Dylan's sermons

Remember That You are Alive: Jesus' Last Supper and Sacramental Living

St. Martin's-in-the-Field Episcopal Church, Severna Park, Maryland
Maunday Thursday; March 24, 2005
Exodus 12:1-14a; Psalm 78:14-20,23-25; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26(27-32); Luke 22:14-30

I love the television show The Simpsons ("One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish," from Season Two), which chronicles the life of an eccentric and flawed, but nevertheless loving, family in the fictional town of Springfield. In one of my favorite episodes, Homer Simpson, the bumbling father of the family, is told that the exotic blowfish he has eaten was not properly prepared, and so is very poisonous -- and Homer has 24 hours to live.

What would you do if that happened to you?

I think Homer does what most of us would do. He makes a long list -- a list that's probably been growing in the back of his mind for a long time -- of things he'd wanted to do before he died, and he hadn't done. He has to cross off the major achievements -- climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, make millions, win an Oscar, that sort of thing -- immediately. There's no time to do those.

But there are a lot of important things he hasn't done yet that he could do, or at least start. He teaches his son to shave. He tells those he loves how he feels about them. He calls his long-neglected father in the nursing home and tries to renew their relationship. And the guy who would rather stay home making his famous ultra-sweet "moon-waffles" wrapped around sticks of butter than go to church gets a recording of Larry King reading the entire bible, and he listens to the whole thing after his family has gone to sleep. He finally gets to some of the most crucial items on his very long list of "things ... left undone," and in the process, lives out what might be the best day of his life.

What would you do, if you thought you were going to die tomorrow?

Jesus faces that question on the night we now call Maundy Thursday.

I do believe that Jesus performed miracles, but on this night, it wouldn’t take a miracle for Jesus to know what was coming the next day. It was Passovertide, when all pious Jews were commanded to offer sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem. There were about six million Jews spread across the Roman Empire, and a significant percentage of them headed for Jerusalem. The city was clogged with pilgrims. Have you ever seen footage of what Mecca looks like during the Haj, the pilgrimage commanded of all pious Muslim men? Jerusalem probably looked something like that during Passover, as thousands upon thousands of pilgrims made their way to Jerusalem to celebrate the liberation of God's people from unjust foreign rule.

Those vast crowds, all aware of how God delivered them in the past from foreign rule, and many eagerly awaiting a new prophet like Moses, who would deliver them from the power of Rome, would make any governor in the empire jumpy, and with good reason. Trouble was easy to stir up in crowds like that, and any governor who allowed such trouble to arise would lose his job, if not his life. Most governors of Judea only lasted a couple of years. Pontius Pilate was not a man to take chances, and he held the populace in such terror that he ruled Judea as governor for nearly twenty years.

But Pilate knew that Passover was a particularly dangerous time for Rome, and to make sure the crowds didn’t rise up, Pilate lined the pilgrims' way into the city with crosses, the victims on them serving as an endless and unspeakably horrific living tableau of what would happen to any who dared disrupt the peace of the empire.

Even then, Pilate made sure that his guards could keep careful watch over the Temple, where streetcorner prophets proclaimed a God who was more powerful even than the Roman armies. Guards stationed in the taller building next to the Temple could see directly into its courts and be ready to respond if there was a disturbance.

That was the situation in Judea as Jesus celebrated the Passover with his friends. And days before, in the midst of all of that tension, Jesus had entered Jerusalem surrounded by crowds who loudly proclaimed him, and not Caesar, as king. That alone would have provoked Pilate, and any local authorities who depended upon Pilate for their positions of power and privilege.

But that wasn’t all that Jesus did. After Jesus took part in this Palm Sunday demonstration, he made his way to the Temple, where -- in the midst of vast and easily agitated crowds, and in full view of the Roman garrisons -- he was shouting, overturning tables, pushing people ... disturbing the peace of Rome in a very dangerous time.

And so, on this night, Jesus knew what was coming. He and his friends had walked by those crosses on their way to Jerusalem. Jesus knew what was coming -- he knew it ever since on the mountaintop, shining like the sun and appearing in the company of Moses, Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem to accomplish a new exodus. I do believe that Jesus worked miracles by God's power, but no supernatural knowledge would have been needed on this night to see that he was headed for a cross. Jesus chose this path, and he knew that this night was probably the last night before his death.

What would you do, if it were you? What would you do, if you knew that tomorrow you were going to die?

