"Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades. Now write what you have seen, what is, and what is to take place after this." Rev. 1:17-19.

Saturday, March 29, 2014

Luminous Exchanges




 Fourth Sunday in Lent


John 9:1-41

Gracious Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down from heaven to be the true bread which gives life to the world: Evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in him; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.



When I head back to the parking lot after a hospital visit, I sometimes feel guilty. For about 10 or 15 minutes, I have blown into someone’s room to say a prayer, perhaps to listen for a few moments, and then I’m gone again. I know that the sick person is still stuck in his bed as I head out into the sunshine to enjoy the rest of my day. I know that his family is still bent over the bed in the stuffy room, full of concern and distress. But me, in the name of Jesus, I put on my collar and pop in, and then I pop back out again, hoping that my visit has brought some comfort to the sick parishioner or her family. But I am all too aware of the long days and nights that precede and follow my quick visits: of the tests and tedium, the fear and pain, that fill those days and nights. I might anoint a patient with oil for healing, but the transcendent touch of God in that oil is only one moment in the midst of a tangle of human relationships, hospital procedures, flesh and blood interactions—one moment in the midst of the long slog of all-too-human coping that makes up our lives.
Fred Craddock points out that our Gospel lesson today is also the story of human coping in Jesus’ absence.[1] On first glance, it might look like John 9 is just one more miracle story. But take a closer look. Jesus is not the focus of this story. Jesus quickly puts mud on the poor beggar’s eyes one day and then continues on his way. The man, blind since birth, has suddenly been given the gift of sight, but Jesus is nowhere to be found. The man has to deal with a whole series of interactions with those around him before Jesus returns at the end of the long story.
First, the newly healed man gains his sight, yet loses his identity. All his life, he has been a blind beggar—unable to work, a fixture at the city gates, someone you pass on your way to work, throwing a quarter into his hat. But now, thanks to Jesus’ healing touch, the man is no longer a beggar scooting along in the dust. He now walks rapidly down the street, purpose in his step. He is so changed that no one recognizes him. He has become an alien in his own village. He might be able to see, but if he looks in the mirror, I wonder if even he would recognize himself? By gaining his sight, he must begin the hard work of rebuilding a whole new self.
Next, the miracle man has to deal with being grilled by the religious leaders. Imagine if you were a homeless person suddenly dragged before the bishop and the police chief and asked to explain a mysterious public healing that you didn’t even ask for? He is an object of suspicion and a source of controversy—and Jesus is nowhere to be found during his interrogation.
And then the poor man’s parents refuse to back him up. They acknowledge him as their son, but, afraid what the change will mean for their own lives and reputations, they don’t stand behind his story: “Ask him,” they stammer as they wiggle away from controversy. “He’s a grown-up; he will speak for himself.”
Finally, as the man begins to make sense of what has happened to him and who Jesus truly must be, he is once again hauled before the authorities and then thrown out of the synagogue for his support of the man who has saved him, tossed out of the community that had sustained him in his blindness, and labeled as a heretic. As Craddock writes, “A few days previous the man’s life was blessed by Jesus and now his old friends disregard him, his parents reject him, and he is no longer welcome at his old place of worship. What a blessing!” Only after the man has dealt with all of the difficult changes brought about by his healing does Jesus finally reappear and reveal himself as the Son of Man.
For the Christians in the community to whom John is writing, Jesus has been gone almost a century. They themselves are Jews who have been labeled as heretics--thrown out of the synagogue for believing that Jesus is the Messiah. The animosity between their communities and the community of the Pharisees is strong, painful and probably all-consuming. In crafting today’s story of the blind man, John wants to encourage the fledgling Christians during this difficult time of transformation. “Stay strong in your testimony,” he is imploring them. “Even though Jesus has gone to the Father, the changes that he has brought to your lives are life-giving changes. You live in the light of his truth. It’s the other side that’s blind. In time, Jesus will return, and your coping will have its reward.
What does John’s story say to us here today, not just to us as individuals, but as a Christian community living together in Jesus’ absent presence? The Humana Festival play “The Christians” brought home to me this week a contemporary take on the plight of the blind man. The play features the well-meaning pastor of a successful conservative megachurch. This pastor’s eyes are suddenly opened to a new kind of Christianity—one in which all human beings are saved by the grace of Christ, one in which there is no hell at all. Full of enthusiasm for his vision, he preaches a sermon that encourages his parish to join him in testifying to this new revelation that he has had. For him, it is clearly a life-giving, grace-filled revelation. But he doesn’t take into account the ways in which such a dramatic change in understanding will affect the lives of those around him.  The idea of universal salvation is just as scandalous to much of his flock as was the idea in Jesus’ day of blindness and other physical ailments not being a punishment for sin. Both concepts touch on the ways in which we understand right and wrong; both revelations prevent us from the security of being able to keep our thumbs on what divine judgment means. Like the Pharisees, family, and villagers who challenge the blind man because of his newly opened eyes, the congregation in “The Christians” confronts the preacher over his new vision of God. Over the course of the play, we watch the associate pastor turn away sadly from his mentor. We watch faithful members interrogate the pastor, confused and hurt and scared by the things that he sees. We watch them shake their heads and shuffle out of the church. Finally, we watch the communication between the pastor and his wife sputter and break down, as she fails to see her way clear on the path that her husband has taken. As if to speak to the persistence of blindness, the lights slowly dim throughout the play. In the beginning, when the pastor’s revelation is new, all the lights are bright, even the house lights over the audience. Slowly, as people turn away, the lights continue to dim. The play ends with the stage in total darkness, and with the truth of the pastor’s revelation still in question. In darkness, the pastor offers to his wife, whose bags are packed, something like: “Even if we’re not certain where we will be in eternity, can’t we just love one another now, day by day, cherishing this time that we can be together.” She does not answer.


