Fear, Peace, and Safety

The Gospel for the second week of Easter is always the same, John’s account of the evening on the first Easter (Jn. 19:19-31).  And every year I have a hard time getting beyond its opening words:  “When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’”   (Jn. 19:19)  Despite all that had happened, the doors were locked out of fear.  Fear, it seems to me, is the great enemy of the resurrection.

It is odd.  Fear ought to be the thing most defeated by Easter.  If Easter defeats death, the source of perhaps our greatest fear, what have we to fear anymore?  Yet, even at the beginning it was not so.

We humans are just fearful creatures.  We know we live in a world with much to fear.  Violence erupts around us in horrifying ways.  Our pursuit of wealth leads us to fear not having enough in the midst of being abundantly provided for.  Pride provokes the fear of being found out to be what we really are.  Fear leads us to choose the tomb, which at least is known, over the resurrection, which pushes us into a world we have never known.

And although Easter ought to be the antidote to all that fear, it is not.  By the evening of Easter Day, we find ourselves again locked behind closed doors.  His own rising to life again notwithstanding and the announcement of his own resurrection notwithstanding, Jesus simply refuses to leave us in our fear, as much as we might hope he would.  Jesus calls us forth from behind the doors, even when we have them most tightly locked up.

To begin with he offers peace.  “Peace be with you,” he said three times in the passage.  Peace.  Peace.  Peace.  But peace does not end there.  The only real solution to our fear is the response to peace.  “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (v. 21).

The sending is related to the peace.  Our peace is not in staying safely tucked away behind the locked doors.  It is in being sent.  It is in getting out there.   We aren’t going to find out it’s safe out there until we take a chance to find out.

Peace be with you indeed.
 

Peace,

Doing Something about Easter

Perhaps some of you have gone to Jerusalem.  If so, you have probably visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  Without turning this into a Discovery Channel special on “Secrets of the Bible,” the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has a very solid claim to contain within its walls the site of the crucifixion and the tomb where Christ was buried and rose from the dead. 

So the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is generally understood to be the holiest spot in the world for Christians.  It is possible to go into the tomb through a small doorway and pray in in the very place in which it is likely that the body of Christ lay from Good Friday until Easter.  

Here is what is curious to me.  This is the holiest site in the Christian world, the place where the most important event in all of human history actually took place.  It has been revered by millions upon millions.  And yet, it is the one place in the world, the only one, in which Christians proclaim that God is not present.  The proclamation of the angel is emphatic and clear:  “He is not here.”  The faithful wait long lines to see the inside of the tomb, but the announcement of the Gospel is:  “He is not here.” 

Even the angel invited the women who came to the tomb that first Easter morning to come in—“Come, see the place where he lay.”  It was not to worship, though, or even to pray.  It was to prove a point.  “He is not here.” 

And the angel no sooner proves his point than he has instructions—“Go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised form the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’”  In fact, it is not just a matter of go and tell the disciples. The disciples themselves are to go, too.  They are to go to Galilee.   And, if you think about it, once they get to Galilee, they get a further instruction to go.  “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.”  Go baptize and teach.  Go. 

We all know that the cross is not the end of the story.  We know that the resurrection comes after it.  But I think we do our faith a great disservice if we take Easter as the end of the story either.  Easter is no more the end of the story of Jesus than was Good Friday.  There is yet more to come.  There is still going to be done.  The angel tells the women to go tell the disciples.  The women tell the disciples to go to Galilee.  Jesus tells the disciples in Galilee to go baptize and teach.  In other words, it’s all about doing something about Easter.  Unless we do something about it, I’m not sure Easter matters very much at all. 

Easter is not the end of the story for us because it was not the end of the story for Jesus.  Easter is the beginning of something.  It is not the end of something.  Easter is an initiation.  It is not a completion.  Easter is a promise to be realized.  It is not an accomplishment to be admired.    Easter is an offer to us.  The part of the story yet to be written is whether we accept the offer or not.  And we can only accept the offer of Easter by choosing to do something about it.

