Jesus didn't stay dead

In preaching class this week, the assignment was to preach a sermon on a "doctrinal subject" -- like atonement theology, ecclesiology (theology about the nature of the church), pneumatology (the study of the Holy Spirit). I chose to preach an Easter Day sermon, on the (bodily) Resurrection (of Jesus), the central tenant of the Christian faith. 

Last week, residents of the Myrtle Beach area of South Carolina got a controversial message in their mailboxes: a postcard, with a picture of a dead white rabbit surrounded by a bunch of smashed colored eggs. The caption on the postcard read, “Bunnies stay dead. Jesus didn’t.”

A church in the area sent these postcards as an invitation to their Easter services (service times were listed on the back), but they may have turned off more people than they reached. The online comments on the news story run by the local television station admonished the church for the implicit violence in the ad and expressed concern over its potential effect on children.

But however disturbing the imagery and however crude the message, the church was right about one thing: Jesus didn’t stay dead. And that claim has been causing controversy since it was first made two thousand years ago.

The people of Jesus’s time knew just as well as we do that dead things usually stay dead. So when the women who had been to the tomb started telling the male disciples that Jesus’s body wasn’t there, and that then they saw Jesus – or, well, they didn’t really know it was Jesus at first because he was different – but they knew it was him, really! – no wonder the men thought it was an “idle tale,” as Luke puts it.

But then they started encountering Jesus as well. The same Jesus who had been killed just a few days before appeared to them in locked rooms, entering and exiting through walls, appearing and disappearing like a character in some kind of children’s folktale. The Gospel accounts repeatedly tell us that the disciples were terrified when they encountered Jesus and thought that they were seeing a ghost. But the stories of the resurrection appearances also are careful to document that Jesus was not in fact a ghost, nor were the disciples merely having a vision of their deceased teacher – those who saw him after his resurrection attested that Jesus had a real, physical body (that still bore the marks of his execution) and that he could eat food and be touched. It was like nothing they had ever experienced. He wasn’t a ghost, but he wasn’t a regular living human being either. He was a physical being, but not constrained by the limits of human physicality.

These stories were just as incredible in the first century as they are today, and despite the fact that Christianity has become the world’s largest religion, there are still plenty of people who do not believe that Jesus was actually, physically raised from the dead. One woman who commented on the news story about the dead bunny postcard wrote,

“Perhaps the most ignorant thing about the card is that Jesus IS dead. He lives on in our hearts, but as far as walking around goes, nope, not happening. So I guess he DOES have a lot in common with that dead bunny.”

But this is precisely what the followers of Jesus did NOT say about him after his death: that he “lived on in their hearts.” No, they claimed that he was actually, physically alive – albeit in a different kind of body than he had before his death. When we Christians say that Jesus lives, we do not mean that he lives in the metaphorical ways in which loved ones “live on” after their deaths in the memories of others. No, when we say Jesus lives, we mean that he actually LIVES, that he appeared to his disciples in an embodied, physical form after his death.

This claim is outrageous, and from the start it has provoked ridicule and disbelief. The skeptics of our day are not saying anything new when they point to the lack of hard and fast proof that the resurrection actually happened and thus discount the witness of the first Christians as fanciful and deluded. Even some within the church, unable to believe in the bodily resurrection themselves or perhaps embarrassed by the foolishness of it in the world’s eyes, concede to the skeptics that perhaps Jesus was not raised in the flesh. As Christians, they still want to hold on to a belief in the resurrection, so they do this by saying that Jesus was raised from the dead, but that his resurrection was a spiritual resurrection, not a physical one. It doesn’t matter whether or not Jesus was physically resurrected, they say, what matters is that his followers continued to have an experience of him in some way and that we continue to have faith in him today. Even if the body of Jesus was found tomorrow, I could still be a Christian, they would say.

But the bodily resurrection does matter to our faith as Christians. It may seem attractive to have a faith that is impervious to challenge from outside forces, and belief in a spiritual resurrection of Jesus certainly gives one that gift. But it contradicts the testimony of the first Christians – that Jesus appeared in bodily form after his death – a testimony that forms the heart of the faith that the church has handed down over centuries. And to me, it seems like an intellectually sophisticated version of “Jesus lives on in our hearts.”

It matters that Jesus’s resurrection was a physical reality, not a vision. If it was a vision, it is entirely subjective, something that is nice for us Christians to believe, but doesn’t make any kind of claim on anyone else. On the other hand, if it was an objective, physical reality, it changes the course of history for all people.

If the resurrection really happened, if God actually raised Jesus from the dead, then Jesus’s message has been affirmed and shown to be true. He was not a false prophet deserving death for blasphemy, but the actual Son of God. And if the resurrection really happened, then the powers of sin and death have been overcome by the powers of love and forgiveness.

At the heart of the good news that we proclaim to the world is that God is not a god of violence and revenge. Jesus does not come back to wreak vengeance on those who betrayed and killed him. He doesn’t destroy Pilate or the religious authorities who had him put to death. Instead, he returns speaking peace. “Peace be with you” are his first words to the disciples who had deserted and rejected him. And then he sends them out with a message of forgiveness and reconciliation for all people.

