Astounding

This is not an uncommon thing to happen: I say something, and the other person thinks I’m criticizing them, even though that wasn’t at all what I had in mind. You know what I mean, don’t you? I feel the need to ask, because I can’t be sure. I presume you’re familiar with the situation where you’re talking to a person who appears to be of good hearing and sound mind, as well as reasonably attentive, but he or she still doesn’t seem to hear you. You make eye contact, you speak slowly and clearly, and without a trace of condescension (as far as you can tell), using common English, but you’re not getting through to them. It’s incredibly frustrating. We just don’t understand each other as well as we think we could or should.

Our hearing develops while we’re still in the womb, and we learn to talk and pay attention to speech in the first years of our life, but we all know that speaking and listening is not just a matter of having the right vocabulary and good hearing. Marriage and family counselors are known to spend much of their time coaching their clients how to speak and listen.

The Bible includes a great number of sayings and writings of prophets who saw very clearly what was going on in their day, and they spoke, they declared, they urged and warned – but who was listening? Often their pronouncements were collected a generation later by people who wondered how they or their parents could have missed the urgent truth. God said to Ezekiel, “I’m sending you to the Israelites, a rebellious people. I’m sending you to their hardheaded and hardhearted descendants, and you will say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God.’ You’ll speak my words to them whether they listen or whether they refuse. You aren’t being sent to a people whose language and speech are difficult and obscure but to the house of Israel – they will refuse to listen to you because they refuse to listen to me.”[1]

The prophets knew that listening is not only determined by language and speech, but by such curious human traits as hardheadedness or hardheartedness. “Whether they listen or whether they refuse,” the heavenly voice said to Ezekiel, “they will know that a prophet has been among them.”[2] Has been – the belated knowledge comes with a measure of regret, but it can yet soften our hardheaded and hardhearted inclinations. The belated knowledge can open our stubborn hearts at least for the desire to listen to each other more attentively.

When Jesus began his ministry, he left his home in Nazareth and went to Capernaum on the shore of the big lake. The people in Capernaum, Mark tells us, were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority.[3] He continued to teach and heal in the villages of Galilee, and word about him spread. His family wasn’t thrilled, though. They were embarrassed; there was talk in the village; some were heard saying, “He has gone out of his mind.”[4] The people who had known him all his life didn’t know what to make of his sudden urge to leave home and walk all over Galilee, talking about repentance and the reign of God.

His family tried to convince him to come home, but once, when people told him that his mother and his brothers were outside, asking for him, Jesus replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”[5] Now that is a beautiful thing to hear for all those who sit around Jesus, but imagine what a harsh word that was for his mother or his siblings.

So eventually Jesus came back to his hometown, Mark tells us, and when the sabbath came he went to the synagogue and began to teach. And again, people were astounded. But it wasn’t the kind of wonder that erupted in Capernaum and elsewhere; it was a mix of bewilderment and outrage. Where did he get all this? What is the source of his power? Who does he think he is? Nothing he said and did in his hometown was any different from what he had done elsewhere, but the outcome was the exact opposite: no miracles and wonders, no marvelous signs of the nearness of God’s reign, only upset and angry people.

Jesus himself was amazed at their unbelief, Mark tells us; and the disciples, I imagine, were pretty puzzled as well, wondering what was going on. They had watched him silence demons and drive them out. They had been there when he stilled the storm, commanding the wind and the waves, and they obeyed![6]  But in this little town, it was like his words hit the walls and fell to the ground. The contrast couldn’t be more striking.

“Prophets are not without honor,” he said, “except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.” Mark tells us that folks in Nazareth didn’t grasp who he was. It would be easy for us to dismiss them as hardheaded or hardhearted – but only if we can’t see ourselves in their shoes. “Isn’t this Mary’s boy who used to work in construction?” they said.

There’s a Jewish text from the 2nd century BC called Sirach, and it sheds a little light on how people then could praise manual laborers and, at the same time, remind them not to think or act above their station. “Scholars must have time to study, if they are going to be wise,” it says there; “they must be relieved of other responsibilities.” And then it continues,

How can a farm hand gain knowledge, when his only ambition is to drive the oxen and make them work, when all he knows to talk about is livestock? He takes great pains to plow a straight furrow and will work far into the night to feed the animals. It is the same with the artist and the craftsman, … the blacksmith … [and] the potter … All of these people are skilled with their hands, each of them an expert at his own craft. Without such people there could be no cities … [But] these people are not sought out to serve on the public councils, and they never attain positions of great importance. They do not serve as judges, and they do not understand legal matters. They have no education and are not known for their wisdom. You never hear them quoting proverbs.[7]

“Isn’t this Mary’s boy who used to work in construction?” folks in Nazareth said. “We know you, Jesus. We know your family. We’ve known you since you were a little boy – who are you to come here quoting proverbs and teaching in parables and talking about the kingdom of God?” It was inconceivable to them that God could be at work in a man they knew so well, a man they had practically known all his life. And so they didn’t bring their sick for healing. They didn’t bring their children for his blessing. They didn’t come to hear his teaching. “Who does he think he is?” They didn’t expect anything, and they were not disappointed.

Jesus could do no deed of power there, Mark tells us. A miracle, the story suggests, is like the tango: it takes two. One who does the deed of power and another who is open to it. Ann Lamott wrote about her step into a life of faith, “I didn’t need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.”[8] But people can also look at a stand of redwoods, and all they see is lumber. Mark’s Nazareth scene suggests that for deeds of power and signs of the nearness of God’s reign to become manifest, it takes at least one who is open to receive what is being done and said. And without that kind of receptivity the wonders cease.

Communities where everyone knows everyone else feel comfortable and safe; but for those who look at life from angles that aren’t defined by what the neighbors might think, life in Mayberry can be suffocating. Small communities have lots of unwritten rules about how things are done properly, and that’s why they can be hardest on their most creative people. If anyone has an idea that breaks the mold, the first response is not, “Wow, keep talking!” but, “Who does she think she is?”

Churches, of course, often function just like small communities, and I wonder how many times we stifle the wisdom and power of God in our midst, and we don’t even notice. There’s a crucial difference between having known Jesus all your life and listening to Jesus now. And Mark’s story suggests that it might well be the difference between “no deed of power here” and “it was a time of miracles and wonders.”

Between the lines of his story, Mark says to us, “People who have never seen Jesus face to face know him better than his own family and kin because they believe that God is speaking and acting through him.” Perhaps we all secretly wait for a god who pops onto the scene like Fourth of July fireworks, and so we miss the God who is so incredibly everyday human.

But once we perceive the presence of God in Jesus, once we see him as the embodiment of God’s love, and hear God’s voice and word through him, deeds of power begin to happen. Acts of mercy. Works of compassion. Miracles of understanding. Ripples of forgiveness.

And when we begin to believe that God is not too big to meet us in each other, we’re ready to be sent. Jesus tells the Twelve to take nothing for the journey, but to travel light. On the kingdom trail, it’s not about the gear; never has been. It’s always been about trusting the power of the one who calls and sends. It’s all about the wondrous power we allow to become manifest when we receive the word of God in Jesus with open hearts. It’s incredibly everyday human, and it’s astounding.

[1] See Ezekiel 2:1-7

[2] Ezekiel 2:5

[3] Mark 1:21-22

[4] Mark 3:22

[5] Mark 3:32-35

[6] Mark 1:27; 4:41

[7] Sirach 38:24-34 (GNT)

[8] Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further thoughts on faith (New York: Riverhead, 2006), 296.

Get up

They wanted to touch him. People came to Jesus in great numbers, for he had healed so many, Mark says, that everyone who was sick pushed forward so that they could touch him.[1] They wanted to lay their hands on him to connect to the power that was in him. Mark paints a scene of people being drawn to Jesus from every direction, bodies everywhere.

Among them a man who somehow makes his way to Jesus and throws himself at his feet. He’s a synagogue official of some kind, an important man, which is possibly why the crowd gave way and let him through; his name is Jairus, Mark tells us. But Jairus doesn’t behave like an important man. He’s on his knees, with his forehead touching the ground; he can smell the dirt, he can feel the grit of sand and gravel against his palms and the tips of his fingers. He behaves like a desperate man, a man on the verge of losing it.

