Bad Love?

There are a whole genre of songs from my adolescence that express the sentiment I am calling this morning “Bad Love.” Bad Love is one such tune; another is Love Hurts. In lieu of moaning my way through either of those ditties to set us up for this morning’s consideration of the dirt under the edge of the biblical rug we are to discover in John’s epistles, I offer instead a prayer, a poem of the Sufi mystic Rumi.

Disciplines

Do not expect to be always happy on this way.
You have been caught by a lion, my dear.

The friend dumps plaster on your head.
Think of it as expensive perfume.

Inside you there is a monster
that must be tied up and whipped.

Watch the man beating a rug.
He is not mad at it.
He wants to loosen the layers of dirt.

Ego accumulations are not loosened
with one swat. Continual work
Is necessary, disciplines.

In dreams, and even awake,
you will hear the beloved screaming at you.

A carpenter saws and chisels a piece of wood,
because he knows how he wants to use it.

Curing a hide, the tanner
rubs in acid and all manner of filth.
This makes a beautiful soft leather.

What does the half-finished hide know?
Every hard thing that happens
works on you like that.

Hurry, Shams. Come back
like the sun comes back
every day with new
and powerful secrets.

The serious scholars who put together the New Revised Common Lectionary, the three year cycle of readings many Protestant communions use to guide their worship and study, are that kind of people, too. Their job is to give us, in three years’ time, the fullest possible exposure to the themes and narratives of scripture….but there are some parts of the bible they would really prefer to keep in the closet, unexamined. And although they have spent the entire six weeks of Easter working over the five short chapters of the first letter of John, you will never see these words from chapter 1: My little children, it is the last hour!!!! As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come!!!! From this we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us they would have remained with us, but by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. From this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. (1 John 1:18-19) Well, then.

The New Testament professor Frances Taylor Gench, who teaches at Union Seminary in Richmond and served on the Theological Task Force for Peace, Purity, and Unity, led our presbytery of Tropical Florida in a study of these less…uplifting texts from the Johannine letters, just about three years ago, as our own presbytery began to try to talk , finally, about the issues of social justice and Christology that have long divided us. Her honest, unflinching treatment of the difficult and painful schisms in the church of John’s letters—schisms over issues of Christology and social practice in the Church—so much like today, have long stayed with me. On Tuesday, this Presbytery which could not bring itself to speak lovingly to nor behave tolerantly toward colleagues who disagreed, will try to practice something we call Gracious Separation—releasing nine of our sister congregations to other, more conservative denominations—but which the author of John’s three letters would probably call Schism, which it is. I remember how Dr. Gench urged us to try to live and learn together, and read these words to warn us how easy it is to move from disagreement to disgust, especially among those we love and ought to love. From 2 John: Everyone who does not abide in the teaching of Christ but goes beyond it does not have God…do not receive into the house or welcome anyone who comes to you and does not bring this teaching, for to welcome is to participate in the deeds of such a person. (2 John 9-10) Remembering how, down through the years of fighting over teachings relating to Christ’s welcome (or the church’s judgment) of homosexual persons, we each had suspected the other of not recognizing the bible (or Jesus) if he had knocked us over the head in a dark alley, we (or at least I) squirmed. Taylor went on, in her mellifluous southern lady voice, to tell us that the only place in the bible where the “antichrist” is mentioned is in the letters of John…and the only persons to whom that hateful and fearsome appellation is assigned is…a member of the community of Jesus, a member of the family, with whom the Elder who wrote the letters found himself in irreconcilable differences.

It’s hard to work up a head of self-righteous steam about those who have called me an antichrist for my belief system…when sitting next to me is a friend whose positions, and sometimes whose personality, I have secretly—and sometimes not so secretly—denounced as the same. Gench had gone from preachin’ to meddlin’, and I didn’t like it so much as I thought I would.

Here’s the thing: the four books that make up the Johannine corpus—the gospel and the three letters that follow—were written to and about a community, a family, really, that had gone through a painful and difficult divorce. Many scholars agree that the gospel of John, written late in the first century, had such a heavenly, divine view of who Jesus was because that was the issue over which the church had reached irreconcilable differences with the synagogue. That is to say, the church, which had been a part of Jewish life and practice, eventually divorced over their differences about who Jesus was: whether an inspired human teacher, or the divine manifestation of God in human flesh. That family broke up over this issue, and the gospel of John was written to help those who had lost their kin and their home place over it to remember what they stood for, and what it had cost them. The letters of John which followed were written, a little later, from that same fraught and frightened place, by an Elder who needed to believe he was right, and whose fear that he might not be caused him to anathematize the friends and family who disagreed with him. So, out of the same mouth that says, beloved, let us love one another because love is of God, also comes the angry and shrill, we are from God, whoever knows God listens to us. (and not to them!). Sometimes the bible’s best teaching is not taking at face value what is said, but in looking at how our convictions about what is most important for us lead us to behave exactly contrary to what we say we value the most. I believe in love, and if you don’t see it the way I do, then, to hell with you. Amen.

This past week, the state of North Carolina raised the stakes on its ban of same-sex marriage from a state law to a constitutional imperative. And President Obama confessed publically his long struggle with same-sex marriage and made public that he now supports it wholeheartedly—the first such affirmation by a sitting president. Both actions were promoted on the ground of Christian faith and practice—and both the state of North Carolina and President Obama have now been exhaustively denounced and demonized for their conclusion by brothers and sisters in the Christian faith. The Elder of I, II, and III John would be so proud!!!

It’s the people we love, or as Stephen Sapp always says, the people we ought to love, whom we can’t bear disagreement with, graciously. Some of the bitterest theological battles I have waged have been waged without mercy in my own or my parents’ living room. Some of the hardest words I have ever spoken have been spoken to my daughter, or my husband, or my little brother, because when those people get under my skin, or fail to support me when I need to know that I am right (and of course that means they need to admit that they are wrong) the only thing I can think of to do to save myself from the hurt is to shove my principled living into the closet and attack. The only people who deserve the title “antichrist,” after all, are those in whom we once saw Christ—that is to say, Love—face to face, but in whom now, at least for a moment, we cannot see any good at all.

Well, now I’ve gone and revealed what a mess I am, and probably not a one of you has ever fallen victim, as I have, to what I call baaad love. It comforts me a little to know that the bible isn’t much less human than I am, so that when I fall back or fail to be the kind of Christian, friend, ex- , spouse, parent, and child that I want to be, others have been down the bad love road before me, and still got up and dusted themselves off and went on reflecting the path of Christ, in the end. Sometimes, when the temptation to thunder antichrist!! is the worst, I think about this old story:

Once upon a time, a vibrant community of monks was reduced to five squabbling and cranky old men. Day after day, they went about God’s business devoid of joy and despairing of attracting neighboring townspeople to their work and worship. One day the abbot, in desperation, went to visit an old hermit who used to be the town’s rabbi. “I don’t know what to do,” he cried. Is there not some ancient wisdom that can help restore life and love to our community? “No.” said the rabbi sadly, “but I will tell you this: the messiah is one of you.” The abbot went home, puzzled and confused. “One of us?” He looked at his members and shook his head. No way. He told two of the brothers, and they, too, laughed in disbelief…and began to wonder: which one of us is messiah? On the off chance that one would turn out to be, each brother began to treat the other as if he might be Christ, and as each one both gave and received that honor, the old cranky monks became known for their extraordinary respect and kindness toward others…and thus, the community was renewed.

$3.00 Worth of God”

Keith Green, an evangelical singer whose music used to challenge and disturb me when I was a Baptist teenager, once said this: Americans have been inoculated with a slight case of Christianity that is preventing them from getting the real thing.

I was struck by this quote while pondering the eloquent words of the author of I John about the power of love: its fearlessness, its longing, its uncompromising purity of commitment—who can attain it? And who could resist it? We all want to love like that…..or, do we? Maybe the slight case could be enough for us….the “real thing” being far too potent an infection to be borne in this world.

The German liberation theologian Dorothee Soelle tells a story about her neighbor in post-WW II Hamburg, a widow who had been living alone since her husband had died. She lived in a tidy apartment, two rooms of which she rented out in order to increase her income. The only people she knew were the renters and the nearest neighbors on her floor. Her life consisted in keeping the apartment clean, going to the market, and cooking her meals. She seldom read books, or even magazines. She watched a little television in the afternoon. She was difficult to talk with, frequently repeating the same jokes, only becoming energized when relating stories of the homeland from which she had fled at the end of the war. She rarely spoke of anyone except herself. Though she was a confirmed and self-described Christian, her slight case of religion had very little impact in her circumscribed life. One time, she told Soelle, she had become friendly with a former colleague from work, but I don’t let her in the house.

