How Long?!

1 How long, O Lord?

will you forget me for ever? *

how long will you hide your face from me?

2 How long shall I have perplexity in my mind,

and grief in my heart, day after day? *

how long shall my enemy triumph over me?

3 Look upon me and answer me, O Lord my God; *

give light to my eyes, lest I sleep in death;

4 Lest my enemy say, "I have prevailed over him," *

and my foes rejoice that I have fallen.

5 But I put my trust in your mercy; *

my heart is joyful because of your saving help.

6 I will sing to the Lord, for he has dealt with me richly; *

I will praise the Name of the Lord Most High.

--Psalm 13

 What I love most about the Psalms is that they cover the entire range of the human experience.  Every single emotion that we feel can be found in the Psalms, from the loudest shouts of thanks and praise to the deepest groans and wailings.  Normally, if we were gathered in the church together, we would sing the Psalm, led by a cantor, which is an ancient custom that goes all the way back to even before the time of Jesus.  But whether we sing them or say them, the Psalms are beautiful reminders that all of our feelings and experiences are precious in the sight of God, and Psalm 13 really captures that because it is a Psalm that speaks to where we are.

“How long, O Lord?!” the Psalm begins.  They say that this Psalm was constructed by David when he was running from King Saul, who was trying to kill him.  But this Psalm could just as easily have been written by any of us, am I right?  How long, O Lord?!  How long before we can gather with our church folks in prayer, and song, and Sacrament?  How long until the scourge of COVID-19 is repelled from this land?  How long must we see those sick and dying before people stop thinking only of themselves and start wearing their masks?  How long can we hear the cries of the poor and neglected, the most vulnerable in our society, whom we have been so quick to forget?  How long will young black men have to walk down the streets in fear that they will at best be accosted by law enforcement and at worst killed be for being ‘suspicious’?  How long before our country finally recognizes the sins of its past—which are still systemic in our present—and commits to changing its narrative?  How long, O Lord?!

Psalm 13 is a Psalm of lament, of deep wailing and crying out in grief.  There are many Psalms of lament; perhaps the one best known to some of us is Psalm 22, the one that Jesus himself quotes on the cross when he says, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ These Psalms deepen our faith and our humanity.  They get us to look at ourselves and the world around us and force us behold those things that we don’t really want to behold.  They help us deal with reality by preventing us from ignoring our various existential crises.  These Psalms deal with what Howard Thurman called the “contradictions of life,” because they begin with an acknowledgement of pain and finish with a reminder of God’s goodness and love.  They are examples of faithful prayers that meander, and they inspire our faithful lives to evolve. 

Howard Thurman, author of Jesus and the Disinherited, understood the power of the Psalms.

There is a pattern to Psalm 13, as well as any other Psalm of lament, a formula that they all follow:  the begin with an address, then a complaint, then a petition or prayer, followed by a confession of trust in God, and finally a promise of praise.  This Psalm begins with a strong address—How long, O Lord?!—a cry of desperation.  The complaint that’s raised here is the grief the David feels and the fear of his enemies triumphing over him.  Then comes the prayer for God to look upon David, to answer him and give light to his eyes.  Verse 5 offers the confession of trust in God’s mercy, and the last verse is a promise that David will continue to sing to God and praise God’s name.  This is the pattern of all Psalms of lament, but because of how short Psalm 13 is we can see that pattern quite clearly:  address, complaint, prayer, confession of trust, and promise of praise. 

At first glance this seems pretty simple, doesn’t it?  David offers his pain to God, and then very quickly he moves to a place of praise.  But we don’t know how long it took him to construct this Psalm, do we?  He very well could have written the opening verses that speak of crying out to God and accusing God of forgetting him when he was hiding out from Saul in a Judean cave somewhere, only to not finish it until he was certain his life would be spared.  Reading passages in the Bible often gives us the sense that it happened all at once, but that is rarely the case.  David may have been in that place of deep despair and frustration for a really long time.

Nevertheless, the Psalm comes back to an acknowledgment of God’s goodness and mercy.  In verse 5, after making his complaint and offering his prayer, David says, ‘But I put my trust in your mercy,” as if to say, “Yes, this pain I feel is real.  And yes, right now, God, you seem so far away from me that I am having trouble finding you.  But I still know that you’re real, and I will still sing your praise.”  

Yes, David laments and gives his despair and desperation space to exist.  He gives voice to his worries and complaints and acknowledges his fears and anxieties, while at the same time he keeps moving through all of it, landing at last in a place where he can offer God praise.  This Psalm is a journey, and David—or whoever wrote it—understood that the only way to get out of a place of pain and get to a place of praise is to go through all of that stuff. 

