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.

The Rapture?

I grew up on Crowley’s Ridge in Green County, at the northern tip of the Arkansas Delta.  My father is from McGehee, in far Southeast Arkansas almost to the Louisiana line, which my brother Andrew calls the “Sure Enough Delta.”  You almost can’t get from McGehee to Paragould, and that was surely the case when I was a child in the 1970s.  The Delta was, and mostly still is, an expanse of two-lane county and state roads, and the trip by car between McGehee and Paragould took at least four hours.  For a child, that made the trip mythical and mystical, like going on a hero’s journey.  And when my grandmother “Gee” (because, from McGehee) would instead make the trip north to see us, we anticipated her coming as if it were the coming of a queen, or, if I may borrow from today’s epistle reading, the return of the Lord.  We Thompson kids would mark Gee’s arrival date on the calendar and check off the days.  The morning of, we’d plaster ourselves to the living room window and keep vigil throughout the day, until, wonder of wonders, a big, olive-green Chevy Impala would pull into the driveway.  The four Thompson urchins would plow out the back door and down the driveway to the car, singing little kid versions of “Hosannah!” as if it truly were the Second Coming, almost knocking Gee over as she emerged from the car.  We’d hug and kiss and grin and giggle with abandon.  It was the best day imaginable when Gee arrived at our home.

Gee and me, circa 1979

And then Gee would pick up one of my siblings, turn around, get back in the car, and drive away, back from where she’d come, leaving the other three grandchildren shaken, stunned, and bereft.

That’s not how you expected that anecdote to end, is it?  At best, it makes no sense, and at worst, if true, it would strongly suggest that Gee was arbitrary and cruel, and not a very good grandmother. 

Take this personal story I’ve just told and apply it by analogy to the way in which today’s passage from Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians is often read in contemporary American Christianity.  This is the famous passage on which the theological idea of “the Rapture” is based.  It concludes: “For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.”

The word translated in this passage as “caught up” is ἁρπάζω (harpazo)in Greek or raptio in Latin, thus rapture. Rapture claimants interpret this passage to mean that, when Jesus returns, the faithful will go up to meet Jesus in the sky, and Jesus will then turn around and take only those faithful with him back into heaven, leaving everyone else alone, bereft, and subject to a burning world.

Perhaps no theological idea since the Middle Ages has been used more extensively as a tool of coercion and fear than the Rapture.  Rapture proponents contend that if you love Jesus enough and if your faith is just right (which, of course, means if your faith is exactly in line with theirs), then when the Great Tribulation (as they call it) comes, Jesus will draw you to meet him in the air and whisk you away from suffering and pain.  But if you are lacking in any of these ways, well, you will be left behind in suffering and torment.

You’ve heard this idea before?  Of course you have.  It’s virtually impossible to live in the religious milieu of the American South and not have heard it.  For more than a few in this room, at some point in your life this very idea likely drove you away from Christianity, and you’re only recently, tentatively returning. 

Hear me say today: the Rapture is a bogus notion.[i]  And by that, I do not mean that it is in the Bible, but that I disagree with it.  Rather, I mean that it is not a coherent idea in the Bible at all.  The entire idea of the Rapture is a spotty, prooftexted, cobbled-together misinterpretation that begins with today’s passage from Paul.

Let me back up for a moment.  At the outset of this homily, I employed an anecdote that (hopefully) resonated with you.  I mentioned locations that you know, the kinds of family images with which you are familiar, and emotions that you understand.  But also note, each of these things hit home for you because they are specific to our time, our culture, and our geography.  If the story of my grandmother’s visit in her 1974 Chevy Impala were told, say, two thousand years from now halfway across the globe, then some of the details might fall flat, or be woefully misinterpreted or misunderstood.  The same risks are at play whenever we read Holy Scripture.  Paul was a brilliant writer and employer of images, but his, like anyone’s, were specific to his day, era, and location.  And if we merely read the words and ignore their historical and cultural context, we will misunderstand.

Specifically, in First Thessalonians today, Paul uses terminology commonly understood in his day and age to describe what happens when a beloved or esteemed dignitary—a king, perhaps—comes to visit a city state.  As when my grandmother Gee made the long, arduous journey through the Arkansas Delta to Paragould, and her four grandkids ran out with abandon to meet her at the end of the driveway, the faithful citizens in ancient days would leave the walls of the city to run out and meet the approaching visiting king.  This is the image Paul is using when he describes the faithful going out to meet the returning Jesus in the air. But what would happen next is not that the king took a few of the citizens and turned around to go back where he came from.  Rather, the welcome party accompanied and ushered the king onward into the city.[ii]  The faithful met the king and traveled with him the rest of the way.

This actually occurs quintessentially in the Gospels, on Palm Sunday when Jesus approaches the gates of Jerusalem.  The ebullient faithful go to meet Jesus, singing their hosannahs, and they then travel with him the remainder of the way into the city.

When, after much fretful, furtive, yet hopeful waiting my grandmother Gee would pull into our driveway, and we’d run out to meet her with joy, she wouldn’t get back in the car with one of us and drive away.  She’d embrace each of us and then smile and coo as we all walked together up to and into the house.  When Gee entered our home, it was as if transformed.  Even the dog, who saw her rarely, immediately loved her the most.  More than forty years since those arrivals, I still feel the incredible depth of her love as I talk about her.  Her arrival changed everything.  As will Christ’s, when Christ returns.

There is no coherent biblical support for a Jesus who whisks a few true believers to heaven and says to hell with the rest.  There is no coherent biblical warrant for supposing that Jesus will abandon this world to destruction.  Rather, the Second Coming of Christ is all the way back into our world.  Whereas in the First Coming Christ was incarnate in the singular person of Jesus, at the Second Coming Christ will be incarnate in all things, redeeming and restoring them. 

Mercy, how we need that promise.  Our world is rent asunder:  In Sudan, in Central America, in Ukraine, and in the very Holy Land in which Jesus lived, breathed, and walked; in our own broken communities and broken homes, in our political viciousness; in the speed with which our culture finds unforgiveable fault…And yet we love this world of whose clay we are formed.  Our hope is not to be whisked away from it, but rather that it would be restored as the world of fullness and grace God intended it to be.

