FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Jeremiah 28:5-9

Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18

Romans 6:12-23

Matthew 10:40-42

Prayer of the Day: O God, you direct our lives by your grace, and your words of justice and mercy reshape the world. Mold us into a people who welcome your word and serve one another, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” Matthew 10:40.

Jesus presumes on hospitality. Success of the mission upon which he sends his disciples in the verses previous to our reading depends on their finding a welcome among the people they meet. Jesus expects that his disciples will be welcomed by the curious, the generous, the hopeful and open minded. He is counting on hospitality.

In this respect, Jesus is thoroughly grounded in traditions of the Hebrew Scriptures. At the dawn of history Abraham and Sarah welcomed three strangers travelling in the heat of the day with shade, water for their tired feet and the best meal of which they were capable. They had every reason ignore or turn away these visitors. The world was a dangerous place during the bronze age. For all they knew, these three strangers might have been bandits or representatives of the nearest city state come to run them out of the jurisdiction. Instead, they opened their home, their larder and their hearts and, as the author of the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews tells us, ended up “entertained angels without knowing it.” Hebrews 13:2.

Of course, Jesus is well aware that he is sending his disciples out into an inhospitable world. Alongside the example of Abraham and Sarah is that of Sodom and Gomorrah. The citizens of these two towns met the same strangers so lavishly entertained in the tent of Sarah and Abraham with threats of gang rape. Jesus knows that his disciples will be “sheep into the midst of wolves.” Matthew 10:16. He warns them that they “will be hated by all because of my name.” Matthew 10:22. The disciples can expect that their good news will be met with rejection. They can expect that doors will sometimes be slammed in their faces. They are not to be dismayed, nor are they to seek retribution. They simply move on to the next town. What might the church of today look like if only more missionaries of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries had taken the same approach rather than riding the coattails of colonialism?  

Hospitality to strangers is an integral part of the church’s life. As noted above, the Letter to the Hebrews urges us to “show hospitality to strangers.” Hebrews 13:2. Saint John commends Gaius the elder for welcoming, housing and providing for strangers. III John 5 Throughout the Middle Ages, monasteries afforded hospitality to pilgrims, travelers and the wandering homeless. Today refugee sponsorship and resettlement are important ministries of the church-and increasingly so given that, as of the end of 2021, no less than 89.3 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, violence and human rights violations. USA for UNHCR Website.

It is against this back drop that I wish to reflect on two events that transpired over the last couple of weeks. One was the tragic loss of the Titan submersible in which five people were lost. The other was the sinking of a packed migrant boat off the coast of Greece in which at least seventy-nine people were lost and dozens more missing. In the case of the submersible, which was carrying four billionaires and a nineteen-year-old son of one of them, the United States Coast Guard and governments from around the world conducted an extensive search sparing no expense and employing the most advanced equipment. The migrant boat received aid only after it had gone down, having previously been seen in distress. The fate of the submersible was televised non-stop by all major news outlets. The migrant tragedy got only a passing notice. Sadly, while the loss of the submersible was a unique event affecting a few adventurers who willingly assumed a substantial risk, the fate of the migrants off the Greek coast is but one among many such tragedies affecting thousands of individuals whose decision to put to sea had little to do with thrill seeking and everything to do with a desperate effort simply to remain alive. The juxtaposition of these two shipwrecks makes painfully clear which lives matter and which do not; which deaths are newsworthy and which are not significant enough to make the obituaries.

We are reminded by these events that the world today is no more hospitable to sojourners, refugees and aliens than it was in the days of Abraham and Sarah. The hardline stance of Europeans and North America against migration from Africa in the fist instance and Central and South America in the case of the United States has left persons threatened by war, gang violence and starvation little choice but to embark on dangerous journeys by land and sea in the hope of finding sanctuary. The cruelty of these policies rivals that of Sodom and Gomorrah. We who stand on what we deem our side of the border would do well to contemplate the fate of those two cities and consider whether we are not earning for ourselves the same judgment. God has a particular concern for the refugee, the stranger, the people without a country. See Psalm 107:4-9; Leviticus 19:33-34.

There is a reason why hospitality to strangers has been woven into the fabric of Torah and constitutes a core practice of the church. It is simpy another word for “gospel.” As we learn from the book of Genesis, all human beings spring from the same descendants, share the same blood and are all alike made in God’s image. As the Book of Revelation makes clear, it is God’s intent to reunite the human family in a new creation consisting of every tribe, nation and tongue under heaven. In addition to embodying the practices of Jesus, the ministry of hospitality serves as a witness to the gentle reign of God Jesus proclaims and God’s gracious will that God would have done on earth as in heaven. Jesus tells us that one criterion under which the nations of the world will be judged is the degree to which they welcome strangers. Matthew 25:35. As the visible presence of Christ’s Body on earth, the people of God are to live into God’s future. The people of God are to be, in the words of Clarence Jordan, founder of Koinonia Farm, a demonstration plot for God’s kingdom. Jesus teaches us that hospitality invites transformation, builds trust, births friendship, overcomes prejudice and extends visit by visit the just, gentle and peaceful reign of God. To reject the stranger is to reject Christ, resist the work of the Holy Spirit and rebell against God’s gracious will for creation.

It is for this reason that we sponsor, resettle and assist refugees and migrants seeking entry into our country. That is why we advocate for open borders. It is why our churches seek to become places of sanctuary and safety for LGBTQ+ folk in states that have adopted violent, repressive and discriminatory laws that put them in jeopardy. It is why we strive to remove from our worship, language and practices all that would become a stumbling block for someone who might be open to Jesus and the kingdom he proclaims. As the GEOCO commercial says, “it’s what you do” when you follow Jesus.   

Here is a poem by Remi Kanazi from the perspective of the refugee, stranger, sojourner, outcast.  

Refugee

I.

she has never

seen the sea

sunlight imprinted

on her father’s skin

waves crashing

at his feet

smile tattooed

underneath boyish grin

snapping pictures

with closing eyelids

her father’s face

flush on recollection

the same waves that had

clenched like an angry jaw

at his mother pushed him

forward like a train car

watched his neighbor drown

tears streaming

eyes connecting

screams muffled

as inhalation

suffocated lungs

muscles weary

skin pruning

barely a boy

knowing he would

never return

his neighbor

    an older man

born in Akka

looked dapper

at dinner parties

looked helpless that day

    his body revolting

    against death

a pool intent

on swallowing him

so many stroking

to get on boats departing

who’d have known this gulf

would be their deathbed

II.

she has been beaten

ID checked

body thrown to the ground

fists and feet pummeled

fractured hip, shoulder broken

heart, too many times

tear gas inscribed on her lungs

she wrote back on her breath

that the canister’s defeat is near

III.

these fields are ours

she told me

before the Europeans

    and Brooklynites

before the swimming pools

    army jeeps and barbed wire

before the talks, roadmaps

    and Swiss cheese plans

before declarations rewrote history

    those hills met footprints

    and that can’t be erased

like village massacres

    can’t be erased

like broken bones policies

    can’t be erased

like the screams ringing

    in her father’s ears

    can’t be erased

we are the boat   

    returning to dock

we are the footprints

    on the northern trail

we are the iron

    coloring the soil

we cannot

    be erased

Source: Before the Next Bomb Drops: Rising Up from Brooklyn to Palestine, Remi Kanazi (c.  Haymarket Books, 2015). Remi Kanazi (b.1981) is a Palestinian-American poet, writer and community organizer currently living in New York City. He is the editor of anthologies of hip hop, poetry and art and the publication Poets for Palestine. He is the author of two collections of poetry. Kanazi’s political commentary has been featured by news outlets throughout the world, including the New York Times, Salon, Al Jazeera, and BBC Radio. He is a Lannan Residency Fellow and is on the advisory board of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Jeremiah 20:7-13

Psalm 69:7-18 

Romans 6:1b-11

Matthew 10:24-39

Prayer of the Day: Teach us, good Lord God, to serve you as you deserve, to give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to toil and not to seek for rest, to labor and not to ask for reward, except that of knowing that we do your will, through Jesus Crist, our Savior and Lord.

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” Matthew 10:34-36.

Today was Juneteenth, a day that was established just last year as a federally recognized holiday by the United States Congress. Juneteenth commemorates the day on which federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865 to take control of the state and ensure that all enslaved people be freed. Thankfully, we have reached a point at which we acknowledge publicly the dark history of slavery in our nation and the point at which it was formally terminated. Sadly, it took us over two hundred years of slavery, a century of Jim Crow, a relentless fight by Black citizens to obtain the civil liberties the rest of us take for granted, a pandemic laying bare the stark discrepancies that still exist between Black and white citizens in terms of health care, credit and land ownership and the murder of an innocent Black man by a police officer in order to get there. Truth be told, we still are not there.

