Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Presenting Engagement: The race as metaphor for life.
Every Fourth of July, the Atlanta Track Club hosts a ten kilometer footrace down Peachtree Road in the center of Atlanta. They’ve been putting on this race for over three decades and the 2007 race attracted 60,000 runners.
When you register for this race, you have to predict how long it will take you to run the race based on your record in other equally long races or in previous Peachtree races. Runners receive a placement number to pin on the front of their shirts and the first two digits of that number indicate which section you are eligible to start from. You can understand that if, based on your speed, you are runner 59,999 then you are going to be at the back of a very long group of participants!
I have personally never been in a group any closer to the front than halfway and it takes ages to even get up to the starting line. So there you stand, shaking loose the muscles in your calves and thighs and arms, stretching your back and stomach muscles for maybe twenty to forty minutes. It’s hard to stay loose and it’s even harder to stay focused. There are spectators on the curb and spectators peering out of hotel windows overhead. The loudspeaker up ahead announces the start of faster groups. The excitement climbs. You want to get going.
Finally you begin trudging forward with stunted steps. You are packed like a sardine with hundreds of other anxious sardines beside you, behind you, ahead of you. Two hundred yards to the starting line. One hundred yards. Fifty yards. Twenty five yards.
Finally you reach the line. The race officials call out. Radio stations broadcast live some kind of thumping, heart pumping, heavy jamming music. A starter pistol barks.
So off you go into the July sunshine. You’ll have stretches where the road descends and other points where you’ll encounter places with names like “heartbreak hill.” You’ll get leg weary. You’ll get thirsty but you won’t want to drink for fear of stomach cramps. You’ll get hot. And close to the finish you’ll slow back down to a stutter step as thousands of runners attempt to navigate two narrow chutes at the finish line. Finally, if you’ve made it all the way, you will flow out into the broad expanse of Piedmont park.
You did it. Or at least some of you did it. The reward, the big pay off? It’s a T shirt and a popsicle and the knowledge that you made it all the way.
How did you make it through to the end? What got you from the pre-start warm up and anticipation to finish line?
I can tell you from experience that the thing that keeps you going through it all is the support of spectators. It’s a far bigger reward than either the Tshirt or the popsicle! They cheer. They wave banners. You see people you know standing on the sidewalk and they call out your name. Even if they don’t know you they yell: “looking great!” or “you’re gonna make it!” or “way to go!”
All in all, this race, in fact any race, is a great metaphor for life itself. We all need the encouragement of others to make it from pre-start to finish. We all need those cheering hollers and smiling faces to bouy us up in times of distress and heartache and illness and grief and loneliness.
We need a community and if we have a faith community that is strong and loving, then perhaps we can live strong lives no matter what life throws at us.
Biblical Context: What's going on?
The scripture lesson today talks about just such a community of faith.
The reading is from a portion of the New Testament known as the Letter to the Hebrews. It was added to the cannon, which is the body of scripture that we speak of as the Bible, in the 4th century specifically because it was thought to have been written by the Apostle Paul. Scholars after that time, however, decided it wasn’t written by Paul. They also don’t think it was written to Jewish Christians as the title implies. And there’s no greeting at the beginning that would have been standard in an epistle so it probably isn’t even a letter either.
Now, with all that contradictory scholarship you might wonder why this “letter” stayed in the Biblical cannon and why it continued to be keep its title. But then, Hebrews is a difficult text to get to know. It’s one of those texts that defies any attempt to read it simplistically or literally because if you read it that way you will come away with some very dark considerations about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism that contrast very strongly with the teachings of the Gospels.
The basic theology of this “letter” is that Christianity is superior to and supercedes Judaism. It proclaims that the Old Testament is inadequate testimony to the powerful redemption of God. It claims that God’s covenant with Abraham is an inadequate revelation of God. It claims that the faithful patriarchs of the Old Testament could not achieve salvation without Christ no matter how faithful they were.
Hebrews was very likely a sermon written late in the first century and sent out to be read to various congregations. At that time persecution of Christians was widespread and there was a strong impulse among new converts to either abandon this persecuted religion or fly under the official radar of the Roman governors by claiming that they were Jewish instead of Christian. It’s the same God, after all. Isn’t it?
This sermon intends to dissuade these frightened congregations from leaving the faith by specifically demonstrating the superiority of Christianity.
This was an age when the apocalypse- the end of time- was expected to occur at any moment. So the writer of Hebrews wanted to show that being faithful to Christ was the only way to be certain of immortality. The writer says: “Look, if you convert to Judaism then you are abandoning true salvation in Christ for a mere foreshadowing of salvation through the law of Moses. If you accept life under the flawed covenant of Abraham then you are giving up on the true covenant in Christ which promises resurrection from death.”
It’s a powerfully written argument heard by a frightened and imperilled group of believers whose new found faith was tenuous and susceptible to threats from Roman authorities.
Explication of Text: What’s it all mean?
The section we read today tells of the mighty deeds that Old Testament heroes performed because of their faith in God. These are impressive accounts. Gideon, David, Samson, the prophet Samuel. Through their faith they were able to “conquer kingdoms, administer justice, obtain promises, quench raging fire.” The Jewish martyrs described in the Maccabean writings suffered mocking and torture, and even endured excruciating death at the hands of stone throwing mobs and sadistic Roman soldiers. The faith of these heroes was powerful and they were steadfast in their beliefs even in the face of torture and death.
This is a strong testimony of what faith can do. When we read this, we’re set up to admire these heroes and count them as lion hearted role models. We understand that. We accept it and we’re ready to imitate those role models. But then the writer twists the narrative around and tells us something that is inteded to make us see that no matter how faithful these heroes were, their achievements were imperfect because they did not know Christ.
The writer says: “Yet all these… did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.”
What in the world can that mean? Just when we get scripture figured out there’s something that throws us of course again.
The answer lies in the claim that our faith is different than the faith of these Old Testament heroes because we have the revelation of Christ and we have Christ’s death on the cross that gives us salvation. It’s a fine point of theology but it says that since Christ’s covenant is perfect and Christ’s revelation is perfect and since Christ’s saving death is perfect then our faith in Christ fulfills the imperfect faith of the patriarchs and martyrs who lived before Christ.
Our faith in Christ fulfills the faith of our Old Testament ancestors.
Our faith in the possibility of eternal life through Jesus Christ brings eternal life to our Old Testament ancestors.
And yet, this writer also calls all those Old Testament ancestors a “great cloud of witnesses.” It’s as if two things are happening at once.
On the one hand, our faith is making perfect the faith of those who came before us. On the other hand, those who came before us, the witnesses who surround us, were the pioneers in faith whose mighty acts of heroism made our own faith possible.
We fulfill them but we need to stand on their shoulders to claim that fulfillment for ourselves.
Listener Context: How does this relate to my life?
I think that as we go through life’s experiences, as we run the race of life, we tend to think of ourselves in that good old American way: we think of ourselves as lone pioneers forging our way through the challenges of the wilderness, combating the storms and floods and wild animals, climbing over the lofty mountain passes. And like those early pioneers we sometimes we think God is on our side because we stand for what is morally right and our successes prove how right we are. Conversely, we sometimes think God is against us when we meet catastrophic setbacks.
But actually, we’ve got that all wrong. That traditional folklore promotes a false reality.
First of all, God is on our side because God loves us and not just because of the moral talk that we talk. And more than that, God does not stop loving us just because we fail to walk our talk. That’s what divine forgiveness is all about as long as we are honest about our human nature and the human capacity for moral failure.
Second, if God loves us despite our human nature, then God can never be against us. God is never the cause of our setbacks.
Third, we are not the pioneers that we think we are. Behind every Horatio Alger story of a self made man there is some un-named and unacknowledged individual who gave that self made man a crucial opportunity. In every Peachtree Road Race, there are volunteers who hand out unlimited cups of water to hot and dry and thirsty participants. Every mile there is someone who shouts to thousands of anonymous runners: “Come on. You can do it. I have confidence in you!”
There is a great cloud of witnesses around us at all times urging us on. They have travelled the road we travel. They know the challenges we face. They have faced persecution. They have faced illness and loneliness and grief. They have fought cancer. They have lost loved ones and they have cried with joy over photographs of new babies. They have loved life.
You are not alone.
You stand on the shoulders of those witnesses to claim your triumphs and by boosting you up, they fulfill their own triumphant destinies. The joy is twofold. It is the joy of completing the race as well as the joy of helping others to complete their own race.
This is a joy that we can never find on our own. This shared triumph is far more glorious than any single handed achievment because it is the achievment of a whole community.
Conclusion: What’s the Point?
Whatever else the writer of this “letter” to the Hebrews is telling us, he is telling us that Christian believers have something unique that sustains us for the long race of life.
We have the community which is a great cloud of witnesses who have prepared the way for us and who urge us on to the finish line.
