Shepherd-folk

Thomas Kleinert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plunge right back into the ditch, headfirst.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] Mt 12:11 ASV

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

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

[4] Ps 78:70-72

[5] See Ezekiel 34:2-6

[6] Ezekiel 34:16, 28

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

[8] John 10:14-15

[9] Lamott, 64-65.

[10] John 21:15-17

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

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

Peace be you

Thomas Kleinert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[5] Ibid., 274.

[6] Luke 24:25

[7] Luke 1:79

Resurrection Scars

Margie Quinn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas needs to see the scars for himself. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May it be so. 

Light and life

Thomas Kleinert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here she opens the door:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] John 16:16-20

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

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

Servant song

Thomas Kleinert

Palm Sunday is like standing on the rim of a canyon. It’s a good day, a day of joyous welcome and celebration, the sun is smiling on the crowd waving palm branches and on the curious king riding through the gate of the city on a borrowed donkey. It’s a good day, a very good day, and the arrangers of the sound track have called for fanfares of bright trumpets and happy trombones weaving through wavy layers of laughter, cheering, and applause. It’s a good day, you can see all the way across the canyon to the other rim, and there the kingdom shines in peace and glory.

It’s a good day, but you know there won’t be a crew of angels to build a soaring bridge of light across the depth. You know Jesus won’t just ride on over to the other side. He’ll walk, all the way down into the lonesome valley. The fanfare was fantastic while you watched him coming up the hill toward the city gate, but now he’s inside the wall, and the clip-clop is fading, and you’re not sure what song belongs to this moment.

We heard two poetic texts just now, one from Isaiah, the other from Paul’s letter to the Philippians; the first one is often referred to as one of Isaiah’s four ‘servant songs,’ and the passage from Paul’s letter, as a ‘Christ hymn.’[1] They are like lyrics waiting for a tune to tie the fanfare of the entry to the minor keys and somber silence of Friday.

The Lord God has given me
the tongue of a teacher,
that I may know how to sustain
the weary with a word.
Morning by morning [God] wakens,
wakens my ear
to listen as those who are taught.

There’s a saying in Italian, “Traduttore, traditore” – meaning “The translator is a traitor.” It sounds harsh, but things do indeed get lost in translation, and the Bible is no exception. An earlier revision of the King James Bible, called the Revised Standard Version, translated the opening line:

The Lord God has given me the tongue of those who are taught.

In the New Revised Standard Version, the one we use in worship, this became the tongue of a teacher. I wish the committee in charge had just left that line alone.

The Lord God has given me
the tongue of those who are taught,
that I may know how to sustain
the weary with a word.
Morning by morning [God] wakens,
wakens my ear
to listen as those who are taught.

Both the servant’s attentive ear and skilled tongue are shaped in a community of learners who are taught. The prophet speaks in the first person, and it can be frustrating to try and determine if he is speaking about himself or someone else, or if he refers to an individual, the community of exiles, or the people of Israel as a whole.[2] All of the above seems like a good solution to the dilemma to me, because the role of the servant belongs to the whole community of learners as well as to those individuals who, like the prophet, remind this community of its true identity as God’s covenant people. The prophet speaks poetically about ‘the servant’ not to remind people who he is, but who they are: a community of learners who listen attentively to God who, morning by morning, wakens their ear, and who are given, because they listen attentively, tongues that allow them to sustain the weary with a word. And perhaps that’s the point of being ‘the servant’: knowing how to sustain the weary with a word, how to take some of the weight off their shoulders, how to speak of comfort and the promise of home when long years of exile have only brought grief and compromise after compromise with the demands of the Babylonian empire. The poet continues,

The Lord God has opened my ear,
and I was not rebellious;
I did not turn backward.

I hear confidence in those lines, and courage. This is the voice of one who has kept the faith, and in these lines individual experience comes into view. Some in the community of exiles hear what may sustain the weary, but they don’t want to hear it. They may think the prophet and others whose ears God opened are just stirring up trouble with their talk of making the long journey home when to them, for quite some time, exile hasn’t felt like exile at all. They’re quite comfortable, thank you very much.

I imagine a moment like March 7, 1965, when John Lewis and Rev. Hosea Williams headed out of Selma on U.S. Hwy 80. They were leading some 500-600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, all of them tired of exile, many of them knowing how to sustain the weary with a word, and all of them pointing toward home. You know what awaited them on that Bloody Sunday, and they probably did too. The poet writes,

I gave my back to those who struck me
and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard;
I did not hide my face
from insult and spitting.

This is painfully specific language, as painfully specific as

Troopers, with gas masks affixed to their faces and clubs at the ready, advanced and knocked the marchers to the ground. …  Clouds of tear gas mixed with the screams of terrified marchers and the cheers of reveling bystanders. Deputies on horseback charged ahead and chased the gasping men, women and children back over the bridge as they swung clubs, whips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire.[3]

The language is painfully specific like ‘a crown of thorns.’ The poet continues,

The Lord God helps me;

therefore I have not been disgraced; 

therefore I have set my face like flint,

and I know that I shall not be put to shame;

[God] who vindicates me is near.