To live one’s days alone like the woman in Hamburg, with no meaningful connection to another, no participation in the world of her renters or neighbors, no life at all beyond the self, is not living., says Soelle, but rather, a living death.

The first epistle of John, written late in the first century of the Christian era, echoes this stark judgment: We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death.. In other words, the person who does not love is spiritually dead, and those who want to feel and be genuinely alive, must live for and with others.

It’s tempting to read 1st John—obsessed with the idea of love—as a kind of feel-good script, eminently suitable for weddings, so soothing and benign and sweet and tender and helpful…but the writer of 1st John, struggling for survival against the Romans while enduring schism within his own church family, has something else in mind altogether. When he is speaking about love and community and God, he is not being nice, but rather, praying his way through matters of life and death. The love he yearns for is potent, powerfully inconvenient, and massively disruptive of life as we know it: an experience so vital that it quite literally defined his world in terms as clear as darkness and light. This is love, as the Song of Solomon puts it, that is fierce as death, a passion as mighty as the grave, its darts are darts of fire, a blazing flame. Vast floods cannot quench love, nor rivers drown it. That is a lot to ask for—maybe, too much to bear? The poet Wilbur Rees put it this way:

I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please. not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. I don’t want enough of him to make me love a (homeless) man or pick beets with a migrant. I want ecstasy, not transformation; I want the warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack. I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please.

American life continues sliding, I fear, into a $3.00 worth of god world view. We still use the language of welcome that Emma Lazarus once inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free… but, worn down by years of war and fears of threats and a shrinking economy, we are more vulnerable than ever to settling—settling for a cup of warm milk, the warmth of the womb and a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack.

But we know we want more. We know we are more. We know God expects more.
And we know that God will give us more than we can imagine or believe, if we will take the risk of Love. And that is why we are here, week by week, trying to help each other with our prayers and our practice, to be more of God in our lives and in the worlds our lives touch.

I’ve been haunted all week by one of the prayer requests that was offered in worship last Sunday, as we sat, enveloped in community while the hard rain beat down on our metal roof, insistent and demanding. Camilla Tamargo stood up to make a plea for a child whose family is a client where she works. She spoke of the sweetness of this ten year old boy, and of his needs: he is partially paralyzed on one side of his body, mentally handicapped; yet he knows what love should be: he wonders, Camilla said, why doesn’t my mommy want me? Her voice carrying over the sound of the rain, Camilla wrung her hands and said, please, please, if anyone knows of someone who could find room for this child in their lives….

Beloved, says the author of I John, just another Christian like you and me who has been infected by the bug and can’t shake off the demanding Love of God: beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us, and God’s love is perfected in us.

Let us pray: My Jesus, I love thee, I know thou art mine. For thee all the follies of sin I resign. My precious redeemer, my savior art thou: if ever I loved thee, my Jesus, ‘tis now. Amen.

A Wake of Goodness and Mercy

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want….
He makes me
Lie down in green pastures
Leads me beside still waters
Restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I fear no evil
for You are with me.
Your rod and your staff,
they comfort me
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies
You anoint my head with oil
my cup overflows….

Surely goodness and mercy
shall follow me
all the days of my life….
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.

The story was about a cocktail party conversation with a bunch of seminarians and the boyfriend of one of them: a real shepherd. A seminarian at the party asked…..is it true, the good shepherd gives his life for the sheep? Nope, a dead shepherd don’t do anybody any good…. If you couldn’t tell by the reading and all the hymns based on Psalm 23, this is good shepherd Sunday….usually an extended metaphor on the shepherd, Jesus about whom there are so many childhood bible and church pictures that the life has been beaten out of the metaphor, especially for us, for whom the agrarian context is distant and quaint) But in the life of Jesus and his friends—the 23rd Psalm was a prayer, a song of the heart that anchored his own life, despite circumstances, in a sense of the abiding presence of God. This morning, I invite us into a similar way of praying: to allow this so familiar psalm to seep into the cracks and crevices of our daily lives to see what wisdom lingers there, to connect where we live and move with the sometimes-distant benevolence of God.

We will consider four moments in the psalm:
The Lord is my shepherd….I shall not want.

What does it mean to live a life grounded in this belief: “I Have Enough.”
So much of our lives is focused around anxiety: rooted in what we lack.
Possessions, yes, resources; but more, the anxiety that we, ourselves, are not enough, not sufficient, severely lacking in the face of some imagined perfection or adequacy. So often our self perception focuses on our inadequacy instead of our sufficiency, our gift from God. What wakes us up in the night, I suspect, is not the challenges that face us, but the deep and haunting notion that, in the face of those challenges, we do not have enough, we ourselves will not be enough.

I can’t do this…because I lack _____________.

The psalm, after enumerating the many places and gifts God gives (green pastures, still waters, rest and restoration) invites us to imagine a life grounded in trust and abundance, rather than in anxiety. The word for “right” in the phrase, he leads me in right paths is tsedeq, from which the mystical tradition in Judaism derives the name for those who are wise: Tsaddek. From the same root comes the word for offerings: tsaddakah. The way of wisdom breathes into a sense that we have enough, are enough: living in “enough,” we offer ourselves with generosity and grace.

How might our lives be more rooted in a sense of trust, sufficiency, confidence.? That God has made us, and made us adequate? How might the way we inhabit our workplaces, schools, homes and neighborhoods be more of an offering, a blessing, if we lived in the conviction: The Lord is my shepherd, I have enough.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil….

Some of you may recall a story I once told about a walk in the valley where our cabin is in the mountains of Colorado, an intentional walk in the darkness, with my daughter, so that we could see the stars…. A walk that began in wonder and appreciation, and ended, for no reason other than an overactive imagination and the sound of a cow breathing near us in the field, in a headlong, reckless rush back to the safety of light and warmth. We don’t walk through the valleys of our shadows, we run headlong. When threat looms….when grief hovers…when death is near or just past…when we are in any place of darkness, sorrow, fear, or distress, we do not linger there, but will do anything, anything, to preserve our denial and restore our souls—even at the cost of our souls.

The study of holocaust survivors: interviews that rewarded happy endings.

The psalm invites us to pay attention to the places in our lives that are shadowed.
The psalmist invites us not to fear evil in our lives, nor in the lives of others, but to walk alongside them, to companion them with tenderness, patience, slowness.

To walk through the valley of shadows, not to run. To meander, to pause, to step carefully, not carelessly, over the rocks and past the pits and pitfalls. To pay attention to those places that come to all of us, many times, with gentleness, and not with fear. Rainer Maria Rilke:

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots embrace:

A dream once lost
among the sorrows and songs.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies…you anoint my head with oil.

There has always been for me, in imagining this scene from the psalm, a tiny sense of smugness. Who doesn’t want one’s enemies to watch us with hunger and longing, being feted, rewarded, treated with lavish respect and joy?

Two stories: the presbytery meeting here at RPC, when, in the midst of being dis-enfranchised, the people of this church prepared a table, literally in the presence of their “enemies,” those who would shut them out and shut them down. From where do we find the strength, courage, and freedom to prepare such a table?

Some time ago, I heard from an old Miami veteran of the civil rights movement a story from right downtown in Overtown. A man of color, Mr. Clayton Moore, went into a diner with his white friend, and they sat down at the counter. With a face twisted in hate and disgust, the short order cook and waiter sneered: we don’t serve niggers here. The room tensed, fell silent. Danger was there, in the presence of enemies. Not missing a beat, Mr. Moore said pleasantly, That’s all right, then. I don’t want n–, I just want ham and eggs. The cook froze, and in the silence of that standoff a holy space opened up: his lips twitched, and he laughed. Ok, then, ham and eggs.
In the presence of enemies, God makes a way for us to sit down together, to feast.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.

These days, when I read the words, shall follow me…., the first image that comes to me is of pursuit. I recall moments in which I have found myself on a dark road at night, and fear caused me to believe that the sounds behind me, the shadows of men and the sounds of footfalls, were not goodness and mercy following, but rather, danger in pursuit. What pursues us in the night? What do we leave in our wake?
For more than two months now, we have been following the story of Trayvon Martin and the neighborhood watchman, Zimmerman, who shot and killed him after following him down some dark valley we can scarcely imagine. There was no goodness there, no mercy for either man in the end. Families have been shattered by whatever it was that followed Zimmerman and haunted his heart: by that, and by how, in turn, he followed Travyon Martin. Communities beyond Miami and Sanford have been, by this event, shaken and shattered—old wounds of racism we had hoped were healed, ripped open and exposed in their raw, painful ugliness.

What follows you? What do you leave in your wake? When you leave a meeting, a room, a visit with family, a chance encounter in the grocery store, the gas station, the shop—what is left in your wake? Were you on the phone as you pushed your groceries down the counter, so that the clerk who checked you out found in your wake not courtesy or a moment of community, but instead, indifference and invisibility? Did your impatient honking or angry gesturing at an intersection shock someone into better driving, or add a touch of violence to a day that may already have been shadowed by trouble?

