Could I Stand in God's Way?

Could I Stand in God’s Way?
Acts 11:1-18;
Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35

Systems of belief, institutions, communities of faith, and individual minds are all subject to the effects of constricting build-up, just as the arteries and veins of our bodies become constricted with the plaque of cholesterol. Individuals and societies develop some sort of process by which the breadth of vision becomes smaller and smaller. It is like looking down a tunnel and seeing the other end which appears to be much smaller. In the tunnel, however, the far end turns out to be the same size as the near end. But in the case of vision, the size spirals smaller and smaller, as in a very long sugar cone intended for ice cream. The constriction of an ever smaller spiraling thought pattern may cause spiritual angina or congestive spirit failure. That’s a chronic condition that is as dire for the spirit as its cardiac counterpart is for the body.

Scholars like Loren Mead and Phyllis Tickle(1) have been saying for some time now that the North American church has entered an age which is very comparable to the Apostolic times of the first and second centuries. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life research which came out last year showed that the number of practicing Christians in the United was continuing to decline. But the most provocative of their findings was that the number of people who self-identified as having no religious preference has soared from the long-traditional 7% to a whopping 20%. These are the “Nones” but for the most part they are not atheists, but are spiritual in ways that are independent from the institutional church. Robert N. Bellah in his 1985 seminal work, Habits of the Heart, noted that religion in America was moving very much towards individualism, which he labeled “Sheilaism,” in honor the example he used.

If the trend of individual religion is confirmed by the rise in the “Nones,” the spiritual but not religious, then there is a whole pantheon of religions alive and living well outside these doors. And the idea that we have returned to the Apostolic Age in terms of being a minority religion, one faith among a multitude of faiths, is very much a force to be recognized and responded to.

British New Testament scholar G. B. Caird noted in his study of the Apostolic Church that Jewish orthodoxy was much more oriented toward  practice than belief. The Jewish religious scene was populated with a variety of sects, from the near hermit Essenes to the Sadducees and Pharisees. The scholars of the day did not condemn the Christians for any beliefs they held about the Messiah, the Resurrection, or the Age to Come. Those discussions were already going on within the wider community. Specific Christian beliefs would not be likely to incur any charge of religious disloyalty as long their beliefs did not affect their obedience to the Law.

Judaism was regarded as more than a religion; it was a nationality. The Torah was religious precept, social custom, and civil law all rolled into one. Even though the religious center of life had shifted from the Torah to Christ, Jewish Christians could not abandon the Torah as a national way of life without becoming cut off from the nation.(2)

The remaining disciples of Jesus were part of this ethos. They were part of Israel the nation as well as Israel the faith. The complexity of this situation came to a head for Peter when the Holy Spirit fell on the household assembled in the home of Cornelius, a Roman army officer who lived in Caesarea. Peter had a dream about a vast buffet of foods that encompassed foods which observant Jews could not partake of. Three times the same image came to Peter with the accompanying narrative, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” Most of us need to be told something more than once before we can take it in. Remember that Samuel was beckoned by God three times before Eli realized that it was indeed God that was calling the boy. After three iterations of the dream Peter wondered what it all meant. That was when the messenger from Cornelius arrived to fetch Peter to Caesarea, for Cornelius had received a vision of an angel telling him to send for Peter.

When we stop and think about it, the hero of the Book of Acts, the chief protagonist, is not Peter or Paul. It is the Spirit who gets top billing throughout the whole story Luke tells in Acts. This is certainly the case in today’s reading. The Spirit rather than Peter was the driving force behind the
change of mind in the Jerusalem community; and in the Apostolic Church’s subsequent change of strategy in the accounts which follow this one.

Of course, the apostles and believers who lived in Jerusalem didn’t have the advantage of Peter’s dream or his experience of the Holy Spirit coming upon Cornelius’ household. All they knew was that Peter had gone into the house of a Gentile – a Roman, no less – and had eaten with him and his family. From a behavioral standpoint, Peter had broken one of the biggest norms of the Law. And they were ready to tell him in no uncertain terms about it: “Why did you go to the uncircumcised men and eat with them?”

