April 19, Third Sunday of Easter

Bryan Cones

Acts 3:12-19, 1 John 3:1-7

When I read that passage from Acts this week, I was all ready to get irritated by Peter’s speech: “You rejected the Holy and Righteous One and asked to have a murderer given to you, and you killed the Author of life.” Here is yet another text, I thought, that has been a foundation of religious misunderstanding, of intolerance, and eventually violence by Christians against Jews.  And then I was surprised: “And now, friends,” says Peter, “I know that you acted in ignorance…”

“Friends,” not enemies, Peter says. And rather than ill will, “ignorance.” Not perfect, but a much better place to start when speaking across difference, and surely Peter, who after all denied Jesus three times, would himself have to admit his own ignorance of what God was doing in and through Jesus’ death. Even after Jesus appeared alive again, it took Peter awhile to get it.

Ignorance is not something that is highly valued in our culture; it is not something I, at least, tend to admit easily: And yet there can be something freeing about admitting what we don’t know: This week at my training at the diocese there were some members of the staff at the St. Louis Episcopal Cathedral, who have been involved in the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and are trying to be a part of the larger movement for racial justice there. They all talked about how important it was for them, all but one of whom is a white person, to admit that they didn’t really know the solution, or even understand the problems driving events in Ferguson; they had to rely on their African American colleagues, to lead them to understanding and action. 

I know for myself, as I listen today to our presenters from Cure Violence about responding to gun violence among young people in Chicago, how important for me it will be admit that as a person who does not live in a neglected neighborhood affected by violence, poverty, and racism, and who is not automatically disadvantaged by my skin color, I don’t know the answers to the challenges that face West Englewood or Little Village or South Shore. I am ignorant,  and admitting what I do not know will help me learn.

And that’s just the beginning of my ignorance. In truth, when it comes to how God is working in the world, how God’s plan for life is unfolding in the universe, how God’s desire for justice is rolling out, how God’s hunger for peace is coming to fullness, I am ignorant, just like Peter, just like those Jewish and Roman authorities who killed Jesus.

And that ignorance feels to me like a blessing, because it reminds me that it is God, and not me, who is running this show. It is God’s work, and not mine, to bring forth the resurrection and the reign of God. And by and large I have no clue about how God is doing that.

And yet, what I do know, what I hope we all know in faith, is that God desires co-conspirators, accomplices, partners in bringing about the liberation and reconciliation God has been promising since the beginning. And we know that we who are baptized are among those who are called, even in our ignorance, to be those partners and accomplices. So how might we do that?

I have been wondering what it would be like every morning to make my first prayer to God: God, I have no idea how you might work through me today, but give me some share, some role to play, whether I know it or not, in bringing about your dream for the world. 

Perhaps after a time we might start to notice the opportunities God gives us. Perhaps we might start to know, to understand, how we want to partner with God. Perhaps our morning prayer might change: O God, I want to be a part of ending racism today. O God, I want to feed the hungry today, or shelter the homeless. O God, I want to heal the earth today. O God, I want to forgive someone today. O God, I want to help shape a fairer economy today. O God, I want to contribute to the growth of peace today.

I wonder what we might learn about ourselves through such a prayer. I wonder how we might discover our own call, how we might come to know ourselves, our own mystery, our own share in the life of God.

“Beloved, we are God's children now,” says the writer of First John in the second reading, “What we will be has not yet been revealed.” Acknowledging, even embracing our ignorance, about God, about ourselves, about the needs of this world, might be the first step to discovering just what God is revealing in us and through us as God brings about what God longs for in the world. 

April 12, Second Sunday of Easter

Bryan Cones

John 20:19-31; 1 John 1:1—2:2

As I’ve been reading today’s gospel this week, I’ve been imagining what I might look like “resurrected.” Maybe try it yourself—imagining you that is. Do you look the same as you do now? Or are you maybe just a little younger, or fitter, or stronger? I’m noticing for example that I have a bit more hair and definitely less gray; perhaps there are resurrected washboard abs in my future.

In particular what I am not noticing are any scars or injuries or defects, unlike Jesus in today’s gospel story, who appears with all his gaping wounds on display. I have to admit that is not how I imagine my own “heavenly body.” I find the image a bit jarring. So, when I hear Jesus invite Thomas, to “put your finger here and see my hands,” and “Reach out your hand and put it in my side,” my own response is something like: Eww! That’s gross! I mean, really—do you have to touch the wounds, put your hand inside Jesus, to believe. Is that what Easter faith is?

