Image by Manfred Werner. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
Reading Jesus as a coyote who brings us into God’s reign against the law at no charge, or presenting baptism as making us all equally “wetback” strangers and aliens, are understandings coming directly out of years of working with undocumented immigrants struggling with the constant reality of possible deportation…
Reading Paul with undocumented immigrants, inmates, and “criminal aliens” cam clearly bring new life to worn-out texts. Reading these Scripture passages in a way that holds onto the radical grace that infuses them requires faith and risk. Though I am fully aware of other texts that emphasize the importance of being subject to governing authorities (Rom. 13:1-7) and of walking by the Spirit and not by the flesh (Gal. 5:16-26), I do not believe that people always need to be presented with the “whole picture.” Most people on society’s margins assume the Scriptures are only about lists of dos and don’ts and calls to compliance. Reading with people whose social standing, family of origin, addictions, criminal history, and other factors make compliance with civil laws or scriptural teachings impossible requires a deliberate reading for and acting by grace. The good news alone must be seized by faith as having the power to save, heal, deliver, and liberate. This good news is no one other than Jesus Christ himself, who meets us through the words of Scripture and the sacraments, and through the flesh of his family of buen coyote followers.
–Rev. Dr. Bob Ekblad, Reading the Bible With the Damned, p. 179-180, 195-196
European Bee-eater (Merops apiaster): a distant relative of the legendary Phoenix? Image by Pierre Dalous. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons,
Before I say anything else, I think it would be appropriate on this particular Easter morning to express thanks for the brave work of the men and women of the Boonville Volunteer Fire Department in their handling of the fire that destroyed part of downtown Main Street this week.
I don’t know if you heard, but there was a class of kindergarten students that was looking at a picture of a fire truck with its crew and trusty Dalmatian close at hand. One student asked the teacher why fire trucks always traveled with Dalmatians. The teacher didn’t know, so the kids began to speculate. One said, “Maybe they help control the crowds.” And another one said, “Maybe it’s just for good luck.” But in the end they all agreed that the best answer came from the third kid who said, “They must use the dogs to find the fire hydrants.”
Like Dalmatians on fire trucks, there is so much in this world that we simply accept as present without asking why it’s there. Take the church, for instance. A lot of people go to church their whole lives without ever really asking why. What is the purpose of the church? Why is it here? Is it just to keep the pipe organ and stained-glass window companies in business? Is it just to give our pastor a place to bring all his corny jokes that no one else will laugh at? Is it a civic organization where people can gather as a community to reflect on their beliefs and values?
According to our ancestors in the Presbyterian tradition, the church does have a particular purpose. Actually, it’s a six-fold purpose. It was most clearly delineated and written down a little over a hundred years ago by the United Presbyterian Church in North America, one of the predecessor denominations to our current national church: the Presbyterian Church (USA). The statement written by our forebears is called The Great Ends of the Church and it reads as follows:
The great ends of the church are:
The proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind
The shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God
The maintenance of divine worship
The preservation of the truth
The promotion of social righteousness
The exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world
Now, I don’t expect you to remember all of these points at once. But starting today, we’re going to spend some time with the great ends of the church over the next several weeks (not including next week, when I’ll be away from the pulpit). One by one, we’re going to look at these related ends and ask ourselves why we are here. My ultimate hope is that our discussion of the great ends of the church might lead us to explore questions about what it is that God might be calling our particular congregation to be and do in this community and the world at large.
Today, we’re going to look at the first great end of the church: The proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind.
Now, that’s a mouthful of theologically loaded terms that don’t always conjure up the most positive mental images of the church. When the average person hears church-folks talking about “proclaiming the gospel” and “salvation”, the first thing they tend to think of is proselytism (the active recruitment of converts to one’s religion). In other words, they think of people going door to door with Bibles in hand, winning converts for Christ and saving souls for heaven. At best, people see this kind of activity as misguided and self-seeking. After all, aren’t these people just trying to grow the ranks of the church and fill the offering plate? Most folks (understandably) would much rather be left alone from this kind of “gospel”.
So what else might we mean when we say that the first great end of the church is the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind? Well, we’ll have to take a closer look at the words “gospel” and “salvation” in order to get a clearer picture about that. The word “gospel” simply means “good news” and the word “salvation” comes from the Latin word “salve” which means “to heal or make well”. So we’re really talking about some piece of good news that has the capacity to bring wellness to the entire earth community. When I let that definition roll around in my head, I imagine a TV news bulletin interrupting regularly scheduled programming in order to inform the public about some momentous discovery, like a cure for cancer, for instance.
For Christians, we see the life of Jesus as representing just such an occasion of good news. We see in him a way to heal the darkness, chaos, and brokenness of this world. We hear it in his teachings. We see it in his actions. Most of all, we believe this good news to be embodied in the stories we tell about Jesus’ death and resurrection. Whether or not we take these stories literally, we see them as expressions of truth: the truth that the pure Love living in Jesus could not be silenced or held back by the hateful, violent, and power-hungry forces of this world. No, this Love that he revealed to us is more powerful than all the crosses, all the bombs, and all the schemes of all the nations of the world. Death itself is not strong enough to keep this Love down. This Love is so powerful that we would even call it divine. We would go so far as to say that the Love revealed in Jesus pulses in the nucleus of every atom, in the core of every star, and in the heart of every person. No matter what you try to say or do to it, the divine Love of Jesus lives.
In other words: God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.
That’s it. That’s the message of resurrection. That’s the story of Easter. That’s the gospel: the good news that brings wholeness and well-being to all.
The first great end of the church, the first reason why we exist at all, is to make this good news known to as many creatures as possible. The Love we see in Jesus should be apparent in our words and deeds as well. Our lives, as Christians, should make it easier for others to believe that Love does indeed conquer all (even death). Every service, every prayer, every hymn, every sermon, every building, every service project, every committee meeting, every rummage sale, and every dollar raised or spent should be directed toward making this one truth more clear and visible to the world:
Love conquers all.
God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Can we say that our church currently embodies this truth in everything we do? If not, how do you think we can do it better? What concrete steps can we take toward that end?
How about your individual life? Do people ever look at you and say, “Wow, that person’s life makes me want to believe that Love really does conquer all”? If not, then what concrete steps can you take to make the reality of Love more apparent in your life? Maybe it’s even something as simple as learning the name of your server in the diner where you eat lunch today?
There are bigger ways we can do this as well. This Easter morning, our congregation is collecting the One Great Hour of Sharing offering, which will go to support national and international organizations that provide, disaster assistance, hunger relief, and self-development resources to people all over the world. Grants funded by One Great Hour of Sharing go to support initiatives like the Water for Life project in the African country of Niger. Since 2006, Water for Life has dug six large wells for drinking water, 85 small gardening wells, and ten water-retention pools. “As a result,” according to the website of the Presbyterian Hunger Project, “19,892 people in 3,292 households, as well as 28,000 livestock animals, have benefited from improved access to potable water for drinking and food production. Additionally, over 853 acres of land have been cultivated with food crops and over 4,942 acres have been reforested.”
This is Love in action, embodied at a distance for people we’ll never meet.
On a more local level, I’d like to draw your attention to the post-fire recovery effort currently underway at the Boonville United Methodist Church. From the very beginning of this crisis, before the buildings had even stopped smoldering, the Methodist Church opened its doors as a command and resource center for victims. Donations of food, clothing, and supplies have poured in from all over our community.
Rev. Rob Dean tells me the one thing they need most right now is people who can come down to help sort and distribute donations. Starting Tuesday, I’ll be spending most of next week over there as well, lending a hand and assisting Rev. Dean with any pastoral care needs for the families. You’re invited to come along as well. We could really use the help.
I spent yesterday afternoon over there. When we sat down to dinner last night, we had more food than we knew what to do with. In that upper room together were displaced families, dedicated volunteers, exhausted firefighters, and two bewildered pastors who still had services to lead and sermons to write for Easter Sunday. Looking around the room last night, I discovered this sermon. I realized that I was witnessing resurrection in action, right before my eyes. In the midst of these people: suffering, hugging, laughing, and eating together. Within them and among them, new life was rising up from the ashes and taking flight like the Phoenix of Greek legend.
Friends, this is not just charity, nor is it simply a worthy cause. This is the good news that brings wholeness and well-bring. This is the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind. This is the first great end of the church. It is why we are here.
