Not normal

Jeremiah 23:1-6
Canticle 16
Colossians 1:11-20
Luke 23:33-43

A few weeks ago I was chatting with someone in the office at the church, and we were commiserating about the electoral campaign and the vulgarity and vitriol coming out of it.  And she said she couldn’t wait until November 9, when it would all be over and life could get back to normal.  Well, I had to tell her that I was sorry to say so, but that I didn’t think it would be over then, and that normal might never return.  Now, when I said that I was envisioning a different scenario from the one that played out in the end.  And you can call me a hypocrite if you like, but now the idea of returning to normal feels less like a promise to be wistful about, and more like a temptation to be resisted. 

My daughter came home upset the other night because a friend of hers at school, who had been as outraged as all the other kids during the campaign, had said of the President-elect, “well, he’s not that bad.”  Which was also the message that the sitting President put out after meeting for the first time with his soon-to-be successor.  And even I, in the days right after the election, when so many people I knew were freaking out, posted a statement on Facebook suggesting we give the man the benefit of the doubt.  I dared to suggest that the realization of his awesome responsibility, and some vaporous mystique of the office that he inhaled in corridors of the White House, might awaken a latent graciousness and magnanimity in his soul.     

But then he started filling posts in his administration: for National Security Advisor, he chose a man who likens Islam to cancer, and describes it as a political ideology disguised as a religion; for Attorney General, a Senator who was rejected for a federal judgeship because of his record of overt racism; for his senior advisor and chief political strategist, an internet publisher of white-nationalist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic propaganda.  The Ku Klux Klan, and the rest of the neo-Nazi and white supremacist wing of the President-elect’s movement is jubilant, anticipating an all-out attack on the rights and liberties of ethnic, and sexual, and religious minorities.  God help us if we come to see this as normal.

Of course, from a Christian point of view, there was never any “normal” to get back to.  The Collect for this last Sunday of the Christian year describes the peoples of the earth as under the sway of a hostile power.  It keeps us divided from each other, splintered into spurious identities of nation, and race, and religion.  Not only are we divided, but we are also enslaved.  We are imprisoned in the resentment and hate we nurse against those we consider “the other,” in the lies we tell to rationalize injustice and violence.  Even when we succeed in dominating the other, and enjoying the privilege of their subservience, we are not free.  We have only subjected ourselves, along with them, to a superior power.  And the name that the Collect gives for this power is “sin.”

And it prays for God’s well-beloved Son to free us from this bondage and bring us together under his most gracious rule.  But when it says that he is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, we must be careful not to misunderstand.  This does not mean that he is of same ilk as the kings and presidents and party chairmen who rule the nations of the world, or that he makes a rival claim to their power.   It is saying that Christ has overcome the superior power that keeps them, and us, enslaved.  Because all earthly power, when you come right down to it, is a doomed effort to perpetuate itself, to defend its interests against those of an other.  But Christ’s power comes from the sovereign will of the almighty and everlasting God, whose purpose it is to reconcile all people, and restore all things.

Which sounds nice, but how it really works is not the least bit normal.  This is apparent when you consider that this power was decisively revealed on the cross.  In Luke’s telling of the story, the Jewish leaders scoff at Jesus as he is hanging on the cross, and say, “he saved others; let him save himself.”  And then the Roman soldiers mock him, saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!”  Finally one of the men crucified along with Jesus, derides him, saying, “Are you not the Messiah?  Save yourself and us!”  To these people “save yourself,” is a taunt, a way of rubbing Jesus’ nose in his powerlessness, because preserving oneself is what power is for.   His inability or unwillingness to save himself is proof that he is no king, and no Messiah. 

But the other criminal is somehow able to see the real power of Jesus.  Crucifixion was a punishment reserved for rebellious slaves and others who took up arms against the state.  So here is someone who has tried and failed to overthrow domination with revolutionary violence.  He knows enough about Jesus to understand that this was not his way, and yet here Jesus is, suffering alongside him, condemned as if guilty of the man’s own crime.  And this fills his dying agony with insight about what is really happening here.  Jesus has not failed, because he never tried to win victory for one party over another, or to restore the greatness of one exceptional nation.  He is, in fact, freely giving his life to lead all humankind into a different world.  He is founding a new humanity, on the forgiveness of perpetrators and the witness of victims, on the vulnerability to lostness and sickness and sinfulness and death that we all have in common, and on our shared hope for the answering compassion of a loving God. 

