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Rev. Nancy Rockwell
Ready – Set – Go!
27 June 2010
Galatians 5: 13-16: only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. 14For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 15If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another. 16Live by the Spirit
These texts we have read today are about as clear as mud. Or maybe, about as tasty as mud. What we have here is Jesus being quoted talking about his own discomfort as a model for us and a lesson to be learned. But we want a pleasant experience of Jesus as our comfort, assuring us we are God’s beloved. There’s an unappealing taste in these words.
Luke says: As Jesus was traveling to Jerusalem he sent his advance team to a Samaritan village to prepare for a stopover. "But the people there did not welcome him" . The disciples James and John exploded in rage at the rejection: "Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to destroy them?" They probably spoke figuratively, not literally, but their desire was for revenge. Instead of rebuking the Samaritans who rejected him, though, Jesus rebukes James and John, who defended him. They must have hated that.
Scholars, in footnotes in annotated Bibles, having studied the more than 5000 ancient texts of Luke’s gospel, say there is an extra verse that belongs here:
"And Jesus said to them, 'You do not know what kind of spirit you are of, for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them.'"
And this single verse is reflected in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, when Paul says: the heart and whole of the law is this: Love your neighbor as yourself.
And none of us is an A student at that. It is so easy for us to dislike and become suspicious of strangers. Early in this week someone said to me, I worry a lot that there are so many Pakistanis in this country, and they could all be planning car bombs, who knows.
But Jesus says, If we take on his yoke, then we try to love our enemies. Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls this costly grace, which is different from the kind of grace we love, that falls upon us as a free gift, no matter what. But costly grace leaves us, as Jesus said, homeless on the earth. And it even takes us away from the homes we once had.
Jesus’ baptism (which we have repeated in a rite here today for five people, with great joy) functioned kind of like a portkey in a Harry Potter story. That water hit his head, and everyone heard the word Beloved being shouted from the sky, and one minute he was standing in the river bathed in love with a laughing, loving crowd all around the shore, and the next Jesus was immediately plunged into the wilderness, alone, and there the Devil tested him, by offering him such wonderful delights, and the power to do all kinds of good things. It took all Jesus’ strength to remember who he was, God’s Beloved and as such, fully human and no more than that. And remembering this, he had the courage to say No to the Devil.
Like it or not, we also are plunged into the wilderness of temptation in this life: and one temptation is to tell the stories upside down, so that we win, and feel good about ourselves. Like this lovely gem, that someone sent me this week, about parents and teens:
A teenage boy had just passed his driving test and wanted to discuss his use of the family car with his father. The father said: 'You bring your grades up to a B average, study your Bible, and get your hair cut. Then we'll talk about the car.' They agreed on it. After about six weeks his father said, 'Son, you've brought your grades up and I've observed that you have been studying your Bible, but I'm disappointed you haven't had your hair cut. The boy said, 'You know, Dad, I've been thinking about that, and I've noticed in the Bible that Samson had long hair, John the Baptist had long hair, Moses had long hair...and people think Jesus had long hair.” His Dad said, 'Did you also notice all of them walked everywhere they went?'
Well, we want it to be this way. But Jesus doesn’t tell stories like this, ever. The stories he tells hurt more to live through. The story Jesus tells about a father and son is about a son who rejected the deal, left home with his long hair, took most of his father’s money and treasures money and wasted them in every regrettable way, and after a few years, in which he never sent a single note, he came home broke and hungry. And the father loved him, and took him in. Who knows what happened after that, with such a prodigal son? But we know the father loved him unconditionally, and embraced him in every way.
So many of the people Jesus embraced were not people you and I would want in our houses. My own definition of mysticism, writes theologian Suzanne Guthrie, involves the awareness of interconnectedness, the intuitive knowledge or insight that everything is linked, and that what we tend to call “the divine” is at the heart of all being.
So, then, the cost of our Belovedness, our baptism, is that we have the hard work of remembering who we are -- not the ones who know the most, or control the most, or are free of the burden of troublesome others, no, we are the ones who love the most, who find the grace of that love in the midst of everything, even in the midst of the hardest things we encounter in this life.
May God be with us, that we may know in our hearts, in the midst of our pain, that all shall be well. Amen.
Rev. Nancy Rockwell
The Things That Remain
20 June 2010
Father’s Day. I’ve been thinking about my father a lot this week, and my grandfathers, too. They are all gone from the earth now, or gone into the earth if you prefer, but they are with me still, as your fathers are with you, in memories, in approaches we take to life, in phrases and skills they passed on to us.
Both my father and his father loved to read, and I’ve thought how tickled my father would have been with the book discussion that Karen Prior organized in our Vestry last week. He would have been grinning from ear to ear, so pleased to engage in this kind of conversation. He was always leading book discussions at church or in the local library. He organized a Great Books group when that was first in vogue, and two weeks before he died he led a book group on a book I had given him, Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, and I was so glad to have hit a chord that worked for him. When we were young we were the group he was always getting to discuss things. When I was a small child he loved to read bedtime stories, and when he read Eeyore, he sounded like a donkey, and when he read Gulliver’s travels, the Houyhnhnms sounded like horses, and I have never been able to imitate that voice he used, but I remember it so well. For the Just So Stories, he had a special voice for each animal, and I love to give the book to children, because of my father’s reading.
As the roses have bloomed around Exeter I’ve thought of my father, a devoted gardener who grew a dozen varieties of roses, and who would patiently pick off the beetles from their stems, and talk about them as if they were friends. He loved to give his roses to people, especially to people older than he was, whom he knew were no longer gardening. And he always stood in the kitchen and clipped off the thorns before he gave them away. He read us the part from St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, about the rose who taught the Little Prince what it meant to love someone.
His father, my grandfather, used to pay me to memorize poems, and that eaarly money is golden to a kid who has no way of earning any. Granddad paid more for Shakespearean lines, and it was my father who would pick them out and help me learn them . I may have been a kid with no front teeth trying to say Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in its petty pace from day to day, but my father also gave those words meaning, in the ways he faced hardship and illness in his life, and in the ways he loved us, no matter what.
His ancestors had lived in the same Connecticut town for more than 250 years, and his father had taught him to stand up for things that were right, even if they were unpopular. His father had helped to persuade old farmers to sell land to allow the creation of a lake for hydroelectric power, and my father in his turn, persuaded old timers to make some changes in town government as the town grew and became suburban. It wasn’t easy to get people to share power with strangers and newcomers, but at last, after what seemed like a hundred meetings, it happened.
When I was in the 8th grade, my father sold my grandfather’s old home to an African American dentist who had recently come to town and who was having trouble buying a house. We got hate calls for months when he did that, and he gave us all instructions about how to handle that. We were not to argue, but just to hang up, and if the calls persisted, in those days before phones could be unplugged, we were to put the phone in the oven! Someone wrote an angry letter about Dad to the paper, and that was upsetting. But eventually, it all died down. And the dentist began to come to the Congregational church, I remember he was Melchior in the Christmas pageant and he had a deep bass voice as he sang his way down the aisle.
When they were about 80, my father and mother moved to Florida. And there was a lot they liked about their town and the Florida life. But they were shocked as they drove around and saw how black people lived, how miserable and impoverished were the conditions of their homes. He and Mom, who was always proud of her abolitionist ancestors, read in the paper about a dinner honoring black high school graduates, and the proceeds went toward college scholarships. They went, and were seated with the only other white people there, the Lutheran minister and his wife.
The event, it turned out, was run by a group of politically active black women, the Black Women’s Alliance. Over the next year my father was more and more impressed with their activities, and finally he asked them, did you have to be a woman to join their group, and did you have to be black, and in some astonishment they decided he was welcome, and so he joined. And at Christmas, when they came back up north to be with us, Dad delighted in telling everyone he was now officially a Black Woman, because he was part of the Black Women’s Alliance. I still have some newspaper pictures of their group at various events, about 20 black women and one old white haired guy bent over his walker with a huge grin on his face, and my mother behind him, trying to be sure he didn’t fall down.
His experiences of failure, of illness, and of seeing his own people marginalized as sweeping changes altered our town, the ways in which life turned out so differently than he had imagined it would, all of this brought my father to embracing the struggles he saw these black women taking on, so that the young, growing up on such mean streets, might have a better life. And so my father’s story merges with a narrative that's deeply embedded throughout the Bible and in human experience, whether in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill that is destroying a way of life for many, or in the war-torn experience of Afghani people we talked about on Thursday night. "Where is your God?" taunts the cynic in Psalm 42. And, “Lord, why have you forgotten and rejected me?" (Psalm 42:9). "I've had enough, Lord," mutters a dispirited Elijah (1 Kings 19:4).
And in this week's gospel, a naked and homeless man, tormented in body, mind, and spirit screams in desperation at the top of his lungs, "What do you want with me, Jesus!?" (Luke 8:28). At times in his life, and for most of his last decade, my father tried to answer that scream of desperation with his own presence, and with his faith. The story in Luke is that Jesus was willing to do what the town was reluctant to do: to spend some real money to heal this young man. The real money came in the form of pigs, into whom the demon voices in the young man were cast. And the pigs, who had a clear sense of what it meant to be pigs, were so unwilling to be hosts for these demons that they threw themselves into the sea and drowned. And the people who owned them, who were forbidden by Jewish law to have anything to do with pork, got mad, because a lot of their money had just gone over the cliff. And Jesus was the one they were angry at, because he broke the rules about money and the rules about fear, and he restored one of their sons, but it cost them more than they had imagined ever paying, to change the world so that even that boy could come in, that boy whose life has been shaped by his trials and tribulations. Now doesn’t this sound like BP, reluctantly handing over some money for harm done to people, people who are screaming like that boy in Geresea, while BP is happy to spend $50 million so far on TV ads to improve their image?
We are all shaped by our trials, and ready to explode over them at times. Where is God? we demand, and I’ve had enough, fix it! we demand. The poet Denise Levertov wrote:
There is anger abroad in the world, a numb thunder,
because of God’s silence. But how naïve,
to keep wanting words we could speak ourselves,
English, Urdu, Tagalog, the French of Tours, the French of Haiti . . .
Yes, that was one way omnipotence chose
to address us – Hebrew, Aramaic, or whatever the patriarchs
chose in their turn to call what they heard. Moses
demanded the word, spoken and written. But perfect freedom
assured other ways of speech, God is surely
patiently trying to immerse us in a different language,
events of grace, horrifying scrolls of history
and the unearned retrieval of blessings lost forever,
the poor grass returning after drought,
timid, persistent.
