Homily delivered at the monthly healing service at St. Paul's Franklin.
“For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ” (2 Cor. 1:5).
As we gather today in this service of healing, we remember that we are not alone in our pain and our struggles. God himself in Christ has experienced the gut-wrenching pain of a violent death on the cross, and has experienced what it is like to wrestle with the dread of pain and suffering. The night before his crucifixion, Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, “My Father, if it possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want” (Matt. 26:39). Although the Gospel of John portrays Jesus as calmly accepting his fate, Matthew, Mark, and Luke all describe Jesus struggling in anguish the night before his death, wishing that things could be otherwise. His prayer gives voice to a universal human cry: “Dear God, please save me!” – from pain, from suffering, and from death.
But pain, suffering, and death are unavoidable in this world: even Jesus did not get to bypass them in this life. And Jesus never promises his followers that their lives will be easy and painless; in fact, he warns them that following him may bring more pain and suffering into their lives, from a human perspective. But the consolation that we have through Christ that the Apostle Paul writes about is the knowledge that pain, suffering, and death do not have the final word. Although Jesus’s prayer to have the cup of suffering removed from him was not answered, the suffering and death that he endured did not defeat and destroy him. “On the third day, he rose again,” (Nicene Creed) and “rising from the grave, destroyed death, and made the whole creation new” (Eucharistic Prayer D, BCP 374).
God has answered that universal human cry to “save us” from pain, from suffering, and from death. As believers in Christ, through our baptism we have been united with Christ in his death – and in his sufferings – but also in his resurrection. As Paul writes in Romans 6, “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5).
The ultimate healing of humanity has already occurred in the transformation and transfiguration of mortal flesh into the eternal life of the Resurrection in Jesus Christ – and through our baptism we already begin to participate in that transformed life, the full flourishing of which we await at Christ’s Second Coming and the Resurrection of all. This hope for full participation in the Resurrected life is why we can say in our burial service, “Even at the grave we make our song, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” The consolation we have in Christ is not one that denies the anguish of suffering, but looks for its transformation into the life-giving power of the Resurrection.
“For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ” (2 Cor. 1:5). “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5).
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Sunday, September 9, 2012
A call to be in community with "the poor"
Sermon delivered Sunday, Sept. 9, 2012, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Franklin, Tenn.
When I was about 16 years old, I started reading the Bible for the first time. Sure, I’d grown up in church – my parents took my sister and me to the local Lutheran church every Sunday – and I’d heard scripture passages read out loud in the service every week, but until I was 16, I don’t think I’d ever actually opened a Bible. When I “got saved” at a youth rally sponsored by a friend’s Southern Baptist church, I came home with a pamphlet of materials about how to nurture my new life in Christ that instructed me to read and study various scripture passages. So I asked my mother, “Um, do you have, like, a Bible I could borrow?” She gave me a small, pocket-sized paperback copy she’d been given in a Sunday School class years ago, and I began to explore, reading voraciously through the New Testament.
But as I read, I began to get a bit uneasy, because the picture I began to get of Jesus didn’t match up very closely with what I’d seen and experienced in church. I noticed that Jesus had spent his ministry being with people considered to be on the margins of his society, but I didn’t see many Christians around me doing similar things in our society. Sure, I had learned through church that being a Christian had something to do with “being a good person” and “helping the less fortunate,” but donating our used clothes to the area thrift store and taking some canned goods to the food pantry didn’t seem to be the same as what I saw Jesus doing in the stories in the Bible: actually being with people – ministering to their needs, yes, but more significantly, being with them, knowing them, loving them. I had never actually met a single person who had benefitted from any of the items my family or church had donated over the years. “The poor” were not part of our church; they were somewhere “out there,” and certainly not “one of us.”
Our passage from the letter of James this morning (James 2:1-17) is about what happens when “the poor” actually show up in church, when they don’t stay safely “out there,” hidden behind the back doors of distribution centers or in alleys beside shelters. It’s about what happens when “the poor” cease to be an abstract statistic and become real people in our midst. It’s about what happens when a person who is exhausted from spending his days sleeping on park benches in the blazing sun because it is too dangerous to sleep at night shuffles in to church and sits down in the back pew. How do those who claim to believe in and follow “our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” respond? Do they clutch their purses a little closer? Wrap their arms protectively around their children? Edge uncomfortably away?
James’s words about the sin of partiality and favoritism in the church ring just as true today as they did in the first and second centuries. There seems to be something innate in human societies that leads them to favor the “haves” over the “have nots.” Despite the fact that Jesus spent his ministry caring for and being with those on the margins of society, and despite the centuries-old Jewish tradition of God’s favor and care for the poor that we heard echoed in our passage from Proverbs this morning, the earliest churches – just like churches today – became stratified and segregated according to socioeconomic status. And even in the churches that were or are socioeconomically diverse, those with the most money often wield the most power and command the most respect. Churches might give lip service to Jesus’s teachings about the impossibility of serving God and money (Matthew 6:24) and the teachings in 1 Timothy about the love of money being the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10), but in practice the person “with gold rings and in fine clothes” is often treated better than the “poor person in dirty clothes,” just as the letter of James describes.
Encountering these scriptures for the first time at age 16 and observing some of these dynamics in the churches around me began to open my heart to a deep sense of call to ministry with those on the margins of society, but it wasn’t until nearly 10 years later, while I was living in the Boston area for graduate school, that I began to act on that sense of call.
Through the Episcopal church I was attending at the time, I heard about an outdoor worship service for homeless people in Cambridge, called simply, “The Outdoor Church.” It was an offshoot of a larger gathering in downtown Boston called “common cathedral” that had been started by an Episcopal priest about 10 years before. The rector at my parish went down once a month to the Outdoor Church to help with the service and to share in fellowship with the community there. I remember being in a Christian formation class on a Monday after one of his Sundays at the Outdoor Church and being captivated by his descriptions of his experiences there the previous day. “It really felt like church,” he said.
Not too long after that, I began volunteering weekly with the Outdoor Church. My priest’s words resonated deeply with my own experience: it did indeed “feel like church,” like what I imagined the church was supposed to be. I felt I had finally found a community whose way of life seemed to mirror what Jesus did in the Gospels: being with those on the margins of society, offering them not just care for their physical needs (which we did in the form of sandwiches and socks and jackets), but a sense of belonging and community.
It was through my encounters with the people in that community that I learned how damaging the unspoken concern with appearances in churches can be. Many churches will never have to deal with the hypothetical issue the letter of James presents because no “poor person in dirty clothes” would feel comfortable even walking through the doors of their church. Many people on the streets think they are not “presentable” enough or “worthy” enough to attend church. They worry about how they look or how they smell, and fear of rejection keeps them far from the doors of any church. Simply saying “our church welcomes all people” is not enough to counteract unspoken cultural norms that dictate that people arrive for church clean and nicely dressed, nor does it outweigh the palpable uncomfortable vibe that homeless people can often sense from people in traditional churches if they show up for a regular Sunday service. Communities like the Outdoor Church – and our own Church in the Yard [C.I.T.Y.] here in Nashville – attempt to respond to this dynamic by taking the church to people where they are, on the streets, instead of waiting for “them” to come to “us.” The United Church of Christ minister I worked with at the Outdoor Church used to say that our mission was to “take the church to people who either cannot or will not reach it on their own.”
The Outdoor Church really “felt like church,” I think, because it was a gathering where people were accepted just as they were, where there were no acts of favoritism or preference shown to those who had money over those who did not. It was a community where there were no pressures or expectations to look or act a certain way, but where all people were seen and treated as beloved children of God.
And in that community of faith and belonging, people’s bodily needs were met as well. After Eucharist, we served a meal – just like they do at Church in the Yard. We did not simply say to our brothers and sisters who lack daily food, “Go in peace, keep warm and eat your fill,” but we shared a meal with them and helped them find snow boots or jackets when they needed them.