And so the crucified revolutionary discovers the unconditional and sacrificial love of Jesus, which more than a religious sentiment; more than a social ethic; more than a political strategy.  In his willingness to forgo self-preservation in his confrontation with the power of sin, he is one with the self-emptying of God who created a universe free to rebel against their creator.  He is one with the compassion of God who refuses to abandon her creatures to their rebellion.  Jesus manifested this unity of human and divine will throughout public ministry, and his death and resurrection make it finally possible for all of us to perceive it, to believe in it, to understand how it works, and what it aims to do.  And when our eyes open to see the kingdom of the Son of God, it is not just an illumination of the mind, but a longing kindled the heart, a fire lit in the soul, a passion to offer our selves in service to its consummation.  The love that was in Christ becomes our own, not to form us into a new tribe called Christians, to wield the old, false power of domination over others, but to make us free agents of the reconciling, liberating love of God.        

The news this week contained a vivid demonstration of this love.  As the COP22 climate conference in Morocco was winding up on Friday, a group of 48 of the poorest countries in the world made an announcement.  They said that while it is true that they are the least responsible for adding greenhouses gases to the atmosphere, and have benefitted the least from fossil-fueled industrial development, and have the least capacity to address the problem of human-caused climate distruption, because they are suffering the most from the unfolding catastrophe they have decided to take the lead in saving humanity.  And so they are committing themselves to leaving behind the carbon economy as soon as possible.  They are revising their plans for national development so that their carbon emissions peak by 2020, and they will build resilient economies based on renewable energy, and be completely carbon-neutral by 2050.

I’m not sure what it says that while we squander our wealth on military dominance, and indulge our fantasies of nationalistic revival, the poorest people in the world are displaying the moral greatness that we lack.  Or that while we willfully prefer opinions of convenience to the facts threatening our children’s future, they are showing the capacity for altruistic sacrifice we seem largely to have lost.  Certainly it gives the lie to any claim we might make to be a Christian nation.  But “Christian nation” is an oxymoron anyway.  And if the murderer could gain paradise while hanging on a cross, surely it isn’t too late for us.  The Son of God still has the power to free us from the bondage of division and the slavery of sin, if we really want him to.  But, of course, we would have to give up being normal.   

Not all there is to the egg

Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
Acts 10:34-43
John 20:1-18

As religious holidays go, Easter is a bit of a challenge.  People often compare it to Christmas, and—let’s face it—Christmas wins.  Because Christmas is easy to understand.  It is about the birth of a child, and that needs no explanation.  All of us remember what it was like to be a child, and we know what it is like to hold a child.  You can make a picture of a baby, and put a mother and father in the picture, with a donkey and cow, and maybe a star or an angel, and you can write “Merry Christmas!” on it and send it to a friend.  And even if that friend is not a Christian, they can admire the pretty picture, and understand what it is about, and why it makes you happy.

But Easter is different.  The story of Easter begins at a tomb, and who wants to think about a tomb?  Who wants to draw that on a card and send it to a friend?  And that tomb is empty, because the man who was dead in the tomb came out, and now he is alive.  So you could send a picture of the man, but while the baby in the manger is sweet and lovable, the living man of Easter is controversial.  He always was—that’s why he ended up in tomb in the first place. 

And I think that even for us who are attracted to that man, who try to believe in the things he died for, and are glad to hear he is alive, it is still hard to know exactly how to talk about it.  Easter is about finding that the house of death, that we thought was full, is actually empty, and how do you talk about emptiness? It’s about a man whose life is not closed off, but open and infinite.  And how do you make a picture of infinite openness?  If he is alive he has a future, and how do you celebrate what you don’t yet know? 

One way to talk about it is in terms of freedom.  Easter comes from Passover, the ancient Jewish festival of Spring, but also of freedom; and the Jewish story of freedom begins with a voice that speaks to Moses out of a bush that burns but is not consumed.  And the voice tells Moses its name, a name you can’t pronounce, a name that means “I will be who I will be.”  The body of Jesus that rose from the tomb is like that bush and that voice.  It lives and lives and is never used up.  Its future is open and free.       

Or you can think about Easter as transformation, like that ancient image of the egg.  The egg, that is so perfect and complete.  It is closed, and contains within itself everything that is needed, so it is hard to imagine it ever changing at all.  So it is only when something stirs unexpectedly inside the egg, and suddenly a tiny beak starts pecking through, that we realize that the egg is not all there is to the egg. It only exists for the sake of the new thing that breaks the shell and bursts out, fluffy and yellow and peeping, and totally alive.  

Yesterday I thought of another image for Easter, of freedom and transformation, which is the universe.  People used to think that the physical universe was closed, like an egg.  But in recent times we have learned that the universe is actually expanding in all directions.  Some of the scientists who study these things say that it will keep expanding and expanding forever, and some say that, as it does, the fires of the universe will get colder and colder until they go out, one by one.  To them the universe is a tomb.  But no one really knows, and I prefer to think the expansion is a sign that the universe is open.  It is free.  And maybe it really is an egg, hatching something unexpected, entirely new.

