Tag Archives: Jesus

Superman and Violence

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Big title, short post.

All this Superman talk reminds me of the Doomsday storyline from way back in which Superman is killed. As a strange attempt at selling books (which it certainly did), it revealed the problem of violence in comics, particularly for Superman.

In Doomsday, Superman met an evil he could not prevent and an enemy he couldn’t defeat. He was not stronger or faster than Doomsday. He couldn’t outwit Doomsday because the situation wouldn’t allow for it.

It also revealed the essential character of Superman as protector, rather than responder or advocate, to violence. Doomsday came marching in and Superman put himself in the way. The deadly confrontation was sacrificial. It wasn’t even “last resort” or an attempt at making violence tolerable. He put himself in mortal danger. And was killed.

That was a decade and a half ago. I didn’t keep up with the books more than a couple years afterward. The ensuing plot included the rise of several different heroes claiming the mantle of Superman. Eventually, the real Superman emerged (with long hair, btw) and the stories could continue.

I think the Jesus motifs are far too easy and far too inappropriately applied to Superman generally, Here are good responses by Mark Sandlin and Zack Hunt for why that is. Particularly as Superman is operating in a zeitgeist that is alien to the Jesus story, particularly with the World War origins of the Man of Steel.

I do believe that essential to the character of Superman is his relationship to his power; that unlike Spider-Man’s great line about responsibility, Superman’s true greatness is based in the power he doesn’t use. He is never portrayed as the smartest hero, but his struggle is to always protect people while doing no harm. In this way, Superman turns out to address the most human need of all.

A need that only comes through peace.

May He See Us

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a homily for Proper 5C

Text: Luke 7:36-8:3

The Awkward Dinner

If I were to ask you to name a person, living or dead you’d like to have over for dinner, after hearing this story, I’m guessing you wouldn’t say “Jesus”. Jesus makes a lousy dinner guest for the faithful. The people that need help or are ostracized: those people get love from Jesus. Guys like Simon, the Pharisee get a different companion.

The text doesn’t give us Simon’s motives for inviting Jesus over for dinner. We know who he wouldn’t invite over. He wouldn’t eat with someone below his station. Purity laws and customs forbade it. So Simon sees Jesus as something of an equal.

Which means he seems to be completely ignoring the woman that is on the ground, sobbing, and wiping Jesus’s feet with her hair. I’m not sure how he does this. We’d be distracted. If we didn’t want her there, we’d have her kicked out. If we wanted her there, she’d be sitting somewhere. If we wanted her near the table, she’d be serving or eating at it. She wouldn’t be on the floor, like a dog.

We can also sense a certain hostility in this conversation. Simon impugns Jesus for this woman’s presence. Jesus, meanwhile, responds to the man’s spiritual immaturity. It is all quite the odd dinner. Put in the right hands, this scene could make quite an excellent short film.

There’s something more to this, something in the composition that is revealing.

Eating and the Law

If you remember from last week, we’ve been exploring this section of the gospel we call Luke as growing out of this sequence of calling and naming the apostles and preparing them for ministry. It is a quite bold storyline.

In the middle is the curious argument about the Sabbath. I believe that this is a central moment in the text and directly informs what we’re talking about here with this man sitting at the dinner table and this woman beneath it, washing Jesus’s feet.

At the beginning of chapter 6, Jesus is criticized by the Pharisees for allowing his people to pick heads of grain to eat on the Sabbath. He responds with a story that may as well say “man, you have the wrong idea about the Sabbath.” This is followed by Jesus going to a synagogue. Inside, and in front of a whole bunch of people, a man with a withered hand approaches Jesus to be healed. Jesus is warned that it is improper to heal him. Jesus does it anyway. [For more about this story, click here.]

In both of these pieces, Jesus flaunts his breaking of Sabbath law, but more over, He breaks it with witnesses. Witnesses who would be cheesed to see such a thing. It is purposeful, willful, and antagonistic. And if you think Jesus is a meek lover-not-a-fighter, then you need to reconcile that Jesus willfully broke what amounts to canon law in front of people knowing they would catch Him.