The faith in that community was not the “faith by itself” with no works that James criticizes, but a lively and robust faith manifested in the actions of the members of the community toward one another. The selfless giving and works of faith flowed not just from the people making the sandwiches and donating the jackets, but from our homeless parishioners as well. Our street friends would often make small monetary donations to the Outdoor Church, or give back to us in other ways. I remember a small Latino man in Harvard Square with whom we shared sandwiches every week as he sold his handiwork as a street vendor. Although he spoke almost no English, one of our volunteers was fluent in Spanish and was able to translate for us. His situation was dismal: he had somehow managed to come to the U.S. without the proper paperwork, traveling with friends or relatives and not understanding the legal situation he was getting himself into. He had expected to be able to return to his family in Latin America, but now realized he was unable to leave or to get a job due to his undocumented status, so for the time being he was hand-making beaded items and selling them on the street. Those items were the only source of income he had, but one week he presented to each of us ministers a small, hand-made dreamcatcher, decorated with feathers and beads. “Because you help me,” he said to us in English. I have kept it by my bedside ever since.
Churches whose focus is on the so-called “social gospel” – feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and other “acts of mercy” – often are criticized by so-called “evangelical” Christians for neglecting to “share the Gospel” with those whose physical needs they meet. “Social Gospel” Christians like this passage from James that argues that “faith without works is dead,” while evangelicals prefer Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith… it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”
This tension between faith and works and what role “sharing our faith” should play in our outreach work is a constant point of contention between Christians on different ends of this spectrum. A fellow student in one of my religion classes at Furman University once said during a class discussion of the life and work of Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa that “if you feed the poor but don’t tell them about Jesus, it’s like a slap in the face.” I remember thinking that I believed the exact opposite – that the “slap in the face” would be to tell people about Jesus but not provide for their basic needs. But reflecting on this tension now, I don’t think that either extreme is the authentic Christian way. Neither the street corner preacher handing out tracts or the food pantry handing out canned goods is fully living out the Christian call to be in community with the poor. Both approaches require little interaction between the “ministers” and the people they say they are trying to reach. The problem comes largely when we think of “the poor” as an abstract group that we need to do something to rather than fellow human beings and fellow people of faith we need to be in relationship with. We think we need to “give to the poor,” never considering that they have much to give to us. We think we need to “share the Gospel” with others, never considering that the people with whom we aim to share our faith might already know quite a bit about God and be able to teach us something about faith.
The kind of church the letter of James is calling us to be is one where we engage in the mutuality of community, not the inequality of donor and receiver. We are to come together across classes as one body in Christ, and to share with each other whatever we have to share – be it money or faith or skills or knowledge – because everyone has something to contribute to the body of Christ. It is out of that foundation – of recognizing our equality in the eyes of God and the unique contribution of each person to the church and the world – that we move toward providing for one another’s needs in the way that James describes. When we know one another, we won’t be able to not care about the plight of our neighbor, because we will be to each other not abstract statistics or problems to be solved, but brothers and sisters in Christ.
When I was about 16 years old, I started reading the Bible for the first time. Sure, I’d grown up in church – my parents took my sister and me to the local Lutheran church every Sunday – and I’d heard scripture passages read out loud in the service every week, but until I was 16, I don’t think I’d ever actually opened a Bible. When I “got saved” at a youth rally sponsored by a friend’s Southern Baptist church, I came home with a pamphlet of materials about how to nurture my new life in Christ that instructed me to read and study various scripture passages. So I asked my mother, “Um, do you have, like, a Bible I could borrow?” She gave me a small, pocket-sized paperback copy she’d been given in a Sunday School class years ago, and I began to explore, reading voraciously through the New Testament.
But as I read, I began to get a bit uneasy, because the picture I began to get of Jesus didn’t match up very closely with what I’d seen and experienced in church. I noticed that Jesus had spent his ministry being with people considered to be on the margins of his society, but I didn’t see many Christians around me doing similar things in our society. Sure, I had learned through church that being a Christian had something to do with “being a good person” and “helping the less fortunate,” but donating our used clothes to the area thrift store and taking some canned goods to the food pantry didn’t seem to be the same as what I saw Jesus doing in the stories in the Bible: actually being with people – ministering to their needs, yes, but more significantly, being with them, knowing them, loving them. I had never actually met a single person who had benefitted from any of the items my family or church had donated over the years. “The poor” were not part of our church; they were somewhere “out there,” and certainly not “one of us.”
Our passage from the letter of James this morning (James 2:1-17) is about what happens when “the poor” actually show up in church, when they don’t stay safely “out there,” hidden behind the back doors of distribution centers or in alleys beside shelters. It’s about what happens when “the poor” cease to be an abstract statistic and become real people in our midst. It’s about what happens when a person who is exhausted from spending his days sleeping on park benches in the blazing sun because it is too dangerous to sleep at night shuffles in to church and sits down in the back pew. How do those who claim to believe in and follow “our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” respond? Do they clutch their purses a little closer? Wrap their arms protectively around their children? Edge uncomfortably away?
James’s words about the sin of partiality and favoritism in the church ring just as true today as they did in the first and second centuries. There seems to be something innate in human societies that leads them to favor the “haves” over the “have nots.” Despite the fact that Jesus spent his ministry caring for and being with those on the margins of society, and despite the centuries-old Jewish tradition of God’s favor and care for the poor that we heard echoed in our passage from Proverbs this morning, the earliest churches – just like churches today – became stratified and segregated according to socioeconomic status. And even in the churches that were or are socioeconomically diverse, those with the most money often wield the most power and command the most respect. Churches might give lip service to Jesus’s teachings about the impossibility of serving God and money (Matthew 6:24) and the teachings in 1 Timothy about the love of money being the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10), but in practice the person “with gold rings and in fine clothes” is often treated better than the “poor person in dirty clothes,” just as the letter of James describes.
Encountering these scriptures for the first time at age 16 and observing some of these dynamics in the churches around me began to open my heart to a deep sense of call to ministry with those on the margins of society, but it wasn’t until nearly 10 years later, while I was living in the Boston area for graduate school, that I began to act on that sense of call.
Through the Episcopal church I was attending at the time, I heard about an outdoor worship service for homeless people in Cambridge, called simply, “The Outdoor Church.” It was an offshoot of a larger gathering in downtown Boston called “common cathedral” that had been started by an Episcopal priest about 10 years before. The rector at my parish went down once a month to the Outdoor Church to help with the service and to share in fellowship with the community there. I remember being in a Christian formation class on a Monday after one of his Sundays at the Outdoor Church and being captivated by his descriptions of his experiences there the previous day. “It really felt like church,” he said.
Not too long after that, I began volunteering weekly with the Outdoor Church. My priest’s words resonated deeply with my own experience: it did indeed “feel like church,” like what I imagined the church was supposed to be. I felt I had finally found a community whose way of life seemed to mirror what Jesus did in the Gospels: being with those on the margins of society, offering them not just care for their physical needs (which we did in the form of sandwiches and socks and jackets), but a sense of belonging and community.
It was through my encounters with the people in that community that I learned how damaging the unspoken concern with appearances in churches can be. Many churches will never have to deal with the hypothetical issue the letter of James presents because no “poor person in dirty clothes” would feel comfortable even walking through the doors of their church. Many people on the streets think they are not “presentable” enough or “worthy” enough to attend church. They worry about how they look or how they smell, and fear of rejection keeps them far from the doors of any church. Simply saying “our church welcomes all people” is not enough to counteract unspoken cultural norms that dictate that people arrive for church clean and nicely dressed, nor does it outweigh the palpable uncomfortable vibe that homeless people can often sense from people in traditional churches if they show up for a regular Sunday service. Communities like the Outdoor Church – and our own Church in the Yard [C.I.T.Y.] here in Nashville – attempt to respond to this dynamic by taking the church to people where they are, on the streets, instead of waiting for “them” to come to “us.” The United Church of Christ minister I worked with at the Outdoor Church used to say that our mission was to “take the church to people who either cannot or will not reach it on their own.”
The Outdoor Church really “felt like church,” I think, because it was a gathering where people were accepted just as they were, where there were no acts of favoritism or preference shown to those who had money over those who did not. It was a community where there were no pressures or expectations to look or act a certain way, but where all people were seen and treated as beloved children of God.
And in that community of faith and belonging, people’s bodily needs were met as well. After Eucharist, we served a meal – just like they do at Church in the Yard. We did not simply say to our brothers and sisters who lack daily food, “Go in peace, keep warm and eat your fill,” but we shared a meal with them and helped them find snow boots or jackets when they needed them.