It is as if the uncircumcised were the untouchables in India. It is evidence of the narrowing, limiting, constricting force that seems so inevitable with institutions, society, and individuals. Thinking about what Professor Caird said, it is as if not only their purity and identity is threatened but their very existence. As I was reflecting on this passage this week, it struck me that the attitudes espoused directly or indirectly were a lot like those offered in the late 15th century when a Genoese sailor named Columbus tried to sell the idea of sailing west in order to get to the Far East. Everyone knew that the proposition would not work. The earth was flat and the ships would fall of the edge of the world. It is akin to saying, “There is an edge to creation beyond which God does not go.” In spite of the words of Genesis: “God created the heavens and earth.” In spite of the psalmist’s declaration: “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.” In spite of the psalmist’s affirmation that there was absolutely no place that he could go to be absent from God’s spirit.

The “uncircumcised” represent something that is scary, frightening, unknown, threatening, maybe even fatal. The “uncircumcised” are anyone other than we ourselves. They are the “them” that are so different from us that they have to be kept at bay, barricaded away at arm’s length. Why? What is so frightening? So perceived as dangerous? Are we so unsure of ourselves that we are afraid that we will be tempted away from what we firmly know and believe? Are we more afraid of becoming like them than their becoming like us? Are we so undisciplined that we are more likely to run away and join them than they are to join us?

Peter concluded his defense before the assembled apostles and believers by saying, “If God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God? Who am I that I could stand in God’s way? How could I object to God?”

The history of the Christian Church from the very beginning is the story of how the Spirit continually challenges the faithful to carry the Gospel to the world. We are still being challenged to live and witness in that historical environment.

Who are we to hinder God? And who are the uncircumcised that God has called us to go to. They aren’t the first choice we would opt for. We would feel more comfortable, at greater ease, going to people just like us. And some of us are called at different times to do just that. But more than likely, the uncircumcised in our lives don’t look like us, don’t act like us, don’t think like us, don’t vote like us. And are probably just as scared of us as we are of them. They might people we don’t even know. They might be people we know a little: the pharmacist, the technician who takes our blood sample, the clerk at the post office or bank, the server at the drive-thru window, the clerk at the library, the neighbor across the street, the mother who comes into the food pantry.

Who is God calling to come into the orbit of your daily life, knowingly or unknowingly seeking the salvation of Christ, the good word of Life, the new creation of redemption? And who are we to refuse God’s working through us? Who are we to hinder God?


(1) Loren Mead, The Once and Future Church (Herndon VA: Alban Institure, 1991) and Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence (Grand Rapids MI: Baker, 2008)

(2) Caird, G.B. "The Apostolic Age." Studies in Theology. (London: Duckworth & Co., 1955) p. 83-84.)

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.

What Is Your Witness?

What Is Your Witness?
Acts 9:36-43;
Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:22-30

Some days you can’t help but be a Presbyterian and celebrate the Reformed theology gathered and systematized by John Calvin. We are fortunate to believe in a God who not only has not abandoned the world but is active directly and indirectly in caring for the world. We live in a world where God has an infinite and ineffable purpose and has arranged things so that when we need comfort and embrace God is there in the details.

Paula and I were blessed Friday night to attend a performance of Johannes Brahms’ “Ein Deutsches Requiem” performed by the Columbus Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. The Brahms’ work is not a traditional requiem following the texts of the Latin Mass which celebrate the departed. Rather Brahms carefully wedded texts from the Old and New Testaments of Luther’s German Bible to comfort and console the living. He begins with the wonderful words of Matthew 5:4: “Selig sint...” – “Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” The concluding seventh movement uses the words of Revelation 14:13: “ ‘Blessed are the dead who from now on die in the Lord.’ ‘Yes,’ says the Spirit, ‘they will rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them.’ ”

The Requiem was introduced by one of the symphony’s bass players who is a marathon runner and who participated in the Boston Marathon. He had passed the finished line and his cheering family members had cleared the area some time before the bombing took place. He said it was fitting that the symphony’s performance was a could be a tribute to Boston, the runners, the first responders, the injured, and the families of those who died.

We have our instantaneous electronic media to thank for telling us about the Boston events. Most assuredly that same media is to be thanked for the follow up and subsequent capture of the alleged perpetrators, one dead and one alive.

We Americans are shocked when frightening and tragic events like this happen in our country in places like Oklahoma City, Aurora, Newtown, Columbine, New York City. We are often equally taken aback when natural disasters strike: torna-does in places like Joplin; hurricanes like Sandy and Katrina; earthquakes; snowstorms and blizzards; explosions like the one in West, Texas. We would like to think that we are immune to tragedy and suffering and death, that we are too big, too free, too prosperous to have it happen here, too good to succumb to the reality of the world.