How does our orientation to these words—whether we live a life pursued by threat, or a life in which we imagine ourselves leaving a wake of goodness and mercy behind us, shape our reality, and the experience of those around us?

Practicing a life shaped by goodness and mercy, we will find ourselves, paradoxically, followed less and less by fear…and regardless of circumstances,
the gracious rooms of the house of the Lord will rise around us, providing shelter and welcome—all our life long.

Second Hand Stories

Every year, the appointed gospel reading for the Sunday after Easter is the same: the story, told second-hand, of the one the church has dubbed “Doubting Thomas.” With such a very large and diverse canon of scripture, why? Why tell this story, again and again to the diminished congregations who gather on what is called, somewhat ironically, “Low” Sunday? Though “Low Sunday” is merely a liturgical designation that contrasts the style of the Mass on Easter Day—“a “High” and formal liturgy—with the more ordinary “Low” services that follow— Low Sunday is for every church in Christendom a day of contrast experientially—the crowds are gone, the riot of flowers and feasts, diminished, the people who gather here and in other places on this Sunday are, like the eleven in John’s locked room, those disciples who are willing to admit the reality of fear and doubt, anxiety and threat in daily life, and who still are willing to gather, to wonder, to wish, and to wait and see if, and how, the risen Christ might show up in our midst.

This work of watching, waiting, wondering and wishing is important: so very important to learn as a spiritual practice, that the Church does not devote just one Sunday to Easter: rather, the celebration merely begins with the Day of Resurrection but continues for a full seven weeks: Sundays in not After, Easter. We are in Easter now: what is our work, our hope, and our practice?

The Gospel of John tells us first, our Easter work begins in diminishment.

The disciples, minus Thomas, have heard the witness of the women—that the tomb was empty and Christ was raised and seen by Mary—but they live in a real world: a world of threat, anxiety, loss and powerlessness that is not easily trumped by tales of resurrection. This is our world as well: a world where the persistence of circumstance wears down our stories of faith and challenges what we believe with incessant demands for proof. The second hand stories of believers are too small an antidote to the power of fear and loss: disciples, even faithful ones, still struggle and strive to believe. “We have seen the Lord” they say, but what, really, is different? A week after Jesus shows up, moves through a locked door, wishes his people peace, and gives them the gift of the Holy Spirit, John tells us, the disciples are still hiding in a locked room, still afraid, still unable to figure out or even to feel what the inward power of the Spirit is meant for, in lives that have changed so utterly and so soon. Thomas gives voice to the continuing state of struggle all of them—all of us—experience in such seasons: unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.

Okay. So, what Thomas has….put his finger on, is the crux of the matter: if God comes, it must be in the midst of, not despite, those times of hardship that give all of us so many reasons to doubt. A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said “peace be with you.”

The story of Thomas and his friends tells us that loss, pain, and hardship, which so easily shut us down and lock the doors against hope and faith, are in fact not a barrier to the presence of God, but rather, the very door through which God comes.

The Gospel of John tells us, secondly, that the God we are praying to see, after, is not always or easily recognizable.

When Jesus twice walks through the locked doors of the disciples’ fear and grief and confusion, they do not know who he is. Jesus came and said, “peace be with you…after he showed them his hands and his side….then they rejoiced when they saw the Lord.

If the God we are praying to see looks exactly like the God we worshiped before, we are bound to be disappointed in our seeking. The risen Christ, the Easter God who meets us After, does not, may not, look anything like the God we worshiped before. And how could he? The God whom, Christian faith teaches, was incarnate among us—that is, who took human form and experienced all that human life experiences—could not possibly be the same after loss, suffering, or hardship—for we are not the same after such things come to us. The God who honors our human experiencing with God’s own life must be changed, as we are.

Easter work, the gospel of John teaches us, is done when we face and touch and feel the effects of violence in the world, pain in our life and in the lives of others, when we touch the wounds and the scars and do not flinch away from them. In different seasons of life, Jesus’ appearance changes for us: especially when hardships have given us or others many reasons to doubt.

The gospel of John reminds us that logical reason is not the answer to our doubts and fears: but rather, experience is.

Then Jesus said to Thomas, “put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord, and my God!”

This morning, a number of our regular disciples are not here worshiping with us, but are marching down Collins Avenue on Miami Beach at Gay Pride, and standing for the rest of the day in a booth labeled “Riviera Presbyterian Church: reflecting the path of Christ” alongside our neighbors from Temple Beth Am, Coral Gables Congregational and Temple Beth Sholom. The people standing and marching for us have, in their own lives or in the lives of people they loved, experienced the wounding of rejection, and the doubt that God lives or loves them. Through the experience of living with honesty, and through touching and being touched; they have found peace; they have experienced the transformed face of Christ. They did not come to believe that God loves them as GLBT people because of logical argument: they came to believe it because of their experience—their experience in congregations like ours; their experience of living and loving. And their experience of living and loving and receiving peace has allowed them to leave behind the locked doors and closed rooms of fear, and to go out into the world to be and to become Christ there. What they hope to accomplish by their presence at Pride—by our presence at Pride—is to offer their stories and their presence as a doorway through which others might see and experience faith.

In a similar way, when you or I show up—empty handed or with a casserole, filled with words of comfort or silent—when someone we know is in need, or loss, or hardship—we begin to show what God might look like, and open the door to a new way of seeing and knowing God.

The gospel of John helps us to know the tools by which we can navigate our way into Easter faith. When we cannot know any longer what God should look like, we recognize God’s new face and presence through the experience of peace and through a touching love that is stronger than death. In the wonder of our wounds, God finds us, we find each other, and we find God.

Serene Jones, a theologian who through her work with traumatized women has tried to understand the heart of the gospel, says this:

When God comes, we will recognize God’s presence in those moments when peace is offered, in those moments when life’s most brutal violence is honestly acknowledged, and when, in the midst of this bracing honesty, we realize that we are not alone but have, in fact, been always, already found.

This is the work which Easter requires of us: that we embrace our own doubts and hardships, that we find in them a new doorway to the presence of God, that we wait to see how God will look in that new moment, and that, when we have lived into that experience, we share it with others, touching them as we ourselves have been touched.

God will come, and be our guest, through all the locked doors of our lives, if we are willing to become host to the Holy.

I love this old poem of the Sufi mystic Rumi, whose invitation challenges the Thomas in us all:

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

~ Rumi ~

A Terrain of Resurrection

Some have named this place where we are rooted a place of death
We fix them with our callous eyes and call it, rather
A terrain of resurrection. (Robin Morgan, Easter Island: I Embarkation”

Writing an Easter sermon is like composing a eulogy, or maybe an obituary, for someone you loved beyond bearing. It’s almost impossible to begin: because to begin means to confront the reality of loss. To admit how stunned you are, in the face of death, and still to be able to tell those stories, you have to believe that that life being resurrected—in words, in living memory and in practice—still has a palpable reality; still has, somehow, a continuity, despite the evidence of death you can neither avoid nor evade. To speak about such things, you have to know—deeply, unshakably—that the life you are commemorating matters, still: present and future. . . or else, the effort it requires to tell the stories that keep that soul alive, despite the sharp pain of absence, would be utterly unbearable. So the act of remembering and speaking about those we have lost, becomes, in its own way, a proclamation of resurrection.

But: what resurrection is, for Jesus, for my lost loved one, or for yours—none of us can truly comprehend, on this side of the grave. Thus, the witness of a believer and a survivor to the truth of resurrection does not begin on Easter morning, but before:
in a way of life that finds wisdom
in attentiveness and watchfulness
in an ability to admit what we do not know
and through a profound reverence that is beneath, and beyond, words.

A friend who called me this week to see how I was doing, during a holy week so closely following the death of my mother, commented: well, maybe it’s a good thing that we’re in the gospel of Mark this year. The gospel of Mark ‘s version of the resurrection has always been an optional reading for Easter Day; its disturbing ambivalence usually passed over in favor of the more lyrical and celebrative story of the resurrection told in the gospel of John. Though the church has spent the entirety of the liturgical year following Mark’s urgent and powerful telling of Jesus’ story, the abrupt and, let’s face it, disturbing train wreck that is Mark’s last line—and they ran away, and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid—makes no sense to a people who have been primed by the good news of the gospel to anticipate a happy ending.

Anybody with half a brain knows this is an awful way to end a story that was supposed to be good news. Even the other gospel writers figured that out, and embellished Mark’s stark announcement and disappointing failures with a soulful walk down the Emmaus road, a breaking of bread with a mysterious stranger turned risen Lord, a breakfast on the beach, and a be not afraid, touch my hands and see that it is I who stand before you.

