Bearing Fruit.

John 15:1-27.

I.

            This reading is a part of Jesus’ long, last discourse to his disciples before he is arrested.  They are in the upper room in Jerusalem where he has just washed their feet as a sign of servant leadership.  He gives them this example of how they are to serve one another, even to the point of humiliation and acting like a slave, bowing down to each other and washing the parts of the body that got most dirty: the feet.

            Then, after predicting Peter’s denial, Jesus talks for 4 whole chapters with barely a break.  It’s like he is trying to get as much teaching into their heads as he can before he dies, like a mother going on a trip, hastily giving last-minute instructions to the baby-sitter before she gets in the taxi….

            In chapter 14 he talks a lot about his death and departure.  We often read parts of that chapter at funerals.  Here in chapter 15 he changes the focus to the disciples and how they are to act going forward.

            The image he uses is a grapevine and its branches.  He says he is the grapevine, and the disciples are the branches.  God is the vineyard keeper.  The disciples are supposed to produce fruit: Grapes, which were used to make wine.  Unproductive branches, branches that don’t produce fruit, are removed by the vineyard keeper.  Those are worthless and they are burned.  Productive branches get pruned and trimmed so they produce more fruit.  This is supposed to focus the energy of the branch so it produces fruit rather than, I guess, leaves, or it keeps the branch from producing a high volume of mediocre fruit, helping it produce a smaller volume of much better fruit. 

            We have a bonsai tree at home, and I have learned that this pruning thing is an art.  Cutting off a branch in one place doesn’t necessarily mean the other branches will grow more.  Sometimes it means a new, stronger branch will grow where the cut is.  I still haven’t figured it out.

            Jesus’ point is that disciples have to be productive, they have to bear fruit, in order to be rendered worthy to stay on the vine.  He says, “You are already trimmed because of the word I have spoken to you.”  So this pruning happens to the disciples by Jesus’ teachings.  When their lives are reshaped according to Jesus’ words, then they are more fruitful and may stay connected to Jesus. 

            His teachings help the disciples to stay on the right path, not to wander out into other ways, not to dissipate their energy with trivialities.  They are to stay focused and use Jesus’ teachings as their guide.  If a disciple gets too distracted and spreads the vine’s energy too thin, it becomes unfruitful and even dies.  Then it gets cut off and thrown in the fire.  We don’t have to imagine hell or anything.  It’s just that an unfruitful branch/disciple is being shaped by Jesus words or expressing Jesus’ energy, and is therefore has no reason to be connected to the vine.

II.

            This whole thing hinges on what it means to “bear fruit.”  What does it mean to be productive as a disciple of Jesus Christ?  Keeping the commandments does not appear to be the end and goal here; that is the way the branch is shaped and disciplined so it may bear more fruit.  But keeping the commandments is not the same as bearing fruit.

            In other words, Jesus does not come to announce and impose a new law, a new set of written instructions, the diligent obedience to which itself constitutes salvation.  He does give us commandments and he expects those commandments to be obeyed.  But these are a matter of shaping the disciples so they can do something else.  His commandments are a means to an end, which is what he calls bearing fruit. 

            Christ’s energy, which flows from God, through him, into his disciples, as from a vine to its branches, is love.  Keeping his commandments enables the disciples to “remain in” his love.  That is, his love flows from him into us.  The connection is maintained.  The point of keeping the commandments is to remove any blockages, and stay focused, so that his love fills us, and enables us to bear fruit.

            And the bearing of fruit, finally, means that this love is expressed and done and accomplished, first of all, within the gathering of disciples itself.  The disciples are to share and live this love, which they receive from Jesus, with each other, even to the point of giving up their lives for each other, as Jesus is about to literally give up his life for them.  In other words, what comes to the disciples as an energy from the Lord Jesus, and then shapes them by their obedience to his commandments, is then embodied and expressed in real actions in actual relationships among the community of believers.

            “This is my commandment,” he says, “That you love one another as I have loved you.”  All the writings of the early churches that were taught by the apostle John, have in common this preeminent concern for the love that disciples have for each other.  I think the main message is that if we who follow Jesus can develop communities of love, if we can learn to love each other with Christ’s love, that in itself will shine like a light into the world.  That will be attractive.  It will attract new disciples, and, as chapter 15 goes on to say, it will also attract the world’s hatred.

            But the point is to build this community, this collective, energized by the love of Christ, all connected to Christ, in which we express that love by showing love – which means generosity, patience, forgiveness, humility, forbearance, empathy, affection, and even sacrifice – for the good of the other participants in the gathering of disciples.

            If we bear such fruit first on the vine, then the vinegrower will take the grapes and use them to spread and share love to the whole world.  That is, God will take the love that we have for each other in the gathering of disciples and use it as a way to heal, redeem, and save the whole world.

III.   