If we do, we will go in the same way that Christ was known to go—to proclaim good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, liberation to the oppressed, and the acceptable year of the Lord.  If we do not, well, we might as well be waiting in a long line for the chance to see the one place on earth where God is not present.  God is found by going, going out among the people Christ has given us to love and the creation Christ has given us to care for.   We are going to have to go if we are going to get to the resurrection.  We are going to have to go do something about Easter.

Peace,

Easter of 1971

My family lived in the suburbs of New York for a few years when I was growing up.  Among my memories of those years was Easter of 1971.  It snowed that year on Easter, which made Easter rather difficult to imagine.  I remember my dad driving to church that morning creeping along to avoid an accident in the slippery conditions.  Had Easter been any earlier than it was this year, it could well have been our experience in New York this year. 

As it turns out, though, this Easter is going to be nothing like the Easter of 1971. Spring has arrived.  We are surrounded by new life.  The weather this last weekend was particularly glorious.  It just feels the way I think Easter ought to feel.  It makes it rather easier to anticipate the coming celebration of the resurrection.

Of course, Easter is never more needed than when it is difficult to anticipate and impossible to imagine.  In truth, though, resurrection is difficult to imagine at any time.  Resurrection is always difficult to anticipate. 

In some parts of the world, Easter comes, not in the spring, but in the midst of shortening days and increasingly colder weather, not as flowers are blooming and trees are budding, but as the landscape turns brown and the leaves wither and fall, not as abundance and color return but as barrenness and dark approach.  Easter must be difficult to imagine.  It is never more needed.

I had time a few weeks ago with my oldest friend and his family.  I was glad to see his daughter, who had recently returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan.  I had been praying for her.  She returned safely, but not unaffected.  I think Easter may have become more difficult for her to imagine.  It has never been more needed.

Within the past year I have had parts in services on the death of a young single mother taken by Leukemia, of a young woman struggling with her identity as a transgendered person, and of a young Native American deacon whose ministry as a reconciler had placed him at the center of a church fight of international proportions.  It makes Easter difficult to imagine.  It has never been more needed. 

A senseless loss of life in Kansas, apparently motivated by hate, makes Easter difficult for us to imagine.  A mother’s loss of both her son and her father at the hands of a man described as a “raging anti-Semite” makes Easter difficult for us to imagine.  It has never been more needed. 

And Easter, I am sure, has never been more difficult to imagine than it was on the first one.  In the midst of hatred, loss, and broken dreams, resurrection catches us, as it did the first disciples, off guard, unprepared, and by surprise.  Still, Easter comes.  It came on the third day following Good Friday.  It came in 1971.  And it will come in 2014, just a few days from now. 

I’m pretty sure it is always equally needed. 

May this Easter come to you, whether it is difficult for you to imagine or not.  May light triumph over darkness even if the days grow shorter where you are.  May life overcome death even when death surrounds.  May love triumph over hate even when hate seems to have the upper hand.  Easter comes.  Easter comes especially when it is most needed. 

Happy Easter.

Peace,

Overcoming Religion for Easter

Peter preached a sermon (Acts 10:34-43) in the months immediately after the death and resurrection of Jesus.  For close to 2,000 Easters, and I say this from some personal experience of having tried to preach on 1% of those Easters, preachers have struggled to find something new to explain it.  It is impossible really.  Perhaps Peter put it best in his sermon.  He just announced it—no elaborations, no reflections, no explanations—just announced it.  “God raised him on the third day.”  That was it.  

The truth is that the New Testament really doesn’t say much more than that about the resurrection.  None of the gospels describe the actual event—how, exactly the stone was rolled away, or what happened at the dramatic moment when the body of Jesus arose.  That is a little curious, I think, given how central the resurrection is to Christian faith.  Still, neither the gospels nor the apostle Paul say any more than Peter did—just an announcement.  God raised him on the third day.  He is risen.  That’s about it. 

