Life in the Apocalypse – 11/15/09 – Daniel 7, Mark 13

Tuesday’s Enquirer carried a number of letters to the editor regarding people’s responses to the health care bill passed just a few days before by the House of Representatives.  Here are some voices of those who spoke out against bill:    

“If the government takes over health care with everything else it now controls, the free market will not be able to compete (and) the government (will make) us taxpayers pay for its follies and mistakes.  Our Constitution is stealthily being eroded.”

“So the House has passed legislation called health care reform.  This is a 2000 page misnomer.  The real name should be health care control.  Wake up America!  Your freedoms are being stolen right under your noses.” 

“This is just the sort of big government our Founding Fathers sought to avoid.  Today they would, like I, fear for our rights and our Republic.”

Several weeks from now, on December 6^th, world leaders will gather for the United Nations Climate Summit, in Copenhagen, to discuss how nations can better address issues of climate change.    

Here is a quote from a person speaking on behalf of the Global Climate Campaign which is organizing to urge world leaders to act quickly on this matter:  “The current financial crisis does not absolve world leaders from their responsibility towards the literally billions of people, mainly from the world’s poorest communities, who are likely to perish if climate change remains unchecked. Frustration is boiling over at the years of failure to achieve meaningful international action on climate even as the evidence that we are on the brink of an unprecedented and irreversible catastrophe mounts.  On Saturday December 5^th, people from all around the world will be saying that the time is now for world leaders to take decisive action to avert a global calamity” Link HERE

I’m going on a hunch here, but my guess is that if these global warming activists and the health care protesters were to get in the same room that they wouldn’t agree on a whole lot.  In fact, it could get ugly, fast.  But from their comments on these two separate important issues, there is a common thread that at least brings them together on a most basic agreement.  Did you hear it?  Our Constitution is being eroded, I fear for our Republic, must take action to avert a global calamity.  There is a shared sense that the world as they know it and love it, is in grave danger.  A sense that the fabric of society, or even creation, is stretched to the point of almost tearing, perhaps holding on by just a thread which could break any minute.  If we listen to both deeply enough, we’ll find a common conviction that we are on the brink of disaster and that there must be an intervention to stop the whole thing from falling apart.        

Lots of people can agree that we’re living in apocalyptic times, we just have different thoughts about what are the signs of the apocalypse.

What I’d like to do is to start from the assumption that this intuition is a correct one and that we are indeed living in apocalyptic times.  What if these times, our generation, this point in history, is an apocalyptic moment and we find ourselves right in the middle of it all?  I want to try it out and see what things look like if we 1) accept that we are living in apocalyptic times, and 2) let go of what we think that may mean and open ourselves to rereading scripture to listen for what in the world it may say about such a time and such a life.  This will be a theme that keeps coming up as we move into Advent and the texts that prepare us for the coming of Christ into the world and the apocalyptic preaching of John the Baptist, so today can be an introduction into life in the apocalypse! 

Apocalypse has come to be another way of saying the end of the world, the end of life as we know it, by some cataclysmic event of nature or human initiated war and destruction.  I looked up some recent movies that have apocalyptic themes like The Matrix, Deep Impact, and Armageddon and realized that they were all released in the late 90’s, so maybe the apocalypse already happened ten years ago on a Hollywood stage set and we somehow missed it.  Although it looks like this new movie 2012 is reviving the theme, so maybe we’re just a little over two years away from apocalypse.

The shaking of the heavens and earth is a part of where apocalyptic thinking has come from, but involves quite a bit more than that.

Between the years 200 BCE and 300 CE, approximately, the Jewish world produced various documents that we now call apocalyptic literature.  What this literature holds in common is that it is being written by a minority group experiencing persecution, to the point of being overwhelmed by the forces arrayed against them.  The experience of oppression and was so strong that the only hope for salvation was a divine intervention that would overturn the order of the present world and set things in order as they should be.  General historical progress toward a better world was no longer an imaginable possibility.  Evil would be defeated, unjust kings would be destroyed, and the righteous would be justified in their faithfulness to the ways of justice and the right path.  The mind of the ancient imagination connected the great power of kingdoms and tyrants with the power of the stars and the sun, the social order mirrored in the cosmic order, so the shaking of the thrones of the powerful also meant the shaking of the heavenly bodies.  Isaiah 24 has apocalyptic words, “On that day the Lord will punish the host of heaven in heaven, and on earth the kings of the earth…Then the moon will be abashed, and the sun ashamed; for the Lord of hosts will reign on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem.”

One of the early apocalyptic writings, the book of Daniel, rose out of Jewish persecution under the 2^nd century BCE Greek ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes who desecrated the temple.  By this time the Jews had lived under the reign of the Babylonians, who exiled them, the Medes, the Persians, and the Greeks.  It was not a short, temporary loss of national sovereignty as had been hoped for.  It was centuries.  Generation after generation.  In a dream, in chapter 7 of Daniel, Daniel sees four beasts, each corresponding to one of these empires.  Each beast is stronger than the one before it and each more destructive.  After seeing the beasts, the text says this: “As I watched in the night visions, I saw one like a human being (a son of man) coming with the clouds of heaven, and he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him.  To this one was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.  His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.”  So right in the midst of his apocalyptic times, which had been ruled by beasts, Daniel envisions one like a human being who is given the thrown – coming with the clouds of heaven.  Sounds sort of like thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.  The beasts are defeated, God intervenes by raising up one with a human heart, who humanizes the systems that had been oppressing people, and this is the one who reigns for ever and ever.  And soon after, in the same chapter, Daniel identifies this Human One as the righteous of Israel, the holy ones.  In the midst of empire ruled by beasts, Daniel assures the people that the Human One, the son of man, is coming.    

Writings like this continued on up to and beyond the life of Jesus.  If you want to know more about apocalyptic literature you should take John Kampen out for breakfast sometime and ask him what all he has learned in his studies of this!  Jesus was living in apocalyptic times, only this time the hope of Daniel had been delayed and yet another empire, another beast, had risen up, this time the Roman Empire.  And again Jews found themselves as a persecuted minority.  The book of Revelation is part of this apocalyptic literature and kind of picks up where Daniel left off in some ways and talks about this new beast of Rome that is now the source of so much hardship for the people of God. 

Mark 13 is an apocalyptic chapter and is one of the key places where we can take our cues for how Jesus interprets apocalypse not only with his words, but also with his life.  Because apocalyptic consciousness was there in Jesus time, he’s not inventing this language, it’s already part of the day’s lingo.  So he uses the language of the day to tweek and alter and shape perception of life in the apocalypse, taking it as a given that that generation was living in apocalyptic times – that there were powerful forces working to the harm of the people – forces that needed to be overthrown, or stopped, or defeated in some way.  And like anyone trying to wade through the troubled waters of apocalypse, Jesus enters into this conversation carefully but also purposefully and with direction.

He approaches apocalypse in a way that lines up with the root meaning of the world.  Apocalypse, apocalypsis in Greek, means to unveil, to reveal.  To peak behind the curtain, in a sense, and see things as they really are.  Who’s really running the show.  So Dorothy and the scarecrow and the tin man and the lion are on an apocalyptic journey in their encounter with the Wizard of Oz.  And it’s not as they or anyone supposed.

Mark 13 begins this way: “As he (Jesus) came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Look Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!’  Then Jesus asked him, ‘Do you see these great buildings?  Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.’”

Ever since entering Jerusalem on the back of a colt, back in chapter 11, Jesus had been teaching in the temple.  His interaction with the scribe about the greatest commandment, and his words about the scribes and the widow that Dustin spoke to last week all happened in the temple.  The temple and the area around it had undergone a massive construction project, sort of the economic stimulus of the day, by Herod the Great.  It was built to impress and produce awe.  Some of those stones from the retaining wall of the temple are still there in Jerusalem at the Western wall, the wailing wall, and they are indeed massive and impressive.  We might think of walking through Times Square in Manhattan and being in awe of the lights and towering buildings rising all around us.  So when the disciples walk out with Jesus, they comment on the massive stones and buildings all around them.

Jesus then speaks with apocalyptic language.  Do you see all this?  All this which looks so powerful and dominating and secure?  Don’t be so mesmerized.  All of these buildings will be thrown down.  One gift of apocalyptic knowledge is that we are given the gift of disillusionment.  Herod’s temple, Herod’s city, the rule of Rome, the iron fist of the emperor, carried with it an air of immortality and invincibility.  This is the potential illusion for anyone living in apocalyptic times.  That the system will hold us fast forever, that the structure is too big to fail, that these stones which we carried and formed and set in place with our own hands and our own technology can never be moved or shaken.  Worship and faith are energies that we can often direct at things which are not God, and Jesus seems to be saying ‘don’t do it.’   The order of the world is much more fragile than you think.  Don’t live under the illusion and the hypnotic trance of such things.  I have a better place for you to focus your energy.

Well, since Jesus brings up an apocalyptic kind of conversation the disciples seem all of a sudden eager to go in this direction.  OK, Jesus, since you brought it up, when is it all going to go down?  When is the fire going to burn it all up, the colliding comet going to blow it all to smithereens, the revolution going to topple the king?

Here’s how this is put in the rest of the Mark 13 passage that was read: “When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, ‘Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?’  Then Jesus began to say to them, ‘Beware that no one leads you astray.  Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and will lead many astray.  When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.  For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines.  This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”      

It’s more than a little unfortunate that these words have been taken to mean pretty much the opposite of what Jesus is trying to communicate here.  The disciples asked “when” and “what are the signs.”  Jesus lists typical apocalyptic imagery and expectations – the wars, the famines, the earthquakes – and basically says “these aren’t the signs.”  Do not be alarmed.  These things aren’t the end of the world, this is more like the beginning of birth pains than the actual birth of anything.  Beware.  Don’t be led astray.  This isn’t what you’re to be watching for.  Stop being mesmerized by the massive buildings, because they’re not invincible.  And stop thinking that wars and earthquakes mean it’s the end of the world – that they have some kind of sacred meaning.  Let me teach you where to look, Jesus seems to be saying.

This is actually the last Sunday that I’ll be preaching on the Year B lectionary cycle, the Year of the Gospel of Mark.  Next Sunday will be Thanksgiving Sunday and people will be sharing their gratitude and the Sunday after that begins Advent, the beginning of a new church year, Year C and Luke’s gospel.

So since we’re finishing up with Mark, I feel compelled to go out with a bang and mention that according to Mark, the world has already come to an end.  Mark narrates the apocalypse and its not to be missed.  Later in chapter 13 Jesus echoes the words of Daniel – that the sun will be darkened and the stars will be falling from the heavens, and then you will see ‘the Son of Man, the Human One, coming in the clouds with great power and glory.’  And Jesus says to his generation “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place,” and he ends the apocalyptic discourse by saying “Therefore keep awake – for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn…Keep awake.”  And Mark goes on to narrate the end of the world, the coming of the Human One, the master of the house, “in the evening” when Jesus eats with his disciples and gives them the new covenant of bread and cup, and the disciples fails to keep awake in Gethsemane, “at midnight,” when he is betrayed by Judas, “at cockcrow,” when he is denied by Peter, and “at dawn” when he is tried and crucified, and when the sun is darkened over the whole land, and Jesus dies on the cross.

It’s the end of the world, the apocalyptic moment unveils, reveals everything, and the curtain (of the temple) is torn down the middle and we get to glimpse behind.

So if the world has ended, what exactly is it we’re doing now?  If the apocalypse has been fulfilled and the veil has been removed, what is it we’re supposed to see?  The nonviolent defeat of evil?  The coming of the Human One?  Where is it?  Do you see it?  Are we keeping awake?