Rather than prooftexting a singular verse here and there to cobble together a Rapture theology of manipulation and fear, I prefer to lean on the theology of that weirdly hopeful book Revelation, in which the Second Coming of Christ—the Christ who restores this earth and everything in it—culminates in the wondrous words of the returned Jesus himself, who says, “See, the home of God is among mortals.  God will dwell with them; they will be God’s peoples, and God himself will be with them; God will wipe every tear from their eyes.  Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”[iii]

Rightly understood, this is what Paul is promising in First Thessalonians today, that nothing—not the already-dead, not the yet to come—nothing will be lost to God.  The daily losses that seem to slip through our fingers; the brokenness that grieves us; the injury to bodies and souls that we endure…In the End Christ will appear gloriously and, wonder of wonders, restore it all.  Not for some few, not for those who believe hard enough or exactly the “right” way, but all.  Like little children with their faces plastered to the window, we will see Christ’s coming.  We will run to meet him.  And we will sing with joy, as he enters into our hearts and homes. 

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[i] For a comprehensive analysis of The Rapture, see Barbara R. Rossing’s excellent book The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation. 

[ii] https://www.ligonier.org/learn/devotionals/caught-up-in-the-clouds

[iii] Revelation 21:3-4

Living in the middle of the story

Jill’s grandmother, whom we all called Mammaw, had a habit of beginning conversations in the middle.  Have you ever known anyone like that?  Mammaw lived to be ninety-six years old.  She saw a lot in her long life, the vast and incredible sweep of the twentieth century.  Mammaw was carried along by that huge story, and so whenever something would occur to her—momentous or mundane—she’d begin to speak out loud about whatever part of the story was running through her mind at that moment.  She began conversations in the middle.  If you were on the hearing end, you had to catch up to whatever Mammaw was talking about. It could be discombobulating.

Today’s Deuteronomy reading chronicles the end of Moses’ life, which was, itself, a life that began in the middle of a story.  By the time of Moses’ birth, the long story of the Israelites had already involved uprooting, movement, establishment, joy, trial, and forgetting.  By the time of Moses’ birth, the Israelites had forgotten even about God.  They lived as enslaved people in Egypt, oppressed and despondent.  Moses was born at a time when the Egyptian Pharaoh was attempting to wipe out the Israelites, and Moses himself was plucked from death and given a dual name, Mosheh in Egyptian, which means “son,” and Mashah in Hebrew, which means “drawn forth.”[i]  Moses’ very name unwittingly declares that Moses is a son of Israel drawn forth to play a special role in the story whose beginning happened long before his birth.  Discombobulating, to say the least.

Moses grows up and lives a wild story of his own before he is forced to flee and live in hiding in the wilderness, where one day as a shepherd he meets God in a burning bush, and God explains to him who both God and Moses are, and the role Moses is to play.  It feels like a starring role, a central role, a role that will bring Israel’s whole story to its ultimate culmination.

Moses plays his part faithfully and well.  He leads; he prays; he problem-solves; he deals with threats and challenges from within and without.  Finally, after forty years of wandering with the Israelites in the wilderness, what appears to be the culminating moment of the whole story arrives.  We read, “Moses went up to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho, and the Lord showed him the whole [promised] land: Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, and the Plain…The Lord said to Moses, ‘This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, “I will give it to your descendants.”’”

What a cinematic moment!  After such an arduous lifetime faithfully playing his starring role, Moses climbs Mount Nebo and looks out over the sweeping land God has promised to God’s people.  Moses’ satisfaction must be immense, as is our empathy for him.  He is about to exhale and travel down the mountain.  Though Moses had to enter this story in the middle and figure out what it was all about and what his role was within it, now he will finish it.  He will get see, as it were, the final credits roll across the screen. 

But wait.  God isn’t yet finished speaking.  God adds, “Moses, I have let you see the Promised Land with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.”  And the very next sentence in Deuteronomy is, “Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab.” 

Huh?  That makes no sense.[ii]  It is an affront to the way stories should be told, of denouement.  It’s an affront to Moses.  It was difficult enough for Moses to enter in the middle of the story; now Moses doesn’t get to see the end?  Moses learns that he wasn’t the central character.  The story wasn’t about him after all.

I think our indignation is at least as much for ourselves as for Moses, because Moses’ experience on Mount Nebo is, in truth, the experience of us all.  When I attend the bedside of the dying, the sometime anxiety and confusion is less about what will happen to the person after he dies, but rather how the world can conceivably go on without him.  We each imagine ourselves as the main character in the story.  (I am the star—the hero—and y’all are the supporting cast; you know that right?)  Of course, we all enter the story in the middle, and it takes most of our lives to catch up to exactly what’s going on (like one of Mammaw’s conversations), but once we at least dimly figure out the plot, we take center stage.  How in the world can it be that the world might spin without us?

But deep down, we know it will.  And this subconscious knowledge is what leads to much of our unease in life.  It leads to our frustration, when, try as we might to affect the world around us, the needle never moves.  The same old challenges recur; the same old problems are intractable, be those in our immediate relationships, our local communities, or our larger world.  As a result, we risk becoming cynical, apathetic, or both.  Like Shakespeare’s MacBeth, we begin to  suspect that “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.  It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”[iii]

Or, instead, the knowledge results in some people claiming, in each generation including our own, that since our own heroics can’t effect change, God must be about to break in and do it Godself, so that we will be here to see the story’s end.  I have an intelligent and well-meaning friend who, on social media, predicts every few months that God’s End Time is about to arrive.  And then when it doesn’t, he merely shifts the proposed date a bit forward on the calendar.  Such desperate prediction is just another way of dealing with the uncomfortable fact that we aren’t the stars of the show, and that we, like Moses, very likely won’t be around to see how it all works out.  We live in the middle.  We didn’t see the beginning, and we won’t see the end.