This is what 12-step programs understand and why they repeat the mantra “the only way out is through.”  Personally, I cannot think of any modern institution that understands the spiritual journey like 12-step programs, at least not in the western world.  Anyone who has been through such a group can speak to the importance of acknowledging one’s pain and grief, how it matters that those experiences are given voice, and how wading through the muck is the only possible means by which a person can get to a place of praise.  A great many of us are so stuck in our current culture of shame, where we are always taught that the answer to “How are you?” is “Good,” or “OK,” but never the real truth because who wants to hear that?!  Sometimes we just need the permission to cry out, to be frustrated, to ask God, “Where are you?!” Psalms like this one give that permission and remind us that all of our feelings and experiences are held in God’s hand, even when God feels so very far away.

Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, understood the power of giving voice to our pain.

Right now is a time of lament, and we need some Psalms to sing and cry out in these times.  We need to be able to offer our pain and sorrow to God, for it is only in doing so that our fears can be transformed into hope.  I wonder what might our lament Psalms sound like right now.  Perhaps something like this...

Address:  When will you come to help us, O Lord?!  Complaint:  We are lost, lonely, and in pain, held captive by the dual pandemics of virus and racial injustice!  Prayer:  Give us courage and hope that this is not all there is, that light and love are on the other side.  Confession of trust:  Though you seem far away, yet even still, we love you and put our trust in your healing grace and mercy.  Promise of praise:  We will sing your praises in the midst of our sorrows. 

I just put together a Psalm of lament for these times, and I encourage you to do the same.  Take some time to pour out your grief over everything these last 4 months have brought us, and give voice to your experience.  Cry out to God with your pain, knowing that the only way out of it is through it, and see where it takes you. Maybe you would even like to share them with each other, just to let someone else know they’re not alone in their pain and frustration. 

Psalms like Psalm 13, and the one I've come up with, and the ones you may construct in the coming days, are not just about giving voice to the groans and wails of our hearts—though that is very significant, especially in our time—but they also renew our sense of hope because they always come back to trust in God and the determination to keep praising and loving this God who not only gives us these emotions with the understanding that we will feel them and use them, but who has also felt them, who has also lamented from the cross, cried for a dead friend, and asked for strength to get through a time of trial.  Therein lies the hope, in a God who has gone through all of this and who goes through all of this right alongside us.  

May you take heart this week, knowing that you have permission to lament and grieve, and that your crises do not go unheard by our loving, liberating, and life-giving God!

Liberation from Security

“[Jesus said,] 'Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

For I have come to set a man against his father, 

and a daughter against her mother, 

and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; 

and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.

Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.'”

--Matthew 10: 34-39

Don’t ever say that God does not have a sense of humor; after all, on Father's Day we heard this Gospel where Jesus says to his 12 apostles that he has come to pit fathers against children and that anyone who loves their father or mother more than him is not worthy of Jesus.  I wish I could say that I intentionally picked this reading just to mess with all of you, but that’s just the hand of God at work in our lectionary.  It sure made me laugh, though. 

We might hear Jesus say these words and immediately think that he’s somehow anti-family.  That’s not what’s going on here, but for anyone out there who likes to talk about so-called ‘Christian family values,’ this passage does undermine that sentiment.  The truth is that Jesus isn’t really a champion of ‘family values.’  Instead, he has what we might call ‘kingdom values,’ and very rarely are those two ever the same thing.

Last week we heard Jesus call and send forth his 12 apostles, and in this passage, which picks up after that, we hear him warning them what it really means to follow him as a disciple and to be sent forth by him as an apostle.  In short, it means being willing to lose everything that they think is important.  At the top of this list is family. 

But consider what that would have meant in Jesus’ time.  Even more so than now, family meant security in first century Palestine.  One’s survival and prosperity were deeply tied to one’s family; that is, after all, the whole point of marriage at this time: to insure the name and legacy survives and that the two families become prosperous.  All of this was tied to the need for security, to feel comfortable, at ease, content, and not at all fearful.  The goal in life, then, was to find one’s security and to hold onto it by any means necessary. 

This is a concept that is not bound to distant years in Palestine; this is still very true in our time.  Every single day we make decisions based on the question:  how can I maintain security for me and mine?  This extends out beyond our nuclear families to our religious communities, our social circles, and especially to our broader, national identities.  Furthermore, very often when the primary motivation of an individual or a particular group of people is their continued security, other people suffer.  We need only look at Jesus’ homeland today to see how the need for security has resulted in human rights violations, or better still, we can look to the history of our own country, where laws were passed just after the Civil War that prohibited the rights of freed black people because white folks were afraid that they would rise up and seek revenge for the sin of slavery.  The need for security always seems to result in hardship.

This is what Jesus has come to upend. The point of his message is to separate us from all of those things with which we have overly identified to the point that we can only find our sense of comfort and security in them—our sports teams, our jobs and their benefits, our churches, our political parties, our family names and reputations, our national pride, our privilege and cultural ignorances, and every other idol in our lives that we keep holding onto, thinking that our identity lies in them.  Jesus ain’t got time for that!  This is what Paul when he says, “consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God is Christ Jesus (Romans 6: 11).”  It means letting all the rest die so that Christ is our only identifier, and when Christ is our only identifier, then we can give up this false pursuit of security because we know, to borrow Jesus’ own words, that to lose our life for his sake is to find it.  There is no need for security when we are alive in Christ.