And it is reality. Places like Syria, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Mali, Egypt, South Sudan, Bali, Caracas, North Korea know these kinds of evil events on an all too frequent basis.

The reality of Boston, West, Newtown, Damascus, and Baghdad and other places around the world is not really all that different from the reality of Joppa and its Christian community where Tabitha/Dorcas died. Joppa was a community that was battered by illness, disease, and loss. Those are the same things that affected us this week as we listened to the news from Boston and as we tried to make sense of the Senate’s refusal to consider additional measures for registration of legal firearms. These are the same things that affect us every week as we lose another friend or relative to cancer or another vicious disease. We unknowingly eat harmful foods, breathe noxious air, live with levels of stress, carelessness, depression, mental illness, and societal dysfunction that compound the deleterious effects of seemingly insignificant activities and decisions.

The church in Joppa lost a pillar of the church. Dorcas was a beloved saint. Her ministry was far reaching among the widows. She was renown for the scope of her work of caring and sewing. “She was devoted to good works and acts of charity.” Dorcas wasn’t a professional church person. She didn’t have an M.Div., or a D.Min. She wasn’t a commissioned ruling elder. She was herself, a devoted and caring seamstress whose daily activity reminded everyone of the love of God that embraces the world. The community was distraught. That we know her by both her Aramaic name – Tabitha – and her Greek name – Dorcas – suggests that she was known for her charity far beyond the community of Christ’s followers.

We can get caught up in the details of Peter’s raising Tabitha/Dorcas from death. To do so is to lose the more important miracle that happened. Yes, Tabitha was brought back to life. But more importantly the community was healed.

Healing is something that we all need. Healing is something that we all seek, whether it is through medical and pharmaceutical therapies; or through disciplines of diet, prayer, exercise, meditation, or martial arts; or through cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, or couture; or through trying to keep up with the Joneses or trying to make ourselves to be the Joneses that everyone else tries to keep up with. Walter Brueggemann said at the Presbytery’s Spring Fest last week that we live in a hostile culture that is committed to consumerism, militarism, self-indulgent narcissism, meanness, and endless productivity. All that adds up to an anti-human lifestyle which is anything but the good that God created.

The emphasis in the account isn’t on Peter. It is on the community that believed in the embracing compassion of God and joined in witnessing to power of God as they saw it in the everyday living ministry of Dorcas.

This was a community of resurrection hope, and Easter community. They had reason to believe in a God who transcends the categories of birth, life, and death, a God who is uniquely present – not absent – in the midst of tragedy, illness, unbearable pain and loss. None of us, nor all of us together, have the answers to the questions of life that are so often asked in sobs and tears, anger and anxiety, fear and frustration. None of us can know for absolute certainty the will of God – for Dorcas, for ourselves, for our loved ones, for our community, or for strangers in Boston or countless other localities.

C. S. Lewis said that humility is not thinking less of ourselves, but rather, thinking of ourselves less. The humble prayer does not ignore our needs and desires. It places those wants and wishes into the larger context of God’s creative dominion. There is a distinction between praying for a cure, which seems to dictate to God our desired outcome, and praying for healing, which can come in a hundred unexpected ways. God’s Spirit will intervene on behalf of our prayers, yet the healing that comes often surprises us and causes us to catch our collective breath.

Communal healing requires that we overcome the intense privacy and individualism that are the cultural icons of our day. As tension and fear mount, we all want to hide in bunkers that shut out the world rather than let it in. Jesus did not hide from sin and death, from evil and extremism, but faced it fully, even to the cross. God did not cure him of death, bur healed the sin of the world through the combination of his life, ministry, death, and resurrection.

Frederick Buechner has written,

When it comes to putting broken lives back together—when it comes, in religious terms, to the saving of souls—the human best tends to be at odds with the holy best. To do for yourself the best that you have it in you to do—to grit your teeth and clench your fists in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst—is, by that very act, to be unable to let something be done for you and in you that is more wonderful still. The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from. (1)

The people at the Joppa Church witnessed God’s power in their midst and were enabled to become witnesses with Dorcas. It was not her day to die or to remain dead. That would be for another time. Right now God was in their midst transforming their lives. They were living in the present, they were opening themselves to the activity that God was creating in them and through them. They were engaging the world, not running from it. They witnessed God’s love just as all the people who ran towards the injured in the Boston blast. They are witnesses of healing not disease, witnesses of reconciliation not division, witnesses of love not hate, witnesses of God not the world.