There is a solution to our distress.  It is the only solution: to recognize, as Moses did, that the story is not ours, was never ours, but God’s.  We are not, as MacBeth feared, walking shadows, but neither are we the headliners.  We are characters in God’s grand salvation story, which began in the mythical garden[iv] and will end in the city through which runs the river of life.[v]  We may see neither the beginning nor the end, but we can recognize our time on God’s good earth as the sheer gift of a supporting role, and no less essential or important for that fact.  We, like Moses, are created and called to enter the scene already in progress, and to play a part that focuses not on ourselves but on moving God’s great story forward toward the kingdom.  What does that look like?

There is an old parable about the building of a gothic cathedral in medieval England.  Construction began years before anyone onsite was born, and every worker will be dead long before the church is completed.  No one present will see the end.  A traveler comes upon the half-finished edifice.  He asks a stonecutter what he is doing.  With great pride, the man replies, “I’m carving the gargoyle that will perch above the west entrance.  It will be my crowning glory.”

The traveler then sees a mason stirring plaster in a bucket.  “And what are you doing?” he asks.  The mason replies, “I’m plastering the apse behind the altar.  It will be so finely detailed that it will be the wonder of the Cathedral.  It will rebound to my fame.”

Finally, as the traveler is about to leave the half-finished site, he sees an old, bent woman slowly and deliberately sweeping away dust that will merely return tomorrow.  “And you, mother, what are you doing?” the traveler asks.  The woman looks up at him and beams through her wrinkled face with joy that comes from beyond her.  “Sir,” she says, “I’m building a cathedral.”[vi]

It may seem at first to be the hardest thing in the world, to imagine ourselves not as the star or the hero, but as a supporting character in the middle of God’s great story.  But if we will reframe, if we will decenter ourselves, we will come to realize an abiding peace that replaces ego-centered striving and truly passes understanding.  We will discover that there is no unimportant role, no meaningless Gospel task.  And most importantly, we will beam with a joy that comes from beyond us, because we know that, though we cannot know how or when, the love we embody and the grace we share move God’s story toward the Promised Land of the kingdom. 

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[i] Kass, Leon R.  Founding God’s Nation: Reading Exodus, pp. 43-44.

[ii] The Book of Numbers attempts to offer a rationale behind God’s decision not to allow Moses to enter the Promised Land, but in this priest’s opinion, the explanation offered there is weak tea.  See Number 20:1-13.

[iii] Shakespeare, William.  MacBeth, Act 5, scene 5.

[iv] Genesis 2

[v] Revelation 21

[vi] I cannot recall where I first read or heard this parable.

Party Attire

One October years ago, my friend Tom was invited to a party.  Super-excited, he began creating his costume immediately.  Tom decided he’d attend the party as a 1950s science fiction robot, and he went all out.  Tom attached a cabinet television box on top of a washing machine box.  He cut out a hole in the T.V. box for his face.  Tom used pipe cleaners and Styrofoam balls for antennae, and he used dryer tubing for sleeves.  He then painted the whole outfit with silver spray paint.  When Tom donned the costume, he looked for all the world just like a 1950s science fiction robot.  But the costume was huge and bulky.  Tom had trouble walking in it, much less fitting through doorways.  Every time he turned around, he knocked something over.  Even so, Tom wore it proudly.  That is, until he arrived at the party and walked awkwardly in, only to discover he’d misread the invitation: It was a regular cocktail party that just happened to be in October.  It was not Halloween-themed, and no one else was in costume!  Tom wore the wrong thing.

Tom’s costume looked about like this.

A second clothing-related anecdote: When I was in high school, everyone wanted—and most had—a good, old-fashioned letterman’s jacket, with a lined felt body and leather (or pleather) sleeves.  Whether your thing was sports, band, FFA, or something else, the letterman’s jacket was the outward and visible sign of all your toils, trials, and accomplishments.  It was your identity.  Both the sleeves and the letter itself were covered in symbols, slashes, and patches so that the world would know exactly who one was and what one did—the things that made a person valuable and important.  A few years ago, a high school friend found in an old billfold one of my high school senior photos from 1991. I’m reclined on my side, leaning on one elbow, with a decidedly era-specific light swirl behind me enhancing a blue studio backdrop.  In the photo, I look a lot more confident than I actually felt in high school, and I’m proudly wearing my letterman’s jacket. 

A final clothing-related anecdote: A king holds a wedding party, but despite the fact that it will prove to be the most fun and outrageous event on record, none of the “important” invitees are willing to drop what they’re doing and attend.  They are “indifferent,” as one translation puts it.[i]  So the king throws open the doors and sends his servants out to invite in anyone and everyone; importantly, we are told, “both the good and the bad.”[ii]  In other words, one’s moral status has no bearing on whether or not one is welcome at the party.  Everyone—everyone—is welcome.  But then, once the banquet hall is full, the king notices one attendee who is wearing the wrong clothes.  The guest stands out like a 1950s science fiction robot at a cocktail party.  The king approaches and asks the man, gently and without anger, “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?”  The man cannot stay at the party dressed as he is, and he is put out of the light and into the darkness outside.

Notice again: The king does not ask the man if he is good or bad, and the king does not ask the man if he was invited, since the party is thrown open to everyone.  The king is interested only in the man’s attire.  What is that about?

Before we think about that wedding robe the man failed to wear, we probably need to consider what he is wearing.  We can imagine that the man has entered the party donning, metaphorically speaking, the letterman’s jacket of his life.  That’s what we all do, isn’t it?  We proudly wear for all to see the signs of our accomplishment, whether those be through the material things with which we surround ourselves or through the pride or occasional smugness of our assessment of others.  We also wear upon our psyches, and sometimes on our bodies, the battle scars of our wounds, our resentments, our grudges, our disappointments.  Like symbols, slashes, and patches on a letterman’s jacket, we drape ourselves in all these markers wherever we go, subtly or overtly announcing to the world who we are.  They become our identity.

The insidious thing is that, while we think the letterman jackets of our lives give us worth, they, in fact, merely make us cumbersome, and distant from others.  They buffer us from true contact, vulnerability, and authenticity with others, or, crucially, with God.  We present ourselves to God like I presented in that silly senior photo, reclined in our confidence that the symbols, slashes, and patches define us, but God will have none of it.  It’s not that God judges us for it.  Rather, it’s that only truth can abide in the presence of God.  Only truth survives when bathed in God’s light.  Falsehood, including the thick false identities with which we drape ourselves, scatters into darkness.  When the parable’s wedding guest enters adorned with such falsehood, he cannot stay.