The faith in that community was not the “faith by itself” with no works that James criticizes, but a lively and robust faith manifested in the actions of the members of the community toward one another. The selfless giving and works of faith flowed not just from the people making the sandwiches and donating the jackets, but from our homeless parishioners as well. Our street friends would often make small monetary donations to the Outdoor Church, or give back to us in other ways. I remember a small Latino man in Harvard Square with whom we shared sandwiches every week as he sold his handiwork as a street vendor. Although he spoke almost no English, one of our volunteers was fluent in Spanish and was able to translate for us. His situation was dismal: he had somehow managed to come to the U.S. without the proper paperwork, traveling with friends or relatives and not understanding the legal situation he was getting himself into. He had expected to be able to return to his family in Latin America, but now realized he was unable to leave or to get a job due to his undocumented status, so for the time being he was hand-making beaded items and selling them on the street. Those items were the only source of income he had, but one week he presented to each of us ministers a small, hand-made dreamcatcher, decorated with feathers and beads. “Because you help me,” he said to us in English. I have kept it by my bedside ever since.
Churches whose focus is on the so-called “social gospel” – feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and other “acts of mercy” – often are criticized by so-called “evangelical” Christians for neglecting to “share the Gospel” with those whose physical needs they meet. “Social Gospel” Christians like this passage from James that argues that “faith without works is dead,” while evangelicals prefer Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith… it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”
This tension between faith and works and what role “sharing our faith” should play in our outreach work is a constant point of contention between Christians on different ends of this spectrum. A fellow student in one of my religion classes at Furman University once said during a class discussion of the life and work of Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa that “if you feed the poor but don’t tell them about Jesus, it’s like a slap in the face.” I remember thinking that I believed the exact opposite – that the “slap in the face” would be to tell people about Jesus but not provide for their basic needs. But reflecting on this tension now, I don’t think that either extreme is the authentic Christian way. Neither the street corner preacher handing out tracts or the food pantry handing out canned goods is fully living out the Christian call to be in community with the poor. Both approaches require little interaction between the “ministers” and the people they say they are trying to reach. The problem comes largely when we think of “the poor” as an abstract group that we need to do something to rather than fellow human beings and fellow people of faith we need to be in relationship with. We think we need to “give to the poor,” never considering that they have much to give to us. We think we need to “share the Gospel” with others, never considering that the people with whom we aim to share our faith might already know quite a bit about God and be able to teach us something about faith.
The kind of church the letter of James is calling us to be is one where we engage in the mutuality of community, not the inequality of donor and receiver. We are to come together across classes as one body in Christ, and to share with each other whatever we have to share – be it money or faith or skills or knowledge – because everyone has something to contribute to the body of Christ. It is out of that foundation – of recognizing our equality in the eyes of God and the unique contribution of each person to the church and the world – that we move toward providing for one another’s needs in the way that James describes. When we know one another, we won’t be able to not care about the plight of our neighbor, because we will be to each other not abstract statistics or problems to be solved, but brothers and sisters in Christ.
Monday, August 13, 2012
An exegesis of John 6:35, 41-51 - Jesus as the bread of life and the new Passover lamb
Sermon delivered Sunday, Aug. 12, 2012 at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Franklin, Tenn.
Two weeks ago, we began reading through chapter 6 of the Gospel of John in our lectionary, with the story of the feeding of the five thousand. Last week, some of the people who were fed followed Jesus to Capernaum and started asking him questions about who he was and what they must do to follow God. Jesus says that they must believe in him as the one whom God has sent, and tells them that he is the bread of life.
This week, we pick up the story with the people’s reactions to Jesus’s comments. “What on earth is this guy talking about?” they ask each other. “What does he mean, he’s the ‘bread of life’? And how can he have ‘come down from heaven’ when we know who his parents are?” It doesn’t make much sense to them – and it doesn’t make much sense to some of the disciples, either. Later in chapter six, after Jesus finishes talking about how he’s going to give his flesh as bread for the world and people must eat his flesh and drink his blood in order to have eternal life, the author of John’s Gospel tells us that “from this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.” (John 6:66)
These teachings from Jesus about eating his flesh and drinking his blood lose some of their “shock value” on us because we are used to hearing similar language each week in the Eucharist. The bread is the “body of Christ, the bread of heaven,” and the wine is “the blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.” These words are probably familiar and non-threatening, maybe even comforting, for most of us, and since we hear this passage from John’s Gospel with a knowledge and understanding of the Eucharist, these words about eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood may seem metaphorical and benign.
But even within the context of the Eucharist, language about eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood has been controversial in the history of the church. One of the earliest accusations against the followers of Jesus after his death was that they were cannibals – because they spoke of eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood. There were even rumors that Christians sacrificed babies to provide the flesh and blood for their cannibalistic rituals. The mistaken belief that Christians were taking part in such inhumane and abhorrent practices was used to justify persecution of Christians in the first few centuries after Jesus’s death. Although that particular controversy is likely over – I highly doubt that any non-Christians today perceive us as cannibals – the language of eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood still sparks debate among Christians – between those who believe that the consecrated elements of bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus and those who believe that the bread and wine are just symbols for Jesus’s body and blood.
But why is the central ritual of Christianity one that has to do with eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood? The short answer is because Christians believe this is what Jesus commanded his followers to do – to remember the last meal that he shared with his disciples, when he told them that the bread was his body and the wine was his blood.
But why did Jesus do such a thing? And why was he already talking about himself as the bread of life and his flesh as bread for the world in the middle of his ministry in Galilee? The key is found in the Jewish festival of Passover.
Those of you who were here two weeks ago may remember that Passover is very important to the theological claim the author of John’s Gospel is making about Jesus: that Jesus is the Messiah and the new Passover lamb. We looked at the ways in which John’s version of the story of the feeding of the five thousand portrayed Jesus as the Messiah, and I told you that I’d be talking more about Jesus as the Passover lamb in a few weeks. Jesus’s words in today’s passage from John’s Gospel about giving his flesh as bread for the world make more sense in connection with the Passover imagery that is so strong in the Gospel of John.
Passover is the Jewish religious festival that celebrates the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. You may remember the stories from the Hebrew Bible: while Moses was trying to convince the Pharaoh to free the Israelites, God brings a series of plagues on the land of Egypt as a way of showing the Pharaoh that Moses was serious and was indeed speaking the Word of God. The final plague was a slaughter of all the firstborn of Egypt – people and livestock alike. Before this horrific event happened, God instructed the Israelites to sacrifice lambs and to spread their blood on the doorframes of their households. The name “Passover” comes from the fact that this blood served a sign to God so that he would “pass over” those households with the blood on the doors and not kill anyone inside; the blood of the lamb was a protection against the power of death that overshadowed the land of Egypt. After all the firstborn of Egypt are struck dead, the Pharaoh finally agrees to free the Israelites. When he changes his mind and pursues them into the desert, he and his entire army are killed in the Red Sea while the Israelites pass through on dry land. Chapter 12 of the Book of Exodus details God’s command to the people of Israel to commemorate that day as a perpetual ordinance, with specific instructions about how to celebrate the Passover – to kill a lamb and eat it with bitter herbs and unleavened bread.
All four Gospel accounts tell us that Jesus died in Jerusalem, sometime during the weeklong observances surrounding Passover. But while Matthew, Mark, and Luke all indicate that Jesus ate the Passover meal with his disciples the night before his death, in John’s Gospel, Jesus’s last supper with his disciples is not a Passover meal, but takes place the day before the Passover. In John’s version, on Passover, Jesus is not sharing a meal with his friends, but dying on the cross, crucified at exactly the same time that the Passover lambs were being slaughtered in preparation for the Passover meal. Thus John’s Gospel makes a powerful theological point: Jesus is the new Passover lamb whose sacrifice saves us from death. Just as the blood of the lambs saved the Israelites from the plague of the firstborn in Egypt, the blood of Christ shed at his death saves us from death once and for all.
This theology is reflected in our Eucharistic liturgy. When we say, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast,” we are affirming that Jesus is the Passover lamb whose flesh and blood we are about to eat. This is where Christian imagery about Jesus as the “lamb of God” comes from – it all points back to Passover.
Now, at this point, you might be asking, “So what? Why is this connection with Passover important to us as twenty-first century Christians?”
Most Christians in the world today trace their heritage to the Gentile group in the early church who were not part of the “in crowd” of Jesus’s first, Jewish followers. From that perspective, the fact the central ritual of our faith, the Eucharist, has its roots in the Jewish festival of Passover might not look so wonderful at first. After all, the whole story of Passover is about God choosing the Israelites and rejecting the Egyptians – about Jews being “in” and Gentiles being “out.” This sharp delineation between “us” and “them” was so strong in first-century Judaism that many Jews who had chosen to follow Jesus as the Messiah had a very hard time accepting the message of people like Paul, who believed that God’s will was for the community of Christ-followers to include all people, Jews and non-Jews alike.