The Lord God who has opened the ear and spoken and taught the word that sustains the weary, has instructed the servant’s heart in trust, resilience and resolve. Since soon after Easter, Christians have seen Jesus in this portrait, and perhaps Jesus likewise saw himself.[4] In my imagination, he walks and talks and stands like one who knows this poetry to be true.

Who will contend with me?

Let us stand in court together.

Who are my adversaries?

Let them confront me.

It is the Lord God who helps me;

who will declare me guilty?

Again, it’s no stretch to imagine Jesus asking these questions, confident that though council, judge, mob, governor, and the whole sin-sick world might accuse and condemn him, God would vindicate him. Jesus lived and proclaimed the advent of the kingdom of God, and only moments ago we welcomed him to the city, shouting,

“Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—the King of Israel!”

Where do we find ourselves in the story as it unfolds this week? Will we walk with him? Will we eat and drink with him? Will we stand with him? Will we pray with him?

Morning by morning [God] wakens,
wakens my ear
to listen as those who are taught.

Morning by morning, and sometimes before morning, God rouses our ears to listen — to be attentive as those who are taught, and to let the word we hear sink in and do its work in our starved, stubborn and fearful hearts. Which brings me to the lovely hymn Paul quotes in his letter to the saints in Philippi.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he existed in the form of God,

did not regard equality with God 

as something to be grasped,

but emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave,

assuming human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a human,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.

The last time we heard these words in this setting was on the Sunday after the Covenant shooting, Palm Sunday a year ago. Since then, we have celebrated Easter, and we have heard proposals from members of our General Assembly to further harden our schools with heavier steel doors and other building modifications, and to arm teachers. Common sense regulations like save storage laws and measures to keep fire arms out of the hands of mentally unstable persons—though having strong bi-partisan support from over 70% of Tennesseans—still have a long way to go. We still have a long way to go. Some of the work we have to do is just unrelenting, old-fashioned, county-level organizing across the entire state.

But there’s more that needs doing. The world is filled with fantasies of a god that are inevitably entwined with fantasies about power. Fantasies that have more in common with the master over a plantation than with the humble God who died a slave’s death on the cross—“in great agony, without regard, without mercy, and without help.” But this week is the culmination of “[God’s struggle] against our bad imagining of God,” as Willie James Jennings has put it so very well.[5] Paul’s song lyrics helps us remember as we make our way through the dark valley how the living God has toppled our fantasies of domination and vindicated the humble way of Jesus. To the untrained imagination, Jesus’ exaltation is the rise of the ultimate ruler who, in a surprise move, claims the throne of thrones. Those who follow Jesus on the way of the cross, though, will recognize his exaltation as “the drawing up of the humiliated, the despised, and all those ground down under the weight of the world.”[6] To them, his exaltation is the leveling up of the whole system to where love alone reigns supreme

[1] The passages commonly referred to as ‘servant songs’ are Isaiah 42:1-4; 49:1-6; 50:4-9; 52:13–53:12

[2] See the Ethiopian official’s question in Acts 8:34, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”

[3] https://www.history.com/news/selma-bloody-sunday-attack-civil-rights-movement

[4] Richard Floyd, Feasting, 160.

[5] Willie James Jennings, Connections, 127, 129.

[6] Ibid., 129.

Hating the World

Margie Quinn

The world is after Jesus. Here is a man who, in one of his final magic acts before being killed, has just raised a man from the dead. People are flocking to see him; crowds have come from all over to witness this miracle maker. Some of these people want to meet him because they recognize him for who he is: the one who comes in the name of the Lord. While others like the chief priests, flock to him with anger, wanting to kill Lazarus, as John 12:11 puts it, since it was “on account of Jesus that many of the Jews were deserting and were believing in Jesus.” Maybe if they kill Lazarus, they can squash this concept of a man who shows signs of resurrection. All eyes are on Jesus, good and bad. In verse 19, the Pharisees say, “the world has gone after him.” 

The world is after Jesus. The Greek translation of “world” here, as Walter Wink reminded me this week, is kosmos. Kosmos doesn’t mean the “world” as in God’s creation but a fallen world alienated from God, in opposition to God’s purposes. Better put, “world” here means the System. The System, which is embodied in the structures and institutions that aggressively shape human life and seek to hold human beings captive to its ways. Does this sound familiar? The System thrives under exploitation and domination and violence. And there is someone in their midst who is messing with the status quo and challenging the System. 

So the World, the System, is after Jesus. 

Let’s spend some time walking through this passage. We begin this story with a little game of telephone. Some Greeks want to see Jesus. They find Phillip and ask him. He finds Andrew, then they both find Jesus to tell him. He replies, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” Jesus’s death is imminent, and he knows it. He goes on to tell them that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. This probably goes over Phillip and Andrew’s head. Jesus breaks it down a little more in verse 25: Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in the world, will keep it for eternal life. 

Who hate their life in the world. Those are some strong words, and ones that I have wrestled with this week. 

I love my life. I love the ease with which I can move through the world, never being afraid of what may happen if I’m pulled over by the police, never feeling like I’m the only person of my identity in a room, never wondering where my next meal will come from or if someone will refuse to officiate my wedding based on who I love. Rarely has the System worked against me. But here, that annoying, convicting Jesus strikes again. Are you willing to remove the blinders of your life in order to hate this System so that you may find eternal life? Are you willing to expose the System for what it really is and do everything in your power to work against its death-dealing ways? 