If Jesus lives, then the cycle of violence has been broken. And if we are in Christ through our baptism into his death and resurrection, then we too are given the power to resist the evils of this world without fear and without violence, because we know that we too will share in that resurrected life that transforms and embraces all.

Jesus didn’t stay dead. It is a controversial claim. Of course, we cannot objectively prove that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead, but one historical fact is undeniable, even by the most skeptical of scholars: Jesus’s followers believed he had been raised from the dead, in bodily form, and they risked their lives to bring that message to the world. The question for us is, will we believe them?

**I must acknowledge both Christopher Bryan's The Resurrection of the Messiah (Oxford University Press USA, 2011) and The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan and N.T. Wright in Dialogue (edited by Robert B. Stewart, published by Fortress Press, 2006), which both played a strong part in the development of the ideas in this sermon.

Seeking the Call... again and always

This afternoon, I was sending my resume to several churches and dioceses as part of my on-going search for a ministry position post-seminary when I suddenly noticed that the title of my email was nearly identical with the title of this blog: "Sewanee seminarian seeking a call."

"Seeking a call." In the church, we talk about "calls" to minister in a particular parish rather than "jobs." I've been careful not to use "employment" language as I write and speak about my desire for a place to go after graduation that will pay me and give me health insurance, but to instead talk about looking for or searching for where God is calling me to minister. And it hadn't even occurred to me until today that the very title of my blog is "seeking the call!"

Of course, I meant something very different when I coined that term for my blog six years ago. I began this blog as a place to record and share my reflections on my experience in the Resurrection House program in Omaha, a vocational discernment internship for young adults sponsored by the Episcopal Church. (Now part of the Episcopal Service Corps.) At that point, I was "seeking the call" in the sense of trying to figure out "what to do with my life" -- looking at the "bigger picture" of vocational discernment -- am I called to work in a homeless shelter? To be a deacon? To be a priest? "The call" I was seeking -- and eventually found -- was the call to the priesthood.

But even after I discerned that call clearly, I decided not to change the blog's title, because, I figured, we're always seeking God's call on our lives -- we never really have it all figured out. Even if I'd discerned a call to a particular vocation, there would always be ways in which, throughout my vocation as a priest, I would be seeking God's call -- where is God calling this particular parish to go at this time? How is God moving in this parishioner's life? To think that I had found that which I sought when I discerned a vocational call to the priesthood and that there was no more need to "seek the call" would have been extremely naive.

So I kept it. And six years later, here I am, "seeking the call" in a different way -- seeking a particular parish and particular people with whom I can be in relationship and ministry, with whom I can listen for the ways in which the Holy Spirit is moving in their midst and jump on Her bandwagon. (Because, I've found, the best ideas in the world won't come to fruition if the Spirit is not already active in that area. "Success" in ministry, I believe, comes from listening to and discerning where the Spirit is already active and then joining forces with that work, rather than trying to create something entirely of our own devising or our own ideas.)

So, the suspense is building. Where is the call I am so ardently seeking now? How is God about to move in my life to bring me to new experiences and opportunities in ministry that I have not yet known? I must have faith that it is out there somewhere, that call that I seek, and I pray regularly for the parishioners of that congregation, even though I do not know who they are yet.

And even after it is revealed to me, even after I find "a call," I will continue "seeking the call"... in that never-ending process of discernment that is relationship with the living God.

God grant me the patience, perseverance, and openness to remain,

faithfully,

Seeking the Call...

always.

Superfluous miracles and community-building

Today I preached in my Advanced Homiletics class. The assignment was to preach on a miracle text, and I chose the Gospel passage for Proper 13, Year A -- Matthew's account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand (Matthew 14:13-21).

This was a text I'd preached on before, at my sending parish, and I took that sermon and edited and re-shaped it for a slightly different and more focused approach. (You can compare the original sermon here.)  It was an interesting exercise to re-visit a sermon text (even though that wasn't part of the assignment) and attempt to tighten it up for what I hope was a more effective presentation. We've been reading David Buttrick's Homiletic in class, with his emphasis on "moves" rather than "points" in a sermon. I realized that the original sermon had too many "moves" -- it tried to do too much with its dual focus of the community-building of the miracle and the Eucharistic foreshadowing. (This is a common mistake I made in my earliest sermons, I'm realizing.) I also realized that I'd put way too many personal details in that Eucharist section (in the original sermon) about how I got to the quotation that I used. Ultimately I decided to cut the entire Eucharist section and just more fully develop the concept of the "deeper miracle" in the feeding of the five thousand being about creating community.

Our professor says the goal is to get to where we go through this kind of editing process on our sermons before we ever deliver them the first time... and I hope this exercise has helped me to think more clearly about what the "end goal" is for a sermon as I'm writing it the first time. I've also noticed (from watching the video) that the manuscript is a real hindrance to eye contact, even when I've practiced the sermon aloud multiple times before delivery. I think for my next sermon for this class, I'll try preaching without notes and see how that goes!!

Here's a video and the text of the sermon from today:




It sounded like a reasonable request:

"This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves."

I mean, wouldn't you have said the same thing? You're standing there looking at a crowd of over five thousand people, realizing that they're going to be getting hungry pretty soon... and all you have is five loaves of bread and two fish... so you figure it's time to wrap up this healing ministry and let them go on their way.