The fallacy of security is also tied the gospel of scarcity.  When we believe that there isn’t enough for everyone, we get scared, we hoard, we refuse to share, and we ignore the needs of others.  Since the days of Jesus those in power have lied to society’s poor, pitting them against each other and telling them that only the laws and legislations set forth by the rich and powerful will keep them safe.  Jesus calls out those lies for what they are and shows us how they are grounded in fear, but perfect love, his love, as we know, casts out that fear.   

Maybe we need to hear this Gospel now more than ever because we have been held in the grip of fear, and in these last days we have seen just how right Jesus was. In the before time, the long, long ago of February, we clung to all of those other identifiers that we thought protected us from seeing the world for what it really is.  We ignored the regular, day-to-day injustices of our lives because we had all that other identifiers in our lives to distract us and give us a false sense of security.

But COVID didn’t care about any of that and tore right through it.  Lately, we have come to realize just how empty all of those identifiers really are:  sports teams—what sports?!—our jobs and their benefits—how many of us have been laid off and how many “essential” workers still don’t have a living wage or health care??—our churches—some may be, foolishly, coming back together, but we’ve had to relearn that our buildings are meaningless if the real Church, the people, are sick and can’t come together. The wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world has been brought to its knees, in large part because of the false gospel of scarcity that said we couldn’t take care of everyone who is sick.  The veil has been lifted on that false gospel. And by the grace of God, since the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, we have been shown that the institutions in which we have placed our sense of security in this country are deeply troubled and in need of reform. 

People are starting to see the illusion of security that all of those things gave us in the before time, and for the Church this time right now is a new prophetic call for a moral revival, as the scales from our eyes are at last falling away, and all those identifiers and the security and scarcity they embody are being seen for what they are.

Click here to support the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

Jesus was trying to get his apostles to understand that to be a part of this Jesus Movement, to identify with him and to pattern their lives after him, meant total surrender of everything else.  There’s no such thing as a part-time disciple or quarter-time apostle!  Our world is filled with distractions, filled with promises of power, prestige, and possessions that all lie to us and tell us that we can find our needs met and find our security in them.  Jesus called these things Satan: anything that lies to us and pulls us away from our true identity .  If we want to maintain this false sense of security, then by all means we can keep relying on those other identifiers, or we turn to Jesus.

If we are really serious about Jesus and being a part of the Movement that he started, then that means letting our sense of security die with those other identifiers, so that he may be our only identifier.  It means making our lives images of his own, seeking justice, loving mercy, walking humbly with our God; proclaiming that—despite what we see—this is the year of the Lord’s favor, as we don’t just preach good news for the poor but we mobilize ourselves to bring that good news and be repairers of the breaches.  His words about renouncing family mean simply that we must elevate Jesus’ life and message above everything else in our lives.  

Yes, it’s risky and often costly, just as Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or Oscar Romero, all of whom stood up to oppressive systems that provided people with a false sense of security, all of whom were killed by those systems. We may be asked to take a risk ourselves, but in the end it is always worth it because, while we may lose our false life, we will gain our real one.  This is what it means to live into our ‘kingdom values,’ to really be alive in Christ Jesus.

Where Is Jesus [and Our Privilege] Sending Us?

'Jesus sent [the Twelve] out with the following instructions: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment."'

--Matthew 10: 5-8

One of my spiritual heroes is Will Campbell.  He was a Baptist preacher, but he never had a congregation.  He was a white man who was heavily involved in the Civil Rights Movement; in fact, he was the only white person present when Dr. King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957.  He wasn’t the kind of person who was front and center for photo ops, but he was always there at protests for integration in Arkansas or at sit ins in Mississippi, always just showing up and working behind the scenes.  In the summer of 1964 Will heard black activist Stokely Carmichael, founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee speak. Stokely told the white folks in the crowd that, while their efforts at sit-ins and marches were appreciated, what they really needed to do to affect change was to refocus their efforts on educating their fellow white people, the very folks in positions of power and influence. Will took that literally and started having conversations with members of the Ku Klux Klan, figuring, as he said, that they needed to hear the message of freedom and equality, maybe more than anyone else.  Will died in in 2013, but he wrote extensively on his days as, what he called a bootleg preacher, so I encourage you to check out his books—Soul Among Lions, Brother to a Dragonfly, and Forty Acres and a Goat, to name a few. 

Will Campbell, bootleg preacher.