            Not that the world will necessarily appreciate it.  Jesus reminds us that the expected reaction of the world to the love the disciples have for each other is hatred.  Jesus’ disciples should expect the world to react to them the same way it reacted to Jesus.  That is, the fear, anger, shame, rejection, and violence.

            Nevertheless, the disciples are charged with testifying by the power of the Holy Spirit, who is still to come.  Jesus refers to the Spirit as the Advocate, “the Spirit of Truth who comes from the Father.”  The Spirit testifies on behalf of Jesus, and inspires the disciples to testify as well.  They have been with him since the beginning and they know the whole story.  Now they are empowered to tell it.

            We are now the disciples, of course, and what we are to testify to is what the original disciples were to testify to, which is God’s love revealed and poured into the world in Jesus Christ.  So this testimony is the outward expression into the world by the disciples of God’s love.

            We testify to what we have experienced and know together.  We do not testify to hypotheses and theories; we do not testify to hearsay; we do not testify to wishful thinking.  We testify to what we have experienced in the gathering of disciples, which is to say, the church.

            You’ll notice how a lot of this hinges on what happens among the disciples in the church, in congregations.  This is the place where Jesus’ command to “love one another” takes place.  This is where we are supposed to experience God’s love in the love we have for each other.  If we don’t experience God’s love here, with these people, then we aren’t likely to experience it anywhere. 

            Every time the word “you” appears in John 15 it is plural.  We receive God’s love as individual branches tapped into the vine, Jesus; but the branches are a single body with the vine.  And the way we experience God’s love is when we share it together.  In fact, we don’t really experience it at all until we share it.  Until it flows through us to someone else, we don’t have it at all.  And the first place where this happens is in the congregation of believers.

            This means that an awful lot depends on how we relate to each other in this fellowship.  And how we relate to other discples of Jesus.  For the church of Jesus Christ is not like any other group of people.  We are different members, but of one body.  We are branches connected to the same vine, which is Christ.  We have identical spiritual DNA, as it were.  Any sense we have of being separate and independent is superficial and illusory.  We can only think that if we forget that we all receive our life and energy from the same vine, which we see when we are fed at the same table with the One Lord’s body and blood, coming from the one cup and the one loaf.

IV.

            So, Jesus calls us to be one.  He calls us to love each other just as he loved us, whole-heartedly, unconditionally, without reservation.  By the love we have for each other, the world will know that we are Jesus’ disciples. 

            What can we do to cultivate this love for each other?  What can we do so that the world will hear our testimony?  What can we do to express the truth that we are all branches of the One Vine, Jesus Christ, in whom the love of God is revealed?

            I do think we can help each other keep Jesus’ commandments.  We can encourage each other when the world gets us down.  We can correct, teach, support, and heal each other.  We can listen to, accept, forgive, and welcome each other.  We can laugh and cry with each other, pray with and for each other, and hold each other.

            We can create a safe place where questions can be asked, fears expressed, longing articulated, pain shared, and trust learned.  We can communicate with, engage, and empower each other.  And over time we can see how we are changing and growing in faith and strength, together.

+++++++                                      

                                                                                                                                                 

                       

             

  

It's Up to Us.

Mark 16:1-8. (Resurrection.)

I.

Most scholars believe that this is the original ending to the gospel of Mark.  Kind of leaves us hanging, doesn’t it?  The women say nothing to anyone out of fear.  The gospel thus ends with fear and silence.  What a let-down!  On a day like today, with tremendous music, and flowers, and a celebratory atmosphere.  “They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

We may want a better ending.  This ending certainly feel inadequate... which is why later believers probably found it necessary to add different more satisfying conclusions to the gospel.            

But let’s reflect on why the women were paralyzed.  It was due to fear.  Fear is the great enemy of the gospel.  I think fear is the great enemy of life, and has led us into more tragedy and heartbreak, atrocity and horror, than anything else.

In this case, perhaps the women were afraid because they didn’t want to be rejected as crazy or scolded for making up a bizarre story.  They didn’t want to be accused of stealing Jesus’ body themselves.  They didn’t want to be the witnesses to someone else’s crime of stealing his body; that would make them targets of whomever did it.  They had a lot of reasons for fear.

But they also had reasons for hope.  They don’t just witness an empty tomb.  They are given an interpreter: The strange “young man, dressed in a white robe” tells them the good news that Jesus has been raised, and that he will meet his disciples in Galilee.

We, however, probably don’t respond to this story with fear, at least at first.  What’s to fear?  We are here with our families, friends, and neighbors, on a joyous holiday.  Many of us are wearing our best clothes.  We’re looking forward to a nice dinner.  The most we have to be afraid of might be whether the whole family gets along all day.

In terms of this story, we have two-thousand years of domestication under our belt.  We have heard this story so often that any danger or uncertainty or mystery has been thoroughly wrung out of it.

