What word to bring for Easter?

On my way to church Sunday I heard an NPR story about a ministry to homeless youth in Seattle.  The tables are set once a week.  A meal is served, and the pastor shares a "word of encouragement" before the kids set out into the night.  One transgender youth who appreciated both the meal and the fellowship said, "I never came to church before.  I thought these were the people that hurt you." I felt like I was punched in the stomach.

What Word is the Church, my church, bringing for Easter?  A word that hurts a transgender homeless kid and keeps him/her away?  A word of hemming and hawing about Christ changing us--usually not into the image of a Palestinian Jew dying on the empire's cross, but more often than not into the image of  North American Mom and Dad and Bud and Sis primly sitting in neat rows for an hour or so on Sunday? A Word of grace, naked and honest to goodness grace? What Word do we really bring?

I visit an inmate in Milan FCI.  Unlike holy fire that burns without consuming, his passion, a passion he could not quench, burned his life down.  His wife died of cancer during his trial.  He seldom talks with his adult children.  It is always on his initiative. They never write or visit.  As I visited him this week, he said that he phoned them for Valentine's day.  After some stilted pleasantries, his daughter told him that all the kids agree: when he gets out, he will not be permitted to see any of his grandchildren.  Now, his unholy fire has burned even the bridges between generations.

I will next see him on Easter.  At my house, there is no big ham dinner to be made when I get home from church.  Easter is just another Sunday at chez Freedman-Doan.  But it's not just another Sunday in the life of the Church.  Without the Passion, the Cross, a dead body growing cold and stiff in a silent grave, and then women returning in tears from an Empty Tomb, well without all that, what is there?

Every Easter I can recall, I've heard a sermon on new life, resurrection power, and life renewed.  I've heard god awful chrysalis to butterfly analogies and God blessed exegesis that ponders the holy details of the mystery of life and all creation turned back to right by a God willing to pay great costs to redeem.

So when I go to Milan, what word do I bring from my church, from the Church?  What good is "new life" if you can't hold your grandchildren?  What good is release of the captive, when you have no where to go? When you find that some sin burned bridges will never be rebuilt, how do you get over to the Hallelujah? I think on the Thomas incident in the Gospels.  The holes are still, and always, in Jesus' body.  Death may be defeated, but the past is indelibly written in the flesh.  I have been tasked with bringing a Word and I am tongue tied.  Cliches, Pollyanna, nice, nice, won't do. The Word must be both gracious and true to the bone true.  A Word is what I need, but what Word do I bring on Easter?

Miracles

Sunday’s lectionary reading was the story of the wedding feast at Cana in John’s gospel.  Jesus turns water into wine: the first of the seven signs John recounts.  All over the world, folks, like me, whose pastors’ follow the Revised Common Lectionary heard mediations on miracles.  Here’s another sort of mediation on miracles, based on a different story.

This week’s parsha for Jews around the world was בְּשַׁלַּח , Beshalach, “when let go”.  The passage tells the story of the Great Escape—the time when God saved His people from slavery.  It is the story we tell at our Passover Seder each year.  It is the story that Jesus retells at His final Seder in Jerusalem on the night before He died.

The details of the story are worth attention. The parsha begins just after the instructions about how to celebrate the events that the instructions interrupt: “And it came to pass, when Pharaoh let the people go, that God led them not by way of the land of the Philistines [the short direct way to Canaan] . . .But God led the people about, by way of the wilderness by the Red Sea,” (Exodus 13: 17-18).  When the text says “God led the people”, the writers are not kidding around, “the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, . . . and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light;” (13:21).  You want to talk your fodder for sermons on miracles—here it is.  You want your “sign from God” to insure this gamble we call faith pays off here it is. Clear as a bell day or night—the visible presence of the Creator of Heaven and Earth, the Redeemer from the slave pits of Egypt—right there before your eyes directing your steps.  How’s that for miracle.

Then Chapter 14, the cinematic highlight scene, the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are “led” to camp at Pi-hahiroth hard on the sea.  The mighty Pharaoh, heart hardened, welshes on the deal to let the Israelites go and puts 600 chariots worth of hard men in motion to get them back.

“When Pharaoh drew nigh, the children of Israel lifted up their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians were marching after them; and they were sore afraid; and the children of Israel cried out to the Lord. And they said unto Moses: ‘Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness?’ (14:10-11) Moses shouts, “Fear not”, and assures them that the Lord will fight for them and they have nothing to fear.