What, then, is the wedding robe to be worn to God’s great party?  The earliest Christians interchanged images of baptism with images of the wedding.  The baptism of new Christians was, at the same time, the wedding between Christ and believers, to which all are invited both as guest and as bride or groom, in which we vow to give ourselves fully in relationship to God: to love what God loves, to labor for what God labors.  And in the early church, this new commitment, this all-in in which we join God’s great party, this baptism-as-wedding, was referred to as “a change of clothes.”[iii]  And the clothing at baptism was—wait for it—nakedness.  Baptismal candidates in the ancient church would, both spiritually and physically as they entered the water, strip bare.

Do you see?  The correct wedding robe for God’s great party is…nothing, meaning that we are to strip ourselves bare of life’s letterman jackets, of all those things we wear to buffer ourselves, to mask ourselves, to distance ourselves from God and our authentic being.  We have to shed our thickness until we are fully and quite literally exposed to God’s light and clothed only in grace, so that our true self is in the immediate presence of God’s Truth.

I think that’s why, at the beginning of Jesus’ parable, all those “important” people decline the invitation.  There is nothing more terrifying than disrobing ourselves of all those things, good and bad, by which we’ve defined ourselves in life.  It’s much easier to be indifferent to God’s invitation and protest that there isn’t time for God with so many other important, pressing things on our schedules. 

But today’s parable underscores that there is no halfway.  We can be indifferent to God, or we can shed our worldly clothing for the wedding robe of grace, baring ourselves to God in spiritual nakedness and allowing God to see us—the good, the bad, the selfish, the sorrowful, the blessed—and draw us into the communion of God’s love.  One or the other.  What we cannot do—what is impossible to do—is to enter into the near presence of God while still thick with the world’s clothing.  We can’t preen in letterman jackets, or hide behind bulky costumes and masks, and hope that God will not see what we re doing.  It just doesn’t work that way.  We may fool ourselves and one another with our false selves, but we can’t fool God.         

The invitation to God’s party is renewed each and every day.  It is offered this day, and we are about to set the table!  We are not indifferent, or we would not be here.  The question is whether we will cast off those things behind which we hide and will come forward to the communion rail—and in our souls—spiritually naked and vulnerable before God, clothed only in the wedding robe of grace.  If we will, then the celebration will truly begin around and within us, and God’s great banquet will become our new reality.  Thanks be to God! 

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[i] Matthew 22:5, in David Bentley Hart’s fantastic The New Testament: A Translation.

[ii] Matthew 22:10

[iii] Bruner, Frederick Dale.  The Churchbook: Matthew 13-28, 391.

When God rains bread from heaven

Two Sundays ago, we heard about the Passover and the Israelites’ desperate flight from Egypt.  In the meantime, the Israelites have crossed the Red Sea, and today they find themselves wandering in the Sinai wilderness.  Like so many who start out on a new endeavor with a rush of excitement, their adrenaline has waned, and the magnitude of what the Israelites have done by fleeing Pharoah hits them like a wave.  At least in Egypt they were housed and fed.  Now, they are exposed and hungry, frantic and afraid.  An ambient anxiety pervades them.  The Israelites do what people do in such circumstances, then and now: They cry out, complain, murmur in furtive desperation because they don’t know what else to do.  The Israelites are hungry, in every way.

And then one morning, Exodus tells us, “There was a layer of dew around the camp.  When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground.  When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, ‘Man hu?’  For they did not know what it was.”

What is it?

Man hu.  That’s Hebrew for “What is it?”  And that’s what they call this miraculous stuff: What is it?—Man hu—manna.  All the Israelites know is that it is sweet and edible, and they aren’t hungry anymore.

As with so many other stories in the bible, we quickly become preoccupied with its factual details at the risk of losing its meaning: Where did Cain’s and Abel’s wives come from?  Where did Noah’s Ark hit land?  How did Jonah survive in the belly of that fish for three days?  And similarly, we ask Man hu?  What is manna?

The twentieth century entomologist F.S. Bodenheimer posed a hypothesis.  Bodenheimer said the most plausible explanation is that manna was “the sweet secretion of desert aphids that live on tamarisk trees in the region.  The aphids exude the excess sugar they obtain from the trees in the form of droplets that, when dried in the desert air, become flaky sweet crystals.”[i] (Mmm…delicious.)

If that nugget of information is the important thing in this story for you, go with it.  But lest we forget, the Israelites were probably the engineers who built Pharoah’s pyramids.  They were not primitive people of childish understanding.  And yet, the nature of the manna was not what was important to them.  They were content to call this food that rained from heaven “What is it?” because what was important to them was not its organic properties.  What was important to them was that, when they were in such deep need that they knew only apprehension, confusion, and anxiety, God rained bread from heaven.

We understand that intuitively, I think.  We know it in our own lives.  When we are lost in life’s wilderness, some signpost suddenly appears that points us in a new direction.  When we are floundering, a hand as from nowhere reaches out to steady us.  When we are overwhelmed by anxiety, a phone call or the direct gaze of a friend catches us, and for a moment the anxiety melts.  Sometimes these saving graces come through human mediation.  Other times, we experience them directly from God.  Pause here and think specifically of an instance in your life when this has happened, when were you in need—great or small, persistent or passing—and God provided something or someone to sustain you.  Like wispy flakes of manna, by themselves and to an outside observer, each of these instances is insubstantial, ephemeral, maybe even unnoticeable.  But to those of us who have experienced them, we know that they can feed a starving soul.  We know that they are bread from heaven.

I’ll share one such instance from my own life.  I’ll say at the outset that I don’t understand it any more than we can understand manna.  (Professor Bodenheimer notwithstanding.)  I had not yet received my cancer diagnosis, and the near-crippling issues with my back had not yet emerged.  It was the summer of 2019, and something in life felt off, like when a tire is ten pounds under-inflated, or when music is a half-note flat.  I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I walked through my days with an increasing sense of foreboding.  Familiar landscapes took on the look of wilderness.  Do you understand what I’m talking about?  Can you relate in your own life?