His daughter is at the point of death, only he doesn’t say “my daughter,” he says, “my little daughter,” the little girl he has known since he first held her on the day she was born when she was barely bigger than his hand. “She’s dying,” is what he’s there to tell the man from Nazareth, she’s dying. Nothing else matters for him anymore; he doesn’t waste a thought on propriety or social conventions: his little girl is at the point of death. Jairus is an important man, a man with a name, and love has made him a beggar.

She is dying—he says it repeatedly, “my little daughter, she’s at the point of death— and he says, “Come and lay your hands on her.” Come and touch her like you have touched others with healing power. Lay your hands on her, he says, perhaps he’s seen it done, perhaps he’s done it himself, kneeling by her bedside, willing to let his own life flow out through his hands so it would be hers, if that was what it took — only he couldn’t give her what he so desperately wanted to give her.

“Lay your hands on her, so she may be made well, and live,” he says to Jesus. He remembers when she was little, how, in the middle of the night when the house was too quiet, he used to get up to make sure she was breathing. He never told anybody; men, let alone men of importance, didn’t do such things, but he is no longer afraid to show his love and helplessness in front of the whole town. “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live,” Jairus begged, and Jesus went with him, Mark tells us.

Surrounded by people on every side, bodies everywhere, Jesus suddenly stopped and turned about and said, “Who touched my clothes?” The disciples were like, “You’re kidding, right? All this humanity pressing in on you — how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’” They didn’t know what had just happened. They didn’t know who or what had created this sudden interruption of a life-saving mission.

The way our translations seek to render the text in proper English narrative style obscure the dramatic way the scene is described; in a single sentence, one long string of participles builds up like a stack of pages from a diary, before finally culminating in the interrupting action. A woman—having been bleeding for twelve years, and having suffered greatly from many physicians, and having spent all she had, and having benefited not one bit but rather having gone from bad to worse, having heard about Jesus, having come in the crowd from behind—touched his cloak.

Nobody in the crowd knew that a single phrase, a single intention had been on her mind, for who knows how long: “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” That was her faith, a mixture of desperation and magical thinking, fed by long years of disappointed hope.

She’s the second desperate character entering the scene, only she remains unnamed and unseen. She was determined to touch his clothes and she did. And immediately she felt that she was healed. Immediately she felt that life was no longer slowly draining from her, but filling her. And she alone knew it was so. No one else in the crowd had any idea. Not the disciples, not Jairus - try and imagine what this delay was like for him! - and not even Jesus himself.

When he turned around and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” she didn’t just say, “I did.” She fell at his feet and told him the whole truth. She told him of the twelve years of her suffering and poverty; she told him of her loneliness, her shame and isolation – how her life had slowly dripped away.

And Jesus heard her out and said, “Daughter, your faith has made you well.” This curious blend of desperation and magical thinking, this unbending determination to touch him, Jesus called her faith. We should also note that he called her “daughter” as if to remind her and all of us that she was not some woman in the crowd, anonymous and impoverished, but a member of God’s family. And calling her “daughter,” Jesus also reminds us that the divine parent’s love for her is reflected and shared in the love of Jairus for his little daughter.

And suddenly we remember the urgency with which he had begged and pleaded, “Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.” And isn’t that the hope we all bring to Jesus, that he may come and lay his hands on all who long to be made well, all who long for life to be made complete? Isn’t that the hope we all bring to Jesus, because we believe that life is his to give, and restore, and fulfill?

And now the people from the synagogue leader’s house come and they tell him, “Your daughter is dead.” Nothing anybody can do about it now; too late. End of story. “Why trouble the teacher any further?” they say to Jairus.

But Jesus says to him, “Do not fear, only believe.” Believe what? What is a man to believe after a gut punch like that? What might give him the strength to get up and keep on living? We notice that Jairus doesn’t ask any questions like that, and so we refrain from cobbling together quick answers, and do what he does: see what Jesus is up to.

At the house, the funeral is already underway with people weeping and wailing, and when Jesus says, “The child is not dead but sleeping,” they laugh. It’s not happy laughter, though, rising like a lark from the house to the clouds. It’s the bitter, knowing laughter of experience.

Jesus sends them all away, and he takes the parents and three of the disciples into the room with him. It’s quiet there.

And Jesus doesn’t speak to comfort the grieving parents, nor does he speak to teach the disciples who have no clue what he meant by “not dead but sleeping,” — no, Jesus takes her by the hand and says to her with great tenderness, “Talitha cum.”

Mark translates the Aramaic for us so we don’t think Jesus is using some kind of magic spell or secret incantation, but the church remembered the words in Jesus’ native tongue, taking us a little closer to the sound of his voice, “Talitha cum — little girl, get up!”

And she did.

Wherever Jesus went, Mark tells us—villages, cities, or farming communities—they would place the sick in the marketplaces and beg him to allow them to touch even the hem of his clothing; and all who touched him were healed.[2] That is one side of this wondrous pair of stories we heard this morning. It is about our desire to touch Jesus, our deep, persistent desire to touch the giver of life and live, to touch the fount of every blessing and be blessed.

And the other side is about God’s deep and persistent desire to touch us with life and blessing. Perhaps you identify with the woman who persisted in pushing through the crowd to get close to Jesus. Perhaps you identify with the dad who threw himself at Jesus’ feet, abandoning all sense of propriety and decorum for his daughter’s sake. But when you’re in the place where hope has withered and you can’t find the courage to persist, or you don’t know how to get up, let alone imagine what it might mean to believe: remember Jesus who went into the room where the child was. And dare to wonder if the child might be you. You who believe, and you who sometimes believe and sometimes don’t believe much of anything, and you who would give almost anything to believe if only you could. “Get up,” he says, and you dare to imagine that it’s your hand he’s holding, and that the power that is in him is the power to give life to the dead, and also to those who are only partly alive.[3]

Dare to imagine that it’s your hand he’s holding, and that nothing will keep him from sharing life in fullness with you.

[1] Mark 3:10

[2] Mark 6:56

[3] With thanks to Frederick Buechner http://www.frederickbuechner.com/blog/2018/6/25/weekly-sermon-illustration-jairus-daughter

A mighty shrub

The kingdom of God is like this, Jesus declares: Someone scatters seed on the ground, and goes to bed and rises night and day, and meanwhile the seed sprouts and grows — how, this person does not know.

Jesus teaches us about the kingdom of God, but those of us who are looking for a timetable, a blueprint, or a constitution of the wondrous realm, won’t get our answers from him. Jesus tells us stories of shepherds and gardeners and bakers, stories with vineyards, trees and birds in them — parables that say so much and explain very little.

Who is this gardener who scatters seed on the ground, and then nothing is mentioned about watering or weeding or keeping the rabbits away? Are we to think of God as the sower? Or perhaps Jesus himself? Or may we be so bold as to identify ourselves with this “someone” who scatters seed on the ground? Maybe this isn’t so bold after all, since most of us wouldn’t think of God as sleeping and rising night and day, not knowing how it is that the seed sprouts and grows.

Perhaps we want to think of ourselves as the soil in which the seed of Jesus’ life and death takes root and flourishes into a harvest of life, and we don’t know how, but we sleep and rise night and day, confident that the harvest season will come in God’s own time. “Intimacy with Christ grows in us as certainly and as effortlessly as seeds grow,” wrote Wendy Farley. “We have so little to do with Christ’s nearness to us that we can just go to sleep. In fact, it might be better if we did sleep through the whole thing, snug and safe, resting like babies in our mothers’ arms.”[1]

Martin Luther clearly saw himself as a sower when he told his congregation in 1522, “I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses on it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.”[2]

We can enter the parable identifying with the gardener, or the seed, or the soil, and each entry takes us into a different room of meaning. Once the seed is in the ground, the miracle happens, we don’t know how. The miracle happens within us and among us and beyond us. We receive and trust; we bear fruit and don’t know how. Sometimes we sow generously, by the handful, in the rhythm of our walk with Jesus; sometimes we plant just a single, precious seed, mindfully and carefully, trusting that there will be a harvest in God’s own time. We sow and go to bed without a worry.

As an undergraduate, Kent Keith wrote what he called The Paradoxical Commandments.[3]

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.

Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.

Do good anyway. ...

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.

Be honest and frank anyway. ...