The Blindness of Winning

Today’s part of the story is shortly after that moment and seems written for precisely that confrontation. Except that we aren’t talking Sabbath any longer, but ritual purity and the patriarchy. Jesus gives a teaching about love and commitment, but the elements of the narrative tell a bigger story. This powerful man and this powerless woman. He is getting a little respect and she is getting His love.

He isn’t giving anything to Jesus, obsessed with the physical and the situational. If Jesus really were a prophet, He would know better. It’s logical that the debtor who owes more would be more grateful. And those at the table with them, who were probably men, make the same conclusions: “Who is this who even forgives sins?” These are details that distract them and keep them from seeing the humanity of the woman in their midst. They, like we, obsess with the metaphysics and the rules and the systems and the how-does-it-works while Jesus is too busy actually seeing this woman to care about those puny details!

He gives this woman honor in the midst of these fools who cannot see her, which is where we would end the story, confident in that redemption, but Luke continues by saying that Jesus moves on, followed by his apostles and a whole bunch of women. And not just any women, but women who have been redeemed. Which, in this culture, meant redeemed for, to put it bluntly, being women. And women who are his benefactors. Jesus isn’t just going to the outcasts and healing them or hanging out with them in His downtime. He is traveling, ministering with them. And they make it possible. Jesus doesn’t need the rich and powerful like Simon to fund His ministry. He has the women.

A Loser Rebellion

What a fitting text for Father’s Day, isn’t it? Guys, Jesus doesn’t need you because He’s got the ladies! it seems to say. The story, however, is about who is in on this mission with Jesus. The rich and powerful are used to being in charge of things, but Jesus doesn’t let them be in charge over GOD. This is crowd-sourced and crowd-funded. It is of and by the people.

How often are we like Simon, who cannot see the woman, or regard her? As Michael Danner writes this week,

What is more clear, however, is that Simon needed this woman to be and to remain a sinner. Why? In order for Simon to be “Simon the Pharisee”, he needed this woman to be “this woman the sinner.”

We want to judge and make faith into a competitive sport with winners and losers. We want losers so that we feel like winners.

But Jesus loves the losers and regards the winners as already “having their reward.” Isn’t it also clear, however, that Jesus regards Simon as a loser as well? That our own ignorance and mean spirits make us losers and in need of Jesus’s love?

This radical movement that Jesus is creating is not for the successful, but the broken. Those broken by a cruel world and an unjust society. And those broken by their place in maintaining the world’s cruelty and the injustice of society. That any and all of us, may approach in humbleness that we aren’t doing things right and we need help.

When we do this, we might be ignored by society or each other, but Jesus will see us.

Related articles

The scandalous character of ministry

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Scandalous WheatThe Lectionary did us no favors by jumping into Luke at chapter 7, skipping what I think are the two most important chapters in the whole gospel in 5 and 6. Smack in between the calling of disciples and the Sermon on the Plain is one of my favorite moments of Jesus’s. It is striking and captivating. And it paints everything that comes after it.

At the beginning of chapter 6, Jesus and his new rag-tag bunch of followers have started out on their mission. They are healing the sick and proclaiming a new era. They go through this wheat field and the followers pick the wheat on the way through and eat it. Not a big deal. Except that it happened to be Saturday: the Sabbath. Now they’re in trouble.

The Pharisees get on Jesus for this. They ask how he can allow the disciples to break the law. This is Jesus’s response:

“Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and gave some to his companions?”

The text then says:

Then he said to them, “The Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.”

The story, and its companion that comes right after (Luke 6:6-11) demonstrate a big picture view of Jesus that rejects the Law to fulfill the Law. I’ve written about this a few times.

There’s something telling, however about Jesus’s reference to David beyond the easy connections we make about Jesus. I’m compelled less by that follow-up message about being “lord of the sabbath” as I am in the tale of David and his companions breaking the Law to share in the presence. For to make this about Divinity and power of Jesus is to miss the pure humanity of David, and his much greater transgression than Jesus’s. Jesus allowed a couple of dudes to break Sabbath—David himself and his buddies entered the holiest of holies.

