Meanwhile, In Joppa

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Easter 4C

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Acts 9:36-43

“³⁶Now in Joppa there was a disciple whose name was Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas. She was devoted to good works and acts of charity. ³⁷At that time she became ill and died. When they had washed her, they laid her in a room upstairs. ³⁸Since Lydda was near Joppa, the disciples, who heard that Peter was there, sent two men to him with the request, “Please come to us without delay.” ³⁹So Peter got up and went with them; and when he arrived, they took him to the room upstairs. All the widows stood beside him, weeping and showing tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was with them. ⁴⁰Peter put all of them outside, and then he knelt down and prayed. He turned to the body and said, “Tabitha, get up.” Then she opened her eyes, and seeing Peter, she sat up. ⁴¹He gave her his hand and helped her up. Then calling the saints and widows, he showed her to be alive. ⁴²This became known throughout Joppa, and many believed in the Lord. ⁴³Meanwhile he stayed in Joppa for some time with a certain Simon, a tanner.”

The lectionary surprises me sometimes.  Even after close to seven years of going through it, and not yet being completely in the habit of mapping out our Sunday morning messages far in advance, I’m caught off guard when the selections for succeeding Sundays skip a passage that I would expect to follow.  I mentioned last week at the beginning of the message that the passage for last Sunday was taking us almost to the end of the Gospel of John, and that we would probably be finishing it up today.  That turns out not to be the case.  The selections for today did not include those last few verses of John.  Don’t ask.  I don’t know the reasoning behind leaving that passage for another time.

But here we have it.  Of the passages selected for today, we have the story of Peter’s raising Tabitha, or Dorcas in Greek, from the dead.  Though it’s not spelled out in the text, it bears noting that, when we read about someone being resurrected in the New Testament, it needs to be distinguished from Christ’s resurrection in one crucial detail.   Each one of those other people who were resurrected eventually DID, once again, die.  Jesus did not.  Just thought I’d make a point of that, in case there were any questions out there. 

Remember that as we approach the scriptures today, our challenge is to do it with an eye and an ear to what those who first approached it centuries ago would have seen or heard in the story that would speak to them and why, and see how that would be the same touchstone for us today or if it may have changed over time. 

First, we review the story.  

It is, as the title states, a telling of the Acts of the Apostles – literally – things they did.  In this instance, we have Peter, the one we left on the beach professing his love for Jesus, and Jesus telling him to ‘feed his lambs, tend his sheep, and feed his sheep’.  We are today jumping ahead some indeterminate amount of time, though it could stand to reason that it was not a LONG time – perhaps weeks or a few months, and that same man who had left Jerusalem in the wake of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, after having SEEN Jesus and spoken to him and eaten with him he’d then TRIED to go back to fishing.  Apparently it didn’t work. 

He couldn’t seem to fight back this urge to tell the story, to let people know what he’d lived through, what he was a witness to.  And along the way, he is made aware of a woman who was a disciple who was devoted to good works and to charity, and who had died.  He’s not too far away from where they have her, so he goes to the house in Joppa where they have her body.  He gets there, is taken to the room where she’s been laid out, and the women whom she’d been working with, ‘the widows’, the text points out, show him the tunics and other clothing that Tabitha had made while she was with them… it’s an important note to make … it’s not just a passing comment.  What it let’s us know is that she was helping the most destitute population of her society – the widows.  And in knowing that, we know a little more about her.  To say that she was ‘devoted to good works and acts of charity’ gets the information across about what she spent her days doing, but adding the detail about the widows helps us know HER as a person – it tells us that her call was to minister to those who had the least recourse in first century Palestine.  Widows depended either on their children or on the kindness of strangers to survive, or they remarried, and marrying out of desperate necessity makes for truly untenable relationships. 

So we get to know a woman who knew Jesus and followed him and served as his presence in Joppa, with the most marginalized segment of society at that.  And she got sick and died. 

When one serves the most marginalized segment of society, it is usually lonely work.  It’s not exactly the most popular ministry to be involved in.  AIDS hospice care, a home for pregnant teenagers, or a homeless shelter for mostly mentally ill people.  There are any number of valid ministry opportunities vying for our attention and our efforts, to say nothing of our contributions.  So if one that is an ongoing concern is … dependent on the energies and efforts of a single dynamic individual, if that person were to suddenly disappear, that ministry is at risk of crumbling.  It’s not a criticism of the way the ministry is run; it’s a statement of the facts as they relate to difficult and challenging ministries.

We COULD look at this story of Peter’s raising Tabitha from the dead as simply a response to the critical nature of the ministry she performed being assured a continuation – at least until she could hopefully teach the widows to sell garments for themselves to gain some way to earn a living and not be entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers.   

But we could also see this story as presenting us with an image, a picture of Christ as he is conveyed through the life of a disciple.  The widows had found a … I could say benefactor, and though it would be an accurate description it wouldn’t, I think, communicate the full impact that Tabitha’s life was having on them. In losing their husbands they had lost all identity, they were very literally non-persons in that society, and Jesus, through Tabitha, was giving them that back. 