And we have faith in the enduring presence of Christ Jesus who is the true pioneer in faith and leader in this race of life. Christ Jesus, who faithfully suffered on the cross for our sake, gave us a salvation that is the ultimate encouragement for us. Christ Jesus is the ultimate proof of God’s love for us.
With God’s love, we are capable of any good thing. AMEN.
Showing posts with label baby jesus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label baby jesus. Show all posts
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Monday, August 06, 2007
Unfinished Business
Revelation 21:1-7
Presenting Engagement: life and plans cut short.
Imagine yourself travelling along your life’s journey, working to live out your life’s plans, to live out your hopes and dreams, when suddenly some catastrophic interruption occurs that dashes all those plans, curtails all those hopes and dreams!
I thought about that this week when the interstate bridge over the Mississippi River fell during heavy traffic between Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota.
Dozens of automobiles and several busses were travelling on to some particular destination when tragedy struck. They were going home from work. They were going home from school trips. They were going home from summer vacations or just setting off on vacations. They were taxi drivers delivering passengers, truck drivers delivering goods. They were social wokrers going out to help improve the lives of others. Some were simply folks going on an errand on the other side of town.
There were all these people who’s lives were interrupted by catastrophe that resulted in disabling injury or even death. Plans delayed indefinitely. Plans disrupted permanently. Business that now goes unfinished. Busy people in busy moments of play or work or chores whose hopes and dreams for the years to come collapsed with the concrete slabs of a highway bridge, smashing into a swirling river bottom sixty feet below.
I don’t know if the most distressing part of it all is the death and injury or the unfulfilled plans of the accident victims.
Of course, this tragedy reminds me of a number of other disasters involving lives lost during travel. I think of the morbid tragedy of the Titanic. Of airplane incidents. I recall a classmate who perished on an airpalne the summer after our seventh grade year. I recall a college classmate who drowned during a whitewater rafting trip. And we can never forget the victims of 9/11, those who were just arriving at work in the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon and those who had boarded early morning flights on business trips or personal travel. All lives cut short in the middle of plans, hopes and dreams.
The most famous story of such a disaster is probably Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The novel was written in 1927 and was made into a popular movie by the director Quentin Tarrentino several years ago.
Wilder’s novel tells about a fictional bridge collapse in Peru in 1714 in which five people perish. This bridge had been regarded as the finest and most “high tech” bridge in the entire country yet it fell carrying these five people, all on their way to specific destinations, filfilling prescious life plans. Five people living out their hopes and dreams. Five people caught in the middle of their life journeys. Five people whose plans were cut short by disaster.
When asked about the purpose intended in this plot, Wilder revealed that it was a question: is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?[i] In other words, is there some supernatural agent of fate that assigns us each a destiny that we can’t know? Or are we in control?
And that’s really a basic question of life, isn’t it?
I mean, here we are making great plans, hoping and dreaming wonderful things off in the future or working hard to complete dreams and plans that we’ve already imagined and when tragedy strikes from some source outside of our own control we inevitably ask: who controls our destiny? Are our lives just some board game that we play out to fill the time but which ultimately has no purpose at all?
Is the course of life just as Shakespeare described it in the play Hamlet? You know that famous soliloquy where Hamlet says:
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Do our dreams signify nothing? Why bother dreaming? Why make any plans at all? Is the invisible hands that controls our fate the hand of God?
Biblical Context: new things.
Now, the Revelation of John is a daunting and even frightening book of the Bible. In parts, God sounds exactly like a deity that exercises supreme power, forestalling all our hopes and dreams, snatching us out of the prime of life or taking us away from our loved ones when God considers the timing to be appropriate.
This apocalyptic vision of John is hard for us to understand in 2007, so many centuries after it was written, so many centuries after the conditions that this prophet John saw all around him. But we misunderstand Biblical prophecy if we assume that the writer was speaking specifically to us, a future audience, about specific conditions that exist long after his times and about which he knew nothing.
So the first thing we have to do is put this prophecy into historical context and that context is an era of persecution of Christians.
In the Greco-Roman world of the late first century, religion was more pluralistic than it is today. There were many authorized gods but chief among them was the Roman Emperor. The authorities considered Christianity to be a criminal conspiracy because Christians exclusively worshipped one God and that god was neither the Emperor nor any of the other divinities in the Roman pantheon. After Rome burned in the year 64, Emperor Nero carried out a state sponsored persecution and for decades afterwards Roman governors executed Christians by political order for refusing to worship those validated gods.
Fearful Christians were even encouraged to turn in their Christian neighbors in return for leniency. All Christians had to walk a very fine line between giving lip service to Rome and living as people of faith.
These were the times in which John lived. Not only were there rumors of Nero’s return, but Christians were being seduced by this pagan culture and failing in their loyalty to Christ and Christ’s revelation.
John was likely an itinerant preacher of Jewish origin, a Jewish convert to Christianity who personally knew the seven congregations to whom he wrote. As a prophet, he wanted to warn these congregations about an apocalyptic retribution against both the pagan seducers and the disloyal, seduced Christians. He wanted to warn them about this very real act of God that might begin at any moment.
John’s predecessors in the rich Hebrew prophetic tradition were visionaries like Ezekiel and Daniel who lived during the time of Babylonian exile and forecast a similar destruction of God’s enemies. For them, Babylon was the archtype of all God’s enemies. Gog and Magog were names Ezekiel gave to nations that tried to usurp, seduce, and consume the Hebrew followers of God. [ii]
So what was John speaking about? John borrows from the visions in his prophetic tradition. And even though John’s revelation reads as a continuous, chronological epic, it is very likely that he compiled separate visions of his own and others into this prophetic account.
Like Daniel and Ezekiel, John refers to Babylon and John’s new Babylon is Rome. But Babylon is more than just a symbol of an evil state, it’s the state of evil. Babylon is the Dark Side, the perennial, cosmic evil empire. This prophecy is cosmic in proportions because while Rome may be the enemy in the late first century, John is claiming that there will always be a Babylon in the life of Christ’s church.
In such violent times, John wants to give the congregations of the seven churches more than a warning not to be seduced into accepting a culture that contradicts Christ’s message. John is giving them, and us, a message of comfort to cling to in times of persecution.
Explication of Text: what’s it all mean?
So, if John was speaking to first century Christians, how could his prophecy possibly apply to us?
The thing is that you don’t have to see an apocalyptic vision to appreciate the conflict between Christ’s message of love and the destructive influences of our own times that cause unhappiness, lost identity, and even tragedy.
It isn’t hard to find cultural acceptance of violence as a way of life.
It isn’t hard to recognize the power of elitism that devalues the humanity of those who look or live or speak differently than we do.
It isn’t hard to feel the pull of advertising and marketing that says that a bigger house or a more luxurious car or some other commercial consumption will bring us true happiness.
It isn’t hard to hear the loud, self-righteous voices of narrow moralism or jingoistic patriotism.
In order to make some use of John’s message, you don’t have to see the world in terms of some dualistic struggle between good and evil.
All you have to do is simply consider the world just as it is and compare it to the vision of a new heaven and new earth where God dwells among us and where the river of life refreshes the human spirit.
Listener Context: how does this relate to my life?
We go about our lives in this present world, a world filled with tragic possibilities. We go about the business of our hopes and dreams in a world filled with events that cut short our plans. Bridges collapse. Airplanes crash. Automobiles collide. Crime, terrorism, mean spiritedness, racism, cancer, war, infirmity, floods, fires- all these things rob us of robust and precious dreams. These are possibilities in the world as it is.
When confronted with some terrifying, life ending disaster different people will reach different conclusions. Some percentage of the population will claim to see the hand of God in human tragedy. They will say that God is exacting vengace and retribution for personal sins or that God whimsically selects one family to be destroyed by a tornado while sparing another family two doors away. The heavy hand of God is even perceived in the single death of a loved one at any age, death that does not occur from some catastrophic public event.
These people say God takes people out of the midst of life for God’s own mysterious purpose. These people say God has a time and place for the death of every individual and that God will either do the dirty work or will not interfere to save us. There is nothing we can do about it and our plans count for very little.
Theologically, I strongly disagree with that conclusion. And the prophet John disagrees with that conclusion also.
Despite John’s dire warning about divine retribution for false Christians, his revelation is a wonderfully hopeful vision. John agrees with the claim of the great prophet Isaiah. This God, who delivered the Jews out of Egypt, who organized a rabble in the desert of Sinai and gave them a land of promise, this God who raised Christ Jesus from the dead, this God is always doing wonderful new things in our lives. [iii]
John’s vision offers a message of hope and comfort that when we are torn away from this present world a new heaven and a new earth will be revealed. A new thing will be done before our eyes and God will dwell among us, nourishing us with new life.
Conclusion: what’s the point?
Is this just a dream, a far fetched hallucination?