This is pretty strong language for the gospel of John, which is much more likely to have Jesus expounding about his metaphysical relationship to his Father. For John, this story is pretty meaty, pretty fleshy. It’s so fleshy, in fact, that it leads me to wonder just what was going on in that early Christian community. Was there some argument, not about faith in Jesus as such, but about the resurrection, about Jesus’ body? Are we hearing just one very graphic side of the argument here?

I think we are: There was a sizeable group of Christians, in John’s community who believed that Jesus didn’t really have a body to begin with, maybe he wasn’t really properly human. His human appearance was a divine illusion. Some believed that Jesus didn’t really experience death, and after the crucifixion Jesus became a pure spirit. Sometimes these Christians are called “gnostics,” because they believed Jesus saved us by his heavenly knowledge, which frees our eternal souls from fleshy prisons. He certainly didn’t save us through his death, and the Risen One, however he appeared, would not still be wounded by his earthly ordeal, which after all was merely an illusion.

And so we have our argument: On the one side, a really human Jesus, who really died, and who really rose again, wounds and all. And on the other, a purely spiritual Savior, free from fleshy entanglements, who comes to free our souls from our bodies.

Obviously, the meatier argument, the one where Jesus has real flesh, won the day. You can hear it in the second reading, from the same school of thought as our gospel: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands.” Later in John’s gospel, they will eat with the risen Jesus, too.

But let’s put ourselves in those Gnostic Christians shoes for a minute: There’s a reason why their doctrine was so attractive: If Jesus has no real flesh then being Christian means being free from fleshy distractions and the fleshy failures that go with it. Through the ages Gnostic Christians —and they’ve always existed— have often been champion ascetics, giving up sex and food and possessions, though nowadays it sometimes appears in opposite form: A kind of Christianity that behaves as if the Earth doesn’t really matter, so we can drill it, frack it, and use it all up at will, since we’re going to get a new one anyway.

And the idea that Jesus didn’t really suffer and die is pretty attractive, too. Maybe that means Christians don’t really suffer and die, or that at least all the suffering that being bodies produces, from disease and impairment and just getting older, doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. And who wouldn’t want to experience eternity as a pure spirit, an ideal form of ourselves, all the bad stuff erased, “perfect,” just as God is “perfect.”

Frankly, lining that up against the risen Jesus in today’s gospel, who so obviously suffered, and is still even wounded after death, makes the Gnostics’ argument: Wouldn’t it be nicer to be all cleaned up and fixed in eternity, all the scars of life wiped away, erased, and forgotten?

Then again, what would be the point of all our struggles, all our pain, all our crosses, if after life is said and done, they are all just forgotten, erased. Aren’t those parts of our stories, too? The broken bones and broken hearts, the disappointments and failures, the impairments and disabilities, even the worst sufferings of our lives-- aren’t they as important in shaping us as the joys and successes and high points? Don’t they also make us who and what we are? I wonder if the mystery of the cross and resurrection, has something to do with the claim that our God can bring life even out of the greatest difficulties of being human, of having bodies that matter: There is no scar or suffering, no insult or trouble, that renders God powerless to bring forth life again.

The mystery revealed in the symbol of the resurrection is that seen with eyes of Christian faith, every injury of body or mind, every breast lost to cancer, every scar from a bullet, every vanished memory, every town destroyed and life lost in a terrible storm, every deep grief, every misunderstood and persecuted difference, every suffering that comes with life, all of it is held in the mystery of God, and all of it is redeemed in Christ.

The resurrection may not fix us, or give us washboard abs, or make us “perfect,” whatever that might mean; it certainly doesn’t erase who we are and where we’ve been. But it does make us entirely whole. And that faith, while not always easy to swallow, is, for me at least, a faith worth believing in. 

Easter Day: April 5, 2015

Mark 16:1-8

Mark’s gospel begins at chapter 1, verse 1, with these words: “The beginning of the Good News”. It ends with some confusion, no matter how you slice it. Later manuscripts add an alternative ending, in an effort to wrap up Mark’s version of the story in a more consistent and maybe more satisfying way, but all of the earliest texts end at the same place our gospel passage ends today: the women disciples who have gone to his tomb, finding an angel instead of Jesus’ body…fail. They fail at the task the angel gives them. They run away in terror and amazement, they don’t say anything to anyone about their discovery. There’s no account at all here of the resurrected Christ appearing to anyone, no story about the friends meeting him at Galilee as he promised. It just…ends. The beginning of the Good News ends, with terror and amazement and confusion.