The church, appreciating the additions and enrichments offered by those later gospel writers, edited the ending of the gospel of Mark to include the more comforting elements of supernatural signs, definitive creeds, and clear-cut directions from the risen Lord to his confident disciples. But in its earliest days, the ending of the gospel of Mark embraced the human, both in Jesus and in us. It was a gospel less about resurrection, and more about discipleship. It was a story about what it meant to love God and to follow Jesus…even when, and perhaps especially when, you and those around you failed and fall apart.

There are scores of theological, literary, textual and historical-critical arguments for Mark 16:8 being the best, true ending of Mark’s gospel. I could delineate those arguments for us this morning; but I won’t. Instead, let me say simply, I believe in this ending of Mark’s because it rings true. . .

More true than the supernatural certainty of Matthew, the philosophical theology of John, or the sacramental elegance of the gospel of Luke—I am kin to the women whose story ends the gospel of Mark: whose Easter Day was an unexpected meeting between ordinary people and the profound unanswerable mystery of the empty tomb.

But if the other gospels said too much, and the additions to the gospel of Mark got the ending wrong, betraying Mark’s experience and intent, with what are we left? What are we to do with a faith story that begins with good news but ends with its surviving characters stunned, afraid, and silent in the face of an announcement of resurrection? Does God show up even when, like the women, we are undone, stunned and speechless in the face of a hope we do not understand and are not yet ready to touch?

The women of Mark invite us to practice a faith marked by watchful attentiveness.

We live, too much of the time, in fast-forward. The other gospel witnesses, John, Luke and Matthew, support this kind of cultural practice as faithful. Uncomfortable with the lack of movement in Mark’s ending to his gospel, they hurry the Church into its future.

Luke’s Jesus shows up immediately following his resurrection, walking alongside his friends on the Emmaus Road, offering the practice of breaking of bread and drawing his disciples out of Jerusalem to charge them with impending gift of the Holy Spirit and Power From On High. He teaches that waiting is only a temporary feature of our spiritual journey, a moment to be endured, then replaced with Power and Direction and the structures of organized religion.

Before the women of Mark, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, come to the empty tomb with their spices, they have been named by the gospel as those who stood by and watched while Jesus suffered and died. Mark describes them also as those who used to follow Jesus and who provided for him when he was in Galilee. For Mark, the gift of resurrection is not supernatural, but arises out of the context of a life of attentiveness to the ordinary responsibilities and moments of living. What they will learn, at the empty tomb—what they will come to experience and understand, after they leave the place of burial—is not a Resurrection Faith handed over on a silver platter., but a new understanding informed by the experiences of life: the ordinary, the dreadful, and the joyful altogether.

This is, for Mark, the way of wisdom that often runs counter to our practice. On Wednesday mornings here at Riviera, some of us gather for prayer and study of each week’s scripture texts. Often, we ask for prayers for circumstances we want changed in our lives, in our world, in the lives of those we love. We ask for healing, for peace, for comfort, for help. Rarely do we ask just to be allowed to notice what is going on in our lives, to be present to it. This past Wednesday, Henrietta Jones, the eldest mother of our community at 96, showed us the way of wisdom in her prayer. Today, she said, my Mary is leaving me. I have moved into assisted living and she has been caring for me all these years. We waited for her to ask for what she needed: but that was it. Just a prayer that noticed, with gratitude and sadness, a change in a friendship, a change in circumstance, a space opening up for….something to come.

If we watch and pay attention, in all circumstances, we hold open the holy space necessary to make room for the terrain resurrection to reveal itself t us.

The women of Mark invite us to practice a faith that makes room for not-knowing.

As the Marys and Salome walked through the darkness as the sun was rising, they were present to uncertainty, and willing to admit what they did not know. They were saying, who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?

Mostly, we are not all that comfortable with admitting our ignorance. In fact, we have made something of an art form of expressing our ignorance as if it were absolute truth and certainty! The gospel of Matthew fills his resurrection story with certainties and the loud clamoring of the supernatural. Between earthquakes, angels and instructions, there is no space in Matthew to wonder what it all means. Jesus Explains It All to Us, so that we have, really, no choice but to fall in line. What should Jesus’ friends do in the face of the empty tomb? Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them ion the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit. Don’t just stand there, says Matthew, do something.

I have a friend, a life-long practitioner of the Christian faith who came to see me several weeks ago to tell me: I don’t know what I believe anymore. I have always taken the stories of the bible and the responsibilities of being part of the church for granted: I have done them without question. But now, I don’t know. Life has changed so much. I have changed. I need to take time to understand, and to wait and see. I found myself both excited and anxious for him: busy with moving the church along, I listened but was too anxious to respect the space of the empty tomb he had just described. Here’s a book, I said, and a couple of titles you might buy and read so that you can make way into a new faith. Why don’t we set an appointment so that we can talk further about this? I might as well have said: I’m totally open to an unfinished kind of faith! here, let me get you a new, bigger box and help you climb into it. But my friend is willing to practice the way of wisdom found in the women of Mark:
He thanked me for the book, he appreciated our conversation, he would wait and watch and ponder what he did not know….and sometime, in due time, we might speak again.

I have another friend, a spiritual director, who sat with me early last week in much the same way as I had sat with my friend last month. Patrick had not seen me since my mom died, and he asked: what do you think will be different for you now? How will your life change?

My usual practice would have me organized and full of clarity and busyness—my usual practice would have had me ready with a quick answer. But sitting there where my friend had sat a few weeks ago, I found a Markan kind of courage. To my surprise, I found myself admitting: I don’t know yet.
Mark intends us to know that the work of God, and the revelation of God, is not finished, is still unfolding, is an ongoing revelation that is dependent upon our experience and our ponderings. There is no one right answer for resurrection, for the life of faith: each of us, reverently confessing what we do not know; can neither compel others to accept our truth as their own, nor accept some one-size-fits-all answer as the end of our faith.

Lack of closure is the heart of resurrection; which is a beginning, not a conclusion.

Finally, the women of Mark invite us to allow ourselves to experience holy awe .

Virtually every translation of the end of the gospel of Mark states: they went out and fled the tomb, for fear and amazement were upon them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. But Marie Noonan Sabin, in her book, Reopening the Word, makes a compelling case that the women’s silence was not one of paralysis or fear, but rather, a deeply profound response of faith

And going out they fled the tomb, for trembling and ecstasy possessed them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were filled with awe.

What the women of Mark experience at the empty tomb and at the words of the man in white is, simply, a stunning silence that is beyond words.

Prayer experience in ghost ranch. Awe, silence, fear, holy space: what was to come? What would I see?

Silence and awe are not a failed response, but the only response possible that creates the space for the unfolding of God’s word and revelation in ordinary lives. At the empty tomb, the women experience an overtaking of awe that indicates a transformed state of consciousness, a breakthrough in human perception…in that altered/altered state, there is room for the holy; room for us to make with our lives a beginning of the good news of Jesus.—not by running off physically or verbally with what we think, hope, have been told,
or believe: but holding holy awe, making room in our heads and hearts for understanding to unfold, to touch us, to change us.

It would be fair to say I have been a little unready, and somewhat unwilling, for Easter this year. But as I watch and pay attention; as I admit how much I don’t know about death and life hereafter, even after all these years of being a pastor and proclaimer of the gospel, I find myself strangely stirred and willing, against type, to be silent and still: to wait and see how resurrection will reveal itself to me. To listen and attend with reverence how it is with you.
And to believe and bear witness in this hard, holy world of ours: that we Christians do not have the market on new life cornered: but are merely men and women in white, fleeing the place of the dead with our spices and our questions; knowing that Christ is not there where we left him, but going on ahead….

When I came back from attending my mother’s death in Texas, I was sad, and looked tired.
I knew this because everyone who saw me said: I’m so sorry for your loss, I’m so glad to see you; you look tired. But one of our community, a young woman of Scottish descent who has studied Celtic Christianity, looked at me and said: you look wonderful. Really?? There is an old Celtic belief, she said, that when someone dies, a part of their spirit, the light that was in them, finds its way into the souls of the ones they love, whom they have left behind. Today, when I look at you, you shine brighter.

If that is true, and I hope it is, here is my Easter prayer for you:

May you take the time, this Easter Day and Easter season,
to receive your part of the light of the crucified one, Jesus.
May you not be afraid to enter the empty rooms or quiet tombs of your life and your faith.