Most days, I am not. I wonder if Jesus had a few days where he didn’t want to, either. 

Jesus continues to talk to Phillip and Andrew saying, “My soul is troubled.” Again, the English translation here weakens the force of the Greek verb, tarasso, which is more like “severe sorrow or pain.” Jesus is in deep pain, knowing what is to come; knowing that the powers-that-be are so threatened and intimidated by him that they need to eliminate him; knowing that he must expose the system for what it is: a way of death, not life. 

“What should I say?” he asks. “Father save me from this hour? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.” 

It reminds me of Frodo Baggins in Lord of the Rings. Frodo, in a moment of deep pain, looks at Gandalf and says, “I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.” Gandalf replies in a gentle yet convicting voice, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” 

With the time given to him, Jesus knows that it is short and it is coming to an end but there is still time to show God’s people how to hate the world. 

Now the judgment of this world, he says. Now, the ruler of this world will be driven out. On the cross, he exposes the System for what it is and in doing so, he judges this world and casts out its oppressive rulers. He’s ready, however begrudgingly, to look violence in the face and reject it. 

A lot of people have tried to make sense of what’s going on at the cross. You’ve probably heard many of these theories. One theory is that Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross is a blood offering that he must make on behalf of all of us to an angry, demanding God; a price to reverse all of the sins and disobedience God’s people had participated in and to be the Scapegoat on behalf of us.    But John isn’t interested in the Son of God paying a ransom for our individual sins. He’s interested in how Jesus’s death is necessary and life-giving because as a result of it, a Beloved Community is formed. When we turn inward, when we act as single grains of wheat, we miss the abundant fruit of this community waiting for us on the other side of death. We have to relinquish the life that the world offers us each day in order to follow and serve Jesus. 

The world is after Jesus, and in his final act, he knows the kind of death coming for him. “I love my life,” he may think, “but I hate this world so alienated from the inclusive, radical, freeing love of God. I’m going to expose this world for what it truly is.” 

I love my life, Dr. King may have said to himself many decades ago, but I have decided what to do with the time given to me. When the people drinking the poison of White Supremacy turned hoses and dogs on black and brown activists who were marching non-violently, Dr. King shouted, “Let them get their dogs and let them get their hose, and we will leave them standing before God and the world spattered with the blood and reeking with the stench of their Negro brothers.” “It is necessary,” he went on, “to bring these issues to the surface, to bring them out into the open where everybody can see them.”

Let them get their nails, Jesus may have thought. Let them twist a crown of thorns. I will expose the System for what it is, so that all people are set free to die to a life shaped by captivation and domination and can live fully and freely in the life of me, the life of abundance. 

We may love our lives, but are we willing to lose our hold on them in order to oppose a status quo that steps on our brothers and sisters who are suffering? 

Finally, Jesus says, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.” By being lifted up on the cross, Jesus fights for all of humanity to be reconciled to him. The fruits of Jesus’s death is the faith community to come, the one that shows Jesus’s love to the world. No pressure church, but guess what? We are that community. We are this community that has the burden and the blessing of showing Jesus’s love to the world, and that is not a call just to be nice or comfy or reach out with a little bit of condolences, it is a call to die to the lives we love in order to fight against a System that is killing people. Killing their spirits, killing their souls, killing their confidence and killing their bodies. 

“It is by holding too tightly to our lives,” David Dark writes, “that we lose them.” “It is by letting go of our lives that we enter into life most profoundly.” That’s scary stuff.

I love my life. But if I can die to it, the temptation to be the single grain, if I can die to it to look around me at the suffering, if I can die to it, I just might be able to hate the world, the System, with Jesus. The Christ who exposed it continues to expose it today. Are we willing to look around and join him? 

May it be so. 

The celebrity verse

Thomas Kleinert

---

God loves you, honey.

You better believe it.

Where will you spend eternity? the billboard down I-65 asks you every time you drive by.

Believe or else.

Come to Jesus or go to hell.

For God so loved the world… John 3:16, or even more concise, 3:16. Write it on a poster for the endzone; use the fat marker. Ink it on your forearm. Stick it on your bumper. Wear it on your t-shirt whether you’re on campus or at the mall. John 3:16.

I don’t mean to sound mean, but I do, don’t I? The world has taught me well to scorn those who “do faith” in ways that are foreign to me. But the harsh light of my condescension is the wrong kind of bright to let me see that the intention of the meme missionaries may be of the noblest kind: to make known to the world God’s love for the world and all who live in it. In the KJV Bible I read,

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Mary McLeod Bethune, who was born in South Carolina to formerly enslaved parents a decade after the Civil War, grew up in the Jim Crow South to become one of the most important Black educators, civil and women’s rights leaders and government officials of the twentieth century.[1] She declared,

With these words [from John 3:16] the scales fell from my eyes and the light came flooding in. My sense of inferiority, my fear of handicaps, dropped away. “Whosoever,” it said. No Jew nor Gentile, no Catholic nor Protestant, no black nor white; just “whosoever.” It means that I, a humble Negro girl, had just as much chance as anybody in the sight and love of God. These words stored up a battery of faith and confidence and determination in my heart, which has not failed me to this day.[2]

I love “whosoever” – to me it sounds like, “Y’all come. God’s love is big enough for all y’all.” Kerry Hasler-Brooks calls her relationship with John 3:16 “complicated.”

