We Do Not Belong to the World.

John 17:6-19.

First of all, I want to thank Jeff and the session for inviting me to preach today.  It has been a pleasure getting to know the members of the resolution team.  However, this works out I hope we remain sisters and brothers in our one Lord Jesus.

I.

Our passage for this morning is the second part of Jesus’ great High Priestly Prayer in John 17.  Jesus offers these words to God on the evening before his death, as a kind of prayer of consecration leading up to his sacrifice where he gives his life for the life of the world.

I am interested in what he has to say about our relationship as disciples of Jesus to “the world.”  One of the most common complaints against denominations like the PCUSA is that we have essentially abandoned the gospel and caved in to the world.  That is, instead of following Christ, we allow our agenda to be set by the latest secular fad, or the newest, most vanguard, leftist political movement.  Where Jesus talks about conquering the world, many assert that the PCUSA has allowed itself to be conquered by the world.  My colleague Jeff has suggested as much.  Repeatedly. 

In the first part of this passage, the Lord refers to the disciples as those whom God gave him from the world.  Disciples are therefore called out of the world, in the sense of being called to God and away from the values, practices, habits, traditions, politics, and economics dominant in the world.  

Jesus is focusing like a mother-bird hovering over this fragile, shaky, still fairly clueless gathering of disciples he has called together, knowing that he is placing the whole future of God’s mission into their frankly pretty incompetent and inept hands.  

Now, anticipating his status only a few hours later, he says he is “no longer in the world.”  He is returning to the Father.  He is about to be “lifted up” on the cross to draw all people to himself.  He is about take away the sin of the world.  The hour has come for him to drive out the ruler of this world.

II.

And, in leaving this gathering behind in the world, the Lord calls upon them to be one with each other even as he, the Son, is one with the Father.  In their unity in him they will find unity with and in God; they will become the continuing earthly expression of the saving presence and love of God that he himself was while he was with them.

In other words, Jesus establishes an on-going community, a community that, in the way its members cling to and support each other, continues to dwell under his protection.  And they will need protection.  The Lord knows the world is a hostile and violent place.  In binding themselves to each other as one, the disciples are binding themselves to him and therefore to God.

Now they will have to be protected, not by his physical presence, but by his remembered and enacted word.  Jesus, who is going on back to his Father,  addresses his disciples while they are still in the world so that they may have his joy complete in themselves.  What we receive from the Lord is his joy!  Joy is what is going to get them through.  

Joy comes from the knowledge that no matter what happens in the meantime, God wins in the end.  In Christ’s sacrifice, the world’s sins are taken away, the ruler of this world is defeated, God’s life is given for the life of the world, and God’s love dwells within them.  If this doesn’t produce joy in the disciples, nothing will.

Jesus says, “They do not belong to the world just as I do not belong to the world.”   He repeats that sentence for emphasis.  He is not asking God to take the disciples out of the world, but to protect them from the evil one while they are in the world.  Here is the key to the whole passage, I think.  We who belong to Christ do not belong to the world anymore than Christ does.  We do not belong to the world.  The world does not own us.  Rather, he has sent us into the world, even as the Father sent him into the world.  We are sent, as if into an alien country, into the world.

So Christ sends the church into the world equipped with and by himself, the Word of God, and his teachings and commandments.  The Word is at the same time our protection and our proclamation.  The Word shapes our lives and our gathering, and by him we witness to his casting out of the ruler of this world, and his taking away the sins of the world, indeed his conquest of the world, his drawing of all things and all people to himself, the One whom God sent into the world not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through him.

III.

In our Book of Confessions, we find this very truth affirmed in these amazing, strong, and basic words from the Declaration of Barmen: “Jesus Christ, as he is attested in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.  We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.”  We follow the Word in and into the world; we do not follow the world or the rulers of this world.

This sensibility has motivated me for my 33 years in ministry.  These affirmations have been taken with utmost seriousness and rigor by many in the Presbyterian Church (USA) over the past six or seven decades.    

It makes a difference to realize and affirm that “Jesus Christ as he is attested in Holy Scripture” is at the center of our life.  It makes a difference to invest in holding to that standard, because it subjects everything else, all those “other events and powers, figures and truths,” to withering critique.  It takes energy and courage to listen to that one Word of God when he challenges and calls us away from every sacred cow, every corrupt allegiance, every comfortable assumption, every self-serving value that had managed to sidle and sneak and bully and buy its way into our churches over the centuries.  

First of all, we sought to take the Bible even more seriously by identifying and getting away from the interpretive lenses of the world, and the past, and the assumptions and biases of conventional, self-serving theologies, and allowing the word to challenge and contradict our lives.

Then, when we looked to “Jesus Christ as he is attested in Holy Scripture,” we found someone not all that comfortable with the systems in his own day that preserved and protected by violence and coercion the privilege, inequality, wealth, and power of the elites.  We found someone who, from before he is even born, is charged with turning upside-down those regimes, and who commences his ministry by proclaiming justice and jubilee.  We found someone who makes it his business to heal the sick, raise the dead, welcome the outcast, and feed the hungry; who is notorious for including and welcoming and even identifying with all kinds of marginalized people; who infamously hangs out with tax collectors and prostitutes; and who has almost nothing positive to say about wealth or most of the other things valued by the world; and who demands that we give up our lives and follow him.  We found someone who preaches non-violence and the love of enemies.  We found someone who even overturns and cancels out much of Scripture, like the ceremonial and kosher laws.  We found someone who was crucified by the ruling authorities and powers of his day as a seditious blasphemer.

IV.

At our best, what we have tried to do is to follow this Jesus.  We looked around at our own world and we found it under the same powers of evil, and filled with the same kinds of corruption and destructive disorder, that Jesus addresses.  And we have endeavored to follow and obey this subversive radical Jesus by looking to challenge in our own day the same kinds of injustices, inequalities, violence, hypocrisies, and accretions of wealth and power that he opposed.  We have tried to identify with, serve, and include the poor, the victims, the outcast, the hungry, and the blind.  We have stood with suffering people even when it was unpopular.  We have worked for peace and non-violence.  And if we have been sometimes very slow to judge and condemn people labelled as seditious blasphemers today, maybe it is because Jesus, and we, have sometimes been given the same label.  Indeed, when the world calls you a seditious blasphemer it means we could be doing something right.  It could be because we are following the Lord.  