Maria, sister of Lazarus, meets Jesus who is going to their house (1864). By Nikolai Ge. Image Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
My favorite part of our church’s mission statement is the part at the end where we declare that we are “open to all and reaching out to the world in love.” I like to remind you of those words at the beginning of worship every Sunday because they speak volumes about who we are and what we do in this community. The world at large desperately needs to hear this message about a community that is truly “open to all”. So many other groups and organizations, even churches, divide themselves from one another along ideological lines. Here in this church, it is my privilege to be a pastor to so many people from so many different political and religious backgrounds. I can testify from experience that the Spirit who binds us together is deeper and broader than any one set of ideas or opinions. This is a church that has been built from the heart up, not from the mind down.
Almost everywhere else you can go in the world, the exact opposite is true. Most people want to know if you agree with them before they enter into a relationship with you. But we are different. We’ll move over and make room for you in the pew no matter who you are, where you’ve been, or what you think. We’ll just keep on telling you that we love you, God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it!
Yup, we’re “open to all and reaching out to the world in love”. I want you to know this morning how rare and unique that is, especially for a church. I personally believe that this part of our identity is the key to our future as a church. This commitment to openness is what makes us different from so many other Christians, who make people pass some kind of dogma test before they’ll accept them.
Recently, I was engaged in an intense discussion with one of these “other Christians”. This person said to me, “You think it’s okay, in God’s eyes, for people to practice other religions. So then, why would anyone want to be Christian if it’s not the one and only true religion?” I thought that was a great question. Why would anyone choose to be Christian if they could also choose to be Buddhist, Jewish, or Muslim?
I was reminded of this conversation when I read this week’s gospel passage from the lectionary. It’s the story of a woman named Mary of Bethany, who knelt at Jesus’ feet, anointing them with expensive perfume and wiping them with her hair. This was an incredible act of affection and devotion toward Jesus. Mary obviously loved and cared about him very much.
That got me thinking: if I was in Mary’s place, what is it about Jesus that would make me fall down on my knees in love and devotion? What is it about Jesus that makes me want to commit my life to him? Why am I a Christian?
I think this is a question that each and every one of us should ask. Whether you’ve just started coming to church or you’ve been here your whole life, you’ve decided to be here for a reason. We owe it to ourselves and the world to know what that reason is. I can’t answer that question for you. But what I can do is tell you why I’ve decided to be a Christian. I hope that my answer to this question might help you answer it for yourself.
So here’s what Christian faith means to me. This is what has driven me, like Mary of Bethany, to kneel down before the feet of Jesus and offer him all that I have and all that I am:
For me, being a Christian is all about love. Love is what I have experienced in and through the person Jesus of Nazareth. When religious scholars quizzed Jesus about the most important part of the Bible, he told them it all comes down to love: “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength” and “Love your neighbor as yourself”.
Jesus embodied love in the way he lived his life. He broke bread with tax collectors, Jews who sold their own people out to the Romans in order to make a quick, dishonest buck. He pardoned the sin of a woman caught in adultery when the rest of her village was ready to stone her to death. He nurtured relationships with Samaritans, the ethnic and religious rivals of the Jews, and saw the best in them. He praised the faith of a pagan Roman soldier. He reached out and touched a leper, who had been shunned and exiled from society because of his disease. Finally, he spoke words of forgiveness to his executioners as they waited for him to die. This is love.
Love, he said, is the first duty of any religious person.
When he wasn’t around, Jesus called upon his followers to love each other in his place. Any good deed rendered unto the most despised and forgotten members of society, Jesus said in Matthew 25, he would count as service rendered unto him. “Truly I tell you,” he said, “just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family,you did it to me.”
The love that shone through Jesus came to have a profound impact on his followers. The apostle Paul declared that, if it wasn’t for love, all his words, knowledge, and faith would be meaningless. John the Beloved went so far as to let Jesus’ example of love redefine his idea of God: “God is love,” he said, “and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”
What I learned through Jesus is that God is not some angry judge, sitting high up on a cloud, hurling down lightning bolts at people he doesn’t like. No, God is that dynamic energy of love that flows out from within us. God works through persuasion, not coercion. This divine love takes on an infinite variety of forms, depending on the person and the situation. As we open ourselves up to this love more and more, we are continually filled with God’s Spirit, and we begin to resemble Jesus. Love, then, is the measure of our faith, not religious dogma.
Through Jesus, I learn how to love and I learn that I am loved. Jesus didn’t just teach people about love, he didn’t just point to love. No, Jesus embodied love in his very being and person. Love shone through his every word and deed. That’s what I mean when I praise Jesus as the Son of God and the Incarnation of God: Jesus is the embodiment of divine love who invites me to do and be the same, in whatever imperfect and limited way that I am able.
This is what takes my breath away when it comes to Jesus. This is why I want to fall down at his feet and offer everything I have and all that I am, so that I might be part of that love too. This is the kind of God that I can believe in.
For me it is no contradiction to believe that the dynamic God of love I discovered in Jesus can be active in the lives of people from every time, place, culture, and religion. I hear the voice of this God whispering to me in the pages of the Bible and singing to me in the clouds at sunset. Jesus has opened my eyes, ears, mind, and heart to experience the presence of God in all things. For this, I am amazed and give thanks. What else can I do but collapse to my knees before Jesus and worship?
That is why I am a Christian. It has nothing to do with creeds, dogmas, or being the one and only true religion. It has everything to do with love. I hope and pray that the people around me will experience through me, in some degree, the love I have received through Jesus (whether they recognize it by that name or not).
How about you? Why are you here in church today? If you call yourself a Christian, why do you choose that label for yourself? I want to encourage each and every one of you to answer that question for yourself today. Something has brought you here. You are not sitting in this church by accident. It is therefore incumbent upon you to ask yourself: Why?
In your imagination, put yourself in Mary of Bethany’s place: kneeling at the feet of Jesus, offering the very best of what you have and who you are. What has brought you here? Even as you acknowledge and respect the faith of others who are different, something about this faith and this person, Jesus, has captured your attention. What is it?
Answer that question for yourself and don’t be afraid or ashamed to share your answer with the world. There are people out there who need to hear what you have to say. Go out there today and tell them.
“Preach the gospel always… use words when necessary.”
May your words and your deeds say to the people of this world: “I love you, God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Rembrandt, The Return of the Prodigal Son (c.1663-1665). Image retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
The last one hundred and fifty years or so have borne witness to more technological and scientific advances than any other equivalent period of time in human history. From industry to the internet, from the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk to the first moon landing at Tranquility Base, from outer space to cyberspace, we have traveled farther, communicated faster, and dug deeper into the mysteries of the universe than previous generations could have dreamed possible.
In all this time, perhaps the greatest mystery we have encountered is the mystery of each other. Without a second thought, I can pull a hand-held device out of my pocket and initiate an instantaneous conversation with someone on the opposite side of the planet. Compare this ability to explorers like Magellan, whose trip around the globe cost him his life, four out of five ships, and all but 18 of his 270 crew members. Compare it to the life of the average peasant in medieval Europe, who would likely never travel more than 5 miles away from the spot where he was born. Our experience of the world in the early 21st century is so much more connected and cosmopolitan than our ancestors thought possible.
But it hasn’t been an entirely utopian experience, of course. This heightened interconnectivity has brought us into contact with people very different from ourselves. These people talk, dress, think, and worship very differently than we do. Our knowledge of the world has given rise to more questions. The most vexing of these questions have to do with religion. Once the average person became aware of so many different religions on this planet, and especially once they began living next door to people who practice these religions, how are we supposed to make sense of such diversity? With so many varieties of belief and so many opinions about the ultimate nature of reality, surely someone has to be right while everyone else is wrong, right?
These questions have sparked an ongoing debate about who God is and what God wants that has lasted to this day. It seems like there’s always some nut-case out there who is more than willing to stand up on national television and claim with unwavering certainty to have the one and only right answer about what God’s will is. Too many people, longing for something to hold onto in these confusing times, are only too willing to buy into such easy answers. As we have seen, time and again, these peddlers of snake-oil and easy answers can make their followers say and do the unthinkable. In exchange for absolute certainty about the will of God, people are willing to hand over the money in their bank accounts, cut off relations to friends and family, and even fly airplanes into buildings. The philosopher Voltaire said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” I like to pray a prayer I once saw on a bumper-sticker: “Lord, protect me from your followers!”
In these times of complication and confusion, the promise of absolute certainty feels like a virtue but turns out to be a vice. As it turns out, the way we hold our questions with our values is far more important than the answers we come up with.
In Jesus’ time, there was a group of people who claimed to have all the answers. They were the Pharisees. Erudite scholars of the Torah, these well-respected citizens seemed to possess a monopoly on the truth market. Their rabbis fielded questions of theology and ethics so well that they established themselves as defenders of the faith and guardians of family values. Theirs was a world of black and white easy answers. Faith and certainty went hand in hand with no room for mystery, doubt, or mercy.