And then, one weekday morning I was driving down Waugh Blvd., about to turn right onto Memorial Drive to head into downtown Houston.  John Denver’s song “Rocky Mountain High” was playing on Spotify.  Denver sang the line, “I’ve seen it raining fire in the sky,” and the world was suddenly…different.  For a few moments, the veil dropped.  The wilderness scattered, and the concrete urban jungle was infused by God.  I don’t know how else to say it.  (Trust me, I’ve tried.)  By the time I reached the Cathedral, the veil was back in place.  The world had resumed its usual character.  But bread had rained down from heaven.  The gift of grace had been given.  I could not have known what challenges were coming in my life any more than the Israelites could have conceived of what was coming in theirs, but God gave me manna when I needed it, and I thank God that God did.

What do we do with that?  That’s the question, isn’t it?    When the manna appears for us, unexpected and undeserved, how do we respond?  Today we launch our fall Stewardship Campaign, and our Stewardship Council has selected as this year’s theme St. Peter’s counsel in response to that very question.  How do we respond to God’s gift of manna from heaven?  St. Peter says, “Use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.”[ii]        

We scarcely need Peter’s instruction, because the impulse to be stewards is actually part of the gift.  When God sends us a sign, we want to point others to it.  When God throws us a lifeline, we want to cast it further.  When God rains bread from heaven, we want to feed others.

Stewardship is not about guilt.  It’s not about duty.  It’s not, ultimately, even about the material needs of the church (as important as those are).  Stewardship is about the joy of acknowledging God’s gift to us of manna, and then sharing those gifts so that others may be fed.

We receive and share the infinite variety of God’s grace through our worship, our friendly fellowship, our sweaty service, our ardent prayer and faithful teaching.  And, undoubtedly and with equal joy, we pass along God’s grace through our financial commitment to the church.

For the next six weeks, this is our faithful work.  Pledge packets were mailed out this past week, and they include a booklet that shares with detailed transparency Saint Mark’s financial needs for 2024.  Our ministry budgets have not received increases in years; we have deferred maintenance needs on our campus; inflation has ratcheted up our fixed costs just to keep the lights on.  Funding these things could seem burdensome, except that we have received God’s grace as manna from heaven, and sharing God’s grace is our response in joy!

This year your Stewardship Council and Vestry are asking that parishioners who have not pledged in the past make a financial pledge to the parish as your response to God’s manna.  For returning pledgers, we are asked to consider a Matthias Gift in addition to a regular pledge.  The Matthias Gift is named after Matthias, the 13^th Apostle who was added to the original Twelve.  The Matthias Gift is a “13^th payment” on a twelve-month pledge.  Our stewardship material explain how this works, and I encourage you to read it with care.  If we increase our pledge base by 10% and our returning pledgers stretch to make a Matthias Gift in addition to their pledge, then we will meet our budget goal for the ministry of this amazing place in 2024.

In joy, I report to you that Jill and I have already pledged and committed to a Matthias Gift for 2024.  With even greater joy, I report that 100% of our Vestry have also already pledged for 2024.  That’s remarkable leadership and hopefully is both inspiration and aspiration for all our parishioners.   How do we make sense of God’s grace, God’s manna?  What is it, exactly, we ask as the Israelites asked.  It is mysterious and inexplicable.  But we know, and we commit to share, that it is bread from heaven.  

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[i] Kass, Leon R. Founding God’s Nation: Reading Exodus, pg. 228.

[ii] 1 Peter 4:10

Gratitude! Booksigning at WordsWorth, 9/13/2023

When God Acts

Last week Michael McCain and I were discussing upcoming holy days on the calendar and how we should best prepare for them.  After that conversation, I later realized we missed a most important date.  The holy day in question is November 18, as sacred around these parts as any date other than Christmas or Easter…What is it?  It is, of course, the opening day of duck season in Arkansas!

Thinking about that made me recall fondly the duck hunting I did during my ten-year sojourn in Texas, usually with my friend and parishioner Neil Giles.  Neil belongs to the St. Charles Bay hunting and fishing club on the Texas coast near Corpus Christi.  Neil and I would drive down on a Friday afternoon, watch the sunset on the bay, and stay in one of the club’s cabins.  Promptly at 4:00 a.m., someone would pound on the cabin door to awaken us, and after sleepily donning our chest waders, we’d stumble to the dining hall, where we’d be plied with a heavy breakfast of pork chops, biscuits and gravy, and coffee as thick as tar.  The first time I went hunting with Neil, I couldn’t understand why they served such a large breakfast at zero-dark-thirty.

After eating we’d get into an Everglades-style airboat and travel at breakneck speed through the salt marshes of the bay with only a spotlight to guide the way.  The experience was surreal, and though we were there by choice, the sensation was as if we were fleeing from someone or something. 

It took a long time to reach the duck blinds that rose up out of the bay like tiny islands.  The airboat would leave us there, still almost an hour before dawn, and the boat sometimes wouldn’t return until almost midday.  It didn’t take long to figure out why we’d been encouraged to eat so much food.  It was necessary sustenance for the journey ahead.      

That takes us to the Exodus reading today: The institution among the ancient Israelites of the Passover meal.  Anyone who has ever been privileged to attend a seder meal with Jewish friends will recollect this passage.  It is God’s careful and deliberate instruction for how to prepare the Passover lamb for the feast.  God says, “[The] lamb shall be without blemish, a year-old male…they shall eat it roasted over the fire with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted over the fire, with its head, legs, and inner organs.”

But the modern Passover Seder meal, at least for Christian guests observing the ritual, risks leaving the impression of the comfort food of my hunting breakfasts, or the Thanksgiving meal of a Norman Rockwell painting.  God’s next instruction blows such images out of the water.  Crucially, God tells the Israelites what to do with a bit of the lamb’s blood.  God says, “Take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts…of the houses in which they eat it…For I will pass through the land of Egypt…and I will strike down every firstborn in the land… when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.”