This comparison is important because it sets the stage for what it means to do the ministry of GOD. As much as the Sermon on the Plain (6:17-49) explains a ministry of listening and service, Jesus demonstrates also a ministry of rebellion. Or perhaps more accurately, one of reconciliation. This is, in fact, what happens in the raising of the Widow’s Son at Nain, which we explored yesterday, and demonstrated in Jesus’s healing of the man with the withered hand.

These things are important because when confronted by the authorities for breaking the rules, Jesus doesn’t say

I’m bigger than the rules.

He is saying

We break the rules to follow the rules.

Perhaps more specifically, we break the rules we made to support GOD’s rules when those human rules aren’t actually supportive.

Which brings me to what is most striking about the David story: Jesus defends his followers with a story that we would read scandalously if we were paying it any attention. Imagine if people broke into our churches and ate the consecrated elements—how scandalized we would be.

How scandalized we are when we talk about communion without baptism.

How scandalized we are when the wrong people are doing things.

This is the story Jesus picked to defend his followers.

And it is a story so easy to connect with our own practices, our own laws, our own traditions and canons that we are left sitting with an uncomfortable question about our own behavior and our own practices. It is so tailor-made for conversation about Eucharist and access to it, Jesus seems to be arguing against us.

All of this is wrapped in the context of this sequence of events:

  1. Finding his followers
  2. Doing ministry with them
  3. Breaking Sabbath Law
  4. Naming the 12 apostles
  5. Preaching the Sermon on the Plain
  6. Heading out to do the ministry together

This must not be seen as a single scandalous event, but embedded in the essential character of our ministry.

Question: Does your ministry contain this element of scandal?

A Powerful Faith

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a homily for Proper 4C

Text: Luke 7:1-10

[Listen to "A Powerful Faith" here while you read along.]

Making it personal

Man, that Centurion looks good, doesn’t he? Generous? Check. Compassionate? Check. Faithful? Double-check. That guy sure looks good in the end, doesn’t he?

The basics of the story are these: Jesus strolls into Capernaum. A Centurion hears about him, and sends the Jewish elders of the town to convince Jesus to come heal his slave. When they get close, the Centurion sends some friends to Jesus to discourage Jesus from entering his humble home, but perhaps he can heal the slave from a distance.

Jesus’s response to the request is heavy with subtext: “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” Our focus is instantly driven to the Centurion’s faith.

And this story morphs into a story about a faithful Centurion and Jesus. That the healing of the slave is the means by which that personal faith is first revealed, then rewarded.

The physical matters in the text are obliterated. The fact that Jesus doesn’t physically touch the slave is a significant development in the text. Perhaps more significant is that the Centurion already believes Jesus doesn’t need to be in the same room with the slave. That He doesn’t even need to know the slave’s whereabouts or what he looks like or who he even is! That Jesus can heal without physical knowledge of space and time.

Our focus on the faith allows us to ignore the strange new capacity for Jesus’s ministry in the world.

Solo Jesus Time

We do this, of course, because we’ve decided this is a personal allegory of faith. That, if we have the faith of the Centurion, even the matters of matter are irrelevant to the power of GOD. Our friend, Jesus can heal us where we are, with who we are.

I think we do this easily with a text like this because it seems like a perfect reading for us: 21st Century North Americans. We are much less likely to read this text with an eye toward the literal than other texts. I guess because that line about faith trips the wire in our thinking and sends us into “spiritual” territory, rather than “scientific”.

The problem with this reading of the text, then, is that we impose that same filter onto the text: that, as 21st Century North Americans, we are pursuing a personal relationship with Jesus. That it is a matter of competitive faith. If our faith were better…If we had his faith…If we believed harder….

We get there because we think this is only a story about Jesus and a Centurion. We forget that we never actually meet the Centurion. That Jesus never meets the Centurion. That, as a character, the Centurion, and the slave for that matter, need not exist.