Here's what Jesus did:

He put on a dinner.

He did what he did every night: he invited people to eat with him. He invited his friends; he also invited the man whom he knew would betray him. He gathered friends and enemies, righteous and wicked and places in between, and he broke bread with them, and offered them wine. He ate with them, as he had countless times before. He celebrated the Passover with them, as he did every year.

That's a life lived with absolute integrity. Jesus knows that in all likelihood, he's going to die tomorrow. This is the time for any unfinished business -- to say anything that needs saying, to do whatever has been left undone, put off.

But Jesus does what he always does, because what he always does, his entire career -- his healings, his parables, his wonder-working -- was doing what he does this night, what he does every time he sits down to a meal. When people want to talk about Jesus' power, they often talk about the spectacular, the stilling of the storm, the raising of the dead. But Jesus' power is demonstrated at least as clearly in what happens when he breaks bread.

When Jesus broke bread, everyone -- the Pharisee and the leper, the rich and the poor, righteous and sinners -- experienced God's welcome at his table. When Jesus broke bread, the hungry were fed. When Jesus broke bread, serving any who came to him, people experienced what REAL power, God's power, does:

The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you; rather the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves. For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves. (Luke 22:25-27)

Jesus, having lived with integrity to his last meal, does what he always does: he issues an invitation in the breaking of the bread. On this night, as Jesus invites us to his table, he invites us to live with that kind of integrity, to remember him EVERY time we break bread -- at the altar, certainly, but also in the lunchroom and the dorm cafeteria, the family dinner table or the counter at the diner. Whenever we break bread, or draw breath, we are invited to do so in remembrance of Jesus, until he comes to complete the redemption of the world for which God anointed him.

And there is another invitation, in this breaking of bread. For on this night, on the night he was betrayed, on the night before he died for us, Jesus broke bread, and said to those gathered, "This is my Body." Not just the bread, but the company who gather to share it: this is Jesus' Body, given for the world. And whenever we gather with others made in God's image, other for whom Christ gave himself, Jesus invites us to do so in remembrance of him, aware of and honoring his presence.

It's a solemn charge Jesus gives us tonight. Paul cites Jesus' words on this night to back up his contention that those who fail to "discern the Body" gathered for the Lord's meal, those who fail to recognize everyone Jesus invites to his table as being members of the Body of Christ, are "eating and drinking judgment upon themselves" (1 Cor. 11:29).

But what an opportunity, to encounter and receive Christ in the homeless veteran in the Winter Shelter where we volunteer, in a client with whom we're having a business lunch, in a daughter as we share a snack before bedtime. What an opportunity, to live every moment as an invitation to feast with Jesus, who held every meal as if it were the Messianic banquet.

St. Benedict in the sixth century gave his fellowship of monks a solemn charge: as a regular part of life together, he said, “remember that you will die.” That’s an invitation we receive tonight, as we witness and reenact what Jesus did when he knew he was about to die. And as we do that, we receive another invitation, one that follows from the first:

Remember that today, you are ALIVE. Today, you have the most precious of gifts, the most important of opportunities: to LIVE as Jesus lived. Today, Jesus invites you and me to experience the fullness of abundant life. TONIGHT. Don’t put it off until you think you’ve earned it, until the nest egg is big enough, until the kids are in college, until you think you have time. This is it! Tonight’s the night! Tonight is our last supper together before the resurrection of the dead. Tonight is the night to experience God’s power as Christ, come among us to serve. Tonight, Jesus invites us to approach this table as he did for his last supper, fully alive, fully receiving and serving everyone willing to receive and be served. Tonight, we are invited to break bread in the presence of the one who celebrated his last supper as he did every meal. TONIGHT, Jesus invites us to BE in the world the Body of the one whose body was broken FOR the world. TONIGHT, we are alive in Christ, and tonight is the night to live into that truth, that abundant and eternal life. Now. Tonight.

Thanks be to God!

"Reading in the Light" - February 20, 2005

Second Sunday in Lent, Year A
Genesis 12:1-8; Psalm 33:12-22; Romans 4:1-17; John 3:1-17

When I was in high school, I decided that I wanted to learn to surf. But because I both wanted to avoid buying an expensive surfboard if I didn't know how to surf, and because I didn't want to look foolish in front of all my friends at the beach, the first thing I did was buy a book about how to surf. I figured that if I already knew how to surf when I bought a board and went to the beach, I could spend my first day out SURFING, instead of falling off my board and looking foolish.

