The Book of Revelation meets Stevie Wonder, Part II

See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.

“Where I am going, you cannot come.” I start off with that only because some of you may not know that next Sunday afternoon I begin a four-month sabbatical. And, as Jesus tries to communicate to his disciples in these last weeks of Easter season, wonderful things are in store for all of you while I’m gone.

Last week, I preached about the Book of Revelation and its aim as a source of comfort for disciples under persecution. I talked about Revelation as the literature of God’s people in their powerlessness.  At the church door I got a comment from a very faithful person, the kind of person I describe as a mature Christian —not because of age but because of temperament. It was the kind of comment that clergy hardly ever get and which I, for one, truly appreciate. She leaned into me and she said: I beg to differ with you. I have to say, on behalf of all of my preaching colleagues, lay and ordained, we really do love it when you tell us, on the way out the door, how much you love our sermons. But when someone has a bone to pick, I love it just as much. It lets me know they take themselves seriously as a theologian, and I know they’ve really been listening.

“I beg to differ,” she said, and then she said: “being a true disciple means being Christ in the world, and thus you are not powerless but all powerful.”

And—being a person occasionally able to think fast on my feet—I said: “It’s a good thing this was only Part I of my sermon on the Book of Revelation. Just you wait until next week.”

So here we are with another chance to look at what this complex and oft-overly-reduced book of the Bible has to say to us about discipleship.

Last week I talked about powerlessness, as I said, and about suffering. To be a disciple is to suffer, and to be the Christian church is to suffer. And I don’t think anyone back then thought about suffering in terms of an unbalanced budget or the lack of air conditioning in the sanctuary. So where is the good news, in the reality where we live right now at this moment? The good news is that if we are truly Christ in the world, the principalities and powers of the world need not have any more power over us than they ultimately had over Christ. Or, as I heard at the church door last week, “being a true disciple means being Christ in the world; thus you are not powerless but all powerful.”

So where is powerfulness in the Book of Revelation? Well, all through it. In all its psychedelic glory, Revelation is the place where power and powerlessness meet and dance together. Today’s reading gives us a vision of the New Jerusalem, the place where God’s power and our power as disciples intersects. The New Jerusalem is the author’s way of talking about the Kingdom of God. If you’ve heard me preach more than once or twice you know I believe the kingdom is within our reach, and that our job as disciples is to point to it, proclaim it, and reveal it in how we live our lives.

The Holy City, the New Jerusalem is not “up there” somewhere, but comes down to us. One reader imagines it like the Emerald City, floating on the horizon in the land of Oz. I imagine something much less ethereal and more real. Imagine if the new Jerusalem is all around us. God’s kingdom is here, where we are, in all of our broken, fallen mortality.

God is in the alpha and the omega—the beginning and the end—but also in the middle. The home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God, says our text this morning. The middle is where we experience powerlessness and suffering, conflict and grief. Right now. (Well, not right now, I hope, but you know what I mean.) And this middle, between the alpha and the omega, is where we experience the power of Christ within us, the power of being Christ in the world.

Jesus tells us about this power in today’s gospel: I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples. It is simple, and yet, easier said than done, right? But love is the how for Christ’s power in the world, and for the transformation of the world into the Kingdom of God. Love one another, love the world, love the work and the play of the world, the mundane and the mystery. Love our neighbors, love our enemies, love our bodies, love our collective soul with all its dark and confusing places.

If we interpret the Book of Revelation as only about end-times, about the elect 144,000 who will actually get to the New Jerusalem, then we can say we are in the world but not of it, with our sights set on what some might call “pie in the sky.” But this would be to deny the text and all of Jesus’ teaching. Our response to the suffering in the world and in our own lives is not to imagine an alternative universe beyond our grasp, but to engage the world where God is. The home of God is among mortals.

These past few weeks I’ve been meditating on a passage of poetry from one of the great soul-searchers and soul-proclaimers of our time, Stevie Wonder. What has caught me, as we’ve been reading hearing these Easter snippets from the Book of Revelation, are these lines from his song “As”:

We all know sometimes life’s hates and troubles 
Can make you wish you were born in another time and space 
But you can bet you life times that and twice its double 
That God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed 
so make sure when you say you’re in it but not of it 
You’re not helping to make this earth a place sometimes called Hell 
Change your words into truths and then change that truth into love  

This is my last sermon for some time. Next week I’ll be here with bells on, but the Bishop will be our preacher. So, as is my wont, I’m leaving you with a few questions: Where do you see God making a home among mortals? How will you live out the power of Christ within you?

The Book of Revelation meets Stevie Wonder, Part I

And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

In my first or second year of seminary—I can’t remember which, and the whole period is fading into the past much faster than I’d like—but somewhere back then in the very early 2000s there was tragic death on campus; a young man who had everything going for him died suddenly of an aortic embolism. I don’t know about you, but I live in terror of that exact kind of thing happening to me or someone I love.

My seminary was in New York City in the time right after 9/11 where every bad thing that happened in our pressure-cooker, fishbowl community reminded everyone of every other bad thing that had ever happened. The faculty member scheduled to preach the next community Eucharist after his death was one of the scripture professors. She titled it “Mulholland Drive and The Book of Revelation.”

