Filled With the Holy Spirit (Acts 4:5-12)

My colleague and friend, the Reverend Michael McCain, loves horror movies.  From 1960’s Psycho to 2022’s Talk to Me, Michael can’t get enough.  Michael analyzes horror films as commentaries on society, as emblematic of the subconscious fears and drives that motivate us.  Hearing Michael talk about the deeper meaning of a slasher film is akin to listening to a biblical scholar exegete a difficult passage of scripture.

I am not so much a fan of the genre, but I do appreciate the occasional film about demonic possession.  The original Exorcist, which I’m sure I watched as a kid on one of those rare early 80s weekends when HBO was pumped free into our television set in a bid to get my parents to subscribe, terrified this future priest in the best way.  More recently, in 2007 I watched the film Paranormal Activity alone in our Roanoke basement on a pirated DVD, and it scared me so much that I turned on the lights and ran upstairs.

Why bring up horror films and possession in this bright Easter season?  Because in our reading today from the Acts of the Apostles, we are told that Peter, who previously had been a waffling, insecure mess, is “filled with the Holy Spirit” and suddenly able to do and say things that before were impossible for him or any normal person.  This reads a whole lot like possession, doesn’t it?  What’s up with that?  What does it mean to be filled with the Holy Spirit?

Mainline churches such as ours don’t tend to ask this question.  The Holy Spirit makes us nervous, because so many of our Christian sisters and brothers in more Pentecostal traditions claim that the Holy Spirit has them act so, well, weirdly.  The Holy Spirit also makes us nervous, I think, because in our lives we so desperately want to maintain control.  We (rightly) disapprove of being “under the influence” of drugs and alcohol, substances that seem to take us over and impair our ability to control our impulses and actions.  Beyond that kind of impairment, our desire for control is, ironically, its own kind of addiction.  We want to be able to manage the world around us to preserve our well-being, our health, our livelihoods, our kids.  We want to control everything about our lives, and anything that threatens our control—including the Holy Spirit—terrifies us.

Our apprehension about being filled with the Holy Spirit is not lessened when we read how our Evangelical Christian siblings talk about it either.  Billy Graham said, “To be Spirit-filled according to Scripture is to be controlled or dominated by the Spirit of God’s presence and power…To ‘be filled with the Spirit’ pictures a continual filling. We’re not filled once-for-all but filled constantly.  Consider the Mississippi or the Amazon. Much may be taken from them, but they do not run dry. The sources from which they come keep sending water down their course.”[i] 

This paints a picture of the Holy Spirit coursing through us like a constant torrent, so wild that we are taken over by it and carried helplessly along its current.  Setting aside what we said earlier about not wanting to be controlled or dominated by something other, I think most of us would agree that the experience described by Billy Graham is foreign.  My life as a non-stop, un-damned flood of Holy Spirit power is something I can’t even really fathom.  Can you?  If not, then how might we, as Episcopalians, consider what happens to and in Peter this morning?  How might we understand being filled with the Holy Spirit?

Peter before the Sanhedrin

St. Paul offers us a window in his brilliant Letter to the Ephesians, when Paul says, “Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.”[ii]  Paul makes a clear distinction between the possession of drunkenness—that particular kind of being under the influence—and the presence of the Holy Spirit.  They don’t look or feel the same, in other words.  So, the first thing we should recognize is that, unlike being drunk or high, the power of the Holy Spirit does not remove from us our faculties.  Our self-possession is not undercut by God’s Spirit acting within us.  That’s helpful to know.

It’s also important to note that Holy Scripture makes a distinction between the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and being filled with the Holy Spirit.  In John’s Gospel, Jesus promises that God will send the Holy Spirit to his followers, “to be with [them] forever.”  Jesus says of the Spirit, “You [will] know him, because he abides in you, and he will be in you.”[iii]  Again in Ephesians, Paul adds, “You…were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit, which is the pledge of our inheritance…as God’s own people.”[iv]

What this means is that the Holy Spirit dwells within us now and always.  Rather than as a torrent, the Spirit abides as that deep well that plumbs our souls.  We experience that indwelling not in ecstatic and uncontrolled spiritual frenzy, but rather in just the opposite: Through those preternaturally still and quiet moments that sometimes seize us even in the midst of the day’s hubbub; those moments of deep centering and grounding; the sudden insight that we and the world are God’s and rest in God.  It is this experience the disciples themselves had when Jesus joined them in the locked room, breathed the Holy Spirit into them, and said, “Peace by with you.”[v] 

That experience many of us grasp.  That we encounter.  We may not have known what to call it, but we should name it for what it is: Our intuition of the eternal indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit within us.

So how does this indwelling of the Spirit differ from being filled with the Spirit?  For that, we can return to Billy Graham’s metaphor but amend it.  As Graham says, the Mississippi River always has water, but it does not, in fact, always flow with power and might.  Just last September, long stretches of the Mississippi were so still and low that barge traffic was suspended.  The river does not always roil and rush.[vi]

That, I believe, gets at our experience of the Spirit.  Usually, as we’ve said, the spiritual well water in us sits tranquil and still, granting us a serene connection to our Source.  Much rarer are the instances when the well rises to become a gushing spring, which then becomes a torrent, which can become a mighty river.  That is being filled with the Spirit.  And we actually know that rare experience, too, though again, we may not have named it as such in our lives: We have all had those moments in which our passion is stoked, our love unexpectedly expands almost to burst our hearts, our energy is replenished when moments before we were fatigued to near-collapse.  This is God’s Holy Spirit filling us.

Note well: I’m not talking about instances of anger, or lust, or other frenzied emotion in which our reason is compromised and our actions regrettable.  Such episodes are more like demonic possession, in which we risk losing control, and that is never the Spirit of God at work.  The Spirit clears, rather than addles, our hearts and minds.  The Spirit hones our actions rather than muddling them.  When the Holy Spirit fills us, the Spirit does so in ways that empower us as God’s instruments, but always in co-operation with our own agency, and always in outward-facing ways to labor to redeem God’s world. 

This is what happens in and to Peter today.  The Spirit that dwells in Peter rushes forth from the wellspring of Peter’s soul when Peter is dragged before the Council.  The Spirit does not posses Peter, taking from Peter his volition and agency, but it empowers him and inspires Peter to speak the truth in faith.

There is space for spiritual discipline here.  The first step is to become aware and mindful of the Holy Spirit that dwells always within us.  We Episcopalians tend to be quite good at that, actually.  We know how to be still and silent.  We are often adept at turning our eye inward to listen to God’s still small voice.[vii]  Tapping into that Spirit—abiding in the Spirit that abides in us—is essential to the health of our souls.  Drinking from that well regularly sustains us.  It also readies for those moments in our lives in which we may be dragged before councils, so to speak, in which we find ourselves living in faith in and for God’s world and in need of power and grace beyond our own resources.  It is then that, like Peter, we may feel the Spirit begin to rise, granting us crystal clarity of heart and mind, power and energy for God’s work before us, and hope that our work will find purchase in God’s great plan of redemption.         

As in Peter, so in us. 

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[i] https://billygraham.org/answer/what-does-it-mean-to-be-filled-with-the-spirit/

[ii] Ephesians 5:18

[iii] John 14:16-17

[iv] Ephesians 1:13-14

[v] John 20:19

[vi] https://apnews.com/article/mississippi-river-drought-farmers-barges-e923b5f5e844ae278f42957b91d83f27

[vii] 1 Kings 19:12, KJV

The Judas Window (John 20:19-31)

“When 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…”

This is how today’s Gospel passage begins.  Though we are a week removed from Easter Sunday—with the sugar high of jellybeans and chocolate rabbits receding, and with the hysteria of the solar eclipse just ahead—in the Gospel story it is still Easter evening, and if we are to understand the what’s going on in the hearts and minds of the disciples, we must return to that moment.

For us, Easter is a day of joy, in which we worship in the morning, then laugh as we watch our children hunt for Easter eggs, and finally gather with family and friends for a feast.  For the disciples, Easter was a day of discombobulation, spiraling emotions, apprehension, and fear.  Why so?  The disciples followed their charismatic leader—Jesus—to Jerusalem under the misapprehension that Jesus was about to force great change in Judea.  As James and John repeatedly argued, the disciples wanted to be Jesus’ right-hand men in this work, to be worldly, important, and powerful.  On Maundy Thursday all came crashing down when one of their number—Judas, their treasurer, no less—switched sides and helped the Sanhedrin ambush Jesus and drag him into custody.  At that moment, rather than sound the clarion call to rise up, Jesus, his power apparently drained, went meekly with the mob.