Thus the PCUSA has been “Christ-centered.”  Because the Jesus Christ attested in Holy Scripture is about justice, inclusion, non-violence, equality, and forgiveness.     

This journey hasn’t been pretty.  It hasn’t been easy.  It hasn’t been orderly.  It hasn’t even been particularly nice.  There were and are nasty and demonic aspects of the world that we have not given up, but chose instead of follow rather uncritically.  We have allowed ourselves to be duped by figures using violence.  We would rather trust in our often adversarial and legalistic procedures than in the Holy Spirit.  

And we have found ways to be depressingly cruel with each other, self-righteously treating sisters and brothers in Christ as enemies.  Instead of gathering around the Word together, we huddled in our separate corners where it is easier to hear what we want to hear and demonize those others.  We have spoken at each other rather than with each other.  We have allowed ourselves to be motivated by fear rather than love, and anger rather than trust.  I hope we have learned in the crucible of these difficult decades to be a lot less arrogant, self-righteous, and exclusive.  A lot of us have.  

At the same time, the Kingdom of God has been blooming here and there among us in spite of our too often faithless and malicious ineptitude.  We are changing. 

After decades of a top-heavy, corporate, bureaucratic, regulatory regime, we are now focusing on and lifting up congregations as the primary locus of mission which presbyteries exist to empower and support.  After decades of careless ineptitude in church-planting and evangelism, we have set ourselves the task of establishing new worshiping communities, of which there are now nearly 300, including one formed by this congregation.  After decades of a knee-jerk, one-dimensional ideological agenda, we are now more open to orthodox and traditional and evangelical voices in terms of spiritual practices, new liturgies and music, ecclesiology, and evangelism.  You have had more influence than you realize.

         

V.

All of this and more is a result, in my view, of a continuous response to Jesus Christ, as he is attested in Holy Scripture.  I wonder if Jesus doesn’t intend for his disciples to be an inclusive, diverse “big tent.”  Jesus even shares his last meal with, and washes the feet of Judas Iscariot, for heaven’s sake.  Yet we can’t manage to remain connected to each other? 

  Jesus assumes a community of mutually correcting and supporting oneness and unity.  The term “denomination” is not found in the New Testament.  Indeed, we are in an increasingly post-denominational age.  We need to be integrating and connecting with each other, not starting new independent entities.  We need to be exploring new kinds of networking and organization, new ways of communicating and learning from each other, new ways of conversation and discernment.  Should we really be separating off into yet more precise and exclusive grades of Presbyterian, of all things?  What kind of witness does that make?  How is that obedience to Jesus Christ as he is attested in Holy Scripture?

The Lord doesn’t call on us to agree on everything.  He calls on us to love one another as he has loved us.  He loves us by giving us his life!  And in that life he sends us into the world as his witnesses.  Whatever the Spirit has for us, may we realize in our life together the sanctification that Jesus asks for.  May we be made holy in the truth which is God’s Word, Jesus Christ.  May we be made holy together in his love and his joy and his peace.

+++++++

Walking Through Walls.

John 20:19-31.

(Note: this sermon was preached on Holy Humor Sunday.  The dashes indicate listening to the person on the other end of the phone conversation.)

It is the evening of that first Easter day, and the disciples are still huddled behind locked doors in the upper room, fearful of the authorities.

[Phone rings.]

Sorry, I have to take this.  Hello?  Yeah, I’m working here, I gotta go.  I call you back. 

—  Yeah, I’m standing here preaching.  I gotta go, talk to you later.

—  I know you’re on vacation.  I saw it on Facebook.  I’m not. 

—  What?  Why? 

—  Okay, John 20. 

—  19 through the end. 

—  So look it up yourself!  Listen, I’ll talk to you later.  

—  What?  It’s where Jesus appears to the disciples after the resurrection.  

—  That’s what it says.

—  That question is a stupid distraction from the real issue.  It assumes a modernistic, imperialistic approach to the text, and gets us exactly nowhere no matter how we answer it.  The question is not whether it really happened then; it is how it happens now.  The past is dead; truth is always present and alive.

—  Then don’t ask dumb questions.  You knew what would happen if you got me started on that.

—  The disciples have locked themselves in a room, probably the same room where they had the foot-washing thing a few days before, because they’re afraid of the police.

—  I know, but when this gospel mentions “Jews” it almost always refers not to the whole people but the rulers and authorities.

—  Obviously.  Of course they were all technically Jews.  But the followers of Jesus tended to self-identify more as “Israelites” or “Hebrews.”

—  That’s because you haven’t read Margaret Barker.

—  Nevermind.

—  No.  The point is their fear.  They are cowering in grief, fear, and confusion.  Not only has their leader been executed, but the Sabbath is now over and the police will be back on the job, perhaps hunting them down.  At the same time, they have heard these weird reports that Jesus’ body is missing from the tomb.  Not only that, Mary is telling them that she has seen some angels in there and even that she has seen Jesus himself!  So she’s probably giddy with joy while everyone else is catatonic with terror.

So they are not just locked up in a room, the room is a symbol for the fear that is locking them up… and the fear that also locks us up, keeps us hiding, paralyzed, focused overly inward, unable to look out or do anything.

—  Yes.  Jesus comes to us in our fear and kind of breaks through the walls we build around ourselves.  

And when he comes he kind of materializes among them.

— I suppose if you want to imagine it like that, you could say it was like beaming down from the Enterprise on Star Trek, if that helps you visualize it, knock yourself out.  

But the point is that he does show up among them.  I mean he had already revealed himself to an individual, to Mary, and her testimony remains the spark that opens up their minds enough to see him now.  Here he reveals himself to the community, most of them, anyway.  

And he says, “Peace be with you,” indicating that he is not intending to be a fearsome presence.  Remember that this bunch of guys mostly just ran away to save themselves on Thursday night, when he was being arrested, tortured and finally on Friday executed.  They might have thought they had reason to be afraid of him.  When Mary came and told them, “Yo, guys, he’s back,” it might not have been taken as completely good news.