Fear is destructive.  But even fear is less destructive and toxic and corrosive than apathy, over-familiarity, domestication, and complacency.  Fear at least has some energy to it.  It is far worse if we have placed this story in a glass case like a museum artifact, or in a cage like an exotic pet bird.  If it is something we think we know, control, possess, and wear, like a comfortable old jacket, then we have missed the point.

Fear would be a better reaction.  If someone were to come up to me and say this story scared them, I would think that there is at least some hope for that person.

II.

This story turns our world upside-down.  Dead bodies are not supposed to just walk away.  Young men in white robes do not usually appear out of nowhere to explain things to us.  Huge rocks do not roll themselves away.

What the women see that morning was a different world, a world in which the conventional rules did not apply.  It was a world, for instance, where dead people did not stay dead.

Let’s face it, if you can’t depend on death, what can you depend on? 

If we were to suddenly wake up in a different world, with different laws and different rules, that ought to get our attention.  That ought to inspire at least some concern, if not fear.  If everything we’ve always known and depended on is now inoperative and void, what do we do?  How do we know how to act? 

The resurrection forces us to finally come to grips with the question: What if the world really is like this?  What if death really doesn’t have any power over us, what if it is not the end, termination, extinction, and barrier that we have always thought it was?  And if that is the case, then what if everything Jesus taught and did was, you know, like, true? 

What if violence really doesn’t solve anything?  What if the gentle really do inherit the Earth?  What if the proud really are scattered, the powerful brought down, the lowly lifted up, the hungry filled, and rich sent away empty?  What if that really is the way the universe works?

What if the empire really doesn’t always win; what if the One who always wins in the end is the God of love?  What if even the horror of crucifixion, the Empire’s most potent tool to keep people under control, what if even that didn’t work?  What if it not only didn’t work, but actually accomplished the opposite?

What if Jesus really meant everything he said?  Okay, he predicted his own death... but that was predictable and inevitable, given what he was doing.  You didn’t have to be Nostrodamus to see that one coming.  But he also predicted his resurrection, which no one understood at the time, and then it actually happens.                                             

This changes everything!  For the resurrection means we are living in a different world.  And living in a different world requires a different way of living.  If the resurrection is true, if it is an accurate depiction of reality, that is, if we are not wasting our time and effort here every Sunday morning, then a new kind of life is demanded.

If this new world is true, then it would be a disaster to continue to live in the old one.  We would be radically out of synch.  Our actions would make no sense and perhaps be unwittingly destructive.  We would continue to live in fear, be motivated by sins like anger and greed and gluttony and lust... all because we think we live in one world, one of scarcity and death, when in the real world is very different.  Indeed, we would be making this world a place of terror, injustice, and death, when it really didn’t have to be.  Imagine that!

III.

The new world revealed and ratified in Jesus’ resurrection demands a wall-to-wall transformation of a person, the community, the whole creation.  If Jesus’ resurrection is true, we can’t keep living the way we always have.  It demands a response.  It demands a witness.  It demands that we proclaim it to others, because it means that the world we have been assuming is real isn’t, and the real world is something very different.  And this is something people need to know.

Now there is something to be afraid of!  Having to give up familiar and comfortable habits and words and orders and logic and ways of relating to each other... even though they are based on lies and falsehood... even though they have had a murderous effect on people, and communities, and creation, and even our own souls and bodies.  What will people think, after all?

Here’s the choice the resurrection gives us: On the one hand, we may live in love, truth, peace, beauty, and justice... live according to the forgiving and accepting grace of God... live free of the fear of death, free of the Empire’s coercive grip, free of violence and exploitation.  We may live in the power of God’s resurrection life which permeates and fills all things and directs the whole destiny of the universe.  And we may accept and embrace the privilege of proclaiming this good news to others. 

Or, on the other hand: we may keep making bricks for Pharaoh, keep working for what does not satisfy, keep hiding in fear from the future, keep running away from death while at the same time investing in death to win, keep betting on violence to overcome violence — like that’s ever going to happen, and keep assuming that that stone is going to stay put, that body is going to keep lying there, and that these women go home with all their expectations completely fulfilled.            

The choice before us in the resurrection is spoken of by Moses at the end of the book of Deuteronomy.  “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.  Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.”

IV.

The ending to the gospel of Mark is not satisfactory.  It is not supposed to be.  Mark’s intent, I think, is that we are the ending.  We, the believers hearing the story, are supposed to be the on-going ending of the story.  If the women didn’t say anything to anyone, it is up to us to spread the good news.  It is up to us to be the good news.

So, the ball is in our court, as we say, using an analogy from tennis.  The next move is up to us.  That is pretty scary, I suppose.  I mean, we could swing and miss.  Or we could hit the ball out of bounds.  Or we could return it, only to have the opponent smash it back in our faces. 