The events of the next eighteen hours were crushing.  Judas walked away a rich man with powerful new friends[i]; the disciples scattered into the shadows, despite the fact that at their last dinner together they’d promised to stay with Jesus come what may; and Jesus himself—all alone bereft of his friends—was brutalized and then killed in the most public and intentionally humiliating way. 

And then, just this morning (for them), the disciples have received word that Jesus isn’t dead after all.  Jesus has apparently emerged from his tomb alive and different, even stronger than he was before. 

So, as our Gospel reading begins, we find the disciples huddled in a house, with the door locked and barred.  John tells us that they were barricaded there “for fear of the Jews.”  I once preached a sermon that asked, “Just which Jew do you think they were afraid of?” 

Maybe they are afraid of Judas, who might come with the authorities to mop of the remainder of Jesus’ followers, to finish the job he’d begun three days earlier, once and for all.

Maybe they are afraid of Jesus himself, the Jew they’d abandoned after all their bravado, who they gave up to Judas before slinking away into hiding, but who now has demonstrated by defeating death that he is more powerful than they could have imagined.

Maybe both.  But I deeply suspect that the Jews of whom the disciples are most afraid, and from whom they are desperately hiding, are themselves.  They are terrified of facing who they are and what they have done and failed to do, as they bear the triple shame of 1.) having crassly craved worldly power like adolescent boys, 2.) having so quickly given in to fear and deserted the Jesus who had inspired and changed their lives, and 3.) perhaps even having had the terrible thought that maybe they should have joined Judas in his betrayal, should have switched sides when he did and thus be spared their current circumstance altogether.[ii] 

John’s Gospel leaves it for us to decide.  All we are told is that the door is locked and that the disciples are huddled inside in apprehension and fear of someone.  Today’s account inspires a once well-known, but now mostly forgotten name for the peep hole in a door, the little aperture that allows one to see what is coming outside but not expose the one within.  Do you know what it is called?  The name for that tiny, one-way opening is the “Judas window,” named for Jesus’ betrayer who may return to betray the others.[iii] 

The Judas window is how the disciples might spy who is coming for them, whether it’s Judas himself with the mob, the resurrected Jesus, or the disciples’ own overwhelming sense of shame.  The Judas window is how we, too, guard ourselves against that which threatens us.  It’s a symbol for the barricaded doors in our lives, both literal and figurative, the locked doors of our houses and our souls.  The Judas window is the way we look out at the world warily, charting its comings and goings, while anxiously protecting ourselves from whatever may try to enter in.

As it turns out, the one who enters the disciples’ room is Jesus.  The Judas window ultimately provides the disciples no warning, and the barred door provides no protection.  The resurrected Jesus goes where he wills, and suddenly he is among them.  The disciples cower when they first see Jesus with them in the room.  What will the one who can defeat death do to them?  But Jesus says to them, “Peace be with you.”  He shows them the wounds in which they are complicit, but which God has redeemed.  And he breathes into them the healing and forgiving power of the Holy Spirit. 

Jesus enters them just as surely as he has entered the room.  Despite their wary and watchful gaze through the Judas window; despite the locked door of the room and their hearts; despite their shame, Jesus enters.  In every way, Jesus enters.  And the disciples are finally and forever changed.  Only now do they become people of faith and confidence.  Only now can they truly follow Jesus.  Only now, with the Spirit within, them are they able to forgive themselves and others.  Only now can they release their shame. 

Fast forward those two thousand years, from Easter evening with the disciples to a new Easter season here and now.  What might this season of Resurrection mean for us?  We’re not so different from the disciples in that room, I think.  For many of us, we have been peering out at the world through the Judas window of our souls for so long, not allowing anyone truly to see in, desperately barricading the doors of our hearts in the attempt to hide from who we have been or what we have done.  I suspect that’s one reason we so insistently secularize holidays like Easter, so that the holiday itself can serve as yet another barrier against the incursion of Jesus.

But as with the disciples, the risen Jesus goes where he will.  The Judas window provides no forewarning.  The locked door provides no protection.  Jesus will enter into us, and at first that can be cowering.  When Jesus enters, we see starkly the wounds we have caused to God, to God’s children, to God’s world.  We know, in the presence of the crucified and risen one, all the ways in which we have misunderstood, and abandoned, and hidden from God’s goodness and grace.  But in the very next breath, Jesus reveals to us that there is no wound God cannot redeem.  Jesus bestows his peace upon our hearts.  Jesus fills us with his Spirit.  In short, we experience the death of that old life which both defined us and from which we sought to hide—the life that had us anxiously peering out the Judas window day and night—and we begin a new life.  That is Easter.

We then become people of confidence and faith, because Jesus has come to us regardless of who we were.  We become disciples because we now see that discipleship is the work of extending to others what Jesus has done in and for us.  We not only unlock but tear down the doors that seek to block Jesus’ path.         

Like Thomas, we finally say of Jesus, “My Lord and my God!” and we rejoice. 

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[i] We know from Matthew 27:1-10 and Acts 1:18 that things don’t end so well for Judas, but the remaining disciples would not yet have known this.

[ii] Ibid

[iii] This term is still used in Great Britain to describe the one-way window in a prison cell door, which allows the guards to see inside the cell without allowing the prisoner to see out.

The middle of exile (Jeremiah 32:31-34 & John 12:20-33)

During the summers when I was a Hendrix College student, I left the bucolic confines of the Hendrix campus and returned to Northeast Arkansas to work for the Arkansas Highway Department on a bridge crew.  It would be difficult to imagine a starker contrast between the two environments.  The red brick, tree-lined path between the philosophy building and library was replaced with tarry blacktop leading to decaying rural bridges over ditches and creeks.  What’s more, each week the bridge crew worked four, ten-hour days, from 7 a.m. until 5 p.m. in the oppressive summer heat standing on asphalt above water with the sun both beating down and reflecting up.  The minutes of those days ticked by at a maddeningly slow crawl.  Those long summers felt like exile from the life I loved and was supposed to be living.

During those summers I operated a jackhammer and an acetylene torch, but the worst job was flagging.  Flagging on remote county roads was incredibly lonely, because the flagger was fifty yards away from the rest of the crew.  And, it was dangerous, because the rare car that appeared often careened down the road unaware of or unconcerned with the promising young college student frantically waving his red flag.  Flagging was also dangerous because the others on the crew sometimes forgot about the flagger and failed to provide him minor graces in the sweltering heat such as, oh, water.

In my overheated delirium, I would sometimes daydream and occasionally hallucinate, and it was on one such morning while flagging in rural Craighead County north of Jonesboro that a small Chrysler K-Car emerged from the haze and approached our worksite.  At first, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing inside the car.  Was it penguins?  Surely that couldn’t be.  I wiped the sweat from my eyes and peered in again.  And, sure enough, stuffed into that small, powder blue sedan so tight that they could have been circus clowns was a whole bunch of full-habit-wearing nuns.  I’m not sure I’d seen that many nuns collectively in my entire life at that point, and I’d surely not seen so many together, literally sitting on one another’s laps.  The driver smiled at me angelically, and I waved them on.  For the rest of the morning, I wondered at what I’d seen.

Lent surely is a long season.  It’s six weeks in duration, including Holy Week, but the sense of it is longer still.  If we’ve given up something meaningful, Lent is so long that we feel the lack.  If we’ve taken on a discipline, Lent is so long that it begins to chafe.  If we’ve done neither of these things, Lent is so long that we truly begin to feel guilty at our lack of observance.  And if we are theologically attuned, Lent is so long—and this is, of course, the point—that we experience with Jesus the long march to the cross.  The season becomes more and more ominous as the weeks progress.  The mood gets ever-darker.  The sensation of impending doom crescendos.  At this point in the season, on the fifth Sunday of Lent, Lent can be as oppressive as the Arkansas summer heat while standing upon blacktop.

This is the sense that our readings initially convey today.  In the Old Testament reading, the prophet Jeremiah writes during the Babylonian Exile, at a time when many of the Jewish people have been forcibly removed from the their land while others have been relegated to third-class citizenship.  This state of affairs has been going on so long that Jeremiah’s neighbors are despondent.  They’ve forgotten what blessing looks like.