In these apocalyptic times, when the structures are teetering, when creation is groaning, we can fix our eyes not just on what appears to be fragile and threatening to collapse, but also on the Coming of the Human One.  On the new world that is already coming into being.  On resurrection.  On ways that the Human One is already coming to life around us, already reigning from the throne.  In this generation in these apocalyptic times, already seeing signs of the kingdom of God coming on earth as in heaven.     

Thanks be to God.

 

 

Communing With The Saints (Mennonite Heritage Sunday) – 11/1/09 – Mark 12:28-34

When Jesus is teaching in the temple in Mark’s gospel, a scribe comes to him with what would have been a common question of the day.  He asks Jesus to weigh in on what he believed to be the centerpiece of the Torah.  “Which commandment is first of all?” he asks.  Jesus begins by saying that the first and greatest is “Hear O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”  Jesus draws from words found in Deuteronomy, known as the Shema, which Jews would have already known by heart, repeating for morning and evening prayers.  

Had Jesus continued quoting this passage from Deuteronomy, it would have gone like this: “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.  Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.  Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”

Just a little further in the same chapter, it says, “When your children ask you in time to come, ‘What is the meaning of the decrees and the statutes and the ordinances that the Lord our God has commanded you?’ then you shall say to your children, ‘We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.  The Lord displayed before our eyes great and awesome signs and wonders against Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his household.  God brought us out from there in order to bring us in, to give us the land that God promised on oath to our ancestors.  Then the Lord commanded us to observe all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God, for our lasting good, so as to keep us alive, as in now the case.” 

There is a recognition here that what has been learned and what has been experienced is to be passed on to future generations – to remember the past, so as to make it present.  When the children ask “Why?” we have a story to tell them.

One of our ways of doing this is by having this Mennonite Heritage Sunday.  It’s a chance to remember some of the stories of the Mennonite experience and to get a little better sense of “Why” we are who we are and how that affects how we live.  This year Mennonite Heritage Sunday also coincides with another church observance, All Saints Day, and those who have designed the worship theme for the day have asked us to consider combining these two ways of remembering.  Heritage, the stories of a people, and saints, those who have lived faithful lives and whose witness continues long after their death.

In the ancient tradition of Celtic Christianity, there are three categories of saints.  The first is the Red Saint – those who have suffered for their faith and witnessed to the love of God with their blood, through martyrdom.  The Anabaptist movement out of which the Mennonites formed is in many ways a martyr tradition, and we have the book of the Martyr’s Mirror which tells many stories of Red Saints.  I’ve talked about the story of Dirk Willems who was fleeing his captor and who escaped over a frozen pond only to look back and realize that the person chasing him had fallen through the ice.  Dirk turned back, rescued his pursuer and saved his life.  The man wanted to let Dirk go free, but his authority had him rearrest Dirk who was tried as an Anabaptist and sentenced to burn at the stake. 

When I was in Paraguay this summer for the Mennonite World Conference I attended a Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) seminar that was reviewing the first 25 years of CPT and someone there suggested that we should think of Tom Fox as a person who should be included in a modern day Martyr’s Mirror.  Tom was one of the four CPT members who was captured in Iraq several years ago and held in captivity several months.  The other three made it out alive but Tom was found dead.  He was a witness to the nonviolent peaceful reign of God and he spent his final days trying to befriend his enemy captors who were caught up in this war on terror that had pitted their people against ours. 

We have many Red Saints to talk about.

The Celtic Christians also consider there to be White Saints.  These were the saints who had crossed the whitecaps, and had gone over the waters to be missionaries beyond their homeland.  In looking at the map of what Mennonite World Conference looks like today it would no doubt be quite a different picture without this type of saint.  One of the stories of the Paraguayan Mennonites is how they were aided in their early days by Bob and Myrtle Unruh.  Bob was from Montana and Myrtle was from Kansas, and they were both raised in rural Mennonite congregations and met and graduated together from Bethel College in Kansas.  They were newly married and began an assignment to travel down to Paraguay to help the Mennonites who were barely making it in the desert-like region called the Chaco.  On the first night they arrived, Myrtle was remembered to have said, “Thank goodness.  There remain just 1,756 days before we can return home.”  But this ended up being a life-long calling for the Unruhs.  They came to help them develop farming practices that would be productive in the Chaco and they soon had a successful experiment with importing Buffelgrass which grew like nothing else in the sandy soil.  The community then decided that they needed better livestock for their better grass.  This is how the story is described in the book Like a Mustard Seed, which is a telling of the Mennonite experience in Paraguay.  “Mennonite farmers in Lancaster, PA, learned about the need for improved livestock (in Paraguay).  They selected some of the best from their cows and pigs and in 1961 chartered a plane that became a kind of flying Noah’s ark.  More followed.  Holstein bulls…were crossed with Zebu cows, more than doubling milk production while retaining the hardiness needed to survive the Chaco.  Bob and Myrtle Unruh closed their first term, which by most standards had been wildly successful, with these words: ‘We persist with a prayer in our hearts that also through our modest efforts the love of Christ may be made visible.’ The Unruhs were more than respected; they were loved and became one with the people.  They became Chaquenos (Chaco dwellers) and devoted most of their adult lives to making the Chaco productive.” (pp. 159-160)  More of their story is told in this book along with many other stories of the Mennonites in Paraguay. 

Red saints and white saints are probably the easiest to idealize, and they make for excellent stories which are good to tell, but Celtic Christians, and hopefully also Mennonite Christians, also recognize Green Saints.  For the Celts, Green Saints were those who stayed in Ireland and committed their lives to God’s work right there on the Emerald Isle. 

I think that last week Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove helped us think some about green saints.  He told some stories about his small community there in Durham, North Carolian that has committed to the wellbeing of their neighborhood and how their neighborhood is becoming a place where people care for each other.  And he quoted Mother Teresa who said we can do no great things, but only small things with great love.  I think he quoted her on Sunday…. 

And so we also remember those who have found this area, this land where we live, to be the place where they have been called to love God with all their heart and soul and mind.

One of the stories of Mennonite Green Saints are those who served in alternative service during World War II through CPS, Civilian Public Service.  Many Mennonite young people wanted to serve their country but couldn’t reconcile taking another life with their baptismal vows of being Christians, so they entered into CPS as conscientious objectors and served in different positions all over the country.  Service in CPS had the effect of taking many Mennonites off of their farms and more isolated communities and putting them in touch with many of the social problems of the nation.  One of the places where Mennonite young people served was in the nation’s mental hospitals.  Here are some brief anecdotes of that work that comes out of the book Two Kingdoms, Two Loyalties: Mennonite Pacifism in America by Perry Bush who teaches at Bluffton University:

  “Young objectors faced innumerable challenges to their convictions in mental hospital work.  There rough supervisors often informed the Cos by word and example to handle the patients overly firmly, to ‘whip them, or they will whip you.’  Usually Cos learned how to deal with potentially violent situations with their convictions intact.  At one hospital for the violently insane, orderlies had sequestered a crazed inmate in a padded cell, but he still waved a razor blade.  They called two Cos to ‘take care of him.’  The two went into the cell, carrying a mattress for protection in from of them, and calmed the inmate down.  Another CO found himself confronted by a huge inmate (nicknamed ‘Evil’ by the orderlies) towering above him and holding aloft a heavy oaken chair.  Although the usual response from an orderly thus threatened would have been to deliver a swift kick in the groin, this CO asked the inmate, ‘How do you expect to sit down on that when you hold it up like that?’  The inmate merely laughed, put it down, and walked away.” (pp. 109-110)

During the war and especially after the war Mennonites had a significant influence on reforming the way that mental health care happens in our country and they have helped to humanize the system in many ways.  So these are some of our Green Saints.     

I want to talk specifically to our youth and young people now and mention that we hope you have a chance to see a lot of the world and get a big picture of what all is going on around the globe, and also what is going on right here in the US.  And so as you think about being a Mennonite Christian in your young adulthood that is coming to you so quickly, we want to encourage you to consider this heritage of service and mission that we have not just around the world, but also here at home.  We want to encourage you to consider giving several years of your life to Voluntary Service (VS), or serving with MCC.  These will be important years that will help shape how you incorporate service and mission into all the rest of your life.  And you may end up being in a situation like Myrtle Unruh where she thought she was just serving a place for a limited term and in the process discovered that this was really what her life was going to be all about.  We want you to look seriously into all the different service opportunities that are out there, and we’ll encourage you as you step out and do that.    

When the scribe came to Jesus and asked him about the greatest Commandment, Jesus quoted to him the words of the Shema from Deuteronomy as the first commandment and then he said that the second is very much like it, that we should love our neighbor as ourself.  This was the core of all the Law and all the Prophets, better than all burnt offerings and sacrifices, which were happening all around them as they had this conversation in the temple. 

One of the things about loving God and loving our neighbor is that we don’t need to go anywhere special to do this or have anything dramatic happen to us in order to carry it out.  Anywhere we plant ourselves, there will be God and there will be neighbors.

When the Apostle Paul wrote to his little congregations that he had helped start around the Roman Empire he would often call them the saints.  The first words to the Ephesians: “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus.”  The first words to the Philippians: “Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi..grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

And so in the last words of this sermon, as we prepare to move into Communion I invite you, the saints who are in Cincinnati, who are working and serving throughout our home area and who have decided to seek the welfare of this place where we live, I invite you to continue in this story in which we have been joined.  To tell it to our children, to tell it to our neighbors who may be looking for a faith community to join.  When I look at you, I see a congregation of green saints — which maybe in our time can have a dual meaning.  A Celtic meaning and a simple living meaning of trying to green our own lives these days.     

We prepare now for the table.

Whenever we gather around this table, we do so as a part of the communion of saints.  This is how we remember.  This is how the past becomes present.  Christ comes to us in the form of bread, an open table of invitation and grace.  In joining together in communion we join in the communion of saints living and dead who all look to the great feast that has been prepared for us, as we inherit the kingdom of God.

 

Action/Reflection – 7/12/09 – Mark 6

A couple weeks ago I sent out a Musing about the first half of this summer looking something like a series of concentric circles with all these gatherings that are taking place.  It started with the annual meeting of our area conference, Central District Conference meeting up in Sugar Creek Ohio around the theme of how to live faithfully in the context of empire. 

Right after this followed the national Convention in Columbus with the theme of “Breathe and Be Filled” with Mennonites of all ages from around the country coming together for worship, workshops, delegate work, and all of the late night entertainment that is planned at those events.  There were over 8000 in attendance and a number of people probably had the same experience that Matthew Brenneman had when he walked into Nationwide Arena for a worship service and looked around.  He said: “I didn’t know this many Mennonites existed.”  It’s a rare experience, but every once in a while we get a taste of what it means to be the majority culture.  By my count there were over 50 people from this congregation who were at some part of the Convention, with most of those being there the whole week, which is really quite phenomenal.     

And then the final, largest circle that is soon to occur is the Mennonite World Conference, which meets in Asuncion, Paraguay this week, with Anabaptist related groups from around the world.  Ed Diller flew out yesterday and I think is still in route as we speak, and I’ll be flying out this afternoon and be there for a week and a half.  This is a gathering that happens every six years and allows for Anabaptist groups to hear each other’s stories and build relationships that span the temporary borders of our nation-states through this multinational, multi-lingual, global family that is the church.

So this block of time from the end of June to the end of July is a perfect storm of gatherings.  These circles are perhaps in some small way a picture of the concentric circles the angel spoke about at the beginning of the book of Acts, telling those first disciples that they would be Jesus’ witnesses in Jerusalem, the local area, in all Judea and Samaria, the national territories, and to the ends of the earth.   