I mean there was fear and also some shame in their hiding.  They had abandoned their teacher and Lord, their friend.  Not that there was anything they could have done at that point to stop the whole thing.  And they probably reasoned that there was no point to all of them dying.

Anyway he says, “Peace be with you,” because he is bringing peace, shalom, forgiveness, acceptance.  And then he shows them his hands and his side.

—  Because he still had the holes in them from the nails and the spear, when he was on the cross.

—  Well, he was in some different form.  I mean in the other gospels the disciples don’t always recognize him.  Paul says our resurrected form is as different from our mortal form as a plant is from a seed.  

—  Because of the wounds.  His wounds are kind of a validating, credentialing device.  They establish the continuity between his resurrected form and his mortal form. 

—  No.  They weren’t just any wounds.  I mean, he wasn’t showing the scar from being bit by a dog when he was 8, or where he got his appendix taken out, or something.  

I’ve met people who kind of lead with their wounds and it’s more like a self-serving, attention-getting manipulation, sometimes.  I don’t think that’s what Jesus’ is doing here.

These are very specific wounds of having been crucified.  Not only was it an act of love, but it was the intentional absorption of a particular kind of institutionalized hatred and violence.  Crucifixion was only used by Rome, and only for political crimes.  Jesus shows the futility of the violence that was used to intimidate and control the enemies of the State and the ruling elite.  It was exactly what the disciples were fearing at that point.

In any case, it is when they see the wounds that the disciples realize what’s going on, and who it is who has materialized among them.  It says, “They rejoiced when they saw the Lord.”

—  Yes, probably it is an understatement.

—  No, I don’t know how to say that in Aramaic.

—  Well, then he says Peace be with you” again and tells them that as the Father has sent him, so now he is sending them.

—  Yes.  In other words get out of this room.  It doesn’t take though, because they’re still there a week later.  But he does send them out, that’s important.

—  Because he sends us out as well.  He gathers us together, and then he sends us out into the world.  We’re relatively good at gathering together, although we’re even shaky at that these days.  But we’re positively terrible at being sent out.  I think.  It is hard for us to realize that the mission we are given from God starts right here.  When I was a kid a missionary was someone sent far, far away.  We forgot that we’re all missionaries, and it begins with our own families and friends and neighbors.  We are all on a mission from God.

—  Somewhat different from The Blues Brothers, though we could learn from their, uh, intensity and enthusiasm, I suppose. 

—  Really.  I’ll have to watch it again.

—  What?  Your food came?  Where are you?

—  All this time you’re been sitting in a restaurant waiting for your brunch order?  You should be in church.  

—  I go to church on my vacation.  Mostly.

—  Oh.  Well, if those are your only choices I guess maybe going to brunch is a better idea.  What did you order?

—  I would have gone with the huevos rancheros.

—   Oh.  Well, then he breathes on them, and tells them to receive the Holy Spirit.

—  Well, it looks like the Spirit comes from God through him.

—  I don’t want to get into that.  The point here is that receiving the Spirit gives the disciples the power to forgive, that is, release, or, on the other hand, retain people’s sins.  In other words, to receive the Holy Spirit through Christ, is to become Christ in some sense.  We become partakers in the divine nature, as Peter says.  

We become the agents, the touchstones, by which people’s alienation, enmity, self-centeredness, and unconsciousness is released, freeing them to walk in newness of life in the Spirit; or… not.  We can also lock themselves into their own judgment.  Jesus makes his disciples somehow responsible for the sins of others, like the leaders that Ezekiel talks about.  They become in his name kind of like sin managers for the world.  Not in the sense of judgment, which Jesus says he did not come into the world to do, but as witnesses to the truth of God’s love and light and life, which people may unfortunately reject on our account.

—  Yeah.  I know.  Right?  Bummer.

—  It is quite possible that the church has retained more sins than it has released over the centuries.

—  No, I put it together with the Thomas passage. 

—  Yeah, well.  I think Thomas gets a bad rap on that “doubting” thing.  The other disciples weren’t exactly totally on board until Jesus actually showed up either.  And Thomas is the disciple who makes the most comprehensive and profound confession of Jesus’ identity in the whole gospel.  He calls him, “My Lord and my God.”  Nobody else goes that far.  He is also the only disciple who got that Jesus was going to die in Jerusalem.  So we should cut Thomas some slack.

The whole incident is here so we can get to the part where Jesus says, “Have you believed because you have seen me?”  And he’s not just talking to Thomas here.  He’s with the rest of them too, still locked in their hiding place a week later.  “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”     

Seeing in order to believe is good.  We see that all over the gospel, starting with the first miracle, at Cana.  But it is too focused on the past and it is not reliable.  Our memories change and adjust; what we see is often determined by what we are expecting, fearing, wanting, and our individual perspective.  Every judge knows how “eyewitness” accounts are often inconsistent.  So that is not enough for us.  

What we need is the next step: to believe in order to see.  Seeing the truth often begins with trusting in this unlikely story of God-the-Creator becoming flesh and dwelling among us, full of grace and truth, teaching, healing, and finally being lifted up, dying, and being resurrected to breathe the Holy Spirit on us and give us his peace.

—  Yeah.  I know.  It’s what I do.  Preach.

—  No, there’s this little epilogue to the chapter.  It just says that these particular signs are included in this book to bring people to trust in Jesus, that he is the Messiah, the Son of God, and thereby have life in his name. 

So, here, this is the ending to the sermon I was going to preach but now can’t preach because I just spent all this time on the phone to you.

“The message is that in Jesus Christ, God enters into our fear, even our sinfulness, just like he materializes in this upper room full of scared, confused, guilty, ashamed people.   And for three short years he reveals to us our true humanity, which is with and in God.  He is the Son of Man, the Human One, the revelation of our true humanity; and he is the Son of God, the revelation of God’s true nature; and the fact that he is both suggests that at some level these are closely related, that the role and place of humans in the creation is to be the Creator’s agents and presence.