Now we see that this is no ordinary meal at all.  It portends something momentous and ominous.  Coincident with this meal, something terrible will happen in Egypt, where the Israelites presently live as abused and enslaved people.  There will be a crescendo of turmoil, and it will spell either the destruction or liberation for the Israelites.  It is only then that we begin to understand what this whole meal is about.  Listen to the bits I’ve previously leapfrogged:

God says, “You shall keep [the lamb] until the fourteenth day of this month…You shall eat it with unleavened bread…You shall let none of it remain until the morning…This is how you shall eat it: [with] your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly.”

What is God saying here?  In a lunar calendar, the fourteenth day of the month is the night of the full moon, where travel by night is most feasible.  Unleavened bread doesn’t need time to rise; it can be prepared and cooked quickly.  Girded loins and sandaled feet mean you eat—and sleep—with your clothes on, and with your protective staff at the ready.  And finally, God says, in essence, “Hurry!” 

Do you see what all this means?  God is not playing the part of Julia Child or Rachael Ray, giving God’s people a recipe for a lovely lamb.  There is no sitting back after supper and loosening one’s belt.  There’s no time for dessert.  God is preparing God’s captive people to make a run for it, to flee to liberation and safety.  God is prompting them, instructing them, and most importantly, making sure they have food to sustain them for the journey.

What we don’t get in today’s passage are the eleven chapters of Exodus leading up to this one, chapters in which the Israelites are consistently paralyzed from acting.  They have no agency; they have lost the ability to imagine a life in which they are not held captive; they take no initiative to reclaim their integrity and gain their freedom.  But now, through the Passover, God has both empowered and energized the Israelites. Because God has prompted them, because God has instructed them, because God has provided sustenance for their journey, the Israelites find the strength to move.      

As always with Holy Scripture, we are left to wonder and ask: Is this just an old story, memorializing what God once did, or is it somehow more?  Does it in any way inform our own lives in the present?  For our Jewish siblings, the answer is yes.  When they retell the Passover story each year, they use first rather than third person pronouns.  The Ashkenazi Haggadah used at the seder says, “In every generation, we are obligated to see ourselves as though we personally came out of Egypt.”[i]  Observant Jews imagine that, just as God acted in and for the Israelites of old, God’s action is operative in their own lives, here and now.

What about us?  The great Church Father St. Gregory of Nyssa taught seventeen hundred years ago[ii] that, as people of the New Covenant, it is right and good for us, too, to imagine how the Exodus story also speaks to us, here and now.  The Passover story encourages us to ask: In what ways—either in your external circumstances or your internal soul—are you held captive by something in your life that has stripped you of your agency, that threatens your well-being, from which you feel too weak to escape?  In what ways do you feel paralyzed and unable, not only to escape to freedom, but even to make the very first, very small move in freedom’s direction?

The Passover promise is that God will make the first move.  When we cannot conceive of a way forward, God will present a way.  When we cannot conceive how to prepare, God will prepare us, sometimes without our even realizing it.  When we cannot find the will to lift our feet to take the first step, God will act.         

Unfortunately, strains of bad Christian theology—and internet memes like those footprints on the beach—sometimes claim this means God will whisk us easily away from distress.  It is not so.  We are not toddlers, and God will not pick us up and carry us on the divine hip.  What does God do?  God prompts; God instructs; God empowers; and, most importantly, God provides us spiritual food that strengthens us for the journey.  God shows us paths to travel where before we only saw trees.[iii]  God girds us with spiritual clothing and staff when we thought our souls were naked and exposed.  God grants us holy food through the Eucharist, through prayer, through communion with one another.  Like the doorposts of the Israelites, God marks us as God’s own, and if we will heed God’s prompting and follow where God calls, seas will part, and we will enter new life.

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[i] https://www.haggadot.com/clip/avadim-hayinu-we-were-slaves-egypt

[ii] See St. Gregory of Nyssa’s classic text The Life of Moses.

[iii] See the wonderful allusion at Mark 8:24.

The Renewal of Our Minds

Anyone who has ever participated in a bible study on Saint Paul is likely aware that the Letter to the Romans is considered Paul’s most complete letter, the closest thing he wrote to a theological treatise, his most mature thought, his magnum opus.  Some say that all Christian theology for the past two thousand years is really just a response to the Letter to the Romans, and I mostly agree with that conclusion.  Romans is a beautiful and brilliant letter, and today we read its crescendo, its great “therefore,” the final hope Paul expresses for his audience.  Paul says, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.  What does that mean, and how do we do it?  First, I suppose we need to know what Paul means by the word “mind.”  It is the brain, the intellect?  Is it what Agatha Christie detective Hercule Poirot calls “the little gray cells”?  Does transformation mean we change our minds, like being convinced to alter our outlook by some new evidence or argument?

As is so often the case, here English lacks an adequate translation for Greek.  The Greek word Paul uses here, which we translate as mind, is νοῦς [n-o-u-s], and it doesn’t mean brain.  In fact, in the ancient world the nous was understood not to reside in the head at all, but in the center of us, right where the solar plexus is found.  The nous is difficult to grasp.  Practically every classic philosopher describes it just a bit differently.  It is awareness, self-consciousness, intuition, that which comprehends, that which discerns what is good and true.  Judeo-Christian people who know their Genesis might say that the nous is the image of God in us.   

If we take in all this—this expanded, biblical idea of mind that is so much more than our modern idea of the brain—then what would it mean for the mind—the nous—to be transformed?  It surely doesn’t mean merely changing one’s mind from thinking that Jesus is a nice but delusional dude to believing he is God’s son.  It means something much more like changing one’s… everything.  It means realizing that the things in which we’ve placed importance in the world, things we’ve imagined are gold, are really cardboard.  It means the anxiety, anger, resentment, jealousy, petty yearning which have clung to us all begin to lose their hold, as we wonder how they ever gained their grip in the first place.  It means walking out into the world and the air surrounding us suddenly feeling electric, as with an ionic charge.  It means glimpsing trails of glory flowing behind the people walking amongst us—every one of them—each of whom is also created in the very image of God.