And could the reason that the Bible says so little about the details of Easter be that the details are not remotely important?  The point of the story of the New Testament, it seems to me, is not nearly so much what you think about the resurrection.  It is what you do about it.  Indeed, repeatedly in the gospels, the disciples are not at all sure what to think.  In John, the disciples who got to the tomb first weren’t sure what to think.  In Luke, even in the presence of the risen Jesus, some of the disciples doubted.  In Matthew, those who were with him on the mountain after the resurrection doubted.  What matters is what they did.  They lived the resurrection.  They lived as if death no longer had power over them.  What matters is that they lived as if all that divides one human being from another no longer existed.

And that brings me back to that early sermon Peter preached about Easter, and to the part of Acts leading up to it.  Because the point is not what Peter said about the resurrection and more about what he did about it, about how Peter was changed by it, changed from old ways to new ways, changed from death to life, changed from being governed by what divides to being an instrument of reconciliation. 

The words of Peter’s sermon are addressed to a man named Cornelius, his family, his friends, and his household.  There were many people there according to Acts, which is not surprising as Cornelius was a man of some importance and means.  He was a Roman centurion, and not one of the mercenary soldiers from other parts of the Empire common in Judea, but an actual Roman.  He was a good man.  A generous man.  A supporter of the synagogue.  But he was not a Jew.  No matter how you cut it, Cornelius was a Gentile, a foreigner, unclean. 

In fact, Peter’s first words to Cornelius were, “You . . . know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile.”  And then Peter went on.  “But God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.”  And then Peter begins his sermon with these words:  “I truly understand that God shows no partiality.” 

For Peter, that is a matter of the resurrection. That is change inspired by the resurrection.  That is faith in the resurrection showing forth in living a life of witness to the resurrection, a life in the service of reconciliation. 

That gets to the heart of the resurrection for all of us.  To have faith in the resurrection is to give up partiality, things of our own creation that divide us, all things that prevent our reconciliation, that prevent the love of God for our neighbors from being made real, for God knows no partiality at all.  What the resurrection does is destroy all that divides in the name of God’s overpowering reconciliation that will be held back by nothing, not even death itself.

Now things that divide us are not that easy to give up.  After all, they are deeply cherished.  After all, they are all we have ever known.  After all, they are often matters of principle, of conviction.  After all, they are very often full of religious meaning for us, as they were for Peter. 

It is hard for us to associate what is religious with something God is working beyond all imagination to defeat.  But when anything, including religion itself, divides us, that is exactly what we can expect from Easter, that God will defeat it.  “I truly understand that God shows no partiality.” 

Forty-five years ago this Thursday, which was a Thursday that year also, the Thursday before Palm Sunday, a man who had incredible faith in the resurrection entered into it fully.  That man’s name was Martin Luther King, Jr. Forty-five years ago this Thursday, he left Atlanta on an airplane to take part in the sanitation workers strike in Memphis for the reason that God knows no partiality.  And on that evening, 45 years ago last night, King preached these final words:

[God has] allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

The next day he was dead.  And that very costly stand against what divides, as religiously essential as many of us thought that division was at the time, was a product, I am sure, of the resurrection and an encounter with the risen Jesus.  “Mine eye have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”  The question is, of course, have ours? 

That is what the resurrection is all about.  It is about living in the light of the glory of the coming of the Lord, that in the coming of the Lord there is no partiality.  None.  It is living in the light of the resurrection.  It is in living in light of the fact that God knows no partiality.  None.

Not that that’s an easy thing to do.  Partiality is a hard thing to give up.  Fear is a hard thing to give up.  Somehow, partiality is a comfort, a defense, an illusion that we are somehow worthy, deserving, entitled to God’s special care.  We would rather that be the case.  It is not.  The reason that is good news to us is that we are the people that, before the resurrection, Peter would have characterized as foreign, unclean, Gentiles.  It is only by the power of what the resurrection meant, and what a group of followers of Jesus decided to do about it, that we are included beyond the very religious barrier that Peter had to overcome. 