The only characters in this story are Jesus, his followers, the Jewish elders, and the Centurion’s friends.

Taking needs to Jesus

The truly powerful dynamic in the story is that these intermediaries are doing the work of the story. They go to Jesus for the Centurion and vouch for him. They vouch for the slave. They make the request for him. It isn’t the Centurion that Jesus listens to and follows, it is the Jewish elders.

Then when they get close to the home, it is the Centurion’s friends that take his very words to Jesus. His words of humility and faith. They take the audacious request of long-distance healing.

And it strikes me that Jesus’s words of response aren’t to the Centurion. Or not to him personally. They are to them all: “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.”

Perhaps the faith to which Jesus is speaking isn’t some abstract faithfulness in the heart of the Centurion or even the devoted hearts of his friends, but that this very moment is infused with faith. In this space in which these friends bring before Jesus this audacious request, this inexplicable belief they have that it might work, that they are all doing this as one mighty act—that is the expression of faith that provokes Jesus.

Jesus even calls this faith unrecognizable—that it hasn’t been witnessed in even Israel. It isn’t what they believe that matters, but how. That it is not a silent, solo act of piety, but a communal moment of tremendous faith.

And the kicker in the last line is that it doesn’t say that Jesus healed the slave. It says that when they got back, the slave was already healed.

Seeking Christ Together

What we can’t know from the text is the physics of the healing; the how; the means. We don’t even get the certainty that Jesus Himself is responsible. He doesn’t touch the man. He isn’t caught whispering some incantation.

We get a picture of Jesus encountering a unique act of incredible faith on the behalf of what we can only describe as a blessed community. The Centurion’s friends, bringing his needs to Jesus. And after this, we discover the slave is already healed.

Our challenge in this story is that our North American, rugged individualistic ethos gets in the way of demonstrating such profound faith as community. But this story gives us a way in.

The faithfulness of the community in carrying the needs of another to Jesus is the one truly demonstrable act in the whole story. And it is the one thing we know we need to do. That it isn’t enough to believe in Jesus or love our neighbors, but that we carry their needs to Jesus. Many of us are used to praying for our friends. Praying for their healing; praying in the midst of their pain; praying for comfort or wisdom.

What if we speak those prayers out loud with others? Perhaps our true power, our ability as the blessed community of St. Paul, is made manifest in a moment like that. A moment of true faith together, for others. A moment that might provoke from Jesus, “not even in Israel have I found such faith as in St. Clair.”

Choosing Sacraments

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[This is the third of three posts about the sacraments. Click the links to read the first about the sacraments and the second about their messy history.]

If you recall, a sacrament is the “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.” Or the physical means by which we receive the spiritual grace of GOD. The sacraments, particularly Baptism and Eucharist, are our most common ways of receiving that grace. Lest we believe they are so neat and tidy, we covered six questions we persistently have about the sacraments, which reveals wide disagreements about their intention and nature. Now, let’s explore what it means to choose how we understand the sacraments. I’ll speak specifically to Baptism.

In the early church, baptism was practiced with two very different, though related ideas: that it was a transformation of a person and that it was the means by which one enters the Christian community. In those early years, this made a great deal of sense, as nearly all the early converts were adults and their participation in community could be stalled until they had been properly prepared. Soon after this, however, churches began to receive entire families, causing the people to decide whether or not to baptize children and infants. Many did and many didn’t. This decision brought with it problems for those two primary purposes:

  1. Infants have no sin to reject and cannot reject it themselves anyway.
  2. Entrance into the community was often still restricted after baptism.

The very foundation of baptism is shaken. Excuses for preferred methods are made (and still made) to defend why or why not infants should be included. However, in baptizing infants in the first place, we have opened the door to a new way of understanding community that doesn’t allow, in many cases for that early understanding of the sacrament to stand. What becomes particularly plain for us is that one of these understandings is easier to maintain in this way than the other. We can speak for very young children, but we can’t train them as if they were adults. And if we believe they are members in baptism, then restricting them or denying them Eucharist is sacramentally inconsistent.