When she passed away, their loss was at LEAST doubled.  From being a recognized member of society, with a position as wives to their husbands, through to the experience of losing the man on whom their position depended, and therefore their identity, and now to be in a position of contemplating losing the new identity they were just beginning to regain … that was a whole new experience for them, it was completely unexpected, and yet, Jesus had found a way through his disciple Tabitha to give them that sense of self, of worth, of value, back.

And in the face of that second great loss, Jesus sends Peter, who reestablishes that presence in their lives.  In a very concrete sense, Jesus brought life back to their lives.  And it wasn’t in the person of Tabitha, strictly speaking, nor was it through the person of Peter… though they were both involved. 

It was through his OWN presence – THROUGH THEM. 

William Loader, research professor at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, put it this way:

The good news is about bringing life where there is death, love where there is hate, healing where there is brokenness. The greater wonder today is when we can see people stand on their feet, communities make their way out of traps of poverty, enemies move towards reconciliation, despairing people finding meaning again. These are realities which take up the direction or flow of what would otherwise be legends left to the past. They invite us to take such stories as symbols of what is an abiding value and through them to find the hand of God in new beginnings today. 

And that IS one thing that God in Christ was and is still about even today: New Beginnings. 

In the face of a world that would generally write off anyone who is not young, rich and beautiful, we have this story of lives that are being transformed.

It is worth noting that Luke makes an initial reference to her name as Tabitha in Aramaic or Hebrew, but then says her name was Dorcas in Greek and then refers to her by that name throughout the rest of the narrative I don’t think that detail would have been lost on the listeners or readers of the Gospel in the first century.  Not only do they see Peter, a Jewish man, and Dorcas, a Greek named woman, working together to form and sustain this community, but it is an image of the body of Christ – the church – personified through them – being an active part in the redemption and the transformation of lives that had been written off. 

Where does Jerusalem Baptist Church fit into the story?

What role are we playing in this passage this morning?  Are we the widows, weeping for what has been lost?  Our sense of purpose, our identity, our base?  Or are we Dorcas, lying cold on the bed, dead to the world until Jesus comes along in the person of Peter and prays life into us once again?

On a slightly different note, what does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton today?

Are we going to let the dead remain dead, as most of the people, named or not in the story, were ready to do, or are we going to imagine something completely, radically different from the reality we’ve lived with all our lives, one that allows for the completely unexpected to happen – and for God to work through that to redeem humanity to God’s self?  Can we be as bold as Peter and pray for an incredible miracle to happen in this very room?  Can we follow that prayer with two simple words, “Jerusalem, arise”?

Let’s pray.

Break Fast Alfresco

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Easter 3C

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

John 21:1-19

“After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. ²Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. ³Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing. ⁴Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. ⁵Jesus said to them, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” They answered him, “No.” ⁶He said to them, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish. ⁷That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea. ⁸But the other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, only about a hundred yards off. ⁹When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. ¹⁰Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” ¹¹So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn. ¹²Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?” because they knew it was the Lord. ¹³Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. ¹⁴This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.

¹⁵When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” ¹⁶A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” ¹⁷He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. ¹⁸Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” ¹⁹(He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, “Follow me.”

So we get into the last chapter of John’s account of the Gospel, and the writer jumps from telling about the events surrounding Thomas’ doubting that Jesus had arisen to another appearance of Jesus in which Thomas is also present, but not the central figure in the retelling. 

This time, it’s Peter.  SIMON Peter.  You know, the Rock, the brash, outspoken, mercurial follower of Jesus who gave a body to the parable of the sower’s rocky soil - he consistently receives Jesus’ teachings with joy and exuberance, but as soon as he is confronted with some sort of hardship FOR that teaching, he tends to abandon it … his denial of Jesus on the night before he was crucified is only one example.  In the Acts of the Apostles we find him accepting the vision that gave him permission to eat anything – with anyone – but as soon as the folks show up and tell him that the purity laws still apply, he seems to discard the vision without too much of a fight.

What are we to do with Peter? 

Do we laugh at his humanity, chuckle at his weakness?  Shake our heads at his impetuous nature, his second-guessing of his own beliefs? 

If we do any of that, then we must realize that we are doing it to ourselves.      

Ultimately, I believe that the narratives of the Gospels purposefully present a varied portrait of the disciples for one simple reason:  each of the writers wants the folks reading or listening to the story to be able to relate to the people they are reading or hearing ABOUT.  It is one of the critical ways in which we connect to the Gospel story:  where do we fit in?  Where do I fit in?

Here they are, having experienced the passion of Jesus, witnessed his resurrection, SEEN him appear in a locked room and SHOW them the nail prints and the wound in his side, and what do they do? 

