to hear seven verses, from Song of Solomon, only five, and from Zechariah, three. Ezra, Obadiah, Nahum, and Jude aren’t included at all.[1] Psalms 55-61 are skipped in their entirety, and every year on Pentecost, there’s the curious case of Psalm 104: we hear verses 24-34, and 35b—which makes you wonder what’s wrong with verse 35a, doesn’t it? There are good reasons for all that skipping over verses, chapters, and entire books—and many of the passages are indeed included in daily lectionaries or other reading plans and study resources; there’s simply a broad consensus that they are not essential for public worship.

But occasionally, it’s critical to hear some of the verses not heard, to hear them loud and clear, in morning worship. Back in July, members of Nazi groups showed up in downtown Nashville, not for the first time, accosting tourists and residents on Lower Broadway. Some were wearing masks and shirts that said “Pro-White” and “Whites Against Replacement”, they carried swastika flags, shouted anti-Jewish epithets, and raised their arms in Nazi salutes.[2] Before disrupting a City Council meeting that week, they talked with other visitors, including my friend Pat. One of them told her that he hated Jews, and when she let him know that she was Jewish, he stuck his finger in her face and said, “Tell your rabbi, we’re coming for him.”

Seven years ago this past week, “on August 11 and 12, 2017, white supremacists, as the Washington Post reported, ‘mostly young white males,’ gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the Unite the Right rally, ostensibly to protest the removal of the statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee by the City of Charlottesville and the renaming of the park in which the statue had stood as ‘The Emancipation Park.’” Magda Teter recalls,

The rally attracted hundreds of white protesters and a diverse group of counterprotesters, each representing different – and clashing – visions of American society and polity. On the evening of August 11, the white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia, torches in hand, chanting “Blood and soil!” “You will not replace us!” “Jews will not replace us!” and “White Lives Matter,” with some donning medieval Christian symbols. The next day the events turned violent. A white supremacist drove into the crowd of counterprotesters, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer, and injuring nineteen others, while still many others were physically attacked and beaten.[3]

Like I said, occasionally it’s critical to hear some of the verses not heard, to hear them loud and clear, in morning worship. This morning we heard Hebrews 8, declaring with great confidence,

If that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no need to look for a second one… In speaking of a new covenant, God has made the first one obsolete, and what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear.

You may be hearing not-so-subtle overtones of replacement in this language.

Fred Craddock called Hebrews “the finest example of homiletical rhetoric available to us from the first century CE.” It’s not a letter, more like an early theological essay, and its “paragraphs are not written in such a way that they can easily be extracted for devotional or sermonic use” — no neatly packaged clusters of verses that present themselves for spiritual reflection, but a single, grand-scale portrait of the redemptive work of Christ, in an idiom foreign to most of us. “The writer takes us inside the cultus of the tabernacle of Israel’s wilderness journey,” and we’re invited to consider the rituals on the Day of Atonement, the role of the priest, the altar, the sacrifice, and the blood — a very strange world indeed to modern readers.[4] In this portrait, Jesus is presented as “both the preeminent and perfect sacrificial victim as well as the preeminent and perfect high priest,” and as “superior to any other figure: Abraham and Moses, Aaron and the priests descended from him, even angels.”[5]Jewish scholars, A.J. Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, note,

Hebrews claims that Jesus is the “mediator of a better covenant,” for “if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no need to look for a second one” (Heb 8:6-7). … [And] just as perfection replaces repetition, so the Christ replaces the Torah. Along with permanence and perfection comes replacement.[6]

And they add, quoting Alan Mitchell, that it is not surprising, that “from the second century C.E., Christians have used [the Epistle to the Hebrews] to promote the view that Christianity, according to God’s plan, has replaced Judaism,” and “the language of  Hebrews and its author’s style lend themselves to this kind of interpretation.”[7]

I wonder why so many white folk, men in particular, feel so very threatened by  black and brown people and why they are so afraid of being replaced, and I wonder how much of it is because, like all of us, they have grown up in a culture where, for centuries, subjugation, assimilation or replacement have been the dominant ways of coping with difference. And some texts in our Bible, including Hebrews 8, texts we hold sacred, lend themselves to supersessionist interpretation, sowing the seeds of replacement ideologies.

James Dunn observed that

where what became known as 'Christianity' and '(rabbinic) Judaism' were only beginning to emerge in the distinctiveness of their identities, the polemic and name-calling have … the character of the sharp tensions between the different factions [within the Judaism of the time]. The embarrassment of the anti-Jewish or anti-semitic charge against the NT for Christians only arises when the historical character and context of the NT writings are forgotten or ignored.[8]

That is a very careful and accurate observation, but what he didn’t take into account is that for centuries that is exactly how the Scriptures were read and their meaning created and absorbed — with their historical character and context forgotten or ignored, through the lens of “a theology of boasting triumphalism.”[9]And that long history of supersessionist reading has left thick layers of unquestioned assumptions in our theologies, our politics, and our daily interactions.

Where do we begin with the work of pulling back the layers? Five things come to mind:

1. When we hear or read lines like, In speaking of a new covenant, God has made the first one obsolete, we aren’t afraid to say, “Wait a minute, I’m not sure I agree with the writer. Nothing Jeremiah says in this quote, actually implies that God’s covenant is made obsolete by the promised new covenant. And frankly, when I look at the church over the centuries, I don’t see much evidence for a covenant written on the heart, a covenant that leads to a obedience as spontaneous as breathing. We’re not there yet, are we?”

2. We remember that the biblical testimony comes to us not in a single voice, but in a chorus of voices among which we listen carefully for the voice and word of God. And when we wrestle with the claim in Hebrews, that in speaking of a new covenant, God has made the first one obsolete, we are grateful for fellow readers who remind us that Paul, in his letter to the Romans, insisted that “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable,”[10] and that God’s covenant with Israel cannot ever be “obsolete,” for God is faithful.

3. We celebrate that after centuries of anti-Jewish teaching, the church in the 20th century, led by the Catholic Church, finally began to repent. In 2015, on the 50th anniversary of a landmark declaration of the Second Vatican Council, a Vatican commission stated,

On the part of many of the Church Fathers the so-called replacement theory or supersessionism steadily gained favour until in the Middle Ages it represented the standard theological foundation of the relationship with Judaism: the promises and commitments of God would no longer apply to Israel because it had not recognised Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God, but had been transferred to the Church of Jesus Christ which was now the true ‘new Israel’, the new chosen people of God. … [But now a] replacement or supersession theology which sets against one another two separate entities, a Church of the Gentiles and the rejected Synagogue whose place it takes, is deprived of its foundations.[11]

It will take time for that new teaching to make its way into the hearts of the faithful, but we celebrate institutional repentance. That same year, 2015, an international group of orthodox rabbis declared,

Now that the Catholic Church has acknowledged the eternal Covenant between G-d and Israel, we Jews can acknowledge the ongoing constructive validity of Christianity as our partner in world redemption, without any fear that this will be exploited for missionary purposes. [12]

4. We mustn’t ever be afraid to look at the whole story of how we got where we are, or think we are. We must bravely ask the question that may take us to the next layer, unafraid to seek honest answers, with courage to hear them or speak them. We mustn’t be afraid to look at the whole story, not afraid to let our children and grandchildren read every book in the library, because freedom awaits those who do the work.