There is certainly potential for Passover to be a triumphalist celebration of God being on “our side” and a rejoicing in the destruction of another people, and those of us of Gentile heritage who were once on the “other side” of that story should be particularly sensitive to the potential for our Eucharist to convey a similarly exclusive message, affirming that we and not others are God’s chosen people. But there are strong correctives to this perspective in both Jewish and Christian tradition.
Some aspects of Jewish tradition have broadened the theme of Passover celebrations to be not just about the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt, but a celebration of and praying for the freedom and liberation of all people. There is an entire movement among modern-day Jews of hosting “freedom seders” or “liberation seders,” which are interfaith or multicultural Passover meals designed to celebrate all those who fight against oppression and injustice.
In the Christian tradition, there is a strong precedent to viewing the Eucharist as a meal in which we commemorate not only our own deliverance from death through Christ, but the redemption of the whole world. This theology is expressed beautifully in our Eucharistic Prayer D, the most ancient Eucharistic prayer in our prayer book and one that is also used, with slight variations, in Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. It affirms that “rising from the grave, [Jesus] destroyed death, and made the whole creation new.” Not “made us new” or “saved those who believe in him,” but “made the whole creation new.”
Jesus says in John’s Gospel that he will give his flesh as bread for the world, not just for the community of Israel or for a chosen group of his followers. The “Passover” we celebrate in the Eucharist is like those modern Jewish “freedom seders” – a celebration of our redemption from death and an expression of faith in the power of God to liberate all people from all forms of oppression and violence.
Two weeks ago, we began reading through chapter 6 of the Gospel of John in our lectionary, with the story of the feeding of the five thousand. Last week, some of the people who were fed followed Jesus to Capernaum and started asking him questions about who he was and what they must do to follow God. Jesus says that they must believe in him as the one whom God has sent, and tells them that he is the bread of life.
This week, we pick up the story with the people’s reactions to Jesus’s comments. “What on earth is this guy talking about?” they ask each other. “What does he mean, he’s the ‘bread of life’? And how can he have ‘come down from heaven’ when we know who his parents are?” It doesn’t make much sense to them – and it doesn’t make much sense to some of the disciples, either. Later in chapter six, after Jesus finishes talking about how he’s going to give his flesh as bread for the world and people must eat his flesh and drink his blood in order to have eternal life, the author of John’s Gospel tells us that “from this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.” (John 6:66)
These teachings from Jesus about eating his flesh and drinking his blood lose some of their “shock value” on us because we are used to hearing similar language each week in the Eucharist. The bread is the “body of Christ, the bread of heaven,” and the wine is “the blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.” These words are probably familiar and non-threatening, maybe even comforting, for most of us, and since we hear this passage from John’s Gospel with a knowledge and understanding of the Eucharist, these words about eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood may seem metaphorical and benign.
But even within the context of the Eucharist, language about eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood has been controversial in the history of the church. One of the earliest accusations against the followers of Jesus after his death was that they were cannibals – because they spoke of eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood. There were even rumors that Christians sacrificed babies to provide the flesh and blood for their cannibalistic rituals. The mistaken belief that Christians were taking part in such inhumane and abhorrent practices was used to justify persecution of Christians in the first few centuries after Jesus’s death. Although that particular controversy is likely over – I highly doubt that any non-Christians today perceive us as cannibals – the language of eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood still sparks debate among Christians – between those who believe that the consecrated elements of bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus and those who believe that the bread and wine are just symbols for Jesus’s body and blood.
But why is the central ritual of Christianity one that has to do with eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood? The short answer is because Christians believe this is what Jesus commanded his followers to do – to remember the last meal that he shared with his disciples, when he told them that the bread was his body and the wine was his blood.
But why did Jesus do such a thing? And why was he already talking about himself as the bread of life and his flesh as bread for the world in the middle of his ministry in Galilee? The key is found in the Jewish festival of Passover.
Those of you who were here two weeks ago may remember that Passover is very important to the theological claim the author of John’s Gospel is making about Jesus: that Jesus is the Messiah and the new Passover lamb. We looked at the ways in which John’s version of the story of the feeding of the five thousand portrayed Jesus as the Messiah, and I told you that I’d be talking more about Jesus as the Passover lamb in a few weeks. Jesus’s words in today’s passage from John’s Gospel about giving his flesh as bread for the world make more sense in connection with the Passover imagery that is so strong in the Gospel of John.
Passover is the Jewish religious festival that celebrates the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. You may remember the stories from the Hebrew Bible: while Moses was trying to convince the Pharaoh to free the Israelites, God brings a series of plagues on the land of Egypt as a way of showing the Pharaoh that Moses was serious and was indeed speaking the Word of God. The final plague was a slaughter of all the firstborn of Egypt – people and livestock alike. Before this horrific event happened, God instructed the Israelites to sacrifice lambs and to spread their blood on the doorframes of their households. The name “Passover” comes from the fact that this blood served a sign to God so that he would “pass over” those households with the blood on the doors and not kill anyone inside; the blood of the lamb was a protection against the power of death that overshadowed the land of Egypt. After all the firstborn of Egypt are struck dead, the Pharaoh finally agrees to free the Israelites. When he changes his mind and pursues them into the desert, he and his entire army are killed in the Red Sea while the Israelites pass through on dry land. Chapter 12 of the Book of Exodus details God’s command to the people of Israel to commemorate that day as a perpetual ordinance, with specific instructions about how to celebrate the Passover – to kill a lamb and eat it with bitter herbs and unleavened bread.
All four Gospel accounts tell us that Jesus died in Jerusalem, sometime during the weeklong observances surrounding Passover. But while Matthew, Mark, and Luke all indicate that Jesus ate the Passover meal with his disciples the night before his death, in John’s Gospel, Jesus’s last supper with his disciples is not a Passover meal, but takes place the day before the Passover. In John’s version, on Passover, Jesus is not sharing a meal with his friends, but dying on the cross, crucified at exactly the same time that the Passover lambs were being slaughtered in preparation for the Passover meal. Thus John’s Gospel makes a powerful theological point: Jesus is the new Passover lamb whose sacrifice saves us from death. Just as the blood of the lambs saved the Israelites from the plague of the firstborn in Egypt, the blood of Christ shed at his death saves us from death once and for all.
This theology is reflected in our Eucharistic liturgy. When we say, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast,” we are affirming that Jesus is the Passover lamb whose flesh and blood we are about to eat. This is where Christian imagery about Jesus as the “lamb of God” comes from – it all points back to Passover.
Now, at this point, you might be asking, “So what? Why is this connection with Passover important to us as twenty-first century Christians?”
Most Christians in the world today trace their heritage to the Gentile group in the early church who were not part of the “in crowd” of Jesus’s first, Jewish followers. From that perspective, the fact the central ritual of our faith, the Eucharist, has its roots in the Jewish festival of Passover might not look so wonderful at first. After all, the whole story of Passover is about God choosing the Israelites and rejecting the Egyptians – about Jews being “in” and Gentiles being “out.” This sharp delineation between “us” and “them” was so strong in first-century Judaism that many Jews who had chosen to follow Jesus as the Messiah had a very hard time accepting the message of people like Paul, who believed that God’s will was for the community of Christ-followers to include all people, Jews and non-Jews alike.
There is certainly potential for Passover to be a triumphalist celebration of God being on “our side” and a rejoicing in the destruction of another people, and those of us of Gentile heritage who were once on the “other side” of that story should be particularly sensitive to the potential for our Eucharist to convey a similarly exclusive message, affirming that we and not others are God’s chosen people. But there are strong correctives to this perspective in both Jewish and Christian tradition.
Some aspects of Jewish tradition have broadened the theme of Passover celebrations to be not just about the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt, but a celebration of and praying for the freedom and liberation of all people. There is an entire movement among modern-day Jews of hosting “freedom seders” or “liberation seders,” which are interfaith or multicultural Passover meals designed to celebrate all those who fight against oppression and injustice.