The words … are deep in me. I have no memory of learning them and can go years without reading or reciting them, and yet, in a moment, they are in my breath and on my lips, rising from that deep place: “For God so loved the world.” I remember hearing this verse in my mother’s voice as we practiced memory verses after church.

She recalls how the verse came of age, as she did, in the American evangelicalism of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.

Billy Graham recited the verse at crusades attended by thousands, who were often gifted copies of John’s Gospel. Sports fans were broadcast across the United States wearing shirts and carrying signs to games emblazoned simply with “John 3:16.” This is the John 3:16 I inherited, the celebrity verse that roared through American stadiums—football games and revivals alike—and the quiet verse whispered by my mother in my childhood bedroom with the paper doll wallpaper.

I’m glad and grateful Kelly Hasler-Brooks writes about these deeply personal resonances, because to me, rousing speeches in sports venues bring up memories that have nothing whatsoever to do with good news, only with propaganda and mass manipulation. I tense up. Hearing about “crusades” makes me suspicious and cautious; “crusades” smacks of military campaigns against infidels, only conjuring up images of violence and coercion.

Mihee Kim-Kort also memorized John 3:16 as a child, in English and Korean, along with a specific interpretation of it.

While many would easily argue for its ability to summarize the Christian faith, I remember only one interpretation of the verse. It wasn’t about God’s love for the world. It was that only those who believed in God would make it to eternal life. I vaguely understood eternal life to mean heaven, and the afterlife. It was the ultimate destination, and belief in God was the golden ticket to it. The only thing that mattered was living forever.

What kind of faith grows in fields of fear? What kind of life is shaped by a fearful faith? Is it the kind of life Jesus proclaims when he says, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly”?[3] Is it?

Toward the end of his Gospel, John states in a note to the reader that his testimony is for you, plural, “so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”[4] As Mihee got older, the kind of eternal life she had imagined lost its luster. “I looked around at the people who were the most vocal about who would ultimately make it, and they were often the most judgmental [and] hypocritical… Christians.” She began to realize that, according to John’s witness, eternal life refers to a kind of life, not its length, and how it’s very much about life here and now, and not merely there and then. She found herself invited to participate in God’s love for the world.[5] She began to imagine and live her life grounded in the wondrous love that became, and continues to become, manifest in the life of Jesus, a love that drew her in rather than scaring her to heaven.

“There is no fear in love,” we read in 1 John, “but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.”[6] Perhaps the trouble began when the verse became a slogan, when it was no longer heard as part of an encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus, where Jesus talks about being born from above and Nicodemus wonders, “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” Jesus talks about the wind that “blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

As listeners and readers we have a chance to understand what Nicodemus apparently misunderstands; he’s utterly sincere, just a little metaphorically challenged. “Born from above” envisions living life in ways no longer determined by blood or by the will of the flesh or by human will, but by God. What Jesus calls eternal life is life lived in the unending presence of God, not the endless duration of an individual’s existence in the most exclusive club. Eternal life is life as a child of God now and forever, life in the now of the divine presence that is without beginning or end, life that is unfolding in love without ceasing, life that is nothing but life. It is the life Jesus and the one he calls Father share, and more than share, because according to John’s testimony, never afraid to push the boundaries of language, they are this life, poured out in creation. Jesus calls us to believe, in order to be fully part of this life. Pictured as birth, believing is altogether the gift of God, and all the believer does is live and give thanks. Pictured as faith, believing is the result of something we do, and I wonder if it is anything but our continuing intention to live the life in Jesus’ name we have been given. From Jesus’ lips, I hear it as the invitation, “Come and see!” Jesus doesn’t drop slogans; he invites us to turn from easy slogans to the risk of experience. He tells me and you, again and again, “Come and see who I am and who you are becoming with me.”

In September 1954, Martin Luther King Jr. moved from Boston to Montgomery. He didn’t know soon and very soon God would call him from the pulpit to the street. He didn’t know where Jesus would be taking him. His first week in the pulpit at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, King preached on John 3:16. Kerry Hasler-Brooks writes,

That first sermon in his new home bears signs of the voice that one year later would be heard all over the globe—of the man who would stand on the shoulders of Claudette Colvin, Rosa Parks, Jo Ann Robinson, and thousands of other Black women to lead the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and 1956 that would help change the world.

“God’s love has breadth,” said King. “It is a big love; it’s a broad love. … God’s love is too big to be limited to a particular race. It is too big to be wrapped in a particularistic garment. It is too great to be encompassed by any single nation. God is a universal God.”[7]

I wonder if the preacher had sat at the feet of Mary McLeod Bethune, if he had witnessed the kind of empowerment she drew from the wide embrace of “whosoever” in John 3:16, if he had heard her declare, “These words stored up a battery of faith and confidence and determination in my heart, which has not failed me to this day.” He certainly needed faith, confidence, and determination. And so do we.

In John 12, Jesus talks again about being lifted up, and each time he does so, he speaks of his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension as a single movement, mirroring his descent in the incarnation. I find it astonishing how he describes the act of ultimate rejection and humiliation on the cross as an act of exaltation.