They go home.  They retreat to the familiar, to the ordinary, to the everyday routine that they’d not experienced AT ALL over the last three years.

They had heard Jesus speak, watched him heal, and confront, and cleanse, and forgive, and even raise from the dead, and they turned from that and went back to what they had always known.

In a very real way, they were modeling what we do every week.

What can we say about an existence that incorporates the worship of a living God, a risen Savior, a time of communion and fellowship with the creator of the universe, into a weekly routine? 

On the one hand, part of me would celebrate the fact that it IS part of the routine.  The fact that we are able to consistently gather and sing, read, pray, study, and hear the word of God for our lives together is a beautiful opportunity that not everyone who WISHES to in the world CAN.  On the other hand, the fact that it is part of the ‘routine’ in and of itself can be a dangerous thing. 

It is dangerous insofar as it becomes predictable.  It is dangerous in the sense that we can become immunized to the power of the Gospel IF we feel we have nothing new to learn from it – nothing different to understand from it, no new direction to explore at God’s prompting. 

The disciples – those seven that are mentioned in the passage, probably initially welcomed the chance to get BACK into a regular, familiar, KNOWN routine.  They’d been here before; they’d DONE this.  It came naturally to them.  Years of performing the same tasks meant that they hardly had to THINK about what they were doing, it was simply a matter of dropping back into that familiar boat, picking up that net, and throwing it over the side throughout the night to see what they could catch and sell at the market.  Nothing new there, nothing unknown about what to do next, they were the masters of that skill set.

The problem was, when they realized Jesus was on the shore, they ALL understood, not just Peter, that even retreating to the familiar, to the routine they’d all known before he came along and ruined them for the ordinary, that the rest of their lives were going to be marked by this radically new reality.  This fact that they had seen and spoken to the risen Jesus was not going to let them remain quiet about it.  They were going to be compelled to take that message – that Christ has risen – first INTO their lives, and then OUT OF their lives… in that they were going to be LIVING that truth out in such a way that people would wonder if they were even the same PEOPLE they knew BEFORE the crucifixion.     

It is difficult to understate the impact of the change in these disciples’ lives on the world.  Some critics would speak up and say that the only reason the church continues in existence today is because of it’s marriage to the powers – military and political structures – throughout the centuries, beginning with Emperor Constantine and continuing with any given church-state union in the intervening centuries. 

But do we really want to write off the fact that we are here today, that we are engaged in this business of working out what salvation means to the way we live our lives to some understandably questionable merging of faith and worldly power?  Can we step back from the historical baggage that we carry – and believe me, we DO carry some baggage, not ONLY within our Southern Baptist tradition but in almost any given denominational tradition – and tease out that thread of faith that runs throughout the tapestry of the work of God in the world throughout history?  That brightly colored thread that stands out from all the muted colors that bleed into the background and, while they DO make for a strong cloth, they also don’t add much to the beauty of the picture that God is weaving together with us?

Jesus’ first act when he reappeared to his disciples was to break bread with them.  In the passage this morning, he is again feeding them – broiled fish and bread cooked by the heat from the bonfire he built on the beach that morning.  They had been working all night, and had not eaten.  They had been fasting.  And Jesus called to them from the shore and told them to throw their nets on the other side of the boat. 

They were fishermen.  They’d done the work all their lives.  They understood on a gut level that what Jesus was asking them to do was nonsense.  If there hadn’t been fish on one side of the boat, it was because they weren’t biting PERIOD.  They had probably fished off both sides of the boat dozens of times throughout the night with exactly the same results each time.  Zip.  Nada.  Zilch.  Cipher.  Had it been anyone else’s idea, they would have laughed, if not cursed him for being so stupid as to suggest such a thing. 

But it wasn’t anyone else.  It was Jesus. 

And it wasn’t that he was asking them to throw the nets over the right side of the boat, even though those were the words he used. 

He was asking them to trust him.

He was asking them to be willing to do what to other fishermen – friends they’d worked with and lived beside all their lives – would seem to be utter and complete foolishness because HE was asking them to do it. And he wanted them to trust HIM with the results, not their own well-honed skills and knowledge. 

Ultimately, that invitation is the same one that Jesus extends to us everyday.  He invites us to break our fasting, to stop nibbling crumbs from his bounty of life that he has waiting for us and to start ‘tucking in’. 

The problem, if you want to think of it that way, is that, for all the exhilaration and astonishment and surprising and surpassing joy that he promises, there IS an element of risk in doing what Jesus asks.  Aside from that ‘foolishness’ that we could be accused of, there is the risk of being branded, being written off, being considered a part of the fringe rather than the mainstream.    

My question for us all here today is, looking at the Gospel story, and at the life of Jesus, when was following him ever perceived to be the norm? When was it ever mainstream to sacrificially offer yourself in the place of others?  When was routine to be in such strong communion with the Father that we would be willing to take the cup, and become the body of Christ?

Let’s pray.