Our faith, in a way, is a habit of joyful and hopeful anyway.

Some seeds get eaten by the birds.

Scatter them anyway.

Some seeds, you worry, may not get enough water or sunlight.

Scatter them anyway.

The world objects.

Be generous anyway. Be kind anyway. Be merciful anyway. Scatter the seed Jesus has sown: at harvest time the sowers will sing and dance.

Parables resist complete explanation; they aren’t locked treasure boxes that reveal their splendor only to those who find the proper key. No, they are living stories, at once familiar and unknown, conversation partners that surprise and confound us as often as they comfort and assure us on the way to the kingdom. They won’t sit still long enough so we can turn them into catchy memes or paradoxical commandments. And they subvert all the frameworks of thought that prohibit our hearing the message of the kingdom — hearing fully and truly what Jesus proclaims, and not just what we want to hear or have always heard. Parables don’t offer answers that settle things. They point us back, again and again, to the one who speaks the word to us with many such stories and who is himself for us the parable of God and of fullness of life with God.

“With what can we compare the kingdom of God,” Jesus asks us, “or what parable will we use for it?” He wants us to ponder with him what language, what images we might borrow to speak about the dominion of God. And he wanders the realms of nature and scripture, worlds teeming with mighty creatures like the lion, the stag and the eagle, the bull and the bear, creatures frequently adopted as symbols of human dominion, but they make no appearance in Jesus’ stories of God’s reign.

What language, what images might we borrow then? Nebuchadnezzar, king of mighty Babylon, had a dream, according to the book of Daniel:

Upon my bed this is what I saw; there was a tree at the center of the earth, and its height was great. The tree grew great and strong, its top reached to heaven, and it was visible to the ends of the whole earth. Its foliage was beautiful, its fruit abundant, and it provided food for all. The animals of the field found shade under it, the birds of the air nested in its branches, and from it all living beings were fed.[4]

When Jesus asks, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?” perhaps we imagine such a mighty tree, a tree whose branches extend to the ends of the earth; the tallest, the most magnificent tree of all, forever defining the center of the world; with its top in the heavens and its roots in the depths of the earth; with beautiful foliage and abundant fruit; with shelter and food and peace for all living beings.

The prophet Ezekiel dreamed in exile in Babylon of God planting a tender shoot on Israel’s mountainous highlands, a twig growing into a mighty cedar, with birds of every kind nesting in it and finding shelter in the shade of its boughs.[5] Throughout Israel’s history, any story that mentioned trees with birds in them was a story of hope that in the end God’s kingdom would prevail over Assyria, Babylonia, Rome or any other empire.

And that ancient tradition continues to this day. During the years of military rule in Uruguay, a teacher was thrown in prison for subversive activity. He hadn’t planned an assassination or conspired to overthrow the dictatorship; his crime was much more serious: he taught history and literature. He was fortunate, though, since he wasn’t just “disappeared” like so many others, and his 7-year-old daughter was allowed to come and visit him once a week.

On one of her first visits, she wanted to bring him a picture she had drawn the night before at the desk where he used to prepare his lessons: a tree with it’s top touching the clouds, and birds flying in the sky and perching on the branches. She brought it to prison, but the guards took it away from her. Birds were considered subversive, free as they are to fly across a sky without borders—they might give the people the wrong ideas.

A week later the little girl returned with another drawing. It was a beautiful tree, lush and tall, with strong branches, and the sun was smiling in the wide blue sky. The smiling sun had not yet been put on the index of banned images, and so the girl was able to give her dad the picture. “Thank you so much,” he said. “This is the most beautiful tree I have ever seen.” And pointing at a number of tiny dark dots among the leaves, he asked her, “Is it a cherry tree?”

“Shhh, Papa,” she whispered, “those are the eyes of the birds. They live in the tree, and when the guards aren’t watching, they fly!”

Trees with birds in them are symbols of hope, hope that in the end God’s reign will prevail over empires of fear and oppression. Jesus wants us to ponder with him what language, what images we might borrow to speak about the dominion of God, and I’m quite certain he loves the little girl’s picture with its fun, subversive twist of birds posing as cherries. His own parable includes a twist like that.

“The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed,” he says. There’s nothing mighty about mustard. It can grow into a shrub, maybe 8 or 9 feet high, about as tall as the typical Galilean house, but that’s it. The mustard shrub just won’t scale to palatial dimensions.

But what it lacks in imperial majesty, it makes up for with ubiquity. Mustard grows fast and just about anywhere, it tends to take over where it’s not wanted, and the birds love it.

When it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in the shade.

The kingdom of God is like this annual plant that perpetuates itself with tiny seeds. It doesn’t just sit there and simply get bigger and bigger with the years. The mustard shrub depends on renewed sowing and its perennial promise lies in the fruitfulness of the seed and the faithfulness of those who spread it. What this suggests to me is that God’s dominion is no divine empire, putting an end to earthly empires with overwhelming force, but rather an invasive reality, transforming the everyday with the seeds of divine compassion, righteousness, and truth. We carry the seeds of the kingdom in us, and we scatter them by bearing fruit, in freedom and obedience, reminding one another that we are, and are meant to live as, citizens of God’s dominion. We do and say and notice lots of small things in lots of places, things as common as mustard, and we trust that they’re all connected with each other, often in hidden ways like seed in the soil, but bound to be fully revealed.

With what can we compare the kingdom of God? It is like us, ordinary people, young and old, folk who listen intently to Jesus and go and scatter the tiniest of seeds on the ground. Trusting that God will provide the growth, we sleep and rise night and day, always looking forward to the harvest of life.

[1] Feasting, Year B, Volume 3, 142.

[2] Luther’s Works, Vol. 51: Sermons I., J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald, & H. T. Lehmann, Eds. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 77-78.

[3] Kent Keith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_M._Keith

[4] Daniel 4:10-12

[5] Ezekiel 17:22-24

Drawing circles

Mark shows us Jesus drawing circles. We don’t see him sitting on the ground and drawing in the dust. We watch him as he proclaims the message of the kingdom in the villages of Galilee, announcing its coming with mighty acts of healing.

Hearing all that he was doing, Mark tells us, people came in great numbers, a movement of multitudes. They came to him from long distances, drawn to him from all around Galilee, from Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, the lands beyond the river Jordan, and the region around Tyre and Sidon. The names of the places Mark mentions let you draw a map in your mind, and the little red dot that tells you, “You are here”, that little red dot is glued to Galilee in the middle.

To Mark, this is the center of the world, because Jesus is there. But it is also the center of a world in the grip of evil - beautiful, yes, blessed with life’s diversity and the delights of living, but also ugly and oppressive. Many of us didn’t know about the Tulsa massacre of 1921 until Watchmen started streaming on HBO two years ago, or until news of the 100th anniversary made us wonder why we hadn’t heard about it before, why we didn’t learn about one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history in school.[1]

Our life together gives rise to inspiring accomplishments and moving ideas, but also to acts of violence and structures of corruption. In Mark’s world, such structures and the anonymous forces driving their creation and continuation are identified as demonic. They are evil powers that are incredibly resistant to being seen and named and driven out. Karl Barth wrote that demons “exist always and everywhere where the truth of God is not present and proclaimed and believed and grasped, and therefore does not speak and shine and rule.”[2] But now Mark shows us how in Jesus the truth of God is present, and how in him this truth speaks and shines and rules. Jesus begins his ministry, and the demons know their time is up. “Have you come to destroy us?” they ask him.[3] They know who he is, and they fall at his feet. In the presence of Jesus, Mark testifies, demons fall.

In the next scene, Jesus draws another circle. We see him on the mountain, surrounded by the twelve. “He called to him those whom he wanted,” Mark tells us. Twelve men, not a woman among them, they were the initial apostolic team, the ones he would send as co-workers in his kingdom ministry of letting the truth of God shine and rule. They were all men, but that wasn’t what qualified them. What qualified them was his call, and today we celebrate that the risen Christ continues to call to him those whom he wants. Just as we baptize those whom he has called, we ordain those whom he has called; and we do so with great confidence because it is Christ himself who has chosen them, and with great humility because we are just as flawed as those initial twelve were.