In the Christian tradition, there is a strong precedent to viewing the Eucharist as a meal in which we commemorate not only our own deliverance from death through Christ, but the redemption of the whole world. This theology is expressed beautifully in our Eucharistic Prayer D, the most ancient Eucharistic prayer in our prayer book and one that is also used, with slight variations, in Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. It affirms that “rising from the grave, [Jesus] destroyed death, and made the whole creation new.” Not “made us new” or “saved those who believe in him,” but “made the whole creation new.”
Jesus says in John’s Gospel that he will give his flesh as bread for the world, not just for the community of Israel or for a chosen group of his followers. The “Passover” we celebrate in the Eucharist is like those modern Jewish “freedom seders” – a celebration of our redemption from death and an expression of faith in the power of God to liberate all people from all forms of oppression and violence.
Sunday, July 29, 2012
An exegesis of the feeding of the five thousand in John's Gospel
Sermon delivered July 29, 2012 at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Franklin, Tenn.
You may have noticed that we’ve made a little shift this morning in our Gospel reading. For the past seven weeks, we’ve been hearing texts from the Gospel of Mark, but today we switch to the Gospel of John. For the next five weeks, we will read sequentially through chapter 6 of the Gospel of John. (If you want a preview of coming attractions, you might go home and read through all of John 6, which really is one continuous unit, even though we’ll only read short excerpts from it each week in the lectionary.)
So why the switch to John? Well, we’re starting with the story of the feeding of the five thousand today, which is where we had arrived in Mark’s Gospel last week, but the lectionary skipped over that story in Mark and gave it to us this week in John. I suspect the framers of the lectionary preferred John’s version because the story is more robust theologically in John. The feeding of the five thousand and the discourse that follows it about Jesus as the bread of life are at the heart of the message of John’s Gospel.
So what is that message? In order to understand what the author of the Gospel of John is trying to tell us about Jesus, we need to try to hear the story from the perspective of the first-century Jewish Christians who preserved it.
To our modern Western ears, the most striking aspect of this story is probably the “supernatural” element in it, the physical impossibility of five thousand men eating their fill from only five loaves of bread and two fish. I have often heard Christians say that the fact that Jesus performed miracles like the feeding of the five thousand and walking on water distinguishes him from other religious figures and is “proof” that he was God and not just a wise teacher or prophet.
The problem with this argument is that the early Jewish Christian communities who wrote and preserved this story would not have viewed the performance of miracles as evidence that someone was divine. Moses, Elijah, Elisha, and other prophets of the Hebrew tradition all are said to have done things that we modern Westerners would consider “miracles,” and yet Jewish tradition never claimed that they were God. Favored by God and acting on God’s behalf, yes, but not God himself in the flesh, as later Christian tradition came to claim about Jesus.
Miracle stories were common in Jesus’s time about all sorts of religious figures, and miracle stories as such would not have set Jesus apart as any more special than the next holy man. What set him apart was the fact that his followers believed he was the Messiah, the prophet chosen by God to redeem and restore the kingdom of Israel. That is what the author of John’s Gospel is telling us in this story, not that “Jesus must be God because he can break the laws of physics.”
What would have been most striking to the first tellers and hearers of this story would not have been its supernatural elements, but the theological claims it made about Jesus. First-century Jewish Christian hearers of this story would immediately recognize echoes of other sacred stories they knew well: the story of God feeding the Israelites in the wilderness with manna, the bread from heaven; or the story of the widow who shared her last handful of meal and oil with the prophet Elijah and it miraculously lasted until the end of the drought (1 Kings 17:1-16); or the story of the prophet Elisha instructing a servant to share twenty barley loaves and some fresh ears of grain with one hundred men. Though the servant asks, “How can I set this before a hundred people?” somehow they all eat and are filled and yet have some left over (2 Kings 4:42-44).
At the same time as they recognized the similarities to those stories, the first hearers of this story also would have been struck by how much greater the scale was in this story: though Elisha fed one hundred men with twenty barley loaves, Jesus fed five thousand men with only five barley loaves. They would have understood immediately the author’s intent: to convince the hearer that Jesus was even greater than the most highly revered miracle workers and prophets in Israel’s history.
The first hearers of this story also would have noted its setting, near the time of the Jewish religious festival of Passover. Although this story appears in all four Gospels, John is the only one that mentions that detail. For the author of the Gospel of John, Passover is extremely important to the theological claim he is making about Jesus: that Jesus is the Messiah and the new Passover lamb.
Passover was the season of the year when messianic expectation and hope was the strongest: it was believed that the Messiah would come during Passover. Jesus’s actions of blessing the bread, breaking it and then distributing it echo the actions of the host at a Passover meal, and gathering up the leftover fragments was also common at the end of a Passover meal. By telling us that Jesus served as host of a miraculous Passover-like meal, the author of John’s Gospel is calling to mind a banquet of abundance like the messianic banquet foretold by the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 25:6), thus depicting Jesus as the Messiah. The reaction of the crowd acknowledges this claim: “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world” (John 6:14), they say after participating in this meal. But John shows us right away that Jesus will not be the kind of Messiah the people were expecting: a king who would overthrow the Roman political powers who were occupying the land of Israel at that time. Instead, Jesus withdraws to the mountain by himself when he realizes that the people want to make him king (John 6:15). As he will say to Pilate before his execution, Jesus’s kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36).
The claim that Jesus is the new Passover lamb will not be made fully until the end of John’s Gospel, with Jesus’s death, but there are allusions to it in the second half of chapter 6, when Jesus begins talking about himself as the bread of life, but we’ll look at that more carefully in a few weeks.
Finally, I believe that in addition to making theological claims about Jesus’s identity, stories about Jesus’s miracles also offer us a message about how we are to live our lives in faith. The story of the feeding of the five thousand invites us to trust in God’s ability to, as the saying goes, “Make a way where there is no way,” and also calls us to move beyond responding to immediate needs to creating spaces for community.
Since the Gospels do not tell us that the crowds that Jesus fed were starving or unable to buy their own food, it seems that the message in this story is not as simple as “feed people when they are hungry or in need,” because we don’t know for sure that these people were hungry or in need. That fact, to me, makes it all the more significant that Jesus chooses to feed them all, and together. In doing so, Jesus broke down barriers in a culture where, under normal circumstances, your place in society determined who you were allowed to eat with. Some of the other versions of this story tell us that disciples assume that it would be reasonable to send the people back to town to take care of their own needs, but 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 and beginning to form a community together over a shared meal.
The deeper miracle in the feeding of the five thousand, I would suggest, was not the fact that people were fed, but that they ate together, and in doing so were offered a living glimpse of the kingdom of God: a community where society’s divisions are broken down and God’s love is more than enough to meet everyone’s needs. So the message for us, I think, is that as those who seek to follow Christ, we are called not just to respond to immediate needs, but to offer this world a similar glimpse of that kingdom where faith in God’s abundance frees us for a loving embrace of all.
You may have noticed that we’ve made a little shift this morning in our Gospel reading. For the past seven weeks, we’ve been hearing texts from the Gospel of Mark, but today we switch to the Gospel of John. For the next five weeks, we will read sequentially through chapter 6 of the Gospel of John. (If you want a preview of coming attractions, you might go home and read through all of John 6, which really is one continuous unit, even though we’ll only read short excerpts from it each week in the lectionary.)
So why the switch to John? Well, we’re starting with the story of the feeding of the five thousand today, which is where we had arrived in Mark’s Gospel last week, but the lectionary skipped over that story in Mark and gave it to us this week in John. I suspect the framers of the lectionary preferred John’s version because the story is more robust theologically in John. The feeding of the five thousand and the discourse that follows it about Jesus as the bread of life are at the heart of the message of John’s Gospel.
So what is that message? In order to understand what the author of the Gospel of John is trying to tell us about Jesus, we need to try to hear the story from the perspective of the first-century Jewish Christians who preserved it.
To our modern Western ears, the most striking aspect of this story is probably the “supernatural” element in it, the physical impossibility of five thousand men eating their fill from only five loaves of bread and two fish. I have often heard Christians say that the fact that Jesus performed miracles like the feeding of the five thousand and walking on water distinguishes him from other religious figures and is “proof” that he was God and not just a wise teacher or prophet.
The problem with this argument is that the early Jewish Christian communities who wrote and preserved this story would not have viewed the performance of miracles as evidence that someone was divine. Moses, Elijah, Elisha, and other prophets of the Hebrew tradition all are said to have done things that we modern Westerners would consider “miracles,” and yet Jewish tradition never claimed that they were God. Favored by God and acting on God’s behalf, yes, but not God himself in the flesh, as later Christian tradition came to claim about Jesus.