And then the miracle.  The movie makers, and the way we tell the story to our children around the Seder table, would have you believe that the parting of the sea is the miracle: ‘and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all the night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided [think about the creation story in Genesis]. 

But I think the miracle is somewhere else.  Somewhere a little quieter. Somewhere a little more human.  Note the crucial details: “And the Lord said unto Moses, ‘Wherefore criest thou unto Me? Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.”  But how can they go forward?  Just when they need reassurance and direction most, “the angel of God, who went before the camp of Israel, removed and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud removed from before them, and stood behind them; (v. 19).  Just at the crucial moment, one set of miracles ceased.  The signposts pointing the way disappear. Disaster looms on all sides, and then the real miracle occurs.  Someone, unnamed in the story, a real nobody, follows the command God gives: “go forward”.  One heart answered the call of God to ‘fear not’.  One heart moved one step and 620,000 slaves walked to freedom. One heart, an uncertain and frightening future, and one miracle: dayenu; it is enough.

Buen Camino. 

Psalm 40* is a Gospel psalm—a psalm of good news.  What is that Good News?  Simply put, it is: the Lord can and does save.  The most basic accusation of the faithless is, “Your God cannot save.”  In Psalm 40, the writer says he was in a “pit of destruction (v.2).  Later we find some of that may have been a pit of his own making (v. 12) and some came from enemies around him (v. 14).  In the midst of that pit, he cries to the Lord (v. 13—make haste to help me).  His enemies then make the most basic attack possible, they go for the jugular of faith—they see his trouble and cry “Aha” your god cannot save.  This sneering finger pointing is one of the most basic themes of all the scriptures.  The great Pharoh would not let a motley host of slaves go free and dared God (in the person Moses) to make them free.  On the run in the wilderness, as the water ran short and the food ran out, the people cry again to Moses.  The substance of their cry, “it would be better if we had never left”, is the accusers cry—God cannot save.   Over and over again in the history of Israel, those who resist the instruction of the Lord, the Torah, accuse God.   At the most basic level, they shout “You cannot save”.  The priests of Baal surround Elijah and laugh that YaWeH can do nothing to them.  When the kings of Israel think that the armies of Egypt look like a better bet to resist the armies of Assyria and keep Israel free and independent, Isaiah tells the faithful that the accuser has won; his charge “Your God cannot save” has been vindicated.  When Herod’s terrorist death squad sweeps into Bethlehem and starts slaughtering children, the cry on their lips may as well have been “Your God cannot save.”  Even today, believers here and all over the world are challenged to vindicate their God.  “Your God cannot save” is the most basic accusation that anyone can level at a believer. 

How are we to respond?

For the last 100 years or so one common place in North American Protestant Christianity is to retreat and narrow the field of God’s saving activity.   In hope that God won’t be made a fool of Christians retreat and say, “well, God really only means to save souls”, and souls are conceived of in a sense that has no connection with life as any of us know it  – workplaces, scientific endeavors, political institutions, creative expression, educational institutions, virtually the sum of life are declared secular or neutral and thus not in need of God’s saving Grace and Power. Only souls are in need of grace, not really the world that God so loved.  Another tactic so that God won’t be made a fool is to merely baptize the present with the piety of Christian terminology.  Practices born out of religions that worship false gods are “Christianized”—music born in rebellion against God gets allegedly Christian lyrics and God is supposed to be vindicated.  Sentimental prosody pap that makes a mockery of the fullness of our emotional lives has a few words from carefully selected scripture inserted, and now it’s supposed to be fit for the refrigerator magnet treatment as “inspiring”.  Economic practices that grind down on the poor and make their lives misery are baptized with terms like Christian freedom and vocation and “see our God can save”, well at least those of us lucky enough to have been born in the US, Canada, or Europe. 

But the Good New of Psalm 40 and the story of God’s salvation from Genesis to Revelation is that God offers us a different way:  If we truly remember what God has done for us, saving us from Egyptian slavers, keeping us through the dark nights of Exile in Babylon, nurturing us even when the King’s terrorist death squads tried to take away our only hope, building us up when all of Rome was against us, protecting our Scriptures and our traditions when the supposed keepers of the faith wanted us far away from the Scriptures as possible, --if we remember all those things.  If we celebrate them year after year, holy liturgical season after season, like the Psalmist does when he proclaims “Many, O LORD my God, are (11) the wonders which You have done,

          And Your (12) thoughts toward us;

          There is none to compare with You.