There, may that emptiness not be a place of fear, but instead, a generous, open space:
where you can take all the time you need to watch, to remember and to imagine
where you can find the grace to admit what you do not know or cannot believe
where you can find to your surprise that holy awe is your companion
amazement, your friend
and the risen Christ, the Light within you. Amen.

turning away…turning toward

Whenever we baptize a baby, in the Presbyterian tradition, we acknowledge that being a parent is an important and difficult adventure, and we promise as a congregation that we will put our own best efforts into supporting those parents as they fulfill the promises they have made for their child—
to teach and tp practice turning away from wrong and toward God, always, and in all life’s choices.
We all try, in our parenting, to find that elusive balance between fear and freedom,
and to help our children walk with grace and wisdom in that Way
and we need, for sure, all the help we can get.

I grew up in west Texas and in Southern California, wandering in the fields and scrub desert.
Watch out for snakes was one of the only commandments my mother ever handed down to limit my freedom to wander and explore. If I ever saw one (mama said) chances were it was dangerous to me, poisonous enough, maybe, even to kill me. So I became cautious in my freedom, maybe too much so, looking down and around for snakes instead of seeing the world around me.

Once you start doing that, it’s difficult to change.

Our ancestor story here in the book of Number is another example of ophidiophobia,
the fear of snakes, which affects forty-nine percent of women and twenty-two percent of
men…according to a recent Harris poll.

The Hebrew wanderers had been making some progress through the wilderness when it happened
that the people became impatient, and complained against God and Moses

This is the fifth and last of what scholars call the “murmuring stories” of the wilderness narrative.
In the first four, they murmur against Moses and Aaron.
In the fifth, they upgrade, and murmur against God.
After what happens here….apparently they shut up and get on with it.
Because listen to what happens next:
The Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people and they bit the people and many died.

Just what we were afraid would happen.

Now, this part of the story is interesting
First, because when the poisonous serpents came,
the people, already angry and disappointed about their lot in life,
blamed God
they believed (and so does the story)
that God sent the snakes to kill the people
(as if there weren’t already poisonous snakes in the desert that had been biting people
and sometimes killing them since, well, forever)
but, because they were angry and afraid, they believed God did it…
because in their anger, and in their us-against-them polarization,
he had become a little less like God to them,
and a lot more like they themselves were:
Vengeful, Superstitious, Blaming, and more than a little guilty.
Thank goodness we are post-modern people and we don’t believe God sends stuff to kill people
Do we?

The second interesting thing is this:
we don’t actually know what it was the people were being killed by
because the word translated “poisonous serpents” here is obscure
We don’t really know what it means. . .
The root of the word is “seraph”
But it’s not clear what a seraph actually is, or does…
Just that it’s something to be afraid of
Something that can kill you.

I guess post-modern people can believe in seraphs
Something different for each of us,
at different times,
something that causes us to descend into a world of blaming and terror
a world of fear and death
Something that makes us look carefully down,
always watching where we are stepping
so cautious that we don’t get caught
so nothing can sneak up on us and kill us

One seraph may bite and harry you into a dying way of being
Into yielding to the evil inclination of self-destruction
Another may bite or harry me.
Alcohol for one, food for another
the fear of economic loss for one, or maybe the satisfaction of buying and having
a belief, maybe rooted in childhood, that you are never quite good enough…
the idea that fear of punishment is what should motivate our decisions and actions.

We all have motivations, values, weaknesses, experiences that…
if we choose them as Ultimate,
can kill us. . .
If you don’t want to die,
The trick is to know your seraphs and to own responsibility for them
not to blame it on God
or your mother, or your father,
or your spouse or your children or your friend or your boss…

Not to expect God, or your mother or your father or your spouse or your children
or your friend or your boss or your neighbor or your therapist
to make a miracle and save you.
But to know that you have the power to save yourself.
And to do what you have to, to save yourself.

When we read the story in the book of Numbers we see that the people,
snakebit and scared,
prayed to God and to Moses and to anyone who might be listening
Please save us from these seraphs. . . please take them away from us.

But that’s not how it works.
Snakes live in the desert. They are a part of life in the wilderness.

Seraphs—whatever we fear or
whatever less-than-God compromise we set up to protect us from our fear

seraphs are a part of life
not something that God or someone else can take away from us.
We have to acknowledge that reality.
We have to participate in the cure
We have to do the work.
That’s why the oldest baptismal formula, that we used this morning, asks us two things,
Do you turn away from evil? Do you turn toward God in Jesus Christ?
It’s not only what we are turning towards…but what we are turning away from as well.
From the moment of our baptismal birth into the family of God,
—which, by the way, is also likened to death by the bible and by our ancestral traditions—
(buried with Christ in the likeness of his death, raised to walk with him in newness of life)
From the moment of adoption into the family of God we are taught:
The life of faith is about choices, it is about action.
The life of faith is not magic, but hard work.

The Hebrew children in the wilderness were told:
God can’t take the seraphs away, but we can do this:
We can put one up where you can see it for what it is
We can put it high enough so that you have to look up and around at the rest of the world,
and at everyone in it.
We can get it up and away from you long enough to give you a choice:
Do you turn away from evil? Do you turn toward God?

That’s all it is, one choice at a time, all your life long.
That’s what Marisol and Janet have chosen today, for themselves and for their son Nick.
That they will keep choosing God, one day at a time, and they will teach Nick and Emma to do the same.

It’s what Jesus was trying to teach his friends, on that first Palm Sunday when,
instead of heading for the hills to hide from those who were seeking and plotting to kill him,
Jesus lifted up his head and entered the gates of Jerusalem, riding quietly toward his fate.
He knew that to evade or to deny or to fight was, for him, altogether wrong.
And so he turned away from evil, and turned toward God—
Even though turning toward God meant, in his case,
that he was giving himself up to evil men and to death.

It would have been so easy to justify looking at the seraphs of fear and self-protection, of being right and survival at any cost, and to have chosen to flee or to fight.
But instead, Jesus looked up toward God, and chose to give up his life for Love.

It’s a choice to look up toward the light
To live within a world large enough to give you life and not death,
To love that world and not to be afraid of the seraphs
Or to expect someone else to save you from them
It’s a choice to get up every day and do that…
And then to do it all over again the next day, and the next.

One of the gospels that didn’t make the cut into Christian Orthodoxy,
The gospel of Thomas, puts it this way:
If you bring forth that which is within you, that which is within you will save you.
But if you do not bring forth that which is within you, that which is within you will kill you.

Do you turn away from evil and renounce its power in yourself and in the world?
Do you turn toward God, following the way of Jesus Christ? Do you? Amen.

and what’s on the other side?

Just before the beginning of the service celebrating the life of my uncle Roger last Monday, my cousin David grabbed me and asked if I would watch the DVD of my uncle’s life he had produced for the reception. I’m sure most of you have seen something similar. It was a series of still photos, set to a recording of Eva Cassidy singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, entitled “the Wonderful Life of Roger Weldon Kraus.” Standing with my cousins, I watched silently as pictures formed and dissolved: my uncle and my dad in boy scout uniforms, circa 1940. My uncle at his wedding; holding a baby over his head and grinning into the face of his firstborn; with our two families in the back yard at Easter, all dressed up from church; at the wedding of his son; standing on the Great Wall of China; surrounded by his four granddaughters. Viewed backward, through the rainbow prism of memory, it seemed a wonderful life indeed…and it was.

A few minutes later, I was sitting, robed and ready, on the chancel of the sanctuary of my aunt’s church, listening while an interim pastor who knew my uncle in passing read from John 14: Jesus said, in my father’s house are many dwelling places: if it were not so, would I have told you I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself. And you know the way to the place I am going. And Thomas said, we do not know where you are going; and we don’t know the way. Looking over the faces of the crowd and my family, I thought about the flat, desperate honesty of Jesus’ disciple Thomas, and suddenly recalled the pictures that were not in my uncle’s photo eulogy, but should have been: the stories he told me about how his father and mother, during the depression, left him for years in the keeping of a strict uncle and aunt, thousands of miles from home. How angry he still was, decades later, at that abandonment…the two years we don’t talk about when he declared he was done with his marriage to my aunt and moved away, got a girlfriend and a new house. The struggle with COPD and the physical weakness that he damned daily. The many long and loud discussions about Christianity, the bible, the world and the world to come: how much he doubted, how little he believed that God, whoever or whatever that Being was, had any personal interest in him, or in anyone. He was not afraid of death, but in the days before he died, he began to ask those he had loved: do you think there’s a heaven? Do you think I’m going there? I thought about “the wonderful life” my cousin chose to remember, and how much we were missing by fearing to acknowledge and celebrate, along with the pretty parts, the cynical doubting Thomas side of my uncle. We don’t know where you’re going, how can we know the way?
Lent is the season in the church’s life story for acknowledging, even celebrating, our hard questions and for honoring the hard seasons of temptation and struggle that make us who we are, even while they challenge our faith to be strained and stretched, shattered and remade. Lent begins with the ending of the story of Noah; a tale whose happy ending of a perfect, loving, unilateral covenant between God, humanity and the earth glosses over an entire host of truly horrifying presuppositions about the way God is in this world, assumptions that from Sunday School to pulpit we have taken for granted and then filed away in that dark place we don’t want examined too closely, lest we discover we cannot live with what we have learned… whether about God, or about ourselves. We live by the rainbow song for as long as we can, but when by circumstance we draw near enough to examine it closely, the colors and the clarity dissipate, and we cannot see what, just a few moments ago, seemed solid enough to touch.