In John’s Gospel, today’s focus is individually on Jesus.  By now in the Gospel, Jesus has a clear sense of where his ministry is headed: straight to a Roman crossbeam of wood, a painful and humiliating end for him and the dashing of all hope for his followers.  Jesus has attempted to explain what is coming to his closest friends, but no one wants to hear it.  No one wants to believe it.  And so, no one empathizes or truly walks with Jesus in these moments of fear and dread.  Jesus experiences his own personal exile.  He is truly all alone.  In a moment of heartrending vulnerability, today Jesus admits, “Now my soul is troubled.”

For both Jeremiah and Jesus, exile could, and perhaps by rights ought to, lead to despair.  In the midst of the withering heat, or on the march to the cross, or on the fifth Sunday of an interminably long Lent, or in whatever we are facing in life that feels like an endless exile, how do we fend off despair?  How do we persevere?  How do we thrive?

The great American Baptist preacher Tony Campolo has a sermon entitled, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming.”  Friday in that sermon is Good Friday, the Friday when hope is dashed, when Jesus is killed; the metaphoric Friday in which so much of our own lives seems to be lived.  For so many, so often, life is a prolonged Good Friday of pain, or illness, or disappointment, or exile from the things we love and that give life.  Tony Campolo acknowledges Friday in all its reality, in which—like standing on asphalt over water—the heat and glare of life exhaust and confuse and render us practically delirious.     This is what Jeremiah feels in the midst of a broken people.  This is what Jesus feels, all alone in his knowledge of what is coming, as his soul is troubled. 

But in each and every line of Tony Campolo’s sermon, even as he acknowledges the unavoidable, irrepressible reality of Friday, Campolo adds, “but Sunday’s coming!”  And the Sunday after Good Friday is always Easter Sunday.

This is the promise to which Jesus holds fast.  After lamenting his troubled soul, in his next breath, Jesus speaks of glory. 

This is what the prophet proclaims.  From exile, Jeremiah speaks God’s voice and says, “I will be their God, and they shall be my people…They shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest; for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.”

This is not Pollyanna optimism.  Jesus knows that the pain of the cross will dwarf the pain of his present loneliness.  Jeremiah’s exile continues, and he has no way to know when God will restore God’s people.  These are realities that must be faced.  But for those who find their lives in the Living God, these realities are not the deepest reality nor the most enduring.  Beyond any exile, beyond any pain, beyond any challenge, God’s reconciling, restoring, joy-giving love awaits.

At lunchtime on that 1992 summer day in Craighead County, our Highway Department bridge crew loaded into our truck and sought a shaded area in which we could rest and escape the sun for a few minutes.  We drove to a small, nearby county park.  All of us were surly and uncomfortable, complaining and bickering about the relentless heat and endless day, but as we pulled into the park our mouths were suddenly stopped and our eyes widened.  What I’d seen earlier while flagging had not been a hallucination.  In the middle of the park was a playground, and on the swings, the merry-go-round, the slides, and even the monkey bars were all those nuns![i]  In full habit in the summer heat, more nuns that I could count were frolicking around, grinning and playing like schoolchildren.  Can you picture it?  Whatever you are imagining, it was more than that.  I’ve never seen anything else like it, either before or since.  It was surreal.  Those nuns were dressed in black that extended to their ankles.  They had to have been at least as hot and uncomfortable as we were.  And yet, in the midst of that endless and sweltering summer, they laughed with abandon.  They found joy.

At nineteen, I thought those ten-hour days of grueling manual labor in the Arkansas heat were the worst life could get.  (My, how life has, time and time again, proven me wrong!)  But even then, God revealed hope to me, and God did so through the laughter of a playground filled with nuns.  As they awaited the resurrection, in their heavy black habits they played and frolicked and acted like blessed children.  They knew that in a world so often like Good Friday, Sunday is coming.          It is!  Wherever you are in this season of Lent, wherever you are in the Lent of your own life, however endless your Good Friday has seemed, Sunday is coming.  Easter is coming.  Hold fast, friends.  Wipe the sweat from your eyes.  Look for the signs coming down the road.  Easter is coming, and by the grace of the God of love, we will know joy. 

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[i] I later learned that the nuns were sisters of Holy Angels Convent, a house of Olivetan Benedictine Sisters located north of Jonesboro.  The convent still exists, presently with twenty-one sisters.

Of snake boots, Jesus, and open faith (Numbers 21:4-9 & John 3:14-21)

“Poisonous serpents moved among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died.”  

 These are the words from the Book of Numbers this morning.  Sometimes Holy Scripture provides us metaphors so clear that they scarcely need interpretation.  You know what I’m talking about: With last Tuesday’s primaries we have entered another election season.  The serpents are moving, and the venom has begun to flow!

I don’t intend to malign dedicated and self-sacrificing public servants, of whom there are many.  I thank God for them, and I commend their willingness to serve.  But there are fewer and fewer of them, it seems to me, and more and more of those who would slither and bite, serving themselves and their tribe rather than the body public.  Their rhetoric gets into us like poison, and we find ourselves fevered by venom from both ends of the political spectrum.

I wish this were constrained to the secular world, but it isn’t.  Within the broad sweep of Christianity, there are plenty who loudly invoke the name of Jesus as the source and backstop of their ideologies; their opinions of the various people who populate our world; and their determination of who is in and who is out of God’s favor and, even heaven itself.  Such folk speak the name of Jesus, but their messaging often comes across as a kind of Christian venom.  It makes many of us deeply uneasy.  We recoil from conversation with such Christians, keeping a bit of distance, as if we fear a quick strike that may undo us.

I’m a bird hunter.  I love to walk quail fields in the high grass.  And I always wear snake boots of thick canvas and leather, designed to withstand the fangs of a copperhead or timber rattlesnake.  I think for many who find themselves gravitating to the Episcopal Church, we think of the Episcopal Church as ecclesiastical snake boots.  Many who aren’t cradle Episcopalians have been bitten at points in their lives by other forms of Christianity.  The wounds are often lasting, and in here we’re safe from the poison.  That could be the new Episcopal Church slogan: “Join the Episcopal Church: We’ll be your snake boots!”

But it’s worth looking again at the prescription God gives Moses for the health and well-being of the Israelites.  As the Hebrews are getting snake-bit hither and yon, God says to Moses: “‘Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.’ So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.”

What’s that all about?  We’ll come back to it in a bit.  First, let’s look at the Gospel text, which explicitly hearkens back to the Old Testament reading from Numbers.  Jesus himself says today, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

That statement is followed by perhaps the most well-known verse in the Gospels, one that I learned as a small child watching football on television, when a 1980s character known as “Rainbow Wig Guy” frequented the endzones of NFL stadiums holding up a sign that read “John 3:16.”  And here it is today, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

People have visceral reactions to this verse.  For some, it is a great comfort, but for others, it seems to have been claimed as the exclusive property of that brand of Christian to which I referred earlier, serving as the very tip of the fang, spoken to pierce and do damage by implying that if one doesn’t believe in exactly the right way—namely, the way of the one striking out believes—then one is condemned.

So, what are we Episcopalians to do?  Are we to stay huddled and a bit confused, protected within our church  walls that serve like the thick hide of snake boots?  Is that what God is calling us to do?  Is that what discipleship to Jesus looks like?

To get at the answer, we need to remember to whom Jesus is speaking in John’s Gospel this morning.  A few verses before today’s reading begins, Nicodemus approaches Jesus.  John says that Nicodemus is “a Pharisee” and “a leader of the Jews.”[i]  This means he is both well-educated and a person of status and standing in his community.  It’s important to note that Nicodemus is genuinely admiring of Jesus and recognizes that Jesus is someone special with a special message.  Nicodemus says to Jesus, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”[ii]

All the signs point to Nicodemus being at the cusp of a spiritual awakening and a profound faith, except for one crucial nugget of information: John 3 tells us that Nicodemus visited Jesus in secret, “under the cover of night.”[iii] 

Nicodemus wants to follow Jesus.  He wants to be a disciple.  He wants to live by grace.  But Nicodemus is wary and afraid.  He worries that folks will lump him in with all the other religious messianic crazies walking around.  He’s afraid of how his life may change.  He’s afraid of getting snakebit, and thus he wants to remain anonymous.  So, Nicodemus puts on his snake boots, so to speak.  He plays it safe and visits Jesus only at night, when no one will know.   