Miracle stories were common in Jesus’s time about all sorts of religious figures, and miracle stories as such would not have set Jesus apart as any more special than the next holy man. What set him apart was the fact that his followers believed he was the Messiah, the prophet chosen by God to redeem and restore the kingdom of Israel. That is what the author of John’s Gospel is telling us in this story, not that “Jesus must be God because he can break the laws of physics.”
What would have been most striking to the first tellers and hearers of this story would not have been its supernatural elements, but the theological claims it made about Jesus. First-century Jewish Christian hearers of this story would immediately recognize echoes of other sacred stories they knew well: the story of God feeding the Israelites in the wilderness with manna, the bread from heaven; or the story of the widow who shared her last handful of meal and oil with the prophet Elijah and it miraculously lasted until the end of the drought (1 Kings 17:1-16); or the story of the prophet Elisha instructing a servant to share twenty barley loaves and some fresh ears of grain with one hundred men. Though the servant asks, “How can I set this before a hundred people?” somehow they all eat and are filled and yet have some left over (2 Kings 4:42-44).
At the same time as they recognized the similarities to those stories, the first hearers of this story also would have been struck by how much greater the scale was in this story: though Elisha fed one hundred men with twenty barley loaves, Jesus fed five thousand men with only five barley loaves. They would have understood immediately the author’s intent: to convince the hearer that Jesus was even greater than the most highly revered miracle workers and prophets in Israel’s history.
The first hearers of this story also would have noted its setting, near the time of the Jewish religious festival of Passover. Although this story appears in all four Gospels, John is the only one that mentions that detail. For the author of the Gospel of John, Passover is extremely important to the theological claim he is making about Jesus: that Jesus is the Messiah and the new Passover lamb.
Passover was the season of the year when messianic expectation and hope was the strongest: it was believed that the Messiah would come during Passover. Jesus’s actions of blessing the bread, breaking it and then distributing it echo the actions of the host at a Passover meal, and gathering up the leftover fragments was also common at the end of a Passover meal. By telling us that Jesus served as host of a miraculous Passover-like meal, the author of John’s Gospel is calling to mind a banquet of abundance like the messianic banquet foretold by the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 25:6), thus depicting Jesus as the Messiah. The reaction of the crowd acknowledges this claim: “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world” (John 6:14), they say after participating in this meal. But John shows us right away that Jesus will not be the kind of Messiah the people were expecting: a king who would overthrow the Roman political powers who were occupying the land of Israel at that time. Instead, Jesus withdraws to the mountain by himself when he realizes that the people want to make him king (John 6:15). As he will say to Pilate before his execution, Jesus’s kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36).
The claim that Jesus is the new Passover lamb will not be made fully until the end of John’s Gospel, with Jesus’s death, but there are allusions to it in the second half of chapter 6, when Jesus begins talking about himself as the bread of life, but we’ll look at that more carefully in a few weeks.
Finally, I believe that in addition to making theological claims about Jesus’s identity, stories about Jesus’s miracles also offer us a message about how we are to live our lives in faith. The story of the feeding of the five thousand invites us to trust in God’s ability to, as the saying goes, “Make a way where there is no way,” and also calls us to move beyond responding to immediate needs to creating spaces for community.
Since the Gospels do not tell us that the crowds that Jesus fed were starving or unable to buy their own food, it seems that the message in this story is not as simple as “feed people when they are hungry or in need,” because we don’t know for sure that these people were hungry or in need. That fact, to me, makes it all the more significant that Jesus chooses to feed them all, and together. In doing so, Jesus broke down barriers in a culture where, under normal circumstances, your place in society determined who you were allowed to eat with. Some of the other versions of this story tell us that disciples assume that it would be reasonable to send the people back to town to take care of their own needs, but 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 and beginning to form a community together over a shared meal.
The deeper miracle in the feeding of the five thousand, I would suggest, was not the fact that people were fed, but that they ate together, and in doing so were offered a living glimpse of the kingdom of God: a community where society’s divisions are broken down and God’s love is more than enough to meet everyone’s needs. So the message for us, I think, is that as those who seek to follow Christ, we are called not just to respond to immediate needs, but to offer this world a similar glimpse of that kingdom where faith in God’s abundance frees us for a loving embrace of all.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
How do we discern the will of God?
My first sermon at St. Paul's, delivered on Sunday, July 15, 2012 (the Seventh Sunday After Pentecost).
So what am I supposed to do?
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you were asking that question? Perhaps you had a difficult decision to make at home. Perhaps the expectations of a supervisor were unclear. Perhaps you struggled with a difficult moral decision and you didn’t know how to decide what was the “right” thing to do. You may have found yourself asking yourself or God, “So what am I supposed to do – in this situation, with this information, with this person or group of people?”
Perhaps at times like those, our opening collect this morning might be helpful. It asks God that we “may know and understand what things [we] ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them.” The first thing we can do when we are unsure of what we are supposed to do is to pray, to ask for God’s guidance on the matter.
Now, that sounds nice, but if you’re like me, perhaps you’re wondering how exactly we will know for sure what God’s answers to our prayers for guidance are. Should we expect a bolt of lighting? A voice from the sky? A sign or uncanny coincidence that tells us that something is “meant to be”?
Or might it perhaps be more subtle: a certain inner tug on the heart, an intuition, a “gut feeling” that tells us we should do a certain thing?
The biblical figures we encounter in the scripture today all struggled in some way with what they “ought” to do:
- David set out to bring the ark of the Lord to Jerusalem because he believed it was God’s will for him to do so, but what our lectionary leaves out from the reading is that along the way, one of the men who was driving the cart with the ark on it was struck dead after touching the ark. After that, David was afraid to bring the ark to Jerusalem, so he left it at the house of Obed-edom. Our reading picks up again after David has decided it is safe to continue bringing the ark to Jerusalem because things have gone well for the house of Obed-edom while the ark was there. But in that in between time, there was a struggle for him about what he “ought” to do – should he bring this sacred object that apparently had the power to destroy people at whim into the midst of the city he was building to be the center of power of his empire? Ultimately, he is convinced that God indeed does want the ark in Jerusalem and so he takes it there.
- The author of Ephesians boldly asserts that he knows God’s will for all creation: “with wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will… a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him.” He says all these things quite confidently, but in fact they represent his perspective on a struggle in the early church about what they “ought” to do in spreading the message about Jesus – was the message only for other Jews, or could non-Jews be brought in to the community as well? The author of Ephesians, writing in the tradition of the Apostle Paul, believes it is God’s will for the message to spread to all people – both Jews and Gentiles.
- King Herod’s struggle with what he “ought” to do is perhaps the most obvious one: when Herodias’s daughter asked for the head of John the Baptist, Herod was “deeply grieved” because he believed John to be a “righteous and holy man” and did not want to kill him, but he gave in to the girl’s request out of a sense of duty – he felt he “ought” to keep his word to her. In doing so, he allowed a sense of duty and pride to override his deeper sense of what was right.
Herod’s story is a good example of the fact that not everything we feel we “ought” to do is of God or in accordance with God’s will. Sometimes, like Herod, we feel we “ought” to do things out of a sense of duty, even if we think the action is wrong. Or we might feel we “ought” to do things because other people expect or want us to do them, even if we don’t want to do them ourselves. So how can we tell whether a sense that we “ought” to do something is motivated by the proddings of the Spirit or a guilt trip from the demands of the world?
These are not new questions. The church has struggled since its earliest days to discern the will of God for the community and to live it out, and we still struggle to know what we “ought” to do as a church today. These questions are at the heart of what we ask ourselves whenever we gather as a church – whether in the local parish, at the diocesan level, or as a whole body at the General Convention.
Through the centuries, Christians have come up with different ways to answer these questions, with criteria or guidelines for discerning God’s will and for determining whether a desire to do something is of God or not.
One of the most common answers is that the will of God must be discerned in community. Any individual who believes God is calling him or her to do something should take it to the community to benefit from their collective wisdom, or at least to a spiritual director or confidant who can help the person discern whether the direction they are feeling pulled in is of God or not.