And by various signs he opens our eyes, our hearts, our minds, and our hands to a different kind of reality, one in which the Creator is deeply present and strongly active.  In the end, his witness to God’s truth runs so afoul of the authorities who are maintaining by fear, shame, and violence, the broken and distorted world we know, that they kill him.  Yet he emerges on the other side of death, to show us that not even death can stop the love of God.

Now it is our calling to follow him.  Not just in the kind of life he lived; but also to follow him through death to the other side, the real side.  And by our trust in him bring his light, life, and love, the light, life, and love of God, into our world, establishing his peace and his kingdom here and now.”

—  Yeah, that’s it.

—  Maybe you could do better.  For now, enjoy your eggs benedict.  I gotta go.   

Mary's Turning.

John 20:1-18.

I.

Mary comes to the tomb in darkness.  Her walk to the tomb reminds me of our human existence generally, without a second birth.  We’re born, and even though we imagine that we see fully and live completely,  we actually kind of sleepwalk blindly through a few short decades, and we arrive at a tomb.  This is our life. 

Like Mary, maybe there is a sense in which we expect to find Jesus in the tomb.  After all, we Christians believe he “died for us”, so it makes sense to think that the one resting in the tomb that was intended for us is supposed to be him.   

Maybe sometimes we come to church unconsciously seeking to make sure Jesus is still in there.  The world, and even many Christians, have a great interest in Jesus being and staying dead.  The Romans and the religious establishment want him dead because he was making trouble for them, teaching people that there is another way to live, not under their control.  

Some Christians want him to stay dead because then he can be controlled, his message can be defined and reduced to self-serving words on a page which can then be interpreted as the leaders please.  We seal him up in a “tomb” of doctrines, rules and regulations, values, morals, habits, traditions, liturgies, and so forth.  Then we don’t have to deal with him exactly but just all this other stuff we have invented, which is way easier.  

Because if he’s not safely in that tomb, if it is open and empty, then that grave might be waiting for us, and we don’t want that.  Even more alarming, it would beg the question, “Then where the heck is he?”  Did Jesus get loose?  Or did someone else steal him so they can claim him and put him in their own tomb of doctrines, traditions, liturgies, and so forth?  He’s supposed to belong to us!  He’s supposed to be in our tomb!  Other people can’t just take him!

When Mary gets to the tomb, she sees the large stone removed from the entrance, and she imagines the worst.  Even though she does not actually look inside, she worries that some people have taken Jesus’ body and hidden it somewhere.  So she runs back to the disciples’ headquarters, the upper room where Jesus had washed their feet a couple of nights before, and tells this to Peter and another unnamed disciples whom Jesus loved. 

Then they run to the tomb.  The other disciple arrives first.  He only peers dimly into the space to see the linen cloths that had wrapped the body, but no body.  Peter arrives and impetuously runs into the tomb itself, and he also sees these cloths, and the head wrapping rolled up separately.  

All of this indicates that this is not the work of grave robbers since these cloths would have been quite plastered to the skin of the body with myrrh paste, and could only have been removed by a painstaking and lengthy process, which robbers would scarcely have time or energy for.

II.

The disciple-who-isn’t-Peter enters the tomb, sees all this, and, we are told, believes.  Perhaps he remembers that Lazarus, at his resuscitation, came out of his tomb still wrapped-up mummy-like in linen cloth.  Clearly something different is happening here, and it occurs to him that this could actually be a very good thing, even though he still doesn’t understand the Scriptural prophecies about it.  The two male disciples go back home, no doubt in some confusion.

  Mary stays there, in tears.  When she looks into the tomb she sees something the men did not.  She sees two angels dressed in white, sitting on the shelf where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and one at the foot.  This would have reminded her or any informed Jew of the most holy place in the Temple, and the Ark of the Covenant, which used to be in there, and how it had over it’s lid, two carved angels, and between them was a flat surface called the Mercy Seat, or the Throne, which is the space where God literally dwelled.  It was the holiest place, inside the holiest place, inside the holiest place, in the world.  

In other words, she looks into the tomb and has a vision of the Holy of Holies, the place where Atonement happens, where sin is taken away.   As we read in Leviticus 16, the sins of the people are ritually placed on the head of a goat and taken away, driven out to the desert.  That is how John identifies Jesus back in chapter 1, the one who takes away the sin of the world.  The tomb of Jesus is the new Holy of Holies.

Mary notices that Jesus’ body is missing, and the way she expresses this is to use the same word.  She says that it has been “taken away”.  So like the scapegoat in Leviticus, Jesus, whom Paul describes as the One who was made to be sin (2 Cor. 5:21), upon whom the sin of the world is inflicted in his subjection to terrible violence, injustice, and humiliation in his being lynched at the hands of the Romans and their religious collaborators, is also “taken away.”  

He is taken away bearing our sin, that is, carrying the consequences of our separation from God  and enmity with each other, our blindness and paralysis.   All the sour, poisonous spawn of our shattered, sleepwalking existence, all our darkness and fear, anger and shame, he takes away with him and neutralizes.  Like the scapegoat driven into the wilderness, Christ, the creed tells us, “descended into hell,” basically destroying the place and liberating the souls entrapped in it.

That in itself is spectacular good news, on one level.  But it’s not the end of the story.  Still not completely comprehending what is going on, Mary continues looking for Jesus’ dead body.  She turns around, steps out of the tomb and sees a man, standing there, out in the garden.

III.

Mary thinks the man is part of the landscaping crew.  But we remember way back to the beginning of the story in the Bible.  How there is a man placed in a beautiful garden to take care of it, who names all the animals, who lives in peace and partnership with all.  The primordial “man in a garden” is Adam.  Which means that now we move from the world of redemption, forgiveness, and atonement of Leviticus 16, to the world of creation, blessing, and partnership in Genesis 2 and 3.  For if the old world began and then crashed with a man and a woman in a garden, so the new world will begin and emerge with… and man and a woman in a garden.

Mary still expects Jesus to be dead.  She still thinks he can be managed.  She still thinks he is an inanimate object to be moved around.  She still thinks he can be controlled, defined, taken care of, guarded, preserved.  So she tearfully says to the man in the garden, “There was a body in this tomb.  If you took it out for some reason just tell me and I will go get it, and we won’t say any more about it.”