Is the resurrection enough for us to overcome the things that divide us in our own day—national origin, language spoken, gender, opinion, political party, class, tax bracket, orientation?  Is it?  Religion notwithstanding?  Might the resurrection even have the power for us to overcome our religion?

So, here’s the basic proclamation.  God raised him on the third day.  He is risen.  That’s it.  What we think about it matters not a bit.  What we believe about it does, but only in the sense of what we do about it, what we overcome because of it, how we live because of it—without division, without partiality, all religion to the contrary notwithstanding.

Peace,
+Stacy

A Horrifying Part of the Story

The story of the evening of the first Easter begins in a horrifying way.  John writes, “When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them” (Jn. 20:19).  At the time what was probably ought to have been so horrifying is that Jesus, whom they had betrayed and denied and abandoned, stood among them undeterred by locked doors.  What ought to be horrifying to us now, I believe, is the reference to the fear of the Jews.  Much evil has been wrought over those words, and others like them, in the Gospels, particularly in the Gospel of John.  It is important that we pause and say something about them from time to time.
 

For one thing, they do not mean what they may appear at first to mean.  They have a context, and context, as it always does, influences meaning.  For another, they do not give Christians license, as they may appear at first to do, for intolerance, bigotry, and hate-filled violence.  It is a serious scandal to us that we have often taken them so.
 

The context has to do with a very painful reality that was playing itself out at the end of the first century when John wrote these words, a reality that is not unfamiliar to us today.  It is the reality of communities separating.  In John’s day it was the separation of the church and synagogue.  We lose sight of the fact that Jesus was a Jew, an observant and devoted Jew.  He held his people in the deepest part of his heart throughout his life.  The Gospels would lead us to conclude, in fact, that he holds them there still.  
 

We also lose sight of the fact that the early Christian movement was thoroughly within the tradition of Judaism, and not remotely opposed to it.  We must never forget that the meaning of the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus is revealed in its own context, the context of Passover, the feast of liberation.  The feast of liberation for whom?  The feast of liberation for the Jews.
 

Indeed, in those first years after the resurrection, the church grew up in and was indeed nurtured by the synagogue.  It was one among many acceptable expressions of Jewish faith.  Over time, however, that began to change as Christian teaching began to diverge, or at least appear to diverge, from standard Judaism.  Certainly it diverged from standard Jewish expressions of the tradition.  And as it did, a time for separation came when the divergence proved impossible to reconcile.  It is possible to point to hateful things going in both directions.  
 

And though the time came, the pain of it was intense.  What is being expressed in John especially is this sense of pain at separation from Judaism, which must be considered the mother of Christianity.  When John writes about animosity toward Jews, he is writing for himself and not for Jesus, and he is writing as a creature of his context.  When John writes about the fear of the Jews, he is speaking of his own fear more than he is speaking of the disciples’.  The polemic against Jews grows out of this pain.  That doesn’t mean it is excusable, but it does help us understand where it comes from and that it is limited to a particular context and not something to be universalized.
 

Nevertheless, we Christians have done just that over the years.  Even that might have been harmless if we did not, over those same years, become so powerful and so identified with secular, including military, power.  Untold evil has resulted.  The Holocaust is a direct result.  The things we Christians feel permitted to do when we get caught up in being the instruments of God’s judgment are a horrifying reality.   Intolerance, bigotry, and violence are not the way of Christ.  Ever.  And that is, religiously speaking, especially true about our attitude toward Jews, among whom our Lord is to be counted.
 

I once saw a woodcut at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum and memorial in Jerusalem.  It shows a group of Jews being marched off by a squadron of SS soldiers toward a waiting train bound for the death camps.  In the foreground is the crucified Christ.  One of the soldiers has come back to remove Jesus from the cross.  He must go with the other Jews.  It is a very powerful image none of us should ever forget.
 

In fact, the only way the things John wrote about Jews make any sense to me is to understand that when John says “Jews,” what he means when taking the context into account is “the people.”  He is using the expression “Jews” as another way of saying “us.”  The only way the polemic makes any sense to those of us who read it 2,000 years later is to hear those words about the “Jews” and look into the mirror and realize that John is talking about us. 