Generation after generation has redefined the very nature of baptism, and particularly how it is used and for whom. It appears that much of the way we have redefined baptism have been based first on practical understanding followed by a theological defense. Remember that with the changing of who gets baptized (not just adults, but children, and infants in particular), the training of the new Christian is the piece that gets moved and altered. We have shifted much of that burden to the sacramental act of confirmation.

I am moved by the idea that we may need to make a conscience decision about sacraments based on making either a principal of practical consideration or theological witness of primary order. Not that we act without consideration to either, but that we recognize that our decisions must be either grounded in theology and practical application must be discovered or that they are decided for practical purposes and theological defenses are constructed.

As it is, the temptation to backtrack to the ancient traditions or to maintain mideival constructs is so strong, that we must consider our core traditions with fidelity or appropriate understanding.

My gut tells me that I rather have an imperfect sacrament born out of outstanding theological work than a great sacrament with a flimsy theological basis. What do you think?

Jesus’s Prayer for Unity

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a Sermon for Easter 7C

Text: John 17:20-26

Listen to the Audio here: Jesus’s Prayer for Unity

A hopeless prayer

If you are ever self-conscious about praying in public, don’t be. Just remember how the writers of the gospel we call John portray Jesus:

The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

And that’s like the second time he said that. John isn’t doing Jesus any favors with this gobbledy gook. Can you at least string together a coherent sentence? Then you’re good.

In spite of this rambling style, Jesus is praying for three things: understanding, intimacy, and unity.

Understanding: that they might know GOD and what GOD is doing.

Intimacy: that GOD, Jesus, and the people may be “in” one another—that they may be so close that they are joined.

Unity: that all of us may be brought together as one.

This begs the question: if even Jesus’s prayer for unity is not answered, then what hope do we have?

We are not one

Clearly we aren’t one. And despite what many would have us believe, we never were.

From the earliest moments after Jesus’s ascension, His followers had different things to say about Him and His ministry. They spread around the region with their own takes on the Jesus Event. We inherit four different gospels from four different communities, with four different sets of priorities.

Even the great councils of the first millennium, which produced our creeds, among other things, were not moments of great unity, but sources of division. They didn’t gather to determine what we do believe, but rather, eliminate what we don’t.

As a church and as a culture, we don’t seem united at all. In fact, we seem all the more divided. Divided by interpretation of scripture, theology, and ethics; how we treat each other, the outsiders, and the enemies; how we minister to the sick, the suffering, and the disadvantaged. Our churches, our communities, our politics, our neighborhoods, our schools, our civic organizations are all divided. We are not one.

Going back to the skipped steps

Of course, we are looking for that unity by skipping steps.

Jesus prays not only for unity, but for three things:

understanding, intimacy, and unity

Jesus says

Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you, and these know that you have sent me.

Jesus knows GOD. He understands what GOD is about. He doesn’t say that the disciples understand. He seems to say that they get Jesus and they get that He has intimacy with GOD. But that He, Jesus, will build a bridge to that intimacy.

I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.

So Jesus helps reveal who GOD is to those that follow Him. He makes GOD more vulnerable by stripping away the layers of mystery and distance—the things that create power and separation. Jesus does this because there is no other way to have intimacy with GOD, or anyone, without vulnerability.

And through intimacy, we become one. Not uniform. Not identical. Not subservient to a single, dominant bureaucracy. Not ordered—with first and last. One.

In blessed community

Our problem isn’t unity, its intimacy. And to be fair, we should probably do some work at understanding, while we’re at it. We’re a culture of proud know-it-alls. Our men don’t stop for directions and our women don’t want an honest response to “does this make me look fat.”

Even our churches are places which shun intimacy. We want to look good, we attack mistakes, and punish the vulnerable. But Jesus gives us a way out. A way of His being vulnerable to us, that we might be vulnerable to one another. Two examples from earlier in the night were washing feet and anointing for burial.

As followers of Christ, we learn about GOD’s ways that they may become our own. Ways of love and vulnerability. Ways of generosity and sacrifice. That we might find an intimacy that is not of this world, but one that might be sanctified by GOD.