You can imagine then that when Jesus came along, he really messed with their worldview. We read in the opening verses of this morning’s gospel passage that Jesus was eating with tax collectors and sinners. The Pharisees were quite offended by this gesture, since eating with someone in that time and culture implied that you accepted that person just as he or she was. From their point of view, Jesus was sending the wrong kind of message for an upstanding citizen and an acclaimed rabbi. In response to their offended sensibilities, Jesus told them a story. It’s the famous story we now know as the parable of the prodigal son.
The story begins with a fictional man with two sons. One day, the younger of the two decides that he doesn’t want to sit around and wait for his father to die before collecting on his inheritance. He asks for it ahead of schedule. Basically, this move was his way of saying to his dad, “You’re dead to me.” And his father, in spite of what must have been immense heartbreak over this rejection, acquiesces to his younger son’s demand.
The next thing we learn is that this son takes his share of the estate and burns out on the party scene of some far-away city. But when the good times stop rolling, the son is hard-up for cash. He ends up taking the most disgusting job possible for a young Jewish person: feeding pigs. He was do hungry that even the hog-slop was starting to look and smell pretty good to him.
Finally, in a moment of desperation and clarity, the son selfishly cooks up a half-decent apology in order to get himself back into more stable living conditions. And then he makes his way back home with his tail between his legs. He wasn’t really sorry, mind you, he was just miserable enough that he would do anything, put up with any amount of humiliation, if it meant a warm bed and three square meals a day.
This is where the story gets really interesting. Jesus says, “…while [the son] was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” Taken aback by this enthusiastic greeting, the son nevertheless begins his feigned apology speech, but his father never lets him finish. He cuts him off by calling for his servants to bring a robe, a ring, and sandals. He kills the fattened calf and prepares a celebration feast. In this moment, we get a clear picture of this father’s true nature as a man overflowing with love and generosity for his children.
Most tellings of the story end here, with the prodigal son’s redemption via forgiveness. But that’s not where Jesus ends the story. He keeps going.
Enter the older brother, the father’s firstborn son. He has been the dutiful heir to the estate. He has his stuff together, so to speak. He has always done everything right. But he’s not the hero of this story, not by a long shot.
It turns out that this older brother, in his quest to be the perfect son, has severely misjudged the kind of person his father is. When he sees the welcome that his younger brother receives, the older brother gets angry and shouts at his father, “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends.” He thinks his father is a cranky old miser who demands absolute obedience without question. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Jesus’ cautionary tale about the older brother is a biting indictment of the leaders of the religious establishment in his day. Like the older brother in the story, their devotion to certainty and obedience has led them to believe that their God is just as judgmental and small-minded as they are.
On the other hand, it is the tax collectors and sinners around Jesus, no strangers to imperfection and doubt, who have the keenest insight on the nature of reality. Through Jesus’ acceptance of them as they are, warts and all, they are coming to have faith in the power of grace.
What is grace? Well, a theological dictionary would define grace as “unmerited favor” but here’s my favorite definition of grace: God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Sound familiar? It should. It’s how we end our sermons here every week.
But more than that, grace is one of the central religious values of our Presbyterian heritage. In the 16th century, when established religious authorities once used guilt and fear to manipulate and control the people, the Reformers countered that there is nothing a person can do to garner favor with God. Grace is a given. It is God’s basic orientation toward human beings. All we have to do is decide how we’re going to respond to it.
Will we, like the older brother and the Pharisees, storm off in a huff over the scandalous nature of grace? Or will we, like the younger brother and the sinners, open our hearts to this undeserved love? Will we allow it to transform us from the inside out, until we start to look like Jesus?
When I look around our world in the 21st century, I see a planet in desperate need of grace. We’ve had more than enough of pompous, self-righteous fanatics who claim to hold all the right answers to life, the universe, and everything. What we need now is a deep, abiding faith in the mystery of grace.
We need imperfect people, full of doubts and faults, whose lives have nevertheless been touched by the knowledge that they are loved, no matter what. Such people know how to love in return. Theirs is the only message that can successfully defend against the attacks of judgmentalism, fundamentalism, and terrorism.
Their scandalous message of grace, never popular or pragmatic, applies equally to liberals as well as conservatives, Muslims as well as Christians, North Koreans as well as North Americans. Grace is the great equalizer. Grace is the central value by which we know that we can never out-stay our welcome in the kingdom of God, and it is the enlivening force that empowers us to go out from this church this morning, saying to one another (and to the whole world):
“I love you, God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Hidden in the annals of Christian history are stories we’d rather not tell.
The Church of Christ has not always done well at emulating the life and love of its Lord and Savior. As a matter of fact, we’ve been downright evil for much of the time. One need only mention the Crusades or the Salem Witch Trials to get an idea of what I’m talking about. One such example comes from the very roots of our own Presbyterian tradition:
Back in the 1500s, when John Calvin was preaching in the Swiss city of Geneva, a guy named Michael Servetus blew into town. He was on the run from the Catholic Church after being arrested for heresy and then breaking out of prison. Servetus was a Unitarian, meaning that he did not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity: the belief in one God, consisting of three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The fugitive Servetus made a bad choice in putting Geneva on his travel itinerary. John Calvin, whose opinions had a powerful influence on city politics, had no more love for Servetus than the Catholic authorities had. Calvin himself had previously written to a friend, “If [Servetus] comes here… I will never permit him to depart alive.” And Calvin made good on his threat. As soon as someone recognized Servetus attending worship at Calvin’s church, he was arrested, tried, and burned at the stake for heresy. Michael Servetus’ last recorded words were, “Jesus, Son of the Eternal God, have mercy on me.”
This is part of the dark side of Presbyterian history. John Calvin is still remembered as the founder of the Reformed Tradition, of which the Presbyterian Church is a part. In 1903, Calvin’s spiritual heirs in the city of Geneva erected a monument to the memory of Michael Servetus on the spot where he was burned. The inscription on that monument condemns Calvin’s error and acknowledges that the true spirit of the Reformation can only exist where liberty of conscience is allowed to flourish.
It’s too little, too late for Servetus, but the gesture acknowledges that we’ve at least made a little progress in half a millennium.
In so many of these cases of heresy trials and stake burnings, there is an oft-repeated label that has been misappropriated from the New Testament and applied to the opponents of established orthodoxy. That label is: “Enemies of the cross of Christ”.
You might have noticed that very phrase appearing in this morning’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Paul wrote, “[M]any live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things.”
And just who are these “enemies”? Paul is not clear on that. At various points in church history, this term has been applied to Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Pagans, Unitarians, and basically anyone else who’s theological views differ from the person applying the label at the time. “Enemies of the cross of Christ” is a derogatory epithet used to identify others as “outsiders” and “heretics”. Most of the time, it has been applied to emphasize doctrinal differences between religious groups.
I believe that such use of this phrase does violence to its original meaning in Paul’s letter to the Philippians. You see, in that letter, Paul never suggests that one’s religious affiliation or theological orientation are determinant of one’s status as an enemy of the cross of Christ. For Paul, the truth goes much deeper than that: so deep, I would say, that the essence of this message can be found in the spiritual teachings of every mystic and every sage in every culture, every place, and every period of history. Paul’s message of the cross is the story of people graduating from their small, self-centered lives to the larger, reality-centered Life. Some have called it conversion, some salvation, some liberation, and some enlightenment. For Paul, as for most Christians, the central symbol for this process of transformation is the cross of Christ.
The cross is the single most recognizable Christian symbol in the world. Historically speaking, it was of course the instrument of torture and execution on which Jesus was killed. Symbolically speaking, Christians have attached multiple levels of meaning to its significance. Starting about a thousand years ago, a full millennium after Jesus was born, a British writer named Anselm of Canterbury came up with the idea that theologians now call “substitutionary atonement”. You might not have heard that phrase before, but you probably have heard some preacher on the radio or television saying, “Jesus died for your sins.” Substitutionary atonement is currently the most commonly known and accepted interpretation of the significance of the Jesus’ crucifixion, but the idea is only about half as old as Christianity itself.
In his letter to the Philippians, Paul presents an entirely different understanding of the cross. For Paul, the crucifixion event cannot be understood apart from the story of Christ’s resurrection. According to Paul, these two events form a unified whole. Neither one makes any sense without the other.
The crucifixion and resurrection, taken together, form the central image of the Christian spiritual journey. In the process of transitioning from a self-centered to a reality-centered life, every Christian must undergo a kind of death and resurrection. As Paul himself wrote elsewhere, in his letter to the Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” Earlier in his letter to the Philippians, he writes in a similar vein:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
In this early Christian hymn, Paul lays out the path of self-emptying, the path of the cross, which leads to resurrection and exaltation by God. And this, he says, is not only the journey of Jesus himself, but also of every Christian who claims to bear his name. Paul begins his hymn with the exhortation: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus”.