This was, of course, a little silly of me. You can't learn to surf by reading ABOUT surfing. Some information about how waves are formed and how you can ride them is helpful, but at some point -- and probably sooner rather than later -- you're going to have to get in the ocean, or you won't learn to surf. You get your board, you get some friends who have been surfing before, and you get in the water. You try to catch waves and mostly don't catch them, and you try to stand up but mostly fall off, but then your friends give you some pointers, and with practice, you can surf. The more you do it -- especially if you do it with friends who do it well -- the better you get at it, and the better you get at it, the more fun it is.

Or take learning to play guitar. Beginning guitarists need a book or something to show them where you put your fingers to make various chords. Going to a class might be very helpful. But no book and no class will do you any good as a guitarist unless you actually get yourself a guitar, pick it up, and try to play it. Personally, I learned to play guitar at youth group. When I was thirteen, I started coming to youth group two hours early every week. I'd meet Chuck, the seminary intern there, and we'd play through the songs we were going to sing that night. I played abysmally, but a little less abysmally each week, because Chuck was really pretty good, and I picked up more and more from him. After a year or two of playing guitar regularly with other people and in front of other people, I was good enough that I could go to a Stevie Ray Vaughn or U2 concert and, if my seats were good enough, I could pick up techniques, chords, or scales just by watching.

Learning to read the bible is a little like that. My sense, from talking with a lot of people, is that one of the most important steps people need to take to learn to read the bible well is to get over the idea that first you learn ABOUT the bible, and once you know enough ABOUT it, then you start reading it.

But reading the bible is like learning to play guitar. Sure, it helps to have some books around the house that give you information ABOUT what you're reading. But books ABOUT the bible do much more good if you read them in tandem with the bible itself -- you can't really learn to read the bible without picking up the bible. And like learning to play guitar, the best way to learn is to find someone who's pretty good at it and go through a piece of it together.

This morning's sermon is part of our year-long Preaching/Teaching series. And the unit in the series that I get to do is the easy one -- it's the unit on scripture. I say it's easy because if you want to know how we interpret the bible, the best way to find out is to watch someone interpreting it. So this morning, I get to do pretty much what I always do -- I'm going to take up our scripture readings, what I know about the context in which they were written, and what I know about what's going on in our community and in our world, and I'm going to interpret the scriptures, pausing the action every now and then to tell you about what I'm doing, much like sports commentators -- like on the "CBS Chalkboard" -- will pause a football game from time to time to show you with X's and O's where things are going and what happens when they go that way. This sermon will have a number of those "Chalkboard moments" as it goes on.

So ...

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit -- which (chalkboard moment!) I say because when I'm interpreting scripture, I want to be intentional from the start about acknowledging and honoring God's presence. I want to read scripture prayerfully.

This morning's gospel has Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a Judean leader, coming to Jesus, secretly and at night. Having read John's gospel carefully a number of times, I've noticed that it has a LOT of language about light and darkness -- it's an important theme for this writer. And if I read all of chapter 3 instead of stopping where the lectionary reading stops, I see that Jesus says in verse 20, "Those who do evil hate the light, and do not come to the light, lest their deeds be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been wrought in God."

Chalkboard moment! I get a lot more out of this passage when I take the time and care to get familiar with the language and themes of the whole document in which it appears. Because I've done that, I can say, "Aha! Nicodemus is someone who will only come to Jesus secretly and in the dead of night. He's literally "walking in darkness" -- he is not a good guy, in the eyes of this writer."

Of course, there are some clues in the passage that Nicodemus is not reading Jesus' ministry very well. When Jesus says that "you must be born from above," Nicodemus makes two major mistakes in one statement. When Nicodemus says, "look, I can't exactly crawl back into my mother's womb," it's clear that he's taking Jesus' language about birth literally when it's better understood metaphorically. That isn't going to help Nicodemus arrive at a good reading of what Jesus is about. How can I do better than Nicodemus here?

Well, having noticed this repeated use of "light" and "darkness" imagery in the Gospel According to John, I could turn to a good study bible or commentary to help me see how this theme is used. And in that process, I come across the information that the Gospel According to John most likely comes from a community that also produced 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, and Revelation. I can use a concordance to see where this language comes up in all of these documents. And I come across some very important verses in 1 John.