In doing so, the community or spiritual director may ask the individual to look at the potential fruits of that decision. Will it bring greater peace to that person’s life? Will it bring him or her closer to God? Jesus pointed out to his disciples that healthy trees bear good fruit, while unhealthy ones do not, using this metaphor to apply to people: “by their fruits you will know them.” The same can be applied to any of our individual or communal decisions. How will this decision potentially affect us and those in our community? Do those potential results seem in line with what we think God would want for us?
And, of course, as a community rooted in the Scriptures, we also will ask what guidance we can find in the Bible on the matter, although this can be a tricky one, since we have to wade through centuries of layered meanings, cultural and historical contexts, and translations to truly understand what the biblical text is saying about any given matter. And the biblical texts do not always speak with one voice on an issue. There are many tensions between seemingly different perspective and theological approaches represented in the Bible, since they were written by different authors and over a long period of time. Still, as a church we affirm that the Scriptures were inspired by God and that God continues to speak to us through them, and so we seek to root our decision-making in the witness of the Bible.
Ultimately, though, I think it is important to remind ourselves that however many “tests” we may apply to our feelings about any given decision, we cannot ever fully know the will of God in this life. The Apostle Paul says that “now we see through a glass darkly, but then we will see face to face.” The questions and uncertainties that we have in this life about the ways of a God much bigger than we are will have to wait for the next life to be completely resolved.
And this need not lead us to despair, for although part of the work of the church is to discern and do the work of God in the world, the other part of our work – and really the first and most important part of our work – is simply to praise and worship the Almighty God whose mysteries are beyond human understanding. In the Jewish tradition, each copy of the Talmud, the collection of writings and commentary on the scriptures, begins on page 2, leaving the first page blank to remind the reader of all that we do not know or understand about God.
Christians have at times been rather smug about thinking we have God all figured out because we believe God was incarnate in Jesus – so we have an actual human being we can read about and learn from and after we’ve done all that, we’ve pretty much got God all figured out. But how much do we really even understand Jesus? The early church ran itself in circles and shed all kinds of blood arguing over exactly how they should make sense of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and what it meant for the world. And surely the mystery of Christ’s indwelling in us by the Holy Spirit through our baptism is beyond our human understanding! Perhaps we could take a lesson from our Jewish brothers and sisters and leave a little blank space at the beginning of our volumes of theology, our attempts to speak in words what is ultimately unspeakable.
So how do we know what we ought to do? How do we, as a community, discern the will of God for us? Well, we pray – turning the matter over to God and waiting for a revelation or some sense of inner clarity – but we also engage our reason, turning to the scriptures and the community of the church. We “test the spirits” of revelation based on this tradition that has been both received and reshaped by the body of faithful Christians throughout the history of the church. We look at the potential fruits of our decisions. And we do the best we can with the knowledge and insights we have – all the while remaining open to the possibility that we might make the wrong decision, but trusting that God’s grace and mercy will catch and redirect us if we do.
I hope it is in this spirit that we can view the decisions of the church, both those decisions that we make for our life together here at St. Paul’s and the decisions that were made over the past two weeks by the General Convention. Whether we feel that St. Paul’s or the Episcopal Church is doing what it “ought” to do or not, we might remind ourselves that our own sense of what we “ought” to do might not be God’s sense of what we “ought” to do, and that even if we are certain we are doing God’s will, we have no guarantees that that is actually the case! By their fruits we will know them, perhaps, but even in our judgment of the fruits of our decisions, we are seeing through a glass darkly.
But no matter whether we have discerned God’s will for us correctly or not, we can trust that, as Thomas Merton famously wrote, God will “lead us by the right path though we may know nothing about it.” In other words, God’s the one really in control here, whether we realize it or not. Sometimes the best thing for us to do when we feel confused about what we “ought” to do is to return to that blank first page and rest in that.
So what am I supposed to do?
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you were asking that question? Perhaps you had a difficult decision to make at home. Perhaps the expectations of a supervisor were unclear. Perhaps you struggled with a difficult moral decision and you didn’t know how to decide what was the “right” thing to do. You may have found yourself asking yourself or God, “So what am I supposed to do – in this situation, with this information, with this person or group of people?”
Perhaps at times like those, our opening collect this morning might be helpful. It asks God that we “may know and understand what things [we] ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them.” The first thing we can do when we are unsure of what we are supposed to do is to pray, to ask for God’s guidance on the matter.
Now, that sounds nice, but if you’re like me, perhaps you’re wondering how exactly we will know for sure what God’s answers to our prayers for guidance are. Should we expect a bolt of lighting? A voice from the sky? A sign or uncanny coincidence that tells us that something is “meant to be”?
Or might it perhaps be more subtle: a certain inner tug on the heart, an intuition, a “gut feeling” that tells us we should do a certain thing?
The biblical figures we encounter in the scripture today all struggled in some way with what they “ought” to do:
- David set out to bring the ark of the Lord to Jerusalem because he believed it was God’s will for him to do so, but what our lectionary leaves out from the reading is that along the way, one of the men who was driving the cart with the ark on it was struck dead after touching the ark. After that, David was afraid to bring the ark to Jerusalem, so he left it at the house of Obed-edom. Our reading picks up again after David has decided it is safe to continue bringing the ark to Jerusalem because things have gone well for the house of Obed-edom while the ark was there. But in that in between time, there was a struggle for him about what he “ought” to do – should he bring this sacred object that apparently had the power to destroy people at whim into the midst of the city he was building to be the center of power of his empire? Ultimately, he is convinced that God indeed does want the ark in Jerusalem and so he takes it there.
- The author of Ephesians boldly asserts that he knows God’s will for all creation: “with wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will… a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him.” He says all these things quite confidently, but in fact they represent his perspective on a struggle in the early church about what they “ought” to do in spreading the message about Jesus – was the message only for other Jews, or could non-Jews be brought in to the community as well? The author of Ephesians, writing in the tradition of the Apostle Paul, believes it is God’s will for the message to spread to all people – both Jews and Gentiles.
- King Herod’s struggle with what he “ought” to do is perhaps the most obvious one: when Herodias’s daughter asked for the head of John the Baptist, Herod was “deeply grieved” because he believed John to be a “righteous and holy man” and did not want to kill him, but he gave in to the girl’s request out of a sense of duty – he felt he “ought” to keep his word to her. In doing so, he allowed a sense of duty and pride to override his deeper sense of what was right.
Herod’s story is a good example of the fact that not everything we feel we “ought” to do is of God or in accordance with God’s will. Sometimes, like Herod, we feel we “ought” to do things out of a sense of duty, even if we think the action is wrong. Or we might feel we “ought” to do things because other people expect or want us to do them, even if we don’t want to do them ourselves. So how can we tell whether a sense that we “ought” to do something is motivated by the proddings of the Spirit or a guilt trip from the demands of the world?
These are not new questions. The church has struggled since its earliest days to discern the will of God for the community and to live it out, and we still struggle to know what we “ought” to do as a church today. These questions are at the heart of what we ask ourselves whenever we gather as a church – whether in the local parish, at the diocesan level, or as a whole body at the General Convention.
Through the centuries, Christians have come up with different ways to answer these questions, with criteria or guidelines for discerning God’s will and for determining whether a desire to do something is of God or not.
One of the most common answers is that the will of God must be discerned in community. Any individual who believes God is calling him or her to do something should take it to the community to benefit from their collective wisdom, or at least to a spiritual director or confidant who can help the person discern whether the direction they are feeling pulled in is of God or not.
In doing so, the community or spiritual director may ask the individual to look at the potential fruits of that decision. Will it bring greater peace to that person’s life? Will it bring him or her closer to God? Jesus pointed out to his disciples that healthy trees bear good fruit, while unhealthy ones do not, using this metaphor to apply to people: “by their fruits you will know them.” The same can be applied to any of our individual or communal decisions. How will this decision potentially affect us and those in our community? Do those potential results seem in line with what we think God would want for us?
And, of course, as a community rooted in the Scriptures, we also will ask what guidance we can find in the Bible on the matter, although this can be a tricky one, since we have to wade through centuries of layered meanings, cultural and historical contexts, and translations to truly understand what the biblical text is saying about any given matter. And the biblical texts do not always speak with one voice on an issue. There are many tensions between seemingly different perspective and theological approaches represented in the Bible, since they were written by different authors and over a long period of time. Still, as a church we affirm that the Scriptures were inspired by God and that God continues to speak to us through them, and so we seek to root our decision-making in the witness of the Bible.