5. We rejoice in hope. Or as Gary Baum put it, “Christianity is a messianism that is unfulfilled. … Christians stand together with Jews looking for the fulfillment of the promises in the future, restless in this world, ever discerning the injustices and the evil in the present, and open to the victorious coming of God’s power to renew human life on this earth.”[13] Or in the words of A. J. Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, “both Judaism and Christianity are unfinished projects awaiting the messiah, though they differ in beliefs about this messiah’s identity and job description. … Both await fulfillment—each in its own way.[14]

Amen to that. We await fulfillment—with joyful hope, for God is faithful.

[1] Along with 1 and 2 Chronicles and 2 and 3 John. See the helpful index at https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/sunday-citations/

[2] https://tennesseelookout.com/2024/07/15/for-the-second-week-in-a-row-neo-nazis-take-over-nashville-streets/

https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/davidson/2024/07/16/neo-nazis-disrupt-nashville-council/74434069007/

[3] Magda Teter, Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2024), 1.

[4] Fred Craddock, Hebrews (NIB), 4-5.

[5] Amy-Jill Levine, Marc Zvi Brettler, The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), 137.

[6] Ibid., 146; emphasis added.

[7] Ibid., 147.

[8] James D. G. Dunn, Neither Jew Nor Greek: A Contested Identity (United Kingdom, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015), 649.

[9] Franklin Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews, 1975, 29.

[10] Romans 11:29

[11] “THE GIFTS AND THE CALLING OF GOD ARE IRREVOCABLE” (Rom 11:29): A Reflection on Theological Questions Pertaining to Catholic-Jewish Relations on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of “Nostra ætate” (No. 4) http://www.christianunity.va/content/unitacristiani/en/commissione-per-i-rapporti-religiosi-con-l-ebraismo/commissione-per-i-rapporti-religiosi-con-l-ebraismo-crre/documenti-della-commissione/en.html

[12] To Do the Will of Our Father in Heaven: Toward a Partnership between Jews and Christians https://www.ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/documents-and-statements/jewish/orthodox-2015dec4

[13] Gregory Baum, Introduction, in: Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism(United States, Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1996)

[14] Amy-Jill Levine, Marc Zvi Brettler, The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), 418.

Three Courageous Friends

Margie Quinn

The book of Daniel is, as one scholar put it, the most unusual book in the Hebrew bible. The first chapters of the book are “court tales” about a mad King, a fiery furnace, and a lion's den. The second half of the book reveals strange visions and wild dreams of beasts from the sea and the like, that are so fantastical it’s hard to make sense of them. It’s an apocalyptic book just like the book of Revelation. But apocalypse doesn’t mean “doomsday” or “end of the world” in this case. It means “unveiling or “uncovering.” It simply reveals what already is. 

Many scholars think that a few of these stories are folklore, told around a campfire as a way to orally preserve stories of faith and resistance. So, let me tell you a little faithful, fiery folklore this morning. 

In the third chapter of this book of unveiling, we meet the mad King Nebuchadnezzar, the conqueror of Jerusalem, the man who is responsible for the destruction of the Temple, who forced many of God’s people, the Jewish people, to live in exile under military occupation. Exile for the Israelites was an experience of military defeat, deportation and oppression in a new and strange land, which ended their days of independence. 

In the same year that the Temple, the true place of worship for God’s people, comes down, this mad monarch wants to erect a golden statue as a new symbol of worship. We’re not quite sure what the statue was of, some scholars think it was of King Neb himself, but it doesn’t really matter: the King had the economic and political power, (and a particular kind of pride that derives its prestige and privilege from the suffering of others) to do whatever he wanted. This statue is set up in the plain of Dura, meaning that the politically occupied people, the colonized people, would have to walk by it every day, constantly reminded of their inferiority in this strange land. 

Isn’t that what colonialism does? We’ve seen it before– settlers take over land that is not theirs and build statues symbolizing their conquests, their inventions, their victories, and their heroes, making sure that the people striving for a kin-dom of God know that this is the kingdom of Babylon. 

Why does he demand the golden statue? Because he can. He’s rich enough. He has enough gold. And not only that, he has enough people in government who hang on his every word, his minions, with whom he can demand obedience. We learn in verse 2 that he sends for all of these leaders, the highest officials of government who represent Babylonian power, to gather around the statue. They have been called by the King to attend his little statue dedication party. When they’re all there, they learn that every time they hear a particular musical ensemble or anthem, if you will, they should fall down and worship this golden statue. And, as verse 6 tells us, “Whoever does not fall down and worship shall immediately be thrown into a furnace of blazing fire.”

DUN DUN DUN….are you seeing the set up here? 

Enter Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Which aren’t even their god-given, Hebrew names but the names that the King has forced upon them. Their Jewish names, Azariah, Hananiah, and Mishael, are taken from them, their identities stripped and changed to fit into the language of conquest. Sound familiar? 

The King has changed their names, because as history shows us, the best way to enslave the minds of oppressed people is to take away their cultural identities, change their names, change their hair and their clothes and forbid them from speaking their native language. 

The first thing we learn about these three friends is that they won’t bow down to his object of gold. You see, a group of people come up to King Neb and alert him to the fact that certain “foreigners” living under his imperial control are disobeying his command. These three courageous friends, who were actually given leadership positions to oversee Babylonian affairs, who have already tasted a little bit of what it feels like to be among the political elite, throw a wrench in the King’s plan. The narrative of “whatever Neb wants, King Neb gets,” stops here. 

These three courageous friends, these lowly Jewish exiles, stand in faith before the King as he asks, “Is it true…that you don’t serve my gods or worship my statue?” Giving them one more chance to change their minds, he states again, “Now, like I said before, if you’re ready, when you hear the anthem, fall down and worship…but if you don’t, you’ll be thrown into a furnace of blazing fire, and who is the god who will deliver you out of my hands?” 

I hate spoiler alerts but spoiler alert: we know who this God is who will deliver them out of the King’s hands. This is the God who delivered the Israelites from Egypt, who gave Esther the courage to stand up to the mad King Ahasuerus, the same God who likes to do some of his best work in burning bushes and fiery furnaces. I digress. 

These three courageous friends stubbornly refuse to compromise their faith, even in the face of royal wrath and terrible threats. In fact, they double down, despite knowing that their faith has consequences. 

These three courageous friends let him know that they don’t need to get into an argument with him about their Deliverer. In fact, they don’t state that God will definitely deliver them. Instead they say, “ If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire and out of your hand, O king, let him deliver us. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up.” Even if their God doesn’t deliver them, they still won’t obey the King’s commands. Imagine having that kind of faith, that kind of courage, to resist the powers that be even if you don’t know the outcome of your actions. 

Still, their faith has consequences–it leads them right into the fire. The King orders that the furnace be heated up to 7x its normal temperature and gets his strongest guards to bind them and throw them into the furnace. They are bound and thrown in and because the fire is so overheated, the flames kill the King’s own guards who lifted the men into it. The rage of the King is so great, it results in the senseless loss of some of his own officials. 