So on this day, with our fanfare of music and alleluias and choir and flowers and feasting and an egg hunt: on this day of resurrection, the gospel text we have here is actually pretty…discouraging.

The three women: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, walk at dawn to the tomb with spices and oil. They plan to bathe and anoint and re-enfold his body in the shroud, and then, finally, to leave him again, this time for good.

I have to wonder how far they’ve gotten on their journey before one of the three raises what seems like a pretty obvious question: How is this actually going to work?! After all, the women watched on Friday, as his body was laid in the tomb they now walk toward, they watched strong men roll a stone into place blocking the entrance. They know they can’t move it on their own. But however far they’ve gotten at the point when this question comes up, they keep going. Nobody turns back to find a strong male disciple to make this effort possible. Nobody recruits someone along the way as the sun breaks the horizon.

As it happens, their question doesn’t matter after all. Because when they get there, they find the stone already moved. Instead of Jesus’ body, they find a stranger dressed in a white robe. This unexpected stranger appearing at an unanticipated time before these unprepared women says what strangers dressed in white robes tend to say in Scripture: “Do not be afraid.”

But they are afraid.

And so, instead of going to tell the others that Jesus has been raised and that he calls them to meet him in Galilee, just as Jesus promised he would, just as the stranger has commissioned these women disciples to do, Mark’s gospel tells us that Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome run away. They don’t say anything to anyone.

The beginning of the Good News…

            …and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Um. Alleluia?

I will confess in this moment to writing several completely different versions of this sermon in the past week and a half. You’re getting the third effort, here, born yesterday morning of my own frustration at the disparity between the celebration of this day and, honestly, a certain disappointment with the gospel text. (Really? These women who followed Jesus, who took care of him and the disciples, who probably funded their ministry along the way, who stuck around when everybody else ran off, who saw him die, and who watched him laid in the tomb…Really? They said nothing at all? To anyone?)

And so, I honed my skills of avoidance and procrastination over these last days. There has been plenty to do: preparation for worship, a dog that needs walking, bags to pack (even dishes to wash, revealing my deep commitment to procrastinating, to avoiding)…and in the midst of it all, there was a certain new show I found on Netflix.

Perhaps you have heard of the Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne, Senior Prophet and CEO of Savior Rick’s Spooky Church of the Scary Apocalypse, also known to Yelp users in Indiana as Dernsville’s worst wedding deejay. The Reverend (in this show) is the wicked character who kidnapped four women. He keeps those four women, unfortunately termed in national media coverage as the Indiana Mole Women, keeps them hidden away for more than a decade in an underground bunker.

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the show’s title character, is one of those Mole Women. In an interview with Matt Lauer (whom she keeps calling Bryant, because – fifteen years ago…) Kimmy tells the world: “Reverend Richard told us there was a nuke-ya-ler apocalypse, and everything was destroyed, and the earth was scorched, and there were lakes of fire and stuff…”

But all that is just the beginning of what happens. There’s the neighbor’s response to the Mole Women’s discovery: “Unbreakable!” he says. “They’re alive! It’s a miracle! Females are strong as hell,” which gets remixed into a song that goes viral as an internet phenomenon (it serves as the theme song for the show; I defy you to listen to it and not sing it in your head for at least the rest of the day). There’s Kimmy’s landlord, played by Carol Kane, who places an ad for her “garden maisonette” apartment…without exactly telling the man who will be Kimmy’s roommate first. And there’s Kimmy’s roommate, Titus Andromedon (not his real name, surprising no one), who has a sketchy record of repeatedly doomed auditions for the Lion King on Broadway.

And all of that – all of it! – is only the beginning. It’s messy, and it’s funny (Tina Fey writes and produces the show, so there’s that), and everyone fails. It’s comedy, but it’s comedy about something devastating. And there is no pretense about the devastation of all that has been lost, of everything that deserves to be grieved.

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The beginning of the Good News, Mark’s gospel begins. It’s all and only the beginning. And what if resurrection is less about definitive statement and doctrine, and more about an invitation – to live? What if that is our role in the resurrection, to continue it from that crazy abrupt and unsatisfying ending, to give it shape and substance and life and story with the substance of our own lives, in the shape of our own stories? That sounds more satisfying to me than another eleven verses added on to Mark’s gospel to wrap it up neatly, force it to bear more semblance to the gospels of Matthew and Luke.