What is your witness.

(1) Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 46; cited by Stephen D. Jones, “Homiletical Perspective: Acts 9:36-43,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), Year C, Volume 2, 427, 429, 431.
Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.

A Job Retraining Program

A Job Retraining Program
John 21:1-19;
Isaiah 42:1-4; 49:1-4, 50:4-6; Acts 9:1-20

College graduation time will be here shortly with its eternal question: Will the graduate find a job? In our lifetimes job training has escalated. When your fathers came out of high school, they could get a job, stay with a company for forty or fifty years, and then retire. My parents were both fortunate enough to go to college in the 1930s. Even with a degree Dad started at the bottom in the open hearth of a steel mill and worked his way up to general foreman and later assistant to the plant’s general works manager. Many of my generation went on to graduate school for professional degrees – law, medicine, business, academics, and ministry. A master’s degree wasn’t enough for Elizabeth and Drew. They both got doctorates. I wonder what degrees Tabitha will attain three decades from now.

Not only is a baccalaureate degree not enough, but there aren’t even enough positions for people with advanced degrees. And even if a graduate gets a job, there is little expectation that it will be a forty year job. Today’s graduates will likely have eight to ten jobs spanning three or four different career tracks. It is a highly competitive world. Just read the “Ask Sam” column in the Sunday Dispatch to learn about all the ins and outs of presenting oneself in a resume in order to get in interview.

A number of years ago the Jerusalem Management Consultants looked at the resumes of twelve people being selected for a new organization. What they found after a battery of tests and in-depth interviews was that most of the candidates were lacking in background, education, and vocational aptitude for the type of enterprise being undertaken. The report also said that they should not be considered because they did not have a team concept.

• One was emotionally unstable and is given to fits of temper.
• One simply had no qualities of leadership.
• Two brothers were self-serving and boisterous.
• One demonstrated a questioning attitude that might undermine morale among the ranks.
• Another was blacklisted by the Greater Jerusalem Better Business Bureau for questionable business practices.
• Two definitely had radical leanings and showed attitude problems when in public settings.

There was one candidate who showed potential, a man of ability and resourcefulness, who met people well, and who had a keen business mind as well as contacts in important places. He was judged to be highly motivated, ambitious, responsible, and not afraid to take the initiative.

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, the management report was on the twelve that Jesus called to be disciples, and the one that was recommended was Judas Iscariot. In the words of Dr. Phil, “How’s that working for you?”

Jesus called them anyway. He trained them for three years in his way of thinking and his method of working with people in crowds and one on one. He instilled in them his philosophy of ministry. He even sent them out in pairs in a short course of ministry in context, with moderate success. Then came Jesus’ crucifixion. That it was their one-question final exam: What are you going to do now?

I guess you could say that their final grade wasn’t all that great. Most ran away. One denied he had ever taken the course. Another was a basket case left to Jesus’ mother. The women weren’t much better. And a couple of people not part of the inner circle had to take care of the final arrangements.

Three days later, after reports started arriving that Jesus was not in the tomb, that he had risen, the class met again in a locked room. Jesus appeared to them and, according to John, breathed on them and put his peace on them. By the skin of their teeth they had graduated, even the skeptical one, who came late.

What we have in today’s reading from John is a post-graduate seminar on the topic, “What Do You Do When the World Has Been Changed?” Or, if we follow Peter, the main focal point of the reading, then the session was a job retraining course. Peter’s response was to go back to what he knew best. Yes, he had experienced the risen Christ. Yes, he knew what had happened. But still, his world had been torn apart, the world had been changed, and he and his friends went back to what they knew best – fishing. After all, there is comfort in the familiar. At the lakeshore the risen Christ met them again. Sometimes you just can't escape the changed world. Peter may be the main actor of the group in the story, but the seminar topic is for all of them.

Jesus calls the disciples back to the subject matter that he had been pressing them on for three years. Only now, the context was radically different. They would be on their own; no supervision from him. Their support system would be the Holy Spirit and each other. While the question, “Do you love me?” has special importance for Peter, it is a question each of the disciples must answer for himself.