After all, Jesus has already been somewhat “put out” by these people. When the crowds heard that Jesus had withdrawn to a deserted place by himself, “they followed him on foot from the towns.” Although Jesus often invites people to follow him, in this case, he is followed without invitation! Despite his desire for stillness and contemplation, he graciously responds to the crowds and heals their sick. So the disciples must have figured, “Ok, the show's over. We've tended to these people's needs, it's late, Jesus wants to pray already, so let's send these people on back to town.”

An entirely reasonable request, right? But Jesus wasn't done yet. “They need not go away,” he says. Jesus resists the natural human impulse to leave people to tend to their own needs. “You give them something to eat,” he says. In other words, “we will take care of them here.” And then he proceeds to take the disciples' small ration of food and somehow make it more than enough to feed the entire crowd.

So why did Jesus do it? The scripture doesn't say that the crowds were starving or unable to afford their own food - in fact, the disciples’ comments seem to assume that the people are perfectly capable of going back into town and providing for their own needs. Unlike the stories of Jesus healing people who have been suffering for years from physical maladies that no one else has been able to heal, this miracle is, in practical terms, a bit superfluous. Jesus doesn’t have to provide food for the entire crowd. So why does he do it?

Some may say that Jesus multiplies the loaves and fishes merely as a show of his divine power, that the reason Jesus performs miracles is to prove that he is God. Other religious leaders may have been inspiring teachers, but they didn’t break the “laws of physics” by magically multiplying food, this argument goes. Only God himself could do that, so Jesus must have been God.

The only problem is that this argument would not have made much sense to the first-century people who wrote this story and preserved it for subsequent generations. Miracles were common among religious leaders and holy men in Jesus’s day, and things we would consider to be “supernatural occurrences” showed up in stories from many different traditions. The early Christian community who preserved this story would not have seen it as evidence of Jesus’s uniqueness.

They also did not tell and re-tell this story to communities of faithful Christians simply because it showed Jesus performing a magic trick. In discerning which of the many stories circulating about Jesus's life would be included in what became our sacred scriptures, the early church always rejected stories about Jesus performing miracles for miracles’ sake – and there were plenty of them out there. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, for instance, includes stories of Jesus as a child, zapping his friends with lightning when they disagree with him, or making birds out of clay and then bringing them to life, just for fun. But the church rejected these depictions of Jesus as a reckless superhero.

In the stories they did include in our scriptures, Jesus's miracles are always more than just showy displays of power. In fact, Jesus often tells the disciples not to tell anyone about the miracles he performs, especially in the Gospel of Mark. The Jesus of the New Testament is not an exhibitionist, performing miracles and squealing, "Woooo, look what I can do!!!" Jesus's miracles always have a deeper significance, a meaning and implication for how we are to live our lives in faith.

So what is the significance of the story of the feeding of the five thousand, the only miracle story that appears in all four Gospels in the New Testament? What is the meaning of this “unnecessary” miracle, if not just to show Jesus's power?

Jesus's feeding of the five thousand says something deeply profound about the way we are to approach others in our Christian ministry. We are called not just to respond to immediate needs, but to go the extra mile in creating a space for community. In a culture where your place in society determined who you could eat with, Jesus resists what would have been the natural inclination of the people to go about their separate ways, eating only with those who were considered socially appropriate, and instead creates a space for community between unlikely parties, right there on the hillside. Before the disciples knew what was happening, strangers were breaking bread with strangers, probably sharing stories about how grateful they were that their friend or relative had finally been healed of such-and-such a disease, and beginning to form a community together over a shared meal.

The deeper miracle of the feeding of the five thousand is in Jesus's rejection of the patterns of disconnection in society that say, “let them go off and buy food for themselves” and insisting instead, “They need not go away. We will take care of them here.”

Who are the people our church serves that we might invite into community with us instead of assuming they will go away and take care of themselves after we meet their immediate needs? Who is Jesus calling us to feed, both physically and spiritually?

Imagine something with me, if you will. You’re standing in the food pantry downstairs, sorting and labeling piles of donations. Canned goods on this shelf, cereal on that one. You and the other volunteers brush past one another as you hurry around, getting things ready for the morning’s guests to arrive. At 9 a.m. you open the door to a long line of people, some pushy, some with that end-of-the-month desperation in their eyes. As you begin to hand out bags of groceries, you look each person in the eye. You ask them about how they’re doing and listen to a small part of their story. Instead of just nodding sympathetically, you let them know that there is a community of faith here who will support them in their journey. You promise to pray for them, and invite them to join us for worship on Sunday mornings.

A few weeks later, one of the people from the food pantry shows up on Sunday morning. She attends the 10:30 service and finds you afterwards to let you know how much your invitation meant to her. “The other food pantries in town see me as a number,” she says, “and they assume once I’ve gotten what I need, I’ll go away and deal with the rest of my life myself. But you saw me as a person and you cared about my struggles. So I thought, ok, I’ll see what your church is all about.”