The three friends fall down, bound, into the furnace of blazing fire. King Neb is watching the whole thing. “Wait a minute,” he asks his minions, “didn’t we throw in three men?” “True, O King,” they reply.  “But I see four men in there, unbound, walking in the middle of the fire…and they aren’t hurt…and the fourth has an appearance of a god.” 

He immediately approaches the door and says, “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, servants of the Most High God, come out! Come here!” Did you pick up on that? He recognizes that the God who delivers them is not a god of gold but the most High God, their God. 

So, they come out of the fire. And all of the minions gather and see that the fire “had not had any power over the bodies of those men. The hair of their heads was not singed, their tunics were not scorched, and not even the smell of fire came from them.” 

King Neb blesses them for their courage and admits that an angel of their God has delivered them because they trusted their God. This is, what we would call, a plot twist. All of the sudden, this King who tried to culturally and spiritually assimilate these men by tempting them with power and prestige, recognizes that their God has delivered them. In the big ending of this story, King Neb is humbled enough to give them credit for disobeying his command and “yielding up their bodies rather than serve and worship any God except their own. “The humbling of the mighty emperor,” Daniel Christopher-Smith writes, “was instigated by the civil disobedience of three who lived by another reality, because they served another Sovereign.” Another reality. Another sovereign. 

As people of faith, we have a lot to learn from these three courageous friends. As people of faith, we will inevitably find ourselves in opposition to dominant culture and idolatrous patriotism. As people of faith, we will find ourselves resisting a culture based on military conquests and economic abuse of conquered peoples. 

And we have two choices. Will we fall on our knees to worship the symbols of worldly power in all of its religious expressions or will we refuse to be moved by the music of national interest, unwilling to bow before the golden statues of the people in power? 

We must be willing to walk through the fire, not alone but with courageous friends, knowing that there is an angel of God who walks with us every step of the way. 

We may be afraid, the road may seem long, and it may be very daunting to resist what the King offers. But the most High God beckons us to step into a radical faith, not the Babylon-poisoned faith of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego but the ancient, bold faith of Azariah, Hananiah, and Mishael. 

Amen. 

The Wailing Women

Margie Quinn

There is a group of women in Seattle who call themselves the Women in Black. They stand vigil on the streets of Seattle for one hour any time a homeless person dies from exposure or violence. I remember working with people living on the streets of Seattle. I remember the first time someone from the street that I knew died. His name was Dylan and he was just a kid. He died by a lamp post not far from our office. I know this because on my way to work, I saw a group of youth I recognized from the streets, gathered around the lamp post. They told me what happened. Their dear friend, Dylan, had died. Dylan’s death wasn’t in the news. He didn’t get an obituary, his death went unnoticed for the most part. But the Women in Black noticed, were made aware and grieved for him. 

The Women in Black collect the names of our unhoused neighbors, hold signs with them, announce to the public that one of God’s children has died from the elements, exposure, even street violence. They held vigil for Dylan and still today, they hold vigil for those in King County, cutting through the statistics on homelessness to name the people behind the numbers.
The Women in Black is actually an international organization, standing vigil all around the world when injustice and senseless violence takes lives. They have stood vigil for the 40,000 people who have died in Gaza, and will surely stand vigil for Sonya Massey, a Black woman who was shot and killed by a police officer on July 6th after calling 911 for help. Did you know her name? These women do. 

We often refer to Jeremiah as the Weeping Prophet. His eyes are a fountain of tears, he weeps for his people day and night. He weeps with God throughout the book because of the hurt of God’s people. God’s people have disregarded God’s law and followed Baal’s law. There has been a series of attacks on the Judeans and a significant number of them have been forced into exile by the Babylonians. Violence and destruction overrun the city and the temple. And there is a lot of death. In chapter 9 verse 21, Death is personified as creeping through the windows, entering the palaces, leaving its mark on all. Suffice it to say, there is very little hope for liberation in the book of Jeremiah. 

All of this death and destruction makes God angry. Even before we arrive at Chapter 9, we see the indignation of God as she takes in this chaos. In Chapter 5, God urges Jeremiah, “Run to and fro the streets of Jerusalem, look around and take note! Search its squares and see if you can find one person who acts justly, and seeks truth, so that I may pardon Jerusalem.” 

God’s people, who have eyes, but do not see, who have ears, but do not hear. This God is hurt by the people she liberated from oppression–she is fed up and in the previous verses, declares that she is going to “give them poisonous water to drink, scatter them and send a sword after them” because they have forsaken the law, not obeyed her voice, stubbornly followed their own hearts and worshiped the false idol, Baal. 

Eventually, though, her rage turns to sadness. God feels the devastation of war in his own self. The highly visible wounds inflicted on the city and his people cause deep-seated suffering for God. But instead of turning away from his people, he enters into solidarity with those reeling from trauma. The same God who wanted to poison his people finally breaks down in tears and, In the only message addressed exclusively to women in the Hebrew bible, God calls for the wailing women.  

Listen to what scripture says: “Call for the mourning women to come, send for the skilled women to come. Let them raise a dirge over us so that our eyes may run down with tears and our eyelids flow with water.” 

Who are these wailing women? They are professional mourners. They have been trained in the ritual of public witness, of vocalizing what the people need to express, of lamenting on behalf of a community that has faced extreme loss. They demonstrate how to react appropriately in light of all of the destruction and death. They understand that grief is meant to be shared, that communal lament is a necessary response in the wake of unimaginable pain. They are God’s chosen grievers. 

And yes, they may have traditionally held very little power in the public sphere, but when they are summoned, they have the power to bring the community together to grieve. 

Their grief is not performative or quick. When they enter the stage, as Juliana Classens writes, there is no “happily ever after” moment that comes out of this. They simply raise their voices in lament to help the community deal with its trauma. God calls on them to show a community how to name what they have lost, something that the people in power do not want them to do.

Walter Brueggeman refers to the people in power as having a “royal consciousness.” “Royal Israel” leads people to numbness about death. It delights in apathy, in our ability to ignore the ongoing suffering in our communities and skip straight to despair, knowing that despair paralyzes us, desensitizes us, makes us bitter and unfeeling. It whispers to us that we should move on quickly.

And yet God knows and the women know that a public expression of grief is the way to subvert this royal consciousness. First, it is therapeutic. It helps people deal with societal grief by naming tragedy without avoiding the pain. Isn’t this how we take the first steps toward recovery and healing? Second, it bears witness. It tells the truth about what has happened, urging the community not to forget but to be brave about naming the people and the pain behind the numbers. Third, it is prophetic. It is a powerful, visible expression to the fact things are not as they should be. 

The wailing women have showed up not just in Judea but in our lives today 

Perhaps you’ve heard of the Black Sash, a group of South African women who opposed apartheid. This group began in 1955, when six working-class white women laid a black sash over a replica of the constitution as the powers-that-be tried to take away the voting rights of people of color. These women continued to wear black sashes in protest over the loss of constitutional rights and over the horrors of apartheid. They organized marches, held overnight vigils and wept for the destruction of their country. Perhaps people heard their wailing in the streets, “How we are ruined!” they may have said. “We are utterly ashamed!” they may have cried. 

The Black Sash and the Women in Black know what the wailing women knew…it is not only up to them to grieve the violence and injustice around them. God says, “teach your daughters to weep, and each to her neighbor a lament.” Professional mourning, the ritual of wailing over devastation, cannot just fall on a group of trained mourners. They must go out and teach others how to show up to funerals, lead congregations in songs of grief or give us the permission to let our eyes flow with tears. 