A Christian then, in Paul’s eyes, is one who walks the path of the cross, who dies to the old, self-centered life and rises to the new, reality-centered Life. One could say that a Christian is a “friend of the cross of Christ”.
By contrast, those who are “enemies of the cross of Christ” are those who refuse to walk this path of metaphorical crucifixion and resurrection. The Buddha might call them “unenlightened”. Muhammad might call them “infidels”. Harry Potter would probably call them “muggles”.
What can we learn about these “enemies of the cross of Christ”? Well, since this status has more to do with one’s way of life than with one’s religious affiliation, I think we can say that they might belong to any tradition or no tradition at all. We’re just as likely to find them in pews as in bars.
Here’s what Paul has to say about them: “Their end is destruction; their god is the belly”. This is an interesting way of putting it. When Paul says, “their god is the belly” he obviously doesn’t mean their physical abdomens. The belly is where one’s food goes after it is consumed. The belly, in this sense, is the seat of desire. The people who refuse to let go of their small, self-centered lives are worshiping their own desires and addictions. What they want/need is most important to them.
For them, the primary concern is “my food, my money, my country, my church.” Everything is all about I, me, my. There is no big picture or larger context in which they see their lives. That which benefits them is universally good. That which hinders them is universally bad. In every story, these folks never fail to cast themselves as either the heroes or the victims. They’re always on the side of right. They have all the answers. Anyone who disagrees with them is a heretic who deserves to be burned at the stake. This is what self-centered worship looks like. These folks are what Paul refers to as “enemies of the cross of Christ.” There is no self-sacrifice for them. There is no denial of desire for the greater good. There is no responsibility beyond one’s responsibility to one’s own self. Self-centered existence.
What is the end result of this way of life? Paul says it quite clearly: “Their end is destruction”. This self-centered way of thinking and living can only lead to pain and death. This is not some mysterious, mystical idea. Think about it: what kind of world would this be if neighbors never went out of their way to help each other? What if friends and family never forgave each other? What if no one answered the call of charity or the obligation of justice for those who suffer? I don’t know about you, but that’s not a world I would want to live in. That selfish mentality can only lead to destruction, as Paul warns us.
The way of the cross is the way of sacrifice. Jesus could have called upon his mass of followers to rise up and fight if he so desired. Instead, he chose to walk the path of nonviolence. He chose to suffer pain, rather than cause it. He chose to die, rather than kill to protect what was rightfully his. In so doing, Jesus set himself apart from every other revolutionary movement leader of his time. His selfless sacrifice did not go unnoticed or unremembered. He left his followers with a symbol and an image that would change the way they look at the world.
Christ’s willing submission to crucifixion, according to Paul, is the basis for his sovereignty over all creation. For his followers, it is the model we follow for living our lives in the world. The end-result of crucifixion is not death, but resurrection. “Humiliation”, according to Paul, is transformed into “glory”. Followers of the way of Christ must befriend the cross because it is the only way into the “abundant life” that Jesus intended for us to have.
Paul’s warning about the “enemies of the cross of Christ” is not a wholesale condemnation of those who hold different theological views from Paul’s, or John Calvin’s, or mine. Paul’s warning applies to all of us, no matter what religion we espouse. With tears, Paul is pleading with us to realize that our little lives, ruled by our own selfish desires and preferences, lead only to destruction.
The flip side of Paul’s warning is that those who befriend the cross, who walk the path of self-sacrifice for the greater good, like Jesus did, are sure to receive resurrection, salvation, and enlightenment. These are the true saints, the blessed ones who discover the meaning of life. These are the real Christians: the friends of the cross of Christ.
May it be so for you, for me, and for all who seek the greater good, the life abundant, in the name (or the spirit) of Jesus Christ.
I imagine there must have been some excitement in the air that morning as people entered the synagogue, dressed in their Saturday best. Perhaps some of the regulars were shuffling to find a new place to sit, since their usual seats were taken by the folks who normally only show up at Yom Kippur and Passover. But they came to synagogue that morning because they heard the news about the new guest preacher. One of their own, a local son, was returning to Nazareth for the first time since he began to make a name for himself in the region of Galilee.
Many of them remembered Jesus as a small boy, running around and playing with his friends while the adults made small-talk after the service. Now, at age thirty, he was beginning to garner a reputation as an itinerant rabbi, a teacher of the Torah. There were even some astonishing reports of unexplained, mystical healings associated with his visits. If even a few of these rumors were true, then surely he was about to save the best for them, the people of his hometown, the very ones with whom he had grown up and lived.
They were good-hearted, hard-working, small-town folk who came together Sabbath after Sabbath to honor their Jewish heritage and listen to the wisdom of the Torah. They knew Jesus and he knew them. They were the ones who taught Jesus those old stories of Moses and the prophets. Now, Jesus was the one who would preserve that history and pass it on to yet another generation, as it had been passed down to them by their ancestors in that very same synagogue. This was a very big day indeed.
The service itself, like every Shabbat service, featured the singing of the old psalms, praying prayers, and of course reciting the ancient Shema, Israel’s oldest creed: “Hear, O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai alone.” This faith formed the core of their tradition, preserved and passed on from generation to generation. And now, they were proud to welcome one of their own, Jesus, as the newest defender of the faith and guardian of the tradition.
After a reading from the Torah, there was usually another reading from one of the prophets. That week, it came from the book of Isaiah. Jesus read out loud: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Heads around the room were nodding in agreement as the old familiar words washed over them for the umpteenth time in their lives. They knew the story behind the words as well:
The prophet was writing to a community of Jews who had just returned from multiple generations of slavery in Babylon and Persia. It was in that place and time of tribulation that their religion had taken the shape it now held for them. They had come to believe that their God, Adonai of Israel, was the one true deity and all others were mere pretenders to heaven’s throne. In Babylon, alienated from the land of their ancestors and the Jerusalem temple where sacrifices were made daily, their Jewish ancestors had turned their attention to prayer and the study of the Torah in synagogues under the tutelage of learned rabbis. As strangers in a strange land, their ancestors had proudly struggled under oppression to preserve their faith and culture. The very existence of this synagogue in the small town of Nazareth was a testimony to their success.
Finally, after three generations of Jewish children had grown up under a Babylonian whip, the Persians invaded and conquered Babylon. These more open-minded Persians allowed the Jews to return to their homeland and rebuild, so long as they promised to remain loyal and subservient to the Empire. The prophet writing in this section of the book of Isaiah directed his words toward these newly returned exiles. They were faced with the task of rebuilding their country from the ground up. How would they even start? What values and ideals would shape this new society?
This particular prophet, writing in the name of another ancient seer, Isaiah of Jerusalem, who had lived and died centuries before, reminded the people of the ancient tradition of the year of Jubilee, a special holiday that came only once every fifty years. In this year, every debt would be forgiven and every slave set free. The land and the people would rest and then emerge with a fresh start, a new lease on life. The onset of this holiday was certainly “good news to the poor” for it brought release to the captives, freedom to the oppressed, and forgiveness to the debtors. It was a fresh start. The future was suddenly wide open. Liberated by the pronouncement of divine forgiveness, a new generation of people was free to rebuild the world anew. This is why they called it “the year of the Lord’s favor.” It seemed to them like heaven itself was smiling.
Back in the Nazarene synagogue, the old men heard these ancient words with tears in their eyes and smiles under their beards. God had been faithful, their people had survived, rebuilt, and passed on their heritage to another generation of Jews. And now, here was Jesus, the carpenter’s son, the little kid who used to play in their streets, now grown up tall, ordained as a rabbi, and preaching his first sermon in his hometown. The people survived. Their tradition lived on. God be praised!
Jesus finished his reading, rolled the scroll back up, and handed it back to the attendant. Then he sat down in the rabbi’s chair, which is what they used back then instead of a pulpit, and began to preach. He gave them the main point of his sermon with his opening remark: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Wait… what did he just say? Fulfilled? Didn’t he mean to say Honored, or Remembered, or Preserved? What does he mean by ‘Fulfilled’? If those ancient words were being ‘fulfilled’ ‘today’, it would mean that the story of our people is not yet over. It would mean that the journey home to freedom is not yet finished. It would mean that the task of rebuilding a new community is up to us, not our ancestors.
Even more importantly, it would mean that the year of Jubilee is now. All debts are off and all slaves are free. A fresh start for us, not just a bunch of people who lived once upon a time.
Jesus brought their tradition to life by showing it to be unfinished. A new world was being brought to birth by the age-old values of forgiveness and freedom. The same Spirit that animated the ancient prophets like a fire shut up in their bones was ready to set hearts on fire in that synagogue.
