Tuesday, May 24, 2016

How things change






On Monday I mowed my front yard, and then yesterday I spent several hours in back.  It was almost the first yard work I’d done since the rains began to fall, because for a long time it was too wet, and then I was too busy.  It felt good to be out there again, to see what was going on beneath the winter’s growth of weeds, and I began to get excited for what this year’s gardening will bring.  But at the same time I had the feeling of crossing a threshold from which there would be no turning back, because once I start to mowing and weeding, it’s only one step from there to digging, and from digging to planting, and then I’m committed to another seven or eight months of watering and weeding and pruning and harvesting, until the winter comes and I get to rest until it’s time to do it all again.  
There’s a popular saying 12-Step circles that defines “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Which is kind of how I think of the High Priest Annas in the book of Acts.  In our first reading this morning, the High Priest has brought Peter and the apostles before his council.  But Peter and John have been here before, in the preceding chapter, after they publicly healed a man who had not walked since birth, and then went around telling everyone they had done this in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah.  On that occasion they were dragged before the council and warned to stop talking that way, and yet here they are again today.  Because they have not stopped preaching and healing the sick, and more and more of the people of Jerusalem are coming to believe what they say about Jesus. 

And for the High Priest it's suspiciously like trying to stir the people up to hold him responsible for Jesus’ death.   It's all part of what is feeling more and more like a recurring nightmare.  After all, Peter and his friends are in the same place where not so long ago Jesus himself stood, and Annas charged him with blasphemy.  From there they took Jesus and accused him of sedition before the Roman governor, who had him crucified, and, by all rights, that should have been the end of him.  But like a weed that keeps sprouting back no matter how many times you pull it, Jesus of Nazareth won’t go away.  And still the High Priest keeps repeating the same tactics of coercion and intimidation and the thinly-veiled threat of violence.
Of course, Peter has his own bad memories of the High Priest, and of the night that Jesus was arrested.  While all the others ran away, Peter had the courage to follow the crowd to Annas’ house and even to enter the courtyard and find a place around the fire.  But there his courage failed, and he denied that he knew Jesus three times before the cock crowed.  And yet now he is back again, and this time he denies nothing, and makes no attempt to conceal who he is.  So while the High Priest and his council keep doing the same thing over and over again, Peter’s behavior has changed completely.  So why is that?  What has happened to Peter and his friends that they are able to stand up boldly and speak forthrightly, where before they were dissembling and slinking around in the shadows? 

Well, Peter answers that question himself.  What happened is something that the High Priest himself helped set in motion, though he did not know it—a awareness that grew in the disciples of Jesus as they watched him falsely accused, and unjustly condemned, and cruelly put to death.   They saw how deep the world’s sickness runs—how mindlessly it goes through its habitually violent motions, how impervious it is to the imagination of something new.  They saw with disgust how their own dreams of quickly and painlessly setting things right were tainted with envy and lust for power.  But God did not abandon them there, in their guilt and horror and self-loathing.  “The God of our ancestors,” says Peter, “raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.”  Now Peter and his friends cannot help but tell others about the resurrection of Jesus, because  they finally understand what will really change the world. 
And we are not the only ones who know this, Peter says, but God’s Holy Spirit does, too.  In other words, the apostles are not simply going around bragging about a visionary experience they alone were privileged to have. Because the Holy Spirit is the one who speaks through the prophets, revealing and empowering God’s will for the whole nation, and indeed, all creation.  So what Peter is saying is that in the crucified and risen Christ God has revealed, to anyone who’s open to understand, God purpose for everyone, to restore us to sanity, and freedom, and peace.
This revelation is what the Church since ancient times has called “the Paschal mystery.”  “Mystery”, in this context, doesn’t mean the same thing that it does to us today.  It is not a riddle to which we have no answer, or a crime that remained unsolved, but more like the opposite of that.  In the ancient world a “mystery” was a kind of ritual drama through which the participants were able to know what is secret, and see what is hidden—the purposes of God.  And for the apostles the death and resurrection of Jesus was this kind of mystery.  Except it was not confined to the inner precincts of a temple, and it was not for the benefit of a few chosen initiates.  It played in public, in the real world, on the stage of history where everyone could see it.  In spite of that, none of the participants in this ritual drama had any idea they were acting out a mystery, except Jesus himself.  But now Peter and his friends know it too, thanks to the witness of the Holy Spirit.  

The apostles were more concerned with sharing the divine mystery of the resurrection of the crucified than with establishing precisely the facts of what happened.  We know this because the gospels have no problem telling different versions of their most important story, whose details don’t always agree.  And the same is true of the gift of the Holy Spirit.  The Acts of the Apostles separates it from the resurrection by a span of fifty days, to reveal the mystery as a progression of distinct events unfolding through time.  But the Gospel of John connects the gift of the Holy Spirit directly with the appearance of the risen Christ, in a unitive revelation.
Jesus breathed on his disciples, says John, and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit.”  And this breathing is more than a pun on the word for Spirit, which in Hebrew and Greek is the same as the word for breath.  It is a reference, I think, to the Second Chapter of Genesis, where God breathes life into the man he has formed from the soil.  Jesus goes on to say, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”  And in these few words the hidden purpose of God comes to light, because in that same chapter of Genesis we read there was a tree in Garden of Eden, whose fruit gave the knowledge of good and evil, which was forbidden to eat.  And we all know what happened next, how Adam and Eve ate that fruit and brought death into the world.  
But Christ’s resurrection begins the new creation of humankind, in which death is robbed of its power.  And with the gift of the Holy Spirit, the knowledge of good and evil is no longer a fatal trap.  We still have the choice to retain other’s sins, to repeat the old pattern of holding grudges and making scapegoats and condemning them to punishment—otherwise we would not be free.  But we also have the power to do something new, a power that comes from the breath of the risen Christ, from the body that bears the wounds of the cross in his feet and hands and side.  He died that death and yet God gave him back alive as the bringer of peace.  With the gift of the Spirit to help us to choose wisely, he sends us as he was sent.  We who, though guilty, are released from the threat of punishment and the fear of death, are sent to create a new world from the forgiveness of the crucified. 

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About Me

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Petaluma, California, United States
I am a priest in the Episcopal Church, and have been (among other things) an organic farmer and gardener, and a Zen monk. I have a lifelong interest in social and spiritual renewal on the basis of contemplative discipline, creative nonviolence, and ecological practice. In recent years my work has focused intensely on the responsibility of pastoral ministry in the humanistic, evangelical, and catholic branch of Christianity known as Anglicanism. I'm married with a daughter, and have three brothers and two parents.