The play makes clear that coping with divine transformation has not gotten any easier in the past two thousand years, and that the difficult task of judging someone else’s testimony has not gotten any easier for us, either. Clearly, it is when we are certain that we have a grasp on God and on the souls of our fellow human beings that we are most blind. But the point of this Gospel for us, I think, can get lost in John’s polemic against the Pharisees. The Christian life should not be reduced to a tricky trap between sight and blindness, with Light on one side and Darkness on the other. The Good News is that, even before the Son of Man returns and all is made clear once and for all, there is light in our coping. As Jesus prays later in John’s Gospel, right before his death, “Righteous Father … I made your name known to [those to whom you sent me], and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” (Jn 17: 25-26). In our love for one another, smack in the messiness of change and impermanence, Jesus is indeed present with us. Even as Christ opens our eyes in miraculous ways, Christ also lives in us as we cope with what we see. Come to think of it, on those brief visits that I make to those shadowy hospital rooms, I can see Christ’s light flicker in every prayer, in every loving gesture, small glimmers even in the monotony of days. Indeed, as a friend wrote about his recent experience at the deathbed of his father, “Mainly I feel an immense gratitude tied to the discovery that, even in the last instants of life, when all the light seems to be going out, life offers us, in some unimaginable way, luminous exchanges.” God’s light can shine even from eyes not yet quite accustomed to seeing, from eyes that are learning to cope. In our coping, I too give thanks for those luminous exchanges.


[1] Fred B. Craddock, “Coping in Jesus’ Absence” found at http://www.religion-online.org/sharticle.asp?title=706. I owe this interpretation completely to Craddock’s analysis!

Saturday, March 15, 2014

A Journey into Possibilities


    

Genesis 12:1-4a
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17
Psalm 121


O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

       Imagine that God comes to you one morning as you are still lying in bed, just about to get up for a day of work or school, and God asks you if you want your whole life to become a source of possibilities for others, if you want your life to radiate God’s love into the world. Sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it? So how are you going to do it? Abram knows. In order to become a blessing, you have to leave your home and your country and go somewhere entirely different. God promises to be with you, but you have to go to a place where you have never been, a place that will be shown to you once you get there. Now, how many of you would agree to get up that morning, pack a suitcase, and go?