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Those three women: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome – those “ascribed custodians of the crucifixion”[1] had to have continued their own stories beyond this gospel account. They never left him in his life, and they return, however imperfectly, in his death. They’re confused and afraid at the beginning of the Good News of his resurrection – but remember, this is only the beginning. There’s more. There has to be more. In the words of the Mole Women’s neighbor: “It’s a miracle! Females are strong as hell.” These women have already mustered the “grit that allows human life to keep going”[2] in moments of violence, in the face of death. They walk together on that morning at dawn, “traumatized, determined women (who stand) as witnesses to God’s truth.”[3] How could they do anything other than persist, by God’s grace, even in this frightening and confusing moment? How could they finally do anything other than accept God’s invitation to new life?

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One of the very first scenes of the show in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has a SWAT team member taking Kimmy by the hand. He leads her up out of the underground trailer that has served as the women’s bunker in captivity, and he brings Kimmy out into the world she had been told was “scorched by nuke-ya-ler apocalypse, with lakes of fire, and stuff.”

“It’s here,” she says, as she looks around at the blue sky and the fields and the people. “It’s all still here!”

And that is just the beginning of the Good News.

[1] Serene Jones. “Mark 16:1-8, Theological Perspective” Feasting on the Word: Year B, Volume 2. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. 354.

[2] Ibid. 354.

[3] Ibid. 356.

April 3, Good Friday

Bryan Cones

John 18:1—19:42

This a hard story to hear, full of violence against someone innocent, a terrible death, and with this version of the story, a particular history of anti-Judaism, that has produced even more violence through the ages. It is not at all the kind of story we might associate with a day called “Good.”

The day and the story also have some theological baggage that we might not call “good”: The idea that the chasm between God and humanity opened in the Fall of Adam and Eve was so great, that it required a kind of eternal satisfaction. A merely “human” sacrifice couldn’t possibly fill it; it required the terrible suffering and death of God’s own Son to “make up” for the offense of human sin and restore the divine honor insulted by human disobedience.

It’s a theological metaphor rooted in the legal system of the ancient and medieval worlds, societies in which honor and shame were prime concerns, but it is perhaps a metaphor not worthy of the God we long for.

But like all our talk about God and God’s work in Jesus Christ, this one, too, is but a metaphor, an attempt to capture what we call the “mystery” of salvation. Can there not be others?

What if we started instead with another passage from John, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” What would it be like to begin not with God’s honor, or even God’s justice, but with God’s love?

Perhaps we would imagine God, out of love, leaping across that chasm made by human sin, to take flesh as a human being, to reveal the pattern of humanity God had intended all along. That divine leap is so great that God’s choice of humanity does not land God at the “top,” not even in the middle of the sinful human hierarchy. Our God, out of love, takes flesh among the powerless: A peasant in an occupied land, a day laborer, an invisible person among the powerful: That is the human pattern, the human person, in whom God chooses to become flesh.

And God’s love has more surprises: The pattern for humanity God reveals eats with, shares life with, and takes the side of all the other people made invisible by the world of sin: those with broken bodies, women with flows of blood, women the Bible calls prostitutes, their children, the unclean and possessed, the collaborators, the religiously disenfranchised.

And when his “hour” comes this divine-human pattern dies like so many of those among whom he lived: violently, without justification, though not without notice and purpose, a sign of the way human sinfulness maintains its imperial power.

“They will look on the one they have pierced,” says the Passion of John. We will look and we will see our God. Our God, who out of love, incarnates the cost of human sinfulness and bears its burden: the violence, the hunger for power, the scapegoating, the blaming, the cruelty, the neglect. God, out of love, incarnates it all to show us, as if in a mirror, the cost of this terrible madness, this addiction to violence. God bears it, out of love, all the way to death.

And just as those Israelites in the desert looked on the image of the serpent that had poisoned them and were healed, so God offers us, by bearing in the flesh the poison that is killing us, our path to salvation, our way to health. Look and see what is killing you, our God says to us, and see that it is killing me. Turn and be saved.

Our God doesn’t give a damn about God’s own honor: It’s our human honor and human dignity our God cares about, and so our God will simply not allow us to be damned.

This is our God, who leaps all the way to the very end for us, who will not abandon us to our own destruction, who will not allow even death to defeat the life God has given us, and God invites us to glorify God in such ways.