In the next scene, Jesus enters a house, and again a crowd has gathered. They are drawn to him just like we have been, drawn into the circle of his power, drawn to the life where God’s truth is spoken and believed, where true life shines and rules. And then his family shows up, and it’s like they don’t recognize him anymore. The things he does, the things he says, the way he spends his days - they’re convinced he’s gone out of his mind. They don’t recognize the power at work in him. They think it’s madness, and they’ve come for an intervention. They want the old Jesus back, and they’re here to pick him up and take him home, in chains if necessary.

In Mark’s own time, families were torn apart because some members embraced the kingdom message, while others didn’t. And this didn’t create merely tension. In Mark 13, we read about a period of persecution when brother betrayed brother to death, and a father his child, and children rose against parents and had them put to death.[4] The kingdom message is a message of liberation and healing, but its proclamation can create conflict and great suffering, even in the most intimate relationships. Mark wants us to know that. Live the truth of God to the degree that you know it, and let it shine, but don’t expect others to see the way you see or read the way you read or come to the same conclusions as you. But continue to live the truth of God as you know it, with confidence and humility.

In the next scene, the scribes appear, they are scholars and keepers of the sacred tradition, and they don’t recognize the power at work in Jesus. They can tell that he’s clearly in the grip of something, but neither his family nor these scribes know what to make of that powerful something that’s got a hold of him. We believe and confess that it is the Spirit of God, but this group of scribes accuse him of being in league with the master of demons.

But why would Satan cooperate with the eviction of Satan? And if Satan’s house is divided like that, it’s bound to fall, and this fall is the whole point of Jesus’ ministry: the liberation of God’s creation from the demonic forces of evil. So why watch him with suspicion? What could possibly be wrong with the fall of Satan’s house?

The conflict is drawn in stark, apocalyptic contrasts: In Jesus, the kingdom of God encounters not just a world that is sometimes easily distracted and often busy with other, seemingly more important things. In his ministry, the kingdom of God encounters a whole demonic system that is occupying the house of the world and is keeping its inhabitants - you and me and air and sea and all things - in captivity.

But for Mark and the church, this encounter is not a never-ending back and forth between two cosmic powers. Jesus’ ministry represents the beginning of the end of Satan’s domain. If God is to rule and life is to flourish, Satan must be bound. To illustrate the point, Jesus quotes from the burglary manual:

No one can enter a strong one’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong one; then indeed the house can be plundered.

Jesus compares himself to the thief who has come to rob the biggest thief of all. We belong to God; all living things and all of creation belong to God - and not to the strong one who sows lovelessness and division, and robs the world of life’s fullness. Of course Jesus isn’t on the same team as the master of demons. Jesus is the more powerful one whose coming John announced, and he has come to tie up the strong one and plunder his property - property that never was his to begin with.[5] We belong to God, always have and always will.

Jesus has come to set the captives free, and he continues to call to him those whom he wants in order to send them out to proclaim the message, with the authority to drive out demons. And because of who Jesus is and what he has done, his disciples are at work in the territory of a defeated enemy. The power of evil has not disappeared from the world, but its power has been broken. Christ is risen from the dead, and the truth of God shines. And because it shines with the light of love, the followers of Jesus can see demonic realities and name them and face them with courage. And yes, no longer teaching our children a whitewashed version of our history is a significant part of this ministry.

Mark shows us Jesus drawing circles, and in the final scene he’s in a house. It’s not the walls that define who is inside and who is outside, because a crowd has gathered around Jesus. His family, though, is said to be “standing outside.” They send for him and call him, which is sadly ironic, since he is the one calling and sending us.

The passage is saturated with the familial terms mother, siblings, brother and sister, and it illustrates a radical claim: the coming of Jesus as the representative of God’s kingdom makes family relationships the standard for how we relate to all in the one household of God; Jesus’ practice and presence challenge us to think about mutual belonging with the depth of obligation that we associate with being members of a family.

Jesus looks at all the humanity gathered around him, all of us with our hunger for wholeness and our thirst for life, and he draws the circle wide, saying, “Here are my mother and my siblings! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” He draws a circle with a radius long enough to include each of us - a radius stretching so far, it reaches way past any line of exclusion we might draw or imagine. He is the reason why in this family we live in the hope that in the end not a single one of us will be left standing outside. In this family we believe and testify that the love of Jesus has bound the strong one, and that it continues to set the captives free. In this family we look to the day when the whole world is at home in the house that love built.

[1] See the column by Tom Hanks https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/opinion/tom-hanks-tulsa-race-massacre-history.html

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

[3] Mk 1:24

[4] See Mk 13:12

[5] Mk 1:7

We are debtors

Last Sunday, eight of us were baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. We did so in obedience to Christ’s command and with the growing recognition that with baptism we enter into newness of life. Baptism marks with symbolic action what we embrace in faith: in the death and resurrection of Jesus new life erupts, a new creation amid the familiar contours of the world. In baptism we celebrate the power of forgiveness and the freedom to live and serve as children of God in the world. In the deep solidarity of love, Christ has made us his own, and in baptism we say our small yes to God’s big yes: we acknowledge God’s gifts as given to us, and we step into the story of God’s love for us as we step into the water and let ourselves be immersed in it.

Eight times it was my privilege and joy to speak the words, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” It is but one name, because these three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are one. This puzzling declaration is not an invitation to speculation; it is an invitation to enter the mystery of the divine life as participants through Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit – as those eight young people did last Sunday.

C. S. Lewis spoke about prayer both as an illustration and as a way to enter the mystery of the triune God. Imagine, he suggested, “an ordinary simple Christian” who says her prayers. She does so with intention, because she wants to “get into touch with God” and because she trusts that God hears her prayers. But as a Christian she also knows that “what is prompting” her to pray “is also God,” God inside her, so to speak. And she knows that all she knows of God, she knows because of Christ, the Word of God in human flesh. And Christ is present with her, praying for her, praying with her. “You see what is happening,” says Lewis. God is the one she seeks to address with her prayer. God is also the one nudging her to pray. And “God is also the road or bridge,” the way along which she is drawn in her desire to address God. Thus “the whole threefold life” of the triune God “is actually going on” around and within her, Lewis contends — and as she prays, she is being caught up into a fuller kind of life,” which is to say, into the very life of God, three in one, one in three, while still remaining herself.[1]

Paul also writes about prayer in today’s passage from Romans, and he does it to assure his audience of their status as children of God and heirs to the promises of God. “How can we know we belong?” he imagines believers in Rome asking him, and he responds,

When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.

Jesus Christ is the one human being who lived faithfully in relationship with God, and he fulfilled the calling all of humanity had failed to live out, due to the power of sin. Christ is the heir to God’s promises, because Christ was faithful even unto death, and therefore God raised him up, the firstborn of a new creation, beyond the reach of sin and death.

Jesus’ relationship with God was personal and intimate. He addressed God on familial terms as Abba, and the community of believers remembered that intimate address and continued to use it in the original Aramaic after Easter. It was, according to one scholar, “so precious, venerable and distinctive as to resist the absorption into Greek that was the fate of virtually the entire remainder of the tradition.”[2]

Jesus’ relationship with God was personal and intimate, yet it wasn’t exclusive. It included all whom Jesus claimed as his siblings and embraced in boundless love, and all whom the Risen One continues to claim through the Spirit, whom Paul calls the spirit of adoption.

Paul was aware that the believers’ confidence that they were indeed children of God could be shaken in the trials besetting them. And so he told them, “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ we’re not just mouthing words – it’s the Spirit of Christ bearing witness with our own spirit that we belong to the household of God – and as members of God’s household we are co-heirs with Christ to the promises of God.” We are claimed and sealed, sanctified and destined to be glorified. In other words, what Christ has done and what God has done in Christ was for us and our salvation.

“So then, brothers and sisters,” our passage from Romans begins, “we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh — for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” This sentence is strangely incomplete – we are not told to whom or what we are indebted: “not to the flesh,” Paul says rather emphatically, leaving it to his readers to finish the sentence: We are debtors, not to the flesh, but to Jesus Christ, to the Spirit, to God.

Paul didn’t have a doctrine of the Trinity, but he loved God and he knew Christ, crucified and risen, and he was led by the power of the Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity came much later, emerging from worship and study and conflict, and it continues to unfold through the theological work of the church, in conversation the biblical witnesses, with philosophers and mystics, poets and musicians, and believers of other faiths. God is three in one, the church confesses: the Holy One of Israel whom Jesus called Father, the Son who became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, and the Holy Spirit who has been poured out on all flesh. God is not a principle or the ultimate unifying theory of everything, but a personal, relational reality.

