"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, April 19, 2014

Turning our Eyes, and our Lives, to Resurrection



          
 

Almighty God, who through your only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life: Grant that we, who celebrate with joy the day of the Lord's resurrection, may be raised from the death of sin by your life-giving Spirit; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.


           Alleluia, Christ is risen! (The Lord is risen, indeed!)
          There’s a legend that circulates among preachers that, one year on Easter, a courageous (or lazy) priest decided that sermons are superfluous on this most special day. So, he stood up and shouted the familiar proclamation, waited for the people’s conditioned response, and then went back to his chair for the Nicene Creed. The story continues that, while some parishioners were glad for the chance to arrive at the restaurant early for Easter Brunch, most people were dissatisfied—feeling that the priest hadn’t quite done his job.
          I’m not going to try anything like that today, although I do agree that trying to explain resurrection in any authentic way is impossible. I can gush about the cycle of life: about yellow daffodils emerging after a long winter, or about the metamorphosis of caterpillars into butterflies. I can try to compare some experience in my life to the fear and awe that the disciples must have felt on that first Easter: “Once there was this time that a “dead” opossum in my backyard “resurrected” when I poked him with a stick, and it scared me half to death!” But after the tired old metaphors and the lame stories, the strange claim still remains in all of its weird and wonderful glory--that Jesus appeared to the disciples after his death, in some kind of bodily form, thereby defeating Sin and Death forever. Even in Scripture, there is no explanation of what happens between Jesus’ horrible suffering on the Cross and Jesus’ glorious resurrection from the dead. The only picture that we’re given consists of the stone walls of a silent tomb. Rowan Williams warning applies to preachers as it does to all of us on Easter: “However early we run to the tomb, God has been there ahead of us.”[1]
          In today's Gospel, Jesus directs our probing eyes away from the blank mystery of the tomb, and points us to Galilee, to the world that we claim has been transformed by resurrection. Come with me today, then, to a Christian community nestled way up in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. The place is called Holden Village and was founded in an abandoned copper-mining village in the early ‘60’s by Lutherans looking to save the place from destruction, after the falling price of copper caused the mine to fail. It is a place for retreats and for Christian formation—a place where people try to practice their Christian faith carefully and consciously, as individuals and as a community. They live sustainably and in harmony with the natural world around them. They worship together daily; they practice Christian joy; and they work together to provide hospitality to their guests and to care for one another in meaningful ways. Even in this kind of idyllic community, though, far removed from the temptations and tribulations of society-at-large, sin and death still have a foothold. Even this Christian community of disciples must struggle to live Easter lives in a complex world.
          Not too long ago, it was discovered that the old copper mine, blasted by greedy human hands into the heart of the mountain, had left harmful contaminants that are leaching out into the groundwater and streams in this otherwise pristine environment. The Holden community decided that a multimillion dollar clean-up and remediation project was necessary, and, with funding from Rio Tinto, one of the world’s largest mining groups, they committed themselves to the work and inconvenience of the task. Unfortunately, part of the project involves re-routing one of the main rivers running through the property, and, consequently, destroying a host of beautiful centuries-old Engelmann spruce trees, native to these special valleys that were carefully carved by glaciers ten thousand years ago.