Coincidentally (or not) I have been reading The 1619 Project, a book that expands upon the Sunday, August 18, 2022 New York Times special magazine bearing the same title. To make a long story short, the magazine article sought in an abbreviated way to shed light on the pivotal role played by the institution of slavery in the formation of our country, the perpetuation of white supremacy throughout the country and especially in the American south for over a century thereafter and the continuing detrimental effects of systemic racism in contemporary American society. As one might expect, the project met with sustained backlash. U.S. Senator Tom Cotton introduced a bill in the United States Senate entitled the “Saving American History Act.”[1] Similar legislation has been introduced in several Republican dominated states.[2] Suffice to say, there is a determined effort by a significant part of white America to prevent this dark aspect of our nation’s history, too frequently excluded and downplayed in our nation’s mythology surrounding its origins, from coming to light.

Coincidentally (or not), Sunday’s gospel speaks directly to our penchant for self deception and falsification, personal and collective:

“…nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.” Matthew 10:26-27.

To be a disciple of Jesus is to speak the truth, even when it disturbs the peace, even when it elicits hostility, even when it divides churches, splits families and ends friendships. Discipleship is about speaking the truth even when you feel you cannot do it articulately, even when you wish there were someone else that could speak better, even when your voice is shaking. And the truth is that systemic racism infects our educational institutions, our workplaces, our system of justice and, not least, our churches. It is a truth of which we have always been vaguely aware. But the election and presidency of Donald Trump have made unavoidably clear the breadth, depth and persistence of white supremacy and the pain it inflicts on people of color every second of every day. Indeed, that much needed clarity might be the one and only positive contribution of the Trump legacy.

Naturally, I applaud efforts such as the 1619 Project to tell the American story and the story of American Christianity[3] truthfully. But public witness only takes us so far. As Jesus noted, a prophet is without honor in the prophet’s own home and among the prophet’s own people. Yet that is precisely where the witness to truth is most needed. There are, of course, potent reasons for letting Uncle Ned’s racist remark pass without comment in the interest of not spoiling Thanksgiving dinner for everyone else. There is an argument to be made against introducing the issue of racial justice to a congregation that is struggling to sustain itself financially and is already divided and demoralized. One might question the wisdom of a denominational church body already in decline and hardly able to maintain its own ministries tithing a substantial portion of its income to support Black churches as a step toward reparations owed by American society as a whole. Given the fragility of our families, congregations and the churches of which they are a part, we might rather settle for peace at home, peace in the congregation and peace in the ecclesiastical household than the peace won through the hard work of doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with God. But the peace of silence comes at a terrible price, a price that is paid by victims of exclusion, intimidation and violence required to maintain it.

If it was not clear to us before, the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and all that followed should convince us that evil does not go away simply because we choose to ignore it. The people we witnessed storming our capital two years ago chanting racist and antisemitic slogans, displaying hangman’s nooses and flying the confederate flag of racism testify to the sickness of our culture and the pervasiveness of the lies our nation has been telling itself about itself for the last couple of centuries. The false mythology of America that we learned in school as history, a mythology that has ignored, downplayed and minimized the role of racism and the creed of white supremacy, needs to be exposed.

Unfortunately, the people who most need to hear the testimony given voice in the 1619 Project are not likely to read it. Many of them are ingesting a steady diet of right wing propaganda from the likes of Fox, One America News and Truth Social. Nevertheless, they have neighbors like you and me. They have family members like us. They use the same nail salons and barber shops we do and frequently attend the same churches. You might not change Uncle Ned’s mind at the Thanksgiving dinner table. But by calling him out on his racism, you let the rest of your family-including impressionable children-know that his bigotry is not acceptable and has no place in your home. You may not sway the loudmouth in the barbershop, but by speaking out, you might well open the minds of others standing by or encourage those who might have been fearful of speaking up.

As for preaching the truth about America’s racism to the church, what is the worst that could happen? You might lose members. You might lose your job. But while you are thinking about that, thing about this: In the sixth chapter of John’s gospel Jesus went from an adoring congregation of over five thousand to a following of twelve in a matter of days. The truth does not always win converts. Sometimes it makes enemies. Despite what our churches say on their marques about everybody being welcome, if the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers would feel welcome and comfortable in your church, you are probably not doing your job. The good news that God’s limitless love does not recognize borders, require documentation, distinguish on the basis of humanly concocted categories of race, have any regard for class or respect for cultural measures of worth and achievement is mighty bad news for white people desperate to hang onto their societal privilege. But these are the words of eternal life. Those who do not recognize them as such are the ones who need most to hear them.

Jesus warns us not to fear human retaliation, but rather to fear God. Fear of God does not go down well in my ever white, ever polite progressive protestant tradition. But it strikes me that if we really did fear God, there would be a lot less other things to fear-such as ruining Thanksgiving dinner, creating an uncomfortable scene at the nail salon, offending one of the church’s biggest contributors or failing to be re-elected bishop. Indeed, if these are the only consequences we face for telling the truth, we should count ourselves blessed. Throughout history and to this very day many have paid and continue to pay a higher price. Jesus tells us frankly that speaking truthfully about what the rest of the world would rather ignore, deny or erase will bring us into the same struggle to which he gave his life. He reminds us, however, that all who lose themselves in that struggle will find themselves. Matthew 10:39.  The truth, painful as it is, makes us free.

Here is a poem by Denise Levertov dismissing the peace which is merely tolerance of evil.

Goodbye to Tolerance

Genial poets, pink-faced

earnest wits—

you have given the world

some choice morsels,

gobbets of language presented

as one presents T-bone steak

and Cherries Jubilee.

Goodbye, goodbye,

                            I don’t care

if I never taste your fine food again,

neutral fellows, seers of every side.

Tolerance, what crimes

are committed in your name.

And you, good women, bakers of nicest bread,

blood donors. Your crumbs

choke me, I would not want

a drop of your blood in me, it is pumped

by weak hearts, perfect pulses that never

falter: irresponsive

to nightmare reality.

It is my brothers, my sisters,

whose blood spurts out and stops

forever

because you choose to believe it is not your business.

Goodbye, goodbye,

your poems

shut their little mouths,

your loaves grow moldy,

a gulf has split

                     the ground between us,

and you won’t wave, you’re looking

another way.

We shan’t meet again—

unless you leap it, leaving

behind you the cherished

worms of your dispassion,

your pallid ironies,

your jovial, murderous,

wry-humored balanced judgment,

leap over, un-

balanced? … then

how our fanatic tears

would flow and mingle

for joy …

Denise Levertov (1923–1997) never received a formal education. Nevertheless, she created a highly regarded body of poetry that earned her recognition as one of America’s most respected poets. Her father, Paul Philip Levertov, was a Russian Jew who converted to Christianity and subsequently moved to England where he became an Anglican minister.  Levertov grew up in a household surrounded by books and people talking about them in many languages. During World War II, Levertov pursued nurse’s training and spent three years as a civilian nurse at several hospitals in London. Levertov came to the United States in 1948, after marrying American writer Mitchell Goodman. During the 1960s Levertov became a staunch critic of the Vietnam war, a topic addressed in many of her poems of that era. Levertov died of lymphoma at the age of seventy-four. You can read more about Denise Levertov and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation Website.

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[1] This bill never became law.

[2] One interesting permutation of these measures is a relentless effort to keep “CRT” out of public schools. CRT is an acronym for Critical Race Theory, a catch all phrase for a diverse group of legal scholars whose writings explore the relationship between race, racism and power as it pertains to the evolution of American law. Though I am neither a legal scholar nor an expert on Critical Race Theory, as a law school graduate I have some familiarity with it. As with any scholarly movement, there are many diverse and sometimes conflicting voices within it. There is no one single “theory.” Moreover, anyone with the slightest understanding of what Critical Race Theory actually is and more than two brain cells to rub together has to know that it is not being taught to primary or secondary students. Thus, legislation to put an end to this non-event is rather like outlawing the keeping of unicorns within city limits.  

[3] The 1619 Project includes an essay by Anthea Butler on the Black church and the critical role it has and continues to play in the struggle for freedom, equality and civil liberties that has defined African American existence in the United States. See 1619 Project, (c. 2021 by The New York Times Company) pp. 335-353. That an enslaved people were able to take the religion and Bible of their captors, liberate it from its Constantinian captivity to the instrumentality of oppression and recapture the radical message of the Exodus, the Return from Exile and the Cross and Resurrection of the Messiah for the downtrodden is one of the most remarkable facts of history.   

SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Exodus 19:2-8

Psalm 100

Romans 5:1-8

Matthew 9:35—10:23

Prayer of the Day: God of compassion, you have opened the way for us and brought us to yourself. Pour your love into our hearts, that, overflowing with joy, we may freely share the blessings of your realm and faithfully proclaim the good news of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

“So Moses came, summoned the elders of the people, and set before them all these words that the Lord had commanded him. The people all answered as one: ‘Everything that the Lord has spoken we will do.’ Moses reported the words of the people to the Lord.” Exodus 19:7-8.

We know that the people of Israel kept this promise only imperfectly-as do all of us who make big promises. No doubt the people were sincere. I have no doubt that Saint Peter was sincere when he told Jesus that he was ready to go to prison or even death with him. I have no doubt that every couple joined in marriage are perfectly sincere when they promise to “join with [one another] and share in all that is to come.” But for one reason or another, we often end up breaking the promises we make.

There are many reasons promises get broken. Sometimes it is a matter of overestimating one’s own degree of courage, strength or ability. Sometimes circumstances over which one has no control make keeping a promise impossible. Sometimes the conditions under which the promise was made change such that keeping the promise under those changed conditions would be hurtful, unethical or unjust. Sometimes a promise is made recklessly and without due consideration for the consequences that might follow to third parties. Better to renege on such a promise than follow through and cause injury or harm to unsuspecting and uninvolved persons.

Sometimes people make promises they know they cannot keep. Yours truly promised his children when they were small that he and their mother would always protect and keep them safe. Of course, I knew that I was not being entirely truthful. As much as I would have liked to think otherwise, I knew there were many things from which I was powerless to protect my children, even when they were small and always at home. Yet I continued to give them the assurance of my protection because I believed then and continue to believe that children need and deserve to feel safe, secure and free from danger. I figured that, should the unthinkable happen, should one of my children be traumatized in some way despite my best protective efforts, I would simply have to cross that bridge when, God forbid, I came to it. You might call this promise an act of faith. I knew I might not be able to keep it, but trusted nonetheless that God would be present either to do what I was unable to do or help me pick up the pieces of a shattered promise I failed keep.

This last Sunday our congregation confirmed its one confirmand, a remarkably mature and articulate thirteen-year-old whose moving statement of faith left us in awe. During the rite of confirmation, the confirmand is asked to affirm her baptismal vow “to trust God, proclaim Christ through word and deed, care for others and the world God made, and work for justice and peace.” That promise is every bit as weighty as the Israelites’ commitment to fulfill all the commandments delivered to them by Moses. It is also a promise the church manages to keep about as well as Israel was able to keep the commandments. For that reason, the response to the inquiry is: “I do, and I ask God to help me.” We know all too well that the promises we make are too big for us to keep on our own. We know that we have no idea what keeping our baptismal vow will require of us, whether we will have the courage and stamina to remain faithful in times of trial or how we will manage to go on in the face of failure, tragedy and trauma. In all those circumstances, however, we cling to the promise that God will be there for us.

I think perhaps that is what I meant when I promised to protect my children. I might not be able to keep them from getting hurt, getting their hearts broken or making bad decisions. But I can be there for them. I can love them. Love takes shape in different ways under different circumstances. Sometimes love is tender, supportive and gentle. Sometimes love must be tough. Sometimes love intervenes to change a dangerous life trajectory. Sometimes love must take a step back and let events take their course. Always love forgives. Always love leaves the door open. Always love persists.

God’s promise is that God will never stop loving the world God made and the people for whom God bled and died. God’s love is sometimes like being in “God’s bosom safely gathered.” It sometimes takes the shape of judgment and rebuke. But whether in grace or judgment, God is always there “for” us-never against. God will always be there to forgive and help us put back together the broken pieces of our failed promises. Unlike our promises, God’s are unbreakable. As our Psalm for Sunday reminds us,

“For the Lord is good;
   his steadfast love endures for ever,
   and his faithfulness to all generations.”  Psalm 100:5.  

So we are bold to affirm again and again the promises made in our baptismal vows. We continue to make promises to one another. After all, our human communities are held together by promises and our confident hope in their fulfilment. Beyond that, all creation is held together by the God whose faithfulness to God’s promises never fails.

Here is a poem about faithfulness by Emma Lazarus.

Rosh-Hashanah, 5643

Not while the snow-shroud round dead earth is rolled,

And naked branches point to frozen skies.—

When orchards burn their lamps of fiery gold,

The grape glows like a jewel, and the corn

A sea of beauty and abundance lies,

Then the new year is born.

Look where the mother of the months uplifts

In the green clearness of the unsunned West,

Her ivory horn of plenty, dropping gifts,

Cool, harvest-feeding dews, fine-winnowed light;

Tired labor with fruition, joy and rest

Profusely to requite.

Blow, Israel, the sacred cornet! Call

Back to thy courts whatever faint heart throb

With thine ancestral blood, thy need craves all.

The red, dark year is dead, the year just born

Leads on from anguish wrought by priest and mob,

To what undreamed-of morn?

For never yet, since on the holy height,

The Temple’s marble walls of white and green

Carved like the sea-waves, fell, and the world’s light

Went out in darkness,—never was the year

Greater with portent and with promise seen,

Than this eve now and here.

Even as the Prophet promised, so your tent

Hath been enlarged unto earth’s farthest rim.

To snow-capped Sierras from vast steppes ye went,

Through fire and blood and tempest-tossing wave,

For freedom to proclaim and worship Him,

Mighty to slay and save.

High above flood and fire ye held the scroll,

Out of the depths ye published still the Word.

No bodily pang had power to swerve your soul:

Ye, in a cynic age of crumbling faiths,

Lived to bear witness to the living Lord,

Or died a thousand deaths.

In two divided streams the exiles part,

One rolling homeward to its ancient source,

One rushing sunward with fresh will, new heart.

By each the truth is spread, the law unfurled,

Each separate soul contains the nation’s force,

And both embrace the world.

Kindle the silver candle’s seven rays,

Offer the first fruits of the clustered bowers,

The garnered spoil of bees. With prayer and praise

Rejoice that once more tried, once more we prove

How strength of supreme suffering still is ours

For Truth and Law and Love.

Source: Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems and Other Writings (c. Broadview Press 2002)

Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) is most famous for the words inscribed on the Statute of Liberty from her poem, The New Colossus:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Lazarus was one of the first successful and publically recognized Jewish American authors. She was born in New York City to a wealthy family. She began writing and translating poetry as a teenager and was publishing translations of German poems by the 1860s. Lazarus was moved by the fierce persecution of her people in Russia, a frequent topic of her writings, as well as their struggles to assimilate into American culture. You can sample more of Emma Lazarus’ poetry and read more about her at the Poetry Foundation website.

HOLY TRINITY

Genesis 1:1–2:4a

Psalm 8

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Matthew 28:16-20

Prayer of the Day: Almighty Creator and ever-living God: we worship your glory, eternal Three-in-One, and we praise your power, majestic One-in-Three. Keep us steadfast in this faith, defend us in all adversity, and bring us at last into your presence, where you live in endless joy and love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” Matthew 28:19-20.

The American author, Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) once said that “to be good is noble. To teach another to be good is more noble still-and a lot less trouble.” I think of that quote often when I read the bold social justice proclamations by churches like my own. It is all well and good for the church to speak truth to power, to expose, challenge and call for the eradication of systemic racism in government, education and commerce. But when it comes from a church that has been and still is overwhelmingly white, has benefited historically and continues to benefit from white privilege and whose ecclesiastical wealth far exceeds that of most Black churches with which we claim to united-it tends to lack credibility. The cruel, unjust and heartless society we purport to condemn might well throw our own Bible back in our faces with the admonition to “remove the log” from our own eye before attempting to open theirs. Matthew 7:1-5.  

In Sunday’s gospel, Jesus utters what we have come to call “the great commission.” He sends his disciples out to “make disciples of all nations.” Well, no he doesn’t. The English translation, “make disciples,” does not capture the meaning conveyed in the original Greek text. Jesus is not commanding his disciples to make the nations into something called disciples. In the Greek, there is no noun, “disciple.” Instead, “disciple” is the verb, the engine of the sentence. Thus, the command is to “disciple all nations.” It involves “teaching them to obey everything” that Jesus has commanded. That is done as much by preaching as example. “Let your light so shine among others that they see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” Matthew 5:16. Witness to the nations comes from the heart of a community formed by the Sermon on the Mount. One might call this a community that “practices what it preaches.” But I prefer to say that it is a community whose preaching flows from its faithful practices.  