But the man in the garden turns around and names her.  “Mary,” is all he says.

The text then says that she “turned.”  She has already turned away from the angels in the tomb, but apparently she keeps on turning, which reminds me that the Hebrew word for turn is shuv, which also means repent.  Not only is she literally turning her body, but she is also turning into someone else.  She’s turning from a soul still in darkness and expecting death, to her true self in the light, able to see what is really here.  And she keeps turning, she keeps changing, she undergoes this metamorphosis, which involves growing new eyes, and finally she responds, “Rabbouni!”  It is a word which means much more than “beloved teacher.”  It means super, ultimate, great, extreme, and awesome teacher or rabbi.  It means supreme teacher, virtually identical with God!

Our response to Christ’s taking away of our separation, alienation, enmity, and the consequent fear, has to be a continual repentance, a constant turning to the truth and away from falsehood and lies, violence and retribution.  Repentance is not something we do once and then proceed as if we have been permanently readjusted.  No.  It is more like a continual practice that gradually opens us up to the truth.  We have to keep turning, we have to keep cultivating the new mind that Jesus reveals within us.  Our need to turn to God never stops in this life, and if we do stop turning we quickly fall back into darkness, like the way on a bicycle you fall over if the wheels stop turning.

The life of repentance is the life of discipleship, in which we live according to the justice, non-violence, generosity, equality, inclusion, openness, and love of the Lord Jesus, in which we gather in community with others sharing the same awareness and commitment.  This is what is means to be alive.

IV.

Then Jesus says something even more remarkable.  Mary, in her wonder and joy, is apparently about to embrace him when he tells her, “Do not hold on to me,” because he has not yet ascended.  He instructs Mary not to grasp him in any form short of his original/ final ungraspable, spiritual, wild, everywhere form with and in God.  

This may disturb us because we often think that “holding on to Jesus” is what faith is all about.  And on some level it is.  But Jesus is here saying that trusting him is more about not holding on to him, especially in his historical, mortal form, and letting him go.  

Faith is about releasing Jesus Christ, in the form of our testimony about him, into the world.  Faith is about trusting in him and witnessing to him.  Faith is about letting him flow and shine through us into all of life, by our keeping of his commandments, which are all about love.  But any Jesus we can hold onto, any Jesus we can define, own, master, control, or even fully grasp in our own minds, is not the real and true Jesus Christ.  To hold on to him is in effect to keep him in the tomb, dead, inert, unchanging, and domesticated, like a figure in a diorama in a museum, subject to the arranging of the curator.

Instead of holding on to him, cherishing this beautiful moment in the garden, kind of like how Peter wanted to memorialize the Transfiguration, or even like the hymn so many of us love, Mary is instructed to “go.”  She is sent.  Mary is “the apostle to the apostles.”  She is to testify to them what she has experienced of the risen Lord.

Jesus refers to the disciples as “my brothers.”  Earlier he calls them his “friends.”  Mary is to go and tell them that Jesus is ascending to “my Father and your Father, my God an your God.”  In other words, Jesus announces a new familial relationship in which all are siblings together, equals in the household of one common Father and God.  It is as if Jesus says, “Don’t hold on to me; but in my name hold on to each other.  You’re going to need each other.  You’re going to need community.  The new life cannot be lived in isolation.  I have called you into a new birth into a new family.”

V.

Mary goes and reports to the apostles that she has “seen the Lord!”  Not the dead, domesticated, doctrinally defined, historical body of Jesus, but the living, wild, uncontrolled, Presence of the Christ, the Word of the Father, the Wisdom of God, the Light of the World.  He is ungraspable; not even a tomb can hold him!

And because of him, no tomb can hold us either.  He shows us our true selves, our true humanity.  The empty tomb is not our future, it is not there waiting for us.  The tomb, the grave, is not our destiny.  Rather, Jesus Christ shows us that our empty tomb is in our past; it is the existence we have been called out of when he calls our name and calls us into his new community.

In Jesus Christ, the Creator calls us out of our blindness, our brokenness, our alienation, anxiety, and even our death.  God takes all this away, revealing our true selves, and then draws us into union, peace, blessing, and hope.  This is the message of this Day of Resurrection, that in Jesus Christ we are all gathered in from death to life eternal, and sent out with this good news to all the world.

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Coming to Life... By Dying.

John 12:20-43.  (March 29, 2015)

I.

We skip ahead to chapter 12 and pick up the story immediately after Jesus enters Jerusalem.  When he comes into the city the Pharisees observe the scene in frustration, noting that “the world has gone after” Jesus.  As an example of this, we next hear of some “Greeks” who had come up to Jerusalem for the Passover, and want to “see” Jesus.  They approach Philip who tells Andrew.  (These are the two disciples with Greek names.)  They convey the message to Jesus.

But instead of responding to them, Jesus appears to understand this as the indication that the hour has finally arrived for him to be glorified.  Now that his message and reputation have penetrated beyond Palestine, and a window has been opened to the rest of the world in these Greeks, people from some other parts of the Mediterranean basin, Jesus knows that it is time for him to make his final act of witness and service.  Indeed, his public ministry now concludes, and the next five chapters are his urgent teachings to his disciples.  It is almost like he has now to cram a great deal of into just a few short days of instruction.  If you have a “red letter” Bible that it is now starts to be almost all in red. 

The first thing he says is a summary of his spiritual teaching.  “Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies it bears much fruit.  Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep if for eternal life.  Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will by servant be also.”

The way to new life is through death.  The example is that of a seed which, if it does not go down into the soil and “die,” simply rots or becomes squirrel or bird food.  But if it figuratively dies and is buried and gives itself up to its own destiny, allowing the new life encoded in its very nature to emerge, it becomes a new plant, something outwardly very different from a seed.  The new plant eventually matures and bears much fruit, in the form of more new seeds.

Jesus is saying that he, and all people, are like seeds.  The difference between him and everyone else is that he knows he is a seed and that he is created to explode into something new and different, but which is in complete continuity with what he now is.  