God is persons and nothing else. There is no waxy residue of divinity that is not wrapped up in these three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That’s who God is.[3]

And by the grace of God, we are adopted into this interpersonal reality to be in communion with God forever, to know as we are known, and love as we are loved.

Paul writes, “all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” Our status as children of God is not determined by the world’s usual markers. In Paul’s day, things quickly got complicated between Jews and Gentiles in the churches, and to this day they continue to be complicated between male and female and non-binary folk, between rich and poor, cis and trans, preppy and punk, and I won’t even attempt to paint a full picture of all the ways we have come up with to draw each other in or push each other out. Paul insists that our core identity as followers of Jesus is affirmed in our baptism: each of us a child of God, and all of us siblings of Christ. All our other identity layers still matter, but they no longer determine how we relate to each other. All those sharp lines we draw fade in the light of our new and true status as siblings of Christ, children of God who are led by the Spirit of God. We don’t need a Sunday to lift up the doctrine of the Trinity. What we do need are frequent reminders of our true identity as children of God, because we are often fearful and forgetful and ungrateful.

We are God’s children on the way, led by the Spirit into the fullness of our inheritance like Israel in the wilderness: no longer slaves, but not fully free yet either. In his letter to the Galatians Paul writes, “you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.”[4] Self-indulgence is another way of spelling “according to the flesh.” Led by the Spirit, we are no longer slaves to our self-seeking impulses and fear-driven desires; we are human beings made in the image of God who are being remade in the image of the Son of God, the truly and fully human one.

We are debtors, brothers and sisters and fellow-siblings of Christ, debtors not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh, but to God, to live according to the promise and purpose of God. We are debtors, that’s the central point made about us here. We owe all that we are to God: our life, our freedom, our hope. Paul uses the language of obligation again in Romans 13:8 where he writes, “Owe no one anything, but to love one another.” That is the whole point of the debt we owe to God: we can’t pay it back, but in paying it forward we become more fully who we are.

[1] Mere Christianity, 4.2; my thanks to the good people at https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/lectionary-commentary-for-trinity-Sunday for the lead.

[2] Brendan Byrne, Romans (Sacra Pagina), 250.

[3] Richard Lischer, Open Secrets. A Memoir of Faith and Discovery (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 80.

[4] Galatians 5:13

Speak to the bones

A cheerful heart is a good medicine, a proverb says, but a downcast spirit dries up the bones.[1] Today is a good-medicine kind of day. Our hearts are very cheerful after long, long months of worrying and waiting. We smile big smiles behind our masks, and our eyes sparkle with joy. Today is a good-medicine kind of day and we rejoice over the young people who say yes to a life as followers of Jesus, yes to a life of faith and hope and love. Today is a good-medicine kind of day and we praise God for the steady downpour of God’s Spirit on all flesh, inspiring and empowering people of all generations and in all places to dream God’s dreams and see God’s visions and live into God’s future with all their heart and mind and strength.

It is so good that we use a lot of water for baptism, that we don’t just fill a small basin for a little splash, but a pool deep enough to wade in; deep enough for the water to go up to our chest; deep enough for our bodies to go under and feel the water’s support. We use a lot of water because it gives us language to speak of being immersed in God’s love as in an ocean, of floating effortlessly on the currents of God’s grace, and of standing under the broad falls of God’s mercy, washing away our sin and guilt and fear.

A cheerful heart is a good medicine, but a downcast spirit dries up the bones.

A downcast spirit dries up the bones. The driest place on Earth is in Antarctica, I read. There’s an area called the Dry Valleys, where it hasn’t rained or snowed for nearly 2 million years.[2] That’s mighty dry. But nothing compared to the valley Ezekiel saw. The driest place on earth is where hope has evaporated. Ezekiel didn’t want to see it. He didn’t go there out of curiosity. He was taken there in a vision, by the hand of the Lord who set him down in the middle of the valley. First impression: bones everywhere. The Lord led him all around so he could get a good look. There were very many bones, and they were very dry. It was a battlefield, long after the eagles and vultures had finished their feast and picked them clean. It was a scene of defeat and death and abandonment. Nothing but very dry bones.

“Can these bones live?” God asked Ezekiel. How could they? After a battle, there might be wounded warriors who could perhaps survive, but bones spell nothing but life long gone, without a doubt. Ezekiel responded, “O Lord God, you know,” which may have been another way of saying, “Don’t ask me; that kind of question you alone can answer.” And the Lord said to him, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.”

The driest place on earth is not where it hasn’t rained for nearly 2 million years. The driest place is where hope has evaporated. God interpreted the scene for Ezekiel, saying, “These bones are whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, our hope is gone; we are doomed.’” Years of exile in Babylon and recent news of Jerusalem’s destruction had taken a heavy toll.

And the Lord said, “Speak to the bones.” And Ezekiel did speak, and in his vision he saw bodies being reconstituted, bone to bone, layer by layer, sinews, muscle tissue, and skin, in time-lapse mode. But that wasn’t it. There was no breath in them. And God didn’t just breathe into their nostrils the breath of life, no, God told Ezekiel to speak to the breath, the spirit, for it to come from the four winds and breathe into these slain bodies that they might live again. And Ezekiel spoke, and breath, the spirit of life entered them and they came to life and stood up, a vast multitude.

It was a vision of the complete reversal of a hopeless situation. It was a vision affirming for Ezekiel that God, creator of heaven and earth and giver of life, had not abandoned God’s people. But that wasn’t all of it. It was also a vision affirming for Ezekiel that his obedience, his courage, and his voice were needed for the big change. A downcast spirit dries up the bones, and Ezekiel had every reason to lament with his people or fall silent altogether. But he trusted the word, and he didn’t look away, and he obeyed, and he dared to speak.

The driest place on earth is where all hope is evaporated. The driest place on earth is the place where the road ends and folks know they can’t stay there, but they can’t see a way out either. The driest place is the desolate land between Jewish settlements and Palestinian cities, between Israeli cities and occupied territories. The driest place is where words aren’t trusted, where rockets scream and gunships howl, and dreams leave no room for others and their stories, their memories, their claims. Really, the driest place is anywhere where our dreams of the good life leave no room for others and their dreams.

Yehuda Amichai was an Israeli poet. He was born in Germany in 1924, and immigrated with his family to Palestine in 1936. As a young man, he fought in the Israeli War of Independence, but became an advocate of peace and reconciliation in the region. He wrote a poem called, The Place Where We Are Right, and with it, he speaks simple words of courage and hope in the driest place.

From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.

The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.

But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.[3]

The driest place is where the others are wrong, because we are right. The driest place is where I am right, without a doubt, and therefore you must be wrong. Nothing grows there in the spring, no matter how much it rains.

The poet invites us to trust our doubts and loves a little more, to let them dig up the trampled ground of our certainties. He says a whisper will be heard, a word perhaps we hadn’t heard before, or heard a thousand times but never trusted. It may be the word calling the spirit of life, the very breath of God, to breathe on us.

Today is a good-medicine kind of day. We praise God for the steady downpour of God’s Spirit on all flesh, inspiring and empowering people of all generations and in all places to dream God’s dream and see God’s vision and live into God’s future with faith and courage. In the Acts of the Apostles, the images of fire and wind describe the Spirit’s coming, together with experiences of speaking and listening that transcend our cultures and languages. In the Gospel according to John, that same Spirit is associated with the breath of Jesus and the promise of another advocate like Jesus.

In English translations of John the Holy Spirit is called the Advocate, the Counselor, the Helper, or the Comforter; the Greek word refers to someone called to the side of another to help. Someone to be with us forever. Someone to teach us everything and remind us of everything Jesus has said to us. Someone to testify on Jesus’ behalf.

Today we celebrate that the Holy Spirit did come and continues to come – to inspire and empower us, so that we too may see the driest places where hope has evaporated, and not turn away, not run away, but abide with loving attention. The Holy Spirit continues to come so we can each be for each other someone called to the side of another to help – with faith and courage.