Come To Believe

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Easter 2C

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

John 20:19-31

“¹⁹When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” ²⁰After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. ²¹Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” ²²When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. ²³If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” ²⁴But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. ²⁵So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

²⁶A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” ²⁷Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” ²⁸Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” ²⁹Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” ³⁰Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. ³¹But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

Periodically, it is helpful to step back from the details of the Gospel narratives and look at the broader picture of what the writers were trying to accomplish.  That’s what the four people on the front of our bulletin this morning symbolize:  Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, … they COULD be otherwise known as ‘John and the Gospelaires’ – singing their latest hit “He Arose” (see?  They’re even doing the hand motions … I thought I’d have a little fun with the cover this morning … hope that’s not too irreverent! (Although that second one from the right DOES kind of look like a woman, though, doesn’t she? … who knows … it WAS common practice to write under the name of the person or master or teacher you followed in the first century … and even into the second and third centuries).

But it is important to keep a broader perspective as we DO study the texts and explore the ramifications of what they meant to the early church and what they mean to us today.     

Today’s story is all too familiar.  It’s where the term ‘Doubting Thomas’ originated.  It’s where we direct those who place conditions on their belief for factual proof in order TO believe for the word that Jesus has for them – namely: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

That word – that blessing of those who believe in spite of not having seen, which, as the years went by, quickly became the majority of the followers of The Way – of Jesus Christ – is a word that speaks now to every single person who hears the Gospel, or sees it lived out in some way.  It covers the totality of those who today consider themselves to be followers of Christ. 

I was listening to a lecture this week, a professor at Duke Divinity School, who had actually taken his sessions during Holy Week and was running through the varying accounts of the passion of Christ.  With two of the Gospels, Mark and John, he summarized their messages in this way:  They are both passion narratives with a lengthy introduction.  In other words, the sum total of the Gospels of Mark and of John – the focus and ultimate purpose, is to relate the story of Christ’s last week of life – in the Gospel of John it is actually more like half the Gospel is the prelude to the last twenty-four HOURS of Jesus’ life, the second half – in terms of volume of text – occupies those last 24 hours of Jesus’ life. 

To be intellectually and spiritually honest, we have to ask ourselves the question that follows that statement:  Why did the Gospel writers spend so much time on the passion narrative? 

Here’s the thing:  the disciples lived with Jesus for a MINIMUM of three years – that’s 156 weeks, give or take … and when they or their followers sat down to finally record that story of what it all meant, they spent an inordinate amount of time on 1/156^th of the total time they spent together.  What does that tell us about how the disciples ended up viewing the end of Jesus’ life? 

It would seem to be somewhat important, wouldn’t you agree? 

The question has to be faced because it has bearing on how we view the rest of Jesus’ ministry – the weeks, months, and years prior to his last week of life.      

The narratives vary.  That is, I believe, a function of the individuals who wrote them and the communities to whom they were writing.  Matthew seems to have been writing to a community that had a strong sense of it’s Jewish identity, but which had had a falling out with the larger Jewish community from which it came – those who did NOT understand or believe that Jesus was the Messiah.  Luke was writing to a gentile community and focused on Jesus’ interactions with the gentiles throughout the course of his public ministry.  Mark seems to have been writing to a community – a church – a group of believers – who were struggling with the issue of why the Messiah – the promised one of God – had to suffer in order to fulfill scripture.  And John was writing long after all the others were gone, close to the end of his life, if not AT the end – there’s some indication that the final verses of John’s Gospel were written by a disciple of his following his death – in response to doubts that arose when Jesus had not returned prior to John’s death.  The focus of John’s Gospel is much more theological than historical – not that the synoptics – the other three Gospels – are NOT theological in their content – they ARE – but the degree to which John is blatantly making statements about who Jesus was, who he said he was, and who he was perceived to be by the disciples and his other followers to be is exponentially greater than in the other three narratives.  It comes clear in this key phrase that Thomas utters in his encounter with the risen Christ: 

“My Lord and my God!”    

And the writer of John all but spells out the reason the story was written down at all just two verses later: 

³¹But these [signs Jesus did] are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

That is the bottom line for John.  It is the whole reason for the Gospel to have been put down on paper – or papyrus, as the case may be, maybe vellum.  The point is, the writer has spent his life telling this story, explaining it, coming to terms in his own mind with who Jesus was, and realizing that he was getting close to his final days, he, like the other Gospel writers before him, decided to put down in writing what he’d been teaching and living for all these decades:  The story of Jesus’ time on earth. 

His reason for spending so much time on those last few days of Jesus’ life is the same reason that we are faced with this morning.  What do we do with the rest of his life in light of the record we have of his last days?  What sort of weight do we put on the claims of the Gospel writers in light of how THEY lived THEIR lives after Jesus’ resurrection?   

It bears repeating, revisiting, restating, and reemphasizing:  the most compelling argument for the resurrection of Christ is in comparing the lives of his disciples and followers before and after his crucifixion and resurrection.   