Most people are asleep in the fantasy that what they are now is their only stage of existence.  They fear death, or any kind of significant change, as a threat to their identity and life.  They have built a complex culture around preserving and expressing their seed-nature, without any awareness that there is more to life or that they have some greater destiny than merely being seeds.  

Indeed, the powers that rule society actively repress and prevent any awareness that there is more to life than being a seed.  Such awareness would undermine the will of seeds to continue working hard as compliant and productive profit-centers for the elite.

II.

Jesus says that those who are infatuated with this mindless, sleepwalking existence, especially those who benefit most from it’s injustices, inequalities, violence, and exploitation, will lose it.  They have committed themselves to maintaining the illusion that our current existence is our only possible life, and when that life is over extinction is their reward.  They ignominiously perish like moldy, decayed, expired seeds kept too long in a jar in the basement.  They become good for nothing beyond the compost pile.  

But those who awaken to an awareness of a true life beyond this pointless and limited seed-existence, and who therefore reject and abandon the structures, values, habits, and allegiances of this world, striving instead to prepare for and open themselves to another wider and better world, these are the ones who gain what Jesus calls eternal life.

Eternal life does not mean living forever in the sense of never dying and retaining this same mortal body for century after century, which is a pretty horrible prospect.  Eternal life means living outside the limitations, and consequent fear, of time and death.  It means trusting in, following, and believing in Jesus and therefore in a sense embracing time and death, by willingly going to the place of transformation, metamorphosis, deconstruction, and vulnerability, and accepting and nurturing the new life that wants to emerge from within us.  Just like a seed goes into the dark soil so it can send roots downward and sprout a shoot upward, dying in order to live, and become the plant it was created to be.

But Jesus’ view that the way to eternal life is through death does not make him the purveyor of a suicide cult.  We do not come to church for the Kool-Aid.  The point is eternal life, and this is something we can participate in here and now, before our physical death.

Jesus’ way is above all a way of life.  He seeks to awaken people to their true nature as spiritual beings, breathed into life by a loving Creator.  But in order to rise into this realization, people have to symbolically, spiritually, and metaphorically die to this old, corrupt, false, and destructive way of existing.  

A seed in the soil does not literally die; far from it.  It comes to life!  It springs into action!  It cracks open and allows a new kind of life to emerge from it, which is its own life!  This only looks like death when seen from the perspective of a seed that knows no other life than that of being a seed.  Jesus comes to proclaim to us that we have within us the capacity for a glorious kind of life that is presently, to us in our current condition, unimaginable.  But it is who we were made to be.

III.     

The managers, owners, and masters of this world, and the egos that control our souls, want us to believe that we only die once, when our physical bodies cease functioning, and that this death is the termination and opposite of life.  They want us to believe  that death is therefore something to be feared, avoided, provided against, and denied.  And they use this fear to control us and force us to work for them.  It is the source of anxiety, injustice, violence, and slavery.  

Jesus rejects this when he talks about his own troubled soul.  He does  identify with us in our blindness and even our fear.  There is nothing easy about this.  He knows he is walking into a terrible ordeal.  He talks about the ruler of this world being driven out, and by that he means the power of evil, the devil, who controls human hearts.  But he knows that what he is really looking at is crucifixion.

Crucifixion was the most potent weapon of terror that the imperial forces had at their disposal.  It inspired fear and horror in people on many levels.  Obviously, there was the excruciating pain — in fact, crucifixion is where we get the word “excruciating” from.  Then there is the public humiliation and exposure, the profound powerlessness and vulnerability, and finally the annihilation of being marginalized and forgotten as a person, and only remembered if at all as a loser, a victim, an example, an object lesson in what happens to people who cross Rome.

For Jesus’ mission to succeed, he has to neutralize the one thing that has led humanity repeatedly over to the dark side, which is fear.  And the supreme symbol and instrument of fear in Jesus’ day was crucifixion.  He has to show that even crucifixion is utterly powerless.  Indeed, he has to show that it becomes the opposite of what it was invented for.  Instead of fear and death, it becomes an instrument of life and love.

This is why he has come into the world in the first place.  So he refuses to ask God to “save” him from this hour.  Salvation is not an avoidance of death, transformation, or change.  Rather, salvation is accomplished or finished precisely through death, transformation, and change.  

Jesus desires only that the name of the Father be glorified, which is to say he wants the manifestation and the shining out of the love of the Father.  It is love that always banishes all fear.  Jesus identifies with the love of God, and that gives him the courage to face his hour.  This affirmation is confirmed by the voice of God from heaven, which some hear as a rumble of thunder.  It is God speaking in nature, in the creation God breathed and spoke into existence at the beginning.  Creation in itself inherently glorifies God’s name.  Creation itself is an expression, an outpouring of God’s love.

Anything done in love is done in union with God and all creation.  Love is eternal life.  To give up your life in love is to receive back the life of the creation itself.  

IV.

“When I am lifted up,” he says, “I will draw all people to myself.”  Like the bronze serpent that Moses made which provided the antidote to snakebite when people looked at it, when Jesus is lifted up on the cross those who see him and perceive what is going on there, that it is the love of God offered for the life of the world, will find the antidote to death.  By identifying with him they will break through with him and emerge in the new life of resurrection.  

When we see Jesus on the cross, the crucifix, do we see a hapless victim being tortured to death?  Do we see the triumph of the darkness, inspiring only fear and slavery?  Do we see another victory of mindless cruelty, tightening the screws of our own imprisonment?  

Or: do we see the exhaustion of the power of evil and violence, the flood of hatred and fear swallowed up into the infinite love of God and therein neutralized?  Do we see a rift, a tear in the fabric of our blindness, the crack in everything, which is how the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen sings?

The crowd listening to Jesus, of course, doesn’t get it.  They’re going, “But the Bible says….”  “What do you mean by ‘lifted up’ exactly?”  “Who is this ‘Son of Man’?”  “The Messiah doesn’t die; that’s ridiculous!”  And so on.

Jesus just rolls his eyes, shakes his head.  He doesn’t respond to any of this.  He just says, “The light is with you for a little longer.  Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you.  If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going.  While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light.”