The implication is clear. You have to be a disciple in order to make one. The original disciples became such by following Jesus and the way is no different for us. Churches are to be furnaces in which disciples are formed for witness and service. Our American churches, however, have undergone some formation of their own in a context that makes discipling difficult. Most of us do not view our churches as families into which we are born through baptism. We tend to view them as voluntary organizations of which we are willing members. It is all transactional. I join the church of my choice and receive certain benefits and privileges in return. These include a place to be married and buried; a place to baptize and confirm my kids, a place that offers me some socialization and entertainment. If my church does not give me everything to which I believe I am entitled, or another church down the road offers better preaching, better hymns or better programs, I am out the door. Why should I stay at a church that does not speak to me, that does not meet my needs or comport with my expectations? In accord with our capitalist instincts, we Americans build churches designed to market religious commodities rather than calling people to become fishers for people. Accordingly, our churches produce consumers rather than making disciples. So the question is, how can our churches better become and be disciples of Jesus in our contemporary setting?

I have two thoughts. First, we can become truly diverse. That is particularly important in a society built on a foundation of systemic racism and permeated with hateful ideologies grounded in white supremacy. The rise of Donald Trump and his capture of the Republican party has laid bare the extent and depth of racial hate in our land. The murder of George Floyd and the scandalous disparity in access to medical care and other services between whites and non white citizens have made plain the terrible cost the centuries of racial injustice impose. Diversity is not some trendy new byword. It is at the heart of the good news we proclaim. From its inception, the gospel has been proclaimed as a good word for “the nations” and the church has been understood as made up of “all nations, tribes and tongues.” Never has the need to proclaim in word and deed the common humanity of all people and God’s love for all people been more urgent.

In one sense, we already are diverse. Christians in the United States are heavily represented by almost every ethnicity. Sadly, however, we are divided by denominational loyalties often reflecting the same racial/ethnic fault lines plaguing society as a whole. We tend to seek out and welcome our own kind. We mainliners have been aware of that for decades and have been trying to remedy the malady through intentional outreach to people of color, aggressive recruiting of minority persons for ministry and formulae for ensuring that a certain percentage of our elected leaders are non-white. Yet as well intentioned as these efforts are, they do not address the systemic societal framework of racial discrimination that determines where we live, where we go to school, who we meet, with whom we socialize, what career opportunities are open to us and, yes, where we go to church. Trying to remedy racism by integrating the church is rather like trying to end air pollution by changing your furnace filter.

Yet I believe there is a way out of our ethnic captivity. If we are prepared to acknowledge that the church is a single body as Saint Paul teaches us; if we acknowledge that when one part of the body is injured, the whole body suffers; if we follow Saint Paul’s example in urging his gentile churches to contribute out of their abundance to meet the need of the famine stricken churches of Judea; then it seems to me clear how the wealthier mainline churches, like my own, should respond to the Black churches and missions that are struggling on the front lines against racism and economic injustice. The wealth our national church, synods and congregations have tied up in real estate, sitting in endowments and planted in banks can fuel the fight for racial justice and equity while providing a powerful witness to what the reign of God looks like. I suggested one step in that direction in my “Open Letter to the ELCA Presiding Bishop and Synodical Bishops: A Modest Proposal for Reparational Tithe.” Such action will not desegregate our churches overnight. But it will send a clear message that we mean what we said in our “Declaration Of The ELCA To People Of African Descent.”

I am convinced that remedying the systemic injustice that has and continues to oppress people of color in general and African Americans in particular will require an effort on the level of the New Deal or the Marshall Plan. There is currently little appetite for any such effort in American government and I doubt more screechy preachy church social statements calling for it will alter that disinterest. So perhaps it is time we started to be the change we keep calling for. Maybe it is time for bishops and church leaders to stop acting like CEOs of failing corporations answering to their shareholders, put on their grownup pants and start challenging their churches with concrete proposals for doing with our own assets what we are calling our representatives to do with their constituents’ tax dollars. In the Book of Acts, it was the example of the disciples’ acts of mercy and their selfless lifestyle as much as their preaching that won the hearts of so many to the New Testament church. Who can tell whether the corporate example of a church doing justice within itself will influence the larger society to do likewise?  

My second thought is global. As I write this article, Orthodox Christians are daily killing each other by the hundreds in eastern Europe in the bloodiest European conflict since World War II. This is but the most obvious example of an idolatry infecting the church throughout the world. The fact that we are prepared to engage in lethal conflicts pitting Christian against Christian shows that our loyalty to the gods of blood, race, nation and soil takes precedence over out baptismal vows to love our neighbors, near and far, as ourselves. The frightening rise of nationalist/populist movements worldwide has been well documented by the Lutheran World Federation’s study, Resisting Exclusion: Global Theological Responses to Populism, (pub. by Evangelische Verlangsanstalt GmbH, Leipzig, Germany, under the auspices of The Lutheran World Federation). Never has it been more important for the church to assert its catholicity, its claim that ultimate loyalty belongs to Jesus and the reign of God he proclaims and that no nation, government or other human authority must take precedence over the great commandments to love God above all else and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. In a world on the edge of disintegration and global war, the church is called to be the visible sign of Christ’s Body, the Incarnate Word that holds creation together against all the hateful ideologies, nationalistic ambitions and ancient blood feuds threatening to rip it apart.

We need a new ecumenical movement to build a united global church. I understand how difficult that would be and that ecumenism has failed in the past to produce meaningful unity. But I think that is in large part due to our fixation on differences in doctrine and practice. Let me be clear. I believe doctrine is important. I believe discussions about worship, the sacraments, our creeds and ethical concerns are important and worth having. But should they be allowed to get in the way of our common basic assertion that the human family is one and that through the lens of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection there can be no hierarchy of value when it comes to the worth of human lives? And can we credibly make that assertion when our national loyalties trump our loyalty to Jesus and his gentle reign? Do we stand a chance of discipling the nations when we will not disciple ourselves? Can we teach the nations to observe all that Jesus commanded when we ourselves have no intention of following those commands?

I know that these two thoughts of mine are not new, that smarter people than me have articulated them with greater clarity, that better people than me have struggled to bring them to fruition and that the prospects of their taking root now are no greater than in the past. But I can’t help thinking that, perhaps, if enough of us begin loving Jesus and the reign of God he lived and died for more than our institutions, more than our sanctuaries, more than our comfortable traditions, more than our countries, more than life itself-God’s Spirit might once gain make use of us to “turn the world upside down.” See Acts 17:6.   

Here is a poem by Denise Levertov about the kind of peacemaking that resembles the discipling I believe our gospel lesson is talking about.

Making Peace

A voice from the dark called out,

             ‘The poets must give us

imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar

imagination of disaster. Peace, not only

the absence of war.’

                                   But peace, like a poem,

is not there ahead of itself,

can’t be imagined before it is made,

can’t be known except

in the words of its making,

grammar of justice,

syntax of mutual aid.

                                       A feeling towards it,

dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have

until we begin to utter its metaphors,

learning them as we speak.

                                              A line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses . . .

                        A cadence of peace might balance its weight

on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,

an energy field more intense than war,

might pulse then,

stanza by stanza into the world,

each act of living

one of its words, each word

a vibration of light—facets

of the forming crystal.

Source: Breathing the Water (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1987) Denise Levertov (1923–1997) never received a formal education. Nevertheless, she created a highly regarded body of poetry that earned her recognition as one of America’s most respected poets. Her father, Paul Philip Levertov, was a Russian Jew who converted to Christianity and subsequently moved to England where he became an Anglican minister.  Levertov grew up in a household surrounded by books and people talking about them in many languages. During World War II, Levertov pursued nurse’s training and spent three years as a civilian nurse at several hospitals in London. Levertov came to the United States in 1948, after marrying American writer Mitchell Goodman. During the 1960s Levertov became a staunch critic of the Vietnam war, a topic addressed in many of her poems of that era. Levertov died of lymphoma at the age of seventy-four. You can read more about Denise Levertov and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation Website.

Dear Ms. Gorman:

I read about how you felt “gutted” upon learning that a Florida school banned your poem, The Hill We Climb, for use in elementary school teaching and removed it from the elementary section of the school library. While I can understand your reaction, I think you should be pleased. My junior collage professor of Latin verse once told us that “poetry is by nature subversive and invites repression in countries throughout the world, but not the United States. In this country, the government does not censor poetry-because it knows Americans never read it.” You managed to do what my professor thought impossible, namely, get Americans interested in poetry, so much so that for the first time they are trying to ban it! Kudos on that score.