The Gospel reading this week makes me think of Will Campbell.  After he calls the 12 apostles—and let’s remember that an apostle is someone who is sent out, which is different from a disciple, which is someone who follows—Jesus gives the 12 some specific instructions, the first of which is this:  “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 

Their mission is to be sent out among their own people, to the folks just like them, and to preach this message of Jesus, a message of radical hospitality, of salvation for everyone, and of the truth that God had made all things, and all people, clean. The ones that need to hear it most are the very people who, at that time, were denying it.  The towns where these folks are most prominent are the ones to whom Jesus sends the 12 on their mission. 

What Jesus is doing here in this initial sending forth of the apostles gets echoed in the words from Stokely Carmichael that Will Campbell heard, which led him to do the work he did among the Klan.  Stokely was doing for Will what Jesus was doing for the 12 apostles, sending them to their own people; those are the very ones who need the message the most because those are the people who have created and maintained the social systems and structures that have denied the inherent goodness and basic human dignity of other groups of people, based on their racial, social, or religious standing. 

The hardliners in Jesus’ day—the Saducees and some of the Pharisees and scribes—were determined to keep their laws in place, thinking that the laws were fair.  Well, they were…for them.  But what about the Gentiles?  What about women and foreigners? What about the folks on the outside, the folks whose lives didn’t appear to matter much to those in the positions of privilege and power?  Jesus’ message offered good news for those kinds of folks, but the ones who really needed to hear that message were the hardliners, the ones who could actually stop the cycle of oppression because they were the ones holding on to those oppressive systems. 

This is why Will Campbell worked among the Klan.  They were the hardliners—the folks who were determined to keep legal segregation now, tomorrow, and forever. Will never stopped being a part of the sit-ins and marches with his black brothers and sisters, but he also understood that as a white person, he needed to be in relationship with other white people who could affect change on a systemic level, and he needed to call the oppression out and get white folks like him to understand the role they had played. 

He also understood that it wasn’t just the Klan that was the problem; in fact, he knew that the Klan was a by-product, a symptom of a much larger system of oppression, and he was very often critical of institutions that supported and benefited from such a system.  He was known to say the following at more than one university at which he was invited to speak:

 “This institution right here has contributed, wittingly or not, to incomparably more bloodshed and misery, done more to maim and murder, than the whole lot of poor old country boys in sheets holding cross burnings in rented cow pastures.  Now then, the Klan may be more bigoted than the ‘children of light’(that is, the children of the Enlightenment, the educated class), but they’re not more racist because racism is in the structures, the system in which we are all bound up, and we’re all basically of a Klan mentality when it comes to our own structures and our own institutions.” 

Ouch!  Those are harsh words to hear, but it doesn't make them untrue. Few of us may know active Klan members, but we all are caught up in structures and institutions for which we are fiercely loyal, and which often uphold and maintain systems of oppression. Until we can accept that, and until those of us in the positions of power and privilege, those who can affect the necessary change, accept that and are willing to do something to break the cycle of oppression, we cannot know real freedom and equality.

The past three weeks have, I believe, been among the most important in our country in the last 50 years.  The death of George Floyd has galvanized us to address the systemic oppression that is very real in this country, leading a great many of us, including folks in our own church, to ask:  what can—or should—we do?  Some of us have protested.  Some have shared insightful articles on social media.  Some have had watch parties and conversations around the documentary 13^th and films like Just Mercy.

The Netflix documentary 13th is currently free on YouTube.

One example that I would like to lift up to you today is our sister Angie Kratzer, a teacher and member of Good Shepherd.  Angie has given me permission to share with you some of the work she has done through her Facebook page, and she invites any and all of you to go to her page or send her a message and be a part of the conversations that she has been having.  These conversations take the form of simply telling our stories—for Angie that story includes being the white mother of a black child.  So far her conversations topics have included:  White Privilege, the Confederate Flag, Black Lives Matter, microaggression, and terms like bigotry and institutional racism. These are not easy topics to discuss, that’s for sure, but Angie is wading into those difficult waters, and she is doing so primarily by asking her black friends to speak to their experience and for her white friends to simply listening.  In doing so she is educating her white friends by lifting up the witness of her friends of color.  All of this is done in safe and open conversations. This is what the work looks like, and I’m quite proud of our sister for showing it to us, and I commend her Facebook page to you.

Where is Jesus sending us? If we are serious about doing the work of dismantling unjust and oppressive systems, and if we’re determined to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ that proclaims the dignity of every human being, then those of us who are part of the majority population must go to the people like us, for it is up to those in the majority to change if those in the minority are to truly be treated with equality.  It was true in Jesus’ time, and in Will Campbell’s time, and in our time. 

This is how we address systems of oppression and how we affect change.  If those of us in the majority can recognize the role folks like us have played—whether directly or indirectly—in the systemic oppression of others, and if we can understand the ways we have benefited from those systems, and if we are willing to change, then this world can truly be transformed into something that more closely resembles the kingdom of God.  Dr. King said the arc of the universe bends towards justice, but as, Richard Rohr reminded us in one of his daily meditations last week, it depends on our participation.