God’s abstention is only from human dialects.
The holy voice
utters its woe and glory in myriad musics, in signs and portents.
Our own words are for us to speak, a way to ask and to answer.And those are the words I learned from my father, the words to ask, and the way to answer, Here am I. Amen.
Rev. Nancy Rockwell
Graduation Sunday
6 June 2010
Well. Here you seniors are, your caps and gowns are ready, and it is soon to be publicly acknowledged that you have taken a good bite from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge!
Now, some folks think the Bible warns against consuming the fruits of knowledge. But other say leaving the garden was part of growing up. Thomas Merton, an awesome Christian writer and monk, who practiced both Catholicism and Zen Buddhism, wrote this: It is like the first morning of the world (when Adam, at the sweet voice of Wisdom, awoke from nonentity and knew her).
The first morning of the world, that’s what wisdom leads us to discover. And what you are discovering in graduation is that each bite leads to a new morning, a new day, and there is a great deal more to learn. And it does get harder, moving on into yet another darkness and then, yet another strange new day. Without these bites of wisdom, though, you are stuck in a day that never moves on, stuck waiting for time to change and it doesn’t. Kind of like the movie Groundhog Day, that’s what being alive and uneducated is like. But as you consume the apple of wisdom, doors open, and days open, and the fuel that is in you urges you onward and lights your way.
Here is some more of what Thomas Merton said: I am like all humankind awakening from all the dreams that ever were dreamed in all the nights of the world. It is like . . . . coming back . . . .from all distractions, cross-purposes and confusions. It is like the first morning of the world (when Adam, at the sweet voice of Wisdom, awoke from nonentity and knew her), and like the Last Morning of the world when all the fragments of Adam will return from death at the voice of Wisdom, and will know where they stand. -Thomas Merton 1915-1968 in Hagia Sophia
All this may feel uncomfortably over the top for you right now, but this kind of dreamy, first-morning of the world awakening, certainly must describe the feelings that the characters in the Bible stories read today had – the widow and her son, when they doscovered they were not, after all, going to die; and the mother mourning her son, because she thought he was dead, and then discovering he is still alive and will survive. Talk about a bite of the apple! Wow! What a fire of wisdom these women and their children experienced!
The widow who found Elijah, all wild and dirty, by the brook outside her village when she went out to get water, had to find him pretty scary. And she was already in deep despair. The drought had laid waste to the crops. First the wild animals died, then the domestic ones, and now the people were dying, as famine held sway. There was nothing left to eat, and this poor mother had only enough flour to make bread for that one day for herself and her son. Now here was this crazy guy saying, Give me some, and we will all live. She could have said, Get away, we are staying by ourselves. God help me, I think I would have said that. But she opened her door, the door of her house and the door of her soul, to a new wisdom. And in that, she found her way into a new day, and into a long, good life.
There is often some catastrophe threatening to take life away: right now its the oil spill in the Gulf – what life will be left, we all want to know? What livelihood, what new days, or is it just terrible darkness ahead? Wars. The economy. There is always something big to fear.
Well, jumping ahead, we found another mother in Jesus’ time, in a small town, and she was on her way to the cemetery to bury her son, his body was on a cart, and Jesus, this strange man she does not know, saw all this, the coffin and the woman and her tears, and he reached into her life, he touched the body. She could have said, Hey, get outta here! Can’t you see a funeral procession? Why are you busting in? But she didn’t. And we learn a few things here: Jesus, the man who always had a new day in him, was moved to help her into one – by her tears. So tears, as much as bread, can be the thing that makes life possible. So don’t be afraid of your tears, they have the power of wisdom in them, and they can be keys that unlock the door to a new day.
And we learn another thing: it is the wisdom of strangers that restores the living connection between parents and children. Parents all have fears, you see. It isn’t just your parents, it is everyone’s parents who have them. These fears come with childbirth, they are part of awakening and standing in life, of holding something that is part of you and not part of you at the same time.
Whne you leave for college, your parents will miss things you cannot imagine, they will miss you, the sound of your footsteps, the way you say, Oh Mom!, your sullen days, your laughter, your presence at supper and in front of the TV. They will miss shopping for your favorite foods and worrying about a hundred small things, do you have clean socks, are you getting up in the morning, did you eat breakfast, did you remember your keys? This is like a little death for them, letting you go to live among strangers. But, there will be this newness of life for you, moving into a new day, and they know you do need one. You will come home, and you will be changed, you will be theirs and yet not theirs at the same time. From now on you will always belong to others whom they do not know, as well as to them.
And this was true in the Bible stories, too. The widow’s boy in Zarephath belonged to Elijah now, Elijah had become a kind of father to him, for he would have died, but now he lived and grew up, and on every birthday, and everytime something memorable happens, Elijah will be part of it for him. And the boy whom Jesus touched belonged to this strange Galilean now, not just to his mother and his village of Nain. These had been life shaping experiences. These families were expanded by the new days into which they had been awakened by strangers.
And those long ago sons must have had the same questions rolling around in side them that you do, now, about their surprising new days: What will be expected of me? What do I expect of myself? How will I know what to do? Can I do it? Do I want to? Will I ever meet any friends in these new days, because I can’t just go back to the way things were? Will I be lonely? Will I be embarrassed? Will I fail? Who am I, and how can I do this?
The answer to all these questions is Yes. Yes, everything you have felt before you will feel again. Yes, you can do this. Yes you will be lonely sometimes, and sometimes you will succeed and sometimes you will fail. Yes, you will find friends. Yes, you can’t go back, but you can go on from here. And Wisdom is calling you.
Yesterday I went to Jim Griswold’s 101st birthday party. Imagine that! They don’t make ballons that say Happy 101st. So his daughters had to buy three 30s, a 10 and a 1, and tie them together. They put justa few candles on his cake, because 101 would be too much for anyone. But those naughty girls, who are grandmothers themselves now, they went and got the kind of candles that keep re-lighting. Jim blew and blew, and laughed and laughed. And Jim is asking the same questions you are. He’s asking about what lies ahead of him, will he be able to handle it, will he be lonely or afraid, why is he doing this? He remembers going off to college, and what his mother said. His children remember being your age and living with him. Many new days have come and gone, and little deaths and large ones have ensued. At 90, Jim, moved into a new place, Riverwoods, not because he wanted to, but it was time.
Jim asks about eternity a lot. Which, of course, was on the minds of the mothers and children in the Bible stories, for death was around them. And it is on your minds, more indirectly, as you wonder how scary new days and new places will be, and how many little deaths you will face in them. And since eternity is not just a question for after you die, but is centered in our experiences of fear and dread, and love and joy, remember what the mothers and sons in the stories discovered: even when you think things are over for good, they are not. Life goes on, powerfully, and unimaginably. And in a world where science teaches us that we are surrounded by and made up of eternal things, like water and air, which have always been here, the same water and air, since the biosphere began, and which give us our tears and our voices and our lives, the same air we breathe is the air Jesus breathed, and before him, Elijah, and the widow and her boy, isn’t it vain of us to think that only we humans come to an absolute end, and we do it individually at that we think, and we fear that new days or our mistakes, or fearful things, could be the end of us.
Don’t be anxious about your future, Jesus said. We all are, of course. But trust is what Jesus advised. Just swim on into it. Be like the flowers, he said, they trust and they bloom. Billy Collins, who was the American poet laureate a few years ago, offers us his dog:
The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her dog house
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.
Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.
If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.
So there we are, we ‘if only’ one another. And at the same time we offer one another wonder and love. New days are made of these things. Every new day is made of them. Amen.
Rev. Nancy Rockwell
Trinity Sunday
30 May 2010
My colleague Martin Copenhaver, Pastor of the Wellesley Village Congregational Church in MA, writes that the difference between belief and faith can be described this way: Imagine that you are at a circus. A skilled high-wire artist has accomplished so many marvelous feats that the audience has come to believe that he can do almost anything. The ringmaster addresses the crowd: "Ladies and gentlemen, how many of you believe that this daring man can ride safely over the high wire on his bicycle while carrying someone on his shoulders? If you believe he can do it, please raise your hand!" Many in the audience raise their hands. "Very well, then," says the ringmaster, surveying all the raised hands, "now who would like to volunteer to sit on his shoulders?"
Yesterday’s New York Times ran a front page story about a little boy named Sadiq, who lives in Khan Neshin, Afghanistan. On Wednesday morning last week, five year old Sadiq opened a sack of grain in his home, and a pit viper, who was, by accident, coiled inside, lashed up and bit the boy above the lip. Sadiq’s father knew his son would surely die, for there was no hospital nearby So he rushed the boy to an American outpost to plead for help. And in doing so the father set up an agony of conflicting demands. On the one hand, the US military medical capacity, set up across Afghanistan to care for wounded soldiers, simply cannot provide primary medical care to Afghanistan’s 29 million citizens. On the other hand, who is going to watch a five year old die?
Emergency aid may be given to civilians. And more than that, real care, may be given to casualities of war. But Sadiq was not a casualty of war, which would have qualified him for such help. He was just an unlucky little boy who got bit by a snake. Sadiq needed more than first aid. He needed a Black Hawk helicopter transport to evacuate him to a medical center that had anti-venom and physicians experienced in treating poisons. There are very few Black Hawk helicopters and they are not sent for civilian aid – what if a soldier needed one and none were available because civilians were using them? This is the military, and there are rules, there is order. And a child was dying.
Major Jason Davis put it this way: We can’t be Afghanistan’s Emergency Service. But we are. He knew he needed approval from higher-ups to use the helicopter. He requested a helicopter, assumed approval, and put the boy on a helicopter that was at his outpost. But then the request was denied. Sadiq’s breathing was now very labored. And Major Davis had to take him off the helicopter. Sadiq and his father were on their own.
A few hours later the electronic message board showed a new request for a Black Hawk helicopter to transport a boy bitten by a pit viper, and Major Davis knew it meant that Sadiq’s father had found someone with a car to drive the boy to the next American military outpost, where he could make his request again, asking for aid. An officer at the second post, having heard the prior outcome, issued a blunt electronic challenge: would whoever denied the helicopter for the boy acknowledge in writing that they knew the boy would die.