Let us look upon the one whom we have pierced. Let us see the Christ, God’s chosen one, God’s suffering servant, in every broken human body, every victim of torture or rape, in every gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender teenager bullied or driven from home, in every family destroyed in a drone strike or car bomb, in every body pierced by a bullet in our community, in every child of God abandoned or disenfranchised by imperial powers of this earth, for in all of them Christ appears, calling us to him, calling us, for their sake and for ours, to turn and be saved, calling us, out of love, to the restored dignity of the children of God.

April 2, Maundy Thursday

Bryan Cones 

John 13:1-17, 31b-35

I imagine most of us have seen “the painting” of the Last Supper, the one produced by Leonardo DaVinci, which I think of as “Jesus and his 12 dudes,” or maybe we know the spookier, more mystical one by Salvador Dali, which I think of as the “Last Supper in Space.” They both reflect “the standard” image of the scene: Big long table, Jesus in the middle, a younger-looking disciple on his right, and a guy on the far left, Judas, about to slip out the door.

Some artists have creatively reimagined the scene, such as the work by Polish artist Bohdan Piasecki, who places women disciples among the men, an artistic argument for their inclusion at that first Eucharist.

Piasecki’s image, and others like it, got me thinking about some other folks who were probably there on that night, but who remain invisible in our religious imaginations, even though they likely played important roles. Perhaps it was the cook who prepared the food, or the daughters of the innkeeper or householder who had given his home for the Master’s use. Perhaps it was the children, all of whom had jobs in an ancient household. If the owner was wealthy enough, maybe there were slaves who were part of that family, serving food and providing hospitality on behalf of their owner.

As I imagine myself in their shoes that night, I wonder how they felt for them when they saw the Teacher rise from his place of honor, strip to the common garment they all wore, and start doing their work, washing guests’ feet. What was it like for them to have their work recognized, made an example of, elevated to revelation? How might it have changed how they felt about themselves, and about the dignity of their own work?

Like the “standard picture” of this Last Supper, there is also the “standard interpretation”: Jesus was teaching his disciples that leadership means service, that they ought not get full of themselves and lord it over one another. Leaders in the Christian church should be willing to basically demote themselves and be servants.

But what if Jesus was, instead of “demoting” his disciples, rather, elevating all of those invisible people, making visible the dignity and honor of their work, elevating not only their work, but them, pointing to them as signs of the pattern of God’s action in the world. By washing feet, Jesus perhaps was revealing these servants as the feet, the ground, upon which everything is built, just as everything is built on the divine foundation. If you want to be like God, Jesus seems to say, look to the children, look to the women, look to the slaves. It is these who are first in the reign of God, because whether they have chosen it or not, their work reveals the pattern of God’s relationship to creation: foundation, housekeeper, foot-washer, food-server, table-waiter.

It leads me to wonder what sign Jesus might offer today: Whose work would he do? Whom would he make visible? That question got me thinking about our society’s invisible or less visible people whose work I rely on— the farm workers, home care-givers, grocery store stock clerks, stay-at-home parents and childcare workers, night nurses, and countless others, whose work in what we call “the service industry” reveals the divine pattern of service and care and hospitality in the world.

It got me thinking about a young woman I met at a clergy gathering last week. Her name is Ashley, and she works at McDonald’s at 79th Street and Yates in Chicago, and on her $8.25 an hour she does her best to help her mom pay their family living expenses, to buy uniforms and school supplies for her two younger siblings, and pay on her student loans, though she can no longer afford to go to school. As I listened to her tell her story, her long hours in a hot kitchen, moving heavy machines, always uncertain if she will get enough work, she became more visible to me, and her dignity and her work of feeding and hospitality reminded me of what Jesus did this night.

So tonight, as I participate in this sacrament of footwashing, this sacrament of serving, it is Ashley, along with so many others, who will be visible to me, revealing the divine pattern of God’s work in the world, and inviting me to be Ashley’s friend, her partner, her ally.

Who will you be imagining as you wash feet tonight? Whose work will you be dignifying? Will it be your own unrecognized or unsung work? A family member’s? The worker at Panera or Jewel?

In a few minutes we will gather in the south end of this room, where Sunday by Sunday we affirm the dignity of the work of teaching and learning, important work so much at the heart of this community. How appropriate, then, that tonight in that space we honor and dignify so many other kinds of work, our own work as well as the work of others, so that the divine pattern of dignified service, of generous hospitality, might be more deeply inscribed and made visible in us. 