1 John 1: 6-7 says this:

If we say we have fellowship in him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth; but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.

And 1 John chapter 2 (verses 9-11) says this:

Those who say they are in the light and hate their brothers and sisters are in the darkness still. Those who love their sisters and brothers abide in the light, and in it there is no cause for stumbling. But those who hate brothers and sisters are in the darkness and walk in the darkness, and do not know where they are going, because the darkness has blinded their eyes.

Wow. Some things are starting to come together in my mind about Nicodemus and the way that people like him are portrayed in the gospel. Nicodemus is someone who walks in darkness. The community that gave us this gospel associates walking in the light with walking in love alongside brothers and sisters, and walking in darkness with hatred of brothers and sisters.

That might shed some light -- no pun intended -- on something else that's intriguing in this morning's gospel -- something that I raised earlier, and kind of dropped to the side as I paused to figure out what the writer's attitude toward Nicodemus was. And that's this language of being "born from above" in the passage. This is important language for a lot of people. We talk about being "born again," making a fresh start as we become a new person in Christ. That's cool. But my study of the images of "light" and "darkness" is making me start to think that maybe there's another really important dimension to Jesus' invitation to us to be "born from above," and it has to do with that other important theme in John's community -- and that's the insistence that anyone who's really following Jesus shows it by loving brothers and sisters.

Those of you who have been through the Connect class may already see where I'm going here. If you know that I have been born "from Marge," which happens to be my mother's name, and you run into someone else who you find out was also born from this very same Marge, you'll know that you've met my brother Mike. People who are born from the same person are brothers and sisters.

So when Jesus invites Nicodemus to be "born of the Spirit" -- the same Spirit from which all of Jesus' followers are born -- the invitation and the obligation is to be drawn into relationship not only with God, but also with others who have been born "of the Spirit" -- our brothers and sisters in Christ. Maybe Nicodemus would have done well to take Jesus a little MORE literally on that point.

If this is making me say, "wow, that's exciting -- I want to know more about what this means!" or, for that matter, if it's making me say, "wait a sec, that's scary -- being in relationship with brothers and sisters wasn't a fun experience for me growing up, and I hope that being a Christian isn't about more of the same," then there are a number of ways I can explore further. I can get out my concordance and find out how this "brother-sister" relationship between Christians is described elsewhere. I can get out one of my favorite books about the cultural world of the New Testament to find out what that language might have meant to the first readers of the Gospel of John. I can pop by Dylan's lectionary blog, and read about how John's strange-sounding language about "blood" and Paul's equally strange-sounding arguments about circumcision in Romans point toward some insights they share. Or best of all, I can go to the Connect or Commit class and say to my table, "OK, I was reading the Gospel of John the other day, and it got me really thinking about this ... what do you think?" and we can all puzzle it out together.

If I read carefully and prayerfully, and talk with other people who are willing to struggle prayerfully alongside me with the text, I can come up with all kinds of insights that will challenge me, excite me, and occasionally confuse me. Whatever those insights are, if they're of the Spirit, they're going to draw me into relationships that are characterized by the fruit of the Spirit -- love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I know that because I've also spent some quality time with Paul's writings -- but more importantly, because I've spent a lot of quality time with my sisters and my brothers in Christ, praying, singing, squabbling, breaking bread, and wrestling with scripture. Because whatever else we're doing, when two or three of us are doing it together in Jesus' name, Jesus shows up.

I read about that with some friends in a very Good Book.

Thanks be to God!

"In the Image of Love" - June 15, 2003

Trinity Sunday – June 15, 2003
Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-16

Some years ago, my brother Mike was working on a Ph.D. in mathematics. I'm a humanities gal through and through -- I spent a lot of effort in college doing research on which sections of "Physics for Poets" and "Rocks for Jocks" would let me skate through a bachelor's degree without ever having to pull out a calculator -- but every now and then, Mike would try to explain to me what he was doing. Most of what he said about it went too far over my head to register, but I do recall him saying at one point that he was proving that two plus two did not really equal four. Perhaps it was questionable that two is in fact two. The whole thing was simply unfathomable to me.

I think Mike would chuckle to see me now, standing up in front of you all on Trinity Sunday, about to tell you how the concept of Three being One has become an energizing and life-giving force in my life.