Ultimately, though, I think it is important to remind ourselves that however many “tests” we may apply to our feelings about any given decision, we cannot ever fully know the will of God in this life. The Apostle Paul says that “now we see through a glass darkly, but then we will see face to face.” The questions and uncertainties that we have in this life about the ways of a God much bigger than we are will have to wait for the next life to be completely resolved.
And this need not lead us to despair, for although part of the work of the church is to discern and do the work of God in the world, the other part of our work – and really the first and most important part of our work – is simply to praise and worship the Almighty God whose mysteries are beyond human understanding. In the Jewish tradition, each copy of the Talmud, the collection of writings and commentary on the scriptures, begins on page 2, leaving the first page blank to remind the reader of all that we do not know or understand about God.
Christians have at times been rather smug about thinking we have God all figured out because we believe God was incarnate in Jesus – so we have an actual human being we can read about and learn from and after we’ve done all that, we’ve pretty much got God all figured out. But how much do we really even understand Jesus? The early church ran itself in circles and shed all kinds of blood arguing over exactly how they should make sense of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and what it meant for the world. And surely the mystery of Christ’s indwelling in us by the Holy Spirit through our baptism is beyond our human understanding! Perhaps we could take a lesson from our Jewish brothers and sisters and leave a little blank space at the beginning of our volumes of theology, our attempts to speak in words what is ultimately unspeakable.
So how do we know what we ought to do? How do we, as a community, discern the will of God for us? Well, we pray – turning the matter over to God and waiting for a revelation or some sense of inner clarity – but we also engage our reason, turning to the scriptures and the community of the church. We “test the spirits” of revelation based on this tradition that has been both received and reshaped by the body of faithful Christians throughout the history of the church. We look at the potential fruits of our decisions. And we do the best we can with the knowledge and insights we have – all the while remaining open to the possibility that we might make the wrong decision, but trusting that God’s grace and mercy will catch and redirect us if we do.
I hope it is in this spirit that we can view the decisions of the church, both those decisions that we make for our life together here at St. Paul’s and the decisions that were made over the past two weeks by the General Convention. Whether we feel that St. Paul’s or the Episcopal Church is doing what it “ought” to do or not, we might remind ourselves that our own sense of what we “ought” to do might not be God’s sense of what we “ought” to do, and that even if we are certain we are doing God’s will, we have no guarantees that that is actually the case! By their fruits we will know them, perhaps, but even in our judgment of the fruits of our decisions, we are seeing through a glass darkly.
But no matter whether we have discerned God’s will for us correctly or not, we can trust that, as Thomas Merton famously wrote, God will “lead us by the right path though we may know nothing about it.” In other words, God’s the one really in control here, whether we realize it or not. Sometimes the best thing for us to do when we feel confused about what we “ought” to do is to return to that blank first page and rest in that.
Monday, May 28, 2012
Rest in peace, Mom
My grandmother (who I called "Mom") died yesterday, and because of my training in journalism, my family asked me to write the obituary, as I did for my grandfather (who I called "Pop") when he died 9 years ago. My friends from childhood will remember how influential and how big of a part of my life Mom and Pop were to me. Although I'm sad that she's gone, I'm incredibly thankful that she was living a normal life at home right up until the moment she had the stroke, and that she did not suffer or linger. Praise God for the blessing of a long, fulfilling life and a holy death.
Helen Gardner Wells (1925-2012)
Helen Gardner Wells died Sunday, May 27, at Lexington Medical Center, following a stroke on Wednesday, May 23. She was 86.
Helen was born Aug. 27, 1925 in Columbia and graduated from Columbia High School in 1942. Her love of music began early: her father was a band director and music teacher; she was a drum majorette and played the saxophone.
She married William (“Bill”) McKendree Wells of Colorado in 1944 at Ebenezer Lutheran Church in Columbia. He also played the saxophone and they played together often in her father’s band to entertain patients at local hospitals. (Old family photos show Helen as the sole female member of her father’s 1940s-era “big band” ensemble.)
Helen worked for Southern Bell for four years before having her first child, after which she became a stay-at-home-mother, raising four boys in the 1950s and 60s in the Eau Claire area, where her family lived for 35 years before moving to Lexington. After her husband’s retirement from the life insurance business, they enjoyed spending time with their sons and daughters-in-law and two granddaughters, and traveling widely across the U.S. and Canada in their motor home, making regular trips to her husband’s native Colorado and several trips to Alaska.
Helen was known in her family for her great Southern cooking (she was known to add a pinch of sugar to nearly every dish), for her “goodie bags” of candy and cookies on road trips, for her hugs, and for her determination to see the best in everyone. (Her husband lovingly called her “Angel Fuzz” for her eternally good-natured and optimistic outlook.)
Helen’s greatest joy was her family, and she leaves a legacy of warmth and caring to her surviving family members: her four sons, William (“Bill”) McKendree Wells, III, of Columbia; Ronald Llewellyn Wells of Lexington; Jody O’Neal Wells of Alpharetta, Ga.; and Michael Gardner Wells of Lexington; two daughters-in-law, Patricia Walker Wells of Lexington and Patricia Ferrell Wells of Columbia; two granddaughters, the Reverend Tracy Jennifer Wells Miller of Franklin, Tenn., and Ashley Kristin Wells of Medford, Mass; and several nieces, nephews, great-nieces, and great-nephews.
Helen was preceded in death by her parents, her three sisters: Gerry Gardner Lott, Mary Gardner Lucius, and Betty Gardner Cull, and her husband of 59 years.
Funeral services will be held at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, May 31, at Ebenezer Lutheran Church in Columbia. The Reverend Paul Pingel will officiate. The family will receive friends from 7-8:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 30, at Barr-Price Funeral Home in Lexington.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to Ebenezer Lutheran Church in Columbia.
 |
| Mom and I at my marriage blessing last summer in Atlanta |
Helen Gardner Wells (1925-2012)
Helen Gardner Wells died Sunday, May 27, at Lexington Medical Center, following a stroke on Wednesday, May 23. She was 86.
Helen was born Aug. 27, 1925 in Columbia and graduated from Columbia High School in 1942. Her love of music began early: her father was a band director and music teacher; she was a drum majorette and played the saxophone.
She married William (“Bill”) McKendree Wells of Colorado in 1944 at Ebenezer Lutheran Church in Columbia. He also played the saxophone and they played together often in her father’s band to entertain patients at local hospitals. (Old family photos show Helen as the sole female member of her father’s 1940s-era “big band” ensemble.)
Helen worked for Southern Bell for four years before having her first child, after which she became a stay-at-home-mother, raising four boys in the 1950s and 60s in the Eau Claire area, where her family lived for 35 years before moving to Lexington. After her husband’s retirement from the life insurance business, they enjoyed spending time with their sons and daughters-in-law and two granddaughters, and traveling widely across the U.S. and Canada in their motor home, making regular trips to her husband’s native Colorado and several trips to Alaska.
Helen was known in her family for her great Southern cooking (she was known to add a pinch of sugar to nearly every dish), for her “goodie bags” of candy and cookies on road trips, for her hugs, and for her determination to see the best in everyone. (Her husband lovingly called her “Angel Fuzz” for her eternally good-natured and optimistic outlook.)
Helen’s greatest joy was her family, and she leaves a legacy of warmth and caring to her surviving family members: her four sons, William (“Bill”) McKendree Wells, III, of Columbia; Ronald Llewellyn Wells of Lexington; Jody O’Neal Wells of Alpharetta, Ga.; and Michael Gardner Wells of Lexington; two daughters-in-law, Patricia Walker Wells of Lexington and Patricia Ferrell Wells of Columbia; two granddaughters, the Reverend Tracy Jennifer Wells Miller of Franklin, Tenn., and Ashley Kristin Wells of Medford, Mass; and several nieces, nephews, great-nieces, and great-nephews.
Helen was preceded in death by her parents, her three sisters: Gerry Gardner Lott, Mary Gardner Lucius, and Betty Gardner Cull, and her husband of 59 years.
Funeral services will be held at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, May 31, at Ebenezer Lutheran Church in Columbia. The Reverend Paul Pingel will officiate. The family will receive friends from 7-8:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 30, at Barr-Price Funeral Home in Lexington.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to Ebenezer Lutheran Church in Columbia.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
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.
"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.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
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.”
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.”
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
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."
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."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)