That we, gathering in blessed community, learning the name of GOD, becoming close to one another, may become one.

Jesus Verbs

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a homily for Ascension Day

Text: Luke 24:44-53

The Ascension is pretty much the hardest part of the Jesus Event for the post-Enlightenment world to get. It seems as if we can suspend our disbelief only so far. And the Ascension is just too much.

And yet, we might be asking the wrong question.

Listen to the whole thing here: Jesus Verbs

A Parting Gift

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a Sermon for Easter 6C

Text: John 14:23-29

lonely tree

 Jesus the Rambler

In the gospel we call John, Jesus is a rambler. Again this week we are in the farewell discourse that runs through chapters 13-16. It is Thursday of Holy Week and Jesus is giving the final teachings. And He seems to have slipped into repetitiveness and circular arguments. He is going away but He is still here. It is so metaphysically confusing, we might not know which way is up.

This week, we get a tangle of familiar elements: love, loss, presence, relationship: elements we’ve been tangling with for several weeks.

Just before our reading, in verses 18-20, Jesus says:

“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”

What a powerful testimony. “I will not leave you orphaned”.

Throughout this section, Jesus is giving them assurance. He is announcing what is to happen and assuring them that they need not fear it. We hear these words as comforting, but I wonder if the disciples did. I wonder if these words didn’t frighten them more. Like a parent telling the children not to worry, we’ll be back soon.

Not so comforting

In dealing with this we might also be tempted to dwell on the timing. The day before His crucifixion, Jesus says I’m leaving, but I’ll be back. Reading this now, in Easter, when Jesus has come back, we may ear this as the resurrection. That, in rising from the dead, Jesus has fulfilled this claim and returns for a time to be with his disciples.

Later this week, on Thursday, we celebrate the Ascension, when Jesus leaves again.

We believe that Jesus died and was raised. And we usually stop there, making the stories of Jesus’s return and ascension less considered. As if the death and resurrection was the entirety of the story. Much of Christian theology has been obsessively concerned with and reduced all of our belief to the ramifications of those two moments. Are we then to take Jesus’s second departure as the permanent one? Jesus’s claim that He won’t leave us orphaned rings hollow when we recognize that Jesus goes away…twice. And, in the narrative at least, stays away.

And to add insult, He seems to leave behind a babysitter in the Holy Spirit. No offense to the Spirit, but when a kid feels abandoned, some replacement Mom just isn’t enough.

Who is the Advocate?

The word used here is Advocate. The Greek is “Paraclete” which seems to have a legal application here. A legal advocate, like an aid, counselor, or lawyer. The word also has a physical association of “standing next to”. Of being with someone, by them, in the midst of adversity. This is a more telling understanding than we know, for in departing from us, Jesus will take with him future teaching, leaving behind only His past teaching.

And yet, Jesus focuses on his disciples knowing that teaching. In verse 15, which kicks off this section, Jesus says “If you love me, you will keep my commandments”. This, of course, is almost immediately after giving the command to love one another. Keep what I have taught you he seems to say, and the Holy Spirit will dwell within you. Jesus can say to His disciples that they won’t be orphaned because GOD will take up residence within those who continue to follow Jesus after the physical form goes away.

What Jesus leaves behind and continues to give is not order or structure or rules or advice or tips or pithy words of encouragement, but peace. Something that can’t be bought or sold or manufactured or mass-produced or copyrighted or made proprietary or grown organically or bartered or given away. It isn’t born here or made here. It is given to those who know GOD and let GOD take up residence within them.

Gift giving

What Jesus is promising to us is way bigger than we think, and certainly beyond what the disciples were worried about. They worried that their messiah was going away. Jesus tells them He isn’t really leaving, so there is certain comfort in that assurance.

But Jesus’s presence signals a change. Like last week, in which we explored the new power of the community, born of the Spirit, to succeed Jesus in ministry, Jesus is setting us up for a new understanding. An understanding that is not trapped in a historical event or encased in the amber of analysis, but lived out in the experience of living a present relationship with the divine. That in following Jesus, we have within us what others do not. We have purpose. We have love. We have peace.