[1] Proverbs 17:22

[2] https://www.universetoday.com/15031/driest-place-on-earth/

[3] “The Place Where We Are Right,” trans. Stephen Mitchell, in: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, ed. Robert Alter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 66.

Unsentimental love

The right to vote is sacred. It is sacred, because through elections, “government of the people, by the people, for the people” is established.[1] It is sacred, because it is a core definition of who is a citizen and who isn’t, who belongs and who doesn’t. And because the right to vote is sacred, because it is ultimately about belonging, it has been demanded, contested, affirmed, and denied. When elections don’t produce the desired results, political leaders are tempted to redistrict the electorate for more favorable outcomes or to make it easier for some voters to cast their ballots than for others. And, of course, there have also long been less formal, but highly effective ways to predetermine election results through violent intimidation.

Before dawn on January 10, 1966, Sam Bowers, who was the Imperial Wizard of the the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and two carloads of his fellow Klansmen drove to a house about five miles north of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The house belonged to Vernon Dahmer, and while he and his family slept, the Klansmen doused their home with gasoline and set it on fire, destroying both the house and an adjoining grocery store. One of Dahmer’s three children, a ten-year-old daughter, was injured in the fire. Dahmer himself lived for a few hours but died that afternoon. Witnesses testified that Bowers ordered the killing because Dahmer was allowing Black voters to pay their poll taxes in his store. More than three decades later, in August 1998, Sam Bowers was finally convicted, after four mistrials, for the murder of Vernon Dahmer. The right to vote is sacred, not least because Vernon Dahmer and countless others gave their lives for it; and they call on us to pay careful attention when state legislatures fiddle with voting laws and election procedures.

One who did pay close attention was the Reverend Will Campbell. He was a Baptist preacher and former campus chaplain at the University of Mississippi, and he wrote a terrific memoir, Brother to a Dragonfly, which was a National Book Awards finalist in 1978. Campbell had long been involved in the civil rights movement; when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was established, Campbell was the only white person there. In 1957, together with four other representatives of the National Council of Churches, he walked with the Black students who first integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, as they made their way through an angry mob in the street.

In his days at Ole Miss, Campbell had known Vernon Dahmer and had worked closely with him on voting rights issues, and he was present in the courthouse for Bower’s 1998 trial. Nobody was surprised when Ellie Dahmer, Vernon’s widow, embraced him as an old friend. But when the defendant, Klansman Sam Bowers, gave him a hug, courtroom reporters were shocked. During recesses in the trial, Campbell was observed talking with equal warmth to both Ellie Dahmer and Sam Bowers. One of the reporters covering the trial asked Campbell how he could possibly be so friendly with both the victim and the despicable man who had committed murder. “Because I’m a Christian,” Campbell growled, and he cussed a little, just for emphasis.

While reflecting on the integration struggles at the University of Mississippi as part of a book project, Campbell had realized that he needed to spend time not only with his friends and people who shared his views but also with enemies of the movement. And so he had reached out to Sam Bowers through an intermediary, met him and spent time with him. During one of their meetings, Campbell had been riding with Bowers in a car and Bowers had stopped by a local cemetery to pray at the graveside of a friend. And when he came back to the car, Campbell remembered, Bowers had tears in his eyes. And that was all it took for Campbell to see the human being behind the mask of the Imperial Wizard.[2]

I’m telling you this story because it shines with the gospel. Brother Will paid attention in ways familiar to anyone who cares about social justice, but then he took one step further, one huge step outside his comfort zone, and discovered ways to connect with difficult others, relationships he could barely have imagined before. He was very much in the world but he didn’t belong to it. He belonged to Christ. Campbell’s testimony in the courtroom wasn’t part of the legal proceedings. He acted as a witness, but not for the prosecution or the defense; he was a witness for a way of love and life associated with the name of Jesus.

When I think about continuing to grow in faith, Brother Will comes to mind, and his willingness to surrender to love’s uncomfortable call to connect with the difficult other. I’ve read some of his writings and sermons, and I’ve watched some clips of interviews, but only once was I in the same room with him. In 2005, during the General Assembly of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Portland, Oregon, he spoke at a local church, an old man with a cane, bent over and moving slowly and with great caution. He only spoke briefly. The deepest human hunger, he said, can only be stilled by love, unsentimental and dependable love.

The Gospel according to John tells a story, and to the casual listener its testimony can seem wordy, its narrative style, a little weird. It tells the story of Jesus, from the beginning of time to creation’s completion in glory: it tells the story of Jesus as the story of God and the world. And it tells it with the hope that through its testimony we will receive Jesus and with him the life God wants for us: life in fullness, eternal life.

The deepest human hunger, Will Campbell said, can only be stilled by love, unsentimental and dependable love. Jesus, says John, is the bread that stills that deepest hunger. Jesus entire mission – his being born in our flesh, his life and ministry, his death and resurrection and return to the Father – all of it, all of him, is but one gift of unsentimental and dependable love.

In John 17 we are invited to listen as Jesus prays. That evening, his eyes had been on the disciples. He had washed their feet. He had shared a meal with them. And he had taught them, given them the new commandment to love one another as he loved them. Now he looked up to heaven and prayed, and we are given the privilege of overhearing his prayer.

Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.[3]

This is eternal life, this is fullness of life, that we may know God. The end of the story of God and the world is life glorified in the truth and goodness and beauty of God.

“I have made your name known,” Jesus prays, “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world.” In the life of Jesus the name of God is being made known to us, not as a combination of letters, but as the revelation of who God is. “This is eternal life, that they may know you,” he prays, and this knowing doesn’t take us out of the world and onto distant islands of bliss. On the contrary. “As you have sent me into the world,” Jesus prays, “so I have sent them into the world.”

In the gospel of John, “world” is not just another name for the planet or the universe or for the stage on which the drama of human history unfolds. In John’s usage, the “world” is that part of creation that doesn’t know God; it is that part of life that is so out of tune that it is actively opposed to God’s will and purposes.[4]

As disciples of Jesus we are not taken out of the world in a great escape, spiritual or otherwise; we are sent into it to continue Jesus’ work in the world — as those who no longer belong to the world.  We belong to Jesus, we belong to the story of grace and truth, and with the life of Jesus as the pattern of our lives, we participate in the divine mission in the world.

The deepest human hunger, Will Campell said, can only be stilled by love, unsentimental and dependable love. The only way to overcome a world hostile to the purposes of God is to love it – and there is nothing sentimental about that love, as even the most casual glance at the life of Jesus will show. God does not respond with hostility to a hostile world, and neither does Jesus. You remember the famous passage,

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.[5]

And Jesus sent his disciples, sends us into the world to live as witnesses to the dependable love of God. Unsentimental love is difficult work, and so Jesus prays, “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one as we are one.” He prays that we may not give in to the temptation to condemn and exclude the difficult other. He prays that we remain true to the name of God which Jesus has made known to us.

I began by stating that the right to vote is sacred. It is sacred because ultimately it is about belonging, about who is included and who is not. The God and Father of Jesus Christ won’t let the world get away with being loveless, whether it’s at the intimate, personal level or the systemic, societal level. Because justice is what love looks like in public: unsentimental, dependable, and difficult love.

[1] See Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

[2] Bartholomew Sullivan, “Bowers Convicted of Killing Dahmer. Ex-Klan Leader Gets Life Term in ’66 Murder,” Commercial Appeal, August 22, 1998; http://www.asne.org/kiosk/writingawards/1999/sullivan.html#Aug22 . See also Thomas G. Long, Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian (San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass, 2004), 102-103.

[3] John 17:1-3

[4] See John 1:10

[5] John 3:16-17

Not burdensome?

“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love,” Jesus said. Some of you may think, “Isn’t it ironic? Here we are on Mother’s Day, and what do we get to hear? Just more proof how deeply embedded patriarchal language and thought worlds are in both scripture and church traditions.” Others among you may say to yourselves, “Don’t fret about it; it’s not like Mother’s Day is a great bastion against patriarchy, is it? Just get on with it.” And again others among you may have noticed that the second reading does indeed relate rather nicely images of motherhood to theological reflection: “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God,” we heard just a moment ago.

Born of God – that lovely phrase invites associations having to do with pregnancy and labor and the joy of welcoming new life. Our English translation continues by stating that “everyone who loves the parent loves the child,” but the original is a bit more specific: Everyone who loves the one who gave birth also loves the one who has been born.