Like Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand, your invitation to this woman to come to church wasn’t necessary. It didn’t meet a physical need that she had. It was, in all practical terms, a bit superfluous. But like that first century Galilean miracle, it saw past practicality and meeting immediate needs to address a deeper need – a need for belonging and spiritual nurture. Your invitation went the extra mile to create a space for community, a community that says unreservedly to all, “You need not go away. We will take care of you here.”

Adjusting to a new identity

Today, I wore my collar to school for the first time.

I hadn't worn it since my ordination day just over a month ago. The day after the ordination we boarded a plane for two weeks in Costa Rica, and then came back to GOEs and one more week off... and having had no official "deaconing" duties scheduled during that time, I had had no reason to wear it.

At the seminary, there is a tradition of "dressing up" on Wednesdays, which is our main community day. (When I was visiting as a prospective student, someone explained it to me by saying, "Wednesdays are our Sundays at the seminary" -- since many of the students are working in churches on Sundays as part of their field education experience, there isn't an opportunity for the community to gather on Sundays, so the principal worship service of the week is on Wednesdays instead of Sundays at the seminary.) Part of that tradition of dressing up includes those seniors who are ordained to the diaconate in December wearing their collars on Wednesdays for the spring semester, even if they're not scheduled to serve as deacon at the Eucharist that day.

Today was our first Wednesday of the new semester. All five of us who were ordained in December who were on campus (there were six of us total, but one of our deacons is currently on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land) wore our collars today. It was exciting to me to look around the chapel and see my classmates in their collars, looking very official and clerical. Every one of them looked natural and normal in the collar, not a bit out of place, even though this was the first time I'd seen some of them in a collar in real life (I'd seen pictures from the ordinations). My emotion upon seeing them in the collar was pure, unadulterated joy, but my emotions around walking around campus in a collar myself were more mixed.

When I wore the collar for my ordination day, it didn't feel strange at all. I was excited for that day and had tried on the collar several times that fall as I tried to find a clergy shirt that fit me properly in preparation for ordination day. I was excited to wear the collar and it felt natural, I thought, to wear it. But there was something unique about that day -- it was a special day, a special ceremony all about ordination and ordaining. The collar was highlighted that day, literally and symbolically. But today was just another day. A "business as usual" day. And suddenly I was walking around, in normal life, not just on a special day, with a strip of white plastic around my neck that symbolizes an ordained office in the church.

I changed my email signature to "The Rev. Tracy Wells Miller" the day I was ordained, as well as all references to myself on my blog and other areas where my name is listed, and I've had a month to get used to looking at that, and it hasn't felt entirely strange. But somehow it was easier to adjust to the title than to the change in dress. The title was abstract, words on a page. The collar is physical and visible, an outward sign that makes me stand out. And as much as I love attention, there was something unsettling about becoming a physically-marked religious symbol in the world.

As I walked around campus, some classmates and professors commented on the collar. "Lookin' good in that collar!" or "I like the collar on you. It's a nice look." or "Congratulations on your ordination." Others didn't say anything, but I watched their eyes make a brief dip down to my neck before they made eye contact and said hello. Others just interacted with me the same as they ever had, seemingly not noticing the collar at all. But I was aware of it. Every move I made felt different, felt public and scrutinized in some way. I began to think about Muslim women who wear headscarves and Sikh men who wear turbans as outward symbols of their religious faith, and who know what it is like to live as a physically-marked religious symbol in the world.

I thought of Amardeep Singh, Director of Programs for the Sikh Coalition, who appears in the documentary film about post-9/11 hate crimes that I worked with, Divided We Fall. In the film, in speaking about why wearing the turban is important to him, he says,

"Every day when I get up and tie my turban, I'm thinking, 'Be true to the articles. Be a good person.' Because I'm representing not just myself, but my entire community."

I also thought about my friend Susan Werner, an amazingly talented songwriter who calls herself an agnostic but spoke powerfully about faith in her 2007 album, "The Gospel Truth." After writing songs with a Gospel twist, she once told me in an interview for a church magazine,

"Since doing the Gospel project, I’ve had to hold my tongue a few times -- I had to live up to the better messages of the project -- and be a good 'Christian' because I knew I was going to sing these songs that night and I could not let myself be a jerk. Really."

I thought of Susan when I felt myself choosing my words more carefully as I felt the grip of the collar on my neck and thinking twice before I made careless comments or used curse words that have slipped into my vocabulary over the past several years, despite my "goody two shoes" upbringing and my time among evangelicals. I hadn't thought much of it, but now I thought twice. Is this really the image I want to project as a deacon, and as a future priest? Susan's words came back to me. I'm going to have to live up to the faith I profess with my words, the faith I will soon sing as well (in chanted Eucharists!), and be a good priest because I know I'm going to have that collar around my neck and I cannot let myself be a jerk. Really.

Unlike Amardeep, I'm fortunate enough to wear a religious symbol that will be largely respected in this culture, not make me a target for hate crimes. A classmate greeted me today with a respectful nod and a simple, "Reverend." He must have noticed my subtle internal recoil as I laughed, because he responded, "Get used to it!"