Believe me, it's been quite a journey to get to that point. I can remember in my church membership class when I was twelve asking the clergy about the Trinity. Yes, I was pestering clergy even then! I could get that it was important to say that Jesus is God incarnate, but I couldn't get how one and one and one can be One and not three, and I definitely couldn't get why it was important to say that God is three and God is One if it was something that by definition was a mystery, something we couldn't understand. My teachers struggled bravely to provide me with answers. The first answer I remember well. I was told that the Trinity is like H₂0 -- it can be ice or water or steam, but it's all water. Makes sense -- no contradictions there! As it turns out, that's pretty much what the Monarchians taught way back in the fourth century, before they were condemned as heretics at the Council of Nicea, the body that produced the Nicene Creed we say almost every Sunday. Most of the explanations I've heard over the years line up with ancient attempts to make more sense of the Trinity, to explain more precisely how God can be one God in three persons, and these apparently more sensible explanations were pretty much all condemned as heretical. After years of study, I felt like I was back to square one on the whole project of trying to understand the Trinity, and after observing all of the arguing back and forth over the centuries -- arguments that sometimes played out on the battlefield, with bloody conflict between bishops and their armies -- I was starting to feel like it wasn't a project that could do much to build up the community anyway.

So my efforts to understand the doctrine of the Trinity went on hiatus for a while. While I was in seminary and starting my Ph.D., I did read some explanations of the Trinity that seemed solid, but I have to admit that I didn't find them very interesting. I'm a people person, and I get most excited about theology when I can see how it informs our life together as human beings -- when it tells us something of how we can be Christ's body in the world in a way that furthers God's work of reconciling the whole world to God's self. I was excited by the writings of African theologians who spoke of ubuntu, a word from the Nguni language in Africa which Desmond Tutu (in No Future Without Forgiveness) describes as meaning that "my humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound, in yours ... a person is a person through other persons." "A person with ubuntu," Tutu says, "is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole."1 That's a thoroughly biblical idea that a humanities gal like me can get excited about. Ubuntu is not just an abstraction -- it's an idea that has been and can be incredibly powerful in helping communities heal and reconcile. In South Africa in the aftermath of apartheid, ubuntu inspired the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, put an end to the spiral of violence that had enveloped so much of the nation. The tortured could look in the eye the very people who had tortured them and say, "What you did to me was a crime because I am a human being and not an animal. And you are responsible for it because you are a human being and not an animal. My humanity is tied up in yours. My humanity is affirmed by my choice today to treat you as a human being, who even now can make the choice not to behave hurtfully. Wounding you and punishing you will not heal me. I forgive you."

How powerful that is! If ubuntu is the fundamental reality of our relationships, human dignity is not a limited good -- and the more I honor you, the more honor there is for me. If ubuntu is the fundamental reality of our relationships, I don't have to worry about whether another person is getting off too easily. I don't have to fret about whether my colleague, my rival, or my enemy is being treated better than they deserve. If ubuntu is the fundamental reality of our relationships -- if it's true that my humanity is inextricably bound in yours and honoring your humanity affirms mine -- there is more than enough mercy to go around, and it is possible, as the prophet Amos writes, for justice to roll down like waters, and righteousness like an EVER-flowing stream (Amos 5:24). An EVER-flowing stream -- an inexhaustible and unending torrent that makes our weather this spring look like the driest August in the Sahara.

All this is true -- IF ubuntu is fundamental reality, and not wishful thinking. That could be a pretty big "if." What encouragement do we have as Christians to stake our future on that "if"?

We have the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity tells us that God, in God's very self, is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. These aren't just hats that God wears at different times and can put aside, or different ways of being in different circumstances -- that idea was what got the Monarchians condemned. Our doctrine of the Trinity says that this is who God was, is, and will be -- fully, the eternal nature of the eternal God. And it tells us that God -- in God's very and eternal self -- is the kind of relationship, the kind of self-giving love, that we as Christians strive to live into in community.

God in God's very self is Creator. A Creator needs Creation in order to be a Creator. Without Creation, God could not be God's self. God is love, and love that isn't narcissism requires an Other to love. So God NEEDS Creation. God needs us. God's identity is bound inextricably with us, the identity of God as Father is inextricably bound with the identity God gives us as God's children. The hunger we have for the God who made us and loves us reflects the hunger God has for us, the hunger that gave birth to each of us and to the world in which we live.