Is it a quaint story that satisfies simple minds?
All who hear John’s revelation must answer these questions for themselves based on faith. It’s up to you. But I know this.
Life matters. Hope abounds in the new things God is doing every day and every step of our journey.
Life counts for something. Hopes and dreams are relevant and worthwhile and life has a purpose even if our plans are cut short by the tragic possibilities of this present world.
Maybe there is a direction and meaning in human life beyond the individual’s own will. Maybe a terrorist’s plot, the failure to inspect and repair a bridge, the failure to prevent a levy from breaking, the failure of a drunk driver to act responsibly, the helter skelter path of a tornado, maybe all these things are the supernatural intervention of inscrutible fate. And yet, life would indeed matter very little if the end of life were not met with a new heaven and a new earth.
Life matters. Hope abounds. Glory be to God. AMEN.
[i] http://www.tcnj.edu/~wilder/works/bridge.html
[ii] Ezekiel 38-39
[iii] Isaiah 43:18-19
Presenting Engagement: life and plans cut short.
Imagine yourself travelling along your life’s journey, working to live out your life’s plans, to live out your hopes and dreams, when suddenly some catastrophic interruption occurs that dashes all those plans, curtails all those hopes and dreams!
I thought about that this week when the interstate bridge over the Mississippi River fell during heavy traffic between Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota.
Dozens of automobiles and several busses were travelling on to some particular destination when tragedy struck. They were going home from work. They were going home from school trips. They were going home from summer vacations or just setting off on vacations. They were taxi drivers delivering passengers, truck drivers delivering goods. They were social wokrers going out to help improve the lives of others. Some were simply folks going on an errand on the other side of town.
There were all these people who’s lives were interrupted by catastrophe that resulted in disabling injury or even death. Plans delayed indefinitely. Plans disrupted permanently. Business that now goes unfinished. Busy people in busy moments of play or work or chores whose hopes and dreams for the years to come collapsed with the concrete slabs of a highway bridge, smashing into a swirling river bottom sixty feet below.
I don’t know if the most distressing part of it all is the death and injury or the unfulfilled plans of the accident victims.
Of course, this tragedy reminds me of a number of other disasters involving lives lost during travel. I think of the morbid tragedy of the Titanic. Of airplane incidents. I recall a classmate who perished on an airpalne the summer after our seventh grade year. I recall a college classmate who drowned during a whitewater rafting trip. And we can never forget the victims of 9/11, those who were just arriving at work in the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon and those who had boarded early morning flights on business trips or personal travel. All lives cut short in the middle of plans, hopes and dreams.
The most famous story of such a disaster is probably Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The novel was written in 1927 and was made into a popular movie by the director Quentin Tarrentino several years ago.
Wilder’s novel tells about a fictional bridge collapse in Peru in 1714 in which five people perish. This bridge had been regarded as the finest and most “high tech” bridge in the entire country yet it fell carrying these five people, all on their way to specific destinations, filfilling prescious life plans. Five people living out their hopes and dreams. Five people caught in the middle of their life journeys. Five people whose plans were cut short by disaster.
When asked about the purpose intended in this plot, Wilder revealed that it was a question: is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?[i] In other words, is there some supernatural agent of fate that assigns us each a destiny that we can’t know? Or are we in control?
And that’s really a basic question of life, isn’t it?
I mean, here we are making great plans, hoping and dreaming wonderful things off in the future or working hard to complete dreams and plans that we’ve already imagined and when tragedy strikes from some source outside of our own control we inevitably ask: who controls our destiny? Are our lives just some board game that we play out to fill the time but which ultimately has no purpose at all?
Is the course of life just as Shakespeare described it in the play Hamlet? You know that famous soliloquy where Hamlet says:
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Do our dreams signify nothing? Why bother dreaming? Why make any plans at all? Is the invisible hands that controls our fate the hand of God?
Biblical Context: new things.
Now, the Revelation of John is a daunting and even frightening book of the Bible. In parts, God sounds exactly like a deity that exercises supreme power, forestalling all our hopes and dreams, snatching us out of the prime of life or taking us away from our loved ones when God considers the timing to be appropriate.
This apocalyptic vision of John is hard for us to understand in 2007, so many centuries after it was written, so many centuries after the conditions that this prophet John saw all around him. But we misunderstand Biblical prophecy if we assume that the writer was speaking specifically to us, a future audience, about specific conditions that exist long after his times and about which he knew nothing.
So the first thing we have to do is put this prophecy into historical context and that context is an era of persecution of Christians.
In the Greco-Roman world of the late first century, religion was more pluralistic than it is today. There were many authorized gods but chief among them was the Roman Emperor. The authorities considered Christianity to be a criminal conspiracy because Christians exclusively worshipped one God and that god was neither the Emperor nor any of the other divinities in the Roman pantheon. After Rome burned in the year 64, Emperor Nero carried out a state sponsored persecution and for decades afterwards Roman governors executed Christians by political order for refusing to worship those validated gods.
Fearful Christians were even encouraged to turn in their Christian neighbors in return for leniency. All Christians had to walk a very fine line between giving lip service to Rome and living as people of faith.
These were the times in which John lived. Not only were there rumors of Nero’s return, but Christians were being seduced by this pagan culture and failing in their loyalty to Christ and Christ’s revelation.
John was likely an itinerant preacher of Jewish origin, a Jewish convert to Christianity who personally knew the seven congregations to whom he wrote. As a prophet, he wanted to warn these congregations about an apocalyptic retribution against both the pagan seducers and the disloyal, seduced Christians. He wanted to warn them about this very real act of God that might begin at any moment.
John’s predecessors in the rich Hebrew prophetic tradition were visionaries like Ezekiel and Daniel who lived during the time of Babylonian exile and forecast a similar destruction of God’s enemies. For them, Babylon was the archtype of all God’s enemies. Gog and Magog were names Ezekiel gave to nations that tried to usurp, seduce, and consume the Hebrew followers of God. [ii]
So what was John speaking about? John borrows from the visions in his prophetic tradition. And even though John’s revelation reads as a continuous, chronological epic, it is very likely that he compiled separate visions of his own and others into this prophetic account.
Like Daniel and Ezekiel, John refers to Babylon and John’s new Babylon is Rome. But Babylon is more than just a symbol of an evil state, it’s the state of evil. Babylon is the Dark Side, the perennial, cosmic evil empire. This prophecy is cosmic in proportions because while Rome may be the enemy in the late first century, John is claiming that there will always be a Babylon in the life of Christ’s church.
In such violent times, John wants to give the congregations of the seven churches more than a warning not to be seduced into accepting a culture that contradicts Christ’s message. John is giving them, and us, a message of comfort to cling to in times of persecution.
Explication of Text: what’s it all mean?
So, if John was speaking to first century Christians, how could his prophecy possibly apply to us?
The thing is that you don’t have to see an apocalyptic vision to appreciate the conflict between Christ’s message of love and the destructive influences of our own times that cause unhappiness, lost identity, and even tragedy.
It isn’t hard to find cultural acceptance of violence as a way of life.
It isn’t hard to recognize the power of elitism that devalues the humanity of those who look or live or speak differently than we do.
It isn’t hard to feel the pull of advertising and marketing that says that a bigger house or a more luxurious car or some other commercial consumption will bring us true happiness.
It isn’t hard to hear the loud, self-righteous voices of narrow moralism or jingoistic patriotism.
In order to make some use of John’s message, you don’t have to see the world in terms of some dualistic struggle between good and evil.
All you have to do is simply consider the world just as it is and compare it to the vision of a new heaven and new earth where God dwells among us and where the river of life refreshes the human spirit.
Listener Context: how does this relate to my life?
We go about our lives in this present world, a world filled with tragic possibilities. We go about the business of our hopes and dreams in a world filled with events that cut short our plans. Bridges collapse. Airplanes crash. Automobiles collide. Crime, terrorism, mean spiritedness, racism, cancer, war, infirmity, floods, fires- all these things rob us of robust and precious dreams. These are possibilities in the world as it is.
When confronted with some terrifying, life ending disaster different people will reach different conclusions. Some percentage of the population will claim to see the hand of God in human tragedy. They will say that God is exacting vengace and retribution for personal sins or that God whimsically selects one family to be destroyed by a tornado while sparing another family two doors away. The heavy hand of God is even perceived in the single death of a loved one at any age, death that does not occur from some catastrophic public event.
These people say God takes people out of the midst of life for God’s own mysterious purpose. These people say God has a time and place for the death of every individual and that God will either do the dirty work or will not interfere to save us. There is nothing we can do about it and our plans count for very little.
Theologically, I strongly disagree with that conclusion. And the prophet John disagrees with that conclusion also.