This time the request was approved. Sadiq was airlifted, and a second Black Hawk airlifted a crew with anti-venom to the hospital where Sadiq was being taken. For thirty-six hours it was touch and go, as Sadiq was terribly ill from the venom, and small bodies are hard to dose with anti-venom. But just as being small and young made Sadiq more vulnerable, it also gave him more ability to recover. By Friday afternoon, Sadiq was off the ventilator, sitting up, drinking milk and juice, and talking. Sadiq had beaten the mathematical odds that face children who are poor in countries that are poor and at war. It was indeed a miracle.
The miracle began with the faith of Sadiq’s father, a Moslem, whose persistence in placing his son in the dangerous, yet powerful hands of enemy soldiers, who had brought much death to his land, was the miracle Jesus would point to. These were the only people who could possibly carry his little son across the high wire of life and keep him from falling into the valley of death into which bad luck had flung him. The miracle continues in a chain of American soldiers who, with ears of Christian faith, heard in this father a plea that led them to break all the rules and set aside all the reasons that upheld them.
Here then is the Holy Spirit at work, breaking down barriers of every kind. Here is the corollary of the stories of the Roman centurion who came to Jesus on behalf of his son, and the rabbi who came on behalf of his daughter, both of them confessing to Jesus that they were loyal to other authorities, not his, and they had other systems of belief. To them and countless others, when they thanked him, Jesus replied, Your faith has done this.
The greatest minds of Christendom have applied reason, philosophical rigor, depth and breadth to understanding and interpreting the the church's experience of Trinity. But, says theologian Suzanne Guthrie, in the end, knowing God is as illusive as predicting a firefly's trajectory over a field of hay after dusk, as futile as keeping track of a drop of rain fallen into the ocean in a storm, as blinding as gazing directly at the sun. But what we do learn while contemplating the Trinity is the dynamism of creation, incarnation, delight, genesis, the inter-relationship of everything, of darkness, of light, of image, of silence. Of matter. Of nothingness.
The English medieval mystic, Juliana of Norwich, herself a survivor of the bubonic plague, said it this way: As verily as God is our Father, so verily God is our Mother; and that is shown especially in these sweet words: I am the Light and the Grace that is all blessed Love; I am the sovereign Goodness of all manner of things, the endless fulfilling of all true desires. Amen.
Rev. Nancy Rockwell
Easter 6
The Gift
9 May 2010
So: Paul has a dream one night. He sees a man from Macedonia – his clothing, hairstyle, head covering identify him as Macedonian – calling, Come, help us. Straightaway Paul and his companions set sail for Macedonia, convinced this dream was a word from God. The journey is long. They reach Samothrace on day one, Neapolis on day two, and then Philippi, a Roman city in the larger region of Macedonia. The Sabbath has come. All the temples here are to Roman gods, so they go outside the city to a place by the river where people worship whose gods belong to nature, not to Empires. It was women who were gathered there, and one woman, named Lydia, a traveling merchant who sold one of the costliest items around, purple cloth, so expensive only the very, very rich could buy it, listened to them. She, and her household were baptized, and then she prevailed on Paul and company to come home with her as her guests.
Lydia is listed in the dictionary as a Greek name, but it is also the name of a region in Asia Minor known for its immense wealth in an earlier time. As a kingdom it has vanished, but this woman comes to us from the remnant of its proud people.
The Easter season texts are about the gifts Christ gives to those who see him, alive again and here among them. Peace, I leave with you, he says, several times, in fact. A precious gift, peace. Not as the world gives, Christ emphasizes. This peace passes understanding. In the Women’s Bible Study group we’ve watched a DVD of scholar John Dominic Crossan taking American Christians on a tour of this region, Macedonia and Philippi, the very place, in fact, where Lydia and Paul met beside the river. Crossan shows us, on the film, the remains of the Roman temple, dedicated to the Peace of Rome, Pax Romana, which is carved in huge letters on the wall. The images are of Emperor Caesar and the goddess Roma with her feet on a huge pile of weapons. Caesar has conquered all, and that is the peace that is honored in this temple, peace through arms, through might. On the remains of the wall of the early Christian church nearby are the words, Pax Christus, the peace of Christ. No weapons are involved. The image here is a crucifix. This peace challenges the notion of what peace is, and how you come to it.
And it is reasonable to assume that the conversation by the river to which Lydia listened was about this peace. And it must also have been about Belovedness, for she chose to be baptized into the belovedness of Jesus and into the peace of Christ as well.
Well, the first shocker is that it didn’t turn out to be a Macedonian man after all, to whom Paul was being sent, it turned out to be this Thyatiran woman, Lydia. So much for dreams as roadmaps in life. Yes, you get a sense. And, sometimes you need to be quite open for course correction! The second stunning development is that Lydia was baptized with her whole household. A very wealthy woman, Lydia soon becomes Paul’s personal PAC, funding his travels, his fledgling churches, his work. Her household, which includes her successful business, includes employees, house servants, drivers, handlers, in addition to relatives. Lydia, in choosing a new sacredness, a new identity as a Christian and a new relationship with God, brings everyone in her circle of home along with her.
And it is no small thing. From this comes the permission we cherish, to carry our children to God and to include them in the household of faithful people. But so much more: the custom of adoption, of taking the child of another woman into your heart, your home, and your life and calling that child daughter or son, saying before God and everyone, it isn’t the umbilical cord that makes this my child, but the cord of love that binds our hearts. The fashioning of nations and kingdoms that are not based on biology emerges from this record of how you can take on Christian identity. Every time a new crop of Americans become citizens in a ceremony of vows and commitments, this story is the gate through which they pass. In so many parts of the earth, this idea is still suspect, still an impossible dream.
And the hope of the refugees of the world is linked to this story. Think of the lost boys of Sudan, or Anne of Green Gables and the boats full of children who were sent abroad in the clearances of the Scottish highlands. Carlos Eire, a Cuban scholar of medieval religion at Yale, spoke here last Monday about his own airlift out of Cuba as a boy of 11. A few weeks before that I had a conversation with a Vietnamese man who was airlifted at age 16, leaving behind his family of mother, father and 17 brothers and sisters. Without a single word of English at his command, he was sent to an American foster mother in Montana, who then moved to Boston and brought him with her. And this story is the deep root of the hope that his Catholic parents in Vietnam and his Catholic foster mother in Montana held onto, that this could work out. Lydia’s sense of baptism has drawn us together around the world, and created a web of survival for those who are lost but not forgotten.
Baptism emerges from a dream and an adventure, which are remembered in words and in things that go far beyond the power of words . Today at the font a family that loves deeply and well gathered together to baptize their child, with every intention of holding onto him forever. Thaddeus’ family knows that, even if he has his family of origin around him all his days, still he needs to belong to a larger family, because Christians are geographic, cultural, national and ethnic egalitarians. There is no one people to whom we “belong” as Christians, but we proclaim, as Paul did by his traveling preaching, that God lavishly loves all the world, each person, and every place. There is for each of us no place like home, but home is not a single center in our world. Instead the world is, for us, a constellation of points equidistant from the heart of God. What Paul was doing down by that river in Philippi, was declaring that anyone and everyone is welcome in the peace of Christ. A Bosnian Muslim is no further away from God's love than an American Christian. A Honduran Pentecostal is no closer to God's love than an Oxford atheist.
So Lydia of Thyatira became the mother of the Church, in a very real sense, of the Church that was about to blossom and grow as strangers became brothers and sisters, in baptism, and in a new form of life that has remade the world. And so we remember that long ago day when Lydia went and got her whole household and said, Here we are, all of us, we all want to be children of God. Amen.
The reading from Revelation holds an interesting image, of the Holy City of God, Jerusalem, coming down out of the clouds tosettle on us all, and bringing its special light, which does not come from sun or moon or lamp, but only from God, and its healing leaves that can cure nations, and the absence within it of all churches and religions, because God is there. And that is what heaven is, according to Revelation.
The summer after my freshman year in college, my roommate and I spent time with each other’s families. I think it was our parents’ idea, we had little to say about the plans. She came from a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, and I remember that all the homes in the town were made of brick, which was astonishing to a New England girl like me. We went to museums, and some kind of historical village built by Henry Ford, about which I remember nothing at all.
At last we set out in the car to drive across Canada, and eventually, down to Connecticut, to my home. We visited Toronto and Ottawa, the only time I’ve been to those cities in fact, and I remember realizing, in Ottawa, that Canada really was another country, and not just another state. We also went to Quebec, where I have been other times. But mostly we were together in the car.
My roommate’s father was a doctor, a GP who had grown up in Brazil, the son of Swiss-German missionaries. He walked with a pronounced limp, the result of having polio in Brazil and one leg ended up shorter than the other. He liked to tell stories of Brazil and Switzerland. And, he could yodel. And he did yodel, all the way across Canada in the car. I was reading The Lord of the Rings at the time, so engrossed in finding out how Frodo and the very romantic Ranger were doing that I missed most of the Canadian countryside, being immersed instead in Middle Earth, which for me will always have yodelling in the background.
When we reached Quebec, we spent several days touring the sights, and each night we ate at some French restaurant, my roommate being a French major. The ingrained French delight in wine was a source of some consternation to the good doctor, whose missionary parents had been opposed to drinking. The waiters would bring wine to table, and he would waive it away, and the waiters would look at him reproachfully as they brought us food and no wine.
But then the third night there was a Swiss wine on the menu, and even some Brazilian wine, and he found it too appealing to pass up, and so we all had wine, and the waiter was happy. And it hit me then, how hard his life must have been when he was our age, coming to yet another new country, America, and having that limp and a rather strange accent, and an abhorrence of wine, and the yodel. I remember that evening, in the restaurant, more clearly than the rest of the trip, because I had that experience of compassion for the struggle of his life, and of understanding how he was trying to share his story with us.
Well, after that my parents toured us around every colonial site in New England, and finally we were able to return to the world that really interested us, the world of the Beatles and Tolkien novels, Bergman movies and our current heart throbs, and getting new Bass Weejuns for school, which were the ‘in’ thing back in the day. The doctor gave us each Swiss coins to put in our loafers, I recall.
The next Swiss-German who came into my life was a NT professor in graduate school. He did not yodel but he did have the strangest English accent, because he had taught for some years at the Sorbonne, and his accent combined Swiss-German and French, making him terribly difficult to understand. After class we would huddle in the hall putting together the words each of us had figured out.