In much of the U.S., a collar brings with it respect and deference, sometimes excessively so. "Oh, here, Father, have the best seat in the house," or "let me pay for your lunch," or somehow you wind up with a warning instead of a speeding ticket. These kind of stories I've heard about "special treatment" for the clergy make me uncomfortable, but perhaps I'm naive to think the responses I get will be entirely positive. There are enough people who have been hurt badly by priests and there is enough controversy over women priests that I may need to expect the collar to bring me some animosity. A male clergy friend of mine once told me about a female priest friend of his who was shopping in a Christian bookstore with her collar on and had someone come up to her and say, "Take off that costume, Satan!" I certainly won't be mistaken for a Roman Catholic priest, as my male colleagues will be.

Maybe one day I will be so used to wearing the collar that I won't even notice it. Maybe it will become the "new normal," it will be business-as-usual, just part of my regular identity and I won't think twice about my words or my actions while I'm wearing it. But I hope not. I hope it always rests a bit uncomfortably on my Adam's Apple as I swallow, reminding me, "Be true to the faith. Be a good person. Because I'm representing not just myself, but my entire community."

Incarnation

Merry Christmas to all! On this most blessed day, I share with you a poem by Lynn Ungar, titled "Incarnation":

The trees have finally
shaken off their cloak
of leaves, redrawn
themselves more sternly
against the sky. I confess
I have coveted this
casting off of flesh,
have wished myself
all line and form, all God.

I confess that I am caught
by the story of Christmas,
by the pronouncement of the Spirit
upon Mary’s plain flesh.
What right did the angel
have to come to her
with the news of that
unprovided, unimaginable
birth? What right
had God to take on flesh
so out of season?

When Mary lay gasping
in water and blood
that was of her own body
but not her own
did she choose one gleaming,
antiseptic star to carry
her through the night?

The flesh has so few choices,
the angels, perhaps, none.
The trees will shake themselves
and wait for spring.
The angels, unbodied, will clutch
the night with their singing.
And Mary, like so many,
troubled and available,
will hear the word:

The power of the Most High 
will overshadow you 

And in her flesh, respond.


(Thanks to Tuhina Rasche, fellow FTE Ministry Fellow, for making me aware of this poem through her sermon from 4 Advent on her blog, This Lutheran Life.)

Saying "Yes" to God's call

In my baby book, my mother writes about my baptism when I was sixteen months old:

“Pastor Sims baptized you. When he poured the water over your head, you shook your head and said, ‘No!’”

Tomorrow, I will say yes. Twenty-nine years after my baptism, I will be ordained a deacon in Christ’s church and say “yes” to God’s call on my life.

Although in my adult life I became a critic of infant baptism and delighted in the baby book witness that even as a one-year-old, I was against having something chosen for me that I did not choose for myself, I later discovered that the date of my baptism – February 27 – was the same date that I had an evangelical “conversion experience” in high school and the same date that I first started volunteering with the Outdoor Church in Cambridge, Mass., the homeless ministry out of which my calling to the priesthood emerged. So I can’t deny that something must have happened at my baptism, however much I did not choose it for myself at the time.

And as I approach the eve of my ordination, which marks my transition from being a lay person to being a member of the clergy, a transition in identity which can never truly be reversed – an ontological change, if you will – I am reminded of all the ways in which I did not choose this call for myself. Yes, I am assenting to it of my own free will, but it was not simply an individual, personal choice. The Episcopal Church does not allow people to take on ordination solely of their own choosing – the community has to affirm that they see the call as well.

The authority that will be given to me at my ordination is not mine to take, but the church’s to give, and I accept it with a measure of humility and honor and gratitude. The priest who led our pre-ordination Quiet Day told us a story of how the priest in her home congregation used to always have members of the congregation put his vestments on him before the Eucharistic liturgy, symbolizing that he could only be vested and serving them as priest by virtue of their assent and their choosing him as their representative leader. I like the metaphor that we cannot vest ourselves, just as we cannot celebrate Eucharist alone – there must be a community present to assent to the words that the priest offers on their behalf.

There have been times during the formal discernment process and my seminary career when I have wanted to shake my head and say, “No!” to this “odd and wondrous calling,” as UCC pastors Lillian Daniels and Martin Copenhaver refer to it. But after giving the matter serious thought and prayer, tomorrow, I will choose to say yes even to something that I have not entirely chosen for myself. And as a reminder of that, at the ordination tomorrow, under my collar and out of sight from everyone else, I will be wearing a tiny gold cross with a thin, short chain that barely fits around my neck. It is a delicate necklace made for a baby: my baptismal cross, the cross that was chosen for me by parents I did not choose as a keepsake for a sacrament that I did not choose – but that somehow has transformed my life, even without my consent.

What happens when we get what we are waiting for?

Sermon preached at Wednesday Morning Prayer, Chapel of the Apostles, Sewanee, Tennessee.

The reading from Matthew this morning (Matthew 24:45-51) comes from the apocalyptic discourses towards the end of that Gospel, those series of parables about what the last judgment and the kingdom to come will be like. The common theme is that it will come when we least expect it, and we should remain watchful and be attentive to how we are living our lives, lest we be caught off guard when the end comes.

Keep awake! Be watchful! Be alert! These are themes of Advent, which invites us into a period of holy waiting and expectation.

But today, thanks be to God, our expectant waiting for the end of the semester has finally come to an end. Juniors, you’ve survived your first semester of seminary! Middlers, you’re halfway through your seminary career as of today. And Seniors, well, we’re gearing up for our transitions out of this place, with only one semester remaining before graduation.