This job retraining course, this post-graduate seminar is around the topic of servanthood. The last and most poignant lesson that Jesus gave the twelve was in the upper room when he loved them by washing their feet. He poured out the final bits of pride, privilege, and presumption and knelt before each of the disciples and washed their feet. “So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”

That simple yet profound action set before them all the depth and breadth of the tradition of the Servant from the writings of the prophet Isaiah, arguably some of the most powerfully Spirit-filled words in all of scripture. And they become the syllabus for their last seminar – as well as our job retraining course as we live in the radically changed post-Easter world.

The Lord God has given me
the tongue of a teacher,
that I may know how to sustain
the weary with a word.
Morning by morning he wakens–
wakens my ear
to listen as those who are taught.
The Lord God has opened my ear,
and I was not rebellious,
I did not turn backward. (Isaiah 50:4-5)

Isaiah’s servant imagery offers us a three-step model for serving Christ in any time or place.

1.  God arouses the servant morning by morning. Not once a week, not Christmas and Easter. Not when other people are looking on. Not in worship only. Every day. Seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, however many years are blessed to us.

The servant listens at the beginning of every day. In fact, we are not the subject of the sentence. It is not the alarm clock, or the trampling cat, or the sliver of sunlight through the curtain gap that wakes us up. It is God. “God wakens–God wakens my ear,” means just that. God wakes us up and prepares each of us for the day.

2.  Then the servant listens with the ear of a disciple (one under discipline), the ear of an eager learner, to receive God’s teaching. God teaches the servant. And when the servant gets up, the servant listens rather than speaks, receives God’s agenda rather than telling God what he or she is going to do. Listening is routine. Too often we only listen with half a brain because the other half if busy figuring out what we will say in arrogance or rebuttal.

3.  As with any training program, there is a goal for the servant, to sustain the weary with a word. The servant does not listen to gain insight in order to hold others spellbound by oratory or spiritual insight. Nor does the servant listen for flaming indictments in order to point fingers at the wrongdoing of others. The servant listens in order to learn how to support the weary. The servant knows that his or her hearers can’t be browbeaten, that they have been exhausted by years of exile from God, their energy sapped by sin and separation. They need to become acquainted again with the “everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth who does not grow weary or faint” (Isaiah 40:28). The servant awakens routinely, listens routinely, in order to be the source of routine encouragement.

The servant – nor God – is not mesmerized by utopian thoughts. Being the servant who awakens to God, listens to God, and encourages for God, is taking a bold step that flows against the tide of the world. The servant’s audacious vision of world wrapped in God’s love will result at some point in deep private pain.

The Lord God has opened my ear,
and I was not rebellious,
I did not turn backward.
I gave my back to those who struck me,
and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard;
I did not hide my face
from insult and spitting. (Isaiah 50:5-6)

Servanthood is not a life of ease. It is often filled with self-doubt and the disquiet of unexpressed anguish.

“I have labored in vain,
I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity;
yet surely my cause is with the Lord,
and my reward with my God.”  (Isaiah 49:4)

The nations, to whom Isaiah’s servant is to be a light, will be persuaded rather than pursued, taught rather than trounced, by God’s vision.

That’s the message about authority which Jesus was giving in the final seminar, the job retraining course which he taught on the shore of the lake. “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (Luke 21:33).

Be awakened by God. Listen to God. Encourage for God. Envision with God. You, too, can be retrained by Jesus as a servant, to do as he said to Peter, “Follow me.”


Sources:
http://www.aminatl.org/PDFArticles/TheJerusalemManagementConsultingFirm.pdf.

Jack Levison, Fresh Air: The Holy Spirit for an Inspired Life (Brewster MA: Paraclete Press, 2012)

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.

What A Difference a Day Makes

April 7, 2007
What a Difference a Day Makes
John 20:19-31;
Psalm 118:14-29; Acts 5:27-32; Revelation 1:4-8

It’s the Sunday after the Sunday when Jesus rose from the death. That had been a busy Sunday. Jesus appeared to Mary in the garden, to two disciples traveling to Emmaus, and to the disciples who had barricaded themselves in a room somewhere in Jerusalem. We have discovered today in John’s account that not everyone was at the post-Easter lock-in last week. Thomas hadn’t made roll call.