The associations invited here are not just of the one who gave us birth or who cared for us with motherly affection — what comes into view here are familial bonds that go beyond “me and mom” to include all my siblings; and if you don’t know it from life, you’ll know it from literature and film that life with siblings is far from uncomplicated.

On Mother’s Day we tell our mom in special ways that we love her. Perhaps you sent her a card or drew her a picture; or you found beautiful flowers for her; or you’ll give her a call; or you insisted that she stay in bed until you bring her your best breakfast; perhaps you take her out for lunch. Mother’s Day is all about mom, except that it’s also about us, or, more precisely, about me, because I want her to love my picture better than my brother’s, and I want her to know that I made the near-perfect scrambled eggs while it was my clumsy little sister who burned the toast and spilled the coffee. And Mom? “I LOVE these eggs,” she says with a big, warm smile and I grow an inch and a half—but then she continues, “and this is the BEST toast I ever tasted. And the pictures you drew, I must say, you’ve outdone yourselves. Thank you so much! You are the kindest, most thoughtful and generous children any mother could wish for.”

I don’t know about you, but for many years I found being my mom’s child much easier than being the brother of my siblings, and I guess the same was true for them. Love and rivalry make an explosive mix, and I imagine that many a mother had to step between her feuding children, telling them to stop it and be more loving with each other. “Why should I love him? He hates me!” they both protest, and she doesn’t say, “Because I say so.” She says, “Because I love him and I love you.” You gotta love your siblings, because she who gave birth to them and to you loves them as much as you.

The author of 1 John uses this familial language to underline the indissolubable connection between our relationship with God and our relationship with each other. Our shared faith in Jesus is a shared birth that makes of believers one family—siblings, all of us. In this family, there are no grandparents, aunts and uncles, or cousins—we’re all first-generation children, born of God through faith, and given to each other as siblings through the love of Christ our mother and brother.

In 1966, Peter Scholtes wrote a simple little song, We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord. They’ll know we are Christians by our love, was the refrain. Scholtes was a priest at St. Brendan’s, on Chicago’s south side, and the parish was about half Irish-Catholic and half Black-Catholic. It was the height of one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history, and Scholtes was moved by the testimony of Dr. King, Jesse Jackson, and others in the civil rights movement. He was also steeped in the worldview and language of John. “Children, let us love,” we read there, “let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”[1] And so Scholtes taught the youth choir at St. Brendan’s to sing of walking hand in hand and working side by side, returning again and again to the refrain, They’ll know we are Christians by our love. We are one, he taught them to sing, and our faith, our walk, our work, our lives are testimony to our hope that all unity will one day be restored.

When Dr. King came to Chicago on his first trip north, Scholtes and a fellow priest hung a welcome sign outside the church, and he weathered the protest of white parishioners that ensued. He invited Dr. King to come to St. Brendan’s for a cup of coffee and to meet the church members who made God’s love tangible in the neighborhood with a food pantry and a clothing closet and financial assistance. And Father Scholtes watched in disappointment as over the years, white congregants continued to move out of the neighborhood.[2] The vision of unity restored—visibly, tangibly—would have to wait. But the song continued, and the witness and work continued, in Chicago and in tens of thousands of places around the world, to this day.

Father Scholtes’s song is quite orderly and structured, compared to the dizzying speech of 1 John. In 1 John, notions of belief, kinship, love, obedience and victory are chasing after each other in a continuous loop, phrase after phrase in a mesmerizing whirl of words; rather than read them analytically, it may be more appropriate to hear them like a song, like music that reveals through rhythm and repetition how all the elements encircle a gravitational center that holds them all in orbit. The swirling movement in 1 John is centered in a life, a name and a testimony: Jesus Christ. Again and again we hear echoes of his words, “Abide in my love.” The love of God poured out in the gifts of creation is our dwelling place, our habitat, our home. Likewise, we become God’s dwelling place when we allow love’s flow to continue through us. Obeying Christ’s commandments we abide in love and love abides in us, and his commandments—you heard that quick detail amid the waves of words, didn’t you? — his commandments are not burdensome.

Not burdensome? Perhaps you hear echoes of Jesus’ teaching, criticizing leaders who tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others.[3] Perhaps you recall his words, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”[4] Light? Not burdensome? Just think about your siblings. Doesn’t he know what it’s like to live with a sister who occupies the bathroom for an hour every. single. morning? Doesn’t he know how burdensome it is to live with a brother who not only eats the last two pop tarts, but then puts the wrapper back in the box and the box back in the cabinet as though nothing had happened? Putting up with each other’s foibles day in and day out as siblings in the family of God is no walk in the park—and it doesn’t matter much if they are siblings living under the same roof with us or if neighbors choosing to move out of the neighborhood. Putting up with each other, holding on to each other, not giving up on each other is indeed a burden—and Jesus knows that, knows that better than any of us.

What I believe he wants us to understand is that love—demanding as it is—is of all burdens the lightest. Indifference is heavy. Self-absorption is heavy. Hatred certainly is heavy — any form of lovelessness is always the heavier burden. Love is of all burdens the lightest. “All you need is love” the Beatles sang in the 60s, and there’s a lot of truth to that. “This is my commandment that you love one another,” said Jesus; but not just any definition of love will do. Love demands explication, and so Jesus said: love one another as I have loved you. The criterium is not some fuzzy feeling, but Christ himself. Such love is primarily interested in the good of the other person, rather than one’s own. Such love does not attempt to possess, manipulate, or dominate the other. And far from a mere feeling of euphoria, such love is a disciplined habit of care and concern, a habit is shaped over a lifetime of friendship with Jesus. His commandment is not burdensome, because love drives out fear; love conquers estrangement; conquers jealousy and mistrust; heals what is broken within and between us—for whatever is born of God conquers the world.

We are facing profound estrangement and mistrust in this country and in the world, deep divisions. Many of you feel discouraged, because we can’t seem to see a path forward, out of the conundrum we have created for ourselves. Some things are changing at a breath-taking pace, and we have a hard time keeping up. Other things are changing much too slowly, and we become anxious. Through the gospel, God calls us to the long, slow work of love. It’s never too soon, and never too late. It is our testimony to the hope that all unity will one day be restored.

[1] 1 John 3:18

[2] With thanks to Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 2, 490-94.

[3] Matthew 23:4

[4] Matthew 11:28-30

Shepherd-folk

I don’t know much about sheep. I have some faint memories of sheep grazing in fields around the small town where we lived till I was five, and there was an airstrip at a military base nearby where they kept a herd during the summer to cut the grass. I read about sheep in commercials for merino wool and pecorino cheese, but that’s about it. Besides that, sheep show up in some movies — Babe comes to mind, and Brokeback Mountain — and, of course, in the Bible. When the Lord talks about sheep, hearing his words in Elizabethan English seems quite 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]

Many of you will have watched recently the 30-second video of the boy who, with great care and effort, manages to pull a sheep out of a narrow ditch by its hind leg. The sheep takes off, with high leaps that suggest pure, ovine happiness—and plunges right back into the ditch, headfirst.[2] There aren’t many stories in the tradition about the wisdom of sheep. Andre Dubus remembers the first year he and his family lived in a very hold house in southern New Hampshire.

The landlord wanted someone to live in it while he was working out of state, the rent was a hundred dollars a month, the house was furnished, had seven fireplaces (two of them worked), and in the backyard was a swimming pool. There were seventy acres of land, most of it wooded except for a long meadow, hilly enough for sledding. There were also three dogs, eight sheep, and a bed of roses. … The landlady wanted the roses there when she came home after the year, and the landlord wanted the sheep. They were eight large ewes, and he bred them. They were enclosed by a wire fence in a large section of the meadow.

“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.” Catch them and put them back, he makes it sound quite doable, doesn’t he?

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, around the swimming pool, 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.