Part of the nature of these gatherings, and this is just sort of inevitable, is that they are extremely intense while they are happening, quite dense in their content and activity, and then they’re over and people return home to wherever home is.  And there’s this odd combination of things being different, because of this experience, and things being very much the same as they were when one left.  And, if there’s not a chance to process through some of the event or to tell stories or to hear other people’s stories, there can be a sense of a disconnect between these two worlds.

So I’d like to do a couple things in the next bit.  The first is to position this experience, intensity followed by a return to normal, in a story in the gospels in which some similar things are going on, which happens to be right at the lectionary reading for the week.  It’s always nice when lectionary and life and so closely aligned.  This is the time when Jesus has sent the 12 disciples out on their own for the first time to preach in the villages, and they do all this great stuff like traveling the countryside and staying in host homes and preaching good news and casting out demons and healing the sick, and then they return back to Jesus to tell him all about it.  And Jesus’ response it to initiate a debriefing session in which they are to get away and process this experience. 

The second thing is to actually give some time and space here for processing some of the stories from the Columbus Convention.  For those who were able to be there we’ll have some time to share briefly a thought or an insight or a challenge that you received while at Convention.  So as we’re looking through this scripture you may want to be thinking about some piece you’d like to share when that time comes up.  I recognize that not everyone was able to attend, so this is a chance to start to be brought in on this.  My hope is that through starting to share about this that this will become a congregational experience that gets integrated into how we keep learning and growing together.   

The lectionary has us in Mark chapter six right now.  Leading up to this, the disciples have been called out of their professions – fishermen, tax collectors, whatever else – and have been following Jesus around the region of Galilee – mainly observing and listening.  Seeing the unclean be treated as if they are already clean and then becoming clean, seeing healings, hearing parables, witnessing Jesus get confronted by angry leaders, and witnessing him get a cold reception when he returns to his hometown of Nazareth.  And then, at some point, these followers are asked to pair up and to go out themselves, just like Jesus has been doing, only without Jesus with them this time, and do the same kinds of things they’ve been observing.  This is the next step of their apprenticeship program.  There’s no way they’re completely prepared for all they’re going to face, but they go out for this learn-as-you go unsupervised internship in the kingdom of God.  And they’re actually quite successful.  They preach boldly, they cast out evil spirits, and they anoint sick people with oil who actually get healed.  So this is an intense, immersion experience for them, and when it’s done they have a lot to tell each other and Jesus. 

So we get to verses 30-32 which is the part I’d like to focus on.  The disciples have gone out and done their thing in all the villages of the area, and then these verses read: “The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught.  He said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’  For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.  And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves.”  Whether Jesus is impressed with their success or not it doesn’t say, but his response is – Hey, come away a while.  Let’s pause and consider all this together.  Jesus had begun his ministry in the deserted place of the wilderness and he invites them back to such a place for some debriefing.

In doing this, Jesus establishes a pattern that can help to define the Christian vocation.  The disciples are sent out, and then they gather together and reflect.  This pattern can be identified as one of action/reflection.  The way that we learn, the way that we grow, and are formed as human beings, as spiritual beings, is through this pattern of action/reflection. 

Liberation theologians have picked up on this pattern and speak of it as one complete whole, each piece completed by the other.  They also emphasize the order in which these happen.  Concerned especially for the poor and the oppressed, liberation theologians like Juan Sobrino and James Cone have taught that the Christian vocation of seeking the liberation of all peoples must begin with action.  If we are too oriented toward thinking our way into action, rationalizing what we should do before doing it, we can get stuck in certain mindsets and blindness that make us miss out on the calling.  But if we begin with action – if we are willing to place ourselves alongside the poor, or, as the disciples did, to travel around to these different villages with just enough instruction to know how to make it through and what to be looking for, then we begin to see the world from this completely different perspective.  Our thoughts become shaped by this action.  We act our way into thinking and not just think our way into action. 

Jesus is careful not to sit the disciples down for too long in a classroom and teach them about the kingdom of God.  He sends them out to do the work, and then he pulls them aside for a time of reflection and learning.  This is his pedagogy.  Action/Reflection.  With all action there would be no opportunity to actually learn what one is learning — to step back, to ponder, to reevaluate and consider ways that one is being converted.  With all reflection there would be no engagement.  Just good ideas and interesting thoughts that actually start to become rather stale and boring after a while.

Now in this case, the disciples and Jesus end up having an interrupted retreat.  They try and go away to this deserted place and all these people follow them and we have the leading into the story of the feeding of the 5000.  The disciples want to have their time of debriefing and tell Jesus to send the people away, but Jesus has compassion on the people and makes another pedagogical move in teaching about the abundance of God’s providence.  It’s only after that event that the disciples get to have some time to themselves in a boat, and Jesus does his own reflection that he does throughout all the gospels as it says in verse 46.  “After saying farewell to them, (Jesus) went up on the mountain to pray.”  Action, reflection.  The Christian vocation involves this pattern which itself becomes a form of prayer.  When we are reflecting on our actions and acting on our reflections, then all of it is becoming a form of prayer, a channel through which we are opening ourselves up to the movement of the Spirit.  And Jesus is always making this explicit by getting away and spending this time in focused prayer.   

So I’m suggesting that the Convention experience has some similarities to an intense action.  Not exactly the kind of action of going out on mission like the disciples, but still a time of encountering new things, ideas, challenges, sort of drinking from the fire hydrant of collective Mennonite wisdom that is out there through all these talks and workshops and sessions.  My hope is that this has stirred new thoughts, or affirmed previous ideas that needed some more affirmation.  And it can be worthwhile and beneficial for us to move into some reflection, even as other demands come pressing in. 

One of the experiences at Convention that actually highlighted the call for this action/reflection pattern came on the last full day, Saturday, which ended up being one of the most intense days for me emotionally.  I wasn’t able to listen in on many of the delegate sessions, but I had time Saturday afternoon and most of that time was focused on discussion around a resolution on human sexuality.  The resolution itself was a combination of two different resolutions presented by groups with quite different perspectives.  One group wanted the church to affirm previous statements upholding the definition of traditional marriage and the other group wanted the church to take a step back from disciplining congregations who are deciding to openly welcome and affirm the gays and gay couples.  The single resolution took pieces from each one and tried to hold them into one statement.  So you can imagine that the conversation around this during the open mic time was fairly intense.   

As the evening worship approached I was still feeling the intensity of the afternoon and didn’t quite know how this would play out during worship.  Jim Wallis of Sojourners was the speaker for the evening and we all had a chance to talk some before the worship service and we mentioned that it had been an intense day and that he might want to just be aware of that context that he was speaking into.  And so, when it was time for him to speak, he adlibbed the first five minutes or so and spoke pretty directly to us in a pastoral way.  He basically said – I know it’s been a high energy day for you all, a day with some conflict, but since you have this theme of “Breathe and be Filled” I’m going to give you some friendly advice.  Just breathe.  It’s OK to feel differently about these things, just don’t forget to breathe and leave some room for the Spirit.  I don’t know how others heard this, but I took it to be a call for this kind of pattern that Jesus modeled to his disciples.  After the action, enter reflection.  Act, then breathe.  Speak, then step back.  Learn.  Pray.  Trust that God is at work.         

 This is one of the things that happened at Convention and the next couple weeks will offer some more opportunities for reflection.  Next week Keith will be preaching and I believe he’ll be giving some thoughts on the week.  The week after that the youth will have a time of sharing about some of their experiences.  And Violet is compiling the next newsletter to include some stories from Convention.  But for now I’d like to open up for a time of people sharing brief remarks about something about the week that has continued to linger with you.  How did the Spirit speak to you at Convention?  Is there a line or phrase from a speech that you found to be particularly pointed?  Or, in what ways were you challenged or do you feel our congregation could be challenged through something you learned?  Let’s take a little time now to hear a few reflections just as a way to get this conversation started among us.

 

Um….Now What? – 4/12/09 (Easter) – Mark 16:1-8

Christ is Risen!  Christ is Risen indeed!

 

If you like nice and tidy endings to stories, where all of the loose ends are brought together and all of the tensions are resolved, then the ending of Mark’s gospel is sure to disappoint, maybe even frustrate. 

In telling the story of Jesus’ resurrection, the climax of his gospel, not only does Mark fail to include the risen Christ anywhere in the scene, but he leaves us completely hanging as to what happens after the women find the tomb to be empty.  These three women, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, are the first witnesses of the resurrection, the first apostles, and we might expect them to be filled with joy and run out and tell everyone they know.  But instead this is what we read in Mark’s closing statement.  Chapter 16, verse 8:  “So they, the women, went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

Um…..OK.   That’s all?  That’s the end?  What happened next?  Where were they fleeing?  Did they ever recover their composure to tell anyone about the experience?  Have we come all this way only to be left with nothing but terror and amazement and….silence? 

A more literal translation of this final verse seems even more inconclusive, “And they went out and fled from the tomb, for they were gripped with tromos, trauma, and ekstasis, ecstasy, and nothing to no one they spoke, they were afraid for…”  The implied dot…dot…dot at the end gets us asking the obvious question, “And…then…what?”

The heading of chapter 16 of Mark reads “The resurrection of Jesus” but could just as easily read, “The resurrection of Jesus?”  The ending that we have appears to be about as satisfying as if Slumdog Millionaire had ended without us knowing whether or not he got the right answer to the final question.  I wonder if the movie “Slumdog Millionaire?” would have won as many Oscars.

The women who thought they were going to care for the body of Jesus, only to find that it is not there, carry the tension of the empty tomb with them as they flee into the early morning.  Rather than dancing and singing “Jai Ho,” the women are stunned with the mute button pressed on them.  Their experience is too immediate to be characterized as post-traumatic stress.  They exit the scene with during-traumatic stress. 

That this is not the proper way to end a story that is supposedly “good news,” has been observed by scholars and readers of scripture throughout the history of the church.  Some have suggested that perhaps the original ending of Mark has been lost.  We don’t know what the ending would have been, but we can be assured that it brought things together in a way that is more conclusive, allowing us to breath a sigh of relief and come back from the edge of our seat because all is well.  Or perhaps Mark was unable to finish as he intended — martyred or somehow pulled away from his script before being able to complete it.  For those who couldn’t stand not having a proper ending, at least two alternative endings were created in the couple of centuries after Mark was written. 

These new and improved endings do make it into our Bibles, you will notice, although it is sort of like Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire making it into the Hall of Fame for hitting home runs.  They come with a big asterisk.  The footnotes in Bibles include the information that the most ancient authorities bring the book to a close at v. 8, while other, later manuscripts include some combination of these two endings, a shorter version or a longer version, or both, one after the other.  These endings seem to draw from themes and stories present in the other gospels.  The women disciples end up spilling their guts to their male counterparts, but it doesn’t count for much.  Jesus appears to different groups of people, like the walkers to Emmaus which Luke tells more fully, with no one really believing until they themselves have had the experience.  Eventually a more clear mandate is made known to those who have encountered the risen Christ.  They are to spread his message to the ends of the earth, similar to the Great Commission of Matthew.  The point isn’t that these aren’t legitimate things to say.  The point is that they weren’t there when Mark put down his pen.  They’re additions, Mark with a slight injection of performance enhancing substance, and not the closing image of resurrection he intended to leave with us. 

So, assuming – a good assumption, I believe — that the fat lady has indeed sung at the end of verse eight, right when the women are too numb to utter a single note, what might there be here to learn about resurrection?

Let’s back up slightly. 