          If I would declare and speak of them,

          They (13) would be too numerous to count.”

Then we will slowly, and sometimes painfully, build up a trust in the God who has saved in the past and when crunch time comes for us, when jobs choke the God given creativity out of us, when our politicians want to wage death in our names and everybody around us wants us to sign off on it, even when death strikes those close to our hearts, in those times then we will be ready for blessing for we will believe God can save, indeed “How  blessed is the man who has made the LORD his trust, And  has not turned to the proud, nor to those who  lapse into falsehood.”   We will even enter into the history of God’s saving works by writing our own scrolls of testimony of the great things God has done for us, we’ll bring them to the temple and proclaim them for all to hear.  We’ll let our neighbors know that while all others might shout “he cannot save”—we will offer our story that indeed he does save.  We will not hide his righteousness (his faithful promise keeping) in our hearts.  We will not be silent about his faithfulness and salvation.  We will not conceal his loving kindness.

In the Matthew’s account of the Passion week, the soldiers executing Jesus shout at him, “Save yourself, If you’re really God’s Son, come down off that cross.”  The accusers basic charge is shouted for all to hear.  And for a time even the disciples believed that charge.  Peter with the last bit of hope in his heart sprints back to the tomb when Mary Magdelene reports that it’s empty.  There he finds a few clothes and again believes the accusers charge—he walks away shaking his head.  Later, when he really meets the risen Lord, face to face, he like the Psalmist now believes that God can save—that the world can be set to rights. Now like the psalmist he’s got a testimony to bring to the temple, he cannot restrain his lips—God has kept his promise. He has brought back Israel, paid for her in blood coin, and through Israel, all of us.  God had promised a world so transformed that the faithful dead would rise from the dust and a new king would take the throne.   And there at an empty tomb was the down payment, the first fruits of that promise that God made to Abraham so long ago, I will bless you and through you I will bless all the nations.  So

Let all who seek You rejoice and be glad in You;

          Let those who love Your salvation (34) say continually,

          "The LORD be magnified!"

God can save. He’s saved before.  He’ll save again.  He’ll save all who are afflicted and needy.

*The painting is by contemporary American artist Phillip Ratner.  It is located in the Ratner Museum in Bethesda, MD.

A Meditation on Encountering a Dangerous God
[This is actually several years old, but somehow these 12 days of the Christmas season brought back the notion that God, as one of Lewis' Narnia characters says, "is not a tame lion."]

I come to Stony Creek on Sunday mornings expecting to meet the risen Christ. Sunday after Sunday I am not disappointed.   I hear Jesus speak in the beautiful singing of familiar songs, in the written Scriptures, and in the preaching.  I see His hands at work in the announcements about mission activities, fellowship opportunities, and joyous news of answered prayers. Most profoundly, I meet Him soul to soul when I kneel with fellow worshippers and commemorate His death and resurrection with bread and wine.  All in all, the time I spend at Stony Creek comforts and enriches me beyond measure.  Recently, however, my comfortable expectations about encountering God have been turned about.  Sunday morning is no longer quite so comfortable; indeed, its beginning to feel downright dangerous to me. 

Friday, April 16^th, I had the privilege of attending Temple Beth Emeth’s services commemorating the 6 million Jewish deaths in the Shoah -the Holocaust. The highlight of the service was the testimony of a “Righteous Gentile”.  The speaker, Anneke Burke told the assembled worshipers of her meeting with God. 

In 1940 she was a typical four-year-old Dutch girl, happy and carefree.  She lived in Utrecht with her mother, father, a seven-year-old sister and a baby brother. That fall the German Army forever changed her life. Her hometown was captured and put under occupation. Life with German soldiers strutting about was a bit strange, but not burdensome.  Then the identification of the Jews started.  All Jews were required to wear the Star of David sewn on to their clothing.  They were prevented from riding the streetcars.  German soldiers and sympathetic Dutch Nazis violated their shops and homes.  Soon the Germans began to round up Jews for deportation to work camps.  Anneke’s father and mother were God fearing, church going Protestants.  In the faces of their Jewish neighbors they saw the face of their Lord.  Moved by a profound sense of Christian duty, in 1942 Anneke’s father arranged with the Dutch Underground to hide a Jewish man.  When he went to make contact with the man and bring him home, three other Jews were also there.  All four Jews were brought to the safety of Anneke’s house.  Soon they were joined by four more Jews. For the next three years, eight of God’s children spent their days in one small bedroom.  They could go into the living room at night, but no lights were allowed.  The Burke’s even dug a tunnel under the house so that when the German search parties came, the Jews could hide in the tunnel.