I think it is safe to say that Jesus taught an ethic of life that was exemplary.  He lived it as well.  His call to obedience, to sacrifice, to self-giving love is so counter-cultural in any given context that it easily falls into the category of ‘revolutionary’ when compared to the general expectations of the world as we see it and know it to be. 

Jesus’ call to forgiveness and redemption and the sharing that the disciples lived out after his death presented a model of living in community that most establishment religions would wrestle with trying to explain in the light of their self-sustaining interests throughout history. 

But however revolutionary, however dynamic and charismatic a teacher he was, his teachings may have remained with us as a footnote to history POSSIBLY, but most likely they would have faded INTO history HAD IT NOT BEEN FOR radically transformed lives that KEPT HAPPENING long after his disciples were off the scene and long gone.

What do we have that might explain that … persistence of impact? 

We have Jesus’ promise of continuing presence through the Holy Spirit.  We have the promise of his return, we have the commission received to BE HIS BODY on earth until he returns.  So we live in that promise, in that hope, and in that task to which he has called us.  

And all that has brought us to the point of coming to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the chosen one of God.  Thanks be to God!

Let’s pray.

Then They Remembered

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Palm Sunday

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

John 12:12-16

“¹²The next day the great crowd that had come to the festival heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. ¹³So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord— the King of Israel!” ¹⁴Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it; as it is written: ¹⁵“Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion. Look, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey’s colt!” ¹⁶His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done to him.”

It SO HELPS to understand the context of and the history behind an action in order to more fully appreciate what message that action conveys – or conveyed at the time that it originally occurred.   

You’ve heard me say before, in approaching scripture, that our greatest challenge is to put ourselves in the place of those who first heard or read the passages that we study – whether in our Wednesday evening studies or in Sunday School or in worship.  At two thousand years’ remove from the original events and places and people we are reading about, we have to slog back through two thousand years’ of accumulated traditional understanding and interpretation and layers upon layers of presumptions and overlays from intervening eras and scholarly and theological commentary, which includes insights that time and distance preclude us from grasping as well as cultural and societal misconceptions and prejudices and skewed understandings due to ignorance of the original situations – and in saying that I am not only talking about any given period among the last twenty centuries, but I am also including our current culture and society. 

While our exploration and reasoning and computer models and scholarly study seem to be unparalleled in history, I must admit to the possibility and even the PROBABILITY that we are potentially as off-base as any of those ‘middle ages ignorant and superstitious alchemists of central Europe’ were, simply because there is no definitive, objective and unbiased record of the events just as they happened at the time from the time. 

Absent that, we go with what we have been able to decipher from the text itself, historical documents unrelated to the text, but which corroborate the story, and known history. 

Growing up, it was always something of a mystery to me how the same people who at the beginning of the week seemed to be welcoming Jesus and praising his arrival could in the space of just a few days turn so completely against him and cry for his execution at the end of the week.

What I’ve come to understand in the study of the events is that, in the very things that I was interpreting as positive, encouraging expressions from the people of Jerusalem, seen in the light of the context in which they were expressing those feelings the seeds of the very same devastating rejection and hatred are evident. 

All three basic elements that we, viewing the events from a post-resurrection perspective understand in the light of that resurrection, have within them the plainly evident indicators of the carnage to come. 

First, to put the scene into it’s timeline context:  It is the day after last Sunday’s meal at the home of Lazarus and Martha and Mary.  It’s been maybe a week or less since Jesus raised Lazarus from the grave.  Today we talk about a ‘News Cycle’ – that is, the length of time that a story can draw attention and capture an audience before they move on to the next big story.  Depending on the story, there is usually somewhere between a 24 and a 72 hour window of time during which any given story can dominate the headlines, conversations around water coolers, and radio talk shows.   In first-century Palestine, the news cycle was quite a bit longer.  People are still hearing about Lazarus’ being raised from the dead for the first time days later.  It is THE topic of conversation.  And here is Jesus, the very one who DID THE RAISING coming into Jerusalem.  You can pretty much BET that everyone that could was going to BE along that road between Bethany and Jerusalem to see him go by. 

Now, keep in mind the larger context:  Judea is under the occupation of Rome.  People have been chafing under that rule for decades.  A Century before the Romans first moved in, the Syrians had come in and conquered Jerusalem and Hellenized the Jews (convinced them to accept Greek culture) to a degree that caused consternation in one group of former priests led by Judas Maccabeus (the name means ‘the hammerer’) they first escape to the surrounding mountains, and then come back and kick out the Syrian conquerors, and set up what ends up being the last independent Jewish state until modern times. 

One key element in that story is that, after the deliverance of the Temple and the city form the Syrians, the Maccabeans used palm branches in their celebrations.  From that time on, the palm fronds were not simply decorative and colorful, they were also reminders of an event where a relatively small number of devout men overthrew and kicked out what would by objective standards be an overwhelmingly more powerful force of an occupying empire. 