I witness this evaporation of a belief in a good and loving God frequently when I serve at a disaster site; I hear it when in conversation with people whose ordered world has been challenged by catastrophes of a more personal and pointed nature. I hear it from many of you, who are honest enough, and brave enough, to inhabit a faith that is able to sustain hard questions about how the bible is true (if it is true); or what a Christ-follower is, exactly, in this world of multiple religious traditions and infinite spiritual paths. My uncle spent years of family gatherings railing at me, the family pastor, about the hypocrisy of the Church and the unbelievability of the premises of his childhood faith, and while for years I squirmed under such attacks with resentment and fear, I know I became a better theologian and a stronger person of faith because the honesty of his wilderness journeys allowed me to admit my own dangers, toils and fears.

Oftentimes, when faith fails, it is the premise, not the promise, that is at fault. And this is where this Lenten journey, which goes into the wilderness to review and renew, which walks alongside old and beastly ideas of who God is and how God is among us on its way to resurrection, must begin.

The story presumes that God became so disillusioned, so disgusted, so despairing of humanity, that he—or maybe she—exterminated by flood the entire human family and all living creatures except for Noah’s family and an ark-bound two hundred or so creatures. Does God behave like that? When the pastor who presided over my uncle’s service was asked to read a letter from a family friend, he scanned it until he got to the part where the man said, sometimes God has to take our loved ones home because he needs them more than we do, and said to me: I’m not reading that, I hate that stuff. God doesn’t do that,

Does God reach down in anger to smite you or yours with disease, disaster, or death? The story wants us to understand that, though God used to be this way, after Noah, God relented, God regretted, God changed his mind. With relief, the priestly narrator of this story invites us to celebrate a renewal of relationship with a God who, like some born-again batterer, has promised I’ll never do it again.

But isn’t it hard for humane and thinking people to celebrate this relation, restored with a God who, if he really behaved as the story claims he did, probably we would be better off not knowing in the first place? Maybe we don’t need a God who regrets killing us off, but a different sort of God altogether. So: if we cannot accept nor trust the premise of a world whose security hangs on the thread of a vengeful God’s never again, what changes in this story, who changes in this sad family tale?

Driving across Alligator Alley about a while ago, a sudden rainstorm created a stunning double rainbow, a rainbow that was visible all the way down to the road on which I was driving, where it terminated in the asphalt. I wanted badly to have a picture of that rainbow, but as my cel phone camera could not capture the depth and solidity of the rainbow, I drove closer. At the moment when the rainbow’s joining with the earth was in sharpest relief, I stopped the car, leaned out of the window with my camera…and the rainbow disappeared, literally evaporated from the ground up. Our problem with this story is, we’re standing too close.

Taking a step back, we consider not the story alone, but also its tellers: people whose view of the world was oppositional, violent, and vengeful. They could imagine a god who destroyed…they needed such a god. But a community seasoned by destruction and hurt needed to change, and as they changed, so did their understanding of deity. Their move toward a God who could say “never again” was evolutionary, progressive…and so must ours be.

Perhaps we might change, as we think through our suspicions, our hurts, our defenses—think through them and decide: in the wake of disaster, in the midst of what we don’t understand, we will give up blaming, stop looking for a reason or a cause, stop excusing, confessing, or bargaining, and merely accept… God didn’t do it, but we can learn from it.

God didn’t change in this story, because God was never the vengeful one destroying the world in the first place. What changed was this peoples’ view of how God is in the world, and who God is.

People whose growth in self-understanding changes them also can, and will change their understanding of God. People who can be led to believe in a God who is not vengeful, judgmental, or capricious, can be gentler with themselves, and more loving to others. Communities that put into practice an evolving understanding of the nature of God change the world. The community that wrote the end of the Noah story did that once upon a time, and it is our obligation and our privilege to do the same. We can begin with ourselves—our private and sometimes painful setting up of God as sitting in judgment of us or another…and we can move on to our church, our denomination, our religion, and our body politic. Just as the community who told and edited the flood story , a community bruised and battered by generations of exile and deprivation had no more use for a god who would destroy at a whim…so we have no more use, in this troubled world we live in, for a god who is exclusive, sectarian, or capricious regarding his commitment to some at the expense of others. There are already enough people waving a bible around, saying “God says” and “you should…” There are more than enough who claim that their circumstance of fortune or privilege—their good job, or fine home, their wonderful marriage and perfect children, their million dollar bonus and status of freedom and health and life of peace—is due to the personal and particular blessing of such a god, at the expense of others not so blessed. And there are still too many people hungry, lacking justice, or awaiting mercy for us to spend one more minute arguing that old point of view.

Once I read a definition of holiness as accepting what is, and living into it. I think that’s a good place to begin this Lenten season, as we try, not to see how god has changed, but how we can change in our understanding of God and of ourselves.

Why are there so many songs about rainbows? Because no matter how complicated life is, how studded with disappointment, temptation, or doubt—there is something pure within us, something being purified within us as we burn through hard questions and harder experiences. What’s on the other side? In this life, we cannot know…but if we are willing to live the questions, we may see glimpses of a holiness we could never have imagined. In the rainbow promise of a living faith, divine light is being refracted, shattered in a million pieces and made visible—a rainbow connection.

Lord, oil the hinges of my heart’s door, that it may swing gently and easily to welcome your coming.
The gospel of Mark wastes no time getting down to business, after the preliminaries of birth, baptism, temptation and disciple recruiting—subjects that consume whole chapters of the other gospels—are gotten out of the way. No, Mark is in a big hurry to let us know that this Jesus story is going to be different—it’s not business as usual, with scribes lecturing and proof-texting, leaders negotiating and equivocating, people heckling and hounding while secretly hoping this guy will be different from the ones who came before. Mark doesn’t have time for all of that, because the world he lives in is going to hell in a hand basket, and the people he calls “home” are hiding in the hills, harried and hounded by the war machine that was Rome, but even so, still longing to be whole.

What makes Jesus different? What makes his story worth telling, his teaching worth following? Mark says: he taught them as one having authority.

What does that mean? When I became moderator of the presbytery some years ago, the outgoing moderator handed me the gavel that is used to keep order during our meetings and said: this gavel is the symbol of the authority of your office. If you have to use it, you don’t have it.

That’s genuine authority—to know who you are and what your work in the world is, and neither to need to win the validation of others, nor to make “Others”—that is, enemies—out of those people who don’t approve of you. In this month of January, I have spent many evenings travelling to four neighboring churches, from the Keys up to Palm Beach, for meetings with sessions and congregations who are seeking dismissal from our denomination because they think the “big tent” of the Presbyterian Church is too big, too inclusive theologically and socially, and because of that diversity, too scary to be any longer a part of. As I have listened to their concerns and perspectives, as I have been invited to speak from my own perspective, I have prayed to speak and listen with this kind of authority; neither being afraid of “Them” nor proud of “Us,” trying to speak the truth in love, and honor the fact that someone else’s truth is different from my own. I have wondered, on long drives home, why our big tent cannot shelter all of us. Then, on other evenings this month, I have listened to presidents and would-be presidents, listened for them to speak and listen with authority; and wondered why we can’t as a body politic, as a nation, get our acts together, and address the needs of our poor and marginalized and the rest of us without all the opposition and fear. Doesn’t seem to matter which party we cleave to, we’re all in it together, and we are all of us infected with this polarizing anxiety that makes us point the finger and blame, all the while wishing we could be better, we could be whole. Mark wants us to know that Jesus had that kind of authority that we are longing to experience from our leaders and feel within ourselves.
In two stories that take place at “home” in Capernaum, Mark shows us what a game-changer a person of authority can be.