On Fridays, at 8:30 in the morning, a terribly early time for students, the Dean, a Swedish Lutheran theologian, held a Lutheran communion service, and his homilies were so well loved that a lot of us would make our way across town to turn up. Most of us were uninspired by the Lutheran prayers, but the Swiss-German professor clearly loved them, and would stand to recite them, and the Creed, in a firm and richly accented voice.
And then one day we learned that his son, his only son, had died, by his own hand as they say, and in a particularly awful way. Our professor was gone for a couple weeks, and when he came back, on Friday mornings he just sat in his pew, reciting nothing, not even singing the hymn. After some weeks, one Friday morning he stood up and said that he wanted to thank us, because we were carrying him to Jerusalem, and he could not lift himself into the presence of God without us. Right now, he said, his heart was like a stone, he could not lift it, because he was so caught in the death of his son. He spoke a few words about that death and it was not easy for him. In our prayers, he said we were lifting him, carrying him till his heart could recover. And then the Dean, in his homily, talked about the son’s death in some detail. It was hard for us to hear, because the boy was only a few years older than we were. But we could see how the Dean’s words were lifting some of the burden from the professor, allowing him to nod and cry. The Dean invited us to pray for him, and we did, lifting up words of hope for his healing and for his son. And we each went away with some of that pain in our hearts, and gave some of our energy and attention – and our hope – to this foreign man with the funny accent who sat among us but whom we hardly knew until his heart was broken.
And that is what it means to love one another as Christ has loved us. To take on some of the pain another carries, which can only be made real to us in the details. Pain is not generic, it is specific to the wound. And that kind of prayer, we call it intercession, is about this kind of sharing. It is not about submitting a list to God on a throne in the sky, asking for something to be done apart from us. It is about offering the part of our heart that holds the hurt of another, so that our energy and our desire and love become a kind of helium in which the one whose pain we share is held in the shared heart of Christ. Shared heart? Yes, that is what Easter brings us to, the sharing of hearts and the carrying of one another’s pain, in which we are all part of the resurrection of Christ on earth. Christ rose on Easter still wounded – remember, it was doubting Thomas who said he could only believe when he had touched the wounds – those were what made Christ real. This sacred heart, which together we , in prayer and love, are, can bear these wounds, without losing its strength.
One of you, who is facing a very hard time right now, told me of asking a childhood friend for prayers and hearing back that prayers were properly always to be praise, not petitions. Where did that idea arise? Does not Jesus even pray for his own anguish, asking God, please take this cup away from me? And the long afflicted come to him, saying they have prayed and prayed, and he blesses their faith, which is that they continue to pray, and takes their pain into his heart and together they find healing, together they walk the walk through pain.
Such prayers as these, Jesus said, are unending. Our hearts have so much room, and everything in them lives on. So it is for me, that whenever I see the movie The Lord of the Rings, or see old photos of myself in my penny loafers, or hear yodeling, or remember something the professor taught -- or hear of a new suicide -- part of my heart remembers the humanity and hardships these Swiss-German men faced, in faith and with love. And amazingly, the memories no longer hurt, but are gifts for me, blessings. They are still prayers, that is, when they come to me my heart softens and opens. They have returned to me as grace, these prayers that once took part of my heart away.
Church is the place where we can bring pain that is too terrible to bear, and find in one another the heart of God, of whom, in faith we say, You are not lost, even when we cannot find you. That is love, and it is also prayer.
These words are from the great Mystic Ibn Arabi, a Sufi:
My heart has become capable of every form:
It is a pasture for gazelles
And a monastery for Christian monks,
And a temple for idols,
And the pilgrim's Ka'ba,
And the tablets of the Torah,
And the Book of the Koran.
I follow the religion of Love:
Whatever way love's camel takes,
That is my religion, my faith.
Amen.
Rev. Nancy Rockwell
Easter 3
Peter and the Pursuit of Happiness
Who among us has not turned to some rhythmic activity for consolation and healing?
When devastatingly unexpected news pierces our lives, when failure or reversal of fortune, or some tearing in the fabric of intimate relationships occurs, when we feel ourselves separated from a beloved child by silence or by words that fail, or unable to communicate with a partner whose life has been one fabric with ours for decades, or when a mother dies and we discover how great is our loss, or worse, when we lose a child, or when we are unsettled by smaller slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that bring gloom into the day, this then is when we turn to the safety of some familiar ritual and rhythm. Music, a five mile walk, running laps around a track; splitting logs, washing the floor by hand, hanging out the wash, knitting or nailing, any of these can become a meditation, a centering, a finding of our way back from the vise grip of Anxiety, the spirit Jesus called the Demon Legion, the spirit whose suspicions can taint our every thought. And it is something rhythmic that will begin to set us free, some rocking that may belong to our most ancient life forms which dwelt in the sea. In fact, it can be the sea itself that sets us free. It was to the sea that Peter went on Easter night.
Anxious? You bet he was! Remember, he had not yet seen anything of the Easter Jesus but an empty tomb. He had heard from the women, Mary Magdalene in particular, but their strange and garbled tales were the opposite of comforting. And why on earth, he wonders, would Jesus return to them, and not to him? He cannot help but remember, with deep pain, the final words he had heard from Jesus, when he had sworn I will never desert you, Lord, and Jesus said directly to him, You will deny me three times before the cock has finished crowing. And, standing by a campfire outside Pilate’s house, in the darkest night of his life, Peter had done just that – There, that man! He’s with him! - No, not I, I don’t know him! Three times over he had said such things. So – if Jesus is alive, what now?
In his consternation Peter has taken to the familiar, the rhythms of the fishing boat, setting out to do what his body knew well, what has set him free many a time: hauling nets. The night hours have gone by. And the familiar ache has settled in, arms, shoulders, back, calves, neck, knees, feet, all tired and discouraged, for they have caught nothing. So - even the familiar has failed him. He does not feel better, the anxiety has not eased.
Then a little light reaches into the shadows of the nets. And on the shore, a fire can be seen, and a man beside it who calls out to them: Try the other side. Cheeky stranger, what gives him the right? And yet they do it, and suddenly the net is bursting with fish, they can’t haul it in.
And Peter knows that the cheeky stranger is Jesus. It’s the Lord, the Lord! Putting his shirt on Peter jumps out of the boat and wades to the shore, amazed. And Jesus, while feeding him, heals his wound, saying to him, next to the campfire, three times: Do you love me? And Peter responds Yes, you know I do. It’s Friday dawn all over again. But this time, without denials, this time, with affirmation. And now Peter the Denier, the man who caught Nothing, the one whom Jesus once called Satan, is now put in charge of feeding the world.
This is no small thing that is happening. We worship courage, bravery. And no one likes a coward. Nero, the emperor of Rome who persecuted Christians, was a fiend, relishing torture. He liked to take Christians and nail them to stakes and then set them on fire, using them for torches to light his garden parties. These martyrs became even more heroic in the telling of their tales. And those who ran and hid, those who denied being Christians, those who would go to make offerings at the Emperor’s temple to avoid arrest, were despised among the Christian community. During World War I, white feathers, a sign of cowardice, were given in public to men who were thought to be avoiding military service. And at the end of World War II, Jewish rabbis faced the dilemma of whether or not to welcome back those who had saved themselves by public conversions to Christianity, by saying the Creed (with crossed fingers, so to speak) to save their skins, when so many died. We have our own everyday versions of this, telling ourselves that the church belongs to us because we’ve been here longer than some, or work harder, or know the rhythms, the music, the way things should be done.
But here is Jesus, welcoming Peter, specially feeding him, and giving to him, to Peter, the coward, the primary right to lead the church that will gather after him. Peter gets this honor, this welcome, this recognition for his pain. Peter!
Nightfishing. It’s about faith and dreams, about finding God in the darkness of the soul, as much as it is about the activity of hauling nets in the midnight sea. Nightfishing. It’s about forgiveness, and mending what has been torn. And most of all, it’s about a different rhythm, a new happiness, in which the old rhythms and the old doing are of no avail. The old ways, familiar as they are, leave you empty. That’s been the learning of Easter. It’s this new way, the fish you were given not the fish you caught for yourself, the failure that was lifted by forgiveness, not by atonement, the commission that is not about being strong, but is about being generous, this new way is the way of happiness. Easter rises like that, out of despair, and out of futility, out of empty nets. In this good news is the fish haul that feeds the world.
Thomas Merton, in The New Seeds of Contemplation, wrote: A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying him. It "consents," so to speak, to God’s creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree.
The more a tree is like itself, the more it is like God. If it tried to be like something else which it was never intended to be, it would be less like God and therefore it would give less glory.
To be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of . . . salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. Trees and animals have no problem. With us it is different. We can be ourselves or not, as we please.
Peter learns that, in striving to be the bravest, the truest, the most loyal to Jesus, the dearest, he was not true to himself. For he was none of these things. The old rhythms did not save him, not did knowing all that had happened before, or what they used to do. The thing that could save him, and the only thing, was trying something unexpected, trying the other side. And when he found Jesus there, what was shown was how Peter loved, generously, devotedly, even in the midst of his failure and his doubt. And that, according to Jesus, gave Peter the aptitude for feeding and tending all the lost lambs, the lonely and the unloved and the laboring, who are just what Peter himself had been that Easter Day, till Jesus found him.
So let yourself be fed with unexpected fish, let yourself be found in your failures. Love one another, as God has loved you. In this, you give glory, and you praise. Amen.
Rev. Nancy Rockwell
Easter
Signs of Hope
You get used to looking at things a certain way. A place. Or yourself in the mirror, the toothbrush beside the sink. God, even. You get used to things being a certain way.
And with familiar things, you see them because you expect to see them, you see them because you've seen them before. You see them because you know them, like the shape of your own house in the darkness, where you can walk through all the rooms without turning on a light because you know the place. And that, you say to yourself, is what truth is, something that is the same in the darkness as well as in the light.
It was just so that the women went to the grave on Easter morning. Expecting to see what they had already seen before. Jesus, dead. Prepared to deal with death. They came to that place in tears of sorrow, sorrow for themselves, for their friends, for the breaking of their hopes into irretrievable fragments. They came in loneliness, each one drawn inward into her own sorrow, and the pain of that death.
And then, suddenly, they found the grave empty, the body gone. The pressure of that was terrifying enough. Their hearts were pounding with the immensity of it all. And another unexpected happens. Those voices, saying to them, three ordinary women, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”
Huh? As if the question were nothing to ask. Truly terrified now, they bowed their faces to the ground. Which seems reasonable when you consider the enormity of their discovery: the reality that the loneliness of death does not exist outside of the presence of God. And therefore, death is not so lonely, after all.