“When I am lifted up from the earth,” he says, “I will draw all people to myself.”[8]

I believe him.

[1] https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/mary-mcleod-bethune

[2] Allen Dwight Callahan, “The Gospel of John,“ in True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007)

[3]John 10:10

[4] John 20:31

[5] Mihee Kim-Kort  https://www.christiancentury.org/blog-post/sundays-coming/nature-eternal-life-john-314-21

[6] 1 John 4:18

[7] Kerry Hasler-Brooks  https://www.christiancentury.org/article/living-word/march-14-lent-4b-john-314-21

[8] John 12:32

Where God Dwells

Margie Quinn

I was six months into my last job at Westminster Presbyterian Church when the pandemic hit. This being my first job out of seminary, I already had no idea what I was doing. Then in March 2020, at the onset of lockdown, it appeared that none of us knew what we were doing. The physical church building shut its doors and for the rest of the year, the sign that read “Westminster Gathers Here” could have very well read, “Westminster wants to gather here, but it’s complicated so we’re gonna press pause on gathering here, and we know many of you are emailing us wondering why we can’t just gather here, but we are going to creatively figure out how to gather here metaphorically so that none of us feel isolated.”

We pondered alternatives to doing church the “normal” way. You know what makes people feel seen and connected, together even when we’re not together? Zoom. Have you ever tried to sing a hymn with sixty other people over Zoom? Have you ever prayed on Zoom, your roommate watching tv in the other room, the neighbor’s dog barking incessantly outside of your window? Have you ever preached in an empty sanctuary, having to hold back the “Can I get an Amen’s?” because no, no you can’t?

The pandemic left many of us asking, “What does it mean to be the church today?” 

In our passage this morning, this question could have easily slipped out of Jesus’s mouth as he left the Temple in a huff, clearly distraught that the place he had traveled to in order to observe the Passover feast, didn’t feel like church. Why didn’t it? 

Let’s break it down: In every other gospel reading, this story takes place at the end of Jesus’s ministry but in John, it takes place at the beginning, occurring right after Jesus turns water into wine at a wedding. It is as if John wants us to know from the jump that the Word became flesh and lived among us; not above us or away from us, not only in a Temple with us, but outside of one, too. 

We gotta get a few things straight in this story. A lot of people misinterpret who they deem the “bad guys” in the Temple. This story paints the Jewish people as greedy money changers, selling animals and making the church feel more like a marketplace than a house of worship. In reality, these people were actually necessary for the functioning of the Temple. Money changers were there to make sure that the people coming had the right currencies. The temple tax required a half shekel. You couldn’t pay with any other currency so just like my favorite Vietnamese place in Nashville, you could go to the ATM in the store and get cash. 

The animal sellers were there because a major ritual in the Temple was the sacrificing of animals. You could bring your own animals in, yes, but depending on where you lived or what you did for work, that may not have been possible. The animal sellers were there to facilitate the use of the temple, not stand in the way. 

And, in reality, Herod had begun a massive restoration and expansion of the Temple in order to win over his “ungrateful” subjects. So we’re 46 years into that project, which may feel about the same amount of time that construction projects at churches feel. Really, things going on in the Temple walls made practical sense. They all served as ways to ensure that people could be in the building together to worship. 

And, not to be misinterpreted either, Jesus does not enter the scene as an outsider opposing the Jews, but as an insider himself. We often make the mistake of stripping Jesus of his Jewish identity, an enemy of the Jews, but he is a participant. A faithful parishioner in his own right, Jesus looks around at the hoops people have to jump through to even worship together–making sure they have the right currency, paying for animals who don’t have any blemishes so that they can sacrifice them–and gets angry. Don’t you love Angry Jesus? “No!” he says. “We shouldn’t have to make a marketplace out of a place of worship! And we shouldn’t have to rely on experiencing the presence of God in a building. Here’s a little foreshadowing for y’all: The Zeal for your house will consume me.” 

Destroy this Temple, he demands, and in three days, I’m gonna raise it up. The people hearing this are thinking, as I would, that he is going to literally destroy the building, His fellow Jews respond: This has been under construction for 46 years. We had to do countless capital campaigns to fund this thing. It has smelled like paint in here forever. You’re not knocking this thing down. And there’s no way you could raise it up in three days. 

But, we quickly learn, Jesus wasn’t speaking about the physical temple. Scripture says he was speaking of the temple of his body. 

Jesus challenges the very physical location where his people gather and literally shakes the foundation of their faith. Like the prophets in the Old Testament, Amos and Jeremiah, he challenges the church’s authority and offers his own spiritual hot take: You don’t need to look for the presence of God in here, because you’re looking at him right here.

Jesus is the place where God’s presence dwells now. Like the prophets, he serves as the mouthpiece for God but he doesn’t just speak God’s word, he is God’s word. 

Church happens here, within us, he seems to be saying. Church is the bodies we inhabit, the love we give toward self, neighbor, enemy. Church may gather here but then Church goes out of here, to be the literal body of Christ in the world. 