          And here lies the resurrection story. Instead of sighing in defeat, moaning over the sinful state of the world that leads to the destruction of creation—instead of shrugging in indifference, mowing down the trees without a second-thought—Christ’s disciples associated with Holden Village started to act as if Christ is truly risen. First, one of Holden’s frequent visitors, a doctor who is both knowledgeable about trees and guitars, thought that it might be cool to make a few dulcimers out of a log of the cut spruce wood, since this kind of wood is prized by instrument-makers for its beauty and fine sound quality. But then the power of the Holy Spirit took his idea and grew it. The doctor used his connections in the guitar world to speak with the director of a mill that makes soundboards for several famous guitar-building companies. Reluctant at first, because the project made absolutely no business sense, the mill director finally agreed to take some of the logs to use in making guitars. And that’s when life really began to blossom. Suddenly, like buds opening in rapid succession, organizations from the U.S. Forest service, to the huge mining company Rio Tinto, to the mill, to the Taylor guitar company, to Holden Village itself, all lost their fear and their need to control. They stopped calculating for profit, ease, and feasibility, and worked together instead to make it possible to use the doomed spruce trees to make a limited series of special guitars. Moreover, these guitars are to be sold with a sizable part of the proceeds going to charitable organizations that help provide clean water not in Holden Village, but across the world, for rural residents in Central America.[2]
          Can you see it? Can you see the web of good springing from evil in this story? Can you see life springing from death? Can you see wild abundance springing from dry desolation? Can you see a whole group of Christian disciples looking at their imperfect world with resurrection eyes and living as if Christ is indeed risen? Can you see Christian disciples living without indifference and fear and greed and control—and living instead for the earth, for one another, for the Kingdom of God? N.T. Wright points out that Jesus’ story of death and resurrection is not just “a story of some splendid and exciting social work with an unhappy conclusion.” Nor is it “just a story of an atoning death with an extended introduction.” It is the “story of God’s kingdom … generating a new state of affairs in which the power of evil has been decisively defeated, the new creation has been decisively launched, and Jesus’s followers have been commissioned and equipped to put that victory and that inaugurated new world into practice.”[3] Christ is indeed risen, but it is up to us to make him seen and known out in the Galillee's of the world.
          When I read about the Holden Village guitars, I thought that we at St. Thomas needed to participate in this resurrection story this Easter. And so did many of you! I shared the story with our Saturday night parishioners and other guitar fans here in our parish, and they agreed that it would be a wonderful thing for us to join the resurrection work of joyful music, clean water, and Kingdom living by buying one of these guitars for our own Harvey Roberts, who—get this—grew up on a tree farm in Washington State. God has given Harvey a marvelous musical gift, as well as the strength and desire to share that gift—and the gift of Christ’s love and joy—with others, both in our parish and with the world outside of our doors. So let us now join with Harvey, with the shorn Engelmann spruce trees, with our Lutheran brothers and sisters at Holden Village, with the businesses who worked for the Kingdom, with the residents of Central America digging wells to better their lives, with the Risen Christ who unites us all in Love: and let us sing Alleluia, for today, Christ is Risen! The Lord is Risen indeed!