Mamie Till Mobely, the mother of Emmit Till, knew this, too. When she realized that she wouldn’t be able to get through the incomprehensible murder of her son without calling on her neighbors to lament, she made a decision that cut through the royal consciousness of white America. At Emmit’s funeral, she insisted on an open casket so that the world could “see what they done to my baby.” Over 50,000 people surrounded the church that day, weeping and wailing in the streets, grieving together and in doing so, becoming reinvigorated to fight for justice together. Like Jeremiah, their eyes were a fountain of tears. 

Tears–a way of solidarity when no other form remains. Tears–perhaps the only way out of grief toward hope. Tears that cut through the numbness and ache with God. Tears–that break open our hearts of stone, as Ezekiel says, and expose our hearts of flesh. Tears–that allow people to take back some of their power and to boldly say “No” to the forces of domination and violence.

It is tempting, church, to skip Good Friday and run right to Easter, to skip the haunting stories of Herod, who aimed to kill Jesus, and go straight to Christmas. But we are not a people of a candy theology and cheap hope. We are the children of a God who weeps, a prophet who cries and a group of women who grieve. We need to weep, trusting that those who mourn, as the gospel of Matthew says,  shall be comforted. We need to remember that before our savior rose, he wept, reminding us that only those who embrace and name the reality of death will receive new life. 

We need to weep, church, for the ongoing genocide in Gaza, for the death of Sonya Massey, and for the 181 people who died living on the streets in Nashville last year. We need to weep for the destruction of our precious earth, for the victims of mass shootings, and for the losses in our own communities and families. 

This morning, I invite you to become a neighbor of lament with the wailing women, to allow yourself to be vulnerable enough to have a broken heart and to cry out loudly that things are not as they should be. Weep with Jeremiah, ache with God, wail with the women,  Do not shy away from lament, for in doing so you may numb yourself to the possibility of hope. 

Radical hospitality

Thomas Kleinert

Parker Palmer tells the story about an early-morning flight home. “Our departure was delayed,” he writes, “because the truck that brings coffee to the planes had broken down.” I didn’t know coffee was needed for planes to fly; I thought they ran on jet fuel. I was wrong.

After they had been sitting at the gate for a while, the pilot announced, “Good morning, folks, this is your captain speaking. I’m sorry, but we’re going to take off without the coffee. We want to get you to Detroit on time.” Immediately, the under-caffeinated passengers began griping, loudly and at length, about “incompetence,” “lousy service,” etc.

Once they got into the air, the lead flight attendant got on the intercom and said, with sunshine in her voice, “Good morning! We’re flying to Minneapolis today at an altitude of 30 feet…” A little levity might help reduce the tension, she must have thought. Then she continued, “Now that I have your attention… I know you’re upset about the coffee. Well, get over it! Here’s a thought: That bag of seven pretzels you got on your last flight and put in your pocket? Open it, pass it around. Got any gum or mints? Share them. That morning paper you brought? You can’t read all the sections at once. Offer them to each other!” As she went on in that vein, people relaxed and began doing what she had told them to do, laughing and chatting, and quickly a plane load of grumpy travelers turned into happy campers!

A moment later, as the attendant passed by his seat, Palmer signaled to her. “What you did was really amazing,” he said. “Where can I send a letter of commendation?”

“Thanks,” she said, “I’ll get you a form.” Then she leaned down and whispered, “Loaves and fishes, I tell you. Loaves and fishes.”[1]

The story of Jesus feeding a multitude is the only miracle story told in all four Gospels, and in Matthew and Mark, it’s even told twice. Clearly, it’s a favorite across many streams of early Christian tradition. Believers heard echoes of Israel’s wilderness journey with Moses and of the tales about Elisha, the man of God. Palmer writes,

As far as I’m concerned, that story doesn’t involve any magic. It’s about the miracle of sharing in community, an everyday miracle that anyone with some courage can pull off. [2]

That’s certainly one way to hear the story of the loaves and fishes. I agree that it doesn’t involve any magic, but reducing it to an everyday miracle that anyone with some courage can pull off rips out the heart of the story: Jesus. The first followers of Jesus who told and retold this story had little interest in introducing us to a man who orchestrated the miracle of sharing in community so that we may learn how it’s done. The writer of the fourth Gospel we know as John tells us about Jesus so that we may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing we may have life in his name.[3] He writes, because he wants us to come and see in Jesus what he has come to see, and to find the fullness of life he has found in the company of Jesus.

A crowd of five thousand, a boy’s lunch of five barley rolls and some fish, and all ate as much as they wanted until even the teenage boys in the crowd put their hands on their bellies and said, “I’m kinda full.” The disciples went around and picked up the broken pieces, and they filled twelve baskets. Go ahead, do the math. Five plus two, divided by 5,000 equals fullness for all and baskets of leftovers. That’s kingdom math.

Palmer is right, the story doesn’t involve magic, but that doesn’t mean it’s the first-century version of a how-to video. It’s the testimony of the first witnesses about Jesus in whom they encountered the living, life-giving, truth-speaking, grace-outpouring, fully embodied presence of God. The word of God in human flesh. Grace and truth as tangible as bread and fish, as delightful as wine at a wedding, and abundant beyond imagination.

Passover, the festival of liberation, was near, John tells us. Passover was very near indeed, and not just on the calendar. In today’s reading, echoes of manna in the wilderness and the crossing of the perilous sea touch on ancient promises, memories, and hopes of redemption. Passover was near in the person and proclamation of Jesus.

When he saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” John says it was a test, and that Jesus already knew what he was going to do. It was Jesus who talked about buying bread, and Philip quickly did the math he knew. “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little,” he said, no need to mention that none of them had that kind of cash. It was a test, but it wasn’t a math test. Andrew pointed to the boy’s lunch and shrugged, “What’s that among so many people?” Neither went out of his way to offer a solution to Jesus’ question. Neither could see the situation as placing the demands of hospitality on them. They could see themselves only on the edge of the scene, only as bystanders and observers, not at all as capable participants in the banquet of grace.

Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. He didn’t ask them if they were Gentile or Jew or Samaritan. He didn’t inquire if they were getting their second or third serving. They all ate - men, women, children, rich, poor, left, right, locals, strangers, queer, straight - the whole world; they all ate, as much as they wanted. Imagine the scene at any place you want, at any time - in a camp in Sudan, amid the ruins in Gaza, on a bridge in Paris, under a bridge in Nashville - they all ate, as much as they wanted.

What about the boy? What about Philip and Andrew? The focus has shifted away from them. Jesus did all the work. “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost,” he told the disciples, and from the fragments left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. Whereas before we may have identified with the boy, or with Philip or Andrew, or anyone in the crowd, now we’re invited to see ourselves holding baskets — not to-go boxes, but baskets full of bread: more than enough for the feast of life to continue.