We get the impression that Thomas had gone off on his own following Jesus’ crucifixion and hadn’t rejoined the rest of the disciples until sometime after the Sunday evening appearance. Anyway, when the ten told him about Jesus’ resurrection and his appearance in their midst, he didn’t believe them. Try as they might, they couldn’t convince Thomas that Jesus had risen.

Served the disciples right, it did. They hadn’t believed Mary when she came early Sunday morning and told them that Jesus had been raised. They should have believed the word she brought to them, “I have seen the Lord.” Here they were – still behind locked doors because they feared the Jews. If they had believed her word, it apparently hadn’t made any difference in their lives. I can just hear Jesus saying to them, “You of little faith, why do you doubt?”

Brian Stoffregen says that “faith is not really about what we believe, but what difference it makes in our lives that we believe.”(1) John takes that to heart. Of the four gospel writers, he never uses the noun faith, and the only word related to faith is in today’s reading, when Jesus tells Thomas, “Do not doubt but believe.”

Pinchas Lapide is a Jewish New Testament scholar. He is not a Christian; yet he believes that God raised Jesus from the dead. For him, the proof of the physical resurrection lies in the changed lives of the disciples. He writes in The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective:

When this scared, frightened band of the apostles which was just about to throw away everything in order to flee in despair to Galilee; when these peasants, shepherds, and fishermen, who betrayed and denied their master and then failed him miserably, suddenly could be changed overnight into a confident mission society, convinced of salvation and able to work with much more success after Easter than before Easter, then no vision or hallucination is sufficient to explain such a revolutionary transformation.(2)  

What a difference a day makes. Easter Day. “He is risen!” is the Word that transforms lives as no other word can. And that’s important for John, for whom the entire gospel, from beginning to end, is a Word that presents Jesus as the One who reveals God as the savior for those who believe, and as judge to those who are blind to that revelation. Salvation is determined by the way a person responds to the Word. It has nothing to do with what one may or may not see. Salvation comes through our ears more than through our eyes. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

The Word fills our lives, just as it filled the lives of the disciples and friends. Following the crucifixion their lives were bereft, empty. They were experiencing the empty nest syndrome to the nth degree. They had given their all to be with Jesus, to travel with him, to learn from him, to hang on his every spoken word, even if their understanding was too often dulled and corrupted by images and habits of their culture. In three short years their entire identity had become fully entwined with that of Jesus. They may not have realized it, but it couldn’t be hid. Peter couldn’t sneak his way into the high priest’s household. “You are also one of this man’s disciples, aren’t you?” It was that obvious, Peter’s denial notwithstanding.

The church as we know feels a lot like that empty nest period between Friday afternoon’s crucifixion and Sunday morning’s resurrection. Susan Nienaber wrote earlier this year in the Alban Institute’s Congregations magazine:

There are so many congregations that feel empty and cavernous now and so many older members that remember how it used to be when there was much more life and energy in God’s house. Some of our congregations are still deeply grieving what once was and haven’t been able to adjust even though it may have been decades.(3)

It is as if the church has become deaf and no longer hears the Word – the Word that Mary tried to bring to the disciples that first Easter morning, a Word that finally sank in when Jesus visited their locked hiding place Easter evening. It is as if the church has become deaf and no longer hears the Word – the Word the lately come-to-believing disciples tried to tell Thomas sometime after Sunday evening and which he couldn’t accept until a week later when Jesus appeared again to the still locked-in disciples.

When offered the opportunity to actually do a hands-on examination, Thomas does not doubt, but rather confesses: “My Lord and my God!” Thomas is a confessing disciple, not a doubting one. And while many translations have Jesus saying, “Do not doubt,” that’s not the right word to translate the Greek. The Greek actually says, “Do not be without faith,” “do not be faithless.” The Common English Bible translates the verse as “No more disbelief. Believe!” And Eugene Peterson’s Message has “Don’t be unbelieving. Believe.”

In the twinkling of an eye, in the space of a day, so to speak, Thomas has changed, grown, matured. Henri Bergson has said, “To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”(4) To put it a different way, Thomas has grown through the three stages of faith that Episcopal Christian educator John H. Westerhoff III describes. He has experienced faith by having been with Jesus, imitating what Jesus has said and done. And it moved on to an affiliative faith, a group faith, as when Thomas said to the disciples when Lazarus died, “Let us also go [with Jesus to Bethany], that we may die with him.”