          That was the question that God asked Abram in our first reading today. Rabbi Marc Gellman has an imaginative story for the children among us that points out how few of us would probably agree to such a journey. Gellman suggests that Abram wasn’t the first or only person whom God invited to come on this special journey. He says that God first asked a guy named Eber. But Eber wouldn’t go without knowing who God is. Eber wanted to pin God down to being a concrete thing, like the god of the sun or the moon, suggesting that since all the good gods were already taken, that God should check out being the god of the frogs and then come back and ask him again. So God went away and asked a guy named Peleg, instead. But Peleg wanted to know where God is located before he would go. He wanted to see a nice statue of God first. So God moved on to a guy named Serug. And Serug wanted to know what God would give him if he went.
          “I’m not interested in moving anywhere or doing anything just so that my great-great-great-grandchildren will be a great nation,” Serug answered. “I want to know what is in this deal for me right now. Maybe if you showered me with some of those blessings up front I might be convinced. How about giving me all the money in the world and the kingship of all the lands?”[1]
          So God moved on to Abram. And all Abram asked for was to bring Sarai and Lot. And they went. And through travel, through changing their physical, geographical location, and through changing their names, and through all the hardships involved in leaving home and identity behind, God fulfilled God’s promise: The story of the suffering and the joy of their lives’ journey has indeed become for Jews, Christians, and Muslims a sign of what God’s blessing looks like in our own lives.
          The life of faith as a journey is a pretty common metaphor, isn’t it? But God doesn’t always ask us to get up physically and go somewhere in order to be transformed. What if you are lying in your bed in the dark before dawn, and God invites you into blessing through inner transformation? That sounds easier, doesn’t it, on first glance? But is it, really? Would you agree to the kind of transformation or “new birth” that Jesus offers to Nicodemus? When Jesus tells Nicodemus that he needs to be “born again,” or “born from above,” Jesus is talking about change from within. At first, Jesus seems to challenge Nicodemus not to act like Eber and Peleg in our story, wanting to pin God down to signs that can be seen and understood in our world: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes,” Jesus evokes mysteriously. And don’t be like Serug, either, Jesus seems to add. I am not a Lord who will bring you riches and glory if you follow. The Son of Man will be lifted up on a Cross, Jesus hints, to bring salvation like the serpent in the wilderness, and eternal life is going to look a lot like dying.
          Jesus’ invitation to new birth, then, is just as vague, just as difficult to pin down, as a trip into the wilderness, destination unknown. Lying all snug in your bed, snug in your identity, snug in your life, cozy in the dark room where you can whisper comfortably with Jesus the great teacher …would you agree to be born again?
          Some Christians like to make a big deal about this term, “born again,” so much so that it probably makes our flesh crawl as demure Episcopalians. But for me, the expression instead reminds me of how the French talk about giving birth. In France, you don’t say, “I gave birth on Friday.” Instead, you say, “I put a baby into the world on Friday.” When we are born, we enter into a world. Not just “the world” as in “the earth,” but the “world” as an environment, as a whole horizon of possibilities.[2] My “world” is made up of my social customs, of all the books that I have read, of all the songs that I sing and of all the TV shows that I watch. It is made up of my language and the people that I hang out with. It holds me together as an individual self and determines the possibilities for my life. Every time my world meets another world—when I open myself to a challenging book from a new point of view or when I open myself to someone from another culture—my world changes a little bit to incorporate that new horizon. What Jesus is proposing in our Gospel lesson, is for Nicodemus to be born into Jesus’ world. It is for Nicodemus to open himself to a realm of possibilities in which death leads to life, and suffering leads to joy, and light triumphs over darkness. It is for Nicodemus to let the world of the good, wealthy Pharisee meet the world of the Cross of Christ and to enter into the radically new possibilities that Jesus’ world opens to him, like a baby who comes into the world, full of new possibilities.
          And for us, lying in our cozy beds … What does Jesus’ invitation mean for us? I believe that we are indeed reborn into a new set of possibilities through our participation in Jesus’ world, as we enter into relationship with him in scripture and as we enter into Christian community in baptism.
          Andre and Esperance and their six children, the refugee family from the Congo whom our parish is co-sponsoring right now, are making Abraham’s transformational journey. They have left home, language, tribe, kin, country, profession, and they have traveled from one world into another. Right now, they are wandering in the wilderness of American poverty, unsure where their next footsteps will take them. They know that God is with them, however, and they are sustained by that faith. As a matter of fact, it is their strong faith that jumped out at me as an example not just of Abraham’s story, but of what it means for us to be “born again.”
          I was sitting in the Baskin-Robbins across from St. Thomas with Andre the other day. Our youth group had just taken the whole family shoe shopping and then into the Baskin-Robbins for their first ice-cream cone ever. During that whole afternoon, I had watched as the “world” of each Bankuga family member was confronted with a new and unfamiliar “world:” the “world” of English; the “world” of ice and huge snow piles; the “consumer world” of an immense American shoe store; the “world” of Saturday afternoon ice-cream. Their old worlds were constantly bombarded by new ways of being. As they picked at their ice cream, probably wondering why one would eat something so sickly sweet and made of such unnatural colors on such a freezing afternoon, I pointed through the window to St. Thomas. In very simple French (they know just a few words of French and practically none of English) I indicated to Andre and Esperance that St. Thomas is our church and that I am the pastor. Suddenly, Andre’s face lit up in a radiant smile so big that it almost split his face in two: “Me deacon!” he proclaimed joyfully in broken French. “You are a deacon in your church back home!” I repeated, as he nodded vigorously and Esperance patted him proudly on the shoulder, beaming and remembering the Christian community that they left behind in Africa. Suddenly, we were all only Christian pilgrims …. We at St. Thomas reaching out because of our faith; Andre and his family sustained and ready to reach out because of theirs. I could have sworn that a gust of warm wind swirled around us in the moment, though I don’t know where it could have come from. In that one short exchange, the world of Saturday afternoon ice cream in Louisville broke open. The world of “Anne-the-helper” fell away. The world of “Andre-the-needy-refugee” disappeared. The worlds of English, French, and Kirwanda merged into the world of our common Christian story. In that moment of recognition, we saw one another only as committed followers of Jesus Christ. Andre’s life story and my life story met in the story of the vibrant, living Body of Christ, spread across the globe. We recognized one another as “born from above,” our Christian world the only real world, the only one that matters to our souls, regardless of what other worlds swirl around us. As the line from a poem says, “I hold instead of a homeland/ the metamorphoses of the world.”[3] Go forth into the world with scriptures in one hand, your cross in the other, and be born into a new creation, rejoicing in the power and possibilities of the Spirit. Amen.