In John’s story, the people who encountered Jesus and tasted life in abundance, began to draw their conclusions about him. Like any of us, in the framework of their experience, they tried to identify the place where Jesus fit it, and they called him the prophet. And when Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him to make him king, he withdrew. Why did he withdraw? Why wouldn’t he let them crown him? He healed people, so obviously he knew how to make healthcare affordable and accessible! He fed people, so clearly he knew a thing or two about the economy! His character was flawless; there was not even a hint of corruption. Wasn’t he the best man for the job? Why did he withdraw at the precise moment when he was about to be confirmed as king by public acclamation?

We know he is no king in the mold of the Roman emperors who distributed free grain in the capital to keep the people from rebelling. We know he doesn’t conform to our systems of power. We now he subverts our dreams of domination by giving life and the freedom to live as children of God to all. We know he is the healer, the prophet and the king, and that his life has redefined and transfigured all these terms. We know a lot. What we have a hard time remembering is that as those who’ve eaten at his table and have gathered up the fragments as he told us, we now are holding baskets full of bread in our hands. What we tend to forget is that now it’s all about practicing the radical hospitality of God we have encountered in Jesus.

During the bombing raids of World War II, thousands of children were orphaned and left to starve. The fortunate ones were rescued and placed in refugee camps where they received food and good care. But, many of these children who had lost so much could not sleep at night. They feared waking up to find themselves once again homeless and without food. Nothing seemed to reassure them. Finally, someone hit upon the idea of giving each child a piece of bread to hold at bedtime. Holding their bread, these children could finally sleep in peace. All through the night the bread reminded them, “Today I ate and I will eat again tomorrow.”[4]

I love that story. I love the way people responded to the trauma and the needs of these orphaned children with care and creativity. I love the reminder that pieces of bread tell stories of community and promise.

Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”[5] Just imagine, will you, a world where we don’t forget that we are holding baskets filled with bread in our hands, for all to eat.

[1] Based on Palmer’s post at https://onbeing.org/blog/loaves-and-fishes-are-not-dead/

[2] Ibid.

[3] John 20:31

[4] Dennis Linn, Sheila Fabricant Linn, Matthew Linn, Sleeping with Bread: Holding What Gives You Life (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1995), 1.

[5] John 6:35

Feeding the Flock

Margie Quinn

I feel like a broken record after preaching on the Gospel of Mark over the last month. I’ve reiterated that it’s a fast-paced gospel. Jesus is on the move, trying to flee from the crowds after healing and preaching so that, well my guess is that he can get a little alone time, but also so that he can continue to spread the good news before his inevitable arrest and execution. It’s a gospel on steroids, a gospel that is out of breath. Jesus calms storms, feeds thousands, walks on water. Most resonant with me, though, is the constant, compassionate way in which Jesus heals the people deemed unhealable, untouchable and unloveable. 

In our passage this morning, we meet the Disciples and Jesus, gathered together after Jesus has sent them out in twos to heal people and share the freeing news of the gospel with them. I can feel their eagerness as the Disciples share with Jesus all of the work they have put in. Perhaps they gathered around him, talking over each other impatiently to relay their experiences: “I sat with a woman who was sick and anointed her head with oil!” “I cured a man of his loneliness by offering him comfort and presence.” “I told a big group about you over dinner the other night.” “I had some challenging conversations with people very different from me, offering hope where they had none.” 

I can imagine Jesus’ beaming face, communicating to them with one look the same sentiment he received from God at the beginning of his ministry, “You are beloved, with you I am well-pleased.” 

We learn next that amidst their comings and goings, the Disciples have forgotten to nourish themselves, even to eat. How many of us get so caught up in the flurry of our days that we forget to feed ourselves, to breathe? I can hear the gentleness in Jesus’ tone as he says, “Come away and rest a while.” 

The tender, loving words of a shepherd who attends to his flock.

Before they can even take a load off in a deserted place, the frenzy of people swarm them, him, once again. There is, as usual in the Gospel of Mark, an urgency with which people pursue Jesus. Why? 

The system has failed these people. In this same chapter, we read about King Herod’s birthday party, in which the political elite serve up John the Baptist’s head on a platter. The people in power continue to spread fear, threatened by the growing whispers of hope. 

These frenzied crowds are people who are vulnerable in a predatory world, voiceless and seemingly ignored when they try to speak up and beg to be made well. Who guards their human dignity? Who fights for their economic stability, access to healthcare, reproductive rights?

 They have gotten too accustomed to fending for themselves. They have grown bitter and calloused, unable to utter the words “hope” lest they be disappointed once again. No wonder they chase Jesus around. They are a flock desperate  to be brought back into the fold. 

They have heard that Jesus, as Matt Skinner writes, “who is a dangerous figure in the eyes of the higher-ups, who claims spiritual authority, challenges the powers that be, who draws people to deserted places, along seashores, in villages and cities and farms and marketplaces,” is giving support to harassed people, feeding hungry people and  healing sick people. 

So, Jesus, when confronted with another crowd, doesn’t shoo them off or send them to voicemail. He “had great compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.”

Compassion, meaning that Jesus chooses to involve himself in their suffering.  

We know the words commonly associated with Jesus. Messiah, Savior, Redeemer, King of Kings, Bread of Life, Son of the Living God–we read the many words that attempt to describe the fullness of the one who came to liberate and claim spiritual authority. But here, today, we have a new word: Shepherd. Does that give you solace, too?

This shepherd has great compassion on them and chooses to involve himself in their suffering. He sees their longing eyes, hears their desperate cries and as usual, stops what he is doing to teach and heal. 

He devotes himself to healing not just physical wounds, but I believe that he works to ensure the human flourishing of heart, mind, spirit. He restores their brokenness, notices their loneliness, offers provision amidst scarcity. He offers rest, he offers food, he tends to his flock. 

What would it have been like? To experience compassion from this authority figure? I look around at our leaders today and shake my head in resignation. We live among shepherds, who, as Jeremiah states, “use their words to scatter rather than attend to.” Shepherds who destroy and divide a flock that is desperate for healing and hope. Then, I read about this shepherd who brings everyone back to the fold and I rest in the words of Mark. I read God’s promise in Jeremiah, that God will “raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd, and they shall no longer fear or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing.” I take a deep breath and remember: My help, my hope, is in the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. 

This maker of heaven and earth sent a shepherd to us, whose compassion had consequences. His actions altered economies in households and neighborhoods, transformed relationships, urged people to consider old allegiances. They give people hope. Remember hope? “The thing with feathers,” as Emily Dickson describes it, “that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without words, and never stops at all?” 

And never stops at all. 

Lately, my hope wants to stop, to withdraw, to resign itself into scoffing, mocking, numbing.

Until I read about a healer. A shepherd. In whom I place my hope. Who doesn’t use cynicism and fear to control people, who doesn’t stifle human flourishing, who doesn’t threaten the flock but instills in it a thing with feathers, who calls hope out of hiding. Who sees us as beloved. Who leads us beside still waters, prepares a table for us, who invites us to come away from our bustling lives and panicked outlooks and rest awhile, who offers us goodness and mercy all the days of our lives.

A shepherd who folds us all in, missing no one, healing everyone. Who sees our world, our country, the hopelessness and haggardness, the desperation and despair, and has compassion on all of us. May we rest, knowing that our hope is in the one who attends to us and takes care of us, even in deserted places.  

Amen.

Whose Banquet?