Despite John’s dire warning about divine retribution for false Christians, his revelation is a wonderfully hopeful vision. John agrees with the claim of the great prophet Isaiah. This God, who delivered the Jews out of Egypt, who organized a rabble in the desert of Sinai and gave them a land of promise, this God who raised Christ Jesus from the dead, this God is always doing wonderful new things in our lives. [iii]
John’s vision offers a message of hope and comfort that when we are torn away from this present world a new heaven and a new earth will be revealed. A new thing will be done before our eyes and God will dwell among us, nourishing us with new life.
Conclusion: what’s the point?
Is this just a dream, a far fetched hallucination?
Is it a quaint story that satisfies simple minds?
All who hear John’s revelation must answer these questions for themselves based on faith. It’s up to you. But I know this.
Life matters. Hope abounds in the new things God is doing every day and every step of our journey.
Life counts for something. Hopes and dreams are relevant and worthwhile and life has a purpose even if our plans are cut short by the tragic possibilities of this present world.
Maybe there is a direction and meaning in human life beyond the individual’s own will. Maybe a terrorist’s plot, the failure to inspect and repair a bridge, the failure to prevent a levy from breaking, the failure of a drunk driver to act responsibly, the helter skelter path of a tornado, maybe all these things are the supernatural intervention of inscrutible fate. And yet, life would indeed matter very little if the end of life were not met with a new heaven and a new earth.
Life matters. Hope abounds. Glory be to God. AMEN.
[i] http://www.tcnj.edu/~wilder/works/bridge.html
[ii] Ezekiel 38-39
[iii] Isaiah 43:18-19
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Easter Deliverance: The Critical Event
Mark 16:1-8
Presenting Engagement: two sides of Easter.
When I was growing up, the Easter Sunday service always wound up with a peeling of bells and the hymn which begins: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
The writer of the lyrics, Julia Ward Howe, was inspired by the words of Jeremiah 25:30 which reads- “He will thunder from his holy dwelling and roar mightily against His land. He will shout like those who tread the grapes, shout against all who live on earth.”
Now, those are not very Easter-like sentiments! They don’t sound much like affirmation of God’s love in Jesus.
But actually, Julia Ward Howe transformed Jeremiah’s words into an expression of the triumph of God. It’s divine glory that’s on the march! God’s truth and righteousness are transfiguring us all in the glory of Christ!
One particular verse even seems to challenge us: “He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat. Oh be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant my feet! Our God is marching on!”
That’s straight out of Matthew 25 in the section known as The Judgment of the Gentiles. These are the verses where the righteous ones don’t remember ever feeding or giving drink to Jesus or clothing or welcoming or caring for Jesus. But he responds: “truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”[i]
I think we need that challenge of Christ to balance out the image of God’s glorious triumph and victory at Easter.
It is so easy to go from the praises and hosanna’s of Palm Sunday straight to the peeling of bells on Easter Sunday. It’s so easy to stand beside the parade route with arms held high, praising God, rejoicing in God’s mighty deed of resurrection. And it’s so easy to believe that the victory parade is all that Easter is about.
But there is no better time than Easter morning to ask ourselves how well we meet Christ’s challenge every day. There’s no better morning to discover how jubilant are our feet.
If we were strictly a praising and triumphant church we could just glance in passing at the Last Supper and the sharing of Jesus’ sacred blood in the cup of wine. We might only uses our peripheral vision to notice the sleeping disciples and the arrest of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. We could very easily allow Jesus’ agonizing death on the cross, his dry mouth sticky with sour wine, the humiliating abandonment by his closest disciples, the tear streaked cheeks of his mother- we could simply make these images and feelings into momentary shadows on an otherwise cloudless spring day.
I don’t know what religion that “all praise and all victory all the time” is but according to Mark’s gospel, it is not Christianity.
According to Mark, Christian discipleship has a cost that points directly back to the cross.
The Gospel of Mark makes it clear that you can’t get from Palm Sunday to Easter without lingering in the shadow of the cross of Jesus.
Biblical Context: what is going on in the text?
Listen now to the whole story again and think about how it makes you feel.
At nine in the morning on Friday, after spitting on him, beating his head with a stick, and forcing him to struggle through the streets of Jerusalem under the weight of the heavy cross, the centurions crucified Jesus of Nazareth. At noon the sky went black and at three Jesus cried out to God: “Why have you forsaken me?” The crowd thought he was calling Elijah and ridiculed him again. Then in this cursed, shameful moment he breathed his final, mortal breath.
A group of three women watched this moment some distance away from the cross. They had followed Jesus to Jerusalem from the Galilee region and had looked after him wherever he went. They were now clutched together in sadness and dismay. They were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome.
Friday was also the day of Preparation for the sabbath and so in the evening a prominent Hebrew citizen known as Joseph of Arimathea went to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, to ask for possession of Jesus’ body for burial. Pilate, who had been wrist deep in the trials and crucifixion of Jesus, was surpirised by the request since he didn’t even know Jesus had already died. But after some double checking with the centurions Pilate granted Joseph’s request. So Joseph had Jesus’ body removed from the cross, wrapped in linen and placed in a tomb that had been hewn out of solid rock. Then a boulder was rolled across the tomb entrance. Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James stood beside Joseph during the entire burial.
Now because the sabbath was quickly approaching, Jesus had been buried quickly, without proper annointing and cleaning. But once the sabbath was finished the two Mary’s returned to the tomb to perform this custom. It was early on the first day of the week, meaning Sunday, and they brought Salome along as well. Remember that these three had stood together watching Jesus pass out of this world and two of them had witnessed the burial. The three friends had supported each other through every step of this strange journey.
Now they were concerned that the boulder would be too heavy to move and there would be no one at the tomb to help them. They tentatively approached the tomb, arm in arm. Imagine the looks on their faces when they found that the boulder had already been removed! They never expected something like this! Who in the world could have been there before them? No one would have entered the tomb over the sabbath. That would have violated the divine law itself. Had grave robbers been there? Had Roman soldiers removed the body to prevent Jesus from becoming a popular martyr?
Then imagine the faces of these three women as they walked into the open tomb and found, not Jesus’ body, but a strangely dressed young man! He was calmly sitting right over there to one side telling them that Jesus had been raised from the dead and had left the tomb! He must have seen their expressions because he said to them: “Oh, don’t be alarmed. Just go now; go back and tell Peter that Jesus is going on to Galilee before everyone else.”
“Don’t be alarmed,” the angel had said.
Don’t be alarmed?!
They couldn’t help being alarmed. They were so overcome with fright and awe that they huddled together. They backed out of the tomb together and the minute they were clear of the place they all turned and ran away and kept quiet about this entire encounter.
Trembling and astonishment gripped them and they were too frightened to say anything to anyone.
Explication of Text: what’s it all mean?
So, how did this narrative make you feel? Do you feel like ringing any bells? Did the ending meet your expectations or leave you hanging?
It’s common to feel that this tale is unfinished. It’s common to feel like your expectations have been twisted all around. But then, Mark’s entire gospel is all about expectations that get upset, turned inside out, twisted all around.
You would expect Jesus to be glad when he miraculously heals someone and they call him Lord, but he isn’t. He keeps swearing people to silence and seems to want his identity kept secret- it’s called the messianic secret. You would expect Jesus’ disciples to understand who he is and to stick by him in his hour of greatest need but they do not. You would expect that the angel’s news of Jesus’ resurrection would cause these women to run joyously to tell the others. But they flee in fear instead.
Well if this ending doesn’t present the image of Easter that you want or expect or enjoy, there are two additional variations in Mark’s gospel that you can choose from. The shorter ending, about a paragraph long, claims that the women did pass along the angel’s message quickly as they were commanded.
In the longer ending, Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene and when she tells what she’s seen, no one believes her. Jesus later appears to two other disciples as they walk in the country and no one believes their story either. Then Jesus appears to the primary eleven disciples, scorns their disbelief, and sends them out into the world to proclaim the good news. After commissioning the disciples, Jesus ascends into heaven and the disciples disperse. Everyone ends up right where we think they ought to end up.
Even though these endings offer greater closure, neither is considered historically part of Mark’s gospel. They were perhaps added a hundred years after the Easter event precisely because no one in the early church ever liked Mark’s ending.
So why would Mark tell the most important story of the Bible in such an inconclusive way?
Maybe his real ending was simply torn from the scroll that he wrote the gospel on.
Or maybe Mark ends the gospel this way to tell us that Easter is not just about triumphant joy.
Maybe Mark is telling his Christian community not to base their faith on something as superficial as a triumphant Easter without the agony of Good Friday.
Listener Context: how does this relate to my life?
Maybe Mark is telling us that we’ve got to see this moment of fear and trembling at the empty tomb as THE critical moment- THE defining moment of faith for Christians.
After all, this is the very moment that we’ve been building up to through out Lent. This is our moment of deliverence and everything that has come before now was only a preparation for this moment.