And this is when Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.  For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

What, then, is the connection?  Why does Jesus point Nicodemus the Pharisee, who knows his scripture by heart, to this image of Moses and the Israelites?  It foretells the cross, obviously, when Jesus will literally be raised up on the wood the way that Moses lifts the bronze serpent on his staff, but there’s more to it, too.  In the Old Testament story, in which the Israelites are constantly finding themselves struck by snakes, God’s antidote is not for God’s people to hide in darkness or in the armor of snake boots, to recede from the danger and threat.  Rather, God has Moses lift up a blazing icon of sun-burnished bronze and call God’s people to gaze upon it and flock to it, to cleave to God’s grace and power openly—even brazenly—as the way to health and life.  God promises that when one does so, no venom can harm.

And that is what Jesus is saying to Nicodemus as well.  It is what John’s Gospel is saying to us.  Perhaps no one in the Gospel story represents Episcopalians more than Nicodemus.  Like Nicodemus, we are thoughtful and educated, worldly and of standing in our community.  Like Nicodemus, we find Jesus compelling and find ourselves drawn to God.  And like Nicodemus, we are tentative.  We’re often unsure of our faith and so we prefer it to be relatively anonymous.  We don’t want to go toe-to-toe with those “other” Christians who speak so openly of “Jesus this and Jesus that.”  And we surely don’t want to risk non-Christians lumping us in with those other Christians!

And as with Nicodemus, Jesus tells us that we can’t have faith halfway.  We cannot follow Jesus under cover of darkness.  In the end, there is no such thing as mumbling, privatized, anonymous discipleship.   To believe—to adore, to trust, to follow Jesus, which is, we must never forget, what believing truly means—requires openness, gratitude, joy, and a willingness to name in whom we place our faith.  It means gazing upon the cross in the light of our everyday and knowing that, so long as we cleave to God’s grace, no venom can touch us.

If we will come to Jesus in light of day, if we will gaze upon Jesus, if we will speak of Jesus openly and with the brazen confidence of those who feel God’s love, then we will be inoculated from the effect of those who misuse the name of Jesus in venomous ways.  Through our lived and spoken faith, the world will come instead to know the Jesus we know, here in this place: The Jesus whose words always heal, whose love always accepts, whose grace always uplifts the downtrodden.

Nicodemus will show up twice more in John’s Gospel.  The third and final time we see him, he is preparing Jesus’ crucified body for burial.  Finally, he has openly given himself to the one whose life, death, and resurrection saves him, and saves us.           

We don’t have to wait.  As we approach Easter, let this be the time that we say to those we meet, those who are searching, those who need a word of grace in their lives, that here at Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, among this community of faith, we know Jesus.  In a world of vipers, God’s love heals us and makes us whole.  In the light of day, we look to God’s grace.  Openly, we love one another in Christ’s name.    For God so loved the world!

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[i] John 3:1

[ii] John 3:2

[iii] Ibid

I will change your name

In Ursula Le Guin’s fantasy novel The Tombs of Atuan, young Tenar is identified as the next high priestess of the tombs of the Nameless Gods.  In an initiation ceremony, Tenar is stripped of her name and labled “Arya,” which means “eaten one.”  She is consigned to live the rest of her life as merely a cipher of the Nameless Gods in the tombs, without personhood, integrity, or her own meaning.  As time goes on Tenar’s lack of identity smothers her, and she desires nothing so much as to be given back her true name.

Both today’s Old Testament and Gospel readings are all about naming, and the power of naming, and the burden and grace of a name.  In Genesis, God renames both Abram and Sarai, and in Mark, Jesus seems to give Simon a terrible name. 

We know all-too-well the power of naming.  Recall the devastating name someone gave you in childhood or adolescence.  Perhaps it was a teasing friend who didn’t realize her ability to harm.  Perhaps it was a bully who knew exactly what he was doing.  Perhaps it was a teacher who misunderstood the struggles you were facing and mistook them for lack of care.  Perhaps it was a parent who spoke to you in anger.  Whatever the label cast and by whom, I suspect you are still haunted by that name.  I know I am.

That pattern continues throughout life, as we all know.  We receive names from those known to us, by strangers, and by society-at-large, often cast in carelessness as much as in cruelty.  And these names, too, strip us of our given names, viciously stealing our identity and replacing it with one that we find difficult to escape.

It should be said, the name that strips you of your true name may not even be given by another.  It may be the name you whisper of yourself in the morning mirror, because you don’t like the person whose reflection you see.  We do great harm by the names we cast on ourselves. 

Lest we mistakenly believe we are only on the receiving end of such naming, we must remember that we also name others, sometimes deliberately and sometimes carelessly.  Indeed, the most God-like power God gives to Adam in the second chapter of Genesis is the power to name.[i]  I learned this most starkly during the decade I served at Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Houston.  Literally every day, I had to walk past, through, and over the multitude of homeless women and men who congregated and slept on the Cathedral blocks.  The clutter, the intransigence, and the headaches that accompanied so many people on the street were frustrating and wearying in the extreme.  And each day, I had the choice to name in my heart and soul these neighbors as either “worthless bums” or “children of God.”  Some days, the effort required to choose the latter name was mighty.  But making that choice made all the difference.

As with Tenar in Ursula Le Guin’s novel, the names with which we are burdened, and the names we cast on others, threaten to devour us.  Our God-given power to name seems as often a curse as a blessing.

But in today’s scripture, God acts, and God names, and God declares that God’s own renaming supplants all other names.  God says to Abram, “No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you…And Sarai your wife shall become Sarah.  I will bless her…and she will become the mother of nations.”

By God’s renaming, God not only gives Abraham and Sarah new signifiers; God charts a new path for them.  God writes the first words of a new story for Abraham and Sarah, a new identity that will go somewhere, leaving behind who and what Abram and Sarai were, and revealing a new avenue for Abraham’s and Sarah’s whole life.  That is the power of naming.  That is what happens when God grants a new name.

When we turn to the Gospel, things appear to get a bit tricky, because here Jesus refers to Simon as “Satan.”  (Can you imagine the therapy bills you’d rack up if Jesus Christ named you Satan?  That would be a name difficult to shed.)  But is that really the name Jesus casts on Simon?  This passage should not be read in a vacuum.  It comes immediately after two other namings.  Four verses before today’s reading, Jesus asks the disciples to name him.  Who do they, and the gathered crowds, believe Jesus to be?  And Simon alone grants Jesus the name that resounds to this day.  Simon says, “You are the Messiah—the Christ—the Son of the living God.”[ii] 

We miss much if we fail to recognize that it is Simon’s naming of Jesus that grants Jesus himself the confidence and courage then to announce for the very first time Jesus’ plan to go to Jerusalem, to enact his Passion.  And it is in response to the incredible name Simon has given Jesus that Jesus responds with a name of his own.  In Matthew’s account, it is then that Jesus says to Simon, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah…I [name] you Peter—the Rock.  On the rock of your faith in me, I will build my church, and not even the gates of hell will overcome it.”[iii] 

This is the name—Peter, the Rock—that Jesus gives to Simon.  Simon has named Jesus truly, granting Jesus the courage and strength to move forward in God’s story, and so Jesus names Simon truly, granting Peter his own role in God’s story.

Abraham; Sarah; Peter; Christ…these are today’s new names that grant identity, integrity, and meaning.  They propel not only the stories of individual characters, but also the salvation history—God’s larger story—in which each of these characters finds meaning and of which all are an essential part.  Unlike Ursula Le Guin’s Tenar, who becomes nameless in service to gods of darkness, our God grants new names that empower us to shine and, through us, further God’s project of grace in the world.

It is time, sisters and brothers, to shed the old names cast upon you in your life, to say “begone!” to all those names and labels that plague you.  It is time to gaze into the mirror and imagine the name gifted to you by the God who creates you each day in love. 

From the moment you accept God’s new name, God opens the path to a new story for you, and for me.  And that story will graft you as an essential part into God’s great story, the epic of love that saves the world.

As I wrote this sermon, a youth group song looped through my head, a song that in those vulnerable teenage years when the names cast on us can do their worst always lifted my spirits and allowed me to let go of the labels that were imposed on me and that I imposed on myself:

I will change your name
You shall no longer be called
Wounded, outcast, lonely or afraid.

I will change your name.
Your new name shall be
Confidence, joyfulness, overcoming one
Faithfulness, friend of God,
One who seeks my face.[iv]

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[i] Genesis 2:19

[ii] Mark 8:29.  It is in Matthew’s account, at 16:16, that Simon adds “the Son of the living God.”