It means all these things.  Do you see?  This is why, when Jesus himself spoke of such a transformation to Nicodemus, Jesus said it was like being born all over again.[i]  This is why Paul makes it the crescendo of his letter, the most important thing of all.  In the first eleven chapters of Romans, and in all his other letters leading up to Romans, Paul has spoken of the trials and tribulations of the world, the Powers that seeks to tear us down, and even the squabbles that constantly threaten to tear apart the community of Jesus itself.  The solution to it all—the thing that makes the difference for everything—is the transformation that comes from the re-newing of our minds, our nous, the center and core of who we are.

Contemporary Christianity too often fails to grasp this.  It is not about a momentary conversion or spoken magic formula.  In the Gospel today, we see what comes from just such a misunderstanding.  Today, Simon has his moment—his conversion, we might say—and he speaks exactly the right words.  Jesus asks him, “Who do you say that I am?” and Simon responds, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.”  This is a moment Evangelicals love, because in an instant it seems that Simon goes from muddled confusion to faith.[ii]  But immediately after this—literally, in the very next paragraph—Jesus will call Simon Peter “Satan” and say, “You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind [there’s that word again![iii]] the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”  That’s next week’s Gospel text, so I don’t want to say much more about it now, except that clearly Peter’s flash of conversion, as incredible and awesome as it is, does not transform him in his nous, in the core of his being.  Within scant minutes, he is back to being his old self.  How, then, does the transformed renewal of our minds happen, and how does it look in the world?

Peter’s momentary insight did not immediately lead to transformation.

There is no better Sunday of the year to ask these questions than Rally Day, the Sunday on which we renew our commitment to engaging our faith, granting time and attention to God, and, indeed, coming to church.  Because these are exactly the ways that sustained transformation happens.  For many, transformation may begin with a bolt of lightning, or a startling realization, or even a brush with danger or death.  But renewal—the long-term, gets-into-the-marrow-of-our-souls, changing everything—transformation of our minds only happens with time.  As it did for Simon Peter, whose renewal and changed-being-in-the-world still wasn’t complete when Saint Paul met him in Antioch years after Jesus’ Resurrection, our own renewal will be fragmented and occur bit by bit, moment by moment, over a commitment of time.  Just as when we become adept at a sport, or a musical instrument, or an artistic pursuit, it is steady and regular commitment that changes the way we walk through and see this world. So, how does it happen?

For us, here, we participate in the liturgy.  Think about what we do here, Sunday after Sunday, season upon season.  We sing praise for the awesome God who creates us.  We kneel in humble penitence as we recognize the ways we’ve fallen short.  We hold up our hands to receive the overwhelming grace of the sacrament. 

We go to forum and send our kids to Children’s Church and Sunday School, attend bible study or Christ Care groups, or Daughters of the King, or the Rector’s Book Club, diving more deeply into our knowledge of God so that God becomes our intimate companion rather than someone to whom we begrudgingly give an hour per week of our time.

We volunteer at the Food Pantry, or Shrimp Boil, or as lay chaplains, or in the church service itself, remembering that we are the hands and feet of Jesus and that through our own witness others will discover their minds begin to renew.

The bishop who ordained me[iv] was fond of saying that “We consecrate things by their use.”  He meant that things and places become holy over time when we use them for holy purposes.  What is true of spaces is equally true of us.  As we commit ourselves to the life of discipleship, the things in which we had placed importance in the world—things we’d imagined were gold—will be revealed as cardboard.  The anxiety, anger, resentment, jealousy, petty yearning which have clung to us will begin to lose their hold, as we wonder how they ever gained their grip in the first place.  We will walk out into the world to discover the air surrounding us electric, as with an ionic charge.  We will glimpse trails of glory flowing behind the people walking amongst us—every one of them—as we recognize that each one is created in the very image of God. We will find our minds—our nous, the very center of our being—renewed and our lives transformed, and we will look upon Jesus and say in wonder, as if realizing it truly for the first time, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God!” 

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[i] John 3:3

[ii] It is also a moment that Roman Catholics love, since Jesus replies to Simon, “I tell you, you are Peter [Petros in Greek, Cephas in Aramaic, Rock or “Rocky” transliterated into English], and on this rock I will build my church.”

[iii] Here, the word is φρονεῖς [phroneis], but the root is νοῦς [nous].  https://www.billmounce.com/greek-dictionary/phroneo

[iv] The Rt. Reverend Don E. Johnson, Bishop of West Tennessee, Retired

“How Can We Know The Way?” Launched and Climbing!

My new little book, How Can We Know The Way?: Reflections on Belief, Salvation, and Eternal Life was released yesterday, and this morning it ranks #1 on Amazon.com’s New Testament Meditations New Releases chart and #5 on the New Testament Meditations Best Sellers chart!

How Can We Know The Way? is intended as a four-session small group study or for personal devotion.

Readers can order books from Little Rock’s WordsWorth Books here:

https://www.wordsworthbookstore.com/book/9798822921450

It can also be ordered at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.

There will be a book signing at WordsWorth (5920 R Street, Little Rock, AR 72207) on Wednesday, September 13, at 6:30 p.m. I hope to see you there!

Braving the waters

Jill and I are finally watching The Big Bang Theory.  Many will know the premise of the sitcom: Four Caltech scientists live a cloistered existence between their apartments and the comic book store.  When not working, they play superhero, fantasy games, and (when they are feeling especially daring) paintball.  But the risks they take are always pretend.  In fact, much of the show’s humor is about exactly that.  Whenever Sheldon, Leonard, Howard, and Raj consider stepping out and taking an actual risk, their oversized brains rationalize reasons to stay in safety.  They talk themselves into the supposed virtue of their cloistered lives, and one day becomes the next in an unchanging existence.

Today’s Gospel reading in Matthew is the account of Jesus walking on water.  This is one of those universally well-known Gospel stories, like Jesus turning water into wine.  Everyone knows that walking on water is one of Jesus’ most potent party tricks.  But is that the truth this Gospel story intends to convey? 