Imagine: all you are used to seeing suddenly will not come into focus. Something you are not used to seeing insists on being there and being familiar, instead of alien. Then, and ever after then, how do you tell the truth?
The truth of Easter is that it is the unity of people who love, not the individuality of Jesus, that survived the grave. The different stories of Easter that are told in the four gospels all say that Jesus was unrecognizable to his dear ones. Mary mistook him for a gardener. Two disciples walked eight miles with him arguing all the way, and didn’t know it was Jesus. Jesus did not emerge to take up life where he left off. The point of all the stories is that those who loved him, once they knew him at Easter, they took up where he left off, and he moved on, to new life, larger life, while holding on to them. He lives, he loves, we live, and we are with him.
John Dominic Crossan, the foremost NT scholar in the world today, a Catholic and the writer of profound books on the life and times of Jesus, points out that, in the earliest iconography of the resurrection, which is found in the Coptic churches in Egypt and the Greek Orthodox churches that existed before Rome, in their art the resurrection is never portrayed as something Jesus did alone. It is a participatory event – Jesus has spent the days since Good Friday not lying around asleep in his tomb, but hard at work in the land of the dead, and even in Hell, harrowing, which is an old word that means reaping, reaping lives, the lives of those who rise with him on Easter. In their art Jesus comes forth from his grave leading a multitude skyward, and in one hand he is holding the hand of Abel, the first martyr in the Hebrew scriptures, and , and Abel is leading a line of Old Testament figures; and in his other hand, Jesus is holding the hand of John the Baptist, the first martyr of the New Testament, and John is leading forth a multitude of the rest of us, of the world.
And then there are these women, standing there at the tomb discovering this. Mary Magdalene, whom Luke wrote had once been occupied by seven demons and Dan Brown wrote was Jesus’ lover, and medieval painters portrayed as having bright red hair and being overly emotional, and two other women, the three of them becoming the first folks in the world to realize that Jesus was no longer someone they could know by touching him, sitting near him, listening to him. His is now a life they can only know by living it, by becoming him. Only by becoming him, can they be raised up from the death in which they, but not he, were caught that Easter morning. And that’s the invitation of Easter: catch hold, and hang on.
Here are a couple of stories of people who’ve caught hold, and have held out their hands and pulled us along:
First, there’s Greg Mortenson. He spoke at the Music Hall in December and at the High School here in Exeter a few weeks ago, and he is amazing. He’s written books about how he caught hold, and his book, Three Cups of Tea, has been on the NY Times bestseller list for a couple years now. He was a child when his father, a medical missionary in Tanzania, died, leaving the family impoverished and suffering. And then, when Greg Mortenson was in his early twenties his youngest sister, who had epilepsy, died in her sleep. Mortenson was devastated. And he determined to take his sister’s necklace up the mountain K2 and leave it there at the top. And this journey, to anoint her life with his trek and his sorrow, would, he thought, be the final blessing he needed. But the climb did not go well. He was overcome with altitude sickness and had to go down without reaching the top. At the bottom he needed to stay for some weeks to get well. And he felt such a failure. Bad weather had forced him to descend into Afghanistan instead of Nepal. But then, while he was healing, he got to know the people who lived there. Especially the girls, who were in spirit like his sister, but who were also illiterate. He got to know them. One cup of tea at a time. And when he was healed he was also transformed.
What he had expected to see refused to come into view. And something he was not used to seeing insisted on being there and being familiar instead of alien. How does he tell the truth now? He tells it one story at a time, and in all of them, one of his hands is joined to his sister and the Afghani people, and his other hand is joined to us, and we are all rising together, in the giddy Easter-like understanding that he found his sister’s alive at the bottom of the mountain, among a people he had never met before.
And then there is Amos Winter, a local New Hampshire fellow who is a grad student in mechanical engineering at MIT. Amos Winter’s girl friend went to Tanzania with the Peace Corps. And Amos Winter wanted to go and see her. But how to get to Tanzania was his problem. No money, in short. So he rooted around MIT for some kind of project that would pay his way over there, he didn’t care what. And he found a group working on wheelchairs for African countries, where there are a large number of people who need them, who have lost legs to accidents, infections and mostly landmines. But the terrain of unpaved, rutted, rocky roads, and dirt-floored houses make ordinary wheelchairs unusable.
I’m not sure where things are with the girlfriend, but the truth is that Amos Winter fell in love with wheelchair bound Africans. What began as a lark for Amos Winter has turned into a commitment that involves his working lifetime. He has engineered revolutionary designs for wheelchairs that work in countries where they are desperately needed. His heart went out, in a lasting way, to people he found suffering with disabilities, and who, like him, had no access to money to make their lives turn out the way they wanted.
So, as Jesus predicted and as the earliest Christian art shows, it’s the harrowing of hell that makes Easter an accessible story. And hell, like heaven, as Jesus taught, doesn’t wait till after you die to begin. The kingdoms of heaven and of hell are among us even now. Those who share your hell, your pain, and those you find in the journey through your own pain, those are the people who raise you and whom you raise in the Easter of this world, in what the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas called the “sky stride of the always slain in battle . . . the world winding home.”
Thomas Merton, another extraordinary Catholic writer, wrote: When the sun rises each one of us is summoned by the living and the dead to praise God.
And whatever kind of tomb we are in, the shut Ark of a perilous journey, the dry bones of people who have lost hope, or the despair of the grieving, as Isaiah wrote, O afflicted ones and storm-tossed, you are, in the presence of God, established in jewels and priceless stones.
-Thomas Merton 1915-1968, in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
And the Kentucky poet Wendell Berry advises:
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Expect the end of the world.
Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
“For I tell you, this Scripture must be fulfilled in me: and he was counted among the lawless.”
We have followed Jesus among rural Galileans, among the diseased and despised, among women notorious for their sexual liaisons. We have followed Jesus as he sat with a madman clanking his chains, accompanied a Roman centurion with a sick son and went to the home of a rabbi with a dead daughter. He has hung around with a most unpopular tax collector, Zaccheus the Short, and short has a number of meanings. And Jesus has collected a motley crew of disciples that includes a woman whom he healed of seven demons and two brothers who are known as the sons of thunder. Now, as they end a Seder meal they have shared in hiding, he tells them he has one more group to enter, the lawless. And it is among that group that he will die, on a cross, which is the peculiarly shameful death reserved for the lawless, for thieves, runaway slaves, and murderers.
Jesus has preached peace always. Yet, someone there has two swords, and the moment Jesus speaks of lawlessness, they think violence will become an option. We make the same connection today. But Jesus will not allow it. So part of the Way, then, is to descend into the depths of living hell and remain peaceful, remain God’s person. But the two swords remind us that this is not a beautiful death. This part of the world, the lawless part, is full of terror. This terror is so real it can be tasted. Jesus’ prayers are desperate, his sweat is mingled with blood Luke says, and it takes an angel to give him the strength he needs.
Does the moment surprise us? Before his birth his mother Mary proclaimed that by her son God would "bring down rulers from their thrones, fill the hungry with good things, and send the rich away empty". And the aged Simeon prophesied: "This child is destined to be a sign that will be spoken against". Thirty years after his birth, Jesus burst onto the public scene, according to Mark, with the provocative declaration, "Repent! The kingdom of God is at hand".
After three years of itinerant preaching, teaching and healing that focused on the poor, the imprisoned, the blind, and all who were oppressed, his family has tried to silence him and the authorities have had enough. And so perhaps it is not such a shock to find that one of his disciples, Judas, has also had enough. Judas, who was a member of the Zealot party, a group that believed in armed conflict, had hoped Jesus meant to escalate his agitation against Rome. And on no day would Judas’ hopes have been higher than on Palm Sunday.
The two preeminent scholars of the New Testament in our own time, Marcus Borg, a Protestant, and John Dominic Crossan, a Catholic, are convinced that Palm Sunday constituted Jesus’ most public act of disregard for Roman authority. Both scholars are persuaded there were two processions entering Jerusalem that day, in the spring of 30 AD. From the west, the Roman governor Pilate entered Jerusalem with all the pomp of state power. The public would have been notified and a crowd expected. And in a blatant parody, ‘king’ Jesus descended the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem from the east in fulfillment of Zechariah's ancient prophecy: "Look, your king is coming to you . . . riding on a donkey." Jesus won the day by winning the crowd, who surged to his parade, roaring their approval, proclaiming with laughter an alternate social vision.
Judas has been the more devastated to discover, then, that Jesus is not going to become the leader of a revolution. Instead, he is going to immerse himself among this final group of the despised, the lawless, the desperate, and the despairing, and he is going to be killed among them.
Judas is indignant that the discipline of the journey is breaking down – women are acting on their own initiative. Some of the women have prepared a lavish meal. John’s gospel even refers to two rather lavish meals put on by Martha and Mary that week. And then there is that upstart woman who bought such expensive perfumed oil and wasted it. All that money! Judas, who is after all pretty traditional, is aghast. And in reply to his objections, Jesus praises the women. Jesus upbraids Judas, who just cannot believe that things have changed.
This is where the prayer of Jesus is so important, a physical and emotional struggle, in which he becomes open to changing his own understanding of his vocation and of the challenges of his life. He has done this before: he began his ministry thinking that his role was to preach and teach, traveling from town to town. A crucial shift came when he realized this was not enough, that telling stories about a world where things were different was not enough, he also had to act out his message, get involved with people’s lives, touch their forbidden sins and sicknesses, their hostilities and fears. He began breaking the Sabbath laws, and healing where healing was taboo. And then he reached the crossroads, where he understood he had to enter Jerusalem as he did. Now, the final hour is at hand. Not, as Judas hoped, an hour of rebellion and victory. No, he is here to mingle with the failures of this world.
The great poet W.H. Auden was asked once why he was a Christian, instead of a Buddhist or a Confucian, since all these religions share similar ethical values. And Auden said, “Because nothing in the figure of Buddha or Confucius fills me with the overwhelming desire to scream, “crucify him.” As Auden knew, the part of ourselves that remains to be offered to God is the part of us that foams in rage against Jesus because he does not do what we want, he did not come to tell us we were wonderful just as we are. The part of us that doesn’t mind the procession of the powerful, with their weapons and their wiliness and their will to ravage the earth in order to subdue it. The part of us that feels the way Judas felt.