[iii] Matthew 16:17-18

[iv] Written by D.J. Butler

Transfiguration Light

It was a hot summer day in the Texas Hill Country.  (A hot summer day in the Hill Country is when you can fry an egg on your forehead, when streetlamps wilt like week-old flowers, and when the Devil himself says, “Forget this; I’m moving to Canada.”  It was hot.)  Griffin was a baby, and my parents had come to visit us in Austin.  We took a day trip to the little town of Fredericksburg to visit the National Museum of the Pacific War, a seemingly odd place for a grand exhibit until one learns that Fredericksburg is the hometown of Admiral Chester Nimitz.  The museum is impressive, and in addition to its indoor exhibit, there is an extensive outdoor portion arranged like an Ikea store, where you follow a lengthy path in a single direction until you come out on the other end.  As we—Jill, my parents, baby Griffin in a stroller, and me—entered the maze, a burly WWII veteran was volunteering at the turnstile.  He was gruff and perfunctory, but hey, he’d earned it. 

The sun beat down on us like hammered gold, and within a few minutes it was impossible to enjoy the outdoor exhibit.  Griffin went from being fussy to lethargic, and Jill worried about him.  When we were only twenty minutes into a maze designed to last an hour or more, Jill said, “I’m going to go back through the entrance and get Griffin inside into the air conditioning.” At a double pace, she wheeled Griffin in his stroller back to the veteran at the gate.  The gate had on it in large letters, “No Exit,” and this veteran, long accustomed to following orders, was not going to break them for a twenty-something mom and her baby.  From the distance, my parents and I could hear snippets of the conversation: “Can’t go out this way, Ma’am…” “Too long the other way…” “I don’t make the rules…” “My baby needs to get out of this heat quickly…” “This is not an exit…”

And then, my mother, father, and I witnessed something scarcely less amazing than Peter, James, and John in today’s Gospel.  Jill was transfigured before our eyes!  Though she is barely five foot three on her best day, Jill suddenly seemed to tower over the veteran.  Jill’s countenance blazed with something other than the Texas heat.  Power emitted from her.  And we weren’t the only ones who noticed.  The grizzled veteran manning the gate had stormed Guadalcanal or Iwo Jima, but before my wife—no, before Griffin’s mother—he receded and cowered in fear.  That vet tilted his head as if in supplication or prayer, and he dutifully opened the gate for Jill and Griffin.  And my petite wife, now transmuted back to her normal countenance, took her baby and walked right through.

Today, Peter, James, and John go up Mount Tabor with Jesus.  On the mountain, Mark tells us, “Jesus was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.” 

This account is what we call the Transfiguration.  The original biblical word is the Greek μεταμόρφωση, or metamorphosis.  That word can be translated into any number of synonyms: transfiguration, transformation, transmutation.  This last one gets the closest, perhaps, to what we have in mind when we think of the Transfiguration, because “transmutation” is the term most closely associated with the medieval practice of alchemy.

Alchemists sought to transmute base metals into gold.

Alchemy was a broad field of endeavor, but its most well-known pursuit was the attempted transmutation of base metals to precious metals, i.e., lead into gold.  The hope was to discover some catalyst that would alter the base metal’s structure and change it—metamorphosize it, transmute it, transfigure it—into something valuable, to transform one thing into something else, something better, that it was not.

Alchemy is, I think, what we carry around with us when we think about transfiguration.  For instance, the most recent, pervasive use of the term “transfiguration” beyond Christianity is in the Harry Potter canon.  The kids at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry take a course called “Transfiguration,” and the course description is, “A required class…Transfiguration is the art of turning one thing into another, changing the form and appearance of an object by altering its very molecular structure.”[i]

At Hogwarts, Professor McGonagall taught Transfiguration.

But is this in what transfiguration consists?  Is this what happens at the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor?  Is Jesus transmuted from being a mere human into something more, much greater and more valuable?  The key to understanding is the voice of God, as God speaks to Peter, James and John.  God says, “This is my son,” but we usually put the emphasis on the word “son.”  If we instead emphasize the demonstrative pronoun—the “this” in God’s statement—then the reality behind the Transfiguration shifts.  God is saying, “This is my son.”  In other words, to Peter, James, and John who have followed Jesus down the roads of Galilee for months now, God is saying, “This is who Jesus has been all along.”  On Mount Tabor, God doesn’t transmute Jesus into something or someone different.  Rather, God drops the veil to allow Transfiguration Light to shine through and reveal who Jesus already and always is.

For the past seven hundred years, the Greek Orthodox tradition has held to this understanding of the Transfiguration.  St. Gregory Palamas taught that God’s Transfiguration Light, which bathed Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration of Jesus, “is not something that comes to be and then vanishes, nor is it subject to the sensory faculties, although it was contemplated by corporeal eyes for a short while upon [that] inconsequential mountaintop…The initiates of the Mystery, (the disciples) of the Lord at this time passed beyond mere flesh into spirit through a transformation of their senses, effectualized within them by the Spirit.”[ii] 

Transfiguration Light changed not Jesus, but the disciples’ senses.

In other words, on Mount Tabor Transfiguration Light doesn’t change Jesus.  It changes the way the disciples are able to see.  The Orthodox point to other places in the bible where God illuminates the world with Transfiguration Light: the burning bush, Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus.[iii]  In no instance does Transfiguration Light alter reality.  Rather, in each instance, Transfiguration Light pierces the veil and reveals the Really Real that was there all along. 

Friends, Transfiguration Light is not a phenomenon only of the biblical past.  Now, as then, God allows Transfiguration Light to pierce our world, not to change things but to reveal them as they already truly are.  Transfiguration Light transforms and illuminates our human senses so that, for a brief and blessed moment, we are able to see through illusion.  We see flashes of it in those moments—few and far between and the more blessed for that fact—when the veil drops and we see God’s world as if through God’s own eyes.  I’ve glimpsed it; so have you: When, in the course of an otherwise ordinary day, you are unexpectedly stopped in your tracks by something that, to anyone around you, would be unnoticeable.  Sometimes you see it through another person who cannot even detect it themselves.  But for you, a different light illuminates the world in that moment.  It’s confusing; it throws us off kilter; it doesn’t fit with our normal vision or routine.  So, we often brush it aside or hurry past so that life will return to normal.

That is not God’s counsel.  At the burning bush, on the road to Damascus, on Mount Tabor, God’s counsel is always the same: The only appropriate response to the world bathed in God’s Transfiguration Light is to pause, be still, pay attention, and listen.  Transfiguration Light illuminates to show us that what we think is normal is not.  Transfiguration Light enlivens with wonder the world we mistakenly believe is inert.  Transfiguration Light does not change the world into something invaluable; it reveals the infinite value of the world as given, a world teeming with God, incarnate with Christ.         

This is the Last Sunday of Epiphany, the liturgical season all about God’s disclosure to us in infinitely myriad ways.  In just a few moments, we will pray in the Eucharistic Prayer for God to “open our eyes to your hand at work in the world about us.”[iv]  This day, may our added prayer be that God grant us a flash of Transfiguration Light, and when God does, God also grant the grace to pause, look, and listen for the wonder of the Real. 

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[i] https://www.wizardingworld.com/fact-file/magical-miscellany/transfiguration

[ii] St. Gregory Palamas, “Homily on the Transfiguration,” https://orthochristian.com/38767.html.

[iii] Exodus 3, Act 9:1-9.

[iv] Eucharistic Prayer C, BCP pg. 372.

What do you have to do with me?

In many ways, today’s Gospel passage is the first scene in Jesus’ ministry.  This is the action onto which the camera zooms in after the Star Wars-like words have scrolled across the screen, setting the scene.  Or, if you will, this is the big Apple Computers product launch rally.  Or, this is Jesus’ debutante coming out ball.  Whatever metaphor you choose, the Gospel action proper begins here and now. 

Before this scene, Jesus has been baptized by John, tempted in the desert by Satan, and called to him his band of disciples.  In other words, everything has been preparatory.  Now, though, Jesus has found his way to Capernaum, the largest and arguably most important town on the Sea of Galilee.[i]  Jesus has entered the city and gone straight to the synagogue, the town’s primary locus of both civic and religious life.  And there, Jeus stands up and begins to preach. 

Everything about it freaks people out: Who Jesus is, what he says, and the way he says it.  Some translations read that the congregation is “amazed;” other translations say “astounded.”  But we misinterpret if we take this to mean they think Jesus is awesome.  Perhaps a better translation would be that the people are slack-jawed. 