So when the people along the road to Jerusalem were waving palm fronds in Jesus’ face as he passed by, they were symbolically encouraging him to do the same thing to the Romans that the Maccabeans had done to the Syrians.  And this was most likely not lost on the Romans.

Their mood was even reflected in their cry of ‘Hosanna!’ – a chant which meant ‘Save (or deliver) us NOW’ – and in their blessing of Jesus as ‘he who comes in the name of the Lord’ (drawn from Psalm 118:26). In the original context this phrase referred to the Temple pilgrim on is way to worship, but here it was reinterpreted by the crowd to mean the king of Israel on his way to conquest. 

In the midst of this demonstration Jesus carried out a demonstration of his own by finding a young donkey on which he sat – hardly the standing or strutting of a conquering hero that would have been the expected form of approach – to symbolize his mission as a man of peace.  The act brought to mind the actions of the King of Israel in Zecharia 9:9, where, even though he is the King, he enters the city as a King, yes, but riding on the foal of a donkey, and proceeds to “cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations;” the symbolism in Jesus’ act is strong – he is stating pretty emphatically that his is not a reign of power over a people, designed and wielded to subjugate unwilling followers, but a reign of a type of power that has not been heard of or seen before.  The power that will voluntarily give itself in the place of the other person, that will surrender to the will of God in spite of the fear and danger and ultimate risk that doing so will bring. 

And here comes the editorial note in John’s Gospel:

 ¹⁶His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done to him.

The Gospel is written decades after the events.  In retrospect, things began to make a lot more sense than they had at the time.  The immediacy of the experience was overwhelming to them – it would be to anyone who was that close to Jesus through his ministry.  On a side note, as I mentioned last week, it didn’t seem to be lost on Mary, or on any of the other women who ministered alongside as well as to Jesus.  That may be a message for a future WMU emphasis Sunday…

Finally, the post scripted note from John:  when Jesus was glorified, THEN THEY REMEMBERED that these things had been written of him and had been done to him.  It took the experience of the resurrection, and seeing and being with the resurrected Christ, combined with the indwelling Spirit after his ascension, their own memory of the events, and the witness of the scriptures that they already held in their hearts to bring them to the understanding of what Jesus was doing and saying in those actions on the road from Bethany to Jerusalem on that day, the first day of his final week.

As the disciples remembered, may we continue to remember the fullness of the meaning of what Christ did, what Christ is doing, and what Christ has done for us and for the whole world.    

Let’s pray.

Filled With The Fragrance

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Lent 5C

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

John 12:1-11

¹“Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. ²There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. ³Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. ⁴But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, ⁵“Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” ⁶(He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) ⁷Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. ⁸You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” ⁹When the great crowd of the Jews learned that he was there, they came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. ¹⁰So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, ¹¹since it was on account of him that many of the Jews were deserting and were believing in Jesus.”

There are different angles from which we can approach the passage this morning: 

There is the literary angle, where this text serves as a bridge connecting the resurrection of Lazarus in the previous chapter to the triumphal entry and subsequent passion of Jesus. Set exactly a week before the last supper and Jesus’ subsequent arrest and torture and death, the act of the anointing of Jesus’ feet by Mary with this nard, this incredibly expensive and fragrant ointment, prepares the listeners and readers of John’s Gospel for what is to come, and on another level makes a statement about who Jesus is … the ointment being fit for a King… the Messiah, our Savior. 

There is the Social Justice angle.  Which kind of straddles the position Judas takes and the statement Jesus makes, drawing on the fact that Jesus’ response to the criticism of Mary’s use of the ointment to wash Jesus’ feet  - his statement that in the passage is inserted as “you always have the poor with you…” is taken from Deuteronomy 15:11, which reads: “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.”  It is a clear call to care for the poor, not to relegate them to invisibility and marginalize them.  God’s command is to engage and care for them. 

That’s not going to be the message this morning, as much as I think both of those angles are worth unpacking.  They are for another time. 

This morning I would like to focus on the act itself:  the extravagance, the “shocking intimacy” of a woman using what in Hebrew culture was considered her ‘crowning glory’ – her hair – to sop up the excess ointment that she had just used to clean the most humble part of a person’s body – the feet, since they were commonly covered with dust or mud, depending on the time of year, and would be unsightly and generally better left ignored. 

In the Gospel of Luke, the woman is left unnamed, but not uncharacterized.  She is called ‘a sinner’, the implication being that she was a prostitute, and not only does she bathe Jesus’ feet with the ointment, but also with her tears.    

I can’t completely remove us from those other two angles I mentioned.  I DO have to draw on them, the literary and the social justice angles, to fill out the picture we are viewing.