 

But none of these images of Easter can really take the place of the stories of Jesus’ resurrection.  They are stories of freedom, because the thing that was supposed to be closed forever is open.  Even Death can’t hold Jesus captive, thanks to the freedom of God.   And they are stories of transformation.  Mary Magdalene doesn’t know that it’s Jesus at first.  She thinks it’s the gardener, because even though it’s definitely him, he’s not the same.  And when she recognizes him, she tries to hold him, but she can’t, because he is still on his way.

And that’s really the whole point, isn’t it?--that Jesus is not a character in a story that once was written in a book and now is over.  We don’t close the book and say, “okay, that was a nice story—now what?”  We keep the book open because Jesus is the “now what?”  And this resurrection story tells us what that means.  Because the climax of the story, the moment when Mary sees the risen Lord, comes after Jesus calls her by her name.  The freedom and transformation of the resurrection is not just something that happened to Jesus—it’s something that happened for us.  It is not the story of someone else’s past—it is the story of our future, the future we all have together in God.

We Christians sometimes talk about this future as if it will come from outside of us, as if Jesus is some kind of superweapon who will come down from heaven and blow everything way.  But the Jesus of the Easter Gospel is a future that opens out from within and among us.  He hatches out of our human story like a chick out of an egg.  We don’t recognize him, because we keep looking for the corpse that should be in the tomb.  But all the while he is alive and calling us by name.

When Mary hears her name and sees that it is Jesus, she cries out “Teacher!”  And that is what he is.  It is his voice speaking in our hearts that tells us we are not captive to the mistakes we have made, or our bad habits, or our worn out old images of ourselves, but in every moment our life is open and we are free.  Our teacher is calling us to follow his path of transformation, a journey that embraces our gifts and our weaknesses, our struggles and our victories, our doubts and our faith, our sorrows as well as our joys.  It even embraces death, the one aspect of our future we think we know with certainty.  But his life swallows death, and clothes our mortal bodies with the glory of God.   

And because it is the same Christ who is calling each and every one, what is coming into being in us is not just a new person.  It is a new world—a world from which the curse of destruction and the fear of death have been lifted; a world of unity, compassion, and justice, of deep and abiding peace; a world in which the fullness of God’s glory dwells for everyone to see, in all beings, in every cell and molecule, every drop of water and grain of sand.   This inconceivable future comes into the world in a single person, but through his death and resurrection it comes to all of us.  And so this celebration itself is a living symbol of what it celebrates.  If you want to see Christ’s resurrection, look around you.  We act it out in public every Sunday, the eighth day of the week, the first day of a new creation. 

Called by Christ we gather here, each one called by name, and we blend our voices into one song, the song of resurrection.  We open the book, the book that no hate or fear or prejudice can ever close, the book of resurrection.  We hear the living words of Christ, and keep them in our hearts; we proclaim again that these are our words, for our generation, our world, our future.  We bless the bread and wine, the gifts our teacher gave the night before his death, to be the ever-present signs of his coming.  We break and share one imperishable food, we pass one ever-flowing cup.  We take them into our bodies, to become our bodies, the many bodies of the risen Christ.  And in those bodies we go out, as witnesses of resurrection, emissaries, sent to be the freedom and the transformation of the world.   

Coming home

Revelation 7:9-17
Psalm 34:1-10, 22
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12

This gospel lesson, often called The Beatitudes, is one of the best known and most beloved passages of the Bible. I have heard it, and read it, and even preached on it many times.  So I was surprised to be pondering it again recently and to find myself thinking about it in a way I never had before. 

Maybe it’s the formal way that the narrator sets the scene, with Jesus going up the mountain and sitting down and then calling his disciples to him and beginning to teach.  Maybe it’s because the teaching itself is quite formal in structure, with its repetitive phrases.  In any case, I had always thought of the Beatitudes as like a kind of official pronouncement.  Jesus is the authoritative teacher for Christians, after all, and so, when you put that together with this formality, I guess it’s only natural to assume that what is being given here is a set of prescriptions—policies, rules.  Biblical scholars will often make the comparison between the depiction of Jesus in this scene and Moses, who went up on a mountain and came down with a set of rules for his community to live by.

The problem with this interpretation is that the Beatitudes aren’t rules.  They don’t exactly tell you what to do.  They aren’t even really promises of what will happen in the future if you do these things.  The Beatitudes are statements about the present, about what God is doing now.  And what is God doing?  God is blessing people.  God is blessing you.

Now when we say that someone is blessed what we usually mean is that they are fortunate:  “So-and-so is blessed with a large, loving family,” we’ll say, or we’ll hear about a big blizzard slamming the Midwest we will say, “Aren’t we blessed to live in California.”  But the blessings that Jesus is talking about here aren’t like that.  For the most part they don’t have anything to do with what life looks like from the outside.  These are blessings that are experienced and received inside, in the heart and in the mind. 