In other words, “I am showing you the way.  I am illuminating the path before you.  I am telling you the truth.  I am revealing, exhibiting, disclosing for you what is real.  That is all I can do at this point.  Trust me.”

But of course, they don’t.  And Jesus is so sick of dumb questions that avoid the issue, change the subject, focus on irrelevant details, and argue about theories, that he finds a place to hide.  From now on, Jesus does not talk to the crowds.  Now he will only try and clarify his teachings for his disciples, in private, giving them what they need before he dies so they will see what is happening when he dies, and when he returns.

V.

The narrator of the gospel sadly adds a reflection on why the people wouldn’t trust in Jesus.  He quotes some passages from the prophet Isaiah about how their eyes were blinded and their hearts were hardened, and they were unable to turn and be healed.  Even people who did trust in him kept it to themselves to avoid being ostracized by the institutional leaders.  “They loved human glory more than the glory that comes from God,” he says.

Well, there is a lot of that going around, because the glory that comes from God involves dying!  

But Jesus says that what we imagine as dying, is really, from another perspective, more like waking up.  We die to our own unconsciousness and become aware of what is real.  We die to our own blindness and start to see.  We die to our own paralysis and start to move.  We die to our own slavery and find ourselves free.  We die to our own death and come alive!

And as the final act of liberation, Jesus is going to offer himself to be lifted up as the lightning rod upon which the forces that maintain our blindness, paralysis, somnolence, and death blow their whole wad of hate and violence and fear, in one terrible convulsion… only to be drained of their power, while the Lord Jesus emerges from the tomb, with us.

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Imitation.

John 5:19-47.   (March 22, 2015)

I.

Jesus continues talking to the religious authorities.  They originally came after him for the crime of telling someone whom he had healed to carry his mat when he arose after 38 years of sickness.  Now they are really apoplectic that he is identifying himself with God by calling God his Father.  Jesus proceeds to start explaining the complicated and sometimes paradoxical relationship between the Father and himself, the Son.

Often passages like this one get filed under “abstract theology” and forgotten, as if the Son’s relationship to the Father may be interesting for dogmaticians, but really has no bearing on us.  But because God is Jesus’ Father, and Jesus is the Son of Man and the truly Human One, the Word who became flesh, God is also our Father.  It is something that Jesus tells his disciples is the very basis for prayer.

Through Jesus Christ, the Word of God, God is our Father.  He is the life of God coming into the world by making the world.  And therefore everything that Jesus says about this relationship with the Father also applies to us, and ultimately to every human being.  Unfortunately, almost all of us are dead or asleep in the sinful bondage to our own egos, and we are locked in a society engineered to keep us in fear, anger and shame.  So it is emphatically not true that we are in our current condition conscious that we are Christs.  Christ comes to reveal our true nature deep within us, from which we are characteristically alienated.  But remember that the very word “Christian” means “little Christs.”  

Jesus starts off by telling them that the Son can’t do anything on his own, by himself.  But only in so far as he is seeing, reflecting, and expressing what the Father is doing.  “Whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise.”  The will of the Son is shaped and informed by the will of the Father.  The Son is the perfect vessel, conduit, medium for the Father.  The Son embodies in human form, in a particular time and place, the will of the Father.  

By saying this Jesus means that even he, the Word of God by whom all things were created, is not independent of God; rather he is the vehicle of God’s self-expression.  He is trying to avoid the common misconception that God’s will conforms to our own.   

There is a huge difference between being subject to God and being subject to our own impulses, reason, and emotions.  They are in fact opposites.  If you want to be answerable only to God the Father, then you have to seek in all things to imitate Jesus Christ the Son, who came not to be served but to serve and to give his life for the life of the world.  Therefore, being subject to God alone does not make you more powerful by the world’s standards.  On the contrary, it means emptying yourself as God self-empties in becoming human in Jesus.

II.  

This is what it means to “honor the Son.”  We only get to God through the humility, openness, and perfect obedience of the Son.  And not as inert spectators.  But it is when we are actively imitating, in our own behavior, his compassion, non-violence, inclusion, justice, healing, and equality, that we are imitating the Father whom he reveals.  Anyone who imagines they are obeying God when they are doing violence, depredation, injustice, theft, or adultery — that is, things Jesus would never do — isn’t reflecting or expressing God’s will at all.

Jesus makes the point that the Father raises the dead.  God is not a killer like those who wield power in human affairs; on the contrary, God draws people in the other direction, from death to life.  On God’s behalf, Jesus is sent into the world to wake people up.  He comes to inspire an uprising.  He comes to shake people out of the complacency of blindness and death, and to see them become alive to God in God’s creation.  

As we will see in chapter 11 with Lazarus, he means he will literally bring people from death to life; but he also and more importantly means figuratively, spiritually, and metaphorically raising to new and fuller life people who are mired in a darkened existence of sleepwalking or a kind of living death.  That is, all of us.  He calls on people to rise against structures, policies, and leaders which enforce the ideologies of death and oppression among us.  

When the church is called to raise the dead, it does not mean going down to the cemetery and trying to pray the dead bodies back to life.  Rather, it means waking people up and bringing them now to a new life that makes them see that what they thought was life before was really not fully and truly living at all.  

This is what he means when he says, “Whoever hears my word and trusts in the One who sent me… has passed from death into life.”  The time is now here, says Jesus, “when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and live.”  The spiritually dead are all around us.  They are us.  And we awaken by hearing his word, which is to say, the Word resonating throughout the creation God spoke into being.  The Christian tradition has always held that God’s Word is expressed in two ways: in the creation God spoke into being and in Scripture, a product of God inspiration of human writers.  

But faith is not an exercise in observation or entertainment.  It is participatory.  We don't just take it all in.  Jesus talks about hearing and trusting, or believing.  So we show we have heard and are awake by changing our lives so that in the decisions we make we are trusting in God, the God whose Word we hear in these different ways, and not in our own reason, feelings, or instincts.