And yes, that is the risk we take when we participate in life at all.  But this is also an opportunity!  And God’s Spirit of Truth is with us guiding us... but only if we plant our feet, keep our eye on the ball, and swing. 

To change sports metaphors, if the women at the tomb have dropped the ball out of fear, we can pick it up and keep the movement going.  We know what they do not which is that Jesus is alive!  His Spirit flows in the world.  We know that God’s love and life are the bedrock and essence of the universe. 

Yes, jumping into life is frightening and dangerous.  But it is not nearly as scary, toxic, and lethal as the alternative, which is staying where we are, doing what we have always done, thinking what we have always thought.  Choosing death is easy.

Let’s choose life!

+++++++ 

Rise Up!

Psalm 68.  (Resurrection Sunrise.)

I.

            When my son was a few months old he spoke his first word.  And the word he said is really a succinct and complete expression of the human spirit.  It is a summary of our longing and hope.  It is the fullest affirmation of trust and the most perfect prayer of someone who follows Jesus Christ.  It is an affirmation that the Lord Jesus implicitly teaches his disciples to call out with full and expectant hearts.  He stood in his crib, lifted his arms, and called out the word, “Up!”

            Our faith is nothing if it is not a hope and conviction that we will be lifted up, we will ascend, we will be raised, we will experience resurrection.  This expectation is based on the event we celebrate this morning, the event that changes everything: the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. 

            The resurrection is a revelation of the basic truth at the heart of the whole universe.  It discloses the meaning embedded in everything.  It informs us of the purpose of life, including each individual life.  And that meaning, purpose, and direction are resurrection.  Our whole life is to be a participation in God’s uprising, the ultimate triumph of life and God.              

            Even the crucifixion is described in John’s gospel as Jesus being “lifted up” on the cross, part of a single movement that culminates in his resurrection and ascension.  The resurrection is more than merely an afterthought, ratifying and validating Jesus death; without the resurrection the disciples scatter and Jesus is just another forgotten victim of Roman brutality.  The resurrection is the good news: that not even death can separate us from God’s love.  Human violence and injustice are impotent to derail even for a moment the love, blessing, justice, and peace of the living God.

            That is what we celebrate on this day.  It is literally an uprising!  It is a movement from darkness into light, from misery to joy, from despair to hope, and from death to life.  God’s coming is not an invasion from outside or above so much as it is an insurrection from below.  God wells up or emerges as from below, from within, from among us.

            Is it our earthly existence that trends down, declines, unravels, dissolves, and descends back into the dust from which we were made.  Our mortal path declines and  slides towards disorder, it loses energy and integration, it dissipates in entropy.  It falls into injustice and violence, hatred, fear, anger, greed, and shame.  It plummets inexorably into death. 

            But God’s life moves in the opposite direction.  God’s life is an ascent, a moving upward, an uprising.  In God, things are more integrated and connected and dependent and knitted together.  As separate, isolated individuals we perish, but Jesus Christ calls us into a community, a collective, a gathering, a body, in which we are raised up with him.

II.

            The great social reversal that Jesus preaches about during his whole ministry, even beginning with his mother’s hymn before he is born, is about how God leads the poor and the dispossessed, the sick and the suffering, the weak and the gentle, the outcast and the rejected, up, out of their suffering.  This is what Jesus devotes his ministry to doing.  As a healer, an exorcist, a preacher, and a community organizer, Jesus brings people up out of all kinds of bondage, brokenness, blindness and benightedness.    

            Remember what this day meant in Jesus’ time.  The resurrection happens at Passover.  This is not an accident or coincidence.  For when God raises the children of Israel up out of slavery in Egypt, it foreshadows Jesus’ resurrection, which anticipates when everyone is raised up in him from all kinds of bondage and slavery, even from death itself.  Whether it is personal slavery to addiction, despair, or ignorance, or social bondage to systems that inflict injustices, inequalities, and violence, Jesus Christ comes to raise people out of them all.

            He does this by raising up and gathering the new resurrection community, where the values and practices of the Kingdom of God are realized.  The church is supposed to be this place where the miracle and mystery of resurrection happens in the lives of people, where healing and liberation are practiced, where the downtrodden are lifted up.  And Christ breathes his own breath, the Holy Spirit of God, into this community, and he sends it into the world with the good news of God’s uprising, and he extends an invitation to all to participate in it.

            We become the community that ever sings in hope and love, “Let God arise!”  Let God’s enemies scatter and flee!  God raises up the vulnerable and the weak; God brings the desolate home and makes prisoners prosperous.  God has lifted up the lowly and filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.  God blesses the poor and the gentle, the peacemakers and the grieving and the merciful.