Now the story so far sounds like a Hollywood movie - brave Dutch Christian resistance fighters, evil pagan Nazis’, frightened Jews.  You can practically hear the swelling music and feel your tears being jerked as the Allies liberate the town and the Jews walk arm in arm with the brave Christians into the sunlight for the first time in three years. 

But real encounters with God are never quite like Hollywood productions.  Anneke never knew the Jews were in the house all those years until her parents awoke her late one night in April of 1945 and invited her to the living room to celebrate the war’s end with a group of complete strangers.  Her parents simply could not risk telling their children about the human contraband in the front bedroom.  Jews, and those who hid Jews, faced deportation to work camps at best, and on-the-spot execution at worst.  Her parents closed off the bedroom where the Jews were hidden.  Anneke was told that the bedroom was her father’s workroom, and she would be severely punished if she ever entered that room.   The children slept, locked each night, in the attic for three years so their visitors could, with some safety, come out at night.  When wartime food rations for the five members of the Burke family were first divided up to feed 13 people and Anneke ate but still was hungry. Her parents told her all the food was gone. When Anneke heard strange noises in the house, her parents lied to her.  They said she was merely hearing things. When a thump on the wall made her turn her head, her parents sat motionless.  Three years of that sort of deception left Anneke deeply scarred.  She no longer trusted her own senses.  Anneke had to go through years of psychological counseling to heal from the experience.  She still, as a mature woman, experiences moments of doubt about ordinary everyday experiences because for three important years of her life the adults around her told her that noises she heard were not noises at all, that lights she saw under doorways were not real, and  that odors she smelled were just her imagination. 

God came to Anneke’s family in the form of eight Jews on the lam from Nazi death squads.  The Burke’s were obedient to the teachings of Jesus and embraced the desperate ones.  That encounter left Anneke scarred for life.  Her testimony has begun to change my perspective on Sunday worship at Stony Creek.  I still love the comfortable feeling of closeness to my Lord that comes from singing the old hymns, from greeting loving neighbors, and from the rhythms of the familiar liturgy.  But I also have read with new eyes the Biblical stories of encounters with God.  He's mighty, He's loving, but He's also dangerous.  Jacob, the tricky one, was crippled for life after he met God.  Hosea heard the voice of God order him to marry a prostitute and turn his quiet life into a living billboard advertising God’s indignation with a faithless people.  Peter, the cowardly fisherman, was led to death in a Roman prison because he saw and declared, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God”.  Oh, I still pray each Sunday for the presence of the Lord, but after hearing Anneke Burke, I pray a bit more warily.  The God we worship didn’t hand over His own Son to torturers so Peter Freedman-Doan could warm the cockles of his heart with familiar Sunday morning rituals shared with good friends. He comes to us so that His will be done.   

The 12 Days

Tomorrow, Christmas, is in the liturgical calendar, the first of 12 days of Christmas.  The last day of Christmas is Epiphany. On Epiphany, we, the orthodox and liturgical types celebrate the Light of Christmas' first day, Jesus, being revealed to Gentiles, the Magi, for the first time.  It is the first intimation in the Gospels that the promises to Abraham that his family would be the source of Yaweh's blessings to all families was finally coming true.
There is wrinkle in the story of Epiphany that seems ripe for a bit of midrash.  The scriptures tell us that wise men from the east, from the lands we now call Iraq, on Christmas' last day found the gift under the special star.  The scriptures are also painstaking in their efforts to show that the gift child of the first day of Christmas, well, his family is from the east also.  Abraham and Terah come from Ur of the Chaldees: Iraq.  So while it is crucial for the salvation story that a gentile boy like me gets to now, in Jesus, be counted as one of the family of God, the look that passed between Jesus and the Magi on Epiphany is a look of family rcongnition.  While Epiphany is the marking of salvation coming from the Jews to the gentiles, it is also a recognition to paraphrase St. Paul, in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, peasant on the run or rich landed gentry, no male or female, black, brown or white, gay or straight, Canadian or American or Syrian or Mexican.  In Christ we are all simply the children of Eve and Adam.  That seems, to this gentile boy, to be both the blessing and the judgement of the season.