And when a critical moment occurs in your life, in my life, it can be startling. It can be awe-some. It can cause your feet not to be jubilant. It can make you stammer and not know what to say.
But like the women who hear the words of the angel, we stand at this point of critical decision. In literary terms, they are the devices that draw us into the plot. We feel what they feel. We think as they think.
What will they do next? What will we do? How will we respond to Christ’s call to discipleship?
What does the good news of Jesus’ resurrection mean for you? For these faithful women, Jesus’ resurrection brings extreme tension and I believe it is no different for us.
In one sense we can ask ourselves if we will be disciples like Abraham who journey in covenant with God for a purpose larger than ourselves- for a blessing which passes through us but is not solely for our own sake. Like Joseph, will we show mercy to others rather than seek revenge even when they mean to harm us, and through mercy gather a community committed to the love of God and neighbor? Will we take stock of our true selves, ask for God’s forgiveness and accept the grace found only in Christ Jesus?
These are the challenges of discipleship.
In another sense, Mark’s ending of the Easter story makes us carry with us the vivid images of Jesus’ agony, despair, and doubt on the cross even as we hear the good news of his resurrection. The shadow of the cross makes our faith stronger on Easter because in our own wilderness moments of despair and doubt, we know that our savior has felt what we feel and that he is truly with us- even to the end of the age.
This is the reassurance of Christ.
Conclusion: what’s the Point?
The challenges of discipleship and the reassurance of Christ.
You see, I like the cliff hanger ending in Mark because it puts me in this uncomfortable place where the reassurance is not separate from the challenge. Christianity is not about a happy ending served up on a silver platter. It’s about a journey with reassurance in one of your pockets and challenge in the other. You have to deal with this tension to be a Christian. We have to constantly reassess our expectations of God and God’s expectations of us.
This confrontational, fragmented ending in Mark’s gospel makes that clear.
So go! Go from this critical moment of your life.
Go sing triumphant hymns and ring all the bells you can find. Believe the good news of Easter and join the parade with jubilant feet. Believe the fulfillment of God’s promise and be a joyful and challenged disciple of our risen Lord, Christ Jesus!
AMEN.
[i] Matthew 25:34-40
Presenting Engagement: two sides of Easter.
When I was growing up, the Easter Sunday service always wound up with a peeling of bells and the hymn which begins: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
The writer of the lyrics, Julia Ward Howe, was inspired by the words of Jeremiah 25:30 which reads- “He will thunder from his holy dwelling and roar mightily against His land. He will shout like those who tread the grapes, shout against all who live on earth.”
Now, those are not very Easter-like sentiments! They don’t sound much like affirmation of God’s love in Jesus.
But actually, Julia Ward Howe transformed Jeremiah’s words into an expression of the triumph of God. It’s divine glory that’s on the march! God’s truth and righteousness are transfiguring us all in the glory of Christ!
One particular verse even seems to challenge us: “He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat. Oh be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant my feet! Our God is marching on!”
That’s straight out of Matthew 25 in the section known as The Judgment of the Gentiles. These are the verses where the righteous ones don’t remember ever feeding or giving drink to Jesus or clothing or welcoming or caring for Jesus. But he responds: “truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”[i]
I think we need that challenge of Christ to balance out the image of God’s glorious triumph and victory at Easter.
It is so easy to go from the praises and hosanna’s of Palm Sunday straight to the peeling of bells on Easter Sunday. It’s so easy to stand beside the parade route with arms held high, praising God, rejoicing in God’s mighty deed of resurrection. And it’s so easy to believe that the victory parade is all that Easter is about.
But there is no better time than Easter morning to ask ourselves how well we meet Christ’s challenge every day. There’s no better morning to discover how jubilant are our feet.
If we were strictly a praising and triumphant church we could just glance in passing at the Last Supper and the sharing of Jesus’ sacred blood in the cup of wine. We might only uses our peripheral vision to notice the sleeping disciples and the arrest of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. We could very easily allow Jesus’ agonizing death on the cross, his dry mouth sticky with sour wine, the humiliating abandonment by his closest disciples, the tear streaked cheeks of his mother- we could simply make these images and feelings into momentary shadows on an otherwise cloudless spring day.
I don’t know what religion that “all praise and all victory all the time” is but according to Mark’s gospel, it is not Christianity.
According to Mark, Christian discipleship has a cost that points directly back to the cross.
The Gospel of Mark makes it clear that you can’t get from Palm Sunday to Easter without lingering in the shadow of the cross of Jesus.
Biblical Context: what is going on in the text?
Listen now to the whole story again and think about how it makes you feel.
At nine in the morning on Friday, after spitting on him, beating his head with a stick, and forcing him to struggle through the streets of Jerusalem under the weight of the heavy cross, the centurions crucified Jesus of Nazareth. At noon the sky went black and at three Jesus cried out to God: “Why have you forsaken me?” The crowd thought he was calling Elijah and ridiculed him again. Then in this cursed, shameful moment he breathed his final, mortal breath.
A group of three women watched this moment some distance away from the cross. They had followed Jesus to Jerusalem from the Galilee region and had looked after him wherever he went. They were now clutched together in sadness and dismay. They were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome.
Friday was also the day of Preparation for the sabbath and so in the evening a prominent Hebrew citizen known as Joseph of Arimathea went to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, to ask for possession of Jesus’ body for burial. Pilate, who had been wrist deep in the trials and crucifixion of Jesus, was surpirised by the request since he didn’t even know Jesus had already died. But after some double checking with the centurions Pilate granted Joseph’s request. So Joseph had Jesus’ body removed from the cross, wrapped in linen and placed in a tomb that had been hewn out of solid rock. Then a boulder was rolled across the tomb entrance. Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James stood beside Joseph during the entire burial.
Now because the sabbath was quickly approaching, Jesus had been buried quickly, without proper annointing and cleaning. But once the sabbath was finished the two Mary’s returned to the tomb to perform this custom. It was early on the first day of the week, meaning Sunday, and they brought Salome along as well. Remember that these three had stood together watching Jesus pass out of this world and two of them had witnessed the burial. The three friends had supported each other through every step of this strange journey.
Now they were concerned that the boulder would be too heavy to move and there would be no one at the tomb to help them. They tentatively approached the tomb, arm in arm. Imagine the looks on their faces when they found that the boulder had already been removed! They never expected something like this! Who in the world could have been there before them? No one would have entered the tomb over the sabbath. That would have violated the divine law itself. Had grave robbers been there? Had Roman soldiers removed the body to prevent Jesus from becoming a popular martyr?
Then imagine the faces of these three women as they walked into the open tomb and found, not Jesus’ body, but a strangely dressed young man! He was calmly sitting right over there to one side telling them that Jesus had been raised from the dead and had left the tomb! He must have seen their expressions because he said to them: “Oh, don’t be alarmed. Just go now; go back and tell Peter that Jesus is going on to Galilee before everyone else.”
“Don’t be alarmed,” the angel had said.
Don’t be alarmed?!
They couldn’t help being alarmed. They were so overcome with fright and awe that they huddled together. They backed out of the tomb together and the minute they were clear of the place they all turned and ran away and kept quiet about this entire encounter.
Trembling and astonishment gripped them and they were too frightened to say anything to anyone.
Explication of Text: what’s it all mean?
So, how did this narrative make you feel? Do you feel like ringing any bells? Did the ending meet your expectations or leave you hanging?
It’s common to feel that this tale is unfinished. It’s common to feel like your expectations have been twisted all around. But then, Mark’s entire gospel is all about expectations that get upset, turned inside out, twisted all around.
You would expect Jesus to be glad when he miraculously heals someone and they call him Lord, but he isn’t. He keeps swearing people to silence and seems to want his identity kept secret- it’s called the messianic secret. You would expect Jesus’ disciples to understand who he is and to stick by him in his hour of greatest need but they do not. You would expect that the angel’s news of Jesus’ resurrection would cause these women to run joyously to tell the others. But they flee in fear instead.
Well if this ending doesn’t present the image of Easter that you want or expect or enjoy, there are two additional variations in Mark’s gospel that you can choose from. The shorter ending, about a paragraph long, claims that the women did pass along the angel’s message quickly as they were commanded.
In the longer ending, Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene and when she tells what she’s seen, no one believes her. Jesus later appears to two other disciples as they walk in the country and no one believes their story either. Then Jesus appears to the primary eleven disciples, scorns their disbelief, and sends them out into the world to proclaim the good news. After commissioning the disciples, Jesus ascends into heaven and the disciples disperse. Everyone ends up right where we think they ought to end up.
Even though these endings offer greater closure, neither is considered historically part of Mark’s gospel. They were perhaps added a hundred years after the Easter event precisely because no one in the early church ever liked Mark’s ending.
So why would Mark tell the most important story of the Bible in such an inconclusive way?
Maybe his real ending was simply torn from the scroll that he wrote the gospel on.