You should be encouraged by that Florida school’s ban. After all, poetry that is harmless is bland and boring. A poem that does not touch a nerve, unsettle the mind, challenge the status quo and make us a tad uncomfortable is like diet Coke. It’s just not the “real thing.” Your poem paints a bold and truthful portrait of what is, yet challenges us to dream of what might be. Naturally, that is upsetting to those of us who like things the way they are or who long for a return to some bygone era when America was “great” (as though that were even possible!). For those of us convinced that any sort of change amounts to our loss and that there is nothing for us at the crest of the hill, poems like yours strike a note of fear and anger. Sometimes, though, you have to open a wound in order to clean it and make healing possible. The ire evoked by your poem in that Florida school illustrates that it is doing exactly what a poem should.

Finally, nothing promotes a work of literature quite as effectively as a ban. You can be sure that, as soon as elementary school children learn that your books are forbidden, they will flock to them like flies to honey. Bans on literature do not work. They never have. Every society that has ever tried to ban literature has been on the losing side of history. Florida’s efforts to ban literature, censor teachers and stifle discussion of uncomfortable topics demonstrate that it has already lost the battle. Such futile measures make painfully clear that the champions of censorship know their ideologies, prejudices and worn out beliefs cannot withstand reasoned discussion and debate. Censorship is the last desperate, panicked attempt of a stagnant and dying society to save its collapsing order from the hurricane of revolutionary change. It will fail today as it always has in the past.

So, be comforted. Time is on your side. The future belongs to you. Your poem will be recited long after Ron DeSantis has been relegated to the dustbin of discarded demagogues like George Wallace, Lester Maddox and Strom Thurman. Truth, beauty and goodness cannot be banned.

ASCENSION OF OUR LORD

Acts 1:1-11

Psalm 47

Ephesians 1:15-23

Luke 24:44-53

Prayer of the Day: Almighty God, your blessed Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things. Mercifully give us faith to trust that, as he promised, he abides with us on earth to the end of time, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“While [Jesus] was blessing [the disciples], he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.” Luke 24:51.

“On the third day he rose again; he ascended into heaven, he is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he will come to judge the living and the dead.” Second Article, Nicene Creed

The one singular event that influenced my thinking on this week’s texts and the Feast of the Ascension is the coronation of King Charles the Third. It is impossible to watch a ritual of such opulence and splendor without being impressed. It calls to mind the words of this Sunday’s psalm acclaiming God as king of all the earth.

God has gone up with a shout,
   the Lord with the sound of a trumpet.
Sing praises to God, sing praises;
   sing praises to our King, sing praises.
For God is the king of all the earth;
   sing praises with a psalm.

God is king over the nations;
   God sits on his holy throne.
The princes of the peoples gather
   as the people of the God of Abraham.
For the shields of the earth belong to God;
   he is highly exalted.

In all likelihood, this psalm was adapted from a Canaanite coronation ceremony, though echoes of its refrains can be seen in the coronation traditions of Israel as well. II Samuel 15:10; II Kings 9:13; and II Kings 11:12. See The Psalms, Arthur Weiser (c. 1962 S.C.M. Press, Ltd.) p. 375. In its final form, however, the psalm is clearly focused on the reign of God over all the earth. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” Psalm 24:1. The nations, including Israel, are but a “drop in the bucket.” Isaiah 40:15. All other claims of sovereignty are, at most, contingent. Consequently, the crowning of a British monarch is but a pale reflection of the worship of the One who needs no coronation.

No doubt the makers of the lectionary intended to juxtapose this psalm of praise with Jesus’ ascension. Throughout the centuries, this critical part of the gospel narrative has been portrayed artistically in terms of a glorious apotheosis. The above icon is an example of such art. There is nothing wrong in these portrayals, though they are sometimes subject to misinterpretation. One example is the now rightly disfavored, but once prominent tradition of extinguishing the Easter pascal candle on Ascension Sunday. Whatever else this practice might have intended to convey, it strongly suggests that the Ascension is Jesus’ departure to some distant place, only to return at some time in the indefinite future. Nothing could be further from the truth. The “right hand of God,” which is biblical shorthand for the agency of God in creation, is not located somewhere “beyond the blue.” To the contrary, the right hand of God is everywhere God is active which is, well, everywhere. Thus, Jesus is not leaving his disciples or the world he came to save. Rather, he is now more intensely present than ever before. As the hymn says:

      Christ is alive!     

No longer bound

to distant years in Palestine,

but saving, healing, here and now,

and touching ev’ry place and time.

“Christ is Alive,” by Brian A. Wren, Evangelical Lutheran Worship, (c. 2006 by Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; pub. by Augsburg Fortress) Hymn #389.

One of my seminary professors, Gerhard Forde by name, used to say that Jesus is God’s “isser.” That is to say, Jesus is God’s way of being present to creation. It is critical to understand in this connection that Jesus is not God. Rather, God is Jesus. The distinction is important because if we begin with the assertion that Jesus is God, we end up trying to understand Jesus by infusing him with all the attributes we think we know to be God’s. I believe that the great Christological debates throughout history have been complicated by this confusion, resulting in endless efforts to reconcile the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God with the Jesus who got tired and crabby, hungry and thirsty, bled and died. But as John the Evangelist reminds us, “No one has ever seen God.”  John 1:18. We know nothing about God beyond what God reveals to us. When an exasperated Philip said to Jesus, “Show us the Father and we shall be satisfied,” Jesus replied “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” John 14:8-9. Jesus is all the God there is.

Because Jesus is at the right hand of God, is the right hand of God, we know how God exercises God’s reign over creation. God rules the world through limitless love, unconditional forgiveness and eternal patience. This is not the god who appeals to our appetite for measurable progress, demonstrable results or easy solutions. Love will not stop bad things from happening to good people, prevent school shootings or end wars of aggression. It will, however, outlast them. I Corinthians 13:13. God’s might is God’s patience.

Most of the world would prefer a god who “fixes things,” solves problems, answers prayers for wealth, success and personal happiness. “Give us burly gods to pummel the world and us,” says the poet. The god professed by the late Tim Lahaye, a god who will simply rapture us out of our problems, violently destroy those we deem wicked and usher in a heavenly existence appeals to people who are angry, frightened, feeling helpless and who lack the conceptual tools for figuring out why.  So, too, the appeal of Hitlers, Mussolinis and Trumps who spew hatred against our perceived enemies and promise a better world built over their corpses. Human leaders of this kind have been too common throughout history. Thankfully, there is no god in their image.

If I were to portray graphically the miracle of the Ascension, I think I would show the resurrected Christ disintegrating into a billion particles that, in turn, infuse every molecule and every subatomic particle in the universe. For better or worse, however, graphic artistic expression is not my gift. I can imagine well enough. Draw or paint, not so much. Suffice to say, faith believes, even in the face of mass shootings, the threat of nuclear war and the continuing rise of white supremacy, that the Triune love poured out into the world through the faithful life, obedient death and glorious resurrection of Jesus Christ holds the universe together against all the powers of evil that would rip it apart.

Here is a poem by Father Daniel Berrigan with an expression of such faith and the difficulty of hanging onto it.

Astonishment

Wonder

          why illness

an odious plague dispersed

settles again after deep knives made

of the loved face a tragic mask.

Wonder

          why after one

tentative promise

raised like a green denial of death,

life resumes

its old mortician method after all.

Wonder

        why men break

in the kiln, on the wheel; men made of the sun,

men sprung from the world’s cry; the only men,

literal bread and wine, the crucial ones

poured out, wasted among dogs. Wonder,

And the lees of men, the stale men, there

in the fair vessels, a mock feast;

take it or leave-nothing else in the house.

Wonder

          at omnipresence of grey minds,

the shade of that made

O years ago, ash of the rowdy world.

Wonder

          at incapacity of love;

a stern pagan ethic, set against Christ at the door

(the discomfiting beggar, the undemanding poor).

Wonder

          woman and man, son and father

priest and sacrifice-to all right reason

one web of the world, one delicate

membrane of life. Ruptured.

Wonder

Transcendent God does nothing.

The Child plays

among the stocs and stones

A country almanac

moon phase, sun phase

hours

records and elements, grey dawn and red;

He sleeps and stands again,

moony, at loss, a beginner in the world.

History makes much of little, bet He

of clay and Caesars, nothing.

There is no god in Him. Give us burly gods

to pummel the world and us, to shake its tree

quail and manna at morning!