Incarnation

On the way back from Egypt, Joseph, Mary, and the boy passed again through that town of closed inns and starry nights.  The women just stared at them.  The fury was mostly gone, now only the emptiness. Their sons were dead, and here, this One the cause of it all, was riding on though.  No angel was commanded to whisper to them in the night.  No Gabriel said,”Fly. Bundle him and flee now, tonight.”   Some of the fathers had burst forth to defend their little ones.  Maybe they hoped that the ancient songs were true, and the Holy One would command his angels to guard their ways.  But steel slit bare-handed rage just as easily as two-year old flesh.   The fathers, who watched this day’s parade, the ones who watched as the thugs took their sons and hacked and hacked, did not know of sacred dramas and holy imperatives.  Maybe they wouldn’t care even if they did know of such deeper purposes.  Who would tell them: Joseph, whose Son yet lived?  Was that day their cruel day on Moriah?  Indeed, what purpose could justify?  They knew only guilt, blood, burial, and Rachel’s tears without end.  Mary had heard hints of this hurt, the angel warned that her day too would come.  But for now, not for 30 more years and three long days, not even God yet understood loss such as this.

The Heart of the Matter*

This past week near the end of Sunday worship, I had one of those moments so aptly captured by the advertisers for a certain vegetable juice.  I had a moment of clarity, and the feeling that I should have seen this all along.  I was overcome by the realization that for all the years I’ve attended, all the sermons I’ve heard have centered on just two pronouncements: Christ crucified and life transformed.

Pastors, as you know, come and go.  Their preaching can be exciting, intellectual, full of anecdote and illustration, or maybe there are times when it’s not so exciting or stimulating at all.  Sometimes that’s the preacher (and given my limited experience preaching, that can certainly be the case) or sometimes it is me: bored, preoccupied, mind drifting or whatever.  Yet through it all, I (and ‘we’ at Stony Creek) have been graced to hear week after week, well-crafted or not so well-crafted, messages that center on Christ crucified and life transformed.  

When you get right down to it, that is the Gospel, the Good News; Christ has died and life will never be the same.  You see, in each of the four gospels the crucial moment in the story is the moment Jesus goes quite voluntarily to offer himself for crucifixion on the Roman cross.  God’s good work of six days has been attacked by sin.  Sin is so powerful that the very creation is distorted by it.  St. Paul says the creation “groans” under the burden of sin (Romans 8:22).  Sin inspires us, the crown of the good creation, to neglect love and think of ourselves first.  In so doing we are capable of monstrous cruelty to one another and do ourselves tremendous damage in the bargain.  Sin’s greatest weapon is death.  God’s greatest good is life.  God Himself, in Jesus the Jew, attacks sin by attacking sin’s greatest strength: its power to destroy life, its power to kill.  All that we fear, all the reasons we cling to ourselves instead of God and each other, all of it is born in the power of sin.  So Jesus walks meekly into sin’s hands and takes the worst it has to offer.  That moment changes everything.  The Gospel writer John says that when Jesus is “lifted up” on that cross, we see most clearly God’s face.  God lifts the veil between us.  There is nothing hidden anymore.  God loves us, becomes us, and comes to us to live what we fear most: death.  And God lives through it.  The stone is rolled away.  Life is victorious over death.

That story is the uniquely Christian story.  But it doesn’t end there.  Coming out of Jesus’ struggle with death is the possibility that we too may live in the power of death defeated.   Our lives, our families, our world, and the good earth itself are being transformed into new life--- abundant life.  For Christians, the story comes to a climax in Christ crucified, but it continues on in a new community of love, established around a table laden with bread and wine.  At that table, together, we feast and grow strong to carry the news of Christ’s victory over death, to live the reality of a world without fear, and to be transformed into folk who love and serve each other and our neighbors.

So I had this moment on Sunday.  I was startled to recognize something that has been present all the time.  Each week, whether I am ready to listen or ready to move on with my day.  Each week, whether the message is well crafted and well delivered or if maybe the pastor isn’t in top form. Each week, week on week, Christ crucified and life transformed has been, and with God’s grace, will continue to be, proclaimed from the pulpit at Stony Creek.  Is the service and the preaching always everything I could ever hope for?  No, but sitting among a congregation I love and who love me in turn, each week, week after week, it is certainly enough, just enough, because it gets to the heart of the matter: Christ has died and nothing will ever be the same.

*The painting is, The Crucifixion, by El Greco (around 1596 or so).  It hangs in the Prado in Madrid, Spain.