I wonder what are the ways that you can affect that change.  Who are the folks that need to hear from you?  What are the kinds of conversations that you can start with people?  One of the ways our church is looking to do that is to encourage everyone to watch Just Mercy and then join us for a Zoom conversation about the film at a date and time that we will announce in the coming days; Just Mercy, by the way is free to rent during the month of June on Amazon Prime. Perhaps you could start up a Zoom book club.  Read White Fragility, The New Jim Crow, or America’s Original Sin, all of which speak to this important moment in our lives.

The film Just Mercy is free to rent on YouTube and Amazon Prime this month.

Jesus sent the apostles out to be laborers in a harvest that was plentiful.  Now is the harvest time, and the Church—the people, remember, not the building—the Church are the laborers.  So ask yourself today:  what can I, what can we, do?  What conversations can we start?  Who are the people, like us, that most need to hear this message from Jesus, a message that offers good news to those who are oppressed and calls for repentance on the part of those who have played a role in that oppression?  I encourage you to share those thoughts in the comments on this blog, or on your own page—as Angie has done—or even send your thoughts to me, and let’s have a conversation and work on something together.  Now is the time, my friends.  Where is Jesus sending us?  

This Liminal Time

'When the apostles had come together, they asked Jesus, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a sabbath day’s journey away. When they had entered the city, they went to the room upstairs where they were staying, Peter, and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.'

--Acts 1: 6-14

Those of you who are familiar with the church’s calendar of high holy days, will recognize that we are in the middle of two of the most sacred moments in the life of Christianity:  the Ascension and the Day of Pentecost. 

Depiction of the Ascension on a notecard from Chad, Central Africa.

The Ascension is the name we give to the event we heard about in our first reading this morning.  This is Jesus’ return to heaven, and it is marked every year exactly 40 days after Easter, so it always falls on a Thursday.  Many times we move the celebration of this day to Sunday so that we can hear the story once more of Jesus’ last action on earth, his physical return into the heavens with the words to his apostles that that they will receive power from the Holy Spirit and will go into the world to be his witnesses. 

The Day of Pentecost, which we will celebrate next Sunday, is the fulfillment of that promise from Jesus, the day that the Holy Spirit comes among the apostles and inspires them to put their faith into action. 

The Day of Pentecost, as depicted by El Greco.

Today, though, we are somewhere in-between those two moments. This is what we call a liminal space, a thin place, if you will, not quite this but not yet that.  This liminality is an important feature in the way that the story of Christianity plays out.  Jesus is raised from the dead on Easter Sunday and spends 40 days appearing to his followers.  On the day that he returns into heaven he does not bestow the gift of the Spirit on the apostles right then and there, instead they have to go back to Jerusalem, back into their home, back into isolation—social distancing, maybe?—and there they must enter into a time of intentional prayer, a time of waiting for God to act.  This is the only way that the story can play out.

  

That’s because right down to the end of Jesus' earthly ministry, the apostles still don’t really understand.  In the moments before he ascends they wonder if this is the time that  he will finally restore the kingdom to Israel.  Think about what they are asking him in that moment.  They wonder if this will mark a return to the past, the restoration of a monarchy long since dissolved.  Their minds are not fixed on what is ahead, on what can be, but rather on what already has been.  This is why they cannot receive the Holy Spirit in this moment, the reason why they need to return to Jerusalem and enter that period of intentional waiting.  Jesus, for his part, immediately redirects them.  It’s not about the restoration of something from the past, and what’s more it’s not their place to even begin to figure out how, when, or even if God the Father will do such a thing.  Theirs is to be recipients of the promised Spirit, to embrace the presence and power of the Spirit in their midst, and to be agents of that power and presence out in the world.  The only way they can do this, though, is to enter that liminal space of waiting, watching, and praying.

The day Jesus ascended into heaven the apostles must have been filled with so much curiosity about what all of this meant, and maybe they were considering what the coming days were going to be like, or they just wanted to bask in the moment, staring up to heaven and taking it all in.  Then like THAT they’re told in no uncertain terms by these angelic figures in white that they need to stop what they’re doing and go home.  I wonder what that walk down from the Mount of Olives to their little apartment was like.  Maybe they complained or wondered who those angels thought they were to tell them what to do.  Or maybe there was a gentle acceptance.  Regardless of how they got there, they did go back, and what’s most important is that they entered into that time not knowing when God was going to act but trusting that God would.  Someday. 

That trust took the form of their constant devotion to prayer and caring for one another in the context of community.  It was because of this period, this in-between time, and the way that they used it, that the apostles were able to not only receive the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost but transform the world as we know it by the Spirit’s power.