On Palm Sunday Jesus invites us to join his subversive counter-procession into all the world. Christian subversion takes as its model Jesus himself, "who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross.
Over and over, across the centuries and today, in small towns and great cities, people have acted out these roles and read this story. And the question remains, will we walk on – or will we turn away as Judas did, looking for a different answer? Have we the courage to walk on, into the hour of the power of darkness? How shall we answer the question: Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Rev. Nancy Rockwell
Lent 4
21 March 2010
Where there is no extravagance there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding. -Oscar Wilde 1854-1900
All the four gospels tell this story, but John tells it in differently from the others. The others set this story of the extravagant woman whom Jesus praised at the door of the story of the Passover Seder Jesus and his disciples kept. But John sets this story at a meal shared between Lazarus and Jesus. The others say it was the crowds at Palm Sunday or the overthrowing of the moneychangers’ tables at the temple that set the authorities against Jesus. John says it was the raising of Lazarus from the dead that set the leaders of Jerusalem against Jesus, leaders who were fearful that the crowds would bring the wrath of Rome down on all their heads. John does write that the Passover was near, and he will go on to tell of the Seder we remember. But this extravagantly loving woman, with her expensive oil and loving gesture, John says anointed Jesus when he ate with Lazarus, the one whom Jesus woke from the grave four days after his death.
This, then, is a sign story. Sign stories point beyond themselves to something deeper and more significant that is going to happen, and to a deeper knowledge of God, who is at work far beyond the immediate sign. What is going to happen is that Jesus is going to die. And we are asked to look at that through the lens of extravagant love, which is the only way we can begin to understand Easter.
Peter Haynes, a commentator on the Bible, writes of all the fragrances at work in this story, and at Mary and Martha’s house that night. Who was smelling what, he asks? A while before that night, when their brother first became ill, the two sisters had sent for Jesus. But Jesus had not come, days and days had passed, during which Lazarus had died and been buried. When he did arrive, Jesus stood at the grave and wept. And each of the weeping sisters came to him and said, If you had been here Lazarus would not have died. Jesus said he would raise their brother from his grave, and then the sisters protested that the stench would be horrible and they wouldn’t be able to bear the sight. But Jesus did call Lazarus, according to John, and Lazarus came out. The mind boggles, at least my mind does. This is not my favorite story in the bible. It’s bizarre to say the least. And I have no idea what to make of this tale.
But it is a sign story, and moving on, we come to this supper, and then it begins to become more human, more real, for me. Jesus has come back, and is sharing a meal with Lazarus, who has been through this unimaginable event. Unimaginable. John tells us Lazarus is now able to welcome his friend Jesus. Yet one of the odors in this house, Peter Haynes writes, is the odor of death. Whatever condition Lazarus is now in, the disciples do remember what happened to him, and the aroma of that may be stuck in their minds. Is it a pleasing odor? If the aroma of what previously happened in Bethany is too pleasing, then perhaps we have not really smelled death, perhaps we are not aware of what is about to come to Jesus, perhaps we are treating Easter as a way to escape death, but Jesus does not do that.
Some scholars say this nameless woman was anointing Jesus in preparation for his own death. Maybe so. Maybe not. Did she consciously buy the perfume for his funeral, as Jesus said, or was her purchase only later revealed (even to her) to have been for this purpose? How often do our actions take on new meaning after we have done them? Regardless of her motivations (which we do not know), the fragrance of the costly oil filled the room as she anointed Jesus' feet. And here is another aroma. Beautiful, sensual, soothing, to Jesus anyway.
And expensive. Money has an aroma of its own, doesn’t it? Chanel perfume, the bouquet of fine wines, the extravagant flowers that adorn the best hotels, oh money does have a scent about it. Judas has a nose for money. He is onto this like a flash. Was it merely Mary's perfumed oil against which he reacted, or was the stench of the earlier tomb still bothering him? Or, as the text says, was it all just a matter of greed on his part?
Well, let’s suspend this story for the moment, and think about another one, another. We could move to the Hospice movement, which world wide applies this story to the care of those who are soon to die, pouring upon them the fragrant oil of love and devotion. And we could consider Mother Teresa, who took that love specifically to the unwanted poor who were dying in the streets of Calcutta. But today I want to ask us to consider the another woman who loved extravagantly, and engaged in an extravagant anointing; Jane Goodall, the woman who helped all of us, and all the world, learn about chimpanzees. Goodall has written that it was her goal in life to become the poet laureate of England. But she did have a fascination with wild animals, and her mother helped her to travel to Africa to meet the famous Dr. Lewis Leakey, who was the frontiersman in biological studies of wild creatures in their habitats.
Jane Goodall knew she was going on an adventure which she thought would be a few briuef weeks. Leakey knew these few things: that the chimpanzees were incredibly endangered by human ignorance and disdain; to save them, it would take someone devoting years to getting to know them, and teaching the world about their beauty, their value, their desirability, the worthiness of their salvation. And who could do that better than a beautiful 24 year old blonde Englishwoman like Jane Goodall? All he had to do was convince her to live in the jungle. Her large heart made it surprisingly easy. And so, against all odds, against the fact that she was the wrong gender to be a scientist, or a disciple of Leakey, against the fact that she did not havea graduate degree in biology and so Leakey’s colleagues called her – disdainfully – the poster girl for the chimpanzees, against all of that, Jane Goodall turned out to be the best friend chimpanzees could have. The media would pay attention to her beauty and in so doing discovered the beauty of chimpanzees. There was a good deal of anointing going on here.
But we need to be careful what we smell in the perfume of her story. Because saving the chimps is expensive, and requires commitment, from local farmers and western world economies. So naturally lots of people don’t want to do it. And observing the chimps for years, and becoming their friends, required an extravagant amount of heartbreak as well as love from Goodall, who could see every day how death was drawing closer every year. She talks nowadays of families of chimps trying to live in parts of the jungle that have been have been cut off from the larger forest and from other chimp colonies, and she says they are doomed by too small a gene pool and by the constant reduction of foraging land.
Well, so what, you might say, and you might add, Jesus didn’t die for chimps. But is that really true? Doesn’t John tell us that God so loved the world, the world, the world? Is it preposterous to compare these two stories? Isn’t it John’s claim that Jesus’ life was given for a world of the lost, the lonely, the left-behind, the unloved, those seen as less than human? And didn’t Jesus spend his life observing and befriending those who needed understanding? And aren’t we somehow nowadays aware, at least dimly, that we simply cannot reserve our love, our service and our ideas of salvation, for human beings alone, because we are all interdependent in this world? And are not chimpanzees our cousins on the family tree of evolution? Where there is no extravagance there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding. -Oscar Wilde said it, and he was imprisoned in Ireland for homosexuality when he said it.
Judas’ objection about the money was not the real issue in his resistance to extravagant love. The real fragrance wafting through the room is sorrow over the impending death of Jesus, of which his disciples have so far caught only a faint sniff. But what they do smell is fear, the fear that things are out of control and not going their way. Fear is palpable, and has an odor all its own. All too soon everything they know is going to change. No longer will they sense Jesus’ physical presence, the aroma of his soap, his body, the oil he puts in his hair. That will be, forever, gone. Soon, though, the new scent of Easter will pervade the world. It will have cost far more than the objectors every dreamed would be spent. And to Judas’ chagrin, it will be offered, extravagantly, to everyone. Amen.
Rev. Nancy Rockwell
Epiphany 6
14 February 2010
Shining
The story, in the Book of Exodus, has it that Moses, when he came down from Mt. Sinai where he had spent many days sitting and talking with God, had a shining face. So full of shine was his face, that the people were awed by it, and in the way of such things, they didn’t get too close to him. So Moses put a veil on, so he could get on with what he wanted to do, issuing commands and such. Among those was his command to build an Ark for the Covenant, the Ten Commandments he had brought back down the mountain. And the Ark the people built had a seat on top, called the mercy seat. Whenever they woke up and the Ark was covered by a cloud, they knew God was on the mercy seat, and Moses went into the cloud and talked, and when he came out, by golly his face was all glowing, all radiant and shiny again, and he had to put the veil back on for a while
We know this look. It’s the look of love. Popular songs sing about it, the glow of lovers. Hollywood makes movies about it. And you and I have seen it. Love and a cough cannot be hid, the saying goes. And it’s easy to spot those who are in love. The old story is saying that being in the presence of God enveloped Moses in love, and that Moses came back from the presence of God glowing like a love-struck teenager.
Paul talks about that story in his letter to the Corinthians, when he says we, too, will absorb that shining, that glow, when we grow close to God. Our face, too, will be radaint with God-shine, when we have let ourselves be loved by getting close to God.
Peter sees this shining in Jesus: he sees Jesus’ face suffused with light, and his clothing becoming all white. Peter’s reverence goes further as he keeps on watching -- in this shining in and around Jesus Peter begins to see other faces, the faces of Moses and Elijah, and he perceives that this glow is about some kind of transcendent communication, some reverent life that breaks through the barriers of bodies, time, even mortality. Of course, this is what lovers experience in each other, too.
At the end of Peter’s story, when they come down from the mountain they are on, Jesus meets a father with a child whose face is full of darkness and rage, contorted the text says, by the demons that are in control of him. This child is the very opposite of what Moses and Jesus became in the presence of God. This child is letting no one love him. The disciples are afraid of the boy and they are therefore powerless, but Jesus uses all the shining that is in him, in his face and aura, in his heart and mind, in his spirit and being, and he loves that boy. And the child is healed. So the purpose of love is to heal, according to Jesus. Love exists to heal the world.
Reverence
Hollywood tends to see the face of love, and its shine, only in new lovers. But most of us are able to see that shine in those who have loved for long years, too. It isn’t just being married that gives you that shine, it’s the aura of trust and communication, commitment and devotion that makes love evident in the old as well as the young, and between parents and children, teachers and students, doctors and patients, pastors and people. But you can be married a long time and not have it, it isn’t a guarantee of any relationship.
An essential part of this shine, in all these people, is reverence. The practice of reverence takes time, takes a willingness to turn aside, as Moses did, to the burning bush, to the Mountain of holiness, to the cloud upon the Ark, and drop your agenda and spend time there. So yes, the reverence that brings love between people is tied to the reverence we can all feel for the earth, and how that can ease our spirits.