Martin Buber (in I and Thou) puts it this way:

You know always in your heart that you need God more than everything; but do you not know that God needs you -- in the fullness of His eternity needs you? How would humanity be, how would you be, if God did not need humanity, did not need you? You need God, in order to be -- and God needs you, for the very meaning of your life. ... There is divine meaning in the life of the world, of human persons, of you and me.

This talk of God's need might sound foreign. It was very foreign to the Greek philosophers with whom Paul was in dialogue. Greek philosophers thought of God as an "unmoved mover" who needed no one, whose power lay in complete freedom from passion. When they referred to humanity as God's children, they meant that humans share with God the ability to be rational, that we too could be freed from passion and need. But God's eternal nature as Redeemer speaks against that. It puts the cross, the PASSION, and God's passionate pursuit of us, God's beloved, at the center of the divine life. God, in God's very self, is self-giving love -- the kind of love that unconditionally treats others as worthy of love and honor. Jesus' earliest followers didn't get that very easily -- they kept waiting for Jesus to show the world who he was by showing his power. They waited for him to throw off all this meek and mild Clark Kent footwashing stuff, put on his cape, and beat the villains into submission. We're not much different sometimes -- we talk about the "Second Coming" as a time when Jesus will finally show his power by taking names and kicking butt. There was already a second coming of Jesus, though -- we call it Easter. And there was a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, as the risen Jesus came back to his disciples, and his message was "peace be with you." Some years after that, Jesus came to Paul in blinding glory, and the message then was to follow Jesus by going to the Gentiles and heretics Paul had been persecuting and serve them instead. There have been billions of comings of Jesus since Easter, for Jesus promises to come wherever two or three are gathered. The Trinity tells us that God's very self, God's ETERNAL nature, is Jesus' nature, Jesus' love as revealed in scripture -- loving and forgiving others as if love and forgiveness were in unlimited, inexhaustible supply for eternity -- because they are.

They are unlimited in the life of the Trinity itself. Some speak of the Holy Spirit as flowing from the love between the Father and the Son, spilling over all Creation as the Spirit hovered over the waters before Creation had form, uniting Creation in the love of the Trinity. For this reason, the theologian Jürgen Moltmann calls the Spirit the "unifying God," God poured out over all flesh, inviting all people to join in the Trinity's loving dance, bringing forth the fruit of the Spirit -- love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control -- wherever the Spirit is present. The fruit of the Spirit -- qualities characteristic of loving relationship -- makes clear what is implicit in the doctrine of the Trinity -- that God in God's very self is relationship. God is love.

And we are made in God's image, in the image of Love. To be God's self, God needs Creation, needs to forgive, needs to unify in love. We humans, made in God's image, also need others, need to forgive, need to unify to become most fully our true self, the self God made us to be. God's self is revealed in Creation, in the forgiveness spoken from the cross, in every relationship that bears the fruit of the Spirit; we find our self in God as we enter into those relationships with others, as we love them in ways that are creative and self-giving and uniting, as we experience God's love through them.

God is love. The Triune God is ubuntu, is love found in loving, is self found in self-giving, is unity in relationship, is now, is then, is ever, is everywhere. And so ubuntu is not wishful thinking; it is the rhythm of the life of the Trinity, of the universe. As Thomas Merton writes in Love and Living:

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone -- we find it with another. We do not discover the secret of our lives merely by study and calculation in our own isolated meditations. The meaning of our life is a secret that has to be revealed to us in love, by the one we love. And if this love is unreal, the secret will not be found, the meaning will never reveal itself, the message will never be decoded. At best, we will receive a scrambled and partial message, one that will deceive and confuse us. We will never be feel real until we let ourselves fall in love -- either with another human person or with God.

Love is the image in which we were created. Let us confess our faith in the Trinity -- the God who is fully, mysteriously, and eternally the Creator, the Redeemer, the Sustainer – and confess it not just in the Creed but with our lives, with our passion, with our offering of ourselves to God for the sake of all whom God loves. Amen.

"Baptized Into Imperfect Community" - January 11, 2004

First Sunday after Epiphany, Year C, the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord
Isaiah 42:1-9; Psalm 89:20-29; Luke 3:15-16, 21-22

From 1974 to 1984 – some very formative years for me – there was a series on television called Happy Days. Happy Days was all about nostalgia, providing a romanticized and idealized view of both the teenage years – portrayed in the series as a carefree time of friendship, romance, and wacky hijinks – and of the 1950’s – portrayed in the series as a time of American pride and prosperity, before the pain and tumult of Vietnam and Watergate. The title of the series says it all: those were Happy Days, when we were teenagers, in the Fifties.