And most importantly, inside of us, we have GOD.

These things, this relationship, cannot be taken away or destroyed. We have what we need. We have the Paraclete beside us and GOD within us.

It begins with remembering what Jesus has taught us. About love, relationship, and sacrifice. So we remember.

Not Free to Think

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A short reflection on race, geopolitics, theology, and the role of the church in faith.

Growing up in the church, I have long felt both at home in the church and like a resident alien. What some classify as evoking transcendent timelessness, I have often seen as dated and inaccessible.

When exploring other ways of being church, I have often found the presence of this same sense, that as time goes by, the church isn’t aging well. It’s clothes poorly fit. It’s tendencies to be a “straight-shooter” now sound like the cranky ramblings of an addled old man. Or perhaps the kindly woman, hunched over; delicate and well-groomed.

Just not vibrant. Lively. Vivacious.

Sort of like looking at my music collection, which used to expand weekly, then monthly, and now annually. My favorite album, loveless by My Bloody Valentine was released in 1991. It’s sound is quite timeless—as it was truly sonic perfection—but my listening to it, even at home, cooking dinner, dates me. It holds me back to a time in my past in which such discovery was so pertinent and essential to my understanding of life itself. Now, I am a musical dinosaur.

In this way, the church has so often been tempted into diving headlong into the hasty decision of being the place for the dinosaurs or the place for the youth. And sometimes they make the slightly wiser decision to be the place of transcendence—and yet still fall into the trap of trying to escape the quicksand by adding more dirt or water to the mix, rather than allow themselves to be freed.

Growing dishonesty

Several years ago, I read a book called The Dishonest Church by Jack Good. It is a charmingly prophetic book, in the honest sense of the meaning. It is written by a pastor, raised in the modern world and he has a modernist mindset. He argues that the main problem in the mainline is that we learn one thing in seminary and teach something different to the parish. That, for at least a generation or more, we have failed to teach our congregations effectively and honestly.

He then breaks it down along liberal and conservative lines and discusses the issue in a binary way, which I essentially reject. But his charge is profound: that in not sharing what we have learned, the pastors of the church have been dishonest.

Many of us in church know this to be true and yet have trouble figuring out what to do about it. When we get 80 people worshiping on a Sunday and then 6 to join a Wednesday study group, parish leaders can easily feel defeated. I do.

This is our work, however. Doing ministry in this context, means that we are dealing with a church that is shrinking across the board, a society that is post-Christian, and a religious landscape that has become calcified by a partisan divide. That is our current condition, but it need not be our reality.

A new focus

Reading an article by Christian Piatt yesterday, which was a reflective piece about the place of race, radical theology, geopolitics, and religious influence in our current milieu and I was struck by how much I agreed with it on so many levels and yet took great issue with its conclusion. Piatt seems to be arguing for a greater place for “practical” stuff in the academic. Or, at least, that this is the source of our divergence. But I’ve long thought the opposite. We need more space for the academic in the practical sphere. This is all based on our comfort with responding to one simple question:

Why?

Why do we do this? Why should I care? Why are we here? Why does GOD care if I eat bacon or drink alcohol or dance or have sex or                       ?

Why?

And the church has so long ignored these questions; more like avoided them; in two ways.

  1. We prescribe what to believe. Rather than give a response that allows people to better understand what we are doing, we give a formulation to memorize and regurgitate. We don’t deal with the task of answering the hard, yet simple question “why?”
  2. We focus on “practical” stuff. We plan for our ceremonies and we get our people to do the “right” things and stand in the “right” places. We run around sitting with people as they are dying. We give food away at the food pantry. We go out and we do all of this stuff. But do we do this because of what Jesus commands or because we have figured out why?

Instead of dumbing down the faith to be easily practiced, we should be building it up. Instead of prescribing what we ought to believe, we should be making belief.