When the Samaritan woman asks him about the proper place to worship a few chapters later, Jesus responds by blowing her understanding of worship open. Worship can’t be restricted to any physical site, he tells her, it happens in spirit and truth. God is spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth. Notice how he doesn’t say “God is bricks and mortar…”

The surprise in today’s gospel reading is that Jesus says that the transcendent is present in his body. The gospel of John makes this claim, that a human body — unique but also a lot like your body or mine — is the holy place of God. Jesus was not just “wearing” a human body like a set of clothes. He was a human body, as inseparable from his body as you are from yours. And God was inseparable from him. 

So, what does it mean to be church today? Is church this sanctuary filled with gorgeous morning light? It is the bread and juice you take week after week with people you like and people you don’t? Is it the beds you make for our homeless neighbors on Thursdays at Room in the Inn? Is it the holy music you hear from such gifted voices on Sunday morning? Certainly Vine Street gathers here. 

And also: during the pandemic, I came to realize that church happens out there, too. It happened in the Bruegger’s Bagels parking lot, where me and a group of high school girls would sit in a giant circle, yelling our stories from the week, pulling down our masks to laugh. It happened at every park in Nashville, when I would meet with our youth for “Walk, Bike, and Worship.” It happened when we drove around to every Senior in high school’s house, in a line of cars, honking and leaving gifts in their yard, shouting “Congrats!” at them as they waved from a window. It happened on the steps of the church one Christmas Eve, singing in the freezing cold as snow fell. 

I can’t know where you feel the presence of God. But today I feel the freedom, through Jesus’s words, to look around for it outside of church. This week, it happened at the Capitol as hundreds of people–students, clergy, parents, doctors, teachers–gathered to advocate for safer gun laws. It happened at a vigil last Sunday night, when people from all over Nashville gathered to honor the life of a non-binary teenager killed that week. It happened in the sunset on my drive home. It happened when my puppy looked at me with love, even though I’m not always good at looking at other people with love. God’s presence was in all of this. Church happened here, too. 

This Lenten season, we don’t have to limit the presence of God to one place. We can trust that the presence of God made manifest in the body of Christ begins and ends in the body. And, as Mary Hinkle Shore writes, “we follow the body of Jesus as he travels to Jerusalem, as his hands braid pieces of rope into a whip to herd cattle and sheep out of the temple, as his knees bend to the feet of the disciples to wash them. We watch him eat and drink with his friends, and we follow him to the garden, where the bodies of his disciples unsuccessfully fight off sleep while Jesus sweats through a prayer that he might not have to endure the torture in his immediate future. We see him beaten, crucified, taken down from the cross, and laid in a tomb. And in the stories of his resurrection, he is still a body — huggable, touchable, scarred, and eating.”

Still a body. A body, who, as John says, was raised from the dead after three days, not to build another Temple but to be the Temple. In our passage this morning, it says, “His disciples remembered that he had said this.” After he was raised, his disciples remembered that he said his body was the temple. Will you remember that he said this? Will you try to embody the presence of God with me? The presence of God in you–I see it. The presence of God in me–can you see it? 

May it be so. 

You name me Beloved

Thomas Kleinert

Somewhere in the United States lives a girl named Britney Shakira Beyoncé. You know what happened there; the parents clearly were huge fans of all three, and they couldn’t decide which one to name their little girl after. Perhaps they were secretly hoping for triplets.

Apparently there are 328 people in the United States named Abcde, the majority being girls.[1] And somebody shared on reddit, “My cousin named her kid Harley Davidson. She’s a moron.”[2]

A name is a powerful thing, and sometimes the awesome honor of naming a newborn human being results only in a very good reason to have one’s name changed later in life.

Abram was 75 years old when he and his household left Haran;[3] his wife Sarai was 65 then. They packed their portable belongings and left, following the call and promise of God to go to the land that I will show you – which is all God told them about their destination. And there was the promise that God would make of them a great nation. Twenty-five years later they had journeyed far and wide, but Sarai still was childless. Abram had a son, Ishmael, with Hagar, a slave from Egypt who served Sarai. The boy was a teenager when God appeared to the old man and said, “No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly numerous. You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her and also give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.”

Not many people, I would be willing to bet, have their names changed at age 99 or 89. But, hey, these two are talking about having a baby, when the rest of their cohort are trying hard to remember the name of each of their great-grandchildren. Abraham and Sarah’s new names reflect the new identity they have been given as bearers of God’s covenant promises. Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and Sarah soon joined him. It’s a perfectly reasonable response, don’t you think? And, of course, “Laughter” would be the name of their boy, Yitzchak in Hebrew, Isaac in English transliteration.[4]

A name is a powerful thing; it binds us to our people and our culture, it becomes part of the stories our families share, and it reflects the unique ways our lives intersect with theirs and the whole story of life.

About half-way through the Gospel of Mark, Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” Over eight chapters, he has proclaimed the good news of God, driving out demons, healing the sick, touching lepers and declaring them clean, forgiving sins, baffling the authorities, telling stories, rebuking the violent wind, restoring a girl to life, and feeding thousands. Over eight chapters, the disciples, and we with them, have watched and wondered, listened and pondered, and now he asks the twelve and the rest of us who have been trying to keep up with him, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answers, without a hint of hesitation, “You are the Messiah.”