Anyone remember that movie? It’s a David Lynch film made in 2001, American “neo-noir” about an aspiring young actress who meets a young woman with amnesia and tries to help her figure out her story. There are many surreal and bizarre subplots that all come together in the end, kind of, but not in any way I could ever figure out. When I came home from seeing that movie, I lay awake for hours trying to make sense of it all.

The professor who preached on “Mulholland Drive” in connection with the Book of Revelation was making two points: one, one oughtn’t try too hard with the Book of Revelation to turn it into linear sense. And two, human experience is full of horrible inexplicable things that sometimes we simply cannot piece together.  We certainly know this latter truth from the experiences of the past week and the unfolding story of the two young men who engineered such a violent and tragic attack. People who live in parts of the world where this kind of violence is a daily occurrence live constantly with the struggle to make sense out of surreal experiences with subplots they will never understand. And for them, the incomprehensible experiences just keep on coming.

This would have been the life experience of the people for whom the Book of Revelation was originally written, who were the first martyrs, victims of the earliest persecution of Christians.

My New Testament professor was not the first person to link the Book of Revelation with a movie. A generation ago (at least), a preeminent scripture scholar with the unfortunate name of Eugene Boring wrote about Revelation in terms of the 1967 American classic, “The Graduate.” How many of you remember that one?

Boring writes about how the Book of Revelation talks of the end-times but contains no closure, and he makes a connection to the end of the Graduate. The Dustin Hoffman character stands behind a stained glass window during a church wedding shouting “Elaine!” The Graduate leaves us with an image rather than a conclusion. And Revelation is nothing if not a collection of images, without a conclusion in sight. Ending without closure.

We tend to dismiss the Book of Revelation as hopelessly incomprehensible. Some people have speculated in all seriousness that the author must have been writing under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs.

Because Revelation contains some of the most creative and powerful images in all of scripture, I’d like to try to rescue it from its exile.

Revelation is the literature of God’s people in their experience of powerlessness. It is written to a particular people in a particular time: early Christians learning, first hand, not just from Jesus’ earlier preaching, that to be a Christian is to be a martyr. Revelation reminds us that God does not prevent suffering, even for faithful Christians. Like many good sources of comfort, the book provides images and poetry, rather than parables or history. It is not a code for us to crack to predict our own future, but a lens through which to see the transformation of the world that has not yet come and is always becoming, where the powerless are granted full life with God.

In and among all the psychedelic aspects of Revelation are words of comfort. If the passage we heard this morning sounds familiar, it is because it is often read at funerals.

So why do we read Revelation during Easter season? I have a couple of theories. One is that it’s an important complement to the book of Acts. In Acts, we read about the earthy day-to-day on-the-ground life of the apostles on the other side of the cross, figuring out what it means to be disciples, what it means to be the church. Revelation reminds them that what it means to be the church is to suffer. We do well to remember that, especially when we find ourselves complaining about aspects of first-world, twenty-first century parish life. Revelation reminds us that for us, triumph is to be found in the symbol of the utmost powerlessness, the Lamb.

I think another reason we read Revelation during the Great Fifty Days of Easter is to remind us that Easter begins with death. My guess is that most of us are more comfortable with the world of Acts than with the world of Revelation. Revelation reminds us—quite frankly—that death is a part of discipleship. No wonder no one wants to read the thing! Revelation also reminds us, over and over again, that God and the Lamb have the final victory, not death.

Anyone who reads the history of the early church knows they just don’t make martyrs like they used to. In the first centuries after the resurrection, to witness to one’s faith meant to be willing to die. This witness became, in fact, a form of evangelism (also a word for witness). The second-century author Tertullian famously said “the blood of martyrs is seed,” meaning that with every Christian cut down, many-fold more will grow up. In the nineteenth century, as they were marched to their death, the Martyrs of Uganda sang and prayed for forgiveness of their enemies. The crowds who watched this converted to Christianity on the spot, and the government could no longer keep them silent. Martin Luther King, Junior, a student of the Book of Revelation, said:

We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will match physical force with soul force. We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.

There are times and places where suffering and death is a powerful Christian witness. However, the word martyr simply means witness. The Book of Revelation is a call to, and a tribute to, patient, faithful witness. How do we serve as witnesses to our faith? How do we keep the Church faithful to that witness? How do we engage the very real powerlessness that is what it means to be a follower of Jesus?

Playing with Clay

For our last session together, the Following the Way group spent time playing with clay. Artist-in-Residence Leroy Goertz talked a bit about creativity and his own experiences with clay, while the rest of us pounded, rolled, pinched, destroyed, rebuilt, fiddled, explored, talked, and listened. This experience, which I’ve been lucky enough to have a few times since LeRoy set up shop in the lower level art studio, never ceases to amaze me. I begin by getting in touch with all of my own inadequacies as an artist, mixed in with painful memories of childhood ceramics classes, where certain things came naturally to a handful of kids, and the rest of us made ashtrays (thank God our parents all smoked back then). Then gradually all of that subsides, and I let myself enjoy the tactile experience, and let it go at that. Tonight, because there were a bunch of us, the best part of the evening–for me, anyway–was seeing everyone else’s creations. Take a look.