Wonder, wonder,

                           across his eyes

the cancerous pass unhealed, evil

takes heat monstrously. What use

the tarrying savior, the gentle breath of time

that in beggars is continuous and unruly,

that in dumb minds comes and chimes and goes

that in veins and caves of earth

sleeps like a tranced corpse, the abandoned body

of violated hope?

Wonder

given such a God, how resolve the poem?

Source: Selected & New Poems, (c. 1973 by Daniel Berrigan, pub. by Doubleday & Company, Inc.) pp. 133-134. Daniel Berrigan was born May 9, 1921, in Virginia, Minnesota. He entered the Jesuit novitiate at St. Andrew-on-the-Hudson, New York in August 1939 and graduated in 1946. Thereafter, he entered the Jesuit’s Woodstock College in Baltimore graduating in 1952. He was ordained the same year and appointed professor of New Testament studies at Le Moyne College in Syracuse in 1957. Berrigan is remembered by most people for his anti-war activities during the Vietnam era. He spent two years in prison for destroying draft records, damaging nuclear warheads and leading other acts of civil disobedience. He also joined with other prominent religious figures like Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to found Clergy and Laity Against the War in Vietnam. In February of 1968 he traveled to North Vietnam and returned with three American prisoners of war he convinced the North Vietnamese to release. Berrigan died on April 30, 2016 of natural causes at a Jesuit health care facility in the Bronx. He was 94 years old.

FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

Acts 7:55-60

Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16

1 Peter 2:2-10

John 14:1-14

Prayer of the Day: Almighty God, your Son Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. Give us grace to love one another, to follow in the way of his commandments, and to share his risen life with all the world, for he lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6.

          That verse has followed me throughout my whole life. It has shaped the trajectory of my thinking in numerous ways at different stages of my development. I have known the verse from early childhood and probably had to memorize it in Sunday school. It was a staple in Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod teaching, the church in which I was raised. The emphasis back then was on the second sentence: “No one comes to the Father except by me.” The way, the truth and the life consisted in understanding and believing the correct doctrine concerning Jesus Christ. Thus, purity of doctrine was essential. Though our pastors and teachers grudgingly admitted that other protestant traditions and perhaps even a few confused Roman Catholics might hold elements of the gospel sufficient to constitute saving faith, the only way to be absolutely sure of your salvation was to hold fast to the doctrine professed in our Lutheran Confessions, the essential bones of which were spelled out in Luther’s Small Catechism. In my mother’s day, memorization of the entire Catechism was a prerequisite for confirmation. Thankfully, by the time I was confirmed, memorization of the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostle’s Creed and several key Bible verses sufficed.

          In my freshman year of high school, I had my first encounter with “evangelicalism.”[1] I met a group of kids loosely associated with a 1970s movement then called “The Jesus People.” They had a very different take on the captioned Bible verse. Their emphasis was on the first sentence: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Jesus, they believed, did not simply teach or embody abstractly the good news of the gospel. Jesus was the good news. Salvation was not about believing the right doctrine, but rather trusting the right person. Faith was relational. Thus, the issue was not “what do you believe?” but “who do you trust?” The critical question was, “have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”

          This new community had much to commend it. It seemed to offer everything I did not know I was looking for in my own church-a living faith and a group of people seriously trying to follow Jesus in the carnivorous world of high school. This group was made up of believers from several different churches. We met each morning before school began in one of the class rooms for a prayer meeting led by Father Joe. Father Joe was a priest from our local Roman Catholic parish who had received “the baptism of the Holy Spirit,” an experience of renewal accompanied by speaking in tongues. In these meetings we bared our souls, offering up prayers for help in our own trials, for one another and for our unbelieving fellow students. Witnessing to our faith was a large part of what we did. Our lockers had bumper stickers reflecting bible verses or just the name “Jesus.” When these were defaced, we simply replaced them, prayed for the vandals and “rejoiced that we were found worthy to suffer for the name.” If our witnessing was intended to win converts, it was not particularly effective. But it led to many lively conversations in locker rooms, tables in the cafeteria and the hallways about faith and the things that matter.

          Ironically, the same Jesus that drew me into the evangelical movement led me out of it. That journey began at my encounter with Rev. James Cone, who preached at an assembly held by my junior college. He spoke eloquently about Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed and discipleship that calls his church to do the same. It would be decades later that I finally read his classic book, A Black Theology of Liberation, but his powerful witness was enough to turn my thinking in a new direction. No longer could I view Jesus as “my personal Lord and Savior.” He is, as John’s gospel makes clear to us, “the savior of the world.” I now understood that discipleship was not about rescuing as many souls as possible from a sinking ship. Discipleship is joining with Jesus in saving the ship.

          I should also add that, just as I was changing my perspectives, evangelicalism was evolving in a new direction. The evangelicals I found myself associating with in college seemed to lack the freshness of newfound faith that drew me to my high school group. They seemed less interested in Jesus than in ending abortion and bringing prayer back into the public schools. They were critical and fearful of the outside world. Indeed, they viewed the school (a Christian one!) and its student body and professors as mostly hostile. Theirs was very much an “us against them” mentality. Bible study, rather than a means for deepening faith in Jesus, focused instead on the approach of the “end times,” the coming “rapture,” “demon possession” and signs of the antichrist in every headline. Perhaps this dark side of evangelicalism was always there and I just did not notice it earlier on. But in any case, it did not square with following the “way, the truth and the life” of the Jesus I had come to know as savior of the world and the God who hates nothing God has made. By the end of my junior year in college, I was done with Intervarsity, Campus Crusade and the small group of prayer partners in in my dormitory.

           I cannot possibly catalogue all the friends I have made, teachers I have had and books I have read that have and continue to influence my faith journey. But more than anyone else, Paul Sponheim, Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at Luther Seminary, shaped my thinking about Jesus as the cosmic Christ, as the incarnation of God’s creative and redemptive love. Jesus is God putting God’s skin in the game we know as human existence. As such, the life he lived and the death he died and his resurrection to which the scriptures testify matter-and not just for those of us who believe in him. If Jesus is who the scriptures say he is, the eternal Word which both is with and is God (John 1:1); the one through whom God created the world (Hebrews 1:2); the one in whom all things hold together (Colossians 1:17); then the salvation he brings is universally applicable, politically oriented toward justice for the oppressed, socially oriented toward reconciliation and ecologically restorative.

In view of all this, it should not surprise us, indeed, we ought to expect that we will find the work and wisdom of this Word through which the Spirit of God is released into the world among people of different faiths and those of no faith at all. Again, if Jesus is who we say he is, how could it be otherwise? Thus, to say that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life through which all come to the Father is not, as so many assume, an exclusion of those whose doctrine is not quite right or who have not explicitly “accepted Jesus as personal Lord and Savior.”  As Jesus himself testified, “I have other sheep that are not of this fold.” John 10:16. It is for Jesus and his lifegiving Spirit to form all of humanity into a single flock. We, for our part, have no idea how that will happen or what it will look like in the end. Ours is simply to bear witness in word and deed to Jesus and live as best we can into the just and gentle reign he proclaims.

          Though I classified myself as a former evangelical in the title of this post, that is not entirely accurate. I am still evangelical in all the ways that I believe are important. I still believe that faith is relational and that, as important as doctrine may be (and I do believe that it is important), it exists to serve, guide and nurture our faith in Jesus Christ. I still believe that theology, whatever brand it might be, is not worth the trees sacrificed to print it if it does not have as its end forming the mind of Christ in communities of faith. I still believe that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life and that all who trust him can be assured of abundant and eternal life. But because Jesus is at the right hand of God, the life he promises is bigger than my own personal needs, bigger than the church and bigger than anything our Creeds and confessions can contain. One thing I have learned is that, whenever you think you have Jesus all figured out, you discover you don’t.

Here is a rendering of the well known Prayer of St. Patrick that I believe captures what it means to be a disciple of the Cosmic Christ.

The Prayer of St. Patrick

I arise today

Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,

Through belief in the Threeness,

Through confession of the Oneness

of the Creator of creation.

I arise today

Through the strength of Christ’s birth with His baptism,

Through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial,

Through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension,

Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of doom.

I arise today

Through the strength of the love of cherubim,

In the obedience of angels,

In the service of archangels,

In the hope of resurrection to meet with reward,

In the prayers of patriarchs,

In the predictions of prophets,

In the preaching of apostles,

In the faith of confessors,

In the innocence of holy virgins,

In the deeds of righteous men.

I arise today, through

The strength of heaven,

The light of the sun,

The radiance of the moon,

The splendor of fire,

The speed of lightning,

The swiftness of wind,

The depth of the sea,

The stability of the earth,

The firmness of rock.