[1] Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2002), 90.
[2] For more about the Holden Village guitar project see: http://www.holdenvillage.org/files/2213/8446/4842/Holden_Guitar_Story.pdf

[3] N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), 204. (Italics are mine.)

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Good Friday Reflection on the "Homeless Jesus"

Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.


After such a long, gray winter, it has been difficult to think Good Friday thoughts this week, as green bursts forth all around me and bright flowers blossom on every side. The earth is shouting “Rejoice!” yet I am supposed to be meditating on the gruesome death of God. It has been harder than usual this Holy Week to keep Easter at bay. I tried to get in the right Good Friday mood by watching the haunting movie, Twelve Years a Slave. Whippings, human cruelty, heartbreaking injustice: all of the elements of Jesus’ Passion were present in the movie, Mel-Gibsonlike on the big screen …. But the horror of a free man’s capture didn't match the thought of Almighty God submitting to such suffering out of love. Even after the somber movie, the spring sunshine outside the theater continued to burn away any gloom.

Then I heard the NPR story about the homeless Jesus. Canadian sculptor Timothy Schmalz has created a life-sized bronze Jesus poured out like a pile of bones under a shroud on a park bench. The homeless Jesus is easily mistaken at dusk for a real homeless man, curled up under a blanket for warmth, rejected and alone. There is room on the bench for a person to sit at the statue’s bare feet, if one dares to come so near. Only when seated beside the heap of human being, can one notice the nail holes in the feet, the mark of crucifixion. The interesting thing is that this statue has turned out to be rather controversial. Two churches turned the statue down before an Episcopal parish in an upscale neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina purchased it, making the national news. Although the statue is clearly inspired by the verses of Matthew 25 in which Jesus says that when we care for “one of the least of these,” we care for him, many good Christians are not happy with their Lord as a bum on a bench. One upstanding Charlotte resident, fearful for her safety, called the police when she first spied the statue at night, believing that the homeless hordes had invaded her own neighborhood. She rejected the sculptor’s theology, too, protesting that Jesus stands watch over the homeless to protect them and to care for them; he therefore cannot be one of them.[1]

At first I was surprised to notice that the picture of the homeless Jesus huddled in the sunshine did more to bring out a Good Friday spirit of contrition in me than did all of the pain and horrors of the Cross. On reflection, however, I began to understand. For the first Christians, the Cross was a daily horror that they ran into on their way to the market. It was a sign of Roman oppression: of hatred, violence, God-forsakenness and despair. For God to end up on one—and for Christians then to venerate such an object as the source of their salvation—was a scandal beyond the pale, as the apostle Paul tries to make clear to us. For me, however, the Cross has become a religious symbol of salvation over which I need to pour all kinds of drama in order for it to move me to the horror that I know it requires. I have to reach deep down into my darkest imagination, pulling up all of my own hurts and then stirring them with all of the world’s wrongs, in order for the scandal of that smooth Cross in the chancel of my cozy parish church to enter my life in a meaningful way.

But a homeless man huddled on a park bench—that is a sight that I recognize only too well in my world. It easily conjures up connotations overflowing with sin and suffering:  oppression, injustice, addiction, loneliness and despair, just to name a few.  Indeed, for the man or woman suffering on that bench, cast out by me and my community, truly to be Almighty God—well now, the fearful woman in Charlotte is right to call that a scandal! But such is the true scandal of Good Friday: the scandal of God completely caught, out of love for the world, within the pain and the sin of the world. To let myself be moved by the homeless Jesus is not to manufacture horror as a religious duty. It is to let God into the place where God longs to be: into the depths and hidden nooks and crannies of my world. W. H. Auden wrote a poem about Good Friday in which he expresses the challenge that we face in making the crucifixion something that transforms us as much as resurrection does. Describing the crowd right after Jesus dies, he writes:

Soon… The shops will re-open at four,

The empty blue bus in the empty pink square will

Fill up and depart: we have time

To misrepresent, excuse, deny,

Mythify, use this event

While, under a hotel bed, in prison,

Down wrong turnings, its meaning

Waits for our lives …[2]

If Jesus suffers on that park bench, and I can reach out and touch his cold and bloody feet, then the scandal of the Incarnation has entered into the gated community of my life. The homeless Jesus can expect more from me than shame at the place of pain and rejection to which I have consigned him. Because he is a part of my world, the homeless Jesus can expect my life to change in response to our encounter.

My struggles with the beautiful weather this Holy Week made me realize that we always bend over the horrors of Good Friday with Easter victory in our pockets. It is OK for us to look at the suffering of our Lord with the knowledge of the resurrection to follow.  It is OK to ask for forgiveness knowing that we have already been forgiven. After all, Christ’s death flows into his resurrection just as smoothly and secretly as “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” flows into “Praise the Lord … For he does not despise nor abhor the poor …but when they cry to him he hears them.”[3] We don’t quite know where Psalm 22 turns from suffering into joy. We only know that it does. We don't quite know where the homeless Jesus ends and the victorious Christ begins. We only know that they are one and the same. All we know is that we live most of our lives in those moments of gray-and-pink streaked dawn when dark night begins to give way to bright daylight and where winter somehow turns into spring. The important Good Friday question for us is this: Like the psalmist’s, will our lives speak what God has accomplished, to generations yet to be born?  Will our lives be signs of God's grace and love? Will our tears of repentance bathe not just the bronze feet of the homeless Jesus but the fleshly feet of our brothers and sisters in whom the risen Christ has made his home?