Consider the days immediately following a death:  When a death occurs, there are things that must be done, practical things.  For us, friends and family must be notified.  The body must be properly cared for in whatever way has been planned – organ donations, cremation, preparation for placing it in the casket.  Arrangements must be finalized for the memorial service.  Jobs and other responsibilities get put on hold, details for transportation and lodging for those traveling from a distance get worked out, and people gather to mourn and celebrate the life that was.  It’s a routine that is unique to every family and culture, and one of the most common and universal events of humanity.  We gather together, we remember, we say goodbye.  We find closure. 

The three women at the tomb are the same three women who Mark names as being present at the crucifixion.  The male disciples had run off for fear of their lives, but, as Mark notes, there were women disciples who looked on from a distance, among them Mary Magdelene, and Mary the mother of James, the younger and of Joses, and Salome.  We’ve never heard of these women before in Mark, although the second Mary might be Jesus’ mother, but all of a sudden they are of primary importance.  When the end comes, they’re the ones who are there.  They watch the painful process of Jesus being placed on the cross.  They are present when Jesus is dying.  When the life goes out of Jesus, no doubt, they experience a profound loss of their own.  Their master has died, the movement they have given so much to is in shambles, and there’s nothing left to do except what must be done when death occurs.  There’s no one left but them to do it. 

They don’t get to care for the body right away, Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, takes it upon himself to do this, taking down the body from the cross, wrapping it in a linen cloth, and laying it in a tomb. 

They intend to bring spices to anoint the body, but can’t do so until the Sabbath has ended.  The sun goes down on the Sabbath, and they rise with the sun early the next morning to go do what they can do to care for the dead.  They seem to be doing this on their own will.  Not sure how things will work out or if it will even be possible.  “Who will roll away the stone?”  They know they can’t do it.  At least they’ll be able to spend some time at the place they believe Jesus to be lying.  Perhaps, find some closure.

In Mark, the women find the stone already rolled away and in place of Jesus, a young man, dressed in white, sitting at “the right side,” the same position the disciples had requested to sit a number of days before when Jesus had told them that they didn’t know what they were asking.   Their initial alarm is met with these brief words, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.  He has been raised.  He is not here.  Look, there is the place they laid him.  But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”      

That’s all they get.  No certainty of what has really happened, no powerful angel shaking up the earth, as Matthew notes, no appearance from Jesus to speak directly to them, like the other three gospels.  Just this: Jesus isn’t here, he’s going ahead of you, and you’ll see him there.

Not so conclusive, sort of the ultimate anti-closure.  

Which, I’m thinking, is the point.  Our desire for our experiences to fit into nice, tidy packages, our need to put a lid over the container, or the metaphorical stone over the grave, could be the very thing that keeps us from entering the kind of reality that the God of resurrection is creating.  Our inclination toward comfortable resolution, our uncomfortableness with sitting on the edge of our seats and our relief with being able to sit back, kick up our feet, and savor that which has come to an end — all these are at odds with what is going on here, with what the Spirit of God appears to be up to in raising Jesus from the dead.   

If Jesus isn’t where we thought he was, contained somewhere back there, or just here, but is going ahead of us, to the place we will be at next, then the world is more unpredictable than we once thought – both frightful and amazing.  What traces of Christ will we find?  What places has Jesus haunted that we might stumble into unaware?  If the resurrected Christ is on the loose, out gallivanting around in whatever form he may choose to appear, then it’s both wonderful and disturbing.

Where will he show up?  What will he look like?  When will something that we thought was dead and over suddenly take on new life?

Resurrection faith involves learning to live with the unresolved.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, leader of the Anglican church, has made some comments about the ending of Mark that resonate with me.  He offers that the women’s silence at the end leaves us to continue the story in whatever way we will.  He says, “”(Mark) invites us to consider what difference the resurrection makes. Is it a reversal of tragedy? A happy ending? A promise of revenge against the sinful judges who brought Jesus to his death? It is none of these. The resurrection comes across as radically unexpected, almost disconnected with what has gone before…. As has sometimes been said, the reader is the ‘lost ending’ of Mark. We have to discover for ourselves what difference is made by this life, this death and this disorienting mystery after the crucifixion.” (Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles our Judgment)

It’s hard enough to know what to say at a funeral, but what does one say about resurrection? 

We don’t know quite what to make of this.  We don’t know what to say.  It throws our expectations and our routines out of whack.  For the women it was like undergoing shock and awe, Jesus style, and they go sprinting off into the sunrise. 

Not a bad picture to be left with for the meaning of resurrection.

 

Palms, Economy, Cross (Palm Sunday)- 4/05/09 – Mark 11

In case you’ve been following along in our outline, you’ll note that we have reached the final Sunday of Lent.  Each time of worship has been shaped by one of these six images, drawn from the scriptures: the bow of the flood story and God’s reconciling relationship with humanity.  The family tree of Abraham and Sara and the trees seen by the blind man who received a double touch from Jesus; the beehive dripping with honey as a reminder of the sweetness of God’s teachings; the snakes in the wilderness, which Jerry Sears noted, despite being a most unwelcome gift, had the effect of lifting up people’s eyes toward heaven; the water of purification and King David’s repentance from sin; and now the parade of palms for a peasant king riding his donkey into a confrontation with the forces that would soon take his life.  All of these images share the simple arc, that shows up in whatever size or quantity or arrangement to make up each picture.  Thanks again to Connie Briggs for making this wall hanging, and for Violet Sears’ Sunday school class for creating your own version of these images that we’ve been using for the children’s story and have kept out in the forum area.   

We could think of the simplicity of the arc as reflecting the simplicity of the season.  Lent is a time to repent, confess, reflect.  A time to fast.  To strip away the extras, the excesses of life and get down to the basics, the core of who we are.  Like the simplicity of the barren wilderness.  Or the simplicity of an open, listening spirit.

My personal Lenten confession is that for our family, this season has been anything but simple.  Ever since discovering, the evening before the ordination on Feb 1^st, that we would be expecting our third child, life in our household has pretty much been a whirlwind of change and adjustments, both realized and anticipated.  Enough change, that our household now has a different house to hold than when this began two months ago.  I’ve already reflected some on this process through Musings and conversations and don’t need to say much more about here, except to say that it has made this simple season of Lent rather complex. 

Alongside this, this has not been a simple time in the life of our nation.  The economic unraveling that started toward the end of last year has continued up until now and how this will shake out in the next year or two is still very much unknown, even to the supposed experts.  We have been confronted with the extreme complexity of our economic system and the financial instruments at work within it, seeing how the failure of one aspect of the economy can influence the entire system of credit and employment and consumption.  We’re left frustrated with asking questions whose answers we’re pretty sure we don’t know and are worried that no one else may know either.  Do we focus on pumping more money into the economy for stimulus or do we focus on regulation?  Is a bank bailout really the only option for stabilizing the economy and restoring credit flow?  Should the poor and middle class get a bailout?  Should anyone get a bailout?  How much do we give to prop up an auto industry that would apparently fail if it were allowed to go the way of market forces?  And if it fell what all and who all else would fall and how painful would it be?  The unknowns and the precarious nature of the situation has left economists and editorialists speaking in terms that echo the apocalyptic warnings of ancient prophets.

As much as I would wish for the simplicity of the season to be the norm, approaching Holy Week with these complexities in mind puts us in a good position to enter into the experience of Jesus leading up to his crucifixion.  This final week of Jesus’ life, to which the gospels dedicate such a surprisingly large amount of narrative, deals with all these same swirling political and economic forces.  Jesus, the itinerant preacher, folk healer, and wonder-worker, comes up from the more simple life of rural Galilee where he has carried out his ministry, and walks into the urban center of Jerusalem, into the economic powerhouse of his time, the temple complex, confronting and speaking to the powers that be, disrupting and angering them enough that they seek his death.  This is the story that we enter into now.

I’m going to be tracing different parts of this story as it’s told in Mark’s gospel and encourage you to turn there, starting in Mark chapter 11.     

When Jesus makes his way into Jerusalem, it is done with a great deal of intentionality and aforethought.  He knows what he’s doing, is fully aware of the potential consequences, and carries out the actions necessary to make his message clear.  This shows up in a couple ways in the text of Mark 11.  As the chapter begins we read that Jesus is approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives.  Bethany was about two miles southeast of Jerusalem and, as the story continues to unfold, proves to be a place where Jesus has connections.  It will be his home base throughout the week, as he shuttles back and forth between his place of lodging there at night, and his activity in Jerusalem during the day.  Along with lodging accommodations, arrangements have been made for the key prop in a parade type entry Jesus plans to have as he enters the city.  Jesus knows where this donkey colt will be located and gives his disciples the correct words to say to those who were watching over it until they arrived to take it to Jesus.  “What are you doing, untying the colt?” some people ask them.  “The Lord needs it, and will bring it back immediately,” the disciples reply, and are allowed to take the colt with them.  Half of the triumphal entry story is given to this process of getting the colt, which could very well signal the well-planned out nature of what is to follow. 

It would have been just as easy for Jesus to walk on foot into the city, but what he has in mind is something akin to a piece of street theater, acting out the words of the prophet Zechariah about the king who comes to bring peace, “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!  Shout along, O daughter Jerusalem!  Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.  He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations.”  (Zech 9:9-10)

As Mark tells the story, this raucous, joyful procession from Bethany toward Jerusalem is a highly symbolic act, with the actual act of traveling somewhere not being nearly as important as the meaning of the parade itself.  Verse 11 gives a fascinating, almost humorous description of the anticlimactic entry into Jerusalem.  The journey that began two miles away in Bethany has ended, the praises have been shouted, branches waived in the air, and then verse 11: “Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.”  Either the parade ran a little longer than Jesus had expected, and now it’s too late to carry out his plans for the day in the temple, or this was all that had been intended, and Jesus just scouts out the temple grounds.  Whatever it was, he was scoping out, it will have to wait until tomorrow, as he turns right back around and walks the two miles back to Bethany with the twelve to return the colt as promised and get some sleep.    

Verses 12-14.  The heading in my Bible is “Jesus curses the fig tree.”  The next morning, Jesus is up and back on his way to Jerusalem with the twelve, this time by foot.  He’s headed straight for the temple, but first, another highly symbolic act.  One of Mark’s techniques in his gospel is something like a literary sandwich, where he will tell about one event, move on to another, and then go back to the first event.  The sandwich is all related and the outer parts help interpret the meaning of the inner part, the meat of the sandwich.  So what may first appear as Jesus just getting up on the wrong side of bed and getting mad at a fig tree that won’t give him his breakfast, turns out to be something much deeper.  Something else that we are about to encounter has not been bearing the fruit that it was intended to produce — desolate, and withering to its roots.  Jesus gives it to the fig tree, the disciples hear him do it, and they move on toward the central institution in Jerusalem, the temple.

In a book about the social structures of first century Palestine, authors Hanson and Oakman make this summary statement after a chapter speaking about the temple: “What stands out about Palestinian society is the centrality of the Herodian temple, especially in maintaining the political-economic system, and the preeminence of the priestly oligarchy in the system’s management and benefits.  The role of the temple in the life of early Roman Palestine was so pervasive that it should be thought of as an institution intruding into and organizing the social life of every Judean region and settlement.  Its effects upon the distribution of social goods within Palestinian society cannot be overemphasized.  The temple was the hub of a redistributive economy; goods and services, raw materials, crops, animals – all flowed to this central point.  There, these goods were redistributed in ways not necessarily benefiting their original producers.  Religious ideology legitimated (and sustained) this arrangement.” (Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts, KC Hanson and Douglas E Oakman, p. 156).