            And Jesus gives his church the same mission when he tells them to make disciples and teach people to obey his commandments.  Jesus says that his new community, gathered together and sent into the world, is to be like leaven mixed into a lump of dough.  The effect of the leaven on the dough is to make it… rise up!  It is to fill it with the Spirit!  It is to let the liberating power of God’s breath raise up every relationship and institution.

III.

            For the resurrection means that peace always overcomes violence, justice always overwhelms injustice, light always banishes darkness, blessing drowns out curses, forgiveness removes condemnation, and life always, always, always conquers death.  Always.

            In spite of how spectacularly the church in its history has failed at fulfilling Jesus’ example and command, in spite of how it is often most proficient at proclaiming condemnation, exclusion, despair, ignorance, and death, in spite of how the church has been used to keep people down… that history may discourage us, but, hey, Jesus’ disciples weren’t necessarily the sharpest tacks in the box either!  And it just makes the cry more urgent: “Let God arise!”  “Up!” 

            God’s uprising isn’t something that happens by our work anyway.  It is purely the activity of the Holy Spirit, with, within, and among us.  Neither is God’s uprising something that will be finished any time before the resurrection at the last day when Christ returns in glory.

            And yet in the meantime there is this anticipatory movement of God’s people who look for and share together in the good news of God’s uprising revealed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

            One ancient proclamation of the church is: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and bestowing life on those in the tomb.”   That is God’s work that we need to see happening among us.  That is God’s work in which we are called to participate by bringing people up from all kinds of degradation and bondage.  Let God arise!  Let justice and peace be done!  Let hope and goodness flourish!  Let life and love triumph!  Christ is risen!  Let God arise!

Fleeced or Fed?

Mark 11:1-25.

I.

            Jesus and his disciples come into the city of Jerusalem with great fanfare.  Mark says they “went into the Temple,” and then just “looked around at everything,” but it was late in the day so they went back out to Bethany.  Bethany is a couple of miles from Jerusalem, but it seems further because one has to descend deep down into the Kidron Valley and trudge up the other side.

            Early the next morning, they leave Bethany to go spend the day in the Temple.  As they are walking, Jesus sees a fig tree across the way.  He tells the disciples he is hungry, and he approaches it.  The tree is in full leaf, but there are no figs on it because, as Mark tells us, “it was not the season for figs.”

            Jesus is not being clueless or naïve here.  He knows what he is doing; he knows it is not the season for figs and that therefore there won’t be any figs on this tree.  So do his disciples.  So when he leaves the road and starts walking over to the tree, they must have looked at each other.  Obviously, this is a lesson Jesus is trying to get across to them. 

            He gets to the tree and makes a show of being hungry and looking for figs.  Then he steps back and says to the tree, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.”

            It seems rather unfair to the poor tree, to be cursed for being unproductive when it isn’t even fig season.  Cut the tree some slack, already!  What is Jesus doing?

            The Lord gives them no explanation at the time.  He comes back to the road and they resume their walk to Jerusalem, the disciples shrugging like, “Maybe he will let us know someday what that was about.”

            When they get to the city Jesus goes directly to the Temple again, just like the day before.  But this time he does more than just look around.  He immediately starts to make a disturbance.  In the Temple precincts there was this whole section where people had to go to change their money – because regular Roman coins were considered graven images and therefore prohibited in the Temple – and where people would buy sacrificial birds and animals.  Jesus goes berserk.  He’s yelling, he’s turning over tables so that coins are flying and rolling all over the place; he’s setting birds free and generally causing a frightening commotion. 

            We don’t know if the disciples got into the act, but we do know that Jesus was applauded by the common people, who experienced these money changers and animal sellers as an exploitative racket and general rip-off.  At this point, Jesus is meeting the expectations of anyone who might have thought he had come to Jerusalem to spark a revolution.

II.

            While he is doing this, and probably after he was done and finds a place to sit and give more formal instruction, Mark says Jesus was “teaching the people.”  In these actions he intends to set an example for people; he is teaching the people to do as he does.  Neither are they to tolerate the presence of bankers, loan sharks, and other religious profiteers in the Temple.

            Jesus’ basic message here is to remind everyone that in Scripture God says of the Temple, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations.”
   But, he says, the authorities have turned it into a den of robbers, yet another scheme for enriching the already rich.

            The Temple is supposed to be a place where the people get fed, spiritually and literally.  It is supposed to be a place where worshipers from all over the world may come to pray.  It is supposed to be a font of God’s grace, flowing into the world through the people.           

            But instead, it has been turned into a place where people get fleeced, robbed, exploited, and otherwise relieved of their money.  Mark specifically mentions Jesus’ activity in the parts of the facility where sacrificial birds were sold.  Birds were the offering of poor people who could not afford lambs or other more expensive animals.  Jesus is most concerned about robbing from the poor.