And Jesus, Mark writes, sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him. He didn’t say, “No, that’s not who I am,” but apparently he didn’t want his disciples to go and tell folks who thought he was John the Baptizer, or Elijah, or one of the prophets, that he was the Messiah. And then, Mark tells us, Jesus began to teach the disciples that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again. The unique shape of his life would determine who he was, Jesus began to teach us, not some title, charged with all kinds of expectations. His name, Jesus, and his whole life and mission would infuse the term Messiah with meaning, and not the other way around.

And Peter, Mark tells us, took him aside and began to rebuke him, because Peter, like the rest of us, at one point or another, wanted him to be his dream-come-true Messiah. And the way to Jerusalem Jesus began to map out didn’t fit in that picture. Peter, Mark tells us, “took Jesus aside,” and that gentle phrase could also be translated, “he took hold of him,” with a hint of, “he grabbed him by the lapels,” and in word and action, Peter strongly suggested otherwise.

A few weeks back, I said that Satan had a part in the Gospel according to Mark, but that he didn’t have a speaking part. Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness to follow a different path than the one defined by his relationship with God who named him Beloved, that temptation is not spelled out in dialogue, but only stated. The closest thing to a speaking part for Satan is Peter’s rebuke to Jesus, his forceful suggestion of a different path. The conflict is not spelled out in direct speech, but the scene is clear enough for us to see that it’s not some mythical horned figure getting in the way of Jesus, but we ourselves when we think there has to be a better way, for Jesus and for us, to proclaim the nearness of God’s reign.

About half-way through the Gospel of Mark, we begin to learn that to call Jesus Messiah means to let go of all our detailed job descriptions for him, and begin, again, to follow him. Jesus is not the fulfillment of our kingdom dreams, but he does embody the reign of God in who he is, and following him, our dreams are renewed. Jesus is not the fulfillment of our visions of salvation, but he is God’s salvation who transforms our vision. Jesus is not the fulfillment of our desire for this and that and the other, but the one who goes ahead of us that we might follow him on the way.

About half-way through the Gospel of Mark, we come to a fork in the road and hear the hard teaching. We are free to say yes or no.

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who will lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

Taking up the cross was not metaphorical to many of Mark’s original readers. In their world, the cross was not a manner of speaking of random forms of suffering. The cross was still known as the punishment Rome imposed on rebels and troublemakers who challenged the status quo. “The cross,” wrote John Howard Yoder, “was not a difficult family situation, not a frustration of visions of personal fulfillment, a crushing debt, or a nagging in-law; it was the political logically-to-be-expected result of a moral clash with the power ruling [their] society.”[5] It will cost you to confess Jesus as Lord; it may even cost you your life. But don’t let your fear keep you from following Jesus; don’t forget that something greater than mere survival is at stake here.

To our ears, this talk of giving one’s life may sound radical and exceptional—I don’t think it is. We all give our life to something or someone, regardless of how many years we live. The real question is, are you giving your life to something worthy of the gift of your days, the gift of your creativity and strength and attention? Are we giving our life to following Jesus on the way, trusting in God’s yes to us, trusting in the promise of God’s coming reign?

Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” is inseparable from the one we ask ourselves all the time, “Who am I? Who am I becoming? Who do I want to be? Who does God want me to be?” Jesus calls us to live into the answers in his company and in the company of all he calls his sisters and brothers. His call to follow him sets us free from anxious self-absorption and draws us into finding fullness of life in God’s covenant of love. His call reminds us that Beloved is not only his first name, but ours as well. A name is a powerful thing.

I heard an old gospel song. I heard it sung by Marian Anderson and Nina Simone, by Roberta Flack and Liz McComb. I told Jesus it would be alright if he change my name. I don’t know who wrote it, and perhaps nobody knows—perhaps it was never written, only sung and sung again. Sung by people whose ancestors had been brought by force from Africa, who had been robbed of their freedom, their homes, their families, and, yes, their names. No longer free, they were given new names by their masters who took their lives as though they were theirs to take and own and use and abuse, masters who didn’t know they too were losing their lives to the soul-crushing idolatry of treating human beings made in the image of God as property.

Yet under the whip and boot of their masters, those men and women, far away from home, far away from anything resembling home, far away from hope and promise, refused to surrender to the religion of their oppressors, and they recognized in Jesus on the cross their brother.

I told Jesus it would be all right
If he change my name

Jesus told me I would have to live humble
If he change my name

But I told Jesus it would be all right
If he change my name

Jesus told me that the world would hate me
If he change my name

I told Jesus it would be all right
If he change my name

It’s a revolutionary moment when people begin to remember their true first name, God-given, the name we share with Jesus, the name he gave his life to make known to all. Beloved.

[1] https://www.momjunction.com/articles/worst-baby-names-in-the-world_00400377/

[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/10bnk5d/comment/j4be4r8/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

[3] Genesis 12:4

[4] Genesis 21:1-7

[5] Cited in Placher, Mark, 117.

Hang Up Your Bow

Margie Quinn

In Floradale, Ontario, there is a woman named Irian Fast-Sittler who spends her days welding hot steel and metals. A few years ago, she took her grandfather’s shotgun and welded it into a work of art, featuring roses and vines made of copper and brass. In another town, a man named Shane Claiborne and other activists use blacksmithing equipment to melt down weapons like semi-automatic rifles and turn them into gardening tools. And in another town, an artist named Welling Hall, took a hundred pounds of bullet shells from the local police station and melted them into garden shears. 