March 29, Palm Sunday

Bryan Cones

Mark 11:1-11

Does anyone else like to play pretend? Maybe you like pretending to be a superhero, or sometimes a super villain. I have a niece that sometimes like to pretend to be a certain chilly Disney princess, and she is pretty convincing when she belts out her power ballad. Even us grown-ups might do it. Maybe we don’t “play pretend” so much anymore, but I know I sometimes pretend in my mind, imagining myself as president maybe, and what I might do, though admittedly I am probably more a benign dictator, or even as a wizard in the Harry Potter world, fixing my problems with a magic spell, or a professional tennis player—which requires a lot of pretending.

In a way we might think of that procession we just took part in as a kind of pretending: We imagine that we are there when Jesus entered Jerusalem; our pretending is a way of telling the story, of making it real.

Maybe Jesus and his followers, too, were pretending that day. They were enacting God’s promise  from a prophet named Zephaniah, about the day when God’s chosen one would enter Jerusalem as its peaceful king, complete with a donkey—what princes rode when they came in peace, as opposed to a warlike horse. Jesus and his friends were pretending that God’s reign had actually come to Jerusalem, that God was the real king of the city.

And how do we know they were pretending? We know because it was obvious to everyone that the God of Israel was not king in Jerusalem: Everyone knew that Caesar, the emperor of Rome, was king in Jerusalem, and Caesar had just sent his henchman Pontius Pilate with his Roman soldiers into the city to remind the people who was boss during Passover, or Jewish “independence day.” The biggest bullies were in charge. Pretend all you want, they might have said, we know who is the real boss. But don’t pretend too much or too long, or you’ll pay for it.

The thing is, though, Jesus wasn’t pretending. And he wasn’t kidding either. The gospel story tells us he had lined everything up: He had his donkey staged and ready, told his disciples the code words to get it,  and he timed his piece of street theater for maximum effect, for maximum insult to the Roman occupiers and their lackeys among the Jewish aristocrats: He was telling Pontius Pilate and the Temple priests that God was the real king in Jerusalem, and Jesus was God’s hand-picked agent, his general. And if you’ll notice, Jesus goes “straight to the Temple and looks around”: Jesus is casing the joint for his next move, which will involve a whip of cords and big mess in the Temple.

Things just got tense, and the tension is about to get worse. Jesus is provoking a crisis, turning up the heat, and he’s asking everyone to choose sides. Is the God of Israel your king, he is asking, or is it Caesar? And in Jesus, God is provoking a crisis: Do you want to live in kingdom of heaven or in the empire of Rome? And they aren’t pretending, not at all.

And neither are we. We weren’t pretending we were there in that procession: That procession is the sign that we are there, we are part of Jesus’ parade now. And Holy Week just keeps turning up the heat.

Today as we march with our palms, Jesus is asking if we wish to live in his rule of peace, or if we will live according to the rules of Caesar and his bullies. Maundy Thursday as we wash each other’s feet Jesus asks if we will show greatness by our service to others, or if we will choose to lord it over each other and boss each other around, “as the Gentiles do.”

Friday as we encounter the mystery of the cross and the way Jesus dies, Jesus asks if we will fight violence with violence, and become bullies ourselves, or if will we follow Jesus all the way to the cross, resisting the bullies of this world with our lives, even with our deaths. And we won’t be pretending, because God is not pretending. God is finally going to show Caesar just who is king in Jerusalem, just what is pretend and what is real.

And how do we know that? Well, that we will find out on Holy Saturday night and Easter Sunday morning. But between now and then, Jesus is asking: Which side are we on? 

March 22, 2015: Lent V

Kristin White

Jeremiah 31:31-34, John 12:20-33

There has been a certain amount of hand wringing, in recent years, among church leader types, about people who consider themselves “spiritual but not religious.” These folks tend not to find their way to church on Sundays. They tend not to join churches, or sign and submit pledge cards, or serve on parish committees.

Reasons for people to characterize themselves in this way are as varied as the individuals themselves. But generally it comes to this: no longer is there the social pressure to go to church because it’s “what people do”. Church membership is no longer a requirement for work positions of a certain level. People’s neighbors aren’t super likely to look at them funny if they don’t see them pulling out of the driveway at 9:15 on a Sunday morning. Spiritual But Not Religious people interviewed for research studies on this subject talk about seeking encounter, and avoiding religious practice purely as a matter of expectation. In his book The Future of Faith, Harvey Cox claims, “The experience of the divine is displacing theories about it.”[1] And, frankly, people are looking for those encounters in places outside of church…in nature, in yoga, in a morning run on the lake.