Thomas Kleinert

What a gloomy story that is.  You were hoping for something to feed your soul, weren’t you? Good news of great joy. Glad cries of deliverance. Especially now, when the cultural mood can only be described as ‘gloomy’, no matter how blue the skies are.

Instead we get this tale of a ghastly birthday banquet like something straight out of Game of Thrones: Ambition. Scheming. Seduction. Fear. Brutal violence.

It was Herod’s birthday. This was Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great. He loved it when people called him king, because that’s what he dreamed of being someday: the one with the power to make the truth whatever he wanted it to be. The title the Emperor in Rome had given Herod Antipas after the death of his father, was Tetrarch, “ruler of a quarter” in English: rather than trusting one man with the whole realm, Rome divided it between him and his brothers. Antipas got Galilee.

So this was his birthday, and he had invited officials and dignitaries to a banquet at the palace. Course after course of delicious food, prepared and presented to impress, and plenty to drink—before, during, and after dinner. You’ve heard the end of the story, so you already know it wasn’t the kind of party King Charles and Queen Camilla would host on the occasion of the royal birthday. Speaking of the queen, it was common for the women—had they been at the banquet at all—to leave the room after the meal, and then there would be more drinking and after-dinner entertainment.

Herod was in a splendid mood—the wine, the food, the lavish praise of ingratiating toasts—and on a whim he asked the daughter of Herodias to dance for his guests. Herodias was his wife, his second wife, to be precise, but she used to be his brother Philip’s wife, and she wasn’t a widow. No big deal in Roman law, particularly among the leading families, but in Jewish law this kind of marriage was forbidden. John the Baptist, the wilderness prophet, was very clear about it: “It is not lawful for you to have her.”[1] The fact that Herodias was also Herod’s niece apparently was no cause for concern.

Anyway, Herod, not known as a proud supporter of free speech, had John arrested, bound, and put in prison. Mark presents this as some kind of compromise, protective custody, as it were, because Herodias wanted the Baptizer dead. ‘Let him tell his truth to the dungeon walls,’ Herod may have suggested to calm his vengeful wife.

So, after dinner Herod asked the daughter of Herodias to dance for him and his guests. You may imagine a young princess in ballet shoes and a tutu, delighting the guests with a sequence from Swan Lake, but this was not that kind of dance. Let’s just say this was something typically done by professionals, and not the kind of dance your typical dad would want his daughter to perform in front of a bunch of drunk men. But Herod wasn’t your average dad and so he did ask and he watched and he was pleased and he promised on oath to grant her a wish. “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.”

“Kingdom” was a big word, of course, too big, really, but he was dreaming of becoming king, and he wanted to impress not just the girl, but his guests, with his royal generosity, and he may have had a few drinks too many. “Whatever you ask me, I will give you.”

She didn’t ask for a pony. She asked her mother. And she rushed back to Herod, “I want you to give me, right now, on a platter—the head of John the Baptist.” The platter was the girl’s idea.

Herod may have been reluctant to grant the request, but he couldn’t afford to lose face in front of his VIP guests, who had heard him make the foolish promise. Not if he wanted to continue to be the empire’s man in Galilee; not if he wanted to hold on to his kingdom dreams. So he sent a soldier of the guard with orders to bring John’s head.

The death of the prophet was the final course at the palace, and the closing line of this story shows us John’s disciples who came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb.

What do you do with a terrible story like that? Do you find anything resembling life and hope in it? It’s so bloody realistic: the party is over, the prophet is dead. What do you do with a story that ends in a tomb?

Mark, of course, tells us this gloomy tale as part of a larger story, one that encourages us to see beyond the tomb. Mark inserts this tale right after telling his readers about the rejection Jesus experienced in his hometown and how he responded by sending out the twelve two by two. The message I hear, is, Be prepared for rejection when you proclaim the nearness of God’s reign! And the disciples went out and proclaimed that all should repent. And they cast out all kinds of evils that bind and oppress people and they brought hope and healing to many communities. Proclaiming repentance, they did exactly what John had done before he was arrested, and driving out demons, they did what Jesus did, with awesome power—healing, liberating work.

When Herod heard of it, he was afraid: “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.” Herod worried the fearless kingdom messenger had risen from the dead. He had sent men who arrested and bound John and put him in prison, and he himself had sent a soldier of the guard to bring him John’s head… Mark tells us how Jesus sent the twelve to liberate and heal, and in the next scene he tells us about Herod who sent men under his authority to bind and lock up and kill. Mark wants us to see, in this and every story of his Gospel, the clash between two visions of power: the empire of death and the kingdom of life. He has inserted the gruesome banquet scene as a commentary between the sending of the Twelve and their return: it’s a flashback to what Herod did to John, and a flashforward to what Pilate will do to Jesus. Don’t be surprised, the commentary goes, when the world doesn’t gladly receive the good news of God’s reign as a gift of liberation and new life—don’t be surprised when the world can only see your message and ministry as a threat to its own dreams of greatness and domination. Mark tells you and me and any who wish to follow Jesus as servants of God’s kingdom, “Be prepared, not only for rejection and ridicule, but also for violent push-back from the servants of empire.”

And to the degree that we ourselves have been shaped by aspirations of domination, we do not gladly receive the good news of God’s reign, but can only see it as a threat to our own dreams of ruling. We would be foolish to assume that the line between the servants of God’s reign and the servants of empire can be drawn as clearly between us and others as it was between Herod’s banquet hall and the dungeon down below—the line runs through us.

The real struggle for us who wish to follow Jesus is to faithfully live as servants of God’s reign, to hear the call to repentance, to hear the call to discipleship, to hear the call to mission and service, and to humbly follow that call, again and again, trusting in the faithfulness of God—especially when fear and gloom are swamping the land.

Mark tells us the story of Jesus to help us see beyond the tomb, beyond all that threatens to bury our hope: The murder of the prophet does not stop the truth of God. The crucifixion of the witness does not put an end to God’s determination to redeem all of creation. And the ridiculing  and silencing of the servants of God’s reign cannot prevail. Why? Because justice is not merely a prophet’s demand; and compassion is not merely the wishful dream of the unnoticed, the unheard and unseen; and love is not merely a fuzzy consolation for those who lack power. The ridiculing and silencing of the servants of God’s reign cannot prevail, because justice, compassion, and love are at the heart of who God is.

Verse 30 is not part of today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark, but it’s very much part of the story. Mark tells us the apostles gathered around Jesus, and they told him all that they had done and taught. They told him about their struggle to live as servants of God’s reign in the world, and they did so surrounded by a multitude of people, men and women, children and adults who were longing for life, longing for healing and forgiveness, for new beginnings—so many, they had no leisure even to eat.

And that’s when we hear about the other banquet. That’s when we hear about the birthday banquet of the world to come where all who are hungry eat their fill, and the leftovers fill twelve baskets. That’s next Sunday’s Gospel reading, stretching the contrast between the banquets across the entire work week: The banquet of Herod the wannabe king, and the kingdom banquet of Jesus.[2]

This is the week when we collect bottles of water for our homeless neighbors. ‘What’s a bottle of water when people need housing and healthcare and jobs?’ you may ask. That’s a very good question, don’t ignore it—just don’t let it keep you from making your contribution to the banquet Jesus is hosting. At Herod’s party of bending tables and bottomless pitchers you’re unlikely to have a single sip or morsel that doesn’t leave a bitter taste in your mouth. There you must be willing to swallow the lies, the shameless flattery, the fear, and the violence. But outside the palace, Jesus is hosting the feast of life.