By appealing to this passage, Jesus deftly drew from multiple layers of tradition in order to make his point. Present, prophet, and Torah each represented different strands woven into a single tapestry in this sermon. Jesus appealed to the very deepest parts of who they were and what they valued as loyal, faithful Jews. He called them toward their higher calling through a fuller vision of who they were. He opened their eyes to the presence of a dynamic reality that is still unfolding, still working in their lives in order to bring fulfillment to the prophet’s ancient vision. Like any good preacher, Jesus brought the past into the present in order to shape the future. He opened their minds to possibilities that boggled their imaginations. He showed them a vision of what this world could be like if it were remade along the lines of these Jubilee values instead of the exacting cruelty of the loan shark and the slave driver.
Jesus introduced the people of his home synagogue to a living tradition, a prophetic tradition that reveres the memory of the past by trusting the promise of the future. Jesus invited his neighbors to follow the trajectory of the prophets rather than standing by their writings.
I believe that same invitation is now extended to us, the people sitting in this church today. We too can best honor the heritage left by our forebears by tracing the trajectory of their lives, rather than dogmatically hanging on their every word. To quote the Buddhist poet Matsuo Basho: “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.”
Like those members of the Nazarene synagogue, we have our own tradition that we would like to preserve. Beginning with Jesus, we might follow our tradition through the likes of the apostle Paul, Augustine of Hippo, John Calvin, and Karl Barth. Each of these voices (as well as many others) is worth paying attention to. But it is always a dangerous thing to make an idol of history. None of these voices carries the last word in matters of faith and ethics. Every generation of believers is still responsible, as heirs of the tradition, for continuing to interpret spiritual truth (as we understand it) in its day.
Our church tradition has a slogan that reflects this conviction: Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda. “The church is reformed and always to be reformed.”
The Reformation never ends. The story is not yet over. The Christian faith begs to be interpreted and applied in our day, just as it was in Calvin’s and Paul’s. Our interpretations will not match theirs exactly. John Calvin, for example, would shudder to learn that we now ordain women to preach in the very churches he founded.
There are some who argue that we have departed from “the faith once delivered to the saints” because of these and others of our practices that differ from our forebears. I say that we are not heretics but pioneers, reformers, maybe even prophets. Our task is not to blindly adhere to the words written on a page, but to critically follow the trajectory of the values expressed in those words. Following the image of the Jubilee that Jesus used: what does it mean to forgive debts and liberate slaves in 2013? Following Paul and Calvin, what does it mean for us to be reformers of church and society today?
As we stretch our minds to answer these questions, we continue the living tradition that was handed down to us from our ancestors. We honor our history by moving it forward, trusting in the guiding light of the Spirit to lead us home to the One from whom all blessings flow.
The Wedding at Cana, by Paolo Veronese (1562). Public domain. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
Let’s face it:
Parents just don’t understand.
I’m only 32, so it wasn’t all that long ago that I was a teenager bemoaning this very fact to my friends at school. All through those years, my elders kept on telling me, “You’ll understand when you have kids of your own.”
Well, you know what? I do have kids of my own now and guess what:
Parents still don’t understand!
For the life of me, I cannot comprehend even a fraction of what goes on in my four year old daughter’s mind. I admit that I’m still pretty new to the parenting game, but somehow, I get the impression that me not understanding her is only going to get worse as she gets older.
She has this incredibly vibrant and active imagination that can create entire worlds with their own cast of characters and plotlines. Once in a while, she’ll poke her head out of her fantasy play world and update us on what everybody in there is doing. Naturally, she just assumes that we’ve been in there with her all along and therefore know exactly what she’s talking about. We don’t, of course. But whatever she’s telling us is obviously important to her, so my wife and I usually just nod, smile, and say, “Okay!”
Parents just don’t understand.
But, as a parent, there certainly are things that you do understand.
For instance, there are things we know about our kids that no one else will ever know (with the possible exception of their future partners/spouses). Sometimes, we know them even better than they know themselves. We know what they’re capable of, even if they don’t.
I imagine that such was the case between Jesus and his mother as well. On one occasion, around the time that Jesus began his ministry, he and his mother attended a wedding together in a tiny little village called Cana. This village was so small and remote, in fact, that archaeologists today aren’t entirely sure where it was located. During the celebration, the unthinkable happened: the host family ran out of wine.
If that happened at a wedding today, we would probably say something like, “Gosh! That’s a bummer!” but then quickly get back to entertaining ourselves in other ways. Generally speaking, we would get over it. But in the ancient world, where social capital was just as valuable as money, this would have been a supreme humiliation. The family’s reputation would be ruined for all time. They would never live it down in the eyes of the community. The shadow of this event would haunt them for the rest of their lives.
With that in mind, you might be able to imagine the very real concern in Jesus’ mother’s voice when she tells him, “They have no wine.” At this point in the story, it’s not entirely clear what Jesus’ mother was trying to accomplish by telling Jesus this. According to the narrative text in John’s gospel, Jesus had never done anything particularly amazing or miraculous before this point. Even Jesus himself seems standoffish and dismissive when his mother first approaches him. He says, “Woman (which was a term of respect back then, like ma’am or madam is today), what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.”
Now, I just wish that the narrator had described the look on her face in that moment. In my imagination, I see her with her head cocked to one side and her hands on her hips, looking her son right in the eye. Then, without another word, she turns around, grabs a panicked staff member as he rushes by, and almost shoves him in Jesus’ direction, saying, “Do whatever he tells you.” Jesus, visibly annoyed, clenches his jaw and furrows his brow at his mother. She simply raises her eyebrows and walks back to the party, smiling knowingly.
Jesus says it isn’t time yet, but his mother knows: it’s time. It’s time for Jesus to become the person he was always meant to be. It’s time for the potential hidden in his life to break out into the open. He may not have even seen it in himself, but his mother saw it. And in order to actualize that potential, she had to get ahead of Jesus. She had to take that leap of faith and push him into something that even Jesus didn’t think he was ready for.
What happens next is the famous incident of Jesus miraculously turning water into wine. According to the narrator of the text, it was Jesus’ first miracle… and it never would have happened if his mother hadn’t pushed him into it.
Now, this whole scene might strike some of us as strange. We’re used to thinking of Jesus as our guru: the all-knowing, all-wise Son of God. He teaches and people listen. After all, he’s Jesus Christ, right? But in this story, he’s the one being pushed. The situation feels a little upside down.
To be honest, the more I think about this disturbing idea, the more I like it. In a metaphorical sense, it’s almost as if Jesus’ mother is reaching out across two thousand years of time just to mess with our heads. But if you let yourself sit with this ironic image of Jesus being pushed into his first miracle, some interesting thoughts start to develop.
Here’s what struck me about this story: Jesus’ mother is getting ahead of Jesus.
When I think about some of the most heroic people in history, I can’t escape the observation that most of them had to push back against the forces of cultural inertia in order to achieve greatness. In a sense, they too were getting ahead of Jesus, so long as we understand “Jesus” as a cultural icon whose name is invoked by the powerful in order to legitimate the social status quo.
For example: 150 years ago, a large number of preachers invoked the name of Jesus and even quoted the Bible in order to justify the practice of slavery in this country. And you know what? They were right… technically speaking. Numerous passages in both the Old and New Testaments talk about slavery as an accepted part of life. Pro-slavery advocates had the text of the Bible on their side.
Nevertheless, abolitionist movements, beginning with the Quakers in the 1600s, gradually built up steam and generated support among the people. They argued that the ownership of another human being as property violates the spirit of Christianity, even though it’s not expressly forbidden in the text of the Bible.
We take this line of reasoning for granted in the 21st century, but it was still a hotly contested issue in the 19th century. It was not socially advantageous to be an abolitionist in those days. Those who called out in the name of conscience were often beaten back by well-respected citizens carrying Bibles. These early heroes of freedom and equality, like Jesus’ mother in the story of the wedding at Cana, had to get ahead of Jesus in order to stand up for what is truly right and good: not the historical person named Jesus of Nazareth or the Spirit of the risen Christ that lived in their hearts, but the image of Jesus that was constructed and corrupted by the prejudice of the slave-owners.
When I talk about “getting ahead of Jesus”, I mean to say that people need to challenge their ideas about Jesus, not Jesus himself. We need to cultivate enough self-awareness to question our own assumptions about reality. When well-dressed and well-paid preachers go on TV, quote the Bible, and use it to justify the exclusion of gay & lesbian people, we to get ahead of that Jesus. When someone sends you an email with a painting of Jesus wrapped in an American flag and carrying an assault rifle, you need to get ahead of that Jesus. When politicians use Christian rhetoric to turn our diverse society into a religiously monolithic nation, we need to get ahead of that Jesus.