            The sacrificial cult in the Temple was thus a racket designed to steal from people who were least able to pay.  And it also constituted a crime against nature.  With all these animals being slaughtered, there are ancient accounts indicating that one problem was what to do with all the blood.

            Then there is the whole theology of sacrifice itself.  With the exception of the birds offered by his parents at his birth and the lamb that was procured for this Passover, there is no record of Jesus making or sharing in any sacrifices.  That’s what people come to the Temple for, and yet Jesus not only declines to participate, but makes this big scene.

            Some scholars believe that sacrifice rituals developed by humans over time as a way to create social unity by focusing violence on one person rather than on each other.  This eventually evolved into a system where animals were used as substitutes for people.  But human societies continue to “sacrifice” people in less formalized ways, like lynching, even today.

            Jesus comes to smash that whole apparatus.  He does it eventually by offering himself as the final sacrifice, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, the once-and-for-all sacrifice which ultimately expresses the trajectory of the Scriptures in which God identifies, not with the society and its leaders who manufacture an artificial social unity by putting scapegoats to death, but with the scapegoats, the losers, the excluded, and the lynched themselves.

III.

            Jesus recognizes the sacrificial system as a bloody racket that glorified violence and misrepresented god as a bloodthirsty deity whose mindless wrath needed constantly to be appeased with ever greater quantities of blood.  For pointing this out, Jesus draws down upon himself the wrath of the chief priests and the scribes, who at this point were convinced that for the sake of domestic tranquility they had to make a sacrifice out of him.   

            But the authorities are still afraid of the people, who are transfixed by Jesus’ preaching and inspired by his revolutionary message and actions.  So they leave him alone as he teaches and preaches in the Temple.  They skulk off to figure out some kind of plan to get rid of him.

            When it starts to get late, Jesus and his disciples prepare  to leave the Temple to go back over to Bethany.  In the gathering darkness, they make the long, 40 minute walk.

            The next morning, bright and early, they are up and leaving Bethany again.  On their way to the city, the disciples notice the fig tree Jesus spoke to the day before.  The leaves are now shriveled and falling off.  It is clear that the tree had died.  Peter is the one who points this out.  “Look, Rabbi,” he says, “The fig tree you cursed has withered.”

            “Yes,” replies Jesus.  “Trust in God.  Prayer rooted in absolute trust in God is extremely powerful.  Truly I tell you, if you were to say to this mountain” – and here he may have pointed ahead of them to the very mountain to which they were headed, the mountain upon which the Temple was built, which is to say this particular mountain, this mountain representing the religion, the site of sacrifice and atonement, the focus of Israel’s hope and faith – “if you were to say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and you do not doubt but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you.”

            So Jesus connects the fig tree to “this mountain,” the Temple mount.  What he has demonstrated in microcosm with the tree is what he is in the process of doing in macrocosm with the Temple.  The Temple is also “out of season,” which is to say that its time has past, the efficacy of centralized, priestly, sacrificial worship is over.  It is not producing fruit; it is not feeding God’s people or nourishing them spiritually; it has become a superficially beautiful yet completely ineffective institution.  Hungry people who come to the Temple will not be fed.  And they never will be.  When Jesus speaks to the tree he is really speaking to the Temple when he says, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.”  It wasn’t a curse, as the disciples assumed, so much as a statement of fact.  The institutional religion of the Temple is finished.

IV.

            Instead of sacrifice; instead of this attempt to appease an angry, vindictive God; instead of choosing some weak loser as the focus of our wrath and killing them; instead of developing priestly, intercessory institutions, Jesus says true faith, real trust in God, is about prayer.  “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours,” he says. 

            So prayer is not about what we don’t have but must propitiate and beg God to give to us even though we don’t deserve it.  Prayer is not based on our consciousness of scarcity and lack.  Prayer is not a matter of getting God’s attention so God will do what we want.  

            On the contrary, prayer is about realizing, actualizing, verifying, and participating in what God has already done and is already doing, and is always doing for everyone, all the time.  Prayer is a trust in God that God has already provided everything we need and desire.  Prayer is not an attempt to change God but a way to change ourselves so we can perceive and participate in the benefits and blessings we have already been given.

            Then Jesus adds one final little but very important lesson about prayer.  It has to do with forgiveness, or release.  He says this here because the most powerful force preventing us from perceiving and participating in the benefits God has already given is our insistence on holding on to people’s wrongs against us.  This retention of anger, fear, resentment, hurt; this dwelling on bad memories and desire for retribution or vindication; this cherishing our pain, is the strongest blockage and hindrance to prayer.  Prayer only works if we let go of all that.

            Prayer only works if we release bad memories of the past and fear of the future.  Prayer only works if we are open to what God is doing right now, and if we see our past and especially our future in terms of blessing, peace, justice, and grace.  Prayer is letting go of this garbage blocking the flow of grace in and through us, so that we can see and participate in the truth of God’s love for the world revealed in Jesus Christ.