It started as a cave. And then it became a seashell.

And if you wish you were there, it’s not too late. This summer’s Faith & Story Project will be all about fellowship and creativity, and you’re invited. The best way to know about specific upcoming opportunities is to read our weekly enotes. If you’re not a subscriber, go to our webpage, scroll down to the bottom, and enter your email address.

Shelf fungus. Right?

St. Michael the Archangel. Indeed!

“Container-guy”

Lindsay made this dogwood, just in time for St. David’s dogwood to bloom sometime next week.

Megan and Anne came to Following the Way AND had a girls’ night out all at the same time!

A contemplative dude.

Nurturing turtle

Resurrection: A never-ending story

Blessed are those who believe.

And blessed are all of you who are here today. Statistics tell us that there were three times as many people here last Sunday as this Sunday. And why do we come back the week after Easter? Many of us are here because this is what we do on Sundays, any Sunday. Some of us are perhaps here because we look forward to church getting “back to normal” after all the hoopla for Holy Week and Easter.  And I hope that some of you came back—whether for the first time or the fiftieth time—because you want to know more about the life of faith as we live it out in this community. Because you want to know more about the Jesus whom we encounter so intimately during Holy Week, whose resurrection we celebrate so vigorously at Easter.

Did you see it? Did anybody actually see him get out of the tomb? Did you see the resurrected Jesus? Did anyone you know personally ever know anyone who actually saw Jesus walking the earth? How do we know?

After the wonderful liturgies of Holy Week and the glorious celebrations of Easter which we experienced in this place last Saturday, last Sunday and in the days leading up to it, it is striking to me that every year, no matter where we are in the 3-year lectionary cycle, the next time we all get together after Easter, we hear this story of Thomas and his refusal to believe without proof. As this story has been handed down to us through generations from the first Easter, Thomas has been given the name “Doubting Thomas.” Not Disbelieving Thomas, or De-bunking Thomas, but Doubting Thomas.

In the midst of any life of faith, doubt comes in all sorts of ways for all kinds of reasons. We’re tired, we’re hurt, we’re vulnerable. We’ve spent ourselves, whether in rejoicing, or in working on a relationship that may fail, or in working toward an important goal that always seems just out of reach, or in praying to be healed from an illness. Doubt comes in to protect us from further disappointment. Doubt comes in to say God cannot possibly be in charge of the messy, chaotic, complicated lives so many of us lead.

Thomas speaks for all of us at one time or another. I say this every year at this time: just as Jesus is the bearer of our sins, so I believe Thomas is the bearer of our doubts. Thomas was not the first disciple to doubt, and he will certainly not the last.

Thomas stands for the human need to touch and see in order to believe. When I look at Thomas, when I look at my own life, I come to the conclusion that doubt is not about unbelief, it is about the longing to believe. Think about how we use the word in daily life. Perhaps the sun will come out this morning. I doubt it. Perhaps so-and-so will smile at me today. I doubt it. Perhaps all of this will work out just right. I doubt it. Doubt is not about unbelief, it is about the longing to believe.

So what do we do with our doubts? We do what Thomas did. We go to where our friends our, to where Jesus might be, and we share our doubts. We go to church, the beach, Hopworks, Lucky Lab, People’s Co-op, Powell’s, little t, and we wrestle through our doubt. Maybe we do this with a friend, or maybe on our own. Maybe shaking our fist at the sky that may or may not hold the One we may or may not believe in. Any kind of wrestling with doubt is, in itself, an act of faith.

In his words, Thomas is completely focused on the need to believe, rather than the practice of faith. But in his deeds, he acts out his faith. He practices. Driven by hope, he seeks out the disciples, goes back to where they met the Risen Lord. Then he makes this audacious request to put his hands in the holes made by the nails and the spear, and Jesus grants it.

But it starts with Thomas acting through his doubts: going, asking, and believing.

In our collect today we prayed: grant that all who have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body may show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith. Many of us need to show forth our faith in our lives before we actually believe it. To put it another way, we need to act ourselves into right thinking, rather than think ourselves into right acting. That’s why our baptismal vows are all about action. When we renew these vows, as many of us did last Saturday night, we promise to break bread, to seek, serve, pray, persevere, strive, respect, repent, and return. Action words.

It is in our actions and our interactions that we encounter the Risen Lord. In seeking out the poor and poor in spirit, in breaking bread with neighbors and strangers, in coming to this table, that we might touch and taste Jesus, in praying for those with whom we struggle—even when we don’t want to or we don’t believe that God is listening—these actions bring us closer to Jesus and give us “proof” of resurrection.

And it is through us, as we minister our way through our doubts, that others experience the Risen Lord. As we act our way into right thinking, we touch the lives of those around us with our actions. The Benedictines have long held to a principle of hospitality, inspired by St. Benedict’s teaching that “all that come to the monastery be received as Christ.” What if we received all that came to our church as though each one of them were Thomas? Think about today’s gospel scene as a model for Christian ministry: Thomas, who missed the disciples’ first encounter with the Risen Christ, is given a second chance. He is greeted with love and grace, with an invitation and the assurance that Christ is truly alive. He is offered the Peace of Christ, and he is blessed.