Or maybe Mark ends the gospel this way to tell us that Easter is not just about triumphant joy.
Maybe Mark is telling his Christian community not to base their faith on something as superficial as a triumphant Easter without the agony of Good Friday.
Listener Context: how does this relate to my life?
Maybe Mark is telling us that we’ve got to see this moment of fear and trembling at the empty tomb as THE critical moment- THE defining moment of faith for Christians.
After all, this is the very moment that we’ve been building up to through out Lent. This is our moment of deliverence and everything that has come before now was only a preparation for this moment.
And when a critical moment occurs in your life, in my life, it can be startling. It can be awe-some. It can cause your feet not to be jubilant. It can make you stammer and not know what to say.
But like the women who hear the words of the angel, we stand at this point of critical decision. In literary terms, they are the devices that draw us into the plot. We feel what they feel. We think as they think.
What will they do next? What will we do? How will we respond to Christ’s call to discipleship?
What does the good news of Jesus’ resurrection mean for you? For these faithful women, Jesus’ resurrection brings extreme tension and I believe it is no different for us.
In one sense we can ask ourselves if we will be disciples like Abraham who journey in covenant with God for a purpose larger than ourselves- for a blessing which passes through us but is not solely for our own sake. Like Joseph, will we show mercy to others rather than seek revenge even when they mean to harm us, and through mercy gather a community committed to the love of God and neighbor? Will we take stock of our true selves, ask for God’s forgiveness and accept the grace found only in Christ Jesus?
These are the challenges of discipleship.
In another sense, Mark’s ending of the Easter story makes us carry with us the vivid images of Jesus’ agony, despair, and doubt on the cross even as we hear the good news of his resurrection. The shadow of the cross makes our faith stronger on Easter because in our own wilderness moments of despair and doubt, we know that our savior has felt what we feel and that he is truly with us- even to the end of the age.
This is the reassurance of Christ.
Conclusion: what’s the Point?
The challenges of discipleship and the reassurance of Christ.
You see, I like the cliff hanger ending in Mark because it puts me in this uncomfortable place where the reassurance is not separate from the challenge. Christianity is not about a happy ending served up on a silver platter. It’s about a journey with reassurance in one of your pockets and challenge in the other. You have to deal with this tension to be a Christian. We have to constantly reassess our expectations of God and God’s expectations of us.
This confrontational, fragmented ending in Mark’s gospel makes that clear.
So go! Go from this critical moment of your life.
Go sing triumphant hymns and ring all the bells you can find. Believe the good news of Easter and join the parade with jubilant feet. Believe the fulfillment of God’s promise and be a joyful and challenged disciple of our risen Lord, Christ Jesus!
AMEN.
[i] Matthew 25:34-40
Magi In The City: A Tale of Epiphany
Matthew 2:1-12
Samuel walked into my office adjacent to the sanctuary, a little bit down. The city was adorned to the hilt with Christmas regalia on every light post, in every store window, and on every house. Christmas festivals with seasonal choirs of school children were mysteriously popping out of thin air. Even the most bah-humbugiest, the grinchiest, the most gotta-see-it-to-believe it people I knew- they were all caught up in the season.
Even Mr. Hooey, the 85 year old curmudgeon up at the end of our street whose rare contributions to public conversation were limited to complaints about the dangerous loitering of neighborhood boys (who were in reality as good as gold and were only discussing whose front yard would host the next touch football scrimmage). Yes, even crusty old Mr. Hooey stopped me in the middle of walking the dog one morning to say how great the Douglas Fir and Holly wreath with pomegranates looked on our front door. It seemed that everyone in town, including the neighborhood grouch, was excited.
Everyone except Samuel.
“I just can’t seem to get into the spirit of the season,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked as pastorally as possible.
“Well it doesn’t seem like anybody thinks Christmas is really about Christ and so I just don’t get the point. It’s about store advertisements and mall Santa Clauses and crowded roads and people cursing each other over parking spaces and completing last minute deadlines before the office shuts down ‘til January. Maybe we’d be better off just skipping this commercial Christmas thing, have a simple church service and then start celebrating New Year’s; take a little trip to a warm beach to relax and then just get on with it.”
“Get on with what?”
“You know, get on with the next thing in life - the next year, the next work deadline, the next day of school for the kids, the next tax period, the next trip to the grocery store or the gas station.”
“Tell me,” I probed. “What do you think would have to happen in order for you to get into the Christmas spirit?”
The frustration dammed up in Samuel erupted: “It would take an act of God for me to get into the Christmas spirit!”
“Sam, I… I don’t mean to get all theological and deep,” I tried to say as humbly as possible “but, technically speaking…”
“Stop. I know where you’re going. You’re going to say: Christmas is an act of God. Yes, I get that. I understand what Christmas is supposed to be all about. But it isn’t about that really. At least it doesn’t seem to be about that at all from where I’m standing.”
I called on the all the resources of all my theological experience and training. “Maybe, in order for you to get into the Christmas spirit you need to find God somewhere in all that stuff going on out there that seems to have nothing to do with God.”
“Huh?”
“Do you remember the journey of the three Magi?” I asked. “I always liked the T. S. Eliot poem about it because it starts out talking about how daunting the journey was: ‘A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a long journey…’ You can really feel it. The camel drivers threatened to leave if they didn’t get more pay for the trip, and the townspeople were hostile in villages they passed through, and tavern keepers were thieves, and there was a lack of fire and adequate shelter in the desert.[i] Think of the doubts and longing for family and luxury back home, and…and no room service!
“Then, near the end of their journey, there were false leads about where the baby was actually lying and Herod Antipas tried to trick them into participating in his appalling political intrigues. So much clutter, distraction, obfuscation, misinformation, disinformation. It’s incredible that they found Jesus at all. But what a fantastic revelation they had, despite all their tribulation.
“They were gentiles, after all, who theologically represented all gentiles. They followed the light of that star until they arrived at the location of the Jewish messiah and in the very moment of their epiphany- of their revelation, of finding that infant- Jesus became the messiah of Jews and gentiles alike. Maybe your experience is an updated version of their experience. It’s everybody’s faith journey. It’s everybody’s epiphany.”
“You’re right, you know,” Samuel replied somberly. “I can’t find God anywhere in any of these Christmas preparations and hooplah. Even my kid’s choir recital here at church seemed to be more of an opportunity for the parents to ooh and aah than a worship event.”
As the pastor, that last comment smarted a bit so I retorted rather crisply, “Not to be cliché about it but you really should go look for the baby Jesus. Start now. If you find Jesus, you’ll find God too.”
Samuel was undeterred. “But I thought God is coming to us - as Jesus. That’s part of the whole problem. I keep expecting God to show up and it just doesn’t happen. The FedEx guy shows up. The power bill shows up. The lawn crew shows up to clean up the leaves that show up on the grass. Why hasn’t God showed up?”
I tried one last time. “Here’s the thing,” I pronounced bluntly and a little peeved. “The world is a bundle of complicated contradictions. If you want a simplistic life with superficial answers then you go ahead and live that way but don’t complain when such one dimensional faith lets you down. Alternatively, if you go meditate in the undisturbed solitude of some Himalayan mountain top, it may just rain on your well developed theories and high minded spiritual insights so that your thoughts just dissolve into a muddled mess like chalk drawings on a wet sidewalk.
“Think of the billions of molecules out there full of atoms, neutrons, electrons, protons. Stable and unstable. Unstable ones decaying into some other arrangement in order to become stable. Particles firing off randomly because of some microscopic chain reaction, pinging against your skin, your heart, your head, your brain, your consciousness. Ping. Ping. Ping.
“Your job is to find God in the middle of all that; not necessarily so that you can make sense of all those contradictions remorselessly pinging away at you or make them go away. They’re not going to go away. Go find God in order to liberate some little spark of divine truth within your consciousness, within your personal understanding of life that allows you to see beyond the material distractions so you can make something healthy and hopeful and joyous out of the human condition.
“Take the journey. Find Jesus: find the Father; find the Holy Spirit. Be the Magi, Sam. Be the Magi.”
Several days later I received an email from Samuel. He was still unsuccessful. “No sightings,” he wrote. “Have stared into every passing face at the mall, on the street, at a soup kitchen. No Jesus. No Father. No Holy Spirit. No nothin’. Seems like God would come out of seclusion at least once a year so those of us who believe could feel like we believe in something rather than nothing. Not asking for miracles, just some reassurance. Just a little sign maybe. God can do anything, right?!”
I immediately tapped out a response and fired my own set of pinging electrons through the wireless internet link. “Sam- Most of us get our images of God from what we learned in childhood rather than discerning things for ourselves as our brains develop, so I can understand how you might think God would magically appear at special times and leave little motivational tokens. God’s collection of inspirational sayings. But the Holy Trinity is not some kind of tooth fairy who shows up and leaves fifty cents under your pillow and the Bible isn’t a fortune cookie. Besides, Jesus is probably right under your very nose.”