The time Jesus looks least like a Mennonite pacifist is this time when he enters the temple industrial complex and starts driving out those who were buying and selling and, nonviolently I’m sure, overturning tables.  The terminology here, “driving out” is the same used throughout the gospel for Jesus driving out demons.  This is a public, institutional exorcism.  The presence of economic activity in a house of worship would not have been what Jesus found scandalous.  If Jesus were to visit a CMF Ten Thousand Villages Christmas sale in past years my guess is that he would have been the first in line to purchase some beautiful handicrafts that would have also served to help the poor lift themselves out of poverty.  In the temple, he aims his efforts at the money changers and those who sold doves – doves being the sacrifices that Leviticus prescribes for those who are poor.  He halts the flows of goods through the temple and laments that the purpose of the place is to be a house of prayer for all nations, but that is has become a den of robbers, with the wealthy benefiting off of the ritual obligations of the poor.

This is not received well by the authorities, who themselves benefited from the temple economy, for whom the temple was simply too big to fail.  Verse 18 says that “when the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him.” 

Evening comes, Jesus heads back out of the city, and when they set out again the next morning the final slab of the sandwich shows up.  Peter says, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.”  With the temple mount visible in front of them, Jesus says, “have faith in God, Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘be taken up and thrown into the sea and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you.”  The fig tree is the temple.  Jesus then continues to describe a spiritual economy of grace that imagines a life after the temple, free from the debt system.  “Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.”  No dove purchase necessary.

When Jesus stands trial later in that week, one of the accusations brought against him is that he had said, “I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands.”  It’s not clear whether Jesus had actually said this or not, but it does help illustrate Mark’s theme throughout the events of Holy Week.  In speaking to the question, “why was Jesus killed?” Mark seems so be saying something to the effect of “It’s the economy, stupid.” 

Jesus was not anti-temple, per se, but he was introducing, imagining, urging an alternative economy.  A way of exchanging gifts and graces with one another in a way that builds us all up, in a way that glorifies the God of the poor, the God of all nations, the God who rescues and delivers us from our debts. 

In place of the massive space filled with the system of temple economy, Jesus offers an almost laughable alternative around which to form a community.  Laughable because it pales in comparison to the sheer scale of our economic apparatus that we’re still barely able to understand.  Laughable because it is so decentralized, so localized, so simple, that it is hard to fathom how it can have the power to transform us.  But it does.  It seizes us, haults us in our path, and converts us to its ways.  

The complexity of our economic lives gets boiled down to these edible symbols of life under the reign of donkey riding King Jesus.  The simplicity of the bread and the cup.  We can’t get much more basic than this.  Much more subsistence.  On the night that he was betrayed Jesus gathered together his closest followers, and he offered them a new covenant, a new center around which to orient their lives.  During the meal he took the bread, and he gave thanks and he broke it and he gave it to his disciples saying, Take this and eat, this is my body, which is given for you.  And in the same way after the meal, he took the cup, and he gave thanks, and he gave it to his disciples saying, take this and drink, this is the cup of the new covenant in my blood.  As often as you do this, do so in remembrance of me. 

This is a bread and cup based economy, where all are welcome at the table and where there is enough for everyone.  We never quite get what all it means for us.  What all it asks of us.  How these simple exchanges of bread and juice impact all of our other exchanges of time and money and goods and love and grace.  But we’re pretty sure that it gives us everything we need, even as it demands everything of us. 

When we share our offerings on Sunday mornings, we are participating in this economy.  When we use our resources in ways that support practices that improve the welfare of others and the planet, we are participating in this economy.  I know that Abbie and I felt like we were participating in the grace of this economy when a whole slew of you showed up to help us move a couple weeks ago. 

Here are the simple elements of God’s holy economy.  Bread and cup.  The body of Christ.  You and me, the body of Christ.  Blessed, broken, shared.

 

As you prepare to come up and receive these elements, hear this invitation from the words of Isaiah 55:

“Listen, everyone who thirsts, come; and you that have no money, come, buy, and eat!  Come buy wine and milk without money and without price.  Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?  Listen carefully to me; and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.  Incline your ear and come, listen so that you will live.  God will make with you an everlasting covenant, God’s steadfast, sure love.”

 

Reflections on Baptism – 1/11/09 – Mark 1:4-11, Romans 6:3-4

It’s nice, sometimes, when things fall into place without a lot of intentional planning of our own.  That’s a little how I feel about this and the next three weeks of worship.  I shared in the Musing that we have a four week block now where every Sunday we will be either observing or exploring some kind of ordinance, or, as we like to call them, a sign of the church.  In following the lectionary this week we have a focus on baptism, and then next week we’ll share in communion and look at how this act is connected with the calling of being peacemakers.   We also happen to have the Coming of Age celebration for our next group of youth on the 25th, as well as the ordination ceremony the week after that.  And so we have a chance to reflect on some of these practices, ancient and almost brand new (in the case of our coming of age ceremony), that are ways that we mark our identity.  I hope this can be a time when we gain a deeper sense of the way we are shaped by these practices.   We’re not having any baptisms today, but we’ll take some time now to meditate on its meaning.

A couple months ago The Mennonite magazine had an issue with a focus on baptism (11-18-08, http://www.themennonite.org/issues/11-18/articles/Remembering_our_baptism ).  The lead article was by John Roth of Goshen College called “Remembering our baptism.”  He described the joy of recent baptisms at his own congregation and then went on to lament that he feels that the significance of our baptismal vows has been diminished in how they actually function in our lives.  He wonders if we are doing enough with instruction before baptism, as well as what he refers to as “continuing education” after baptism.  He worries that our tradition’s emphasis on baptism as a personal choice can too easily get co-opted by the individualism of our culture such that we don’t make a strong enough connection between our baptism and our commitment to a faith community where we are accountable to one another and willing to give and receive counsel.  He also wonders whether the Anabaptist teaching that baptism is not really a sacrament – an act that in itself changes our standing before God – but rather a symbol, or sign of that change that continues to happen throughout our life – he worries if this has potential to reduce baptism to “merely a symbol,” not actually very important and not actually changing us.      

One of his closing comments is a reflection on the experiences he has had at Lutheran worship services, a tradition that practices infant baptism.  One of the things that has stood out to him that he most appreciates about Lutheran worship is that there is a time each service where they are encouraged to “Remember your baptism.”  He then jokes about the irony of Lutherans, who technically can’t remember their baptism, holding this up as a weekly reminder, while Anabaptists, who, by definition, are supposed to be able to remember their baptism, are so rarely encouraged to do so.     

With all this wondering and worrying going on in this article about baptism, I wonder what comes to our minds when we are asked to “remember our baptism.”  And more than just the details around how and where and when you were baptized, I wonder how this call to remember our baptism makes baptism a present reality for us.  How does our baptism shape us?  How doesn’t it shape us?  How might it shape us?  How does it inform our present identity and sense of calling and allegiance?

This was more or less one of the questions that came up during one of the times after worship recently when the youth had a chance to ask a panel of four adults any questions they wanted to about their faith journey.  These brave adults gave thoughtful answers to the youth’s questions about sin, and heaven and hell, and God’s existence, and evolution, and what the Bible means to them, and the stories of their baptism and what that means to them.  With baptism, answers ranged from one who was baptized as an infant and who has since come to find great meaning in that event, to one who felt pressure to be baptized at a certain point in life because that’s what good kids did, to one who chose to be baptized not out of any great revelation or personal conversion experience, but as an expression of committing oneself to the work of the church and to being in community with those seeking to live in the Jesus way.  So we had a wonderful diversity even within that small group.         

I want to recognize the diversity of experience among us, and also recognize that baptism has not been a part of everyone’s faith journey.  I hope that we can have a rich, multi-faceted view of baptism among us and that we have chances to share these stories when we have opportunity.

I also recognize that events like this – baptism – like wedding vows, like communion, are never static in their meaning.  As we grow and learn we load them full of significance as to what they mean to us now, sort of retrofitting the experience to bring it up to speed with our life.  Which is really what remembering our baptism is all about.  To bring a past event into the present, and to learn from it things that we never could have anticipated when we actually experienced it.    

What I’d like to do now is to present two different sets of things that baptism brings together, each of these  centered around a scripture, and look at the ways these comings together give us a picture of what kind of thing we are entering into when we are baptized.      

The first coming together I want to highlight in baptism is that of the royal tradition, the kingly, and the servant tradition.  This is one of the major themes being illustrated in John’s baptism of Jesus.  The king and the servant fused together.  Jesus launches his ministry out of the one that John had already begun, and goes under John’s hand in the Jordan River.  It’s the first thing we read about Jesus in Mark’s gospel: “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.  And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.  And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” 

There is plenty to unpack in this short narrative, but I want to focus on the voice that comes from the heavens.  The words themselves are a conflation of two traditions of the Hebrew scriptures.  The first part of this statement, “You are my Son” is a reference to the royal tradition when the king was coronated and declared to be the Son of God, something common throughout the ancient near east.  The words come from Psalm 2, believed to be a Psalm used at a coronation ceremony.  Part of that Psalm reads, “I will tell of the decree of the Lord: The Lord said to me, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.  Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage.”  By referencing this Psalm, the voice from heaven is signifying a royal event happening.  There is a giving of power, a conferring of authority that is taking place.

But then something very interesting happens.  The next words come out of a tradition that we may consider the flip side of the royal tradition, that of the humble servant.  The rest of the phrase, after “You are my Son” is “the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”  These words are an allusion to one of the servant songs of Isaiah.  Isaiah 42 begins “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, with whom I am well pleased…he will not cry out or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street;…he will faithfully bring forth justice.”  With this reference, the voice from heaven is signifying the humility and lowliness of the calling.  Essentially unnoticed, off the radar screen, as if it’s nothing at all.  A power so subtle that it’s not heard in the streets, but comes from below to bring forth justice.

By bringing these two together, we have the conferring of an identity through baptism that shapes one’s life.  True power and authority, are made evident in servanthood.  The one who is baptized enters into this odd position of recognizing the great worth of one’s life – a king, a queen, a beloved child of God, while also recognizing that one’s work may not even register in the ways that work and worth are often measured.    

        

The other coming together in baptism that I’d like to point to is that of death and resurrection. 

No one is completely sure what all the physical act of baptism was meant to represent as it was practiced throughout the ancient world — in Babylonian and Greek cultures, for example — and then was adopted by Judaism as a way of marking the conversion of Gentiles. When John the Baptist came on the scene he was using a form of religious ritual that had been around before him and was speaking fresh meaning into it, inviting people to be baptized for forgiveness of sins.  But why dunk people in water?  One of the proposals for what was being represented is that baptism was an act of simulated drowning.  That going under the water and coming back up out of the water, was nothing less than a symbolic death, and being raised up to new life.  The person being baptized is voluntarily entering into a death of the old life and beginning a new life.

This is what seems to be echoed in Paul’s letter to the Romans.  At the beginning of chapter six of that letter he says “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”          

In this image the water becomes both a grave and a womb.  The end of a life and the beginning of another life.

In our Anabaptist tradition the connection between this simulated drowning of baptism and an acceptance that one might actually die by drowning has been quite direct.  The one who we consider to be the first martyr of the Anabaptist movement, Felix Manz, was one of those who was in the inner circle of people who first re-baptized each other as adults, believing that they were now claiming their true allegiance to Christ above their allegiance to the established church and the violence of the state it was so entangled with.  In response to this heresy, in a twisted 16^th century sense of humor, the magistrates decided that if anyone who called themselves Anabaptists wanted water for themselves, then it was water they would get.  Felix Manz was bound hand and foot and drowned in the Limmat River in Zurich as a warning to those who would challenge the authority of the church.  Drowning came to be referred to as the “third baptism.”  If the Anabaptists wanted to give themselves a second baptism as adults, they could very well meet up with the third baptism soon thereafter.