The easiest practice of reverence I know is simply to sit down somewhere outside, preferably by a body of water, and pay attention for twenty minutes or more. With any luck, you will begin to see souls in pebbles, ants, small mounds of moss, an acorn on its way to becoming an oak tree. If you can see water, you may wonder what it is saying, and where it is going. You may even feel the beating of your own heart, which one theologian calls that miracle of ingenuity that does its work with no thought or instruction from you. You did not make your heart, any more than you made a tree. You may even find your attention extends to someone walking by, a stranger to you, yet now, because of the pebbles and the ants, you can also see the stranger’s soul. There is something he is working on in his life, the same way you are working on something in your life. You are related, even if you have never met. In this way, Jesus, full of shining and Belovedness, met and knew the child who was full of fury and darkness and anger.
Suffering. Deep suffering makes theologians of us all, says Barbara Brown Taylor. The questions we ask from deep pain are huge: Why? Why now? Why me? Why this? Brown Taylor says these questions are just as relevant when we are in pleasure as they are when we are in pain. Who deserves the way a warm bath feels after a hard day’s work? Or who deserves the smell of someone who loves you nd gives you a hug? Holding a sleeping child gives deep answers to many a question, and lying in the yard at night looking up at the stars can admit you to divine mysteries such as Peter saw Jesus entering into when his face was filled with shining, such as people saw in Moses after he had been in the clouds with God.
The daily practice of incarnation – which is being in the body with full confidence that God speaks the language of flesh, of bodies, of life – is a pedagogy as old as the gospels. Why else do you think Jesus spent his last night on earth teaching his disciples to wash each other’s feet and share food?
And life in the flesh, and love, are what bring us to Ash Wednesday, which leads us into Lent, when we confront our own mortality. We who take on the name Beloved follow Jesus into the wilderness, so that we too may be tested. Popular religion focusses on the spirituality of success, so much so that we do not know the first thing about the spiritual fruits that may be gained from failure. When we fall ill, lose our jobs, wreck our marriages or alienate our children, it can be hard to shake the shame of getting lost in our lives. And yet most of us, when asked to name the times that changed us for the better, will point to these wilderness times.
Perhaps the father of the afflicted child, in later years, pointed to this anguished journey he made to the stranger, Jesus, seeking help. Perhaps he spoke of the shining face of the man who was able to help his son. How many of you have made anguished journeys, to MGH, to an adult child in trouble, to the bedside of a failing parent, to court, to counselors, taking with you your own despair and fear of failure, and perhaps someone over whom your despair and your love were falling. And whether or not you found a cure, healing does always come, in peace, unexpected laughter, the kindness of strangers, hope handed to you like a treasure, in words, medicine, a second chance, a ray of sunshine falling on your face. These then become shining moments in your life, snatched from the jaws of defeat. They becomes ways in which you enter into Belovedness and learn to see the beauty all around you, and the mystery, and God, even in stones. These are your stories, for you to tell, love stories, of your own flesh, and that of others, of your own opening like a flower into the light of this world, and of the mystery of God that runs through it all. Amen.
Rev. Nancy Rockwell
Epiphany 5 7 February 2010
Woe is me, for I am lost, Isaiah cries out, in response to his experience of the glory of God. And Peter, too, reacts this way. After working all night, his arms and back aching from throwing and hauling huge and empty nets, his muscles groaning from the repeated motion and the nets growing heavier as they pull more water with them, after all this, Jesus comes into his boat and bids him to give it one more try. And then the abundance overwhelms him. It is only then that Peter cries out Woe is me.
Isaiah, too, arrives at the doorway of holiness in staggering emptiness. The king has died, and everything is tottering – the economy, safety, peace and proserity of his world are draining away. He enters the temple a broken man. And then he has this experience of the abundant presence of God, of seraphim flying to and fro and singing Holy, Holy, Holy. Heaven and earth are full of your glory, and of smoke and the throne of the Presence, and of overwhelming awe. And then, then, Isaiah cries, Woe is me, For I am a man of unclean lips. Pain sets in, in answer to his prayer. Hot coals are pressed against his mouth, making him clean.
Peter, too, cries out that his mouth is unclean, when he discovers the abundance Jesus has brought to him. What made their lips unclean? Had they sworn, cursed, their fate, the emptiness of the world, the nets, the future? Was it more than that – had they shrugged at the idea of God in their lives?
What happens to them, happens to them as men, as ordinary people. In the words of the Hasidic Kotzker Rebbe, Your holiness shall consist of being truly human, not angelic. God has plenty of angels. (The Kotzker Rebbe 1787 – 1859)
And so this is how God comes to us people, not riding the highs of your life, but moving into the lows, urging you to one more try. One more try. And all of us call out, I can’t, I can’t do it, I just can’t. Which is the same thing as saying Woe is me, and then comes blessing, only then. And with it, our confession, I didn’t believe it, which is our way of saying, I am a man of unclean lips.
The mystic, Hildegard of Bingen, who lived a long time ago, 1098-1179, wrote: with interior yearning, grace and blessing are bestowed. It is a yearning to take on God's gentle yoke, it is a yearning to give one's self to God's way. -Hildegard of Bingen 1098-1179
So . . . What do I really believe about the ways that God works in this world?
Do I have eyes to see the surprising ways in which God moves in the midst of situations whose outcome I think I already know?"
Not an idle question if you, like me, drive a Toyota. If you, like my niece, have been looking for work for ten months, and find yourself coming up with nothing. If you, like another of my nieces, have a good job that has become oppressive as layoffs have reduced a ten person office to five, and flu season has some days reduced that to two, but the demand for output has remained the same, and now you work nights, weekends, and tell the kids to adapt.
This is when Jesus gets in the boat. Isaiah has an experience of God wrapped in glory, but Peter’s experience is of God with skin on. That has always been harder for most of us, we are so much more skeptical of each other, than of magical beings. And we are so much more competitive with each other than we are trusting. It’s a hard truth the Kotzker Rebbe teaches, Your holiness shall consist of being truly human, not angelic. God has plenty of angels.
So who is this Jesus in the boat, anyway? Why couldn’t he be an angel, and, you know, just do it for us? But that is never what Jesus is about. He is always about urging us to try again, to believe in our own ability to survive, to thrive. A modern wag has written of the effort to understand the historical Jesus,
There are 3 good arguments that Jesus was Black:
1. He called everyone brother
2. He liked Gospel
3. He didn't get a fair trial
But then there are 3 equally good arguments that Jesus was Jewish:
1. He went into His Father's business
2. He lived at home until he was 33
3. He was sure his Mother was a virgin and his Mother was sure He was God
But then there are 3 equally good arguments that Jesus was Irish:
1. He never got married.
2. He was always telling stories.
3. He loved green pastures.
But the most compelling evidence of all – there are 3 proofs that Jesus was a woman:
1. He fed a crowd at a moment's notice when there was virtually no food
2. He kept trying to get a message across to a bunch of men who just didn't get it 3. And even when He was dead, He had to get up because there was still work to do.
All of which is fun and funny, but all of which also points us toward the work of accepting, in Jesus and in one another, the hardest parts to live with, the hard work that has to get done, and the endlessness of the search for life with God.
Which brings us back to our own work, and our identity. And this is the exact point to which both Isaiah and Peter were brought by their encounters with God. Each of them had to assume a huge new burden of work, each embraced it with heartfelt love, and the confession of need for help.
I think we all know that we no longer live in a world where people can opt to live outside the economy. Women as well as men need to be able to earn an income, and farmers as well as professors need a higher education in order to do their work.
In another time, in another era, in another century, under a different king, things were different. But now they are what they are. And our identity, which is who we are, will be shaped by our work, as were the identities of Peter and Isaiah. Our identity has been shaped by our choices, which come to us nearly every day: choices to become embittered by our losses or to find within them a way to approach the wonder and glory that inhabits our world, and to incorporate into our own humanity the vision and spirit of amazement and blessing.
Communion, no matter how it is distributed, is about this choice, this rising again and again after being knocked down, this confession that our spirits have sunk and our lips are unclean, and that we have said and done the things that make for despair, but, by golly, here we are, hands out for the abundance of hope and life this bread and cup that can burn us clean again, here we are, saying, Here am I. Send me. Amen.
Rev. Nancy Rockwell
24 January 2010 [Listen to this Sermon]
Here then is the third story of the revelations, the showings of Jesus and people, including us. There are no stories in which Jesus alone is revealed, for the lightbeam is wider than that, and we are all caught in its shining. All manner of things are exposed in this light.
So far we’ve heard about Jesus coming up from the Jordan river at his baptism and words of his belovedness -- his new name, Beloved -- fell upon the ears of all the crowd at the river’s edge, some of them wet themselves. That day belovedness crept into the ears of everyone who longed to find God, and every day since then, and even now. That name, Beloved, pours like water over our heads. Do you believe it? About yourself I mean, now, not just Jesus?
And last week we heard about the wedding at Cana, where the wine ran out, and his mother pushed Jesus to do something, and Jesus complained, ‘What’s it got to do with me?’ and she pushed again, and he turned the family bath water into elegant wine, and so much – maybe 800 bottles of it! – and the servants, who saw it all, were awed, of course, and the family was, well, stunned and confused, and relieved to be no longer embarrassed in front of the wedding guests, but soon now they would discover they had no more bathwater. Once again, belovedness is linked to water, and to washing. Would you pay such a price for joy?
Now, here, today, is this tale of Jesus going home to preach, just as he is beginning to get a reputation as a rabbi. And he reads from the prophet Isaiah, a portion of a long chapter in which Isaiah speaks of the Spirit of the Lord anointing him to bring good news to the poor, the despised, the blind, the brokenhearted. And Jesus stops reading there, though Isaiah’s words, which everybody knew, continued, about how those messengers were to be called oaks of righteousness, who will build up the ruined cities and repair the devastations of many generations. Jesus looks up, and says to those listening, “Today this Scripture has been fufilled your hearing.” And suddenly the light is shining, not on him, but on them. Because fulfilled in your hearing could well mean, you know, that you’re the ones who are to do these things. Often it is said Jesus meant, “Hey, I’m the one!” And that made people mad. But that really doesn’t sound like Jesus, to brag like that. And in everything he opened up the work and its fruits to everyone, so more likely he was saying, You are the ones. And that made them mad.
God knows they wanted someone to do these things, as we do. But the implication, that Jesus was what they were getting, not a Superman, and that theirs were the heads and hearts and mouths to say Yes to what they had heard as task, well, it made everyone angry. Luke says they chased Jesus out of the synagogue and pushed him to the edge of a cliff, and according to Luke they would have pushed him over, but he somehow slipped into the crowd and was able to get away.