All three artists and activists were inspired by the passage in Isaiah, you know the one: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war no more.”

“Neither shall they learn war no more.” These artists, among countless others, turn their grief at the world’s destruction and violence into art, reminding their fellow human beings or perhaps reminding God, of a covenant from long long ago, that hoped for peace. 

In another story from a different time, the God of creation hangs up his bow of many colors, art in its own regard, in the sky, as a promise to end warfare and a reminder of his pact made with all of creation: to learn war no more. 

Wait a minute, though. The rainbow in the sky that we’ve read about our whole lives, the rainbow that paints the sky after the flood, that’s actually a war bow? Let’s press pause there.

This week, we’re in the book of Genesis. God has created order out of chaos, a diversity of creatures and people, light and oceans and pear trees. Yet how quickly we warped what God called good. In chapter six, we learn that God was sorry already that she had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved her to her heart. Cain murdered Abel. Adam and Eve turned away from their Loving Parent–and God saw, chapter six says, “that the earth was filled with violence, was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth.”

And what do we do when we witness such careless evil in the world? God resolves to destroy the destroyers. Yes, God! A hard one to reckon with. God picks a 600 year old guy named Noah to go into an ark while God floods the earth. Noah and his family and some snakes and giraffes hop on the ark and wait around for seven days, twiddling their thumbs and raking up cow manure until finally, the flood of waters come on the earth. 40 days and 40 nights pass and we learn that God blots out every living thing on the earth except for Noah and his family. Why are they the righteous ones that God wants to save? What did Noah do to get a VIP spot on the ark? We don’t know and man I wish I did. The Bible can be so elusive like that. 

Anyway, the flood wipes out every living thing before it subsides, but the waters don’t go down for another 150 days before Noah builds an altar to the Lord of burnt offerings. When God smells this pleasing odor of dead birds and other animals (I’m not making this up), God says, “I will never again curse the ground of humankind, nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.” 

And here we arrive at our passage today…bringing with us a lot of confusion and questions about the theodicy of God, which basically means the question of how a loving God could commit or allow evil. Sidenote: We don’t have enough time today to get into how ancient cultures perceived floods and interpreted them as a warrior God committing violence rather than a natural disaster, so I’m going to chalk this one up to a story of how human beings perceive God rather than a story of how God really operates. 

If we stick to the way in which these people perceive God, we see a sad but relatable interpretation that makes a lot of sense to me: God must have destroyed most of creation because we kept committing senseless acts of violence. God wanted to destroy the destroyers. 

And yet: humanity is spinning toward a downward spiral of violence and in this passage today, God doesn’t join us in our chaos but makes a covenant with us instead. In a pretty wild turn of events, when many of us think that our God is unchanging, God changes her mind. Let me repeat that: God changes her mind. 

“I’m not gonna curse y’all anymore,” God says, “but instead, I’m going to make a covenant to remind myself of the promise I made: to turn away from wrath and destruction and to protect humanity, even though your wickedness grieves me.”

Now we get back to the rainbow; which I learned this week is not some vapid, lovey-dovey visual for us to see, but the sign of a covenant that God makes with herself. This rainbow in the sky is actually a qeset, a “war bow” that God hangs up in the sky as a pact with all of creation to end the warfare. This bow in the clouds is a deal between God and…God. It serves to control God’s divine power, in case God wants to lash out once again. 

Isn’t this wild? God changes her mind: she throws up a war bow so that when she peers at the sky, she recalls how her heart has been touched by creation’s suffering. She is willing to accept all of the hurt we cause and feel in order to keep hope alive. 

Seven times in this passage, God references this “covenant.” It is as if God is staring in the mirror, repeating to himself (and I’m reading this word for word now): “When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.”

“When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”

“This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all the flesh that is on the earth.” It seems like God realllllly needs a lot of reminders to not be wrathful and stuff. I get that. And in this instance, by binding himself to the fate of humanity,” as David Lose writes, “ God becomes inherently invested in us and keenly vulnerable to being exposed. Not a distant oblivious God who sits back but one whose fortunes are now bound up in humanity. God is not simply committed but deeply invested in the fate of his creation.”

And as Joy J. Moore points out, “I want a God who can handle the horrors of this world…who addresses the oppressor, who doesn’t just say nice little warm fuzzy things…I want a God who says, ‘I made this commitment with humanity as I created humanity and I’m not giving up on that.’” This war bow, this sign of a covenant becomes a reminder to us that God is faithful enough to keep a covenant that God made. 

In our first Sunday of Lent, you may be asking yourself what any of this has to do with Jesus being tempted in the wilderness. Well, Lent forces us into our wilderness temptations, to come face to face with our wild natures. Lent begs us to ask: “Will we repent, accept our finitude and stop grasping for control or will we continue the violence?” God herself repented and the next time the heavens opened, instead of grabbing her war bow, God used her compassionate voice to name Jesus as Beloved and to say that she was pleased with him. 

Church, in this Lenten season, will we continue the violence that is all around us? Or will we be like Irian, Shane and Welling who transform weapons into gardening tools and art? Will we be like our God who hangs up her bow and calls us Beloved instead? 

May it be so.