                                      

Peace,

+Stacy

God’s Belly Laugh

Dan Daniel, the Bishop of East Carolina, is a very good friend of mine.  He is also perhaps one of the funniest people I have ever known.  While he was the priest at the Episcopal parish in Bristol, Rhode Island, he served as the chaplain to the nursing home.  One Christmas Eve the nursing home called.  One of the residents had died, and the staff had been unable to reach the woman’s daughter.  Would Dan mind going by the house and informing this person of her mother’s death?  “Of course, I’ll go,” Dan replied.
 

So off he went to the designated address, looking carefully at the numbers on the porches through the falling snow.  208-206-204.  204 Oak Street.  He got out of the car and knocked on the door to deliver the unwanted news.  A neatly dressed woman answered.  Dan introduced himself.  “Hello, I don’t believe we’ve met, but I’m Fr. Daniel from St. Michael’s Church.”
 

“Oh, yes, she said, we haven’t met but I certainly know who you are.”
 

“Might I come in?”
 

“Certainly,” she said, “and Merry Christmas.”
 

“And Merry Christmas to you, too.”  They sat.  Dan declined the egg nog that was offered under the circumstances, and they made small talk for a moment.
 

“You must be wondering why I’m here,” Dan finally said attempting to broach the topic for which he had come.
 

“Well, yes,” his hostess said.
 

“I’m so sorry to have to be the one to bring you this news on Christmas Eve, but I’m the chaplain for the nursing home, and I’ve come to tell you that your mother has died.”
 

The woman, understandably, was stunned, and her eyes welled up with tears.  “I am just shocked,” she said.  “I was just with her this afternoon and she seemed fine.  We had a lovely conversation.  I never dreamed it would be our last.”
 

Dan handed her a hankerchief.  “Would you like us to pray?”
 

“Oh, yes,” she said.
 

“Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant Louise,” Dan began.
 

“Wait a minute,” the woman interrupted.  “Who’s Louise?”
 

“Why isn’t that your mother?”
 

“No.  My mother’s name is Betty.”
 

“Isn’t this the Andrews residence?”
 

“No, this is the Wilson residence.”
 

“Isn’t this 204 Oak Street?”
 

“No, this is 204 Maple Street.  Oak Street is the next street over.”
 

What I don’t know is what Dan said next and how, exactly, he extricated himself from the house, and how things went we he finally found his way to the right address.  What I do know is that Betty Wilson’s daughter, God bless her, had some experience of Easter that Christmas Eve, some small taste of what it is like to look for the living among the dead, some brief experience of death itself defeated.
 

What ought to accompany the defeat of death is laughter.  I’m not sure Betty Wilson’s daughter experienced Dan’s visit quite so amusingly as I do now, but I hope she has at least come to see the humor in this Christmas Eve visit from a hapless pastor who meant well.  And, once she got over it, at least, I hope she has told the story of her Christmas Eve experience of Easter around the family table on every succeeding Christmas Eve.
 

The best way to understand Easter, I think, is as the punch line in an utterly incongruous story that threatens to be overcome with seriousness.  Easter is God’s answer to the oppressive seriousness with which we so often take life—and ourselves.  Easter is God’s belly laugh at the seriousness of death itself.  Easter ought to be a day of great joy for us precisely because it is cosmically hilarious.  Easter is what turns human existence from divine tragedy in the inherent flaws of human nature into the divine comedy, that God redeems even our most tragic flaws, the things that lead us to death, the seriousness that threatens to squelch our joy in God.
 

I in no way want to suggest that death is not a serious thing, or that sin is not a serious thing, or that the human attraction to evil is not a serious thing.  What I do want to suggest is that when it comes to our salvation from all these things—sin and evil and death itself—God has already done all the serious work to defeat them all at the cross.  The only thing left to do is to respond with joy.  All our seriousness only tends to let them back in the picture.

Peace,

+Stacy