But the power of death in us, our self-interested, ego-centric, personality-driven approach to existence is so pervasive that we can still think we are hearing and believing in God, while we do unspeakable evil.  For this reason God sends the Son into the world.  Jesus Christ the touchstone, the criterion, the test, that standard against which we are judged.  He is as it were the round hole that accepts only round pegs.  And our job is to look at the Son when he is lifted up on the cross in the ultimate act of love, and see our lives shaped in conformity to him.

The spiritual life is about sanding chipping, dissolving, scraping or otherwise removing our sharp edges, so that we do come into conformity with him.  That is what enables one to pass from death to life.  We are able to slide through a Jesus-shaped round hole.  Like Michelangelo who quipped that in making his great statue of David he simply took a block of marble and chipped away everything that wasn’t David, so also the spiritual life means chipping away everything in us that isn’t truly human, everything that isn’t the Image of God, everything that isn’t Jesus Christ.

III.

All who are in their graves, that is all who exist in this living death state, will hear his voice.  And every person will rise up.  Some will rise up in life.  Others will rise up only to subsequently crash and burn in judgment and condemnation.  The choice is between life on the one hand and judgment and condemnation on the other.  What we receive is what we do.  If our lives are about delivering judgment and condemnation to others, then that’s what we get.  If our lives are about acceptance, forgiveness, patience, and welcoming, as is the life of Jesus Christ, then we rise into our true humanity and God’s realm.

Jesus Christ, the Word of God, is the only true judge in the sense that he is the pattern and model of our true humanity, and he is therefore the One we have to conform to and imitate.

This brings up the obvious question, “Why him?”  He himself recognizes that it is not enough just to take his word for it.  This is something Christians don’t quite understand.  We accept Jesus and the Bible as our authority, and we seem to assume that that settles it.  But our time is like Jesus’ and the apostles’ time in that for an increasing number of people that doesn’t settle it.  Like it or not, it’s just a fact, that when we appeal to Scripture it does not necessarily impress.  

Jesus knows this.  “If I testify about myself my testimony isn’t true,” he says.  “Don’t just listen to my words; I could be crazy,” he says.  The Bible says it takes at least two witnesses to verify something.  So Jesus says, “Well, John testified to me.  Some of you believed him.”  Some of John’s disciples were still around when this gospel was being written.  But of course, that might not have convinced many since John was dead.  Dead witnesses are not as good.

So then Jesus mentions another witness that isn’t a person subject to death.  It is his works.  The things he is doing.  Even Nicodemus noted that no one could do the kinds of things he is doing unless he were from God.  We know this was a significant argument people understood at the time.  What he was doing was so obviously good — healing people, raising the dead, casting out demons, even purifying the Temple, and supplying wine at a wedding — that he had to be from God.  His opponents had a very difficult case to make in claiming that there were demonic and evil actions.

In our day, Jesus’ works are testified to by his disciples.  Not his works back then, but the effect he has on people today.  People experience him and his healing power now.  Some of us in this room know from their own direct experience of the healing power of Jesus Christ.

If that’s not good enough, Jesus says God the Father testifies to him… but people who don’t recognize the Son also don’t hear the Father’s voice, so no wonder they’re so clueless.

Then he says the Bible witnesses to him… but unfortunately only people who have God’s love in their hearts can see this, because of course the Bible is all about God’s love.  It is people who don’t think that the Bible is about God’s love but insist that it is about just about everything else — exclusion, patriotism, judgment, maintaining the rules, institutions, authorities, traditions… people think it’s about history or even science, for heavens’ sake!  They are the ones who often have trouble finding Jesus in the Hebrew Scriptures.  Jesus is God’s love; if you look for love in the Bible, you will find Jesus Christ.  If you look for that other stuff, not so much.

IV.

It is in the end about love.  We heard in chapter 3 those famous words that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.  To trust in the Son of God is to live forever.  It is to see the truth, to know what is actually real.  It is to perceive that the love of God is at the heart of all things, and Jesus embodies that love.  Jesus does not testify for himself; it is the love of God that pours through him into the world that testifies on his behalf.  That is what finally demonstrates that Jesus is who he says he is.

It’s like Jesus says, look: What good is it anyway if we collect a thousand witnesses, if they are all blind?  If they all see things in exactly the same way?  If none of them has the capacity to see what is real?  Jesus says elsewhere that if a blind person tries to lead a blind person they will both fall into a ditch together.  People accept glory and praise from each other, we recognize people who come in their own name, because we do not perceive there is any other reality.  

But it is not the number of witnesses that is important.  Truth is not a democracy; we cannot change the laws of nature or God by majority vote.  

If we want to have any kind of knowledge of the truth we have to have the love of God in us.  Jesus says that this is why his opponents don’t get it.  They don't have the love of God in them.  They have in them judgment and condemnation.  They are hassling him over a sabbath violation, and disregarding the fact that he just healed someone.  It’s all about fear and control for them.

They have in their blindness even reduced Moses to a mere giver of regulations and rules, a fashioner of a written law code.  But Jesus says that if we had the love of God in us we would see that even Moses is sent into the world to accomplish Gods love.  Through him God liberates and saves and frees the people; through him God gives them a just and good way to live together in equality and peace; through him God delivers them to a land of prosperity, fighting for them against the powers of oppression and exploitation.

It is as if Jesus says to these authorities: “If you’re so badly informed about Moses, it is no surprise that you have no idea what I am about.  If you think the Bible is all about threats and guilt and punishment and coercion and retribution, if you use it as a weapon to maintain your own power and tradition, then it is clear that God’s love, the love which I embody, is unintelligible and utterly invisible to you.”

But if we are able to accept Jesus’ testimony, and find God’s love in us — and God’s love is in all of us.  It was encoded in the very Word by which all things were made at the beginning, when God created the universe as an overflowing of God’s immeasurable love.  It’s already there.  The voice of the Son of God resonates with that love and awakens it, and we rise up in it.

V.

In the end, the only witness whose testimony matters is that of ourselves.  Jesus says we are to be his witnesses.  And we testify, not of abstractions of theology, but of what we have found to be real, reliable, true, and accurate; we refer to what we have found to work in our lives.  In the end it comes down to “I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.”  We once were dead and now we are alive.  We once were crippled by fear, and now we are liberated to love.  

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