The Rev. David Buck sits next to the Jesus the Homeless statue that was installed in front of his church, St. Alban's Episcopal, in Davidson, N.C.

The Rev. David Buck sits next to the Jesus the Homeless statue that was installed in front of his church, St. Alban's Episcopal, in Davidson, N.C.
http://www.npr.org/2014/04/13/302019921/statue-of-a-homeless-jesus-startles-a-wealthy-community




[1] http://www.wcnc.com/news/neighborhood-news/Homeless-Jesus-sculpture-sparks-controversy-247134691.html
[2] W.H. Auden, “Nones,” from the Horae Canonicae, found at  http://vl­adivostok.com/Speaking_In_Tongues/auden9eng.htm
[3] Psalm 22

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Returned--or Set Free?



Fifth Sunday of Lent


Ezekiel 37:1-14
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45
Psalm 130

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

          “Out of the depths I call to you, O Holy One. Lord, listen to my voice. Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.”
I couldn’t help but think of the missing Malaysian Airlines plane as I thought about these words from Psalm 130 this week. I pictured the ill-fated flight’s two-hundred-and-thirty-nine passengers still strapped to their seats in the wreckage of a cabin hidden somewhere on the ocean floor. Their laughter and their tears have been silenced. Their voices are now captured only in the tiny “ping” of a black box. Yet even that electronic voice tires and grows faint, its supplication for justice and truth lost beneath the waves of the remotest ocean on earth. I can’t even imagine the pain of the friends and family of the passengers and crew on that flight: the wrenching separation and powerless despair that they must feel. Like the psalmist, they must strain with all their being for any glimmer of hope, waiting for answers like that night watchman trembling in the dark for a glimpse of the dawn.
For me, though--I who have no personal relationship with anyone on that flight--it is not the separation of death that haunts me. It’s the sinister mystery surrounding the lost flight that troubles my thoughts. It’s the suggestion that human sin, rather than some mechanical failure, caused the tragedy. That’s what nags at the serenity of my daily prayers. The drowned flight is a sign for me of the haunting and mysterious wreckage of goodness. Perhaps that, more than the deepness of the water, is what brings the crash to my mind when I read Psalm 130. For today’s psalm is a lament over the sea of sin that overwhelms us in life. It’s not a psalm about death. It’s a psalm about the separation from God that is a part of life. The psalmist feels sucked into chaos, into the turbulent chaos that churns and overwhelms our lives in this world: the chaos of injustice, the chaos of fear, the chaos of power-plays, the chaos of war and violence and suffering that we bring upon ourselves. The psalmist lies with the chained Africans in the fetid hold of a slave ship. He cries with Jewish prisoners at Dachau. He holds the hand of the little child at Fort Hood who is told, once again, to “shelter in place” as senseless bullets kill those around her.
As the psalmist cries out from the depths of sin, though, he remembers to remember. He remembers that there is hope in God’s word, in God’s word that is action and command. He remembers that God is steadfast love, loyal love, and that with God there is abundance of redemption, no matter how black the night, no matter how hopeless the sin. Psalm 130 dwells on sin not because of the desperation of our wrongdoing, but because of the sure and certain hope that the presence of our faithful and loving God brings to our lives. Psalm 130 is like our prayer for the forgiveness of sins that we say every week: we say it not to beat up on ourselves, but to remind us that we are, by God’s grace, forgiven indeed. As Martin Luther wrote, in his famous hymn text based on today’s psalm: “Wherefore my hope is in the Lord, my works I count but dust. I build not there, but on His word, and in His goodness trust. Up to His care myself I yield, He is my tower, my rock, my shield, and for His help I tarry.”[1]