In the first, Jesus showed up to teach in the synagogue. It didn’t matter what the text was, or the subject for the week—what mattered was he taught as one having authority, he was different from the other teachers who sought their authority from the crowds or from having the symbols of the office. He spoke his truth from the heart, and connected with the hungry hearts of his listeners. He served them by bringing his best self to the people: And when a heckler from the crowd—well, Mark calls it a man possessed with a demon—tries to change the subject and create a climate of Us against Them (have you come to destroy us? I know who you are!) Jesus doesn’t get distracted or defensive or buy into the premise that someone has to be destroyed for someone else to move forward—he just rebuked him and stopped him from destroying the holy space that had been opened up by the teaching and listening and genuine communication in that synagogue. He didn’t destroy his opponent; rather he gave him a way to experience healing by refusing to allow him to harm himself and his neighbors with his verbal abuse and fear-mongering.
In our second story, it was reported that he was at home. It was a homecoming so longed by the people of Jesus that immediately it drew a houseful of friends, a gathering of us so joyful and intent that the gospel story reports there were so many gathered around that there was no longer room for Them, not even in front of the door. Just stop for a moment and think about this, about how true it is: we are welcomed home, into the arms of our own; and almost as soon as we have received that embrace that says you are one of us, the camera lens widens to reveal Them, outside the door, looking in. Whenever we find ourselves comfortable, secure, at home….there is the world, and others, ready to challenge us and make their claim for our attention, for their fair share.

Then some people came, bringing to Jesus a paralyzed man, carried by four of them.

Unless we just refuse to see, we don’t get to be at home for very long before we are made aware that there are people outside, people outside who may want or need to be inside, where we are. They may be the “them” to our “us.” The system we live by—and let’s be honest, we’re not just talking about our global system or our system of law or culture of success, we’re talking about our faith and family systems as well—these systems set boundaries, erect barriers that protect us and our peace of mind from being overwhelmed by the needs and the smells and the noise and the accents of those who are crowded outside the door. And we use those systems every day by whom we invite and whom we ignore, who we see and who is all but invisible to us. The paralytic was one of the unlucky ones in this story: a man who needed what Jesus had to offer as much as, if not more than, any of us already crowded inside the house. . . a man who had less ability than many to position himself favorably to get what he needed. He was a paralyzed man, but he could be anyone outside: a gay teenager, a downsized business man or woman without prospects or insurance, a soldier trying to do the job he has been ordered to do and maintain his humanity, a colleague whose ideological affinity group has just lost the majority position, if only by one or two votes. You know who they are, or at least who “they” are for you, for us: people paralyzed by fear or circumstance by who they are or who they aren’t, people waiting outside the doors and windows we have inadvertently or deliberately locked and barred, because we need to feel at home, and there is simply, unfortunately, no more room. That paralytic was in no position to help himself. . .but others were. Inside the house, plenty of us didn’t notice, or didn’t care, or couldn’t figure out a way to help or were too busy meeting our own needs to see him lying outside on his bed, yearning for a chance to come inside, to belong. Apparently, Jesus himself didn’t even notice! but four men did. Out of that whole crowd of outsiders, four looked beyond their own needs, chose to become a community of healing, decided to tear down some walls, rip up some boundaries, make the tent bigger yet. It was not a solution most people would have thought of. It was neither pushing into the house nor taking turns; not shaming those who had arrived first nor blocking the streets, windows and doors with protest or appeal. It was a curiously creative solution. A humane solution. A solution at once gentle, humorous, effective, and inclusive. A solution that permitted four strangers to become community with one man who needed to be healed, and with a whole household of oblivious or even regretfully impotent people, people who needed to see beyond their refuge to the wide open sky and smell the fresh air of new ideas and loving solutions. No one had to leave. No one gave up much. Everyone moved a little bit, and the room turned out to be a whole lot larger than anyone had thought possible. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic: your sins are forgiven.
Now this is an interesting thing: right here, right at this place in the middle of what is really a typical miracle story, everything changes. You know the formula: Jesus teaches. People come. One comes needing healing. Jesus responds: your faith has healed you, rise and walk, open your eyes, and see. And they do. They see, walk, speak, regain their health, praise God and go their way. That’s the way miracles happen, right? But this story from this point on is no longer stock stuff, and I’ll tell you why. Jesus doesn’t say, your faith has made you whole, rise, take up your bed and walk. Instead he says: your sins are forgiven. What is that about? Did Jesus believe that a person’s sin caused their illness? No. Jesus didn’t believe that illness or infirmity had anything to do with the judgment of God, but his neighbors did. His friends did. His teachers did, and his culture did. And what they believed sustained the system, the rules that let some people be at home, inside, and kept the Others out.
So when Jesus saw their faith (not the man’s) and said your sins are forgiven, this is what I think he meant: sometimes, an entire society, a prevailing world view, a typical way of being, can be blown to kingdom come because one or a few people see another possibility, another vision and act with authority to bring that vision into reality. Rosa Parks sat down in the last seat on the bus and wouldn’t give it up to a white man because she was tired, and it wasn’t fair. A couple in California went to the county court and registered to be married, carefully crossing out the word “husband” and firmly inserting a second “wife” because there wasn’t any good reason, really, why they shouldn’t have the marriage their heterosexual next door neighbors had. “Sin” isn’t the condition of the people crowded outside the door; sin is the ways we keep the rooms of our home so full of us that we won’t or can’t make room for the Others. Sin, after all, can be defined as separation. Sin is the breakdown of relationship—between God and us, between us and them, between the spark of the divine that gives us a soul, and the soulless, demonic powers that sneer, I know who you are and what you’re trying to do, and then do everything in their power to kill the possibility of health and life together. And people who are possessed, paralyzed, separated or fearfully excluded can be restored to wholeness-they can be!— if and when some people—be it four or forty or forty thousand , get off their butts and do something about it, for God’s sake.
Jesus saw their faith, that is, their authority, saw that a few people were willing and able to think outside of the box, and then he acknowledged publicly and for the sake of that paralyzed man what was already patently obvious to him: that divisions had been torn down, the power of sinful separation broken by the healing actions of four strangers and a guy in need. The family room got bigger, and the family had five new members, and whenever that happens, there’s a little less space for sin in the room.

Changing Our Mind
(lose your mind and come to your senses.)
–Fritz Perls, gestalt therapy founder

Why are you on this planet?
What principles do you choose to practice in service of this purpose?

How many of you have ever breached those principles, or failed to live, even for a while, in consonance with your personal code of honor and covenant?

Those of you not raising your hands, go straight to heaven—do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars. The rest of you—that is to say, the rest of us– listen to this tall tale, this fable, this parable from the bible: the book of Jonah.

In the Israel of the fifth century before the birth of Jesus, things were complicated. It was the time of the return of the Jewish people from exile—a time to celebrate a newly reconstituted nation, a time to affirm national identity. People who had maintained their religious and cultural integrity throughout seventy years of captivity were coming home in triumph to restore their heritage; those who had remained behind to keep the candles of Judah’s faith dimly burning rejoiced with hope and energy renewed. But times were hard, resources scarce. Natural disaster and the depredations of wartime created a situation of endemic poverty and widespread discontent. It was a difficult time—a time that needed vision, and unprecedented national unity. But then, as now, fear and anxiety drew the people, individually and as a nation, away from their purpose and principles—to be a light for the nations, seeking justice, loving kindness, and showing mercy—and made them far less than their best selves. Then, as now, in seasons of perceived scarcity and polarizing, paralyzing fear, a national consensus was built upon a politics of negativism, exclusivity, and hatred.

The fable, the satire that is the book of Jonah was, for those who wished to recover their practice of what Paul later called a more excellent way, the strong medicine of self-examination; a mirror held up to the inevitable effects of our devolving into our smaller, meaner selves. For Jonah, our reluctant hero, it was a lesson grudgingly learned, if at all. The story is set in a period of history when Israel was destroyed by the Assyrian nation—by the way, the land now occupied by the nation of Iraq. Commissioned to preach to that despised nation, Jonah, a righteous and God-fearing Israelite, is filled with horror and revulsion at his task. Assyrian power had brought Israel to her knees. Assyrian atrocities had deeply embittered the Jewish people. For hundreds of years following the fall of the Israelite nation, the name of Assyria and its capital city were the very expression of evil incarnate, the perpetrators of holocaust.

And the God who could not stand silent in the face of the suffering of his people spoke, and said, go, and inform Nineveh that their wickedness has become known to me. And Jonah went—the other way. Called to travel overland to the limits of the civilized East, Johan hopped a ship and went West, as far as any soul could go. We all know the fish story that followed, the storm on the deep and the bed in the belly of a great fish; and how Jonah was compelled at last to fulfill his call, and burped up on the shores that were the gateway to the great and terrible city of Nineveh. He would fulfill his call—and how.

Stalking a day’s journey into the city, burning with rage and humiliation, with resentment and fear, Jonah found a likely spot, unpacked his striped tent,
cranked up the sound system to its highest volume, , raised his big black bible in his clenched fist and roared: yet forty days, and God will destroy Nineveh!!! . Eight words, and what an opening line! Lord, did it feel good. He paused to gauge the effect of his words, and licked his lips in anticipation. Sucking in another great breath, he prepared to go on but—wait, what was that?