[1] Marc Gellman, Does God Have a Big Toe? (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 49.
[2]Paul Ricoeur, “Poetry and Possibility,” The Manhattan Review 2 (1982): 21.
[3] Nelly Sachs, “Fleeing” in The Torah: A Women’s Commentary (New York: Women of Reform Judaism), 83.

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Scattered Ashes, Scattered Lives








 Ash Wednesday

  Almighty God, you have created us out of the dust of the
  earth: Grant that these ashes may be to us a sign of our
  mortality and penitence, that we may remember that it is
  only by your gracious gift that we are given everlasting life;
  through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
Isaiah 58:1-12
2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6,16-21
Psalm 103



Nothing scatters quite like ashes. You’ve seen them billow out of your fireplace and onto the hearth like fine mist. You’ve seen them mix into the dirt around an old campfire, fine and smooth like silk. You might not know that Lenny Baltra burns, grinds down, and sifts last year’s old Palm Sunday palms to make the ashes that we use today: You should see them fly swiftly away like black talcum powder to coat everything on the counter in the sacristy when we try to transfer them from one jar to another in preparation for this service. And then there are our human ashes. They scatter, too. A colleague tells the story of the time that he tried to bury a parishioner’s ashes in the church memorial garden on a windy day. Most of the ashes never made it into the ground. In the blink of an eye, and before anyone could stop them, they were swept up and away like gray fog, briefly coating the hair and face of the priest and then vanishing into the wind. You just can’t hold on to ashes. If you hold them tight, they smudge and flake away. If you hold them loosely, they sift through your fingers and escape into the world.
Nothing scatters quite like our lives, either. With each breath, seconds flee as smoothly as the sand in the chambers of a timer. Minutes and hours seep through our clenched fists, too, as we jog through each day, rushing from one activity to the next. Years are over in the blink of an eye: babies grown, parents gone, youth slipping away like that cloud of ash into the wind. Our attention is pulled from one thing to the next, from the beeping messages on our phones, to the multiple tasks at work, to the needs of the people around us, to the emails on the computer screen … and as we pour our attention from one rigid container to the next, our lives spill out like fine dust, and the wholeness of our being scatters into the wind. Nothing scatters quite like our lives.
On Ash Wednesday we take our ashes-to-go out into the Kroger parking lot. There, in the land of to-do lists and boring errands, I mark a stranger’s forehead with the sign of an instrument of death. Why does that stranger get tears in his eyes and thank me? Why does he look at me as if I had just handed him a winning lottery ticket? Why do mothers bring their wide-eyed children up to the altar so that I can tell them that their beloved babies will die? Why would a woman with a terminal disease want to come to church on Ash Wednesday to be reminded that her body will soon return to the soil?
We come to receive our ashes with tears of thanksgiving, because we are starving for words of truth, for the outright acknowledgment that our lives are as out of our own control as ashes on a windy day. I can see that hunger for truth in the eyes of every person who holds her head up bravely to meet my gaze. “I dare you to say it,” the eyes gleam.
“I dare you to tell me the truth.” For you see, we are not fools. We know that nothing scatters like ashes, that nothing scatters and breaks like our lives. We long to hear the truth and to give up the exhausting facade that we can hold our ashes and our lives firmly in our own two hands.
          The world won’t tell us the truth. Our media tells us that certain products will make us forever young, that certain supplements will make us thin and beautiful. Our consumer culture tells us what we need to buy and what we need to have in order to be happy. Even our churches don’t always tell us the truth. They might lure us in the doors with fancy words or even with free guns (!). They tell us that if we come every Sunday and make a pledge and serve on enough committees and give up chocolate for Lent that we won’t feel so scattered. But we do.  The truth is that we are human beings—human beings whose well-meaning fasting, almsgiving, and praying can quickly scatter into hypocrisy, like that of the religious men whom Jesus criticizes in our Gospel lesson today. The truth is that, without God’s life-giving Spirit, we are like the dry soil in our gardens, still crumbly and thirsty for the water of Life.
          The good news today is that God comes to us in Jesus Christ. God comes into our churches. God comes over to the Comfy Cow. God comes into the snow-covered Kroger parking lot. God comes to us as a man who knows what it means for his bones to break and his mouth to turn dry like a potsherd. God comes to us as a God who empties himself out in love so that death and emptiness are no longer the last word.
Nothing scatters like ashes and lives. Nothing restores like the Truth of God's Love.