The hope that Jesus brings to Lazarus and his family in our Gospel lesson is also the hope of the redemption of the world, of the abundance of God’s grace. I imagine that Lazarus was glad to be returned to his family, and that his family—and Jesus—were overjoyed to touch him and laugh with him again. But that is not the point of the story. Lazarus was not resurrected, like Jesus was, to inaugurate a new kind of existence. His wasn’t the resurrection that Martha expected, either, of the new creation at the end of time, when all the dead would rise again. The story isn't just all about Lazarus. Though Jesus gave him life, Lazarus will return again to the grave, as do we all. As the Malaysian flight represents for me the captivity of sin, the story of the raising of Lazarus serves for John as a sign—a representation—of the new life that God wants to give to all creation in Jesus Christ. In Jesus, God’s Kingdom of light and life is launched on earth as in heaven. Jesus’ words to Lazarus, “Come out [of the darkness of the tomb!]” are addressed to us, as well, when we read about what happened that day in Bethany. Jesus’ words, “Come out” are the words of the dawn in which we can put our hope. They are an invitation to a life of grace and forgiveness, a life that shares with others what we have received from God.
You might have seen the new TV show that is now advertised ad nauseum on ABC: It’s called Resurrection and is about dead people who come back to life, like Lazarus … Except that these dead people have been in the tomb not for four days but for some 30 years … And that Jesus does not raise them—the viewer has no idea why they are returning. I watched part of the pilot episode and was not impressed. I was interested to learn, though, that this new show is the American remake of a French TV series called The Returned. Because I like any excuse to watch a show in French, and because the French version is supposed to be better than its American cousin, I watched a few episodes of that one, too. On one hand, the name “The Returned,” is a much better title than “Resurrection.” Remember, resurrection is an entry into a new kind of life, not just the return of a dead body. And to call the resuscitated bodies in the show, “the returned,” creates a suspenseful, haunted atmosphere, much more fitting than the obviously misunderstood pious overtones to the title “Resurrection.”
 On the other hand, despite the ABC title, the main plot of both of these series is not the joy of new life in Christ. The plot concerns the trouble that the return of the dead causes to the lives of the living. The plot instead is the persistence of chaos. The plot lurks in the depths of human sin and tragedy, without the dawn offered in Psalm 130. A child murdered by burglars, a girl killed in a school bus crash, a young man who committed suicide on his wedding day … all of these people and more show up again in town as if nothing has happened, encountering family members who have already undergone the grieving process. The Returned are not zombies; they are human beings fully alive, although they do start to decompose over the course of the series, pointing to the mortality of their flesh and the temporary nature of their return. They definitely do not glow with the light of heaven. And the results of their return on the community are not life-giving. Their return results in upturned and unsettled lives, even murder, crime, chaos, and anguish unbounded. The French village in which the dead start coming back to life is on a lake—and as more and more dead people return to their loved ones in this village, the water level in the lake mysteriously drops. It is as if “the depths” are getting more and more shallow as life returns. However, not even this symbol turns out to be a hopeful one. At the end of the season—spoiler alert!—the waters of the lake suddenly and without warning rise again, drowning the entire village. Will Season 2 bring redemption, or only plunge everyone deeper under the depths?
Both of these shows reflect our society’s obsession with the chasm between life and death. We dream of what it would be like to get our loved ones back. We dream of keeping life in our flesh, even when we let our spirits wither and die from lack of care. Like Mary and Martha, we reproach God for allowing the separation of death to enter our lives. Yet we ignore the equally heavy separation from God caused by evil that is heavy enough to push airliners to the bottom of the sea and to turn joyful reunions into a horror movie. We look for salvation lounging on the clouds in heaven, forgetting that Christ’s offer of deliverance from Evil begins right now, today, on earth.
“Out of the depths I call to you … Listen to my voice. Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.” Wait! Is it just our voices that float up to God from the depths, or is it Christ whom I hear calling from under the deep sea of sin? Is it Jesus’ voice that I hear, a voice full of love and choked with grief, begging me to listen, pleading with me to “come out” like Lazarus, to come out of the darkness that entombs me and to be set free?


[1]Martin Luther, “Out of the Depths I Cry to Thee,” verse 3, trans. from the German by Catherine Winkworth.