And so in a very real way, one’s acceptance of baptism was closely tied with one’s acceptance of death, an idea very much present in the New Testament.

Whether or not our lives are threatened as a result of baptism, there is a sense in which baptism carries this spiritual reality of accepting death.  We can think of baptism as dying in advance.  This is where the more mystical aspects of our baptism come into play. 

Through baptism we are invited into a condition, a way of being, that has already taken death into account and is connected to the Life greater than ourselves.  We come to acknowledge that our lives are no longer in our hands, but that the life that we now live, we live to God.  Our small individual “I”, our limited personal ego, gives way, dies, we could say, and is joined up with the Great cosmic I, the I AM, that holds us in being.  By dying in advance, we have the opportunity to take that spiritual journey of what it means to live beyond ourselves, as if our life, as we would have it, were already over.    

And then we continue to have life in this world where there are great injustices, like waterboarding, and other forms of torture, and the taking of life, and the oppression of the weak, and our baptism enables us to enter into this context with a spiritual footing.  As we take up the new life of Christ, we live a life in a community that is a contrast to these injustices and we accept that we may very well be on the receiving end of these injustices.  If we have died in advance, then our life that we do have becomes a gift that we are given every day.  So what will we do with it?

Baptism is a coming together of the royal and the servant.  Death and resurrection.    

We put a lot of value on being an age of accountability and responsibility when we make our decision for baptism.  But no matter how old we are, we never really know what we’re getting ourselves into.  We have a vague notion when we recite our baptismal vows that we are entering something that we’re only beginning to understand, and we have the rest of our lives to work out what it means to be a dead/resurrected queen/king/servant beloved child of God.

If you have been baptized, I offer that the event is something that can continue to carry more meaning throughout your life.  Whatever it meant to you at the time of your baptism, you get to continue to pack the event full of meaning as you grow, and keep coming back to that event that symbolizes all these things for us, letting it shape our priorities and our commitments.

If you’ve not been baptized I encourage you to consider this as a way of publicly expressing and marking your faith commitments.  I’m open to hearing from you and being in conversation, and, if you decide to move forward, to walk with you toward receiving baptism.

Let’s end this reflection by learning a lesson from the Lutherans and remember our baptism.  Remember the vows we have made to God, to ourselves, and to our community of faith, and remember the gift, the voice, the resurrection, that fills our life with mystery and grace.

Remember, beloved children of God every one of you, remember your baptism.

 

 

“The Beginning of the Good News…” – 12/07/08 – Isaiah 40:1-11, Mark 1:1-8

One of the things I like to notice when I read a book is the opening lines of the story.  I’m interested in how a writer chooses to introduce what they have to say and what effect that has on me as a reader.  How does it set up the rest of the story that will be told?  How does it draw me in and make me an active part of what follows?  What clues does it give about what I’m about to read and what does it choose to withhold, to be discovered later should I choose to continue reading?

A book that I’m starting to read now again is one that I’ve been picking up and putting down for the last year, starting over several different times.  I’ve done this not because it’s so bad that I can’t get through it, but because it’s so good and dense that I can only handle it in small portions and even then feel like I have to go back and recover some of what I missed in the previous reading.  It’s by Annie Dillard and it’s called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  It starts this way:  “I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest.  I’d half awaken.  He’d stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood.  Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk.  And some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I’d been painted with roses.  It was hot, so hot the mirror felt warm.  I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp.  What blood was this, and what roses?  It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth.  This sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain.  I never knew.  I never knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I’d purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the Passover.  We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence…”   (pp. 1,2)  Annie Dillard then goes on to write about her experiences and observations of the natural world around her house by Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge.  I’m only on page 25, but so far she’s talking about the act of seeing, about what we do notice and what we don’t notice.  What we let come through our open window, so to speak.  She sees in her surroundings untamed beauty, as well as devastating violence.  She feels an awareness of “something powerful playing over me,” all the while being baffled by its elusive presence.  In other words, her opening description of the tom cat and the blood that found its way on her body serves as a metaphor for the rest of what she has to say.   

A book that I finished recently is one I’ve alluded to before — Gilead, by Marilynn Robinson.  This is written as a reflection of an aging Midwestern pastor, writing to his young son.  It begins this way: “I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old.  And you put your hand in my hand you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it.  I told you you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you’ve had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life.  And you said, Mama already told me that.  And then you said, Don’t laugh! Because you thought I was laughing at you.  You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother’s.  It’s a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern.  I’m always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after I’ve suffered one of those looks.  I will miss them.” (p. 3)  The rest of the book is a monologue of this elderly Reverend John Ames telling stories from his life and passing on his thoughts to his son.  But the way the book opens reminds the reader that this is more like a dialogue, with the son always present, listening, as if he were still sitting on his father’s lap, reacting to different statements, affecting the way his father chooses to communicate what he has to say.     

Both of these books drew me in from the very beginning, with their opening setting the tone for what was to come, helping define just what kind of story this was going to be.

Today’s scriptures in this second Sunday of Advent are also beginnings.

You can’t tell it at first glance, but Isaiah chapter 40 is the start of a new story, opening words for a new narrative that is taking shape.  In its finished form, Isaiah comes to us as one book, but contains within it multiple books from multiple Isaiahs.  Scholars believe that there are three distinct voices in the book of Isaiah, each speaking from a different time period, a different location, into a different set of circumstances.  Rather than a single person, Isaiah is more like a prophetic tradition, a school of multiple generations of prophets.  We could think of the final product of Isaiah as something like a trilogy, packaged together in one box set, so one can watch the whole thing unfold from beginning to end– a trilogy that was around long before the writing of the adventures of Frodo and Sam leaving the shire and walking the ground of Middle Earth. 

After chapter 39 of Isaiah, when first Isaiah has said all he has to say, there is a long pause.  150 years of silence.  During this silence the nation of Judah is destroyed, invaded and conquered by the Babylonians.  Many of its people are exiled, into Babylon — living as disoriented, displaced persons — grieving over what has been destroyed, longing for God to work salvation for them.  Out of this silence, the Second Isaiah speaks, in exile, from Babylon.  Book two begins, and it’s opening words set the course for where the story is headed.  “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.  Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.  A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.  Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.  Then the Presence of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.’”

‘Comfort, comfort my people’ begins this story.  Comfort plus comfort.  Comfort times two.  Extra fortified double strength comfort to meet the need of the double strength devastation the people have experienced.  I imagine that these were welcome words for the exiles.  They had fallen onto the hard, inflexible, unforgiving solidity of forces greater than themselves.  The aspirations of an invading empire, points of spears leading them away from their homes, forging a new life in a foreign land — the harsh realities of the world that many people continue to experience who are displaced by violence.  And now they are hearing words of comfort.  “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem.”  Words of tender speech.  Like a parent comforting a child.  Like life partners speaking gently to each other.  The hard edges are softened.  The inhuman situation suddenly has a swatch of humanity.  The prophet speaks words of assurance and consolation.  A way is being made for them.  They’re not stuck where they are.  There is a way being prepared that they will be able to walk.  They haven’t been forgotten here or abandoned in exile.  This is how this story begins. 

There are times when I have experienced words of comfort as having the power to open up a whole new path.  There is a sense that I/we can get trapped in our worries and fears and self-doubts, as if we are surrounded by mountains and valleys that we can’t see around or climb over.  And then words of comfort or assurance come to us, and we experience what Isaiah describes.  “Every valley shall be lifted up and every mountain and hill be made low, the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.”  And we see a way where before there was no way.            

As Handel was writing The Messiah, he chose these first words of Second Isaiah to be the first that are sung.  Comfort, comfort.  What unfolds in Isaiah and what unfolds through that music is a story about the offer of comfort, which changes the whole landscape of our world.    

When Mark begins his gospel, he cites this passage from Isaiah as having to do with what he calls “the beginning of the good news.”

I’ve been working with the youth in catechism class this fall and we spent one of the class times looking at the first chapter of each of the four gospels.  My challenge to them was to notice how each gospel writer chose to introduce the story of Jesus.  Each of the writers do it in a different way and how they introduce Jesus in the opening chapter affects how they tell the rest of the story.  The youth were not all that pleased to realize that Mark has no birth story for Jesus.  I think I may have permanently demoted the standing of Mark for them when I mentioned that if Mark was the only gospel we had that we wouldn’t have a Christmas story!  Mark is one of the gospels who tell of the beginning in another way.

Mark’s first words are, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”  In the next few verses Mark goes on to tell of John the Baptizer proclaiming a baptism of repentance and forgiveness of sins, and of Jesus who is fully grown when we meet him and who hits the ground running with a quick baptism, wilderness trial, and is very soon proclaiming his message that the kingdom of God has come near.          

Mark calls his story “good news,” and its beginnings are rooted in this ancient longing for a way to be opened up for us that makes our crooked paths straight.  The womb that gives this good news birth, is the voice of God that spoke through the prophets, was speaking again through John the Baptizer, and continues to speak.  Prepare a path for the Lord.

Mark’s gospel does not begin as one of pure comfort.  Right from the get go he uses contentious language that sets the stage for later conflicts in the story.  He calls his writing “gospel”, “good news” which was a term associated with the Roman propaganda machine as decrees of gospel would be sent out to the far corners of the empire to announce a military victory or the coming to power of a new emperor.  But this that he is decreeing, Mark claims, is real gospel.  In referring to Jesus as the “Son of God,” Mark is challenging the emperor who also carried this title, and making a claim about what it really means to be a representative of God on earth.  The first character on the scene, John the Baptist, also carries this sense of struggle.  Aside from being someone who lived in the wild, wore clothes made out of camel’s hair, and ate bugs, his message also had an abrasive edge to it.  He fits more in the category of the prophets who both comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.  He was a whistle blower on people’s sins, calling them to turn around 180 degrees and walk in the other direction.  Very soon we learn that John is arrested for his message, a signal that not everyone found his message comforting.

But his message was one of hope.  He was cutting a path through obstacles of people’s lives and clearing a way for a fresh start.  He made the remarkable claim that people’s sins could be forgiven.  That all those mountains of mistakes that had accumulated in people’s lives and all those valleys of despair that people carried with them could be made level.  It’s comforting to hear that no matter how deeply worn in our habits are there’s a possibility of a fresh start.  A fresh start with God, and a fresh start in a community of baptized people who live under the order of forgiveness.  John also said “One who is more powerful than I is coming.”  I’m guessing that he found this personally comforting.  That he recognized that he didn’t have to hold everything together on his own, but that one more powerful than he would come along and build on his words and his mission.

This is how the story begins.  This is how the Second Isaiah and Mark introduce what they have to share.   And like the beginning of any good story, it sets the tone for what we can expect to come next. 

 

Zooming Out, Focusing In – 11/30/08 – Mark 13:24-37

Mark chapter 13 contains two distinctly different perspectives on the world.  It begins with Jesus and his disciples walking out of the massive temple complex in the heart of Jerusalem.  The temple was Herod the Great’s crowning achievement of his massive public works projects that he had undertaken throughout Jerusalem and Palestine.  During his lifetime he had built a new palace on the western side of the city protected by three towers.  He had also built the Antonia fortress on the north side of the temple with its distinct towers.  He constructed an aqueduct system that increased the city’s water supply by bringing it from the Bethlehem region six to seven miles south, into the city.  The ancient historian Josephus also records that Herod built a theater, an arena for horse and chariot races, and a stadium.  The building program served something like a first century economic stimulus package, and brought prosperity to certain parts of the population.  But the jobs created through the construction process were slave labor wages and the massive budget for the projects resulted in increased taxation.  On the surface these structures looked like great civic accomplishments, but underneath there were political and economic tensions mounting, and growing resentment against the ruling class, the clients of Rome.  (This info taken from Holman Bible Atlas, 1998.)