Uncovering Love

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a Sermon for Easter 5C
Text: John 13:31-35

Love Each Other. Too Obvious?

Sometimes we have a selection from scripture that is too obvious. We understand where Jesus is going and what He’s getting at. Today is one of those days.

Jesus gives a new commandment, something he pretty much never does outside of this, and says “love one another.” Something so simple, direct, sensible.
“Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
and
“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

What’s our action? Love each other. Our calling card? Love each other. How does the world recognize us? We love each other.

This is so clear, so ready for us. What makes much less sense to us is how Jesus gets to that revelation. Let’s think of Jesus as a teacher in front of the classroom, standing at the blackboard. He is explaining a theorem in calculus and we are sitting there, eyes glazed like donuts. Then he arrives at the solution and we snap out of it. The pencils leap up and we all write out the solution. “Love.” There! We found it!

This makes a certain amount of sense on its own. Most of us have gone through the lectionary and heard these things before. We have lived lives of faith. We aren’t in basic math—or at least matriculated from that years ago. Perhaps we can just get some tips for better living. That might help. Preferably something easy. We’re simple people, after all. We like that “love” stuff.

Timing the Glorification

You can see that this story is from Chapter 13 in John, which takes place on that auspicious Thursday. Jesus washes the disciples’ feet. Judas leaves to betray them. Jesus gives them his only command: to love. They eat.

Throughout this gospel, Jesus makes reference to the hour of glorification (including 4:23, 7:30, 12:16, 12:23) not yet here, and now Jesus announces that this is that hour: “Now the Son of Man has been glorified”.

This is that moment. And for us to understand that command to love, we have do the work. That means dealing with this moment and glorification.

Protestants argue that Jesus’s glorification comes through the cross. Friday. In the death and the blood, Jesus becomes the vehicle by which we might all be saved. At the point of death, therefore, is the moment of victory.

Catholics argue that Jesus’s glorification comes through the resurrection. Sunday. In defeating death, Jesus destroys death. That, in rising from the dead, Jesus’s true glory is found, therefore we celebrate the arrival of victory.

Anglicans, I suppose split the difference. Saturday?

And yet Jesus announces that He has been glorified as of Thursday. How is that possible?

The Overlapping Events

I think it has to do with this moment. If I understand His work, Jesus is saying here:
1) The Son of Man has been glorified and
2) In him, GOD has been glorified.
3) If this is the case, then
4) GOD will glorify the Son of Man in himself immediately.

This moment is Jesus’s final teaching, His final moment of intimacy with His followers. A moment that begins with service, humbly cleaning his disciples’ feet in a ritual of purification. Then Jesus announces what Judas has planned and tells him to go do it. Then He commands them to love each other. Then he foretells Peter’s denial, speaks of GOD and the Holy Spirit and of many more things. He says they are not servants, but friends.

It seems that what has happened is that this last time of intimacy, of service and sharing and love is the moment of glorification. Because they are ready. It isn’t about Jesus anymore, but His followers.

This is why He tells them that they can’t follow where He is going, but that they will. I will no longer be with you, but when you get together, I will be there.

The Jesus Event will soon be done, but the event it inspires has already begun. How will we know this is the case? By followers loving each other.

Our Inheritance and Our Mission

This isn’t some spiritual guru do-gooder with a self-help message saying good things happen to people when they love. It is Jesus reminding us that we have taken over for Him. That we are doing GOD’s work here. And that we know we’re on the right track when we love each other. When we wash each others feet. When we pitch in when someone loses a job. When we are eager to help our children know what it means to be loved, rather than scolded or scorned.

Jesus tells us that this work requires that we act together. We can’t be Christians alone, but we can be the only Christian in a room.

We are the inheritors of that event. We aren’t telling people about a Palestinian Jew who died 2000 years ago, but a Lord who liberates us today—whose power flows through us when we gather in service and worship.

We are also the builders and the creators of a new event. An event for here and now. For this community and this people. We are not protecting precious artifacts, but making new, holy icons of our faith. Icons written by our love.

For when students become teachers, their teachers are glorified.