I’m going to close with a portion of the General Thanksgiving in the morning prayer service:

And, we pray, give us such an awareness of your mercies,
that with truly thankful hearts we may show forth your praise,
not only with our lips, but in our lives,
by giving up our selves to your service,
and by walking before you
in holiness and righteousness all our days;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit,
be honor and glory throughout all ages. Amen.

The Empty Tomb

But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.

Then Peter said “wow! Those women were telling the truth after all. Maybe I should have listened to them in the first place!”

Peter had to see for himself.

Many of you probably remember, at least by title, the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1990s: Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. The scene in this morning’s gospel could be taken right from that book, or others like it published around the same time. Look at the contrasts between women and men in the gospel story:

The women, when they encounter the guys in dazzling clothes, which I always call superhero outfits, are terrified. They don’t know what to make of the empty tomb, and they bow their heads. They know they are in the presence of the holy, and they intuitively act with humility and reverence. The guys in superhero outfits, on the other hand, think it’s obvious. Don’t you remember? They say. While he was still in Galilee, he predicted that he would be crucified and rise again. The women take their time letting this sink in. Ohhhh, now I remember, they each think to themselves. Could it be? They begin to believe, and they run to tell the other apostles. But to the apostles, their words seemed an idle tale, and no one believed them. Peter, the concrete guy, had to go see for himself. He went, and got religion from a pile of bloody linen rags.

We need everyone’s voice to tell the story we just heard: the guys in dazzling clothes, the women at the tomb who are afraid then exuberant, the apostles who first doubt and then believe. This day is about how to incorporate all the voices—men, women, those that proclaim, those that doubt, those that wonder. It’s about the voices of Baptists, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Episcopalians, Buddhists, atheists. It’s about incorporating all of these experiences of faith into how we are in the world.

How would you tell the Easter story? What would you take on faith, and what would you need to see, in order to believe? What would be the turning point to make you believe?

It is easy to spend a lot of time thinking about whether or not we believe in the resurrection. We all know people—some of us might even be those people—who say: “I believe in the Jesus, but not the resurrection.” There’s not a lot of hard evidence, after all. All we have for evidence is an empty tomb. An empty thing is an odd symbol of faith.

Although I did discover recently that there are some companies that make empty tomb jewelry, coffee mugs, and t-shirts, and I even found a fascinating recipe for empty tomb cookies.

An empty thing is an odd symbol of faith. Absence is a strange symbol of faith. And so we use the cross instead. The cross is something we can see, something we can put our hands on. It is a tangible symbol for sacrifice and suffering. If we leave it bare and lay it on the floor here, it makes us sad. If our children cover it with flowers on Easter morning, it makes us happy. If we turn it sideways, it becomes the bridge we walk across to get to new life, God’s triumph over death. All of this is not proof, but faith. Which brings me back to the empty tomb. It is the empty tomb that makes the cross a symbol of resurrection rather than a symbol of torture and execution.

I don’t know about you, but I am here because of the mystery. I am here because I have no clue whatsoever about what happened between the time when they laid Jesus in the tomb and sealed it up and when the women discovered the two superheroes on Easter morning. I am here because I love that our faith teaches us that the very most important thing that happened in Jesus’ life—God’s defeat over death—is something that we actually can never know for sure. I am here because that never-knowing-for-sure has engendered some of the most beautiful art and music and writing on the planet. I am here because the empty tomb creates space for hope and uncertainty to coexist.

I am here because the empty tomb signifies the already/not yet nature of the kingdom of God. Like Christmas in Narnia, the kingdom of God is always coming, but not quite here. Unlike Narnia, we are not under a winter spell of an evil queen, but rather we are Easter people, always in the process of becoming citizens of a kingdom where the hungry are fed, captives are freed, the sick are healed, and the poor have good news preached to them. The empty tomb is the sign-post pointing to this kingdom. The empty tomb says that the wild reversals Jesus preached about really will happen, have in fact already happened, and have not yet happened.

Who are you in the Easter story? What will you do next? Whom will you tell?

Holy Saturday: This is the Night

You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own, forever.

This is the night. This is the night when new fire burns in our hearts.

This is the night, when you brought our mothers and fathers, the childrenof Israel, out of bondage in Egypt, and led them through the Red Sea on dry land.

This is the night when the stories of creation and deliverance rekindle our corporate memory as the beloved people of God.

This is the night, when all who believe in Christ are delivered from the gloom of sin, and are restored to grace and holiness of life.

This is the night, when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and rose victorious from the grave.

This is the night for deliverance, for the movement from darkness to light, from ancient story to the story of now.

This is the night when we proclaim resurrection and victory over death, ours, and Christ’s.

This is the night when we recall that our deliverance is through the waters of baptism. As St. Paul writes in the words we hear every year at this Easter service: We have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead, we too might walk in newness of life.

This is the night for baptism. The way we do baptism here is highly symbolic but I thought a full immersion tub, especially for three adults, might put the altar guild over the edge.

This is the night we proclaim resurrection by making, anew, our baptismal promises.

This is the night when we make new Christians, who drown in the waters of baptism and emerge with a new identity as little Christs. This is the night when Capers, Derek, and Megan are marked as Christ’s own, forever.