Especially when things get rough, we like to romanticize the past, to look back to “happy days” and hope that in the future we can say that “happy days are here again.” But our view of what those days were like is often incomplete. In the TV series Happy Days, high school was all about friends and dances and hanging out in the malt shop; the show left out the real problems and pressure and pain we all went through when we were teenagers. And the apple-pie America portrayed in Happy Days was deeply appealing, but it left out the Fifties’ McCarthyism, segregation, and nuclear anxiety. The bottom line is that the “happy days” we like to get nostalgic about weren’t as ideal that we tend to make them out to be.

But what’s the harm? Why not idealize, if it gives us pleasure in a difficult time? Here’s the problem – sometimes idealizing something distant from us – something “out there” in the past, or the future, or in another country, or another community – prevents us from receiving the grace that’s right in front of us, in the messy present tense, in this messy place, with these imperfect people.

Our lectionary for today, which includes two verses from Luke, then skips four verses, then finishes with two more verses, does some editing to clean up the scene for us, and our translation does too. The favor our lectionary and translation try to do us has a cost I don’t want to pay this morning, so let’s read the whole passage, Luke 3:15-22. Here’s what our NRSV says there:

As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, ‘I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.’ So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people. But Herod the ruler, who had been rebuked by him because of Herodias, his brother’s wife, and because of all the evil things that Herod had done, added to them all by shutting up John in prison.

 

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

And here’s the translation error in most English translations, including the NRSV we use. It might not seem like a big deal at first. In the original Greek of verse 17, when John the Baptizer talks about the mighty one who is to come – the one he hopes is Jesus – he doesn’t say, “his winnowing fork is in his hand”; he says, “his winnowing shovel is in his hand.”1 Fork, shovel – what’s the diff?

Here’s the difference. A winnowing fork is used to separate the wheat – the good stuff – from the chaff – the stuff that’s useless. At the harvest, the farmers will take their winnowing forks and separate the good from the bad. Then comes the winnowing shovel – that’s what takes the grain, the good stuff, and literally saves it – shovels it into the granary to be stored. And the person with the winnowing shovel then takes the chaff – the useless stuff – and shovels it into the fire to be destroyed.

John the Baptizer says that the one who is to come – the one he hopes is Jesus – is coming not with a fork, to separate the wheat from the chaff, but with a shovel, to deal with the separated wheat and chaff. John’s mission statement for Jesus is here in this passage – “to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” – John hopes that Jesus is going to bring not only salvation to the righteous, but also destruction to the unrighteous.

And John is going to be seriously disappointed. Let’s take a look at Jesus’ own mission statement, in Luke 4:18-19:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’

Here, Jesus claims part of the book of Isaiah as his own mission statement, what he is anointed by God to do. Actually, Jesus is doing some creative editing of his own, as here’s the whole passage from Isaiah 61:1-2:

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, AND THE DAY OF VENGEANCE TO OUR GOD.

Jesus here is mixing back and forth between two biblical passages, between Isaiah 58:6 on one hand – that’s where the “year of the Lord’s favor” comes from – and Isaiah 61:1-2 on the other hand. And what Jesus cuts out from Isaiah 61 in the mix, in his statement of purpose, is “the day of vengeance to our God.” In Jesus’ message and ministry, there’s no shoveling the chaff into the fire. There’s no “day of vengeance.”

So a little later in the story, in Luke 7:18-23, John the Baptizer, who is in prison, sends some of his followers to ask Jesus what he’s up to. If Jesus is all about good news, healing the brokenhearted, giving sight to the blind, and liberating the prisoners, who’s going to shovel the chaff into the unquenchable fire? That’s what John wants to know, so through his disciples he asks Jesus, “are you the coming one – the guy with the winnowing shovel – or should we expect somebody else?” And Jesus’ reply is to quote Isaiah again as a kind of mission statement, but Jesus again quotes from parts of Isaiah2 that talk about healing and good news for the poor. Then Jesus finishes his response to John with these words: “blessed is the one who does not take offense at me” – a remark directed at John, who is taking offense at Jesus’ seeming dodge of half his mission – the day of vengeance, the bad news for the unrighteous – that Jesus, in John’s eyes, is shirking in favor of more healing, more good news, more freedom.