Nobody says a word, except one guy.  If you have a study bible, there may be heading over this story saying, “Jesus exorcises his first demon,” and the NRSV reads at verse 23, “there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit.”  The preposition “with” surely makes it seem as if the spirit is something separate from the man—like a demon—that resides within him alongside his own spirit.  But scholar David Bentley Hart’s more faithful translation of the original Greek reads, “there was within the synagogue a man in an impure spirit.”[ii]  That’s a distinction with a difference.  That translation reads less like a demon possessing this man than that the man’s own spirit is impure.  His thoughts, priorities, and motivations are wrong.  His conscience is twisted.  Whatever is impure is him, not some outside force controlling him.

Let me pause here and tell you a quick anecdote.  You’ll know by now that I’m an extrovert.  I like to talk, joke, backslap, and the volume of my voice generally carries.  I was once in a study group with some colleagues in which everyone patiently waited their turn, was respectful when others spoke, and did not fill important moments of silence with noise.  One day I said to my closest friend in the group, “I love this group.  There’s not a blowhard among us.” My friend responded, “Barkley, if you can’t identify the blowhard, it might be you!”

Maybe so.  Related to today’s Gospel, the man in an impure spirit asks Jesus, “What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?  Have you come to destroy us?”  Usually, when this passage is characterized as talking about a man possessed, the “us” is assumed to refer to the man and his demon.  But if we privilege David Bentley Hart’s translation and consider that this is not a man possessed with a demon, not two entities speaking with one voice, but rather a man with a twisted and distressed soul, then who is “us”?  Who is this man referring to besides himself when he asks, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

There’s only one possibility.  If you can’t figure out who it is Jesus has come to critique, indict, call to change…maybe it’s you!  The “us” to whom the man in an impure spirit refers is himself and his fellow congregants, all those slack-jawed worshipers who are likely wondering the same thing of Jesus.  In truth, their spirits are likely as twisted, their consciences as compromised, as the man who speaks.  Everybody in that synagogue—that church—wonders, “What has this guy Jesus got to do with us?  Is he here to tear down everything we assume?  Is he here to call us into question?  Are we in danger in his presence?”  That’s ironic, isn’t it?  The church is supposed to be the very crucible for the Gospel.  But is it?

The Rector’s Book Club is reading Ross Douthat’s book Bad Religion this month, and the book is all about the ways in which the church often serves as an impediment to the very Gospel it should embrace.  Instead of being receptive to the Gospel’s life-altering message, Douthat argues, churches often become bastions of the worldviews their congregants bring to church with them. 

“Oh yes,” we may immediately react, “Those other churches do that all the time.”  But Douthat points out that this is an equal opportunity pursuit, operative on both ends of the theological spectrum and everywhere in-between, in multiple and varied ways.

Non-denominational churches tend, Douthat says, increasingly to embrace a “prosperity gospel,” in which God’s blessing is believed to be of the most literally materialistic sort.  If you have enough faith, so it goes, God will provide you with a better job, or bigger portfolio, or a nicer house or car.  This is the Gospel of such television personalities as Kenneth Copeland, Creflo Dollar, or Joel Osteen, who has actually said to his enormous flock, “You need a bigger vision, a bolder prayer: ‘God, I’m asking to be debt-free—my home, my car, my business, my credit cards…Somewhere in your path there’s promotion, increase, good breaks, divine connections.”[iii]  For Christians whose deepest desire is upward mobility or material ease, the prosperity gospel renders Jesus a first-century Peter Drucker.

The doppelganger of the prosperity gospel is found one Barnes & Noble aisle over.  It exalts not material success, but the self as the center of all concern.  This worldview seeks not transformation of the self or service of the self to others, but acceptance and embrace of the self exactly as it is found.  It is the gospel of “focusing on me.”  This is the Gospel according to Oprah Winfrey, or Elizabeth Gilbert, who actually writes in her best-selling memoir Eat, Pray, Love that when she hears the voice of God, “It [is] merely my own voice, speaking from my own inner self.”[iv]

Yet other Christians bring into the church a political worldview and then want the church to serve as the justifier of their ideological values and convictions.  The church becomes a front for civic religion, a muscular Christianity more about the American flag than the altar and cross, where beliefs are claimed as Gospel whether or not they grow from the words and actions of Jesus.

And finally there is, in the name of enlightened reason, the worldview that refuses even to admit the possibility that Jesus is who the Gospels and Paul claim him to be.  Jesus may be a teacher of sublime ethics, a mystic, even a healer of some unusual sort, but the incarnate Son of God?  The redeemer of humanity?  The savior of the world?  That’s all so passe.  Surely, we’re beyond that.

Ross Douthat does not only say that each of these very different versions of church is mistaken; he boldly calls them heresies.  Douthat’s book is offensive, in that, at least a bit and on some level, it offends virtually every kind of modern American Christian.  (Heck, it offended me more than once.)  But that’s his point: Jesus is offensive. 

To the materially striving prosperity Christian, Jesus says strive first for the kingdom of God and tend to the least of these. 

To the inwardly-focused Christian who hears God as an echo of one’s own desires for the self, Jesus says that we are, each of us, broken in the pain we do to one another and to ourselves.  It is not enough to accept who we are; God wants us to become who God calls us to be.  God wants to redeem you and redeem me.

To the political Christian, Jesus says do not make a religious idol out of an ideology.  Do not confuse power or winning for God’s favor.  All rulers, dominions, and powers will pass away.  Look not to them, but to God’s grace.  Be in all things agents of love and grace, not political partisans.

To the sophisticated Christian who would domesticate Jesus into a wise but mere human being, Jesus says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.,”[v] and gazing upon this Jesus, the Apostle Thomas cries out, “My Lord and my God!”[vi] 

What worldview did the man who speaks to Jesus in Mark’s Gospel bring to church with him this day?  One of these? Some other?  What is the twistedness in his spirit?  What about all those other congregants?  How have they misunderstood God and the Gospel?  They must all wonder, as they stare at Jesus slack-jawed, “What have you to do with us?  Have you come to destroy us?”

In a manner of speaking, yes.  Jesus intends to disrupt and destroy all our worldviews.  And it hurts.  (The man in the impure spirit today shouts and convulses as Jesus redeems him.[vii])  But that, and nowhere else, is where redemption must begin, as Mark’s very Gospel begins today.  We must be open to the possibility that through Jesus the very God speaks to us, sharing the Way to life abundant.  And we must grant that Jesus’ Way is not the way of material striving, or self-actualization, or party politics, or domesticated faith.  Jesus’ Way is one that admits our fragility and flaws, that seeks redemption in us and for the world, that hopes the answer to the question, “What do you want from us, Jesus of Nazareth?” is “Everything.”  Then, in our lives, the Gospel begins. 

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[i] First-century Capernaum had fifteen hundred residents.  By comparison, Nazareth had somewhere between one hundred-fifty and three hundred.  

[ii] See David Bentley Hart’s The New Testament: A Translation, 64.

[iii] Douthat, Ross.  Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, 209.

[iv] Ibid, 212

[v] Revelation 22:13

[vi] John 20:28

[vii] Mark 1:26

Found

 Last summer when Jill and I were in Iceland, our very Viking-like guide, Stefán, carried on and on about Icelandic chocolate treats.  They were the best in the world, Stefán repeatedly claimed, and at one stop he purchased a bag of chocolates for us to try.  They looked like little mini Twix bars, except, truly, the chocolate was extra creamy and succulent.  My mouth started to water, and Jill and I popped a chocolate into our mouths with a smile and bit down.  At the same instant, the smiles on our faces shifted, first to confusion and then to revulsion.  Jill gagged and spit her candy into her hand.  I choked mine down.  What we’d learned is that the secret ingredient, the special something in the middle of Icelandic chocolate, is a thick plug of the densest, most potent, home-grown black licorice imaginable.  Now, you may enjoy licorice.  I do not.  Neither do many others.  I perused the internet for descriptions of the taste of black licorice; here’s what I found: In answer to the question, “What does licorice taste like?” folks responded, “Like chewy black death,” “a mouthful of carpenter ants,” and “the most delicious poison you’ll ever try.”[i]  Icelandic licorice was infinitely more putridly-strong than anything I’ve encountered here.  And it was juxtaposed with creamy milk chocolate.  It was horrific, and it coined a new phrase that Jill and I thereafter giggled under our breath: “Can anything good come out of Iceland?”