This meal DID take place sometime after Lazarus’ resurrection … in John’s Gospel it is found just a few verses earlier… it is worth noting that there is a repeated reference to the sense of smell in these two chapters … in verse 38 of chapter 11 there is a mention of the stench that will waft from the tomb where Lazarus has been laying for four days if the stone is rolled away, as Jesus has requested before raising Lazarus.  And now, in chapter 11, the house is filled with the fragrance of expensive perfume …

I’ve heard … and experienced, that the sense of smell is the most powerful sense when it comes to triggering memories.  You’ve heard me say before, the smell of chopped cilantro puts me back in the neighborhood feria, walking past the stand with all the spices and condiments… it takes very little to take me back there when I am smelling that.  I know if we went around the room and asked what smell triggers the most vivid memories for each of us, there would be little hesitation in identifying exactly what the smell was and what the memory was.  I would suspect that the writer of John’s Gospel had experienced that as well … and was communicating that here. 

There is a suggestion that the ointment – the nard – was something that Mary had been saving – or saving up for – for some time… the idea, again leading into the literary angle, of preparing Jesus’ body for a ‘proper burial’ – something that Mary was apparently able to discern was coming, but that the disciples were not – since most victims of execution by crucifixion were usually left to hang and at least partially decompose in the elements, later to be thrown into a common pit for burial with other bodies indiscriminately, there was no opportunity for preparing the body for religiously sanctioned burial before it was too late.  The element of foreshadowing comes into play. But again, that is part of the literary angle.

What I’d like to focus on is the statement that Mary was making in the simple act of washing Jesus’ feet with – whatever – it happened to be horrifically expensive perfume here, and she was doing it in front of everyone … which in and of itself was proclaiming how she felt about Jesus – after all, he HAD just resurrected her brother from the tomb, and he was already a close beloved friend. 

Can you imagine what it would have been like to share a meal with a family who, days earlier, would have been preparing a meal for mourning the passing of their brother, and have it turn into a meal WITH the brother in attendance?  … It makes you wonder what dinner conversation might have been like … it gives a whole new meaning to the question “what have you been up to lately?”  (Oh, not much, you?)

Two things stand out in the washing of Jesus’ feet by Mary.  The first IS the costliness of the ointment.  It was worth roughly the equivalent of a years’ wages for a regular workman in first century Palestine.  Roughly speaking, that would be like spending the cost of a really nice SUV on something that was going to get washed down the drain in a couple of minutes. 

The other is the element of the intimacy of the action.  Mary didn’t care that it would be considered improper for a respectable Hebrew woman to be touching a man who wasn’t her husband or her son in public, much less that she would be using her hair – which was kept covered except for her husband in a private setting – to wipe the part of the body held in lowest esteem in their society – the feet – she was, in essence, giving herself up – her name, her reputation, her standing, for Jesus. 

I remember as a younger man, I was more than willing to be considered a little excessive, a little radical, for Jesus.   There was no sense that I needed to protect anything in order to be seen as someone who was GIVEN to Christ.  

Planning a lifetime of service in ministry, it only seemed natural that I turn every expectation over to the service of the Kingdom.  Family, Home, belongings… on some level it has remained so.  But on another, it has changed slightly.  Now I have to REMIND myself that I am doing that.  It’s not so obvious.  Having a family, having responsibilities, duties, filling a place in this community – not only within this community of faith called Jerusalem Baptist Church, but also in the Warsaw and the Northern Neck communities, it has become something different – this telling myself that what I am and what I have here now is all the Lord’s to give, and the Lord’s to take away …

I guess it’s just the fact that I have to remind myself that makes it different… that’s all. 

How are we alike in this way?  As believers, I would think that on some level we all came to a point in our lives that we realized that all we had and all we supposedly ‘owned’ belonged to the Lord and would be available for the purposes of the Kingdom … but how often do we have to remind ourselves of that fact?  How long has it BEEN since we did that reminding? 

I think our reminder call comes this morning, with a woman spilling a year’s wages worth of perfume on Jesus’ feet, and wiping it up with her hair, and looking up at us and asking ‘what are you willing to give – and to give up for Christ?’ 

Let’s pray.

Be Reconciled

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Lent 4C

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

2 Corinthians 5:14-21

“¹⁴For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. ¹⁵And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.¹⁶From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. ¹⁷So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! ¹⁸All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; ¹⁹that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. ²⁰So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. ²¹For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Periodically, you come across a passage of scripture that has so much meat in it, so much depth and breadth of meaning that, in just a few sentences, the whole of the Gospel can be drawn out.  

I’ve often heard Paul referred to as a ‘Religious Genius’, and though the term may well apply, it is slightly discomfiting … because it implies that the Christian faith was the brainchild of Paul rather than being based on the teachings of Jesus.  I DO believe in giving credit where credit is due, Paul DID crystallize much of what has come down to us as our Theology, but I do not believe that, in saying that, it diminishes the centrality of the message and the person of Jesus because if it weren’t for Jesus, I don’t think Paul could have come up with this stuff on his own. 