We are in a liminal space right now, not just the liminal space between the Ascension and the Day of Pentecost, but the liminal space between what was and what is to be.  Like the apostles we have been driven back into our homes and told to stay there, to wait for…something.  This is where we are now.  There are a few ways that we can look at our situation, both as individuals and as members of communities.  We can be stuck here, bored out of our minds, frustrated by all of the unknowns—about the virus and about if and when things can be normalized—or we can see this time as a gift, the gift of liminality.  Now is the time for us to pray for guidance, for comfort, for strength, and for patience.  Now is the time for us to care for one another in the context of our various communities—and yes, caring does mean remaining separated.  Now is the time for us to wait for…something, for the Holy Spirit to tell us when we, like the apostles, can go back out into the world.  And when we do, thanks to this time of discernment and intentional prayer we will be poised, like them, to transform the world as we know it. 

There are a lot of unknowns, a lot of uncertainties in our lives right now, but one thing that is certain is that whatever God has in store for us will not be a restoration of something from the past.  Rather, whatever is to come will be a new future highlighted by the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.  Neither the Ascension, nor Pentecost, was the day when Jesus restored the kingdom to Israel.  That day never happened.  Many of us have been hoping and praying that God will likewise restore our world to the version that we knew, to something familiar.  Yet it is clear that this is not how God operates.  Jesus tells the apostles before he leaves them that they are not to be concerned with such matters, but they are to be recipients of the Spirit, so that they may move the world forward, toward that promised Kingdom that we always pray will come on earth as it is in heaven.  Christians are not a people who look to restore the past, but as a people of resurrection we look for new life and meaning in a future that is guided by the Holy Spirit and with Jesus at its epicenter. 

There is no going back, there is only the forward movement of God.  Likewise, some of us may find ourselves looking up into heaven, waiting on Jesus to return and fix everything, like the apostles staring into the sky when Jesus left them.  But discernment and intentionality are not passive actions.  We are not so much waiting for God to act, as we are watching and listening for the ways that God is calling us into action.  These were the hallmarks of that liminal time in the lives of the apostles, a time that we find ourselves in now.  It's a time that can be, if we let it, a tremendous gift from God.

One day the Holy Spirit will drive us out of our homes and into the world, not back into something old but into a brighter, more hopeful future. What we do on that day will be determined by what we do with these days, with this liminal time of retreat, reflection, preparation, and prayer.

The (Not So) Unknown God

'Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,

‘For we too are his offspring.’

Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”'

--Acts 17: 22-31

I'd like to take some time this week to talk about this important moment from the Acts of the Apostles.  Last week we heard in one of our Sunday readings about the death of Stephen, who is regarded as the first martyr of the Christian faith.  His death was, at least in some small way, attributed to a young man named Saul, who had launched a fierce campaign against the Followers of the Way.  This campaign was halted, though, after an encounter with the living Christ along the road to Damascus.  Following that experience, Saul repented of the wrongs he had done and become a full-fledged member of the very community he was trying to stop.  By the time we find him this week, Saul has even taken a new name, Paul, and for much of the rest of the book of Acts we hear his exploits preaching and teaching among the Gentiles; that is, among non-Jewish folks.  One of the most heated arguments in this early church was whether one had to be Jewish in order to be considered a Follower of the Way—folks like Saint Peter insisted that only Jews could be permitted, though he later softened on that, while Paul felt that God was opening the message of salvation originally given through Moses and the prophets of Israel to all people through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  So Paul makes it his mission to share this good news with folks who have no understanding of the Scriptures and no connection whatsoever to the stories and beliefs of his own people, and what better place to do that than in Athens.

An Eastern icon of Paul preaching to the Athenians.

As a lot of you know my wife Kristen and I honeymooned in Greece after we got married two years ago, and the first place we spent time was Athens.  We were both struck by the fact that Athens could be described as the original metropolis—for lack of a better turn of phrase.  Other cities would try to copy what Athens had in terms of architecture, art, philosophy, religion, food—first Rome, then Paris, then New York—but none can really beat the original.  Athens had it all, and still does.  If you wanted to have a conversation with someone about things that really mattered, this is the place you wanted to be.  It was a big reason why we wanted to go there for our honeymoon.

We find Paul, then, standing at the Areopagus, a small hill, also called Mars Hill for the Latin name of the God of war.  It stands in the shadow of the Acropolis, the great hill in Athens that serves as the home of the Parthenon, the huge temple of Athena that was the jewel of the architectural reforms of King Pericles in the 5^th century BC.  This is where meaningful conversations happened in Athens, and Paul finds himself right in the middle of one. 

We can learn a few things from the way that Paul engages with the Athenians.  First of all, there is no sense of proselytizing on Paul’s part, he isn’t trying to convince the Athenians that they have been wrong all this time and that he has all the answers.  He acknowledges right out of the gate that they are a religious people; in fact, religion was so much a part of their daily lives that it was something they took for granted.  No one really denied the existence of the gods, but they were so commonplace that they were often pushed to the sidelines when it came to conversations about “real” issues—something that the Athenians seem to share with many in our culture today. 