Whenever we take a controversial stand for what we believe is right, there will always be people who can quote the Bible against us. On the surface, many of these folks will appear to be more knowledgeable and more dedicated believers than some of us, but I’m telling you now that you don’t have to buy into their ideas. The real measure of your faith is not the church you attend, the Bible you read, or the check you write. The real measure of your faith is the life you live.
When people call you a hell-bound heretic, just remember Jesus’ mother, who made a miracle happen by getting ahead of Jesus. Remember the abolitionists and Martin Luther King, whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow. They all got ahead of Jesus, going beyond the text of the Bible in order to honor the spirit of the Bible and so they worked their own kind of miracle: a living miracle of freedom and equality that has yet to be completed in our day.
It falls to us to keep this miracle going, to question our own assumptions and challenge deeply-established injustice, to get ahead of our ideas about Jesus and come to know, love, and follow the real Jesus, the Jesus whose Spirit lives within us, working miracles in us and through us that we cannot even begin to imagine.
Image is in the public domain. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
How do you know when you’re on a bad first date?
When you’ve been waiting at the restaurant for half an hour and she still hasn’t shown up yet.
When she pulls out a newspaper and starts reading it.
When she pulls out a cell phone and says, “Let me call my husband…”
Each and every one of these things happened to me at one point or another when I was still single. Looking back, they’re kind of funny, but they didn’t seem so at the time (especially the last one).
There is something especially deflating about a first date that does not go well. It takes the wind out of your sails in a way that few things can. You put on your best clothes and your best behavior in an attempt to ultimately convince another person that you are worth loving. When it doesn’t work out like you had hoped, it’s hard not to take that personally. Your self-esteem usually needs some time to recover.
This doesn’t just happen in the dating world either. Job interviews can be just as brutal in their own way. You’re putting yourself out there, your future is on the line, but nobody wants to take a chance on you. That kind of rejection stings to the core and leaves a mark on the surface.
Rejection is probably the most disempowering and disheartening experience a human being can go through. It hits us right where we live and makes us feel like we aren’t worth anything. No matter how old we are or how successful we appear to be in life, each and every one of us carries inside of us the pain of past rejection and the fear of future rejection.
This is true of everyone: from the washed-up wino under a bridge to the pop-star princess on TV. I remember learning this as a teenager when I overheard a conversation one day with a girl who I thought was the prettiest and most popular girl in school. She was telling someone how she would sometimes just sit in front of her mirror at home and cry because she felt so ugly. I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I thought for sure that this girl, of all people, must know what it’s like to be beautiful and loved by everyone, but I was wrong. The pain and fear of rejection is universal among humans.
Saddest of all are those who experienced rejection so many times that they start to really believe that they’re not worthy of love or happiness in life. These folks have started to internalize that message of rejection. They think that’s who they are. They think that’s what they deserve. They think they’re nothing and that their lives are worth nothing. So they treat themselves and others accordingly.
Personally, I can’t help but wonder whether this kind of broken heart might lie behind some of the many incidents of mass murder and random violence that have become so epidemic in our society? If so, then I would humbly suggest that an effort to include the outcasts and befriend the loners might be more effective in preventing violence than our repeated (and unsuccessful) efforts to “watch out for those maniacs” or “keep an eye on those weirdoes.” Internalized rejection is disempowering and dehumanizing to people. There eventually comes a tipping-point when a rejected person becomes the kind of monster that others have made them out to be.
Rejection is powerful, but then again so is love. Knowing that even one person cares is sometimes enough to make all the difference in the world. It can even save a life.
I’ve seen what love can do in my life. Having already mentioned some of my bad experiences in dating, I’d like to share one good one. This single, ongoing good experience has been enough in my life to outweigh all those other bad dating experiences put together. I’ve been married to an amazing woman for eight years. We have laughed together, cried together, encouraged each other, and challenged each other. Loving her and being loved by her has changed the way I live in this world. I carry myself differently, I see myself differently, and even though Sarah and I might set each other off sometimes, we usually manage to somehow bring out the best in each other. That’s what love can do. That’s the power of love.
Jesus understood that power. He had experienced it directly, in an ultimate sense. When he was about thirty years old, he got involved with a radical movement started by his cousin, John. Cousin John, who we all now know as John the Baptist, was a kind of revival preacher who lived a simple life in the desert and made extensive use of a Jewish practice known as tevilah (ritual washing). Tevilah was (and still is) used for all kinds of religious and sanitary reasons in traditional Judaism. John used it as a ritual sign of for Jews who wanted to recommit their lives to following the Torah. John intuited that big changes were on the way for his people and he wanted them to be spiritually ready.
Jesus himself appears to have been attracted to John’s renewal movement. Like many of his peers, he participated in the tevilah ritual (which our Bibles have conveniently translated baptism, from the Greek word for “immersion”). But then something happened to Jesus that didn’t seem to happen to the others. Luke tells us,
“Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.””
This ritual washing seems to have been a significant spiritual experience for Jesus. It was the catalyst that set the rest of his life in motion. This is the point where Jesus’ work of healing and teaching really gets started. In a sense, Jesus’ baptism was the moment when he was ordained and commissioned to his ministry.
The part of this story that really stands out to me is the voice from heaven. This voice says, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” This message is addressed directly to Jesus himself. The voice calls him “Beloved,” which I take to be significant.
I think about those times in my own life when I faced a scary challenge and my wife said to me, “I love you, sweetheart. I have faith in you and, no matter what happens, I promise we’ll get through this together.” I can tell you that, when I hear that from her, I find an inner strength I didn’t know I had. Love is empowering, no matter where it comes from. Spouses and partners can affect each other in that way. We can do the same as friends, family, parents, teachers, and bosses. We encourage each other. Have you ever thought about that word? Encourage. It comes from the Latin en (into) and cor (heart). We “put heart/strength into” one another. When Jesus was baptized and heard that voice from the sky saying “You are my Son, the Beloved,” I believe he was being en-couraged: the very heart of who he was and what he would do was being put into him at that moment. I believe it was then that Jesus discovered the depths of inner strength that would allow him to heal the sick, feed the hungry, and speak such bold words of truth to power. Whatever else we might believe about him, we can say that Jesus was a person who felt himself to be empowered by the ultimate Love that springs up from the very heart of reality: the sacred energy that we Christians name God or HolySpirit.
The same Spirit that empowered Jesus also lives in us. The same energetic force that catalyzed the Big Bang also animates our brains and bodies. The flame that burns in a hundred million stars is also shut up in our bones, sparking our creativity and setting our hearts on fire to imagine what might be possible. After 13.75 billion years of preparation, fine tuning, and evolution, the universe has finally given birth to us: you and me. We have been gifted with unprecedented knowledge, opportunity, resources, and power to shape the future of the world. Life itself has placed these gifts into our hands as if to say, “You are my beloved sons and daughters. I made you, I love you, and I believe in you.” No less than Jesus, you and I are empowered people.
We call it a miracle when we read about Jesus feeding 5,000 people with loaves and fishes, but we have that power too. According to the World Food Programme, one dollar will feed four children for a day in a developing country. This means that we could feed 5,000 people for only $1,250. Even our little country church could manage that much miracle. On Christmas Eve 2011, our congregation answered a cry for help from Thea Bowman House, an affordable daycare center in Utica whose funding was being slashed by the county government. Closure seemed imminent. This would have forced dozens of parents to leave the workforce and go on welfare because they couldn’t afford full-time daycare without assistance. People from our church raised $1,000 that Christmas Eve and sent it to that program. I ran into their director several months later, who told me that, thanks in part to our contribution, they managed to weather the storm without closing their doors. What’s even more amazing is that they did it without having to drop services to a single family. I call that a miracle!
We call it a miracle when we read about Jesus healing the sick, but we have that power too. Our congregation recently finished paying off a $4,500 pledge to Presbyterian Homes & Services in New Hartford to help build the new Parkinson’s Residence. We’ve been told that this program is the first of its kind and will lead the nation in the fight against Parkinson’s disease with state-of-the-art technology. Just a few weeks ago, at our most recent Christmas Eve service, our little congregation took up a special collection of $1,420 that was sent to Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA) to help with the cleanup effort in New York and New Jersey after the devastation left by Hurricane Sandy. Immediately after the storm, PDA set up emergency shelters and food distribution sites for the victims. Since then, PDA has continued to work with churches and send down teams of volunteers to help with the long-term cleanup and recovery. I call that a miracle too.