People in church leadership positions like mine often wring their hands about this. “The church isn’t the same as it was 50 years ago,” they say. And they are right. It’s not. “The pews aren’t as full as they were 50 years ago,” they say. And they’re right. Usually they are not. “The budgets aren’t as big as they were 50 years ago,” they say. And they’re right. Often, though not always, they are not.

Spiritual but not religious folks are often more likely to spend Sunday morning reading the New York Times at Starbucks than teaching Sunday school, more likely to eat takeout on a Thursday night than come to a parish potluck, more likely to sing to their favorite music by themselves in the car than they are to join a parish choir.

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Today’s Gospel might be the perfect one for the SBNR crowd.

Some Greeks come up to Philip, and say: “Sir, we would see Jesus.”

Now let’s stop right there for a second. Notice what the Greeks don’t do: they don’t ask for Jesus’ bio. They don’t ask about his teachings or credentials, or for a statement on his authority. They don’t ask what the requirements are for association with his band of followers. They don’t ask what it costs.

They don’t ask about him. They ask for him.

And notice who the Greeks are, and are not: they’re not Jews. They are not the tribe of friends and neighbors that have been following Jesus since he extended his first seaside invitation. They are Gentiles. They are outside the circle. And there is zero obligation whatsoever to do this, based on their social position, their family history, or their status at the office. In fact, all of these things would point them away from exactly what they are doing.

They are Greeks, Gentiles. They grew up in the same mixed-heritage community that Philip did, and they speak the same language, and they know he’s following Jesus. And they want to see this Jesus for themselves.

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In today’s first reading, the prophet Jeremiah issues God’s promise to the People of Israel: “I will put my law within them, I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people…no longer shall they teach… ‘know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me…”

God’s promise is so dear, that for God to write this on tablets or scroll makes it too far away, too easily lost or forgotten. “I will be your God, and you will be my people,” God says. Talk about personal experience. Talk about direct encounter. This may be as personal and direct as it gets. This covenant is the promise “at the core of (our) being.”[2]

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Next Sunday we begin the journey through Holy Week. Over those sacred next days, I pray that you would see Jesus. I pray for your own direct encounter, your very own experience of the divine in our midst.

I pray that you would see Jesus as we raise palms and sing “All glory, laud and honor” next Sunday, as we hear the words of the Passion read at the end of our worship, as we leave this space in quiet. I pray that you would see Jesus on Maundy Thursday, as we share the agape feast and recall the Last Supper, as we wash each others’ feet, as we strip the altar of everything that adorns it, as we keep watch hour by hour through the night. I pray that you would see Jesus as we kneel before the cross on Good Friday, pray the solemn prayers of our faith. I pray that you would see Jesus as we gather in the Columbarium on Saturday night at the Great Vigil, light a fire in the darkness, chant the names of our beloved dead. I pray that you would see Jesus as we find ourselves once more clothed in the light of the resurrection, with fanfare and music and joyous celebration.

This Holy Week and Easter, I pray that you would see Jesus. Because he promises that he is right here.

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This is the promise, to those who teach Sunday school and to those who read the New York Times; to those who stop to pick up Thai food and eat it in front of the TV, and to those who make great food to share with church friends; to those who sing alone and to those who join their voices with others: “You will be my people,” God says to each one of us, “And I will be your God.” It’s God’s covenant with us all, written at the very center of who we are.

We are not the same church we were 50 years ago. We are a different institution than we were back then. And for that, honestly, I give thanks. Our pews may not be as full as they were 50 years past…but you are here. And you’re here because you have decided to be here, among a multitude of places you could choose to be, without social obligation hanging over your head to make that decision for you. Our budget may be proportionately smaller than it was 50 years ago, but we have everything we need to do the work we’ve been given to do, and people have given generously to support that good work, and we’re growing into a fuller manifestation of living as the church we’re called to be. Our leadership looks different than it would have looked 50 years ago. 50 years ago, not one of the clergy now serving this parish would have been welcome to pursue ordination. 50 years ago, only one of our two wardens would have been accepted by the canons, the laws of the church.

This is the promise, to the church of our heritage and to the church of this moment and to the church of the future, to the people who count themselves among that church and to those who define themselves as Spiritual But Not Religious: that God will be our God, and we will be God’s people. This is God’s promise: that when we say, along with the Greeks, “Sir, we would see Jesus,” we will.