I arise today, through

God’s strength to pilot me,

God’s might to uphold me,

God’s wisdom to guide me,

God’s eye to look before me,

God’s ear to hear me,

God’s word to speak for me,

God’s hand to guard me,

God’s shield to protect me,

God’s host to save me

From snares of devils,

From the temptation of vices,

From everyone who shall wish me ill,

afar and near.

I summon today

All these powers between me and those evils,

Against every cruel and merciless power

that may oppose my body and soul,

Against incantations of false prophets,

Against black laws of pagandom,

Against false laws of heretics,

Against craft of idolatry,

Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,

Against every knowledge that corrupts man’s body and soul;

Christ to shield me today

Against poison, against burning,

Against drowning, against wounding,

So that there may come to me an abundance of reward.

Christ with me,

Christ before me,

Christ behind me,

Christ in me,

Christ beneath me,

Christ above me,

Christ on my right,

Christ on my left,

Christ when I lie down,

Christ when I sit down,

Christ when I arise,

Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,

Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,

Christ in every eye that sees me,

Christ in every ear that hears me.

I arise today

Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,

Through belief in the Threeness,

Through confession of the Oneness

of the Creator of creation.

Source: Though attributed to the legendary Irish Saint Patrick, no one knows the precise origin of this beautiful expression of faith which appears in many abbreviated forms and has inspired numerous hymns, including “I Bind unto Myself Today,” by Cecil Frances Alexander in Evangelical Lutheran Worship, (c. 2006 by Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; pub. by Augsburg Fortress Press) Hymn # 450.  

---

[1] I will not attempt a comprehensive definition of the term “evangelical” as it applies to a distinct Christian tradition. As with all movements of any sort, there is a great deal of diversity among evangelicals as well as some dispute over who belongs there and who does not. Moreover, many of us “mainliners” also lay claim to that term with our own take on what it signifies. From my own experience, it seems that one common denominator is the belief that a genuine Christian is one who has made a conscious decision to accept Jesus Christ as savior.  

FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

Acts 2:42-47

Psalm 23

1 Peter 2:19-25

John 10:1-10

Prayer of the Day O God our shepherd, you know your sheep by name and lead us to safety through the valleys of death. Guide us by your voice, that we may walk in certainty and security to the joyous feast prepared in your house, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“You prepare a table before me
   in the presence of my enemies…” Psalm 23:5.

The Twenty-Third Psalm is one of the few biblical passages retaining some currency in contemporary American culture. Though most people have some vague concept of what a “Good Samaritan” is, what it means to “burn midnight oil” or why you might call someone or something a “pearl of great price,” few know the parabolic context of these terms anymore. But the psalm remains in the public consciousness as a whole. It is one of the few scriptures to which nearly everyone resonates. For that reason, it was one of my staples for the many funerals I did over the years for people I never knew, who had no connection to my church and whose families had little or no faith background. It forms a point of connection, an opportunity for bringing the comfort of the gospel to people unfamiliar with the language of faith. If they know nothing else about the Bible, the Psalter or the Gospels, they know that the Twenty-Third Psalm is a poem of comfort and consolation.

Nevertheless, its popular appeal should not be taken to mean that it is in any way glib, shallow or simplistic. The comfort afforded by the psalmist is not to be equated with mere safety, security or escape from earthy misery somewhere in the sweet by-and-by. The green pastures and still waters lie along paths leading through dark valleys inhabited by enemies and the threat of death. The way by which the shepherd leads the sheep is not free from evil, but the shepherd’s presence dispels all fear such evils might otherwise inspire. That is the core confession of the psalm: God is the Good Shepherd who is with the sheep no matter were God may lead them.

Those of us urban/suburban folk frequently stumble over the shepherd/sheep imagery. For the majority of us, the closest we have ever gotten to sheep is the petting zoo. In the biblical world, sheep were not cute, cuddly little pets. They were commercial commodities. The good shepherd defends the sheep from wolves because his livelihood depends on their survival. He needs to get them to market. From there they will go to someone’s table. Just as the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, so the sheep will be called upon to lay down their lives for the Shepherd. John’s gospel is clear on that point: “Remember the word that I said to you, ‘Servants are not greater than their master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you; if they kept my word, they will keep yours also. But they will do all these things to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me.” John 15:20-21. Being Jesus’ sheep and following him as your shepherd is not all sunshine and happiness. To the contrary, it is daily taking up the cross he carries.

It is in this context that I consider the captioned verse about the Shepherd preparing “a table in the sight of my enemies.” However the psalmist may have viewed this verse, disciples of Jesus cannot interpret it apart from Jesus’ command to love our enemies. “If you love those who love you,” says Jesus, “what credit is that to you?” Luke 6:32. Love is easy between neighbors with nothing between them but white picket fences. It is a good deal more difficult across culture war battlelines and harder still across hostile borders behind which there are people who would kill me if they got the chance. But Jesus would have us love even these enemies and do good to them. Luke 6:35

I don’t know about you, but if I have to love my enemies, I would prefer to do it from a distance. I would rather not be in the presence of people who think my transgender friends and family are “mutants,” “freaks” and sexual predators as some public figures have recently done. I don’t want to be in the company of people who throw about racial slurs, make a point of visibly packing their guns and ramble incoherently about elite cabals of Satan worshiping pedophiles. I can feel a degree of compassion for these folks, try to understand them and pray for them, but I do not want them anywhere near my table. I must confess that part of what drew me here to the Outer Cape is the near absence of such people. To be sure, you would probably find a few if you turned over enough rocks, but not in the numbers that allow them to organize marches, disrupt our town meetings or attempt to censor our school libraries. That sort of thing takes place in other communities far away from mine and I like it that way. If absence does not make the heart grow fonder, at least familiarity does not breed contempt.

Love, however, does not reside in a gated community. It is always found in the public square conversing with self righteous religious leaders, harlots, tax collectors and old, cowardly white guys like me who just want to be left in peace. Jesus makes quite clear that his disciples are to be fully in and participating with the world God sent him to save. Following Jesus means going to places where you will not be welcome, speaking truths your audience might not want to hear and engaging with people who do not like you and might even wish you harm. That is dangerous work. It can get you nailed to a cross.

Dangerous as it may be, there has hardly been a time when peaceful engagement with persons we regard as hostile is more urgent. The divisive power of hateful ideologies currently being enacted into law throughout the country, the carnage in Ukraine threatening to spill over into the rest of Europe and the frightening military brinksmanship between the United States and China cry out for the better way of being human Jesus taught us. The world needs a community capable of living peacefully in the presence of enemies-without fences, walls or barbed wire to protect it. To be one of Jesus’ sheep is to be as vulnerable as the shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep.

I can think of no better example of such a life than that of Charles Eugène de Foucauld de Pontbriand (1858-1916), the French priest recently canonized by Pope Francis. After a brief military career and some time spent exploring Morocco, Foucauld joined the Trappist monastic order. He was ordained in 1901, after which he traveled to the Algerian Sahara where he settled with the intent of starting a congregation among the Berber people, an ethnic group indigenous to the Maghreb region of North Africa. He was unsuccessful in this regard. In reflecting on his lack of success with traditional missionary methods, Foucauld adopted a new apostolic approach. His witness consisted not in preaching sermons, but through living a Christlike example. Taking the name, “Brother Charles of Jesus,” Foucauld lived with the Berbers as a humble guest with the chief objective of learning rather than teaching. In order to become more familiar with the Berbers, he studied their language and culture for over twelve years. He collected hundreds of native poems which he translated into French. He censored nothing in the poems, and never changed anything that might not conform to Catholic morality. Foucauld managed to win the love and trust of these people brutally victimized by colonialization and understandably suspicious of him and the church he represented. He also educated his own people on the beauty and sophistication of Berber culture. His life was dedicated to being an ambassador for Jesus Christ, seeking reconciliation and peace.    

Foucauld paid the ultimate price for living in the presence of those who were, in terms of blood, soil and nation, his enemies. His life of peacemaking ended on December 1, 1916, when he was assassinated at his hermitage in the Sahara. One might conclude that Foucauld’s mission was foolhardy and ended in failure. One could say the same about Jesus of Nazareth-except that God raised him from death and raises up the fragile bonds of friendship his disciples manage to build across human divisions in fractured and violent world.   

Here is a poem by Rebecca Seiferle that speaks to the fear we harbor toward our enemies causing us to dehumanize them and driving us to seek their destruction. Yet if one reads between the lines, perhaps the poem also beckons us to consider that there might be an alternative.