V.

            In the coming week, Jesus will finish off the sacrificial system by offering his own life for the life of the world.  He will identify with the lynched, the scapegoats, and the victims of human violence, fulfilling the role John the Baptizer gave him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  He will expose the heartless and cynical violence of the powers that maintain their order and wealth on the backs of suffering people.  And he will reveal the unfathomable depths of God’s love for us all.

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"Taste and See."

Psalm 34.

I.

            When Psalm 34 says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good,” it draws our attention to the experiential nature of faith.  Historically, we Presbyterians too often imagine that faith is a purely mental, verbal, and auditory thing.  If you look at old, classic Presbyterian, Puritan, and Reformed churches, you notice how unadorned they are.  Sometimes all benches don’t even face the front, because seeing the pastor wasn’t the point, only hearing him was important.  There is very little color, few if any symbols, absolutely no pictures. 

            Even today in some churches it’s like they’re allergic to actually sensing anything.  I’ve seen baptisms where the water was barely more than a rumor, so little of it was used.  And Presbyterians used to only celebrate the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper quarterly, and then only because Jesus said you have to do it sometime, so averse are we to anything as gross and sensory as chewing, tasting, and swallowing in church.

            Fortunately, God’s Spirit has led us away from these neuroses – not that we don’t still have a ways to go – and we are no longer averse to experiencing God with our bodies and with senses other than our hearing.  When we do a baptism now the person gets wet, though we’re not dunking anybody.  And we celebrate the Lord’s Supper almost as regularly as Paul and the early church, not to mention Calvin, intended.  And when we worship, some of us even move our bodies!  So there’s that, anyway.

            Faith is to be experienced.  God comes to us through all our senses, and the effect is to know God’s goodness.  Not just know about God’s goodness, not just know God’s goodness as data or information or facts, but to really know God’s goodness in and with our bodies.

            The context of this Psalm, from its brief introduction anyway, is that David wrote it after an incident where he was in danger from a powerful enemy and managed to save his life by pretending to be insane.  He made-believe he had defective mental qualities and abilities.  (It’s in 1 Samuel 21, described somewhat graphically.) 

            I think that plays very well into the idea that we would do well to get out of our heads, even as David pretended to be out of his mind.  Maybe temporarily letting go of our mental faculties can cause us to be more open to a sensory faith.

            In the face of threats from powerful forces, I wonder if disciples might get some mileage out of putting rationality aside and just doing some apparently crazy and nonsensical things.  Certainly the Lord Jesus, while he never intentionally pretended to be insane, he was accused of insanity, even by members of his own family!  And many thought he was crazy for advocating relationships and practices that were sure to get him into trouble, not, like David, to get him out of it.

            I am reminded of how the line between holiness and insanity has always been rather blurry.

II.

            One of the reasons we are slow to open up to a more sensory and experiential faith is fear.  Fear is a big factor in that story about David.  It is fear that leads him to feign insanity.  And it is because of fear that too often we do not come out of our heads and experience life.  Life can bite.  Not everything we are invited to sense – taste especially – is good for us.  Certainly for a person of my personality, I want to do exhaustive research before I put anything in my mouth to taste it.  If someone says, “How do you know you won’t like it if you won’t try it?”  My response is, “How do I know it won’t kill me if I do taste it?”

            But the Psalm invites us to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”  How do you know how good the Lord is if you won’t take a taste?  That is, we can’t know God without tasting God, without taking God into us, without risk, without direct interaction, without allowing ourselves to sense God with our bodies.  This only happens, of course, in and through creation and the things God has made. 

            We cannot taste the Creator directly; the idea is absurd and even a little heretical.  But we can “taste God” in a sense by tasting the things God has made and placed in the creation for our benefit.  We metaphorically taste God by tasting life, by immersing ourselves in relationships and community, by feeling and sensing and experiencing… by touching the world and letting the world touch us.

            Tasting is trusting.  Tasting is believing.  There is a certain level of trust that is involved every time we put something into our mouths.  But unless we do, we starve.

            David is saying, “Stick you neck out.  Take the risk.  Interact with life.  Do something crazy.  Put your life on the line.  The only way to know how good something is, is to experience it, to taste it, to get involved with it and interact with it, to mess with it and be immersed in it.” 

            David is suggesting that we should assume goodness.  We have to assume the goodness of the Lord, as the basis for our taking a taste of what the Lord has to offer.  We have to trust the one holding out the spoon to us; we have to rest in the assurance that the Creator and Lover of all is not going to feed us poison.