Dubus hadn’t had much experience with sheep until then, outside of movies and church, that is. “When I was a boy,” he writes,

sheep had certain meanings: in the Western movies, sheep herders interfered with the hero’s cattle; or the villain’s ideas about his grazing rights interfered with the hero’s struggle to raise his sheep. And 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 shepherds: they feed themselves, not the sheep; they don’t strengthen the weak; they don’t heal the sick; 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. He subverts royal visions of absolute power. The good shepherd lays down his life. Five times this phrase is repeated in the short passage from John, emphasizing a sovereignty that is entirely defined by love, love for God and love for us. This shepherd has 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 multiple flocks of all shapes and sizes, mostly made up of sheep that look alike, bleat alike, and smell alike. But the good shepherd keeps reminding us, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold”—and while we may all think that the envisioned unity will come when finally all of them will have become more like us, Jesus’ mission is all manner of ‘we’ and ‘they’ becoming a new kind of ‘we’ by growing in likeness with him.

Some of us think that being scattered isn’t so bad. We’re quite comfortable in our respective little flocks, and when the comfort level isn’t to our liking anymore, we move on—there’s something for everyone! Some of us have convinced ourselves that the ideal herd size is actually the flock of one: I come to the garden alone, and that’s how I like it. Just me and the Lord; and he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own—forget about the others. Others just make community so complicated.

The wolf, as you can imagine, is very pleased. The wolf loves to tell the lambs not to give in to “herd mentality” and to “forge their own path.” The wolf, of course, is mostly interested in a steady and convenient supply of lamb chops.

And the good shepherd? At the end of the Gospel according to John, Jesus says to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?”

He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.”

Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.”

A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”

He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.”

Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.”

He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”

Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.”

Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.”[7]

This suggests that at the end of the story we sheep-folk are to become shepherd apprentices, loving Jesus, listening to the voice of Jesus, and caring for each other. James Rebanks comes from a long line of shepherds and he wrote about the trials and the beauty of the shepherd’s life.[8]

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’s pulled out of the ditch, only to watch them leap off and plunge right back in, headfirst. He writes,

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.[9]

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

[1] Mt 12:11

[2] https://youtu.be/f97zwQS6I4o

[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] Ez 34:16, 28

[7] John 21:15-17

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

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

Creative maladjustment

When I read that there had been 45 mass shootings this past month, I thought it was a typo. Maybe 45 this year, I tried to tell myself, just to keep the sorrow at bay.

So I looked it up. The number was correct. The number of mass shootings in the United States for the year, as of April 16, is 147. In Indianapolis alone, there have been three; one on January 24, one on March 13, and the most recent one, on April 15.[1]

The victims were identified by the police as Matthew R. Alexander, 32; Samaria Blackwell, 19; Amarjeet Johal, 66; Jaswinder Kaur, 64; Jaswinder Singh, 68; Amarjit Sekhon, 48; Karli Smith, 19; and John Weisert, 74. Five more were hospitalized with injuries.[2] The shooting at the FedEx facility was yet another one involving a large capacity, military style weapon, and the President called it a national embarrassment.

I don’t know, he may not be able to call it what it is, hoping to move at least some Republican Senators to support legislation banning the use of military style weapons and large capacity magazines outside of the military and law enforcement—legislation supported by a large majority of voters, including a majority of registered Republicans. Crumbling bridges and underfunded schools, that's what I’d call a national embarrassment. But America’s paralysis in the face of repeated attacks in which four or more people are killed, often randomly, reveals an obsession on the part of too many, that I can only call idolatry—a death cult where my right to carry any kind of firearm I wish ranks supremely above any concern for public safety and public health. I can only call it idolatry because it holds my right to practically unrestricted access to weapons more sacred than my neighbors’ lives.

“The whole law is summed up in a single commandment,” Paul wrote in Galatians 5:14, echoing the teaching of Jesus, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The only love I can detect in the refusal to let the public draw certain boundaries around my right to arm myself, is an isolationist variant of self-love, the very opposite of the love of God in Jesus Christ. So I’m not trying to make a legal argument or a political argument; I’m speaking from a place of deep theological concern about self-absorption masquerading as passion for the constitution.

I’m concerned, I’m troubled, I’m sad and angry, but mostly I’m heartbroken; mostly I feel like my soul is being pummeled and bruised by the reports and the statistics— and they just keep coming, relentlessly. And, of course, it’s not just the mass shootings. Charles Blow wrote on Wednesday,

One of the first times I wrote about the police killing of an unarmed Black man was when Michael Brown was gunned down in the summer of 2014 in Ferguson, Mo. Brown was a Black teenager accused of an infraction in a convenience store just before his life was taken. Last summer, six years on, I wrote about George Floyd, a large Black man accused of an infraction in a convenience store, this time in Minneapolis. Both men were killed in the street in broad daylight.

He points out that every year since 2015, “the police shot and killed roughly 1,000 people,” but “Black Americans are killed at a much higher rate than white Americans, and … unarmed Black people account for about 40 percent of the unarmed Americans killed by the police, despite making up only about 13 percent of the American population.” And he continues,

Something is horrifyingly wrong. And yet, the killings keep happening. … Now there is another: Daunte Wright, shot and killed during the day in Brooklyn Center, Minn., not far from where Floyd was killed. There is video. … The aftermath of these killings has become a pattern, a ritual, that produces its own normalizing and desensitizing effects.

Now there is another —  four bare words that convey the normalization of the  horrifyingly wrong. “It becomes hard to write about this in a newspaper,” says Blow,

because it is no longer new. The news of these killings is not that they are interruptions of the norm, but a manifestation of the norm. There is no new angle. There is no new hot take. There is very little new to be revealed. These killings are not continuing to happen due to a lack of exposure, but in spite of it. Our systems of law enforcement, criminal justice and communal consciousness have adjusted themselves to a banal barbarism.[3]

Idolatry, the normalizing of he horrifyingly wrong, and systems adjusted to a banal barbarism – these are realities pushing hard against our hope.

In today’s Gospel reading, Luke uses words like startled, terrified, disbelieving and wondering to draw us into a moment when the newness of resurrection life breaks in. Jesus, we’re told, appeared among the disciples and ate with them, and he opened their minds to understand the scriptures. It was the interplay of Christ’s living presence and their immersion in the scriptures that allowed his followers to absorb the meaning of Jesus in its true magnitude.

Harvey Cox used to teach a course called “Jesus and the Moral Life” to undergraduates at Harvard. Some of his students identified as Christian, and many did not, but the content of the course was so compelling that their numbers kept going up until Cox finally had to move the class to a theater usually reserved for rock concerts. Initially, he ended his class with the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and death. He did so out of respect for his students who came from a variety of religious backgrounds, but, as he wrote later,

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]

Eventually he realized, though, that by leaving out this part of the story he was not just being unfair to his students, he was “also being intellectually dishonest, a little lazy, and cowardly.” He decided that he would “sketch out some of the current interpretations of the Resurrection and suggest that they would have to decide among them on their own. … [And so he] set out to move from silence into at least some kind of conversation.” And when he did, he had his mind opened by the witness of the prophets.

It … 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.

Resurrection hope was a thirst for justice, and the resurrection of Jesus was God’s affirmation and fulfillment of 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.”[5]

Idolatry pushes hard against our hope; the normalizing of the horrifyingly wrong pushes hard against our hope; systems adjusted to a banal barbarism push hard against our hope— but God raised Jesus from the dead; and immersed in the community of believers and the witness of the scriptures, we too are having our eyes opened to his living presence and our minds to the true magnitude of his life, the true magnitude of his teachings, and the true magnitude of his execution and resurrection.

Dr. King loved to talk about proper adjustment.

Certainly, we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. In order to have real adjustment within our personalities, we all want the well‐adjusted life. … But there are certain things in our nation and in the world [to] which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all [people] of good‐will will be maladjusted until the good society is realized. I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism [and the] self‐defeating effects of physical violence… In other words, I’m about convinced now that there is need for a new organization in our world. The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment — men and women who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”[6]

When our institutions have adjusted themselves to a banal barbarism and the idolatry of isolationist self-love, the advancement of creative maladjustment is the faithful, the hopeful, and, yes, the loving, response. It is our insurrection against the reign of death, in the name of Jesus.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/article/mass-shootings-2021.html

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/04/16/us/indianapolis-fedex-shooting

[3] Charles Blow https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/opinion/us-police-killings.html

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

[5] Ibid., 274.

[6] Excerpt from a speech at Western Michigan University on Dec 18, 1963. Dr. King frequently repeated the theme of “creative maladjustment” in speeches and sermons.