These are your miracles. This is the power of what Love can do. It causes us to think outside the box and reach deep down inside to find resources of strength and generosity we didn’t even know we had. It’s true that the sharp sting of rejection and the dull ache of loneliness can be felt in all corners of this hurting world, but the caress of love can be felt as well. The same Spirit that empowered Jesus’ ministry inspires ours as well. The same voice from the heavens that spoke to Jesus still whispers in our hearts, calling us beloved children. I pray that our lives will continue to echo the sound of that loving voice to this lonely world, saying to it: “I love you, God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Angels Appearing Before the Shepherds. By Henry Ossawa Tanner (1910)
There are two ways of not seeing something. One way is for the object in question to be so far away that our eyes can’t distinguish it from the surrounding environment. This is what happens when we try to look for distant stars and galaxies with the naked eye. We can squint as hard as we like but, without the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, we still won’t be able to see the millions of galaxies that surround us in every direction. They’re just too far away.
The other way of not seeing something is for the object in question to be so close up that there’s no way for us to see all of it at once. Such is the case with our own galaxy. We are part of it. It’s all around us. If someone were to ask you where our galaxy is, you wouldn’t be wrong at all to say, “it’s right here” without pointing to anything in particular.
When it comes to thinking about invisible things like the reality of God, most modern philosophers have argued for the first option: God, if there is a God, is simply too distant from our everyday reality to be seen or experienced directly. From one point of view, this was a most useful idea. It helped modern thinkers to move beyond the old mythical and superstitious ideas about God as “the old man in the sky” inherited from their ancient and medieval ancestors. This was a good thing. It needed to happen, especially once science began to debunk so many of the old superstitions. In place of “the old man in the sky,” modern people began to think of God as a kind of cosmic clockmaker: a rational mind which was responsible for the machine-like order we observe in creation. The Creator, according to this way of thinking, designed the laws of nature, built the universe, set it in motion, and then sat back to run under its own steam. Compared to ancient mythologies, this idea of God seems very plausible, rational, and consistent with the discoveries of science.
On the other hand, this way of thinking has also made God seem more remote and distant from the concerns of everyday life. God, according to the modern mind, doesn’t exist in this universe. Some would say that God doesn’t even care about us or creation. “The clockmaker may have got everything started,” so they say, “but hasn’t been seen or heard from since.” The clockmaker idea of God might be more rational and less superstitious than “the old man in the sky,” but it doesn’t inspire our hearts toward worship and devotion. The clockmaker God is little more than a mental concept that can be either accepted or rejected without consequence. It didn’t take long for modern philosophers to dismiss the clockmaker concept itself as irrelevant and unnecessary. Like the distant galaxies, such a God was simply too far away to be seen or experienced by human beings.
In recent years, those of us who still feel drawn toward worship have come to realize that both the “old man in the sky” and the “clockmaker” ideas of God are wholly inadequate. Neither one captures the essence of what we mean when we use the word “God.” In contrast to the modern thinkers who say that God is too far away to be seen, we say that God is close: so close, in fact, as to be all around us… too close and too big to be fully seen and understood by any one person. The Bible tells us that we “live, and move, and have our being” in God. God is like our own Milky Way galaxy: if someone were to ask, “Where is God?” it makes perfect sense to say, “Right here! All around us! We exist in God!”
For me, this idea of God being all around us, too close to be fully seen, is expressed most beautifully in the story of Christmas. That story begins in a fairly mundane way: with regular, working class people being pushed around by the powers that be. This has been the story of humankind in every age of history. In this case, the Roman emperor wanted an accurate count of the population in occupied territories for tax purposes, so people Mary and Joseph were shuffled around like cattle and treated like animals to the extent that they even ended up sleeping and giving birth in a stable like animals. Likewise, we see shepherds working the night shift. Two thousand years of nostalgia and Christmas pageants have romanticized the shepherding profession, but it was a despised and disgusting job in the first century. No one liked shepherds, no one trusted them, and everyone saw them as little better than the animals they tended. Yet, it was to this band of ragamuffins that the angels came. No outsider or passer-by could have known that the pathetic, mundane scene playing itself out before them was one of the most significant and miraculous moments in all of human history. Even the key players themselves were shocked and amazed as “the glory of the Lord shone around them” and the heavens themselves seemed to break out in song.
The God that Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds encountered that night was neither “the old man in the sky” nor “the clockmaker.” Theirs was an incarnate deity who “took on flesh and dwelt among” them. They experienced this God in “the glory” that “shone around them.” Contrary to the conclusions of modern philosophers, their God was too close to be seen, not too far away.
God is here. God is all around us. I can’t point to one place, or time, or thing and say “this and this alone is God” because the God I believe in can’t be so easily contained or limited. We “live, and move, and have our being” in God, whose glory can be seen, shining all around us, if only we have the eyes to see it. Like so many mystics and sages before us, we can see the glory of God shining in the wonders of creation, in the discoveries of scientists, in the guidance of teachers, in the healing of medical professionals, in the courage of those who risk their lives for others, and in the compassion of those who help the suffering.
The glory of the Lord is shining around us tonight, no less than it did for those shepherds on the first Christmas Eve, if only we have eyes to see it. The poet Girard Manley Hopkins wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” and St. Augustine of Hippo reminded us that “God is closer to us than our own hearts.”
The task of the believer in all this is to take these momentary flashes of glory and learn to see them, not as random, isolated events, but as parts of a whole, individual threads in a great tapestry, woven through the ages. That’s what Mary, the mother of Jesus, was doing that night when it says in the text that she “treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” She didn’t let her moment of glory just pass her by, she grabbed hold of it and kept it with her.
In the same way, if we want to become the kind of people who can see the glory of God shining around us, then we need to start paying attention. We need to find those little moments of joy, wonder, peace, and compassion in a day and remember them. Maybe for you it’s the silvery beauty of snow on tree branches or the golden light of an Adirondack sunset. Maybe it’s as insignificant as someone generously giving you the right of way instead of cutting you off in traffic. Wherever you see these little moments of glory, don’t let them escape before you give thanks for them. If you find it helpful for you, try keeping a daily journal of thanksgiving where you keep a record of these little happenings. Develop this into a habit and I think you might be surprised at how easy it eventually becomes for you to call these moments to mind. If that journal idea isn’t exactly your style, don’t worry about it. Find whatever works for you, but find something. Don’t let this life pass you by without seeing the glory around you. Like Mary did: treasure these things and ponder them in your heart. As you do this, may the glory of the incarnate mystery of God in whom we “live, and move, and have our being,” shine around you and become ever more real to you.
You can be trapped in the McDonald’s drive thru at rush hour, with a long line of cars in front of and behind you, and then realize after you order that you left your wallet at home. You can start telling an off-color joke to a friend or sibling, only to have your boss or your mom enter the conversation and ask you to continue with what you were just saying. You can propose to your significant other on the jumbo-tron at an NBA game, only to have that person say “no” in front of 10,000 people.
On a more serious note (not that rejected marriage proposals aren’t serious):
You can walk the hallways of your school in fear, watching your back for that bully who somehow always manages to find you anyway. You can cut every luxury and non-essential expense from your budget, only to realize that you still have to choose between paying rent and buying groceries for a week, because you’re hourly-wage job won’t allow you to do both. You can struggle for years to break a bad habit or overcome an addiction without much success.
There are lots of ways to feel or be powerless.
There is no such thing as absolute power. Every single person on this planet, up to and including the president of the United States, experiences powerlessness in some way or another. Officially or unofficially, everyone answers to someone.
In spite of this fact, or perhaps because of it, people everywhere are constantly trying to step over one another in an attempt to be top dog of whatever hill they happen to be climbing at the moment. In a social system where power comes in limited quantities, people try to take whatever they can for themselves, believing (rightly or wrongly) that with power comes security. So they grab whatever power they can get and use it to their own advantage. Powerful people fight one another for more power. People with this mentality tend to use phrases like, “It’s a dog eat dog world out there. It’s survival of the fittest. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. No one is looking out for you. You’re on your own.”
Compassionate and kind-hearted folks tend to wince at this kind of cynical talk. We don’t want to believe the world really works that way, but when we look at the facts, we have to admit that the world often does seem to work that way. What makes cynicism so enticing as a philosophy of life is its apparent realism in the face of difficult circumstances. Is this who we really are? Is this all we are? Or is there another way of being, of being of being alive, and of being human?
This morning’s gospel reading sets us down right into the middle of a particularly intense competition for power in the ancient Middle East. The religious authorities of Judea were engaged in an ongoing cold war with the occupying Roman government. Each side, through their official representatives, vied for the loyalty and obedience of the people. On the particular day in question, their conflict revolved around a common nuisance: Jesus of Nazareth, the latest in a series of so-called Messiahs who promised peace, liberation, and yes: power to the people of Judea. Each one would rise up, gather an army of zealous insurgents, try to overthrow the Roman occupation by terrorist campaign, and eventually fail. The religious authorities, on the other hand, had learned different ways of dealing with the occupation. Some, like the Pharisees, sought to empower Judean society by a return to traditional morals and values. In time, so they thought, God would intervene on their behalf to free them from foreign rule. Other groups, like the Sadducees, learned how to manipulate the strings of the political system from the inside.