So here’s a question for us to ponder as we come to the completion of another semester and as we move closer to the arrival of the Christ child at Christmas: What happens when we get what we’ve been waiting for? What happens to us emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, when the object of our expectant longing and hopefulness is suddenly realized?

Sometimes there can be an anti-climactic moment when we you get what you’ve been waiting for. The day after the graduation or the wedding you don’t really feel all that different than you did the day before. Or the day after the big party, you feel the loss of all the excitement you’d felt in preparing for it.

It can also be disorienting to get what you’ve been waiting for: suddenly your identity, which for so long had centered around waiting for that day when you would finally graduate or finally meet that person with whom you would share your life, has changed. If you’ve spent years of your life working for a certain kind of social change and you actually accomplish your goal, what then? If your identity has become that of an “anti-war protestor” and the war comes to an end, who are you now? You’ve gotten what you were waiting for, but now you don’t know who you are. Perhaps this is why common wisdom advises us to “be careful what you wish for – you just might get it.”

As Christians, we teach that our hope and longing will never be fully realized until the Second Coming. We talk a lot in seminary about “realized eschatology,” about the “already” and the “not yet,” but the Advent themes of waiting focus more heavily on the “not yet” part. To be a Christian means always to be waiting, not just during Advent, but throughout the church year. No matter how many To Do lists we check off and no matter how many major life transitions we experience, there will still be something we have to wait for. We will never “get what we’re waiting for” until the Second Coming.

But the “already” part of the equation says that we have gotten what we’re waiting for. The incarnation of God in Christ has “delivered us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.” Part of our story as Christians is that we have gotten what we are waiting for – or at least, that the Israelites have gotten what they were waiting for in the Messiah.

So what happens when we realize we have already gotten what we are waiting for? Disorientation? An anti-climax? A loss of a sense of identity? The early church certainly went through these things, and I suspect we continue to experience these responses as we get things we’ve been waiting for in our lives. But there can also be great peace, contentment, and joy in getting what we’ve been waiting for, in seeing our hopes and dreams fulfilled.

As we enter this liminal time between the semesters, we have much still to wait for and anticipate: our final grades from the semester; a visit home to see family and friends; for us seniors, the dreaded GOEs. But in a twist from our usual Advent theme of waiting, as get what we’ve been waiting for today – the end of the semester – and as we draw nearer to Christmas Day, I invite you to reflect a bit more on what we have already received: the gift of Emmanuel, God with us.

Whatever awaits us, whatever things are unfinished, however much the Christian tradition looks forward to that final re-creation of a new heaven and a new earth, we have already gotten some things we’ve been waiting for: a God who offers us unconditional forgiveness and love, a God who took on human flesh, lived as one of us, and died in order to free us from the powers of sin and death. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’s last words from the cross are, “It is finished.”

What more could we be waiting for?

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Sermon preached at Holy Trinity Parish, Decatur, Ga. (my sponsoring parish) for their Stewardship Kick-Off Sunday, October 30, 2011.

You knew it was coming. Fall is here, with all of its traditional trappings: football season, pumpkin carving, trick-or-treating, and, of course, the annual stewardship campaign.

Your stewardship committee, chaired by Steve and Ellen Bishop, have chosen Matthew 6:19-21 as the scriptural theme for this year’s canvass. Since we didn’t hear that passage in the lectionary this morning, let me refresh your memory.

In the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus admonishes his hearers against storing up worldly possessions for themselves, advocating instead that they should set their minds and resources on things heavenly. Jesus says,

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Until very recently, I thought this passage was about what you treasure in the sense of what you hold dear. I thought that Jesus was asking us to examine what it is that we treasure, because those things that we most value will be where our heart is. But that’s really a rather redundant observation, isn’t it? “Your heart will be with the things you care about?” By definition, the things you care about are the things that engage and move your heart!

Upon closer examination, it became clear to me that this passage is actually a lot more “in your face” than that. The Greek word for “treasure,” thesauros, means “what is deposited” or “a store of valuable things.” The word was used in other Greek texts from the biblical era to refer to state warehouses used to store government goods and for temple treasuries where offerings would be collected, in the Temple at Jerusalem and also in the temples of other religions. These religious “treasuries,” or “treasure chests,” if you will, provided a model for the development of private money boxes, places where people could store their personal finances.

In other words, the “treasure” Jesus is referring to here is not “those things you most value,” but your money! In Jesus’s world, it was storehouses of grain or flocks of sheep that people put away to “plan for the future,” but in 21^st century America, it’s often cold, hard cash that people “store up” for themselves on earth. That nest egg saved up for a rainy day, or the pile of bills you have stuffed under the mattress or collecting interest in the bank. That’s what Jesus is talking about when he says, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” You become emotionally attached to the things you spend your money on.