So let’s get down to it:  Paul is explaining to the Corinthian church why he does what he does … why he BOTHERS … why he goes to the trouble of finding a place to preach, risking and more often than not, suffering persecution, engaging people in a dialogue that results in salvation, and then spending time – weeks, months, even years, nurturing and discipling those people who have declared their faith in Jesus as the Messiah. 

What we have in this passage is a concise description of what it means to look at the world through the eyes of God. 

¹⁶From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. 

What Paul is saying is that, in taking on the Lordship of Christ, in accepting the presence of the Holy Spirit as our guide, companion and comforter, THAT is the perspective from which we begin to view the world, not from our former perspective, as fallen, fallible, frail human beings … not that we stop being that, but we hopefully begin to grow … out of it.

Our view of our fellow human beings takes a decidedly different turn.  We are called as followers of Jesus to look at them through the eyes of God – through “God goggles”, as the camp pastor at PassportKids camp told us the summer before last.  It was a great turn of phrase… the point being that, if we hold on to looking at the world through our own, narrow and limited understanding of how WE perceive the world, it is impossible to get past our preconceptions, our subjective understanding and our very superficial view of what is going on in the world around us.  We can’t get past the outside of a person … what they look like, what they wear, what they sound like, what they own … we can make a substantial EFFORT, and yes, on occasion, we CAN ALMOST come to see them apart from all that stuff … but as human beings, as created beings wired to function in that way – visual queues are what we are SUPPOSED to pick up on in order to make value judgments about someone that is approaching us.

When we make the decision to believe and declare that “Jesus is Lord” – that earliest and most fundamentally radical statement of the early church – Paul says we become new creations.

Does that mean that we get new bodies, stronger bones, more (or less) muscle and fat?  No!!  We are reborn in our spirit!  Nothing necessarily changes in outward appearance … I’ve seen pictures of me before and after July 12^th, 1973, and I look pretty much like the same emerging geek that I always was; same horn-rimmed glasses, same eyes, same nose, chin, mouth, ears.  The physical didn’t change.  What DID BEGIN to change was what was inside. 

And that is ultimately what matters.  That is what makes us who we are, that is where we define our being.  We can say, “this is what I look like, but let me tell you who I AM.” … there’s a difference. 

There’s a radio program I love to listen to, called “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” on NPR, and the host of the show is a man named Peter Sagal.  Until this past week, I had never bothered to look their website up on the internet.  When I did, I had a difficult time adjusting to the image of the actual person from the image I had developed in my mind over the last few years of listening to the show.  He doesn’t look ANYTHING like what I had imagined … even though I had intentionally tried NOT to establish any preconceived notions of what he looked like.  I was on the receiving end of that experience when I worked at Bell Atlantic.  My co-workers who lived and worked out of the Baltimore/Washington area office had me pegged as someone darker, shorter, and heavier than I turned out to be.  It was somewhat amusing to see their reactions when we DID finally get to meet face-to-face! 

All that to say this:  we are not truly defined – and no one is – by our outward appearance, we are defined by the inward presence of a growing awareness of who God wants us to be in relation to each other and to God.            

And THAT is what Paul was getting at with the folks in Corinth.  They were still seeing each other from their human perspective.  Some were rich, others weren’t.  Some were slaves, others weren’t.  Some were Jews, others weren’t.  In other words, they were still seeing each other by the world’s standards, focusing on what made them DIFFERENT from each other rather than on what made them ALIKE.  And Paul is telling them – and us – that that “ALIKENESS” is the Holy Spirit dwelling in each of them and in each of us.  And insofar as that “alikeness” is a uniting element, they were to apply it to the rest of their lives and the rest of their interactions with each other – Paul calls it ‘The ministry of reconciliation’ … 

It is important to note here that it isn’t Paul who is calling the folks at Corinth to this ministry of reconciliation.  Paul points out that it is God who is doing the calling… but it is a little more than a call … different, in some way … the word used is ‘entrusted’.  If Paul had said, as he does in other places, that he ‘charged’ the Corinthians with a task, it carries the weight of … well … an order, more or less.  There’s a somewhat legal or military tilt to the idea being presented.   But when the word ‘entrust’ is used, as it is here, what impression does that leave? 

Isn’t it a more … relational term?  Doesn’t it carry more of a connotation of equals at either end of the transaction?  If I entrust something to someone, it means, just as the word includes, that I trust them to do something  … the way I would do it.  So to hear that God was reconciling the world to God’s self through Jesus Christ, and that God has entrusted THAT SAME MINISTRY to us … then we are faced with the same task that Jesus Christ was about during his ministry.   

Have we met that responsibility? Have we fulfilled it? Are there ways in which we have, and other ways in which we haven’t?

As we continue to move through the season of Lent, I hope that we would ponder these questions even as we explore the ways in which God is calling us to greater and deeper and more wonderful ways of bringing about that very ministry of reconciliation.

Let’s pray.