This is the night when their new clothes, their baptismal garments, are a sign to all of us of the new life we share as the body of Christ.

The white alb, which many of you are used to seeing on some of us on Sunday morning, has its origins as a baptismal garment. When those of us “up front” put on albs, it is not because we are special, but because we are ordinary. It is a symbol of the baptismal ministry that we all share. In the ancient Church, those who wore these white robes at the Easter Vigil were the newly baptized.

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, when the baptismal robe is placed on a new Christian, the priest says something like “The servants of God are clothed with the robe of righteousness….” and the choir sings: “Vouchsafe unto me the robe of light, O Thou who clothest Thyself with light as with a garment, Christ our God, plenteous in mercy.” To be baptized is to be clothed in Christ.

This is the night when we are all clothed in Christ. This is the night, when we have renewed our own baptismal covenant, to reflect on our Christian wardrobe. Listen to these words from the Letter to the Ephesians:

Put on the whole armour of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil….Fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace…[T]ake the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

I have a friend who keeps this passage taped to her mirror, and every morning she recites it as she gets dressed. She puts on her belt, and prays that it will be the belt of truth. She puts on her jacket, and calls it the breastplate of righteousness. When she brushes her hair, she thinks about the helmet of salvation. Not a bad way to start the day.

This is the night when we suit up in the promise to join God’s army and fight for justice, dignity and peace for those who need it most. This is the night when we remember that we are prayer warriors, linked through time and around the world to strangers, enemies, neighbors we haven’t met, joined together through prayer. This is the night when we remember that it is our feet—not necessarily our words, as Episcopalians are forever shy of using words to proclaim the gospel—it is our feet, our actions, that proclaim the Good News of Christ.

This is the night when we remember not only our Christian wardrobe, but our Jesus tattoo. Each of us who has been baptized, whether or not we remember it, has been marked as Christ’s own forever. You can’t see it, but it’s there. Trace it on your forehead with your thumb. The Jesus tattoo is a cross made with fragrant oil we use only at baptism. If you’re sitting close to Megan or Derek or Capers, you might be able to smell it. Oil of anointing, because in it we are anointed as followers of Christ, marked as Christ’s own forever.

This is the night when we promise, among other things, that when we fall into sin, we will repent and return to the Lord. Not “if” we fall into sin, but “when.” This is the night when we remember that God is always there, that when we mess up and turn around, there is God. Kind of like a mother waiting patiently at the end of our street, when we’ve run away from home. We decide it’s time to return after all, and there she is. This is very good news for Megan, Derek, Capers and the rest of us. This is the good news of Easter.

A friend used to say: “What part of ‘marked as Christ’s own forever’ don’t you understand?” This is the night when we understand.

Derek, Megan, and Capers, you are marked as Christ’s own, forever. What this means to each of you is as different as each of you is from each other. To all of us it means we belong, not just to this crazy church, but to each other, and to God. God loves us, God has our number, God has our back, and we are marked as Christ’s own forever.

This is the night when there is much good news, indeed. Alleluia, Christ is Risen.

Good Friday: it is finished

A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

            It is finished. It really is. The very end of what Jesus has to say to us from the cross. The very end of this dark, empty part of Holy Week. I recently heard someone describe tomorrow as “awkward Saturday.” We know that we don’t have to be solemn and despairing any more, but it’s not yet the joyful time we expect on Sunday. (Except that it is, on Saturday night.) In any case, we can’t get there without entering into and moving through this gospel story. Without getting to “it is finished.”

            It is accomplished! That’s a common rendering of what we probably are more used to hearing in John’s Good Friday gospel as it is finished. How many of you saw Martin Scorcese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ”? Remember Willem Defoe at this moment on the cross? It is accomplished!  Hard to say whether Jesus would have had Defoe’s vigor after being beaten, bloodied, tortured, and crucified. But that interpretation, not at all original to Martin Scorcese’s film, speaks to John the Evangelist’s perspective in all of this. For John, the betrayal, suffering, the cross…it’s got be all part of God’s divine purpose. It is almost as if Jesus is thumbing his nose at his captors: nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nah! I’m right where I want to be. I win!

            Ohhhhh: it’s all part of God’s plan. Okay, now I feel better! And yet, I find that I don’t want to bypass the emptiness that pervades this day, the mystery and the ambiguity of a suffering God. Even if it’s good theology, I don’t want Jesus to be shouting triumphantly from the cross. To do that would be, well, inhuman. Nor do I want him to face death kicking and screaming, running in the opposite direction, as—when I am completely honest with myself—I fear I would. Which he doesn’t. He simply says “It is finished.”

* * *

            In 2005, my father died what anyone would consider to be “a good death.” He was at home, fully lucid, surrounded by family and friends, and, before slipping into a morphine-induced coma, he was explicit with all of us that this was his choice. His last communication with me was a final wave of the hand, dismissing my offer of a miniature, modern-day hyssop branch, a pink sponge on a stick, dipped not in sour wine, but in ice water. But he was beyond all that. He was finally ready to let go completely. It was finished.

            It was a gift to witness a peaceful letting go. Sometimes Jesus’ last moments are portrayed with that same peace. I’m not sure about that. He’s got nails in his hands and feet. He’s suffocating.