I saw this verse illustrated powerfully by a pastor at a mega-church in South Carolina that I attended while I was visiting a friend. Allow me to share this very high-tech mega-church sermon illustration with you:

In this hand I have a nice pink heart. And in this hand I have a wad of cash. Jesus is telling us in this passage that where this (money) goes, this (heart) will follow. Not that if this (heart) is engaged with something, this (money) will follow, but the other way around. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Think about the ways you’ve seen this play out in the world. If your money goes toward an expensive new computer, your heart breaks when the computer breaks. If you invest your money in stocks and the market falls, your heart falls with it. If you give lots of money to your alma mater, your heart is suddenly a lot more affected by changes made to the campus or the curriculum, or the success of the football team.

When you invest your money in something, you become emotionally attached to it. We even use the financial word “investment” to describe our emotional attachments: “I’m invested in my child’s education” or  “I’m invested in the success of this new community initiative.” We may or may not be contributing financially towards these things, but we’re using a financial term to describe our emotional attachment. Perhaps this is due to this inherent link that Jesus points out between our financial investments and our emotional attachments.

If this is true, what does that say about how our financial giving to the church – or to other organizations that work to bring about the kingdom of God – affects our relationship with God? The mega-church pastor told his congregation that he was certain some members of his church had not fully given this (heart) to Jesus because they’d never given him this (money).

Now, when I first heard that, I recoiled. “What? You can’t love Jesus if you haven’t given him your money?” I scoffed to myself. “But surely ‘treasure’ in this passage means much more than just financial wealth. It sounds so crude to say that we have to give God a wad of cash to really give our hearts to God.”

But that statement stuck with me, and the more I investigated this passage, the more I’m convinced that that pastor was right. Because God demands all of our lives, not just some parts of them, and that includes even the areas of our lives we don’t like to talk about, like money.

We can’t compartmentalize which aspects of our lives we’re willing to give to God and which aspects we’re not. As the mega-church pastor put it, “If there’s anything in your life that if God said ‘give it to me,’ you’d say ‘no,’ that’s an idol.” And isn’t that so often our attitude towards our money when we feel that God is asking us to give it away? We’ll give our time and our talent all day long, but our money? Like the “rich fool” in the parable who builds bigger barns to be able to store more grain for himself for the future, we think that we can – and even that we must – store up treasures on earth so that we can provide for our futures.

It’s only responsible financial management to have a savings account, an IRA, an emergency fund, we say to ourselves, and to a certain extent this is true. But the problem comes when we think we are providing for ourselves, that we are ensuring our future financial success, forgetting that we are utterly dependent on the mercy and grace of God for our very being as well as all the material goods we have around us. We think that our money is ours to spend as we please, rather than a gift from God given to us to use for the service of God’s kingdom. Our hearts are focused on ourselves and our abilities rather than on God.

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Where is your treasure? Where do invest your money? In paying the rent or mortgage? In fun outings with the kids or grandkids? In fast food? In attending theater or music concerts? In car payments? What does your bank or credit card statement tell you about where your heart is? Are you happy with what you find there?

Are there things that you want to value more, but you realize that other things have your heart? Maybe you wish you were more passionate about your faith or about church attendance. Maybe you wish you cared more about social injustices like discrimination or poverty. Maybe you wish you were more worried about the effects of warfare on children in other countries. Perhaps we should not just “put our money where our mouth is,” but put our money where we WANT our hearts to be.

In the same way that the Anglican tradition teaches that “praying shapes believing,” that through participating in worship and church life even when you don’t feel like it, you will live your way into the faith you hope to have, it is also true that “giving shapes caring.” What if instead of trying to will yourself to want to give or waiting until you felt called to give, you just gave? What if Jesus is right and your heart will follow your treasure? You might begin to care more about church, about God, and about working for the kingdom, because you would be invested – financially and thus emotionally – in those things.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

*The "mega-church" referred to in this sermon is NewSpring Church, founded in Anderson, S.C. but now with campuses in Greenville, Columbia, Florence, and Charleston, and with campuses "coming soon" in Spartanburg, Greenwood, Myrtle Beach. I attended the Charleston campus, and since the pastor, Perry Noble, is based at the Anderson campus, he was not even at the service, and the sermon was piped in on a live video feed. It's interesting how much of an impact his sermon illustration still made on me, even though I wasn't seeing it "in person." To watch the entire sermon, which was a "Frequently Asked Questions" about the church (the money/heart illustration was prompted by the question, "Why do you always teach on money?"), click here and choose "Frequently Asked Questions" (June 26, 2011).

The choice is ours

Sermon preached at the Thursday evening community Eucharist at the School of Theology, Sewanee: The University of the South, on the feast day of William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale.

Today we commemorate William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale, both priests in England in the sixteenth century. They are included among those we call “saints” for their work in translating the Bible into English. In a time when the Scriptures were only available in Latin and the reading and interpretation of them was reserved to church authorities, Tyndale and Coverdale worked to make the Scriptures available to the people in a language they understood and spoke in their daily lives.

Although their work was controversial in its time, having the Bible available to us in a language that we understand has become such a “given” to us today that sometimes people forget the Scriptures were not actually written in English! We take it for granted that anyone who picks up the Bible in a church or a bookstore will be able to read and understand it.