During the week before Christmas, Samuel sent another email with an attached newspaper account of a car accident somewhere in a nearby county. His email said: “This guy found a Jesus, but it’s not the real Jesus. Still, it’s the popular Jesus.”
The article told of a man who was delivering his teenage nephew home after an evening basketball practice. As they cruised down the dark country road talking about the team’s chances for the upcoming season, they drove right past the side road to the farm where the boy lived without noticing. Still talking, they drove on another hundred yards and came up on an intersection before realizing where they were. Amid the boy’s shouts of surprise, the uncle slammed on the brakes, skidded, and crashed through a fence in the front yard of a house.
The car rumbled to a halt but not before it had forcefully intruded on a wooden nativity scene. Mary and Joseph got tossed callously aside and plastic donkeys and sheep were upended into very ungraceful poses. Worst of all, the baby Jesus bounced straight up in the air, out of his manger and landed face down on the windshield of the car, staring directly at the driver. The uncle was charged with failure to stop at an intersection and reckless endangerment of a minor.
At last it was Christmas Eve. We had a wild and joyous 5pm children’s service complete with traditional howls from impatient infants with water logged diapers. At 9pm, we had a solemn, candle light service of prayers and hymns and anthems- deeply spiritual and moving. Afterwards Samuel pulled me aside in one corner of the Narthex.
“I’ve been on a pilgrimage all week,” he whispered. “Been hitting every live nativity display in town.”
“Have you found the real Jesus?” I whispered back.
“Not yet. Most of them are really hokey. I mean some red haired guy with a pasted on beard trying to look like a Palestinian Jew named Joseph. And his blonde, lily-white trophy wife faking Mary, but fiddling with her tennis bracelet.”
“Maybe Mary played tennis,” I quipped.
“Cut it out. Anyway there’s a couple more that end just after midnight tonight and I’m going to check them out now.”
“Be the Magi, Sam,” I said in parting. He gave me a silent, blank look.
The next day my cell phone rang and ruing the fact that I had left it on during the one day of the year that I thought I really deserved some peace and quiet, I flipped it open to hear Samuel’s exuberant voice.
“I found him! I found Jesus!”
“The real Jesus?” I queried.
“Yep, the real Jesus! Oh he wasn’t there in body or anything like that, but he was there just the same. I could tell.”
It turned out that just before midnight, Samuel had driven up to a little church in the middle of the city that had become dwarfed by years of growth from the surrounding commercial property. There was a small array of people clumped together in the foggy, cool night as traffic noises broke in from the street.
“It was really kind of strange,” Samuel related. “Thought it was going to be a total waste of time. People just standing around talking, not even paying attention to the nativity scene- not taking it seriously. I wondered why they even bothered to come out. At least the Mary and Joseph were kind of realistic. Mary was probably about 16, dark hair, pimples. Joseph looked about 19 or 20, long hair, scraggly, three day old beard. Then there were these dwarf livestock. Couple of cows the size of Golden Retrievers and a miniature goat and a donkey same size as the cow. A shepherd with a golf towel wrapped around his head and cinched up with what looked like a nylon dog collar was holding the donkey and off to one side three guys with gold painted plastic crowns and burgundy tablecloths draped over their shoulders stood by a short camel that kept belching. I think one of them is a big shot local banker.
“And little kids who were clearly up too late for their age kept crossing the parking lot to the church and coming back with cookies and hot chocolate. There was a small, really smoky fire burning in one of those brass fire bowls straight of a catalogue. A loud speaker screwed to the side of the plywood stall suddenly started barking out the Christmas narrative while the actors mimed their parts. Right in the middle of the whole thing a fire truck screams down the street interrupting everything and I thought I’d had it. I was done. This wasn’t the real thing and the real Jesus just wasn’t going to show up this year.
“But before I could turn to go, I noticed some little tow head boy, maybe seven or eight, cut right across the path of the Magi and the camel. He was holding a Styrofoam cup of cider awkwardly away from his body so it wouldn’t spill and smiling- really proud of himself for having the cider. Didn’t even notice the Magi or the action in the nativity scene. His mom waved at him to hush and he smiled even bigger and gave her the thumbs up.
“I don’t know what happened, but right then I realized Jesus was there. It was like a light went off. All those people just doing their thing with that nativity play going on right under their noses. Just going about their business, not taking anything seriously except mundane achievements and creature comforts like getting some cider and a cookie. And tragedy screaming down the street like a fire truck, tearing a hole right through the whole holy moment.”
“Did you have an epiphany?” I interjected.
“Yeah, whatever,” Samuel blurted back. “It was that kid and his goofy grin. It was like Jesus was in his smile. All this distracting stuff was going on, all these particles pinging around, and Jesus was smack in the middle of it in a smile. And if Jesus was in a smile then he had to be happy that we were all there just doing what we were doing. No judgment of our distractedness. Just gladness about our participation in the moment.
“The thing is, God doesn’t just show up once a year to do a magic trick. Listen, you want my advice? You’ve got to tackle that journey the Magi took because it’s the participating that makes Jesus real; that’s where God becomes real to us. The minute that kid smiled, I realized the nativity play wasn’t just the actors and the narrator. It was them and everybody else standing there plus the miniature animals and the folks pumping gas at the filling station next door and the tired woman at the bus stop who just wanted to go home.
“I guess it really was one of those epiphanies. Well, gotta go. The wife’s got a fever but still wants a roaring fire in the fireplace and the kids want help putting toys together and the dog needs a walk and the in-laws will be here in an hour. But it’s all good.”
“You liberated the truth that was in you all along,” I confirmed.
“Yeah,” said Samuel. “It’s the truth alright.”
[i] Thomas Stearns Elliot, Journey of the Magi.
Samuel walked into my office adjacent to the sanctuary, a little bit down. The city was adorned to the hilt with Christmas regalia on every light post, in every store window, and on every house. Christmas festivals with seasonal choirs of school children were mysteriously popping out of thin air. Even the most bah-humbugiest, the grinchiest, the most gotta-see-it-to-believe it people I knew- they were all caught up in the season.
Even Mr. Hooey, the 85 year old curmudgeon up at the end of our street whose rare contributions to public conversation were limited to complaints about the dangerous loitering of neighborhood boys (who were in reality as good as gold and were only discussing whose front yard would host the next touch football scrimmage). Yes, even crusty old Mr. Hooey stopped me in the middle of walking the dog one morning to say how great the Douglas Fir and Holly wreath with pomegranates looked on our front door. It seemed that everyone in town, including the neighborhood grouch, was excited.
Everyone except Samuel.
“I just can’t seem to get into the spirit of the season,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked as pastorally as possible.
“Well it doesn’t seem like anybody thinks Christmas is really about Christ and so I just don’t get the point. It’s about store advertisements and mall Santa Clauses and crowded roads and people cursing each other over parking spaces and completing last minute deadlines before the office shuts down ‘til January. Maybe we’d be better off just skipping this commercial Christmas thing, have a simple church service and then start celebrating New Year’s; take a little trip to a warm beach to relax and then just get on with it.”
“Get on with what?”
“You know, get on with the next thing in life - the next year, the next work deadline, the next day of school for the kids, the next tax period, the next trip to the grocery store or the gas station.”
“Tell me,” I probed. “What do you think would have to happen in order for you to get into the Christmas spirit?”
The frustration dammed up in Samuel erupted: “It would take an act of God for me to get into the Christmas spirit!”
“Sam, I… I don’t mean to get all theological and deep,” I tried to say as humbly as possible “but, technically speaking…”
“Stop. I know where you’re going. You’re going to say: Christmas is an act of God. Yes, I get that. I understand what Christmas is supposed to be all about. But it isn’t about that really. At least it doesn’t seem to be about that at all from where I’m standing.”
I called on the all the resources of all my theological experience and training. “Maybe, in order for you to get into the Christmas spirit you need to find God somewhere in all that stuff going on out there that seems to have nothing to do with God.”
“Huh?”
“Do you remember the journey of the three Magi?” I asked. “I always liked the T. S. Eliot poem about it because it starts out talking about how daunting the journey was: ‘A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a long journey…’ You can really feel it. The camel drivers threatened to leave if they didn’t get more pay for the trip, and the townspeople were hostile in villages they passed through, and tavern keepers were thieves, and there was a lack of fire and adequate shelter in the desert.[i] Think of the doubts and longing for family and luxury back home, and…and no room service!
“Then, near the end of their journey, there were false leads about where the baby was actually lying and Herod Antipas tried to trick them into participating in his appalling political intrigues. So much clutter, distraction, obfuscation, misinformation, disinformation. It’s incredible that they found Jesus at all. But what a fantastic revelation they had, despite all their tribulation.