Members of these last two groups saw Jesus as “just another self-appointed Messiah with his army of zealots.” As such, he was just another temporary nuisance and a threat to their power that had to be dealt with. So they brought him to Pontius Pilate, Rome’s appointed governor over the perpetually unstable and troublesome province of Judea.
Pilate, for his part, didn’t care about who Jesus was or the content of his message, nor did he care about the Pharisees and Sadducees with their incessant squabbling and competing strategies for survival. The only thing Pontius Pilate cared about was maintaining order and loyalty to the Empire. If this Jesus really was claiming to be the anointed one who would liberate the Judean people from Roman rule by military force, then Pilate would have to deal with him swiftly, in the name of maintaining civil order.
Jesus, for his part, was powerless: caught between multiple groups who were competing for power on a national stage. To the outside observer, he appeared to be a failed revolutionary: his closest followers had denied, betrayed, and abandoned him at the moment of truth. His own people had arrested him and handed him over for crucifixion, a punishment reserved for terrorists. Pilate’s job, in this situation, was to figure out whether Jesus really was a terrorist or not.
This morning’s gospel reading opens as Pilate begins his examination of Jesus. By all accounts, Jesus is helpless, powerless. He has been reduced to the status of a pawn in chess game between multiple powerful parties. The scene plays out as one would expect: Jesus is examined, cross-examined, tossed back and forth, and eventually executed, not because he was found guilty, but because Pilate could find no other way to regain control of a volatile situation.
But, when we look at the conversation between Jesus and Pilate in detail, a different picture emerges. The author of John’s gospel tells this story through the eyes of a Christian, writing decades after the events of Jesus’ crucifixion took place. As John tells this story, the positions of power are actually reversed. It is not Pilate who is interrogating Jesus, but Jesus who is questioning Pilate. Jesus makes no apology, confesses no crime, and concedes no ground. Reading this story is actually confusing to the modern reader because it seems like Jesus and Pilate are talking about two different things. In fact, they are. They’re not so much talking to each other as much as talking past each other. Pontius Pilate obviously doesn’t understand what this Jesus guy is all about and Jesus obviously doesn’t care about Pilate’s need to maintain order. Their conversation goes around and around but never really gets anywhere.
At one point Jesus says to Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this world.” Pilate, thinking he’s finally found his opportunity, pounces and says, “So you are a king?” But Jesus wriggles away from his trap and returns the proverbial tennis ball back into Pilate’s court. “You say that I am a king.” Jesus says, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Their bizarre dialogue ends with an unanswered question in Pilate’s witty retort, “What is truth?”
Pilate never gets an answer to his question, presumably because he would never be able to understand any answer that Jesus gave him. In the language of John’s gospel, Pilate exists in “darkness”, quite apart from the “light” that Jesus offers. Pilate is an “unenlightened” being. The 21st century spiritual teacher and Catholic priest Richard Rohr would say that Pilate was “operating at earlier stage of consciousness” than Jesus was. Pilate was operating out of what Rohr would call a “tribal consciousness” wherein an individual is preoccupied by identifying with a particular group in conflict with all other groups. Competition and power are primary concerns for those who see the world through an “us vs. them” ideology like Pilate had. Jesus on the other hand, according to Richard Rohr, was operating out of a much higher, non-dualistic consciousness. He was not caught up in the petty us/them struggles of the world as Pilate knew it. In the eyes of Jesus, all people and all things are one in God. This is why Jesus was able to say to Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this world.” I don’t think Jesus ever meant for us to think that he came from some far-off, magical kingdom in the sky where everyone is happy and sits around on clouds, playing harps all day. That is the stuff of fairy tales and story books. Nevertheless, Jesus’ kingdom is a reality and it truly is “not from this world” in the sense that it includes all people, all creation, and all other kingdoms in its wide, wide embrace.
As a king, the “king of kings” in fact, Jesus redefines power. In place of domination, Jesus holds up service as the ideal. He said to his disciples, “You know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as this human being came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” At the Last Supper, we see Jesus leading by example in this regard as the Servant King. He gets up from the table, wraps a towel around his waist, and proceeds to wash his disciples’ feet. This was a task typically assigned to the lowest, most despicable slave. No one in his or her right mind would volunteer for this job, but Jesus told his disciples that this is what being a king, a leader was all about. Humble service, for Jesus, is one of the marks of true power.
In a similar vein, Jesus’ kingdom is “not of this world” because he rules by compassion and mercy rather than by violence and judgment. Forgiveness, according to Jesus, is the most powerful act any person can ever commit, whether king or peasant. Victory is not achieved when your enemy is defeated. Victory is won, according to Jesus, when your enemy becomes your friend.
Obviously, Jesus’ ideas seem “out of this world”. They were incomprehensible to Pontius Pilate. They were foreign to the Judean religious authorities. They still sound bizarre to our ears in the 21st century. We’re still operating out of a lower level of consciousness where our competitive, tribal concerns keep us from seeing the big picture, the whole of reality in which we live, move, and have our being.
When it comes to Jesus’ kingdom, we’re simply not there yet. We might not ever get there in this lifetime. But we, as those who claim to be Christians, who claim to follow Jesus, have an obligation and a responsibility to take Jesus’ words and Jesus’ life seriously. What Jesus is offering Pilate (and us, by extension) in today’s gospel reading is a new of being, of being alive, and of being human in this world.
Something inside each of us cries out for this. Even though we tend to give in to the temptation toward cynicism, even though we tend to trust in the power of warfare, weapons, and bombs to make a better world, even though we tend to seek power rather than service, there is nevertheless a deep longing within our souls for a world and a life where we will not have to live in fear and mistrust. Something inside each of us knows that this is not how the world was meant to be.
Something about Jesus awoke this longing within people. In some way that we still don’t fully understand, he embodied, even incarnated this alternative way of being in the world. In Jesus, the longing took on flesh and showed us what it could do if it was given the chance to run free over the face of the earth.
I have seen moments and known people in whom the Spirit of Christ does run free and raises them up above that immature, ego-centric tribal consciousness. I remember one such person who made an impact on my life when I was in high school. His name is Phil. He was a grad student and one of the leaders of a youth group I attended. Through him, I discovered another way of being, of being alive, and of being human in the world.
Phil was the first person I ever knew outside of my family who made me feel accepted for who I am. He spent time with me, mostly just goofing off and hanging around. He didn’t care that I wasn’t popular or influential in school. He didn’t preach to me. He didn’t have any kind of religious sales pitch for getting me to sign on the dotted line as a Christian. He just seemed to care. During my freshman year, when I was going through a hard time and even contemplating suicide, Phil was the one I trusted enough to open up to. He wasn’t a pastor or a therapist, but he knew how to love people like Jesus did and that’s what made the biggest impact on me.
Over time, I gradually came to see something in Phil. Looking back, I think I would call it the Spirit of Christ. And that, more than any sermon I’ve ever heard in my life, is what made me want to live as a Christian. I had been going to church ever since I was a baby, but I never had any desire to make that spiritual path my own. After my experience of seeing Christ in Phil, I wanted to follow Jesus too. Since that time, almost seventeen ago, I’ve been through several crises of faith and endured many seasons of doubt, but I keep on going back to the Christ I saw in Phil: Jesus who is the friend of the friendless, the one who welcomes the outcasts, the one who “eats with tax collectors and sinners”, the one who lives above and beyond this world’s sick systems driven by competition and lust for power, the one who offers me an alternative way of being, of being alive, and of being human in the world.
Each and every one of us is called to be a ‘Phil’ to someone, somewhere, at sometime. None of us is perfect, so we’ll each do it in our own small, temporary, imperfect, and partial way. But when the moment comes and the Spirit moves us, will we have the faith to set aside our twisted hunger for power and competition? Will we take up the mantle of compassion, humility, mercy, and service when it is needed? Will we allow Christ live again in us, so that someone else might hear and respond to the call of that same Spirit in his or her own way? If that hunger in our hearts for a different world, a better world, is true and not just an illusion, if this world’s sick system of power-hungry competition is not finally an expression of all that we truly are, if there is another way of being, of being alive, and of being human in the world, then it is absolutely imperative that we open our hearts and minds to this Jesus, so that Christ can live again in us, continuing in our community today the same ministry he started in Palestine two thousand years ago. May it be so, even here, even now.