Paul starts with the positive, relating to his audience.  He commends them for their deep sense of devotion, but he also points out something interesting:  they hold the gods in such high devotion that they elevate them to a place of unknowing, as they partake in the spiritual flavor of their culture but can’t really name a core belief, hence the altar to an “Unknown God,” which was a catch-all, or a sort of spiritual insurance policy, to make sure that the Athenians were honoring ALL the gods, even the ones that they didn’t actually know.  There’s an acknowledgment of the reality of the divine, but there is little desire to be in relationship with the divine, let alone to actually believe the divine would want to be in relationship with them.  This is what Paul seeks to undercut, to let them know that the God they call Unknown is, in fact, known, as in this is the God who created all things, loves all things, and has made all of humanity siblings in one great big family.

Notice that Paul never mentions Jesus in any of this.  He isn’t concerned with winning anyone to his side, but rather of simply letting people know the truth that he knows, which is that we are all united one to another in this God.  As Marcus Borg points out in his book The Heart of Christianity, it is the kind of faith that imagines God as the encompassing Spirit in whom everything that is, is.  The universe is not separate from God but is in God.  Paul Tillich called this the "Ground of All Being." 

This is Paul’s point.  It’s not an argument about the validity of a certain doctrine or discipline.  It’s not a theological discussion on the merits of Christ’s presence in a post-Resurrection world.  It’s a pretty simple point, one that cuts through all of the philosophical jargon of Paul’s day and, one would hope, cuts through the dominant philosophies of our day:  conservative Christianity, secular humanism, spiritual-but-not-religious, neo-nationalism, etc. etc.  Paul meets the people where they are and in doing so brings the light of Christ into their lives without ever mentioning his name!  I wonder what might happen if we were able to cut through the static of our own personal and even communal philosophies to just get down to the reality of the presence of God in our midst.  What might happen then?

When we were in Athens we climbed up the Acropolis to the Parthenon and on the way down stopped on the Areopagus and took in the awesome reality that Paul stood in this place and talked with the folks here about God.  As we stood there we noticed something quite remarkable.  To our left was a group of folks that we determined were mostly Episcopalian—one of them a bishop—all white folks and presumably pretty well off financially.  They were in Athens for a conference on the church and climate change.  Just in front of them was a man, presumably homeless, with clothes falling off of him, who wandered up to a trash can and picked out a half-drunk cup of iced coffee.  As he proceeded to finish it, we noticed that nobody seemed to pay him any mind, and even when he walked away none of the church folks to our left seemed phased at all by the moment.  We wondered:  could that have been Jesus?  Could the presence of God have broken through in that moment, also?  And is this what it means for us to be church?  To be so consumed by our own worldviews, by our own philosophies, wants, and desires, that we are blind to the presence of God and the needs of God’s people right in front of us?  Are we eager to continue to seek out God in our midst or are we convinced that we’ve already found God? 

Kristen and I at the Areopagus in Athens on our honeymoon in 2018.

What the Athenians had become were a people so religious that they had literally put their gods on their shelf, in the place of honor in their homes, and left them there.  We do the same any time we think that we have figured God out, or any time we get bogged down in doctrines and disciples and forget the spirit of why we do what we do or what it even is that we do.  This leaves us blind to the reality that God is, in fact, present everywhere that we turn: on the Areopagus that day Paul preached and on that day the homeless man finished that coffee in front of those church folks.  Out there now in a hurting world that is too often ignored, leaving God to go unnoticed. If we have eyes to see and hearts that long for that relationship, then this God will be known to us.

A Message of Hope from the Gospel of John

 'Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”'

--John 14: 1-14

An icon of Saint John the Divine (or John the Evangelist, or John the Revelator, or just John).

It’s confession time for this priest.  I have had a very—how shall I say—complicated relationship with the Gospel of John. It is often elevated by Christians above all the other Gospels, but also it contains some sayings from Jesus that are, at least for me, very difficult to hear, ones in which I find it hard to find good news.

One such example is John 14: 6: “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me.”  This passage has caused me—and others—such fits, largely because it has been used to promote something we call exclusivism; that is to say that the message of God’s love, of peace and hope for the world is exclusive to the biblical life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  In other words, everyone else is out, and only Christians are in because—the exclusivist argument goes—Jesus said so, it’s right there in black and white—or red, depending on your Bible.  Jesus said it, I believe it, that settles it.  This is an exclusivist mindset, and for much of my life whenever the question about the validity of other religions comes up, someone inevitably cites John 14: 6,

I have been troubled by folks who preach such a message, and so for years I would often overlook the Gospel of John because of this and other passages that seemed to be to be exclusivist in nature.  But when I got to seminary and had the chance to finally dig into not only the words of the Gospel but the community that produced it I began to see that, rather than being exclusivist, the Gospel of John is meant to be a message of hope to a beleaguered community.  And it’s here that we find our good news.