“They were gentiles, after all, who theologically represented all gentiles. They followed the light of that star until they arrived at the location of the Jewish messiah and in the very moment of their epiphany- of their revelation, of finding that infant- Jesus became the messiah of Jews and gentiles alike. Maybe your experience is an updated version of their experience. It’s everybody’s faith journey. It’s everybody’s epiphany.”
“You’re right, you know,” Samuel replied somberly. “I can’t find God anywhere in any of these Christmas preparations and hooplah. Even my kid’s choir recital here at church seemed to be more of an opportunity for the parents to ooh and aah than a worship event.”
As the pastor, that last comment smarted a bit so I retorted rather crisply, “Not to be cliché about it but you really should go look for the baby Jesus. Start now. If you find Jesus, you’ll find God too.”
Samuel was undeterred. “But I thought God is coming to us - as Jesus. That’s part of the whole problem. I keep expecting God to show up and it just doesn’t happen. The FedEx guy shows up. The power bill shows up. The lawn crew shows up to clean up the leaves that show up on the grass. Why hasn’t God showed up?”
I tried one last time. “Here’s the thing,” I pronounced bluntly and a little peeved. “The world is a bundle of complicated contradictions. If you want a simplistic life with superficial answers then you go ahead and live that way but don’t complain when such one dimensional faith lets you down. Alternatively, if you go meditate in the undisturbed solitude of some Himalayan mountain top, it may just rain on your well developed theories and high minded spiritual insights so that your thoughts just dissolve into a muddled mess like chalk drawings on a wet sidewalk.
“Think of the billions of molecules out there full of atoms, neutrons, electrons, protons. Stable and unstable. Unstable ones decaying into some other arrangement in order to become stable. Particles firing off randomly because of some microscopic chain reaction, pinging against your skin, your heart, your head, your brain, your consciousness. Ping. Ping. Ping.
“Your job is to find God in the middle of all that; not necessarily so that you can make sense of all those contradictions remorselessly pinging away at you or make them go away. They’re not going to go away. Go find God in order to liberate some little spark of divine truth within your consciousness, within your personal understanding of life that allows you to see beyond the material distractions so you can make something healthy and hopeful and joyous out of the human condition.
“Take the journey. Find Jesus: find the Father; find the Holy Spirit. Be the Magi, Sam. Be the Magi.”
Several days later I received an email from Samuel. He was still unsuccessful. “No sightings,” he wrote. “Have stared into every passing face at the mall, on the street, at a soup kitchen. No Jesus. No Father. No Holy Spirit. No nothin’. Seems like God would come out of seclusion at least once a year so those of us who believe could feel like we believe in something rather than nothing. Not asking for miracles, just some reassurance. Just a little sign maybe. God can do anything, right?!”
I immediately tapped out a response and fired my own set of pinging electrons through the wireless internet link. “Sam- Most of us get our images of God from what we learned in childhood rather than discerning things for ourselves as our brains develop, so I can understand how you might think God would magically appear at special times and leave little motivational tokens. God’s collection of inspirational sayings. But the Holy Trinity is not some kind of tooth fairy who shows up and leaves fifty cents under your pillow and the Bible isn’t a fortune cookie. Besides, Jesus is probably right under your very nose.”
During the week before Christmas, Samuel sent another email with an attached newspaper account of a car accident somewhere in a nearby county. His email said: “This guy found a Jesus, but it’s not the real Jesus. Still, it’s the popular Jesus.”
The article told of a man who was delivering his teenage nephew home after an evening basketball practice. As they cruised down the dark country road talking about the team’s chances for the upcoming season, they drove right past the side road to the farm where the boy lived without noticing. Still talking, they drove on another hundred yards and came up on an intersection before realizing where they were. Amid the boy’s shouts of surprise, the uncle slammed on the brakes, skidded, and crashed through a fence in the front yard of a house.
The car rumbled to a halt but not before it had forcefully intruded on a wooden nativity scene. Mary and Joseph got tossed callously aside and plastic donkeys and sheep were upended into very ungraceful poses. Worst of all, the baby Jesus bounced straight up in the air, out of his manger and landed face down on the windshield of the car, staring directly at the driver. The uncle was charged with failure to stop at an intersection and reckless endangerment of a minor.
At last it was Christmas Eve. We had a wild and joyous 5pm children’s service complete with traditional howls from impatient infants with water logged diapers. At 9pm, we had a solemn, candle light service of prayers and hymns and anthems- deeply spiritual and moving. Afterwards Samuel pulled me aside in one corner of the Narthex.
“I’ve been on a pilgrimage all week,” he whispered. “Been hitting every live nativity display in town.”
“Have you found the real Jesus?” I whispered back.
“Not yet. Most of them are really hokey. I mean some red haired guy with a pasted on beard trying to look like a Palestinian Jew named Joseph. And his blonde, lily-white trophy wife faking Mary, but fiddling with her tennis bracelet.”
“Maybe Mary played tennis,” I quipped.
“Cut it out. Anyway there’s a couple more that end just after midnight tonight and I’m going to check them out now.”
“Be the Magi, Sam,” I said in parting. He gave me a silent, blank look.
The next day my cell phone rang and ruing the fact that I had left it on during the one day of the year that I thought I really deserved some peace and quiet, I flipped it open to hear Samuel’s exuberant voice.
“I found him! I found Jesus!”
“The real Jesus?” I queried.
“Yep, the real Jesus! Oh he wasn’t there in body or anything like that, but he was there just the same. I could tell.”
It turned out that just before midnight, Samuel had driven up to a little church in the middle of the city that had become dwarfed by years of growth from the surrounding commercial property. There was a small array of people clumped together in the foggy, cool night as traffic noises broke in from the street.
“It was really kind of strange,” Samuel related. “Thought it was going to be a total waste of time. People just standing around talking, not even paying attention to the nativity scene- not taking it seriously. I wondered why they even bothered to come out. At least the Mary and Joseph were kind of realistic. Mary was probably about 16, dark hair, pimples. Joseph looked about 19 or 20, long hair, scraggly, three day old beard. Then there were these dwarf livestock. Couple of cows the size of Golden Retrievers and a miniature goat and a donkey same size as the cow. A shepherd with a golf towel wrapped around his head and cinched up with what looked like a nylon dog collar was holding the donkey and off to one side three guys with gold painted plastic crowns and burgundy tablecloths draped over their shoulders stood by a short camel that kept belching. I think one of them is a big shot local banker.
“And little kids who were clearly up too late for their age kept crossing the parking lot to the church and coming back with cookies and hot chocolate. There was a small, really smoky fire burning in one of those brass fire bowls straight of a catalogue. A loud speaker screwed to the side of the plywood stall suddenly started barking out the Christmas narrative while the actors mimed their parts. Right in the middle of the whole thing a fire truck screams down the street interrupting everything and I thought I’d had it. I was done. This wasn’t the real thing and the real Jesus just wasn’t going to show up this year.
“But before I could turn to go, I noticed some little tow head boy, maybe seven or eight, cut right across the path of the Magi and the camel. He was holding a Styrofoam cup of cider awkwardly away from his body so it wouldn’t spill and smiling- really proud of himself for having the cider. Didn’t even notice the Magi or the action in the nativity scene. His mom waved at him to hush and he smiled even bigger and gave her the thumbs up.
“I don’t know what happened, but right then I realized Jesus was there. It was like a light went off. All those people just doing their thing with that nativity play going on right under their noses. Just going about their business, not taking anything seriously except mundane achievements and creature comforts like getting some cider and a cookie. And tragedy screaming down the street like a fire truck, tearing a hole right through the whole holy moment.”
“Did you have an epiphany?” I interjected.
“Yeah, whatever,” Samuel blurted back. “It was that kid and his goofy grin. It was like Jesus was in his smile. All this distracting stuff was going on, all these particles pinging around, and Jesus was smack in the middle of it in a smile. And if Jesus was in a smile then he had to be happy that we were all there just doing what we were doing. No judgment of our distractedness. Just gladness about our participation in the moment.
“The thing is, God doesn’t just show up once a year to do a magic trick. Listen, you want my advice? You’ve got to tackle that journey the Magi took because it’s the participating that makes Jesus real; that’s where God becomes real to us. The minute that kid smiled, I realized the nativity play wasn’t just the actors and the narrator. It was them and everybody else standing there plus the miniature animals and the folks pumping gas at the filling station next door and the tired woman at the bus stop who just wanted to go home.
“I guess it really was one of those epiphanies. Well, gotta go. The wife’s got a fever but still wants a roaring fire in the fireplace and the kids want help putting toys together and the dog needs a walk and the in-laws will be here in an hour. But it’s all good.”
“You liberated the truth that was in you all along,” I confirmed.
“Yeah,” said Samuel. “It’s the truth alright.”
[i] Thomas Stearns Elliot, Journey of the Magi.
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