And it is this inner quality of the Beatitudes that recently struck me with a new forcefulness and gave me the idea that they are not an impersonal teaching about objective laws or principles—far from it.  What they really are is Jesus’ personal testimony to his own religious experience.  This is the most detailed exposition we have in Jesus’ own words of his own mind.  Because he experienced all these things for himself.  Jesus was poor in spirit.  Jesus was meek.  He mourned, and he was merciful.  He hungered and thirsted for righteousness, and he made peace.  He purified his heart, and he was reviled and persecuted.

And he was blessed.  He entered the kingdom of God.  He was comforted, and his emptiness was filled.  He received mercy, and heard that he was God’s beloved child.  He looked about him at the earth and saw that it all belonged to him.  He saw God.  And on the basis of these experiences he could sit down with his disciples and say to them with absolute conviction that they could experience these things, too.  They also could know themselves as beloved children of this God whose only desire is to bless them, to fill them with such love for one another and for Himself that no sorrow, no misfortune or calamity, no hatred and oppression by misguided human beings could remove that blessing from their lives.

I like this way of thinking about the Beatitudes because it encourages us to take our own religious experiences seriously.  We have all had them, those moments when we feel the touch of divine grace.  This week I’ve been remembering a crisp fall morning almost thirty years ago.  I was living in an intentional spiritual community in the hills of Western Massachusetts and some of us had gone into the forest that day to cut firewood.  The leaves had fallen from the trees and made a yellow carpet on the ground that crunched under our feet, but apart from that we were working silently, carrying logs out of the woods and piling them by the road for sawing.  And I stopped what I was doing for a moment to stand in contemplation of the delicate branching form of a wild hazel shrub, its lustrous silver bark reflecting the pale morning sun, and in that moment I saw, and I knew.

We have these experiences, and even if it is only once in a lifetime, they stand out of the ordinary run of our days like mountains soaring up out of the plain.  They occur without warning and last for a few seconds, or a minute, or a day, but they change us forever.  They give us only vanishing glimpses, but while we are in them we know that the reality they show us is more real than what we ordinarily take for granted as real life in the real world.  That contrast, between the blessedness we are shown in such moments, and the world of anxiety, meaninglessness, and pretense that we usually inhabit, is like a wound.  It can make us feel like exiles, looking to all outside appearances as if we belong here, but feeling inside that our true home is somewhere else.

This is painful, and we human beings tend to do whatever we can to avoid pain.  We anesthetize ourselves with drugs, and distract ourselves with entertainments.  We go shopping, and fill our closets and garages storage lockers with things we don’t need.  We have built a whole world system around numbing and denying the pain of knowing who we really are and who we really belong to, but it is a system riddled with violence.  It is fueled with poison.  Its pillars are injustice and cruelty, because it is founded on a lie.

But what Jesus says in the Beatitudes is that it is time to come home.  Because the shame of admitting that we are poor in spirit, and have squandered the precious gifts of grace we have received, is so much less than the suffering of keeping up the pretense that we have no need for God.  And the grief that comes from acknowledging that we are lost is so much less than the sorrow of plodding endlessly onward with a phony smile plastered across our teeth.  The cost of opening our eyes to the hypocrisy and injustice of the established order and of longing with burning hearts for equity is far less than the life-sentence of walling ourselves off in ghettos of privilege and imagining that we are free.

The saints of God are those who have heard the summons of Jesus and are determined to follow him home.  Not by seeking to fly away to a better place, but by committing themselves to finding the real world, the world created and blessed by God, right here.  I wish I could tell you that making that commitment would guarantee you more and better religious experiences.  Many of our contemporaries seem to think that this is the whole purpose of the spiritual journey.  And the tradition of Christian spirituality does allow a place for such experiences—it calls them “consolations,” and it consistently teaches not to pursue them. 

God gives them as she chooses, for her own purposes, and her ultimate purpose for us is not emotional gratification, or even individual personal transformation.  It is the perfect blessedness of uniting with all earthly and heavenly creatures in a new creation, the paradise of God.  This ultimate blessedness realizes the potential all the religious experiences of humankind, but it comes about through acts of faith in the truth of those experiences. This is a joint venture of all Godly souls, past, present, and yet to come.  What each one of us lacks in the gifts of grace, God supplies in the others, and by “the others” I mean all the others, most of whom live on the other side of the globe, in the distant past, or far in the future.  And yet each of us present in this place today has gifts, and the success of the whole enterprise comes closer when we are faithful stewards and generous donors of what we have been given. 

That is why it is such an occasion of joy when we baptize new members into this communion of saints, as we are doing at this service for Megan Klarkowski and her little girl, Elsa.  We rejoice because, in following Jesus’ voice, they are setting their feet on the way that leads home.  And we rejoice that they are adding their unique and precious gifts to the treasures that Jesus takes and blesses, and breaks and gives, for our nourishment along the road.