Jesus had been teaching in the temple, and as he and his disciples are leaving, one of the disciples makes the comment, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!”  Down on street level, surrounded by the busyness of the city and the looming structures that make up the urban landscape, they can’t help but be in awe of what they see.  The disciples are having a similar experience that any of us have when we walk through the downtown of any major city.  Standing in Fountain Square and being surrounded by shops and hotels and office buildings.  Walking along the Lakeshore Path in Chicago and looking over at the downtown loop where the modern skyscraper was born.  Or anywhere in Manhattan where it feels like you have to look straight up in order to see any piece of sky peeking through.  These buildings are huge, massive, beautiful for their sheer size and strength, awe-inspiring, even overwhelming.    This is the first perspective in Mark chapter 13.  On the ground, looking up.  In response to the disciple’s exclamation, Jesus answers: “Do you see these great buildings?  Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

The second perspective comes immediately afterward.  “When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, ‘Tell us when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?’”  The temple sat on a high hill in Jerusalem.  But it was’nt the highest point around.  The area east of the temple sloped down steeply to the Kidron Valley and then rose up again on a slope known as the Mount of Olives.  The ridge of the Mount of Olives was significantly higher than the temple mount, and from this perch one could see the whole city.  This view from the east is the one that we often see in photographs of modern Jerusalem with the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque in the foreground on the old temple mount, and the sprawling city in the background.  So, rather than being down in the traffic of the sidewalks and streets, imagine yourself in the Carew Tower observation deck, overlooking Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky with Newport on the levee, the stadiums, and the rest of downtown below you.  Or picture yourself up in the Gateway Arch with the Mississippi River directly below you and the city of St. Louis at your feet.  I received a mass email this past week from someone who may have the highest view of anyone these days.  He was writing on behalf of the ONE campaign, the campaign to end extreme global poverty in our lifetime, encouraging ONE members to stay active.  The email read, “My name is Lt. Colonel Shane Kimbrough and I am on the International Space Station orbiting 200 miles above the earth.  During the 90 minutes it takes us to circle the earth, we do not see borders or boundaries. From up here, the task of solving the world’s biggest problems seems less daunting. But when our shuttle lands next Sunday (which is today), we will return to a world where border disputes and financial crises lead the nightly news. Those challenges define our world and their solutions will define our future.”

This bird’s eye view, from above the city, overlooking the temple and the many structures around it, is the perspective from which Jesus speaks for the rest of this chapter.  Up here things look a little different.    There’s a bigger landscape that’s visible, more than just what’s in front of your eye on the other side of the street.  One can get an idea of how one part relates to another, a big picture view of what lies beyond one’s immediate surroundings.  The structures are still magnificent, but less imposing, less absolute, perhaps even appearing somewhat fragile and vulnerable compared to the massive scale of the rest of creation that is in sight.

The season of Advent begins from this high perch overlooking our world.  Rather than getting too caught up in the things that are just in front of our face, we are invited to zoom out and take a fresh view.  Consider what there is to be seen when the powers that seem to dominate our lives are placed in their proper context.  Re-orient our sense of space to the broad scope of the heavens and the earth.  Re-orient our sense of time to the broad sweep of history, which includes God’s dreams for the future of the world.  And, maybe most importantly, re-orient our sense of what gives us awe, of what causes us to marvel, of what draws us toward itself in a worshipful gaze, of what lays claim to our allegiance and our adoration.

When Jesus speaks from this high up view, he uses a form of speech that had become common in his day.  Apocalyptic language.  The language of apocalypse was a way of talking about how the world as we now experience it would not be this way forever.  It resonated especially with those for whom the evils of the world seemed so overwhelming, so larger than life, that their defeat called for a divine intervention that would turn the order of the world upside down, shake the powerful down from their thrones, separate the wicked from the righteous, and restore order and justice for the faithful.  We begin to see signs of apocalyptic language in the books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and parts of Isaiah, like that passage that Jane read, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence – as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil – to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence.”  By Jesus’ time this was a full blown genre of literature.  Apocalyptic often used cosmic symbols to speak of earthly realities.  So Jesus is drawing from the language of the day when he says, “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.”  The picture is one of a great unraveling of the known order, the order that felt so solid and unwavering, something that will shake the cosmos to its foundations.  This cry of Jesus would have been especially pertinent for the first readers of Mark as the gospel would have been written right around the time that the Jewish national loyalists were rising up against the Romans and the Romans were preparing to march on Jerusalem where they would soon destroy the temple and topple Jerusalem.  The world as they knew it was ending. 

This year the language of apocalypse may hit a little closer to home with the coming undone of our national economy.  We’ve watched over the last six months as our system of finance and credit has come unraveled in front of us.  What began as a sub-prime loan crisis has snowballed into a mortgage crisis, a banking crisis, a stock market crisis, a lending and credit crisis, with lower house prices, higher unemployment, corporate bankruptcies, job insecurity, and tanked retirement accounts.  What once felt unshakeable is all of a sudden fragile.  Whether or not any divine intervention is on the way, we’re trying to figure out how much government intervention is necessary to prevent a collapse of apocalyptic proportions.    

One of the prophetic voices for the Advent/Christmas season has a slightly different angle on apocalypse.  If you’ve never heard of the Reverend Billy or seen him in action you may want to type his name into the Youtube search engine and watch him at work.  Or you could rent his recent film, “What Would Jesus Buy?”  Reverend Billy is a suit and collar wearing, hair slicked back, hell-fire and brimstone preaching traveling evangelist.  Only he’s not your typical evangelist with your typical message.  He travels around with his gospel choir and invites everyone who wants to listen to join Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping.  Bill Talen is an actor and an activist who has taken on this persona of a reverend in order to get his message across in a humorous and provocative way.  He holds revival meetings in mall parking lots, performs exorcisms on cash registers, and calls for deliverance for those who are walking in the valley of the shadow of debt.  The Reverend preaches on street corners, outside strip malls, and inside large stores.  His warning is that we all must flee from the culture of consumerism that has taken over our lives and defines so much of who we are.  He calls this, the Shopocalypse.  The good Reverend has become well-known enough that he has been interviewed on various networks and cable shows, and he tends to stay in his Reverend persona when asked why is doing what he is doing, waving his arms, shouting Hallelujah and trying to get an amen from the interviewer.  But in an interview on Katie Couric’s show “Eye to Eye” he briefly stepped out of character when he was asked how long he thought he would keep up his pho-evangelist mission and his crusading preaching.  Standing on a street corner in Times Square, surrounded by the high rises and jumbo-tron advertisements, he looked up and said, “I believe that this, rising up over my head, and coming into my soul, impacts me.  I think I’m affected by all this more than most people, and I started resisting and talking to more people about it.  And I gradually started to believe that we have inside ourselves, more imagery, more dreaming, more wonderful language than this.  Our bodies and souls are empires of media when you think about it.  But we give it all up.  All of our gifts that we give to each other come from this outside thing instead of from within us.  But we can find another way to give a gift, so I preach.  But the greatest preacher is this: The wind and the air and the fires and the droughts, the things that are happening to us from our consumerism.  That’s the preacher we have to listen to.  And I’d like to think that my job will be done when we have a sustainable economy, when we start getting into balance with the world around us.  Then, I can stop preaching.”

From his view on the Mount of Olives, in the middle of his apocalyptic discourse, Jesus steers a different course than the typical end of the world scenario.  He says that just as the cosmos are shaking and conditions have become inhuman, then one like a Human Being will appear.  Like a Son of Man.  One who gathers together those who are lost and scattered over face of the earth.  A whole community that lives under the reign of the Human One, not the inhuman powers.  He told his disciples to learn the lesson of the fig tree.  That the winter doesn’t last forever — the tree comes back to life, and sends out leaves, and then you know that summer is near.  Something is flowering.  A new way is being born.  The new creation rises up from the dust of the old one.  Be watchful.  Pay attention, Jesus says.  Don’t fall asleep.  Be attentive to where this flowering is happening in the world.  Anticipate its coming.  It could happen anytime, anywhere.  No one knows where these kinds of new creations shoot up from the ground.  It could happen on your way to work, when you’re at home with your family, in an encounter with a stranger, when you’re worshipping at church.  Jesus says it could happen in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or at dawn. 

Whenever we get around to this time of year I’m always a little shocked that we begin the season of anticipating Jesus birth with a passage like this.  What do apocalypse and Jesus’ birth have in common?  It’s a reminder that the manger scene we know will come is more than just meek and mild.  There is something in the picture that will shake us and the world down to our foundations.  In Christ’s coming, we believe that the old order has already been defeated.  The powers have already been shaken and are stripped of their power over us.  A new order is beginning.  It comes to us in the form of a peasant child who will teach us how to be real human beings.  If we are able to step back far enough, zoom out from our short sighted perspective, and see a bigger picture, then we can re-enter the picture with a more clear focus of where to pay attention. Where to be watchful.  When to be alert.  This humble child draws our gaze away from our gods and our idols and draws us into a state of awe and wonder and we are captured by a different power.  The humility and vulnerability and love that overthrows the old order of the world and raises up a community of Human Beings who live humanly.  Watch out.  Stay awake.  Be alert.  It could happen any minute.     

 

The Poor Will Always Have You With Them – 10/12/08 – Deut. 8:7-18, Mark 14:3-9

Consider for a moment all the ways that your life intersects with poverty.  If you’re a social worker or a school teacher, chances are that your work regularly brings you into contact with those who are poor.  Perhaps you know of families in your neighborhood who have lost their job, or who have difficulties paying the bills, despite the parents working multiple low-paying jobs.  It could be that now or sometime in your life you have developed a friendship with a person living in poverty and have walked with them through different struggles.    Maybe you volunteer at Community Meal or with People Working Cooperatively or with the Interfaith Hospitality Network.  Maybe you bring food items here to church to be given to the Oakley Food Pantry. Maybe you have decided to give a certain percentage of your income to an organization like Mennonite Central Committee or to shop regularly at a place like Ten Thousand Villages.  Perhaps you yourself have experienced periods of poverty in your own life or remember stories that your parents or grandparents told about being in poverty.  Some of you have traveled to parts of the world where you’ve encountered poverty on a massive scale.

Any of these cases connects you in some way to poverty.  As close as your own family or neighborhood, or as distant as a developing nation.  Remember these relationships as we talk about poverty and the poor.  Keep these stories and experiences in front of you.  A temptation when talking about poverty is to depersonalize it into one big abstract overwhelming issue, something that happens out there with those people.  One way to avoid this temptation is to remember the people and situations that we are connected with where poverty exists.  If it has to do with connection and relationship then we ourselves are on the inside of the issue, and we find that it is anything but impersonal.  Poverty has to do with us – the big “us.”

Our concern for the poor is rooted deeply in the scriptures.

Jesus defined his own mission by using the words of the prophet Isaiah – “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” (Luke 4:18)  Matthew and Luke each record slightly different versions of Jesus’ most important sermon, but they each start out having to do with poverty.  In Luke, Jesus begins the sermon on the plain by saying “Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” (Luke 6:20).  In Matthew, Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount by saying “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  Jesus’ idea of the poor being blessed included a health care plan that did not discriminate against those with pre-existing conditions.  In fact, it seemed to favor those with pre-existing conditions and send them to the front of the line.  When a paralytic was having a difficult time with health care access, due to the crowds pressing around Jesus, his friends decided to try another approach and come down through the roof of the house where Jesus was staying.  Rather than send the paralytic and his friends away with nothing but a bill for the cost of the roof repair, Jesus admired their great faith, and healed heart and body by offering forgiveness of sins and re-energized legs that enabled the paralytic to walk out on his own, much to the amazement of the people.     