            My father spent the last twenty or more years of his life trying to write his memoirs, his life story. His song, he sometimes called it. He had an interesting biography and a complicated inner life. It was a story worth telling, but for him, the process of trying to do so was both compelling and torture. Finally, he finished something he thought he could live with. He self-published it and mailed it off to a hundred friends, family members, and former colleagues. The minute he left the UPS store, he was filled with regret. “It’s not finished!” he said to his wife, almost in tears.

            He had named his book Insatiable. I hope to write about my dad someday, and if I do, I plan to use the same title. But it could be the title for a book about me. Maybe it could be the title of your autobiography.

            The words, it is finished, make me think of all the things many of us never finish: child-rearing, vocational discernment, housework, a painting we’ve always wanted to paint, a skill we’ve always wanted to master, a prolific author we’ve always wanted to read.

            For the past five years, at the beginning of Lent I have announced to anyone who will listen that this year I will read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. It’s not a long book, but I still cannot seem to finish it. I may never finish it. To be human is not only to leave things unfinished, but also to be unfinished. In our mortality, God calls us to let go of all that we will never be or do.

            When Jesus says it is finished, I want him to bear in his wide-open crucified arms all that is forever unfinished. I like to think that Jesus’ it is finished to be a triumph of his humanity at the moment of death, not a triumph that erases his humanity. And more. And less. It is finished, not in the sense of being over, but finished in the sense of being complete, full.

            It is tempting to want to tidy this all up, this moment on the cross when Jesus says it is finished. But I don’t think that’s what we’re supposed to do on Good Friday, make things neat and tidy. It is finished, and it is unfinished. Jesus’ life on earth is finished, his mission as a human who suffers and dies is complete. His suffering is finished, his unimaginable, excruciating pain is, thank God, finished. The suffering of others is not finished. Freeing the captives, healing the sick, feeding the hungry—not finished. The Good News is not finished. The Kingdom is not finished. It is finished, and it is not finished. Stay tuned.

Get your loves in order

You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.

Have you ever walked into a gathering and felt like everyone but you knew what was going on? When I read this morning’s gospel, I feel like I’m a fly on the wall of a dinner party and it takes a while to figure out all of the dynamics. It’s kind of a bizarre scene, really.

Imagine that you are at this dinner party at the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. The evening would be charged with emotion. Jesus is clearly in trouble with the authorities, and at least some of the people around the table know he is not long for this world. He has already done the deed that seals his death warrant: raising his good pal Lazarus from the dead. This is an odd meal indeed, with Lazarus the undead at the dinner table. I find myself wondering: what did Lazarus look like? What did he eat?

Lazarus is joined by his sisters, Mary and Martha who, you may recall, had a bit of a spat the last time they prepared dinner for Jesus. Martha did all the work while Mary sat at Jesus’ feet.  And Judas is there, that tragic figure who thinks he is the most upright, loyal disciple, most faithful to God’s mission, but who turns out to be the great gospel scapegoat.

Mary once again sets herself apart from the others in her family by doing something outrageous, no longer content to sit and listen when she’s supposed to be in the kitchen. She takes this jar of outrageously expensive perfume—a nearly solid substance, perfume in its purest form—and rubs it all over Jesus’ feet. With her hair. Judas questions whether or this is good stewardship. Do you blame him? Wouldn’t you question someone who showed up with a $10,000 bottle of wine for a farewell dinner? That’s the kind of money we’re talking about, in the first-century economy.

At that moment, however, Mary is doing exactly what she should be doing.

A long time ago, I heard someone say that God is constantly asking us to get our loves in order. Mary has her loves in order. Her greatest need is to express her love of Jesus in this act of unimaginable extravagance. The key word here is act.

Judas doesn’t see it this way. He is like the very sensible, sensate parish treasurer when he says: wouldn’t it be better to sell this expensive perfume and give it to the poor? In our day and age he might have added: “we’ll give money to the poor after we pay off the furnace loan.” I’ve said as much myself. Judas is not necessarily wrong, and I certainly identify with him here. I, too, have much to learn from Mary of Bethany.

Most commentators on this passage say they don’t believe that the reason Judas said this is because he was a thief. But we know this much about Judas: he does not have his loves in order. He is worrying about the budget, while Mary is worshipping God.

Jesus’ response to Judas is one of the most misunderstood gospel sayings in the bible. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me. Through the ages, it has been interpreted as being a dismissal of the poor, a proof-text that there are more important things to Jesus than caring for the poor. Or a rationale for resignation: the poor we will always have with us; our hearts might be in the right place but we can never actually do anything about the poor.

Such rationales come from a place of struggle within us, I think. Jesus spent his entire ministry reminding us that the poor are God’s beloved, and that the way we continue Christ’s reconciling, healing work is to be Christ in the world for the poor. Jesus lived and taught like someone who knew this would be a struggle for us, but he fully expected us to engage in that struggle. Judas is the person at the dinner table who is engaging in that struggle of how to help the poor.

God’s love for us, in sending Jesus become human for us, to be our God-in-the-flesh, and then dying, that he might be raised from the dead and thereby defeat death once and for all, is, on God’s part, an act of unimaginable extravagance. Just as extravagant as Mary rubbing a pound of costly perfume on Jesus’ feet. God’s love for the poor, as told throughout all of scripture, and the way that Jesus lived out that love, is his bequest to us, his extravagant gift like Mary of Bethany’s gift to him.