Friday night George Clooney and Wyclef Jean and Anderson Cooper and about a hundred super star musicians like Madonna, put on a TV fundraiser for Haiti, and movie stars galore were answering the phone, and they let us listen in to some of the phone conversations between thrilled folks donating what modest amounts they could and millionaire stars saying thanks to them. All those movie stars saying, You’re the ones, to all of us. And this garnered millions for Haiti, and the organizers, Clooney and friends, who are all rich guys, knew that the most money you can get is when ordinary people by the millions give the small amounts they can share. And people have been doing that, giving to the Red Cross and Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health, and churches like the UCC and Doctors Without Borders, and what has been shown is that, even in a world in the icy grip of recession, there is enough money out there to build Port au Prince anew.
Provided no one steals it. And that’s going to be the hard part, to keep it from being stolen. Because human greed is as prevalent as human goodness. And human greed has played a large part in the history of Haiti for hundreds of years now. And in large part the devastation we can barely stand to watch is the result of the poverty and neglect that have been wrought in Haiti by many. Who’s to blame? Someone said to me after the early service, Don’t blame the French – it was the English, or maybe the Dutch, or the Americans – hmmm.
Paul the Apostle, in his letter to the Corinthians, talks about the claims we have on one another, describing us as parts of one body, which is the Beloved body, which is the whole world, the creation, all people, the church, anyway you want to describe it. The movie Avatar, the highest grossing film in history, presents a planet where everyliving thing is interconnected in a network in which the greatest wisdom lives in the roots of the trees, who talk to each other. And the blue people of that world have fibers in their hair that can literally be plugged into to animals and trees, so they can communicate. And I asked Erik Hobbie, one of our scientists, what about that idea, are the trees talking? And Erik said, there is a lot more communicating going on out there than we have recognized till recently. We thought all that was happening was competition, but there is really a huge amount of communication. Paul wrote that the network of the Beloved body includes slaves and free folks, men and women, Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor, all connected to each other like hands and feet, like eyes and ears. ‘ The eye cannot say to the hand,’ writes Paul, ‘I have no need of you.’ And neither can we say of Haiti, we have no need of you. And the world does seem to know this, just look at the out-pouring.
But we’re not so simple-minded that we don’t want to blame someone for what happened here, and God is an easy target. How could God be absent here? Or have allowed this? Or not have found a way to prevent, or at least to warn that one of these seismic shifts that does no one any good was about to come out of the core of creation? How can we believe in the goodness of creation when such things happen? Or the presence of God among us when people are still alive after ten days inside these concrete tombs? Or the Belovedness of people when the pain is unrelenting, and the despair is everywhere?
But when you hear Haitian people singing hymns in the midst of the rubble, how can you remain unmoved? When young girls and old women are pulled out of the concrete singing hymns, who am I to say there is no God? When strangers, themselves victims, gather around the newly rescued to wash and clean them, when the able, who are devastated by loss, help the weak, when so many respond so quickly, who are you and who am I to say that what we have heard about is not true and is not to be our calling, to say that we will not do what we, the people of Exeter, can do as our part of the body that, yes, can die, but will rise and rise again?
Alone, I know I won’t do much. A check here and maybe there. But together with you, in the life of the church, I know I will do more than I imagined I could. My eye is on the prize, and Beloved, you are the prize. And my ears are open. Amen.
Rev. Nancy Rockwell
Advent 4 20 December 2009
Open for Christmas
Outer storms – inner fruitfulness. That’s winter, withering the life that walks, swims, climbs, blooms, above the earth, and all the while preparing spring below, growing roots with dreams in them – roots must have dreams, how else can it be that they can make seeds, trees, they must dream of sky, of celestial blue and a hundred shades of green. To survive the storms of winter, every living thing seeks shelter, even dreams, and warmth enough to survive.
Outer storms, inner fruitfulness. That’s Christmas, too. Slogging through the storms of Advent -- John the Baptist’s warnings of impending disasters and the many storms we are facing in this world -- we make our way toward the sheltering warmth where survival is possible. We learn from the story of Christmas that God needs shelter in order to enter our human world, and that finding that shelter is step in God’s coming among us. The survival of the world begins with shelter, so we are told. And Bethlehem, where Mary and Joseph lie down among the animals and find warmth, is one of the names we have for the survival of the world. And another name for that survival is Mary. It was she who first offered shelter to the presence of God, taking God inside herself, where God could rest and grow while hidden from the world, safe in her while she herself became unsafe in the storm.
Now Protestants are, as a rule, pretty uncomfortable around Mary, and the reason, as Harvard Chaplain Peter Gomes has said, is -- we think she’s Catholic! Mostly, we Protestants are very uncomfortable with three doctrines the Catholic Church adopted relatively recently, in the 1800s, namely that Mary remained a virgin all her life (not that she conceived while a virgin but that she remained one after Jesus was born; and, that she was born without a normal human capacity for sin, in some kind of genetic isolation from the rest of us, and third, that she didn’t die, she was, in her old age, lifted into heaven. None of these doctrines have any Scriptural basis at all. Scripture does tell us Mary conceived spiritually, not physically, making it clear that this child’s spirit was not shaped by people or experiences, but was of God. But none of the three doctrines, which are Vatican gibberish all, are Scriptural, and you do not have to wrestle with them or even take them seriously in order to be Christian. In fact, they get in the way of faith, and they obscure far more important aspects about Mary, which Catholic and Orthodox traditions do remember, and we have forgotten.
And the first important memory is that Mary made room, room inside her mind, her heart, and her body, for an unexpected child, and for the Spirit of God, to be sheltered and to grow. It wasn’t an easy choice. She took on quite a burden, making herself the subject of unwelcoming speculation by everyone from Joseph, who argued with the angel about her according to Matthew, to you and me, who argue in our own inner space, our hearts and minds, and among each other, about welcoming her.
In making room, Mary was courageously faithful. Her cousin Elizabeth pointed that out, saying “Blessed is she who believed as the Lord has said will be fulfilled!” For generations Israel had been waiting to “see” the Messiah fully grown, to believe by seeing deeds. But Mary, a woman of humble origins from a town so insignificant it was never mentioned in the OT, Mary believed that the Spirit of God could be present in a child she had not even felt stir in her womb.
Mary had what John Wayne called True Grit. This Child is born not just from the Spirit of God, but also from Mary’s will. Yes! she says to that angel, I will bear this child, this particular child, and I dedicate myself to be a servant of God in this. She goes on to sing a very subversive song about what all this means, dedicating herself and the child to the God who pulls down the mighty from their thrones, scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts, fills the poor with good things and sends the rich empty away. Whew! Mary is no wimp. And neither is she submissive. The room she is making inside herself is the equivalent of the Underground Railroad, she is a fugitive from the evil powers in this world, an adversary of the storm of oppression that exists around her.
Because of her determination and her dedication, her power of will and spirit, and her decision to open herself, heart, mind, and body, as a sheltering place, she is not just a mother, she is a God-bearer. The Orthodox churches call her theotokas, which means God-bearer. Blessed is she, say the Orthodox, and the Catholics, because of what she did and because of who she was.
But none of this makes her physically unique. And what we miss by ignoring Mary is the Christmas invitation to make room inside ourselves as she did, for God to come into the world in our own time. This is perhaps best expressed by the 13th century mystical writer and monk, Meister Eckhart, “We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself? And, what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of Man is begotten in us.” Meister Eckhart 1260-1328
All kinds of mothers are included in this story. Beginning, perhaps, with Joseph, who is not a father in the usual sense, but takes on a mothering role, protecting and sheltering Mary and her child. So – are you a father? Find yourself here. Are you an unwed or single mother? Look at Mary and know you are at home here. Unwed at conception, she is largely on her own as a parent. After Jesus is 12 there are no more mentions of Joseph, only of Mary. Do you have a blended family? Look at hers! Are you estranged from your family? Mary and Joseph were alone in Egypt for two years, then traveled slowly homeward. Have you adopted? Joseph did. Are there no children in your home? Well, this story is not about fertility, it is about grace, Mary’s grace, which the angel addressed in her before she became pregnant. The grace in this story is hers, and does not come from pregnancy, but from her welcome for God, her offering of shelter and nurture.
In more contemporary terms, Dorothy Day, the Founder of the Catholic Worker Movement in New York City in the 1930s, wrote, It is no use saying that we are born two thousand years too late to give room to Christ. Christ is always asking for room in our hearts.
But now it is with the voice of our contemporaries that he speaks, with the eyes of store clerks, factory workers, and children that he gazes; with the hands of office workers, slum dwellers, and suburban housewives that he gives. It is with the feet of soldiers and tramps that he walks, and with the heart of anyone in need that he longs for shelter. And giving shelter or food to anyone who asks for it, or needs it, is giving it to Christ.
If Mary had appeared in Bethlehem clothed, as St. John says, with the sun, a crown of twelve stars on her head, and the moon under her feet, then people would have fought to make room for her. But that was not God’s way for her, nor is it Christ’s way for himself, now when he is disguised in every type of humanity that treads the earth. (Dorothy Day, Selected Writings, ed Robert Ellsberg)
There’s hard work ahead, when you open your heart, your life, your self, to make room for God in this world. Each of you knows that – you know that with every experience of love and freedom you have had – you got married, and if you stayed married, by God, you have worked hard to figure out the shelter involved in that, with head, heart, and body. If you had children, you know the joyful birth leads directly into the endless work of relating, understanding, growing and healing that sheltering a child is about. Most of you went to college, a triumph and an experience of arduous transformation – of mind, soul, and body. You walk differently in this world because of the room your made in yourself for the spirit and discipline of learning.
Your fruitfulness is shaped by risks to which you have said yes, the challenging questions someone posed to you, often a stranger: a Dean, a boss, a teacher, a surgeon, sometimes a friend or relation, saying to you, Look here: why don’t you try . . . Come on, get off the dime here and get going . . . There’s an opportunity . . . andyou seem to me to be the right one for this?
You have opened doors inside yourself with a courage only you can describe. You have dedicated yourself to difficult tasks with a will you reached deep to find. You have believed in things before you could see them come to pass. And grace has been in you, with you, in moments when you were reaching beyond the storms, to a blessedness you know within. So this is the Christmas invitation: to make room in your heart for God to be born in our world. Amen.