Jesus’ idea of the poor being blessed also involved food security for families.  All four gospels tell of a time when a large crowd had gathered in a deserted region to hear Jesus preach.  People had come on foot from all the surrounding towns, and it says that Jesus had compassion on them “because they were like sheep without a shepherd,” so he began to teach them (Mark 6:34).  As it got later in the day, the disciples suggested sending them all back to the surrounding villages to find their own food.  But Jesus tells them to bring whatever food they have to him.  He takes the loaves and fishes, blesses them, and breaks them, and tells the disciples to pass them out.  And somehow, everyone has enough, with plenty left over.

There are many examples of Jesus acting out this teaching, “Blessed are the poor for yours is the kingdom of God,” but what about “Blessed are the poor in spirit?”  What does it mean to be poor in spirit and what relationship do the poor in spirit have with the poor? 

If Jesus’ mission could be called “good news to the poor” it could also be called “difficult news to the rich.”  Some of Jesus’ hardest sayings were directed at those who were wealthy and who made no connection between having wealth and having a responsibility to the poor.  For Jesus, it was a dangerous combination for a person to be both wealthy and proud in spirit, rather than poor in spirit.   

Will Willimon is a former professor and dean of the chapel at Duke University and he starts out one of his sermons by saying “The gospel is so hard to live, I don’t know why you all keep coming here every Sunday to hear me preach about it.”  He talks about the extra challenge of living the Christian life in a culture of affluence and that as much as he tries to live the gospel in his own life he is always challenged to go deeper. 

He tells this story about an encounter with a student: “On the first Sunday of the school year, we had a group of students over to our home after the university chapel service. We had a picnic for them, then some lingered to play basketball or to talk. I sat on our patio with one student. He said, “Dr. Willimon, thanks for having us over to your home. This is the first time I’ve ever been in a faculty home.”  “That’s a disgrace,” I said. “I think that we faculty ought to have students in our homes as often as possible.”  “Well, few faculty think that way, I can tell you,” said the student. “And you have a beautiful home,” he said. “Let me ask you, do you feel at all guilty being a Christian and living in such a nice house? How have you thought about that?”  And I responded, “Now I’m remembering why it was not such a great idea to invite you people over to my house.” (Sojourners’ Poverty Sunday Organizers Toolkit)  He doesn’t resolve the tension, but goes on to say, “Such are the challenges of attempting to be Christian in the midst of affluence.”

To the wealthy, Jesus called for a recognition of their own poverty of spirit.  His teachings were rooted in the ancient story of the Jews as a people who God delivered out of the poverty of slavery and who were to never forget their experience of poverty and God’s love for the poor.  The reading from Deuteronomy is a great example of the relationship between the poor and the poor in Spirit.  In Deuteronomy the people were looking ahead to a time when their days of poverty would be behind them.  They would enter a new land where there would be streams and wells of water, where wheat and barley and vines and fig trees grew in abundance, and where they would eat their fill.  They would go from being poor slaves to wealthy caretakers of the land.  But rather than an all-out celebration of their new fortunes, they receive a word of caution.  Never forget.  It says, “When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your gold and silver is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” (Deut. 8:12-14)  The Israelites are being presented with the challenge of how to be poor in spirit without being poor.  In your Spirit you must remain as one who is poor so that you still consider the poor your brother and sister.  You will treat the poor with fairness and generosity because you have a memory of being poor.  The reality of poverty resides somewhere within you and you are always connected to the poor in this way.

The call to be poor in spirit doesn’t let us off the hook – as if we can just get by with being poor in spirit and not really poor.  In becoming poor in spirit we are placed on the hook in being challenged to make our resources of time, money, possessions and power, always available to the One who delivers the poor from their bondage to slavery.      

Call to mind again all the ways that your life intersects with poverty.  I believe that the Spirit calls us to continually go deeper in the ways that we share our life with the poor and that every small action we do or relationship that we have matters.  There is a model that presents a continuum for the ways that our lives are engaged with the poor and I want to pass that along here.  It involves different steps that build on each other and draw us toward the vision of Jesus.       

The entry level could be called a Holy Nudge.  This is the beginning of a calling to live for more than oneself.  It is the gift of unrest or uneasiness with the way things are.  This Holy Nudge could come through prayer, study, or encountering poverty in a new way.  It can be experienced as a new awareness of the reality of poverty and a sense that one can no longer live completely separated from the poor.  We could call this getting a hand delivered invitation by Christ to become poor in spirit.  We get a glimpse of our own inward poverty and we’re drawn toward the riches of opening our lives up to being good news for the poor.  One of the things that struck me when I was doing the research for the Day Laborer sermon a couple weeks ago was how easy it is to just not know about what all goes on in the lives of the poor.  The privilege of the middle and upper class is that we don’t have to pay attention to poverty if we don’t want to.  So we need these holy nudges often that call us out of our secure world, into the risks of gospel living.

The next step is charity.  We know that we must give something.  Not all of our possessions are for us only, and we free up some of what we have to be given for the benefit of people and programs that serve the poor.  One generous act of charity that you all have done this year is giving out of the government rebate checks that we received this summer.  The portion of the money that goes toward local mission will have a direct impact on our Oakley neighborhood.  The board of the Oakley Food Pantry met recently and was discussing how we would like to have Thanksgiving meal vouchers for people to use at Krogers this year – vouchers specifically for a full meal package.  There was some discussion about where the money would come from for this, and I was able to mention that CMF had collected money this summer that would be able to cover all the expenses.  This money given in charity will enable between 30 and 40 Oakley families to have a full Thanksgiving meal this season.         

The next step of involvement and engagement with the poor after charity is service – where we give our time and work alongside the poor.  With service there is a growing sense of camaraderie and trust that is built as we put ourselves on the ground where there are needs.  I was encouraged to see recently that numbers for Mennonite Voluntary Service were up this past year, well above previous years.  Setting aside a year or two for the purpose of service is something that we value as a church and something to be talking about with our youth.  Service changes us because it is the step where we start to realize that we are receiving so much more than we are giving.

A step that builds on charity and service is advocacy.  There is only so long one can be in service before one recognizes that there are systemic issues at work that keep generations of people in poverty.  Sojourners is fond of saying that it’s one thing to pull drowning people out of a river who keep floating by, but it’s another thing to go upstream to see who keeps throwing the people in the river in the first place.  Advocacy is very much connected with how we vote.  The Vote Out Poverty pledge cards are one attempt to get elected officials’ attention that there are people who consider poverty to be a core issue in how they cast their ballot.  It’s as if a large group were coming together and saying that our own interests aren’t the only things that matter this election.  We voting for what is best for the poor.  Advocacy is where we start to put our own lot on the line and take risks for the well-being of the poor.

Each step becomes harder and requires more commitment and conversion.  Beyond advocacy is friendship.  In friendship with the poor there is a line that is crossed from this being an issue or a cause to being a relationship.  It is no longer by us, for them, but it is “us together” and we are changing each other.  To be truly friends is to be equals and to seek understanding.  This is hard work – to befriend the poor.  We start to see the world as they may see it.

Beyond friendship is something that we just get little glimpses of – what could be call co-liberation.  These are the times when we get slivers of experiences where the kingdom of God is present among us.  We are liberated from our fears and our clinging to what we have.  We see that we are wrapped up in each other’s past and in each other’s future.      

It’s unfortunate that one of the best remembered lines from Jesus about the poor is one that gets used to justify poverty.  After Jesus is anointed with expensive oil during the week of his death and his disciples complain about the extravagance he tells them that the poor they will always have with them.  This has been interpreted to mean that no matter what you do, poverty is always going to exist.  But maybe this is a charge that Jesus is giving his disciples right before he dies.  As my followers, you will always to have the poor with you.  You are never to separate yourselves from the poor but to be with them.  So you will always have the poor with you, and the poor will always have you with them.  As followers of Christ this is also our charge.  As middle class North Americans it comes as news that nudges us out of contentment and toward engagement.  As soon as we take one step we are nudged to take another.  As we walk, we learn more and more of what Jesus may have meant by these words: “Blessed are the poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God.”  “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

 

 

 

Mennonite Arts Weekend Transfiguration homily – 2/3/08 – Mark 7:24-29

The following homily was given at the Sunday worship service of Mennonite Arts Weekend in response to the question ”What gospel story has caused you to be transfigured?”

Throughout the gospels there are different points where we are told that Jesus withdrew from the demands of the crowds for times of solitude and prayer.  The Transfiguration itself was one of those occasions.  A gospel story that has caused me to be transfigured over these last few years has the unique characteristic of being a time when Jesus went on a failed retreat. 

Right in the middle of his gospel, toward the end of chapter seven, Mark tells the story of Jesus setting out and going away to the region of Tyre and Sidon, far away from his Galilee home base and well outside Jewish territory.  Tensions between Jesus and the religious leaders had been escalating and he was just coming off a particularly abrasive encounter with them.  His closest followers had again failed to understand even the basics of his teaching. 

Once Jesus arrives alone at this foreign destination, Mark says “he entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there.”  Maybe Jesus is just trying to get some rest, away from the intensity of his ministry efforts.  Maybe he’s on the run, pondering abandoning this whole ‘kingdom of God’ project that isn’t catching on so well.  Maybe he hopes to hear an audible voice from God to guide his next steps. 

Whatever his intentions, he has little time to carry them out as Mark says that he could not escape notice.  Breaking into the silence of this retreat, Jesus does hear an audible voice.  Some overly assertive local who won’t take no for an answer barges into the house and falls at his feet, begging for healing for her little daughter.  The way Mark describes her, you can count the three strikes she has against her in coming to this rabbi in this way.  “Now the WOMAN was a GENTILE, of SYROPHOENECIAN ORIGIN.” 

Jesus is not moved to compassion.  He defines his boundaries of who gets to eat at his table, letting her know in no uncertain terms that she is outside those boundaries, implying that she might as well get herself outside his house, all the while managing to call her a dog.  Surprisingly, the dog barks back.  The Syrophoenecian woman offers that even the little puppies should be able to eat some of those leftover scraps that fall from the table.  Is her daughter not worthy of even some scraps?

And then, a remarkable moment.  For the first and only time in any of the gospels, Jesus acknowledges that he has just lost an argument.  Jesus — tired, frustrated, didn’t-want-anybody-to-find-me-here Jesus recognizes that he has just been a student of this unwelcomed rabbi and that her word has been better than his word.  He says, “For that word, you may go – the demon has left your daughter.”  This is a pivotal moment in Mark’s gospel as Jesus returns from the region with his ministry now wide open to the Gentiles. 

It’s in this raw, earthy, very human portrayal of our Master that I have experienced personal transformation.  It’s important and valuable to me to see that Jesus was not simply some self-contained, self-sustained dispenser of wisdom, but One whose wisdom rested in the reality of being radically open to learning from any situation.  Jesus the Teacher, no doubt, but also Jesus the Student whose eyes and ears are attentive to those surprising realities that the rest of us are too blind and deaf to notice.  Witnessing this encounter between Jesus and the Syrophoenecian woman only elevates my admiration, curiosity and awe toward this One we refer to as Lord and Savior.      

When I was beginning ministry at Cincinnati Mennonite Fellowship a year and a half ago this scripture happened to be the lectionary passage that I preached from during my licensing service.  I ended then, and I end now, by saying that I hope we will be visited often by the Syrophoenecian woman and that we will be able to recognize her as a messenger from God who breaks through uninvited into our lives and opens us up to new forms of living out God’s compassion for all creation.