What will be our act of unimaginable love and extravagance? I hope that it will reflect our loves being in order.

As we prepare for Holy Week, let’s get our loves in order. I say this to myself as well as to all of you. It’s easy for me to get caught up in the quest for beauty and perfection in the liturgy, for its own sake. What we need to remember is that in Holy Week, we offer our very best—our extravagance—to the one who gave everything he had in order to proclaim victory over death, extravagance over poverty.

As the namesake of the new pope, St. Francis has been in the news a lot lately. That’s never a bad thing—Francis is the great Christ-like champion and companion of the poor. Francis had his loves in order. I’d like to close with a prayer—a blessing, really—attributed to the Franciscan way of life and prayer:

May God bless us with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, that we may live deep within our heart.

May God bless us with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that we may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless us with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war, so that we may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.

May God bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we can make a difference in this world, so that we can do what others claim cannot be done. Amen.

Shine Your Sink

Many thanks, Jeanne Kaliszewski, for this fine sermon!

Today is grubby Sunday, and I am a hopeless housekeeper.  I am not saying this in order to get out of cleaning toilets, it is the truth.  I have given much time, effort and thought as to how to remedy this shortcoming.  One “expert” suggested the best way to keep your home clean was to eliminate what was making it dirty.  Since I could not realistically get rid of my 2 dogs, 3 kids, and husband, I disregarded that advice.

But then a few years ago I ran across the “Fly Lady.”  This is a woman who has built a huge following by providing guidance and cheerleading to the (mostly) women who seek to improve their lives and their homes.

Unlike many of the homemaker gurus I have followed over the years, including the infuriatingly perfect Martha Stewart, the Fly Lady starts very simply.  Rather than bombarding you with checklists and tools, she advises you to “shine your sink”.  That’s it, shine your sink. With all due respect to Martha, I know I am supposed to vacuum behind my refrigerator and wipe down all my baseboards, but sometimes all I can really handle is shining my sink.

When we are faced with the immensity of a task, sometimes the best thing you can do is to set small and achievable goals.  I have to remind myself to shine my sink, metaphorically, during Lent. Sometimes it helps to get back to basics.

The focus on repentance during Lent can be daunting. The Litany of Penitence that we have been praying this Lenten season can feel a little like Martha Stewart’s housekeeping manual: long, overwhelming, too big to tackle.

But the Litany of Penitence is not a checklist of what we need fix by Easter.  Instead it is an opportunity for inventory and self-reflection.  A true and sincere admission of our sins is what repentance is about, not the expectation that we will never again be human, never again be envious of those more fortunate or negligent of our prayer and worship.  We also pray the Litany together and bear our penitence as a community.

The gospel lessons during Lent have an urgent quality, as if Jesus is ready and hurrying to his inevitable end in Jerusalem and Jesus spends a lot of time focused on repentance.  He is running out of time.  Jesus says that we are not any less a sinner than the Galileans whom Pilate has killed, repent now before YOU run out of time.

But after he angrily responds to his disciples that they are as much sinners as anyone, he tells a parable on how to get at this repentance.  Get back to the fundamentals and do the work.

In the parable of the fig tree Jesus gives us a very detailed account, a little like reading a biblical Farmer’s Almanac, of getting back to basics rather than giving up.  When the landlord finds a barren fig tree on his land his response is to rip it out, it had 3 years to fruit and did not, so time to purge. Martha would approve,

But the gardener replies “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it, if it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not you can cut it down”.

The remarkable thing about this parable is that the landlord agrees.  Just as God has the power to grant us the grace to be forgiven, so too the landlord gives the fig tree a reprieve. But it is a two way street, we have to do the work in order for God to respond.

The psalm takes us back to basics as well:

“O God, you are my God, I seek you,
my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
as in a dry, weary land where there is no water”.

This is penitence at its simplest.  The most fundamental repentance we can make is admitting that we thirst for God. The things we give up for Lent, chocolate, Facebook, dieting are all an attempt to clear the clutter of our souls so we can connect to the holy.

The psalm reminds us that like water in the desert, we can not survive without God.  All our acts of contrition and repentance during Lent are to make sure we put God first.

The lesson from Isaiah dovetails nicely with the Psalm, the image of thirsting for God is the same. Again, the bible reminds us where our priorities should be, forgetting the consumption and noise that also was a distraction the 3,000 years ago when the prophet spoke these words:

Ho, everyone who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and you that have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come buy wine and milk
without money and without price.

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me;
listen, so that you may live.

I like to think of Lent as a spring cleaning for my soul, a time to clean house to get ready for the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.

Today we also celebrate St. David of Wales.  Traditionally, St. David’s day is March 1, meant to commemorate the day in 690 when he died.  St. David was a monk from, you guessed it, Wales, who became a famous teacher and preacher founding monastic settlements and contributing to the independence of the Welsh church.