To get at the question, we have to back up and stitch Matthew’s Gospel back together where the lectionary has pieced it apart.  A few verses before today’s passage, Matthew inserts a non sequitur in which he conveys to the reader the grisly story of the murder of John the Baptist.[i]  King Herod Antipas has imprisoned John for speaking out about Herod’s perfidy and brutality.  As a result, and as the culmination of Herod’s sin, Herod beheads John at a dinner party and presents John’s head to his step-daughter on a platter.  The account is as grotesque as any story of Caligula, and Matthew ends it by saying, “John’s disciples came and took the body and buried it; then they went and told Jesus.”

We can’t understand today’s Gospel passage apart from the story of John the Baptist’s death.  The shocking news of John’s gruesome murder, just received by Jesus and the disciples, is why, Matthew tells us, Jesus at this moment needs time alone.  John is Jesus’ cousin and probably his first teacher.  John is as close to Jesus as anyone, and John’s death—brought about by his fidelity to God—affects Jesus deeply.  So, Jesus goes up a mountain to pray and grieve, and he sends the Twelve ahead of him on a boat across the Sea of Galilee.

Undoubtedly, John the Baptist’s murder at the hands of Herod is the disciples’ topic of conversation, too.  Until the news of John’s death reached them, the disciples had a sense of invincibility.  Everywhere they’ve gone, demons, disease, and doubters have fled in their presence.[ii] Everything about the disciples’ experience so far has seemed charmed, as if playing superhero or some fantasy game.  But now, suddenly, the game has become all too real.  Though John the Baptist is a well-known and prominent figure, regarded as a sort of mystical prophet by the masses, Herod blithely dispatches him as bloodlusty entertainment.  The disciples know that if it can happen to John the Baptist, it can easily happen to them. 

Rembrandt’s Beheading of John the Baptist

All night the Twelve stay awake, their senses newly abraded and raw at the reality of the risk they have taken by following Jesus.  As if in a gothic novel, the weather outside mimics their inner disposition.  Wind and wave buffet their boat.  Rain lashes the sail.  Thunder and lightning crack through the darkness.  And it is then that they look out and see Jesus walking toward them on the water.  When they see him, the disciples cry out in fear. 

Matthew suggests the Twelve are afraid because they think Jesus might be a ghost, but I don’t think so.  They’ve been cloistered together for hours talking about John’s brutal death and the mortal danger following Jesus puts them in.  Their emotions are pitching and rolling along with the waves.  They’re having doubts and likely weighing their options.  And then Jesus appears off the bow.  A ghost would have been less frightening.  Ghosts are apparitions.  Ghosts can’t do harm.  Following Jesus, on the other hand, can be deadly.

So, here we are, at the heart of the story.  The disciples are cloistered in the boat, huddled in what they hope is safety from the violent world outside.  Jesus stands in the midst of the lightning, the wind, and the waves.  Were this on television, the scene would cut to commercial, leaving us with a cliffhanger.  What will happen next?

The disciples are at a pivot point in their relationship with Jesus.  They have to decide whether the Gospel, which could get them killed, is truly Good News.  They have to decide whether they’ll stay huddled on the boat or brave the potentially drowning waves with Jesus. And so do we.  That’s the ultimate truth of this narrative.

We, like the Twelve, are drawn to Jesus.  Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.  But deep down, we don’t imagine that following Jesus has real or dangerous consequences.  Discipleship, we believe, involves no risk.  We believe we are as safe as the four friends on The Big Bang Theory, playing their various games.

But it isn’t so.  Following Jesus involves enormous risk.  We live in a world of increasing violence, suspicion, dehumanization of those who are the most vulnerable, and sneering disregard across the board for those with differing principles or heartfelt beliefs.  Jesus’s wide arms of grace have something to say about each of these things, and the followers of Jesus have a witness to make in the world.  We are called, in circumstances minor and extreme, to be agents of grace, insistent purveyors of love, the very hands and feet of Jesus.  Discipleship doesn’t occur only on placid seas.  Discipleship requires that we follow Jesus even when thunder booms, waves roll, and winds knock us sideways, when following the Way of Jesus puts us at risk in our society, among strangers, family, and friends.

In today’s Gospel text, eleven men stay on the boat.  They are, at least at this point in Matthew, worse than those who would debate and challenge Jesus.  At least the challengers stick their necks out and take a stand.  These eleven so-called disciples avoid all risk and make a game of following Jesus, huddling on the boat as if the waves aren’t there.

Eleven men stay on the boat, but one man takes enormous and, to the world, foolhardy risk and steps out into the wide ocean.  First, Peter calls Jesus “Lord” for the very first time in Matthew’s Gospel.  It is a title for a superior from an inferior, like calling someone “sir,” and it matters here because Peter is finally acknowledging in his apprehension, weakness, and fear, that Jesus has power he (Peter) does not have, and that Peter needs Jesus in order to chart choppy waters. 

Jesus beckons Peter to him, and notice what happens next: So long as Peter looks at Jesus as the center of his attention, Peter, too, walks on water.  But as soon as Peter’s attention is averted instead to the wind and waves, Peter begins to sink.  Peter then cries out in fear, but his cry is different than the earlier cry of the Twelve on the boat.  Peter’s cry is the call for help of one who has stepped out in faith to follow Jesus, and Matthew tells us, “Immediately, Jesus reached out his hand and caught him.”  Yes, Jesus then asks Peter, “Why did you doubt?” but Jesus is not castigating Peter.  That’s a poor reading.  Rather, Jesus is saying, “Peter, you were doing it!  You were in the chop, and you were staying above the abyss!  Next time just don’t take your eyes off me.”  And after witnessing all of this, all the disciples no longer call Jesus merely Lord.  They all look upon Jesus in wonder and say, “You are the Son of God!”  Not because Jesus walked on water, but because he empowered Peter to do so, too.         

How deep runs our faith?  Where are we willing to follow Jesus? Is discipleship a game with no consequences or is it the most important thing in the world to us, encouraging us to take risks to proclaim and embody God’s grace for all people.  If we will step out of the boat; if we will recognize the Son of God who beckons us forward; if we will keep our eyes on Jesus, then even when the waves begin to swamp us, we will find the sturdy hand of God reaching out to catch us with power, and in love.

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[i] Matthew 14:1-12

[ii]  Except in Matthew 13:54-58 when they visit Nazareth, where Jesus’ petty neighbors grumble about the local boy made good.