This is the promise, as we follow the cross toward the hill and the tomb, as we wait again and still for that third day. This is the promise, written by God on our hearts, tended by the Spirit, sealed by Christ himself: that God would be our God, that we would be God’s people. That in looking for him, we would see him.

Because he’s right here.

[1] Harvey Cox. The Future of Faith. New York: Harper Collins, 2009. 20.

[2] Fred Craddock, ed. Preaching Through the Christian Year: Year B, A Comprehensive Commentary on the Lectionary. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 1993. 162.

March 15, 2015: Fourth Sunday in Lent

Bryan Cones

Numbers 21:4-9

Who slipped this snaky passage into our readings today? That first reading obviously has a connection to the gospel with Jesus’ assertion that the Son of Man must be lifted up, like that serpent long ago, but it’s kind of a lot to digest just to make that point, with its overreacting, even homicidal God, who sends poisonous serpents among the people because they had complained one time too many as they were wandering in the desert. Why must we read a passage like this in Lent? Why has the church chosen it for our reflection? Indeed, why has this story been included at all in the family history our ancestors in faith have passed down to us in the Bible?

It’s passages like this one that led one early Christian, a man named Marcion, the son of a bishop in the second century, to completely reject the God of the Old Testament. Marcion was probably the first to divide the scriptures into Old and New, and he saw the God of the Hebrew Bible as an angry, jealous, tribal deity, completely incompatible with the Father of Jesus. So Marcion produced a cleaned up “Bible,” which was really quite brief, more like a pamphlet, just his version of the gospel of Luke, along with some of Paul’s letters.

Not that texts like this one are limited to the Hebrew scriptures. Thomas Jefferson, playing a latter day Marcion, clipped out with a razor all the gospel passages that offended his philosophical sensibilities— anything he judged to be supernatural. His Jefferson Bible focused on Jesus’ ethical teachings: no miracles, nothing about Jesus’ relationship to God, no healings or resurrection or any other funny business.

I doubt that Marcion or Thomas Jefferson would be the only two in the whole history of Christianity to want to edit the Bible: It’s full of troubling, even embarrassing stories, stories that have caused a lot of trouble and suffering for people. One of the more difficult ones for me is coming up on Good Friday: the Passion according to John, with its constant refrain that “the Jews,” “the Jews,” as if as a people, were responsible for Jesus’ death, a charge which has through the centuries resulted in real suffering and death for Jewish people.

So why not just cut these texts right out of the Bible? Or if not out of the Bible, at least out of the stories we read when we gather on Sunday. Our lectionary is already an edit of the Bible: We never read, for example, the long, florid list of curses that Jesus hurls against his opponents in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. It certainly is tempting just to keep on editing.

And while we are trimming our religious family history, I think I’d also like to do some editing on my own story. I’d love to take an X-Acto knife and surgically trim those embarrassing moments, the failures and sins, the wrong turns, the acts of prejudice, the times I have punished or judged others, the times I have chosen badly, or poisoned myself.

I’d also like clip out those poisonous influences on my life, the people that weren’t helpful to me, or the ones that led me astray, the bullies, the people who hurt me and made my life hard. Then along with a nice, tidy, consistent religious family story, I’d have a nice, tidy, consistent story of me to go along with it, though, admittedly, it might only be pamphlet-length. It’s so, so very tempting.

Is anyone else tempted?

Of course, I am not always nice or tidy or consistent, and neither is my family history, nor my family of faith. I am as complicated as the Bible, which is why it has been so helpful to me as a way to interpret life. I have struggled with an image of a punishing God, and with my own desire to punish or to have God punish others, or even wondered if I was being punished by God. I have wandered and complained, been bitten and poisoned, sometimes by my own doing, sometimes innocently. And I have found healing by facing truthfully whatever serpent has brought me trouble.

Does that sound familiar to anyone else?

In that light I’m grateful that we heard this story today, grateful that the Bible doesn’t let me or us off the hook, grateful that I have to struggle to make sense of a difficult story, and grateful that my complicated story is reflected in our complicated Bible story.

Lent is after all an invitation to be truthful, to decline the temptation to be anything other than I am, and perhaps we are: complicated human beings, with complicated families, and complicated stories, along with complicated faith, maybe even a complicated God, who nevertheless calls us, invites us, to be God’s complicated people.