St. David’s last words were said to be in a sermon, given when he was well over the age of 100, “Be joyful, keep your faith and your creed, do the little things you have seen me do and heard about”.  “Do ye the little things in life” is a common phrase in Wales (I will not attempt it in Welsh, however, too many w’s and y’s).  Do ye the little things, shine your sink, love God, remember Christ in the work we do.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:

“Earth’s crammed with heaven
And every common brush afire with God
But only he who sees takes off his shoes
The rest sit around and pluck blackberries”

This Lent clear away the clutter so you can see that God is crammed in everything that surrounds you, even the dirty sink, but you might get a better glimpse if you shine it up a bit.

Citizenship in Heaven

But our citizenship is in heaven.

But our citizenship is in heaven. Our citizenship is in the Kingdom of God. Paul writes this to the community of new Christians in Philippi, which was under Roman rule. The Philippians were proud of their Roman citizenship, just as most of us are proud to be citizens of Portland. But—as some of you may have noticed—it is hard to be a Christian in Portland! Not difficult the way it was back in the early Philippians’ day. Not it’s-illegal-and-we’ll-burn-you-alive-unless-you-offer-incense-to-our-pagan-gods, but still difficult. We live in an environment that is averse to, and sometimes downright hostile to, organized religion.

Organized religion has a bad name, either for people who grew up in churches that caused them grief, or for people who grew up outside of any faith community and know only what they hear in the media. They hear about communities that call themselves Christian while proclaiming hatred and damnation. Or they hear about Christian leaders caught up in scandals involving sex or greed.

Another thing about organized religion, though—and I keep using that phrase because I’m trying to rescue it from the outermost margins of society—another thing about organized religion that scares people is that any religion worth being part of asks something of us. Through spiritual disciplines, through sharing bread and wine around an altar, through engagement with a community, through financial participation—when we organize around these practices, we commit to all these things. Religion is all about practice, not about getting it right.

When Paul says “our citizenship is in heaven,” he invites us to map our lives onto the life of Jesus, and to take our place in the way of the cross, the way of the gospel.

In this morning’s gospel, Jesus models this for us with a large dose of pre-Easter intensity. In chapter 9, verse 51 of the Gospel of Luke, right after the disciples come down off the mountaintop, we read that Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem. For the phrase “Set his face” Luke uses a Greek verb not found anywhere else. The best translation is “he went with absolute determination.” This is the Jesus we meet in everything that comes after Luke 9:51.

Jesus is on a mission from God. Just like the Blues Brothers, only more so.

Jesus says Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow. What if our whole lives as practicing Christians are the “today and tomorrow” that Jesus talks about? What if we are to live as he did, doing God’s work?

What? I can’t perform miracles! I don’t know anything about casting our demons or curing people! Who do you think I am, God?

When a group of us started Rahab’s Sisters almost ten years ago, we talked with a guy who had done a lot of work with women traumatized and often nearly destroyed by the sex industry. Many of these women one could describe as being possessed by demons, unable to get out of a life that was killing them and everything good around them. He said: “if you see them, really see them, they will begin to see themselves as you see them. But you’ve got to really see them.” I’ve never forgotten that. When he said that, I thought: that’s how Jesus healed people. By seeing them. Go back and read some of the healing stories. You’ll see that healing comes when Jesus relates to someone in a new way. Being about God’s work is about being with people in their suffering. Not trying to fix them or punish them, not asking them to change in order to be cared for. Attending to them in ways that they have not been attended to before.

When we connect with one another, when we listen patiently, when we care for those in our midst who are suffering, we, too, are casting out demons and performing cures. We don’t think we are, but we are. I know many of you do this in your daily life and work.

If we read this gospel as applying the intensity of Jesus’ last days to your mission and my mission in our time—today, tomorrow, and the next day—what about Jerusalem? Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those that who are sent to it! For Jesus, Jerusalem is the place of death, the place of the religious establishment. Where is our Jerusalem? I’d like to suggest that Jerusalem represents all the forces in the world and—more to the point—in ourselves that work against God and against our own healing power. We all have those, right? I’m not a good enough person. Or: I don’t have enough of this or that training or education. Or: I’m too busy. Or: I’m too distracted by my envy or distrust of so-and-so to focus on really seeing the person who most needs to be seen by me, right?

Look at how Jesus responds to his enemies, to his time-honored forces of destruction. How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings…! In effect he is saying to them that they are like little chicks….he is saying “there, there.” What if we said that to all those voices—inner and outer—that work against God’s mission in us? There, there.

During Lent, one of the ways we hope to cast out demons as a community is through the Litany of Penitence. If it sounds familiar, it’s because we pray it every year on Ash Wednesday and then put it away again for another year. My hope is that it will help us to go deeper into prayer about what blocks us from proclaiming God’s reign.

Our mission is to be about God’s mission to cast out demons and to heal. Our today and tomorrow is after the resurrection, however. Unlike this morning’s gospel, where Jesus has not yet been crucified and raised from the dead, we live on the other side of the cross. We live in the time of already and not yet. The resurrection has already happened, the Kingdom is already being proclaimed, and it is not yet here. The world does not yet match the kingdom Jesus came to proclaim.

This is why we have each other. This is why we organize ourselves around practices that help us proclaim the Kingdom of God. Our lives are here, now, in this already-not yet place where we live. Our citizenship is in God’s kingdom.