Love my Enemies, enemy my love

Oh, we fear our enemy’s mind, the shape

in his thought that resembles the cripple

in our own, for it’s not just his fear

we fear, but his love and his paradise.

We fear he will deprive us of our peace

of mind, and, fearing this, are thus deprived,

so we must go to war, to be free of this

terror, this unremitting fear, that he might

he might, he might. Oh it’s hard to say

what he might do or feel or think.

Except all that we cannot bear of

feeling or thinking—so his might

must be met with might of armor

and of intent—informed by all the hunker

down within the bunker of ourselves.

How does he love? and eat? and drink?

He must be all strategy or some sick lie.

How can reason unlock such a door,

for we bar it too with friends and lovers,

in waking hours, on ordinary days?

Finding the other so senseless and unknown,

we go to war to feel free of the fear

of our own minds, and so come

to ruin in our hearts of ordinary days.

Source: Wild Tongue (c. 2007 by Rebecca Seiferle; pub. by Copper Canyon Press).  Rebecca Seiferle is an American poet, translator, and editor. She taught English and creative writing for a number of years at San Juan College. She has also taught at the Provincetown Fine Arts Center, Key West Literary Seminar, Port Townsend Writer’s Conference, Gemini Ink, and the Stonecoast MFA program. She has been poet-in-residence at Brandeis University. She lives with her family in Tucson, Arizona where she teaches at Southwest University of Visual Arts. You can read more about Rebecca Seiferle and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation Website.

THIRD SUNDAY OF EASTER

Acts 2:14a, 36-41

Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19

1 Peter 1:17-23

Luke 24:13-35

Prayer of the Day: O God, your Son makes himself known to all his disciples in the breaking of bread. Open the eyes of our faith, that we may see him in his redeeming work, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” Luke 24:21.

 “We had hoped.” Perhaps the saddest words imaginable. “We had hoped that this time the pregnancy might finally take.” “We had hoped that perhaps this treatment would be the one to push mom’s cancer into remission.” “We had hoped the counseling might save our marriage.” I suspect that everybody reading this post has lived long enough to see a hope or two dashed. After all, what is life if not a series of events that routinely shatter expectations? Would we want it to be otherwise? What would it be like to live in a world where everything went according to plan? What would be the point of athletic competitions if everyone knew the outcome in advance? Who would bother to watch a movie or read a book without plot twists, suspense and surprises? A world without an element of randomness, unpredictability and surprise would be boring. It would be a world without hope. God loves us too much to place us in such a dry, colorless existence.

The world in which God places us is one where hope can thrive. It is a place where imagination can lead us to new discoveries, life altering innovations in mechanics, medicine and the sciences. Hope enables a people to survive and maintain its dignity under centuries of slavery. Hope allows one to look with unclouded eyes at a world of cruelty, injustice and tyranny and still look forward with joyous expectation to a better world of mercy, justice and freedom. You may have heard it said that, “Where there is life, there is hope.” But the converse is just as true. “Where there is hope, there is life.”

The two disciples on the road to Emmaus were close to death. To be sure, they were breathing and their hearts were still pumping blood. But there seemed to be no point to it all. The hope that had been driving them for the last three years had been dashed. Jesus, who these two disciples expected to liberate their oppressed nation from centuries of Roman brutality and oppression, was dead. Worse, he had been betrayed by the leaders of his own people into the hands of their oppressors and tortured to death in the most inhumane and humiliating way possible. The kingdom Jesus promised and on which the disciples had staked their lives never materialized.

I have seen hopelessness like this before. I saw it in the eyes of a teenage girl trapped in the body of a boy who could not make her friends, her parents or her church understand. I saw it the eyes of a mother whose son was sentenced to decades in prison. I have seen it on television, in newspapers and on the internet in the eyes of millions stranded at our southern border, cramped into overcrowded refugee camps and sitting alone in detention centers. I have seen it over the years in the eyes of institutionalized elderly folk nobody but the pastor ever visits. These are people whose hopes have been so thoroughly dashed so many times that they have lost the capacity to hope. They have become convinced that the way things are for them is the way they always will be. This is as good as it gets.

But then the disciples encounter a stranger on the road. We know this stranger was the resurrected Jesus. But the disciples fail to recognize him. They are not alone in this failure of recognition. Mary Magdalene mistook Jesus for a gardener. John 20: 11-16.   According to Matthew’s gospel, many of the disciples who encountered the resurrected Christ in Galilee still “doubted,” meaning, I suppose, that they were not sure the man they saw before them really was Jesus. Matthew 28:16-17.  I do not know because I cannot get inside the heads of these disciples, but I suspect their lack of recognition stemmed from a lack of hope. Hope is the engine of expectation. Hope recognizes that there is in every transaction a “God factor” that sometimes brings about surprising and unexpected twists and turns. We might define the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as God’s element of surprise imbedded in the last place you would expect to find it.

A cemetery is not the place you look for a new beginning. But that is where the story of the people called church gets its start. Because our story begins with baptism into Christ’s death where we are “born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God,” we are quite at home in seemingly hopeless circumstances. I Peter 1:23. That is why you find churches like mine reaching out to befriend and affirm transgender teens in states where their very right to exist is denied by statute. It is why you find people of faith at work in refugee camps and on our southern border working to secure rights and sustenance for people who have no home, no country and no rights. It is also why we find ourselves visiting and befriending people institutionalized in long term care facilities, detention centers and prisons. God does God’s best work in the dark. It is there God plants the seed of hope which, once planted, bursts through the frozen earth, stone walls, iron bars, barbed wire and the grave.

It was in the breaking of the bread that the two disciples recognized Jesus. Yet it is obvious that the groundwork was already being laid as he was talking to them on the road and setting their hearts on fire by opening to them the scriptures. I would love to know more about what was discussed on that journey to Emmaus. I expect that Jesus was recounting for those two disciples God’s delight in opening barren wombs with the birth of great leaders, making pathways of escape for slaves trapped between the armies of the Egyptian empire and the sea, bringing streams of water from stone to quench the thirst of a people lost in the wilderness, making kings from shepherds and forming nations of landless, wandering aliens. What greater delight could this God have, what greater surprise could God spring on us than to break open the very grave? To be sure, the world is full of tragedy, but Easter reminds us that God is full of surprises.

This is all good news for a world careening toward global military conflict, threatened by catastrophic ecological disaster, overshadowed by the rise of hateful racist ideologies and plagued by gross economic inequality. The way out of these dilemmas appears to be narrowing and may soon be closed. But hope insists that God still has surprises in store for us. This is not the first time the people of God are finding themselves faced with what appears to be a dead end. The world needs to know that its Creator has not abandoned it. The world needs to know that the Spirit of God is working in, with and under teachers faithfully witnessing to tolerance, acceptance and diversity, NGO workers serving and advocating for refugees, attorneys fighting to protect reproductive rights for women, scientists striving to educate the public and call world leaders to take action on climate change and all persons striving to name and eradicate the idolatries of racism and nationalism. All these people of good will need to hear that their efforts are not futile because, whether they know it or not, their efforts are not theirs alone. Whether they recognize him or not, Jesus is working among and through them. As Saint Paul would remind us, what God begins, God will find a way to finish. Philippians 1:6.    

Here is a poem by Sonia Sanchez that speaks of something like the hope born of an encounter with the resurrected Christ. As an African American poet, she knows something of hope struggling to vanquish despair.

This is Not a Small Voice

This is not a small voice

you hear  this is a large

voice coming out of these cities.

This is the voice of LaTanya.

Kadesha. Shaniqua. This

is the voice of Antoine.

Darryl. Shaquille.

Running over waters

navigating the hallways

of our schools spilling out

on the corners of our cities and

no epitaphs spill out of their river

mouths.

This is not a small love

you hear       this is a large

love, a passion for kissing learning

on its face.

This is a love that crowns the feet

with hands

that nourishes, conceives, feels the

water sails

mends the children,

folds   them    inside   our    history

where they

toast more than the flesh

where they suck the bones of the

alphabet

and spit out closed vowels.

This is a love colored with iron

and lace.

This is a love initialed Black

Genius.

This is not a small voice

you hear.

 

Source: Wounded in the House of a Friend (c. 1995 by Sonia Sanchez.; pub. by Beacon Press). Sonia Sanchez (born Wilsonia Benita Driver in 1934) is an American poet, writer and professor. She is a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement. Sanchez has written several books of poetry. She has also authored short stories, critical essays, plays and children’s books. She received Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 1993. In 2001 she was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for her contributions to American poetry. You can read more about Sonia Sanchez and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.