When Thomas was confronted with the death of Jesus and then the reports of his resurrection, he entered the adolescent “searching faith,” wondering if he could believe what he had believed and was being asked now to believe.

Then with a single word from Jesus Thomas moves to the faith stage of “owned faith.” “Is this what I believe?” has become “This is what I believe!” “My Lord and my God!”(5)

Does the Word break into the emptiness of our lives? Has the Word moved us from imitative faith through affiliative faith through searching faith to owned faith? Are we different because Jesus was raised, even though our eyes have not seen his nail-scarred hand and pierced side? Are we different because someone spoke the risen Word to us and it changed everything, matured us, and does now constantly recreate us in the forgiven and forgiving God-imbued image that was intended from the beginning?

This table changes us. We spiritually partake of Christ’s body and blood, even though our fingers touch ordinary bread and our lips taste ordinary grape juice. We are changed. We are transformed into Christ’s living – resurrected – body for the world. We become the bread of life. We become vessels of the breathed Spirit to breathe life into an otherwise empty world around us and to fill it with the presence of God, as the waters cover the seas.

What a difference a day makes. Not just any day. The day. Easter Day. With Thomas we can confess, with faith, “My Lord and my God!”

Alleluia! Amen.


(1) Brian Stoffregen, “Gospel Notes for Next Sunday,” 2 Easter C, John 20:19-31 (http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=51bd49db6caae596e13e44534&id=1d9301e804&e=e9babc8d38)
(2) Pinchas Lapide, The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2002) p. 125.
(3) Susan Nienaber, “Resilient Congregations,” Congregations (Alban Institute), January 2013.
(4) Cited by Nienaber, ibid.
(5) Thanks to Brian Stoffregen, op. cit., for highlighting Westerhoff’s work.

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.

Resurrection Changes Things

March 31, 3013 - Easter Sunday
Resurrection Changes Things
Luke 24:1-12, 36-48;
Isaiah 65:17-25; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26

Do you remember where you were when Jesus was raised? No, I’m not suggesting that some of you are old enough to have been around back then. Actually I am suggesting just the opposite. None of us were there. None of us went to the garden. None of us discovered the stone rolled away from the tomb opening. None of us were startled by the appearance of the two men who asked us why we were looking for the living among the dead. None of us had the opportunity to remember what Jesus kept saying about being arrested, crucified, and rising.

Our memories are better about other things. We remember where we were and what we were doing when key events in our personal lives or the life of the community happened. Events like the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President Kennedy, the events of 9/11, the 1960 World Series seventh game, ninth inning, game-winning walk-off home run by Pirate Bill Mazeroski, the first human steps on the moon by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the confirmation of Sandra Day O’Connor as the first woman associate justice of the Supreme Court, the last episode of M*A*S*H. Each of us could add many other event memories, all the way from the deeply personal to those that changed national history.

We experienced those things. They are permanent entries on the Facebook time-lines of our lives. Emotions which run the gamut from tribulation to trauma help to make up who we are.

There are three words that can either clear a room or bring people to rapt attention: “I remember when....” Psychologists tell us that we don’t remember some of our earliest memories. We remember them because we heard about them so often that we can recite all the details as if we really did remember the event. For example, when I was around two years old, I named my first dog. Dad brought this young blond cocker spaniel mix home from work in order to save it. Dad showed the dog to me and I said, “Do, do,” because I couldn’t say “dog.” That became her name “Dodo.” I remember that – not. What I remember is the story.

Isn’t that where we are with the resurrection? We don’t remember it for real. None of us are 2,000 years old, as much as we might feel like it some days. We remember the story. Or stories. The four gospel writers give us the basic details of the tomb being empty, but then add in their own special “memories.” John may have been the only one to actually see the empty tomb. Mark and Matthew may have seen the risen Christ. Luke gathered the first person memories for retelling.

We are at a disadvantage because we weren’t there. We have to take at face value what the Gospel writers and Paul tell us in their writings. And there is no real way of testing what we read. Our knowledge of the resurrection is mostly in our heads. We know the story so well that it is almost as if we were there.