            So when the Psalm talks about the fear of the Lord, it is not terror at the possibility of being punished for screwing up.  That is what we fear from humans with more power than we have.            An early Christian writer named Cassiodorus describes the fear of God this way:  “This is not fear that induces dread but that which induces love.  Human fear contains bitterness, but this contains sweetness.  The first forces us to slavery; the second draws us toward freedom.  Finally, the first fears the bars that exclude us; the second opens up the Kingdom of Heaven.”

III.

            So fear of the Lord effectively cancels out our fear of anything else.  Not only that, but it has a completely different character than our fear of anything else.  We fear things in the world because of the harm we imagine they can do to us.  So we put up our defenses, our fight-or-flight reactions come into play, and we do what we can to protect ourselves.

            But the fear of God is an awareness of God’s immense love and goodness, and the fear is that we will not get enough of it or we will be cut off from it, or that it will annihilate our imperfections so thoroughly that we will be completely dissolved into it.  We use the word fear because language is inadequate to describe this reality.  So we make an analogy and arbitrarily grab a word to use in talking about it, and by the time it trickles down to the level of our normal experience, the chosen word is so completely inadequate as to mean almost the opposite of what we meant to say.  This happens a lot when we try to talk about God.  We choose a word like “fear,” but what we really mean is some kind of transfigured, transcendant, overwhelming anti-fear.  But there’s no word for that.

            So we use the word fear, and it causes people to think that they are supposed to be afraid of God like they are afraid of some violent, cosmic bully, a reaction diametrically opposed to what we are really trying to say, or what God is really about.

            When we talk about the fear of God we really mean we are in touch with what the apostle John knows as the love of God that casts out all fear.  It is not that we are afraid of being in God’s Presence; it is more like we are afraid of falling out of God’s Presence.  So we do everything we can, by grace and the power of the Holy Spirit, to stay with God, to bend our will and transform our behavior, so that we remain in the light of God’s love, and not wander into the shadows, into nothingness.

            So the Psalm says, in verse 4, ”I sought the Lord and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears.”  So he is delivered from fear of harm.  Because “the angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear [God], and delivers them,” verse 7.  Fear of God is fearlessness in the world.  “Those who fear God have no want,” verse 9, they don’t lack for anything because in God they, in a sense, already have everything.

            And the last place fear is mentioned is verse 11, where the Psalm talks about teaching children to fear the Lord, and then gives practical advice about what this means.  First of all it appears to have to do with not speaking evil or deceit.  So much of our fear is generated and exasperated by what we say, to ourselves, and others.  The source of fear is when we start talking about and rationalizing about things, rather than simply experiencing them in their created goodness.

IV.

            Unfortunately, there are people and forces in the world who derive great benefit from our fears.  They need us to be afraid of just about everything.  We are supposed to be afraid of other people, especially outsiders and people not like us, or with whom we disagree.  And beware of anyone who makes serious money on our being afraid.  Fear is big business these days.

            The fear of the Lord, however, undermines the power that people who benefit from our being afraid of earthly things have over us.  Fear of the Lord banishes our fear of earthly principalities and powers.  People who don’t fear them make them angry because fear is the way they control people.

            So when, instead of fearing the people we’re supposed to fear, and hate, and exclude, and punish, we help them, advocate for them, befriend them, and support them, the principalities and powers who depend on our fear get nervous and angry, and even violent.  When we stand with the people with whom Jesus stands – the foreigners, the sick, the poor, the excluded and disenfranchised, the imprisoned, the hungry, the children, the debtors – we deeply offend those who depend on people being afraid of these “others.”

            The Psalm tells us “the Lord is near to the broken-hearted, and saves the crushed in spirit.  Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord rescues them from them all.”  To fear the Lord does not exempt one from having to face fearsome circumstances.  It simply means we face those circumstances without fearing them, but with courage, integrity, energy, and trust in God.

            Because in Jesus Christ we know whose side God is on.  And when the choice is between cutting yourself off from fearful human authorities and cutting yourself off from the Creator of the whole universe, well, it becomes clear which way we are bound to take.  But if we in our cowardice are more afraid of getting on the wrong side of the evil powers that we allow to control our world, that means we have forgotten God’s love and excluded ourselves from God.

            God cherishes the righteous, those who stand with God for the weak without fearing the harm that might come from any human authority.  The Psalm uses this image of “keeping their bones,” which I interpret as holding their integrity in love until the resurrection, the ultimate triumph of life.  While making ourselves merchants of fear leads quickly to nowhere.  Fear leads to destruction.

V.

            “O taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are they who take refuge in him.”  We can trust the Lord to be good; we can trust everything the Lord made to be good.  That doesn’t mean we can just go and stick anything the Lord made right in our mouths, but it does mean that if we follow the Creator’s will that peace, justice, love, and blessing be done, we will ultimately experience creation as a beautiful and wonderful place.  Not even the ire and violence of fearful human authorities can prevent or change that.  Not even death can separate us from the love of God.

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