This is the phrase Nathanael utters when his friend Philip approaches him and shares with Nathanael the news that he has encountered Jesus.  Nathanael scoffs, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  What’s this reaction all about? 

First of all, it’s worth noting (as we learn much later in John’s Gospel[ii]) that Nathanael is from Cana in Galilee, the next village over from Nazareth.  Whereas Cana was a long-established town, Nazareth was not.  Nazareth was a new bend in the road, settled by folks from the South of the country with tax incentives from King Herod.  Nazarenes were poor and—even more importantly—they weren’t from around there.  We can imagine how people from the surrounding towns might look upon them.  We all understand civic rivalry and the one-upmanship (sometimes light-hearted, sometimes severe) that comes with it.  It’s not unlike how the sophisticated folks from Paragould and Jonesboro in my native part of the state might scoffingly look upon people from the little the bend in the road community halfway between our burgs: “Can anything good come out of Goobertown?”

But there’s something else going on here when Nathanael says, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” I believe.  In twenty years of priesthood and fifty-one years of life, I’ve observed a thing or two about human behavior.  And perhaps the most consistent element is that virtually every expression of disdain for another person is truly, deep down in the recesses of one’s soul, disdain for oneself.  Whether through simmering cynicism that belittles others with biting jokes and sneering ridicule, or else through more explosive lashing out that sometimes does violence in households and the community, the deep, interior motive is virtually always some subconscious self-loathing. 

So many of us don’t like ourselves.  And though we deflect by saying of the other, “How can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  what we really fear is, “How can anything good come out of me?”  We may present to the world like premium chocolate, but we suspect that in our core we are that plug of pungent licorice. 

This is what’s going on in John’s Gospel this morning.  This is what’s behind Nathanael’s reaction.  And how does Jesus respond?  Though we refer to these biblical passages where Jesus first encounters his disciples as “call stories,” John doesn’t actually use that term.  We see in verse forty-three today that Jesus doesn’t call Philip, as if beckoning Philip from afar; Jesus finds him.[iii]  And Jesus finds Nathanael.  Jesus seeks and approaches these men, and Jesus sees through to the very heart of them, as Jesus does all people.  He tells Nathanael who Nathanael is in Jesus’ eyes.  And only after Jesus has found these two does he invite them to follow.

This is a variation on the same theme we see in the Old Testament this morning, except here the subject is not a weather worn Galilean like Nathaneal but Samuel, a child committed to service in the Shiloh temple.  It’s important to note that in the social economy of the ancient world, children were not regarded as full persons.  (In our own society so centered on children, this may seem foreign, but lest we forget, scarcely a century ago at the height of the industrial revolution, children as young as eight or ten were used and used up in factories and coal mines like cogs in a wheel with no regard for their well-being.[iv]  Children as invaluable is a most recent phenomenon in human history.) 

The child Samuel is what biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan would call “a nuisance and a nobody.”[v]  Samuel is someone who doesn’t register, doesn’t count, isn’t worth considering.  Many of us know what that feels like, too.  In Samuel’s young life, we hope that he hasn’t yet learned self-loathing like Nathaneal, but undoubtedly he already detects that his existence doesn’t seem to matter in the grand scheme of things.  And yet, not once, not twice, but three times and four God finds Samuel.  God seeks out and approaches not Eli the judge and priest, but the one who is to society a nuisance and a nobody.  God finds Samuel.

Perhaps nowhere recently have the feelings of self-loathing and worthlessness been examined more effectively than in the Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen.  One character so dislikes himself that he disdains and lashes out at all others.  Another experiences himself as completely unseen and insignificant.  The play captures the dual alienation that marks our human experience in a decidedly contemporary way.  And the redemption song that punctuates Dear Evan Hansen is titled “You Will Be Found.”  It begins somberly, “Have you ever felt like nobody was there?  Have you ever felt forgotten in the middle of nowhere?  Have you ever felt like you could disappear?  Like you could fall, and no one would hear?”  The cast then sings out in hope, “Even when the dark comes crashing through; When you need a friend to carry you; And when you’re broken on the ground, you will be found!  So let the sun come streaming in; because you’ll reach up and rise again.  Lift your head and look around.  You will be found!”

That is the very heart of the Good News.  Like Philip, Nathanael, and Samuel, by Jesus we are found.  Jesus finds us, and approaches us, and sees into our souls.  Deflection fails; pretense sheds; attempts to hide who we fear we are falter.  By Jesus, we are found.

You’ve heard me mention my grandmother, Boo, who gifted me with so much in my life.  Of all Boo’s gifts, the most important was that when she looked at me, Boo saw not who I was in that moment or season of my life, and certainly not the vision I had of myself, but the version of me that God created me to be.  She saw in me someone worthy of love, someone of infinite value, someone who just might be able to follow Jesus.  And when Boo looked at me, I believed her.

That is how Jesus finds Philip and Nathanael today.  That is how God finds Samuel.  That is how Christ finds us.  Can anything good come out of Nazareth?  Can anything good come from you and me?  Jesus looks upon us and knows exactly who we have been, and who we are, and who God creates us to be.  And Jesus finds us infinitely valuable; and loveable; and he calls us to come and see what life can be like if we will but follow.  Lift your head and look around.  You are found! 

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[i] https://www.quora.com/How-would-you-describe-the-taste-of-black-licorice

[ii] John 21:2

[iii] See Frederick Dale Bruner’s The Gospel of John: A Commentary, pg. 107.

[iv] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/history-of-child-labor-in-the-united-states-part-1.htm#:~:text

[v] See John Dominic Crossan’s Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, Chapter 3, “A Kingdom of Nuisances and Nobodies.”

The Punctuation of Advent

When I do premarital counseling with couples, we spend a lot of time considering the dynamics of their family of origin.  I ask each partner, “If I could take a time machine back to the era of your childhood and visit your family home, what would I see?  How did your parents interact with one another?  Did they fight a lot?  Did they show overt affection for one another?  Did they favor one child over the others?  How did they discipline?”

I do this because we are all the products of the households in which we were raised.  As adults, we either unconsciously express the patterns of behavior we witnessed in our parents or consciously strive to act and live differently.  Either way, adult life is a constant emotional interaction with the life we saw patterned in childhood.

This affects us in ways large and small.  Some people had parents who withheld affection.  Some had parents who were way too indulgent.  Some had parents who helicoptered and bulldozed so that they now have trouble fending for themselves.  We all had something.  And me?  Well, I had that trickiest household of all, one that continues to haunt my every verbal and written interaction, one that sometimes strain relationships and steals time: My mother…was an English teacher.

How does this affect me in adulthood?  I am obsessed with punctuation and grammar.  I cannot abide a split infinitive.  Apostrophes used to indicate the plural make my eye twitch.  A sentence-ending preposition drives me to distraction.  I fret to the point of panic over correctly using the words “lie” and “lay.”  My sweet mama ruined me.

Except that, occasionally, the imprinting of an English-teaching grammar mom is a true gift.  And today is one of those days.  This is the Second Sunday of Advent, one of those rare Sundays in which we read the same passage from both the Old and New Testaments.  First, we read Isaiah 40:1-11, and then we read the first eight verses of Mark, which quote Isaiah at length.  And when we read these side-by-side, the inner imprinting of my English teacher mother empowers me.  I want to scream, “Wait a minute!  Though the words are the same in these passages from Isaiah and Mark, the punctuation is different!  What the heck is going on here?!?”

Look at the passages again. Notice very carefully where Isaiah places quotation marks and commas, and then where Mark does so.    

Isaiah says, “A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’”

Mark says, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”

Do you see the difference?  Do you see why it makes this son of an English teacher furrow his brow?  In Mark, the voice that cries out is in the wilderness, but in Isaiah, the voice is not in the wilderness.  The wilderness is the place the voice says we are to prepare for the Lord’s coming.

So, which is it?  It’s actually neither, or both.  You see, in the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament, there is no punctuation.  Really.  In the original texts, words simply flow one into the other, paragraphs simply run on.  This is one of innumerable reasons that there is a disingenuousness in our Fundamentalist brothers’ and sisters’ insistence on a literal reading of Holy Scripture.  Even making sentences out of the original text—even inserting periods, or, commas, or quotation marks—is an interpretive choice.  In the original, punctuation isn’t there.