And that is an advantage. If we had been there, we would have reacted in the same ways as the women and disciples did on finding the tomb empty or on having the risen Lord suddenly pop into their midst. According to Luke the women didn’t know what to make of the stone being rolled away from the tomb and its empty cavern. They were frightened and they cowered when the two brightly-clothed men broke into their confusion to ask why they were looking for the living among the dead.  The women must have appeared hysterical when they went and told the disciples the news, for it struck the disciples as nonsense.

In the second gospel reading, it is Easter evening in Jerusalem. Two disciples had made the seven-mile journey to Emmaus unknowingly in the company of the risen Christ, only learning his identity when they broke bread together. They breathlessly raced back to the city to tell the rest of the disciples their experience. And while they were doing that, Jesus himself stood among them. They all were terrified and afraid.

Confusion, terror, and fear are the dominant outward emotions that seized any of the people who discovered the empty tomb or encountered the risen Christ.

If we had been there we would have been terrified and afraid. That’s because resurrection changes things. Resurrection knocks the pins out from under everything that we thought we knew, everything that we thought was hard and fast. We complain about the changes we face in our physical bodies, in our relationships, in the goings and comings of the world, and in the technology that guides our daily living. All those changes, as aggravating as they often seem, are nothing compared to the change that resurrection brings.

Resurrection takes us out of the realm of knowledge and data and information. Resurrection takes us out of our brains and into the realm of our spirits, our hearts. Resurrection takes us out of presuming that we know what’s what. In the words of Wendell Berry, we can no longer presume that life is “knowable, predictable and within our control.” Resurrection life is a mystery.

Robert Cording says that we are “all too ready to say that a word like ‘mystery’ is a nostalgia.” He goes on to say that “we limit the meaning of ‘mystery’ to a quantity of the unknown, thereby opening the possibility that the inevitable acquisition of further knowledge will reduce that which is unknown and, in the future, erase the unknown entirely.”(1) In other words we only think of mystery as something to be solved. Thank you, Agatha Christie.

But when the biblical writers use the word “mystery,” they are not referring to a quantity of the unknown, but rather to the quality of the unknown. In Cording’s words, it “refers to awe rather than ignorance.” In that sense, mystery attests to the fact that no amount of research could make anything having to do with God, including Christ’s resurrection, less mysterious. We can never be finished with it. Mystery does not allow a conclusion. It goes beyond all evidence. The Spanish writer, Federico Garcia Lorca, noted that “only mystery enables us to live.” The poet Theodore Roethke wrote that only those “who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.”(2)

The resurrection is a mystery. It is a mystery that evokes awe and wonder. It is a mystery that changes us and makes us vulnerable. It is a mystery that gives life. And that terrifies us and makes us afraid.

Resurrection changes us. And we have to let it change us from data based, information driven, findi-the-unknown kinds of people into people of the mystery, people willing to be confronted by what we don’t know and can’t rationally understand, and to say, “I am alive, thanks be to God, because Jesus was raised.” Resurrection is scary because it sets aside everything that we cling to, everything that makes sense to us, everything that lines up square and true. Like the mystery that it is, resurrection is not about quantity of life, but quality of life. Resurrection is about saying to the world, “I don’t live because of what I know. I live because of what I don’t know. I live because of the one who knows me through and through. I live because God knows way more than I ever will.”

In Christ’s resurrection we encounter God as Job did in the midst of the whirlwind. God does not answer Job’s logical questions, “Why this and why that?” God presents Job with images so intense that Job doesn’t hear. Rather he sees “things I didn’t understand, wonders beyond my comprehension” (Job 42:3, ceb).

We are awe-struck by Christ’s resurrection, which takes us out of our data-oriented lives and puts us into the realm of a quality of living that cannot be measured, cannot be surveyed and platted, cannot be graphed and charted, cannot be listed in a financial balance sheet. Resurrection life bursts the bonds of standard reality just as Jesus burst the bonds of the tomb.

Resurrection changes everything. Don’t be afraid of the change that resurrection brings. Allow yourself to be vulnerable to the mystery of life with God. Be daring to live a resurrected life of quality rather than a dead and buried life of quantity. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, crucified, buried and gloriously risen for the world. For you. For now. For always.

Alleluia!

(1) Robert Cording, “Mystery,” Image, No. 75, Fall 2012, p. 40.
(2) Cited by Cording, ibid.

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church, Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.