But those of us who have been in seminary for any length of time begin to notice, as we delve into our Old Testament and New Testament classes, the ways in which we have not truly understood the Scriptures, however much we’ve been able to read them ever since we were a child. The ability to read the words of the Bible in our native language has not prevented us from being ignorant about the nature and history of the texts. Some of our interpretations of certain passages turn out to be not only unsupported by the way church tradition has read them historically, but also based on inaccurate translations that change the entire meaning of the text. What we thought we knew and understood we do not understand at all!

It’s not a very politically correct thing to say in our culture because of the value we place on individualism self-discovery, but some of us begin to wonder whether it was such a good idea to put the Scriptures into the hands of the “common people” after all, when there is so much potential for misunderstanding and even harmful interpretations of the texts. As Alexander Pope once wrote, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” People gain a small amount of knowledge about something and suddenly think they know everything about it. Biblical interpretation has been no exception. People sometimes think that because they are able to read the Bible for themselves, they have the authority to teach and interpret the Scriptures for whole groups of people. Since the Reformation, we’ve seen the formation of sectarian groups who believe they are able to predict the exact date of the end of the world through their interpretation of the Book of Revelation, or groups that justify hatred and violence toward gay people or Jews or Muslims or any other group that they perceive to be outside of the “righteous” people of God that the Bible describes. We begin to understand why the Church had guarded the texts so carefully for so long. In the wrong hands, they can do great harm!

We could say that the anecdote to the problems of the destructive interpretation of Scripture by “the masses” is a healthy dose of good instruction from the priest, or maybe from a lay person who is educated in the Scriptures. But those of us who are “educated” in biblical studies are just as susceptible to destructive uses of Scripture for our own gain as anyone else. It’s not entirely clear that “the Church” itself did only good with the Scriptures when they were read and understood only by the learned clergy. The pre-Reformation era Church, immune from those pesky lay people’s misinterpretations of Scripture, was the force behind the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the anti-Jewish pogroms. Clearly, it is not only the laity or the “uneducated” who have problems with using Scripture to justify destructive behavior.

Although one caricature of church history suggests that the people who pushed for the translation of the Bible into the language of the people “saved the church” from its disregard of the “plain sense” of the Scripture and restored the true Gospel message to the people, it was not quite as simple as that. The problems of destructive interpretations of Scripture lay not in the lack of availability of the “true message” of the Bible in a language people could understand, but in the tensions inherent in the Scriptures themselves, no matter who was reading and interpreting them.

The fact of the matter is, there is not one clear, uncontested or unchallenged message in the Bible, however much the Church has been reluctant to admit it. There are actually two main motifs that are in tension with one another throughout the Bible. One asserts that we are the chosen people, that those who are not part of the people of Israel and do not worship the God of Israel will be destroyed, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies. The other motif asserts that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32).

Both themes are there. We can’t make a respectable case that the Bible only proclaims one of them. And thus simply making the text available to the whole church in a language they can read does not solve the problem. The problem lies with us – in which motif we choose to privilege over the other in our interpretation of the text.

The gift that Tyndale and Coverdale have given us is a larger “us” who gets to make those choices. Now that the Scriptures are able to be read and understood by the entire Church, and even those outside the Church, our decisions around interpretation are more obvious and transparent. Those who are on the receiving end of destructive interpretations of the Bible can read it for themselves and find the liberating message there as well.

So the burden of responsibility for productive, healthy use of Scripture in our lives rests with us – each one of us, individually, and also collectively, as a community. And perhaps this is not an accident.

Perhaps this unavoidable choice embedded in the heart of our sacred Scriptures was given to us intentionally by the same God who created us with free will. Perhaps God is giving us a choice, much as he gave the Israelites at Sinai when Moses presented them with the Ten Commandments. “I have set before you today life and death, blessings and curses,” God says to the people. “Choose life so that you and your descendents may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).

We have a very real choice about how we will approach Scripture. We can choose to emphasize the Scriptural passages that claim that God cares for Israel – and by extension, the Church – more than God cares for other people. We can choose to allow this motif to guide our lives and our approaches to people outside the Church. There certainly is support for it from both Scripture and from the Church’s tradition. But what are we really choosing if we privilege this motif? Although theological exclusivity may not always lead to a crusade mentality, I worry about the tendencies for it to move in that direction. If those “other people” are the “wicked,” and we are “the righteous,” why should we care if they are mistreated or even killed? In fact, maybe it’s our responsibility to take on their destruction ourselves. What are we choosing if we choose this motif?

There is equal support available in Scripture and in tradition – both Christian and Jewish tradition – for a much more generous interpretation of Scripture, one that sees all people as part of the “people of God” and rejects a triumphalist attitude that leads to the dehumanizing of the “other,” even if that “other” is our “enemy.”

There is a passage in the Talmud, the main collection of rabbinical teaching on Jewish scripture and ethics, in which the rabbis assert that when the angels began to rejoice at the death of the Egyptians in the Red Sea, God rebuked them. The Israelites, the “good guys” in our story, were finally free from those “bad guys” who had been oppressing them for so long. Isn’t this a story that calls for rejoicing? According to the rabbis’ interpretation, God did not think so. God says to the angels, “My handiwork is drowning in the sea; would ye utter song before me!” (b. Sanhedrin 39b) In other words, “Stop celebrating. The Egyptians were my children, too.”

I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of God I choose to believe in.

When life hands you lemons...

... make a lemon person!