In today’s case of Isaiah and Mark, this presents a distinction with a difference.  Is the voice out there, in distant wild lands, calling to us in here, in our civilized comfort, saying “Prepare the way for Jesus?  Or, is the voice in here with us, saying, “Your soul is the wilderness.  Your inner life is the parched, disordered, crooked, hard-to-navigate place.  It is there that needs to be prepared for Jesus.”

I actually met John the Baptist.  Truly I knew him, in the form of the Reverend Dr. Will Spong.  Will was the less well-known but arguably much more consequential brother of noted (or notorious, depending upon who you ask) Episcopal Bishop John Spong.  Will was my pastoral theology professor in seminary, and he looked and acted for all the world like John the Baptist.  Will’s hair grew long and wild.  He had a glass eye from a childhood baseball injury, which was always just unfocused-enough to give the impression that Will was looking both at you and off into the middle distance, as if for the coming of the Lord.  The only thing that obviously distinguished Will from John the Baptist is that he wore a starched open-collared shirt and blue blazer.  (Granted, he wore these with Birkenstocks.)  All that is to say that Will’s very existence seemed to be both of the wilderness and of the civilized world. 

The Reverend Will Spong

Will preached prophetically.  He was also my Clinical Pastoral Education advisor, which meant his job was to poke, prod, and ask uncomfortable and sometimes searing questions of me about who I was, what I desired, what I prioritized, and whether I was being honest with myself about my motivations in life.  It was as if Will was John the Baptist come to town, relentlessly insisting to my classmates and me that the true wilderness is not out there but within, where we rationalize, and self-delude, and avoid, and so often create a desert of the soul where God wants nothing more than for our souls to flourish with abundant life.

I cannot read these passages from Isaiah and Mark without thinking of Will Spong, and how much he indicted and challenged me, and how much I loved him for it.

So, how do we best punctuate these passages?  Is the wilderness out there, where John the wild man lives in the desert and eats locusts and honey?  Or is the wilderness in here, where our souls need preparing, cultivating, made ready for Jesus to enter in?  The wonder of God’s inspiration is that it is both. 

First, we must look inward (and oh, how I wish we all had a Will Spong to help us!) and ask with steely-eyed honesty how and where our souls have become parched and barren.  Each of us must ask—I must ask, and you must ask: Where have the paths within your soul become crooked?  Where have you strayed so far from God that love has withered?  The Season of Advent is set aside as the very time for us to ask these questions in prayer and then do the work to cultivate our souls so that, come the Nativity, we are ready to receive Jesus.

And second, the world out there is surely also often a wilderness.  The voice that cries out—the voices of too many to count that cry out—yearn for a world that resembles God’s Eden more than a desert.  And we are to prepare that world, too.  The hungry, the sorrowed, the desperate, the good but abused earth: For all of these, we as Christians are called to find a way through the world’s wilderness until it isn’t wilderness anymore.  But we cannot do that, until we have watered with God’s grace the wilderness within.

The voice of one crying out: In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord.

The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord. 

Within and without, we are to prepare God’s way, until our souls rejoice in the coming of Christ, until the world around us looks more and more like Christ’s kingdom. 

Imagining the Kingdom

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

You’ve heard this philosophical nugget of a question, yes?  It is mind-bending and whimsical, but, in truth, it begs deep consideration: If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound?  In other words—and let this question sink in—Does the reality of something depend upon us? 

Human beings actually ask ourselves this question from almost the moment of birth.  And at that earliest stage of development, we decidedly believe that, yes, the reality of something does depend upon our presence.  This is the whole idea behind the game peekaboo.  Dr. Caspar Addyman of the University of London says that, when the parent hides around a corner, the baby believes the parent has truly disappeared, blinked out of existence, and thus the relief and laughter when the parent reappears.[i]

Last month, the Rector’s Book Club read the most unusual Terry Pratchett novel Hogfather.  Pratchett was an enormously popular fantasy fiction writer of dozens of novels, and Hogfather is as bizarre as any of them.  In the book, the Hogfather, a jolly Razorback-looking fellow in a red suit who is essentially Santa Claus in Pratchett’s Discworld, has disappeared as a result of a wicked magical effort by the novels villains to make children disbelieve in him.  As the children disbelieve in the Hogfather in the story, the Hogfather ceases to exist. 

This creates a crisis in the world that runs so deep that even the personification of Death himself tries to fix it.  Like a character in a Tim Burton movie, the skeletal Death dresses in Santa Claus robes, takes the reins of the Hogfather’s sleigh, and begins jetting across the world delivering presents, all in the desperate attempt to make the world’s children believe in the Hogfather again and thus bring the Hogfather back into existence.

Throughout most of the novel, the reader thinks this is merely a whimsical tale, but toward the end Death explains to his granddaughter (in this story Death has a granddaughter) why it all matters.  Children’s belief that the Hogfather (i.e., in Santa Claus) is real, Death explains, actually makes it real. Children’s belief that there is someone who cares for them all, regardless of who they are, where they are from, who their families are, actually creates the Christmas spirit of generosity and care that otherwise wouldn’t exist.  Belief in Christmas wills Christmas into being.

And most importantly, this early insistence that the Hogfather is real teaches children as they grow and mature to insist that other things, even more important things, are real: Duty, Justice, Mercy.[ii]  Death says to his granddaughter, “Take the universe and grind it down to the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy.  And yet you [humans] act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some rightness to the universe…”[iii]

In the story, Death is not saying that these ideals are fake or pretend, but Death is saying that they exist—things such as duty, justice, and mercy exist—only if and because human beings believe in them. 

Things such as duty, justice and mercy exist only if and because human beings believe in them.

Terry Pratchett is not making up this notion for his fantasy novel.  Philosophers and sociologists since Jean Paul Sartre have long talked about what they call the “social imaginary.”  The social imaginary is the collective world of virtues and values we hold most dear, that run so deep that we assume them without even reflecting on them.  The social imaginary is both the real world, and only exists because we believe it to be true.

That’s the end of today’s Creative Fiction and Philosophy 101 class.  And, it brings us to Christ the King Sunday, the Last Sunday after Pentecost—today—when Christians are invited particularly to imagine what it would mean, what it does mean, for Christ to be king, for Christ to reign in our world.  So, to return to a variation of the question I’ve been posing all morning…If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?  If children cease to believe in Santa Claus, is the spirit of Christmas real?  If the world does not live and act as if Christ is king, then is Christ king?

The portion of Matthew 25 we read today gives us the barometer as we look out at the world: Are the hungry fed?  Are the naked clothed?  Are strangers welcomed? Are the imprisoned comforted?  Does anyone really, truly believe in duty, justice, mercy?  Does Christ reign?

To observe the world and ask those questions could lead, and indeed for some does lead, to despondency, cynicism, and a contention that Christ is not in any way king.  The social imaginary of our world seems to privilege self-interest over duty, power over justice, and vicious tribalism over mercy.

But to look at the state of the world and render that conclusion is, for us, the wrong way around.  Rather, our starting point must be like that of the first disciples who witnessed the Resurrection, or of children, who discover their profound ability to will things into being.

The social imaginary of our world is not unalterable.  We are empowered to revise it, shift it, renew it so that the virtues and values by which we live are transformed.  This is why, throughout the Gospels, Jesus encourages his disciples with images of salt and yeast, small things that change the taste or rise of the whole.  Like the single child who waits upon St. Nicholas with open-hearted wonder and belief, willing the spirit of Christmas into being, our lived dedication to the Gospel—our feeding of the hungry, our clothing of the naked, our welcome of the stranger—makes the Gospel real in our world and ushers in Christ’s reign.

All that is to say, Christ becomes king, when we first believe that he is so.  Christ becomes king when we first become subjects.  Duty, justice, mercy become real in our world when we first commit to living dutifully, and justly, and mercifully. 

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?  If no one is there to follow, is Christ the king?  But we do follow, and through our faith and discipleship, we become the salt, the yeast, that will renew our social imaginary, that will transform the whole world.  It is staggering, the blessed responsibility God bestows upon us.  We proclaim Christ as king; we live as subjects of Christ; we follow Christ’s Gospel command as the directing force behind all our discernment and decision.  And through our belief, duty extends, mercy grows, and justice for all God’s children becomes real. Long live the king!  Hallelujah, hallelujah! 

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[i] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-24553877

[ii] Pratchett, Terry. Hogfather, 380-381.

[iii] Pratchett, 381.