Jesus says “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”  Let’s break down each of those three words:  way, truth, and life, and see what’s going on in this text. 

Jesus is the way.  At the time the Gospel was written the followers of Jesus were not called Christians, but rather the people of the Way.  They were called this because the way implies a journey of faith.  And that journey is one that stretches far back into the history of Jesus’ people:  Abraham journeyed to Canaan; the children of Israel journeyed from bondage in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land; Jesus himself journeyed from his home in Nazareth into the wilderness where he faced temptation, and then to Galilee for his ministry, and finally to the cross; and his followers journeyed from the empty tomb to every corner of the world to spread his message of love.  The way implies a journey, and faith of any kind requires a journey.

Jesus is the truth.  Here is where it’s easy to think that John is saying everything and everyone else is false.  But one of the main themes of the whole Gospel is found in the very first chapter, when John says that Jesus is full of grace and truth, meaning that he is full of the very same qualities that were associated with the Jewish Torah, the revelation of God’s goodness and mercy for the world. He is the embodiment of those qualities. This is truth that is not exclusive to Jesus—as we see in the Torah and later the Muslim Quran –but it is truth that Jesus certainly embodies, as Jesus is the truth incarnate.

Jesus is the life.  One of the tenants that the community of John’s Gospel preached excessively was the notion of eternal life.  But what did they mean by this?  They weren’t talking about heaven, but instead about right now—the way we think of heaven today was not part of their thinking back then.  To participate in the active movement of God’s kingdom here on earth is to have eternal life.  Instead of implying that those who follow him will inherit some reward after this life, Jesus is instead saying that this is what happens when a person follows the way of love, they are already engaging in eternal life, an understanding that’s not exclusive to Christianity.   

Those are the ways we can break down the first half of John 14: 6 to see that an exclusivist message is not the point, but the second half is also troublesome: no one comes to the father except through me.  We need to take a moment to understand the context here.  The Gospel of John was written roughly 70 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection.  By this time the Jewish revolt against the Romans had been lost, the Temple was destroyed, and the kind of Judaism that Jesus himself practiced no longer existed, as the center for worship now became the local synagogue and the traditions kept alive by the rabbis—we call this rabbinic Judaism.  It is during this time of great fear that the message of Jesus really began to take hold, so much so that by the time John’s gospel gets written—30 years after the temple was destroyed—there is a great deal of tension between those who are trying to keep the old traditions of Judaism alive and those who are embracing Jesus as something of a successor to the old ways.  These tensions boil over to the point that synagogues erupt in violence and people declaring Jesus’ messiahship are thrown out.  It is in this context, the context of a people living in fear, isolated from their worship communities, and uncertain about the future, that this gospel gets written.

Rather than a condemnation of another religion, it is instead meant to be a message of hope for a particular community.  The words of the Gospel of John, then, act as something of a two-level drama, where the life of Jesus is actually meant to be a reflection of what’s going on in the gospel community, and the words of Jesus to his disciples are heard as words meant for the community.  This means that when they heard Jesus say to the disciples, no one comes to the father except through me, they heard Jesus’ reassurance to them that, yes, in fact, they’re right, despite the hardships they’ve faced. It’s hard for us to remember this, but these folks were marginalized, and it is very common for anyone in a marginalized group to write their story in such a way that vindicates their group while putting down the other.  But in no way was John’s community trying to say those who had cast them out were never going to get into heaven.  This passage, and the gospel as a whole, is an apology for the faith of one particularly unique community, not a condemnation of every other one.

What, then, does this have to do with us here and now?  What kind of good news can we gleam from this relatively short bible study this morning?  First, I would suggest that it is so very important for us to understand that the gospel of Jesus was never, ever meant to be exclusive, and those who today would use Jesus’ words to condemn the genuine faith of others are doing a grave disservice to the ministry of Jesus and the intention of those who wrote about him.  John 14: 6 is not the final arbiter in the discussion of the merits of different religions or understandings of God, and in a time where we are so entrenched in our divisions across cultural and religious lines, we need to remember that.  We can also use this Gospel to help us remember that it is entirely possible to affirm one's own experiences without totally condemning the experiences of others.

Secondly, while we are not facing any kind of persecution like John's community was, we are all in the midst of great fear and concern for what our future holds.  We do not know when we will return to our houses of worship and what they will look like when we do.  We can easily fall into the trap of scapegoating or lashing out in our frustrations  Or we can take a cue from the Gospel of John, whose entire message, I think, lies in the very first sentence of this reading:  do not let your hearts be troubled.  When we are at our lowest points, Jesus comes to us with that message, the very message that the community of John’s Gospel clung to.  It is the message that love is the way, that God’s goodness and mercy are the truth, and that to abide in them is to have eternal life.  This is the hope of John’s community, and it is our hope even now. 

May the message of Jesus as proclaimed in this gospel, the message of comfort, hope, and divine love be yours today and always.