I don’t want to be at Herod’s party and I want no piece of his cake. I want to be where Jesus makes a banquet from five loaves of bread, two fishes, and a few bottles of water. Where will you go?

[1] See Leviticus 18:13-16; 20:21

[2] My assertion about “next Sunday’s Gospel reading” is not accurate. The Lectionary (Mk 6:30-34, 53-56) actually skips those verses, and moves to John 6 the following Sunday.

The Jesus We've Known

Margie Quinn

​​For the past few weeks, we’ve heard about Jesus in the gospel of Mark, a book that one theologian calls the “Gospel on Steroids.” Mark depicts a fast-paced Jesus, who has been on a healing tour in the first five chapters of the gospel. First we see him heal a man with an unclean spirit, then a man with a withered hand, then a paralytic, then a man known as a “demoniac,” who everyone deemed crazy. He continues his tour, touching and healing a leper, a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years who everyone thought dirty and disgusting and healing a girl everyone presumed dead. Jesus has been busy. 

On this tour, people recognize him for who he is. The man with the unclean spirit and the man who everyone thought was crazy, they are the ones who say, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?” They know it’s him. And others, perhaps coming from a place of awe or curiosity who may not necessarily recognize him but want to know more, ask these questions: “What is this, a new teaching with authority!” “We have never seen anything like this!” “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

Do you hear the excitement and curiosity in their voices? They have a faith, a belief that is bold enough to recognize him, seek him out, touch the hem of his robe, or ask him for healing. They act out of a desperate faithfulness. 

Crowds are chasing him, disciples are scrambling after him; Jesus can’t get one moment alone! That is how popular he is. That is how fast the word about him is spreading and then…

He comes home. 

He comes home, and the first thing he does is enter the synagogue. Once there, he stands up to preach. While the gospel of Mark doesn’t reveal the content of his sermon, we know from Luke 4 that this is one of his most challenging, most memorable sermons. He tells the crowd, “...the spirit of the Lord is upon me today, to preach good news to the poor, to release the captives and to free the oppressed.” Perhaps as he preached, he spoke with a newfound confidence after seeing how many people were following after him, curious about what he had to say. And yet:  the questions in his hometown are different from the questions he has heard on his healing tour. 

As he looks out, he sees his siblings, his parents, the people who watched him grow up, who changed his diapers, asked him to make a chair for them, saw him rabble-rousing with his friends. They ask, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” “Where did this man get all of this?” “What is the wisdom that has been given to him?” “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, are not his sisters with us?” 

What Jesus may have hoped would be a hometown reception quickly became a hometown rejection. 

How could this woodworker preach and heal? 

They can’t let go of the Jesus they’ve known to accept the Jesus they encounter. They can’t believe in his divinity, because of the very human boy with whom they grew up. This is not the Jesus they’ve known. They don’t know what to do with him. 

Perhaps you have felt this too, what Jesus might feel here, when you go back to your hometown or even when you spend time with your family? I certainly regress or start to doubt myself, feeling insecure. I feel the need to prove myself and insist that I have changed and broken bad patterns, that I don’t fit into the old mold. At home, I run into people from high school who watched me sing musical theater in the hallways or get Cs on quizzes. They often balk when I tell them what I do now. “You’re what now? A minister?” I usually shrink or shrug my shoulders, pretending to be just as bewildered as they are, saying, “Yeah, you know what, I guess I am.” As if I haven’t worked for years to pray for, study for and discern this calling! Have you ever done this? Feigned surprise at the person you’ve become because of the person that people have known you to be? 

I wonder if this is what Jesus is experiencing when he returns to Nazareth. 

The people we might expect to grasp our calling, the people who we may have expected to understand Jesus’ significance, Matt Skinner writes, end up failing to do so. Perhaps the insiders are the ones expecting the wrong things of Jesus while the outsiders, the lepers, the bleeding woman, the man with the withered hand, see him for exactly who he is, beg to know more about him and crawl after him in order to be healed. They see and encounter the Jesus in front of them. 

I don’t know how I would react in this situation if I were Jesus’ family. If the little boy I had seen playing with wood blocks stood up here and preached before me, maybe I would possess the same kind of skepticism or disbelief. Maybe I’d wonder, “What kind of son leaves his mom and siblings behind to say and do things that would ultimately lead him and the people following him to trouble? Now he only drops in every once in a while to see everyone before leaving again?” I think his hometown had very relatable responses. 

Like many of the prophets, like Ezekiel, Jesus quickly notices that prophets are often honored in many places but when they come home…not so much. Listen to what we learn next: scripture tells us that Jesus could do no deed of power there. After he has preached, heard the whispers and the questions, after he has seen the lack of faith, perhaps he looks out at the doubt of those around him and begins to doubt himself. Perhaps he looks out at the lack of faith in his ministry and starts to lose faith in himself. He could do no deed of power there. The Son of God! 

He could do no deed of power there except lay his hands on a few sick people and cure them. “And he was amazed at their unbelief.” Perhaps in taking Jesus for granted as Joseph and Mary's son, they took away some of the wisdom and knowledge that he possessed. 

They didn’t have faith in this Jesus because of the Jesus they’d known. Unwilling to accept that we change, evolve and come into ourselves and our calling, unable to believe in that, they turned away from him and in doing so, perhaps he turned away from himself.

When we take people for granted, when we freeze them in time, confining them to the people we’ve known, not the people we know, we miss opportunities to recognize the presence of God working through the people in front of us. We limit ourselves in not believing in the blessings that could come from the very people we are most familiar with: the people in our families, the people at church, the people in our hometown. 

Do we not believe God is expansive, creative and dynamic enough to use the people most familiar to us to bring about the kingdom of heaven here on earth? 

We need to look around at the people in our lives with whom we have underestimated, or don’t believe in, and reevaluate our faith in them. We might be missing the very presence of Jesus right in front of us. 

And for those of us who can relate more to Jesus in this story than to his hometown crowd, let me be clear that we are not responsible for how others perceive our own ministries and gifts. I do not have to shrink or be self-deprecating when I tell people here that “Yes, I was that girl and yes, I am that woman–a minister. Full stop.” We do not have to prove ourselves to anyone, especially those close to home. 

Jesus reveals this to us in the latter part of this passage. He notices that he can’t do these deeds of power on his own and he looks out at the twelve men who have faithfully followed him this far. He commissions the Disciples, sending them out in pairs so that they don’t have to do this work alone. He tells them not to bring anything, just themselves, who they are and who they know themselves to be. “When you enter people’s houses,” he says, “if you feel like they refuse to hear you or are not welcoming to you, shake the dust.” Keep walking. I know who you are. I encounter blessings in you. I see the love of God working in you and through you and that’s enough for me. 

This morning, I invite you and me to continue to spread the love of Jesus, even when we feel misunderstood or taken for granted or underestimated or yes, even rejected. And may we have enough faith that those we have underestimated or belittled, those who we have frozen in time just might be the very people who have a blessing for us. 

May it be so.