Before Jonah’s unbelieving eyes, an entire nation fell to its knees in sorrow and hope. Cattle and other beasts, men and women and children alike, tore their clothes, threw ashes over their heads, and prayed as they had never prayed before to a God that they scarcely had known existed. And the hope of that enemy people in the heart of a God not their own was a sobering and holy thing to behold: let us all repent, the king said, for it may be that God will relent, and spare the people.

And God did. And Jonah? Jonah stood dumbfounded in the midst of the empty tent, tears filled his eyes, and he bowed his own head in prayer. Lord, he began,. And as bitterness filled his heart, he went on, almost spitting out the words, I knew you were a God, rich in mercy, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. I knew you would repent, and permit those disgusting people to live… And then, in the last round of the story that comedians refer to as the rule of three, Jonah disappears into the wilderness, cries in the best Borsht-belt joke tradition oy, you’re killing me!, rests in the broiling heat, receives with entitlement the shade tree God “causes to grow up above him” and then, when that shade is destroyed by the worm of his own bitterness and fear, begs for mercy for an inanimate plant! But God asks him, as God asks us,

Do you do well to be angry? If you want mercy for a dying tree, can’t you find room in your heart to have mercy for another human being, and for yourself?

Let us turn to the words of philosopher, theologian and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who lost his entire family and was forced into degrading and dehumanizing circumstances in Auschwitz: We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. When we are no longer able to change a situation—just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer—we are challenged to change ourselves. ….It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation but in right action and in right conduct. …Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.

Why are you on this planet?
What principles do you choose to practice in service of this purpose?

Don’t you want to change the world? Don’t you want to change yourself?
If you, like me, are tired of the rhetoric, sick of the paralyzed polarization of our nation and our Christian tribes, join me and MJ in looking at the man in the mirror Jonah holds up for us. Join me in believing the good news of the gospel, even the gospel of Jonah: God wants a better life for us than we want for ourselves. God can bring about renewal, redemption, shade and blessing, even in the midst of hard circumstances, even despite our worst efforts. God wants us to go into the heart of our fear with faith and hope. To confront our worst selves and the way we project that yuck onto others, and experiences forgiveness for our shame and hopelessness, and reunion with those who we thought were our enemies but who are really just another version of our selves. To live without regret and undivided. God has given us the resources to do this: and to remain centered in our mission and filled with joy, peace, hope and purpose—regardless of the circumstances. Those of you who participated in our compassion fatigue and resiliency workshops a couple of years ago, and those of you who remember our compassion fatigue sermon series will recognize those God-given resources as the 5 antibodies for a resilient life: 1. Know your purpose in life and practice it.2. Relax your body, have a soft body and relaxed muscles when you perceive yourself in a circumstance of threat or danger. 3. Grow up and stop making others responsible for your actions! Know with Viktor and Jonah that we alone are responsible for the way we choose to react and respond to the circumstances that challenge us. No one can make you be less than your best self—you have that choice. 4. Look around you. Know that you are connected to people who believe as you do, who love you and pray for you and who are willing to be a community of accountability with you. 5. Take care of yourself. Eat right, exercise regularly, drink moderately, enjoy activities that give you peace, creativity, and pleasure. Even and especially when you feel you don’t have enough time. To paraphrase Jesus in the gospel of Luke: do this, and you will live. Amen.

Riviera Presbyterian Church

Laurie Ann Kraus                                                                                                                                John 1:6-8, 14-28

the shape of god

There is a curious poverty to the Advent readings that begin our current lectionary year “B”—as if the table had been set for a party, the guests invited, but the host forgot to prepare the banquet.  We sit down to dine on angels and annunciations and the serving dishes are empty—all we see is what is not there: no prophet, no Elijah, no messiah, no introduction, no one at all, only a quotation from a dusty old scroll—I am a voice of one crying in the wilderness….

The writer Barbara Brown Taylor likens John’s gospel to that old sleight of hand trick magicians used to do:  standing at a table set with crystal, china, silver and candles, the performer yanks the tablecloth right out from under the lavish settings—but instead of leaving the table setting behind trembling but intact, or watching the whole presentation crash to the floor in shards and slivers, John yanks the tablecloth, taking everything with it:  not, not, no, neither, not.  The expected crash never comes. All the tableware simply vanishes as if it never were.  Only then can John, standing all by himself in front of the black velvet curtain, do what God has sent him to do: testify to the light, and to the light alone.[1]

How can we keep Christmas when all the props have been taken away?  Even Charlie Brown, with his ratty reject tree, had the best old words from Luke’s gospel:  and it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus…  John without costume, props, supporting cast or a production budget…survives on the bare minimum of certainty about what God has sent him to do.

It sounds kind of stark and appealing, the way she puts it—like the purity of the desert, maybe, but I, myself, don’t actually prefer a life stripped to the bare essentials.  I like my certainties to be fulsome; my plans elaborate, my faith-pantry well stocked, my hope a tangible thing.  Especially in hard times, what I want for myself and for you is more than enough—of hope, of the holy, of a way through the darkness that Light is shining through, already.  I don’t want subsistence, I want  the feast.

When the writer of John’s gospel wrote,  the word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth,  he was trying, I think, to put words to something so far beyond our comprehension that even that powerful poetic metaphor seemed a poor substitute for experience.  In a way, too, the myths and stories we tell at Christmas—the Star in the East, the journey of the Wise, the angel visitation, the baby in the manger—diminish the ineffable even while trying, through miracle and majesty, to glorify it.

Among you stands one whom you do not know, said the man. How can John talk about what is beyond words, except to say what he is not, what those who listened to him had not yet begun to experience?  It’s like the way theoretical physics works:  in describing or establishing the reality of some unseen body or property of existence, scientists develop their case by inference:  dark matter, for example, is understood to exist because of the way other matter, and energy reacts around it.  So, too, so long after the life of the man Jesus of Nazareth, the community of John tries to describe what they have felt, what has transformed them, what their lives have been shaped around, by stripping away what they do not know and letting their voices, reactions and actions infer the presence of the hidden Christ. We learn who God is by seeing/observing how things react around that space where the Holy might be…or not.

According to the words of the mystic Meister Eckhart, God is found in the soul not by adding anything but by subtracting.

It is only in hindsight, and then, infrequently, that the hand of God becomes visible to us, molding and shaping the lump of life we have been given, then give back.  We can’t predict the hand of God, the course of our future, the success of our resolution, the way life will be for us:  we can only be open and available to whatever, and Whomever comes, and then shape our being and action around that reality.

In the early days of the Civil Rights movement, , a young white woman, returns after college to her family home, where Constantine, the African American maid who raised her, has inexplicably retired to Chicago. Her parents will not tell her why, and Skeeter, grieving, begins to wonder how many untold stories there are, how different the truth must be, among the legion of maids and workers whose near-invisible labors sustained the lifestyle of her family and friends. She enlists the reluctant participation of Aibileen Clark, her neighbor’s housekeeper, and just after the murder of Medegar Evers, their book “The Help” is published.  In the turmoil and violence of those days, the book’s testimony to a life that is NOT what the dominant culture would pretend becomes a scandal, and Aibileen loses her position.  Walking away from last baby she would ever raise, she muses:  In just 10 minutes, the only life I knew was done. God says we need to love our enemies…  That hard to do. But it can start by telling the truth. No one had ever asked me what it felt like to be me. Once I told the truth about that, I felt free. And I got to thinking about all the people I know, and things I seen and done.

Maybe the witness of John’s gospel—his noes and negations—is for a truly Advent people the more important one, after all:   the one that sets us free to be the self God made us, to follow the Christ God sends us. For the word became flesh once, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth…and we behold its glory, as of the only child of God.

We are, each of us, the one sent by God whose name is ______, Our lives shape Christ’s cradle, his only herald in our time and place.  No one can do what you can do, or be who you are.   In your world, in your workplace, in your family, in this church where you sit, and work, and pray…you are the only one who can show the shape of the invisible Christ by how you respond to that mysterious, holy Truth, that Light.  There is no one else, and there never has been. To be empty of expectations, but full of grace and truth.  To be the man sent by God, the woman sent by God, the child sent by God, whatever comes.

I like the prayer the poet Mary Oliver prayed, after her partner of 40 years died and she began to probe the empty place that had become her life with faith:

Thirst

Another morning and I wake with thirst
 for the goodness I do not have. I walk 
out to the pond and all the way God has
 given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, 
I was never a quick scholar but sulked
 and hunched over my books past the hour 
and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, 
a little more time. Love for the earth 
and love for you are having such a long 
conversation in my heart. Who knows what
 will finally happen or where I will be sent, 
yet already I have given a great many things 
away, expecting to be told to pack nothing,
 except the prayers which, with this thirst,
 I am slowly learning.


— Mary Oliver, Thirst   Beacon Press, Boston, 2006, p. 69