Awaken the sleeping Christ

Thomas Kleinert

Some of you would rather be at the beach right now, wouldn’t you? Or perhaps you’re more of a lake person? Fontana Lake is great when it’s in the 90s down here. Or just imagine sitting in the shade by a creek, your feet dangling in the water, and all the mosquitoes are on vacation in Michigan.

Do you know anybody who doesn’t love being in the water, or on it, or at least by it? Splashing around in the pool, zipping down a water slide, doing a canon-ball from a rope swing, soaking in a tub, catching the mist from a waterfall, waiting for a fish to bite, or just listening to the sound of the waves rolling up on the beach – aren’t we all drawn to water like we were all otters once?

When the crowds who gathered to hear Jesus were getting larger, he asked his disciples to have a boat ready for him, just in case, so he could pull away from the shore and teach from the boat.[1] People heard his stories about the sower scattering seed on the ground and birds nesting in the shade of a shrub, they heard these parables of God’s reign with water in the background: the sound of little waves lapping up onto the pebbles and rocks. And they heard them with a view of the lake stretching to the horizon, under the wide canopy of the Galilean sky.

When I imagine that scene by the lake—all of us, young and old, locals and folks from far away, resting by the water’s edge and listening to Jesus telling stories about the kingdom of God—when I sit in that scene, it’s like I’m not just hearing the promise of a better, fuller life together, I’m already living it, body and soul. I hope you too know those moments in the presence of Jesus when you wouldn’t hesitate to declare that the kingdom is already here.

On that day, when evening came, Jesus said to the disciples, “Let us go across to the other side.” Leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat. Most of the people on the beach, I imagine, went home; they had things to do: there were animals to look after, meals to prepare, kids to get ready for bed. Perhaps some of them hung around a little longer, watching the boat go east. Why would he want to go over there?, some may have wondered. Only godless Gentiles over there, idol worshippers, hog farmers, those aren’t our people over there, what business does he have going to them?

Dark clouds were moving in, casting shadows over what had been such a lovely day by the lake. Meanwhile, in the boat, the disciples were enjoying the quiet and the evening breeze—until the wind started picking up, that is, and a storm broke loose. Waves were beating into the boat, and it was filling up fast. The raging wind was whipping the water into a churning frenzy of crashing waves—chaos had been unleashed.

Water is one of our most powerful symbols. It represents some of our deepest needs and comforts along with some of our greatest fears. Few of us are living with a sense that these are days for smooth sailing—too many fears and worries are rocking our little boat, too many unpredictable forces are pushing it every which way. Will we be able to reject the heresy of white supremacy dressed up in Christian symbols? Will we be able to slow the use of violence as a means of dealing with conflict? Will we stop treating our home planet like we had another one in the basement? Will we be able to talk with each other across the growing divide of world views and habits of thought? We can’t name all that has been unleashed and let loose among us, but the wind has picked up and the sea is rising and the waves are crashing against our little boat.

The church has taught us to sing, A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing, our present help amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing. I see a stronghold built on a mighty rock, surrounded by raging seas, waves battering the walls relentlessly, but to no avail: this fortress is a mighty one. And though this world with devils filled, should threaten to undo us—we will not fear. The powers of darkness grim, we tremble not for them; their rage we can endure, for lo, their doom is sure: One little word shall fell them.

One little word. It’s a lot easier to sing bravely against the raging storm from behind the walls of a fortress built high on a cliff than from inside a little boat tossed about by the wind and the waves. And the disciples aren’t singing. They’re looking at Jesus, curled up on a cushion in the stern, fast asleep—a picture of peace amid the chaos.

They wake him up, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” No, they don’t need him to take hold of the rudder or help bail out the boat. They are terrified, and it scares them that he clearly isn’t the least bit troubled. “Do you not care that this little boat is going down and all of us with it?” They are frantic, and the fact that he isn’t, only makes it worse.

Mark paints this scene with the ancient colors of the Creator subduing the forces of chaos. Waking up, Jesus rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Be silent! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.  Jesus spoke, and the sea lay low. The scene echoes words and movements from Genesis 1 and several psalms. He made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed. He spoke and it came to be.[2] The disciples were filled with great fear and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

There is a popular reading of this story where Jesus isn’t rebuking the wind and the waves, but rather the disciples for being afraid  and for their lack of faith. According to that reading, we ought to always remember, no matter how high the waves or how violent the winds may be, that Jesus is in the boat with us—and we shouldn’t be afraid, and if we had faith, we wouldn’t be afraid. According to that reading, we ought to tie ourselves to the mast and laugh at the storm, “Bring it on! Is that all you got?” But we are afraid when chaos rages and the unknown threatens to overwhelm us, and feeling guilty for being afraid has never made anyone feel less afraid. So keep in mind: Jesus didn’t rebuke the disciples; he commanded the wind and the waves to be still.

Now is perhaps the moment to remember that the whole trip was his idea. “Let us go across to the other side,” he said. This was no evening cruise to a restaurant on the other side of the lake. He took them out to sea, away from the land and the life they knew, to Gentile lands. Why? Because sin and fear ruled on the other side, and Jesus crossed over to bring forgiveness, liberation, and healing. Idols and demons ruled on the other side, and Jesus invaded their territory to bring the kingdom of God. This was no pleasure cruise, this was D-day. And the storm wasn’t an episode of really bad weather. The storm was and is this very moment when the forces of chaos are doing their level worst to stop that little boat with waves raging and wind gusts blowing from every direction.

Jesus’ life and mission is one dangerous crossing after another. His presence, his words, his entire way of being in the world lead to constant confrontation with all the forces opposed to God’s dominion. The truth is, when Jesus is near, the storms aren’t far. But Jesus speaks the word that brought light and life into being. Jesus speaks, and we hear the One who prescribed bounds for the sea, saying, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped.”[3] 

“Who then is this?” the disciples ask—and Mark wants us to know deep in our bones that Jesus speaks and acts with the power of God. Jesus has taken us into the boat with him. The whole trip is his idea. He is taking us with him to the other side in love’s invasion of the world.

We know God didn’t save him from drowning in the chaos of our lovelessness. Jesus did drown in the dark depth of death on a cross, but God raised him from the dead. Fear and sin are all-consuming, but the love that called light and life into being is greater.

We’re in the boat with him. The whole trip is his idea. He’s taking us to the other side, again and again, across all that divides us, in the name of love.

And when it’s all too much? When it’s just overwhelming like it so often is these days? Augustine of Hippo wrote sometime in the early fifth century, “If your faith is dormant in your heart, it is as though Christ were sleeping in your boat, because it is through faith that Christ dwells in you. When the sea begins to get choppy, awaken the sleeping Christ.”[4] I like Augustine’s take on this story. Don’t let anyone tell you that letting Jesus sleep in the stern somehow is an expression of fearless faith. When the sea begins to get choppy, awaken the sleeping Christ.

[1] Mark 3:9; 4:1

[2] Genesis 1:7ff.; Psalm 107:29; Psalm 33:9; see also Ps 65:7 You silence the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves, the tumult of the peoples. Ps 89:9-13 You rule the raging of the sea; when its waves rise, you still them…

[3] See Job 38:8-11

[4] Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, ed. John E. Rotelle, Vol. 4, 342.