There was real conflict, real and important theological differences, between Jesus and John. Jesus’ mission statement was a lot like today’s reading from Isaiah; John wanted and expected Jesus to fulfill a different mission, one that included vengeance, fire for the chaff. Our lectionary glosses over that in part by including the passage from Isaiah that Jesus includes in his mission statement, but excluding in our gospel reading the teaching from John the Baptizer that shows that John wanted something else from Jesus.

I think the agenda of our lectionary editors in omitting those verses that sketch the conflict between Jesus and John was to encourage us to concentrate on Jesus’ baptism – and, on this Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord – on our own baptism. On the things – our Baptismal vows – that unite us, rather than on the differences that we have that could threaten to divide us.

But I don’t think they’re doing us a favor. There’s a missed opportunity in the lectionary here. I think in glossing over John’s serious theological quarrel with Jesus – a quarrel, by the way, in which both sides could rightly claim biblical support – our lectionary leaves us in danger of missing something important. Our lectionary presents this moment in Jesus’ life in some ways as a kind of Happy Days retelling of the relationship between Jesus and John – Jesus’ baptism and the moment at which Jesus claims his mission and the Spirit descends upon him – as a moment in which Jesus is recognized by John for who he truly is, and Jesus is supported by a friend to set out on a mission they agree on completely.

That’s not how it is. This is a moment in which Jesus is seriously misunderstood by a close friend, someone whose support Jesus had counted on. This is a moment in which we are shown clearly the seeds of a conflict that isn’t going away. Does God need to get rid of or punish the unrighteous before the kingdom of God can arrive here, “on earth as it is in heaven,” as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer? John says yes – God will send a mighty one with a winnowing shovel to clear the threshing floor; Jesus says no – the kingdom of God is coming, like a mustard seed, with small acts of healing and reconciliation and liberation in the midst of everything else going on, in the midst of all of the things that have gone wrong in our relationships with God and one another. It’s a fundamental conflict between theological opposites.

And it’s a moment of real contact between passionate friends with passionate differences. It’s a moment in which, perhaps inexplicably, the Spirit breaks through, and descends like a dove to rest on Jesus. Inexplicably, perhaps paradoxically, a moment of misunderstanding, a moment that held the seeds of pain in a relationship between friends, is the moment when the Spirit says, “You are my beloved child, in whom I am well pleased.” The Spirit says that to and of Jesus, but I hear the Spirit saying the same to and of John, who with deep faith and love persists in his mistaken view that the one to come must destroy the chaff.

I don’t want to gloss over that difference because I don’t want to lose the incredible, inexplicable grace of that moment. I don’t want to lose the hope of that moment. Telling me that in the earliest days of Jesus’ ministry everybody agreed and so everyone was happy not only offends my sensibilities as a card-carrying member of Generation X, who has lived in and through enough brokenness in families, communities, countries, and the world to be suspicious of claims of perfection; it also offends a close reading of the Bible. The Bible is full of serious disagreement between God’s people about important things. Does God want us to worship in a tabernacle, a tent set up temporarily to remind us that God’s people are called to be on the move – or in a Temple, a grand building that gives us an opportunity to give the world an impressive and visible sign of God’s glory, but which requires taxes that burden the poor? That’s a conflict that continues in Scripture long after the Temple is built – and long after it’s rebuilt. Is it possible to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land, or must God’s people dwell in a particular place to hear God’s voice? Does God require circumcision and sacrifice, or only prayer and justice? And does God need to clear the decks of the impure and unrighteous before the kingdom of God can come, or has it already started amidst all of the pain and confusion we see around us?

The Bible is not free of conflict, any more than God’s people have been free of conflict. And still there is nowhere we can flee from God’s presence. There is no feeling more lonely, I think, than the feeling that the people in your life whom you most need and trust don’t understand you and so aren’t equipped to support you. If Jesus had the same sense of mission in Luke 3 that he does in Luke 4 – and I suspect that he did – this moment in today’s gospel was one of those lonely times for Jesus. And the great hope, the unimaginable grace, that comes across to us from this passage when we recognize how serious the difference between Jesus and John in this moment was, is that THE SPIRIT BREAKS THROUGH. When you connect – really connect – with other people in this community, you have a fleeting glimpse – seeing “as through a glass darkly,” as 1 Corinthians 13 says – of what God’s love for you is like. That’s easiest to grasp intellectually, I think, in the bright times, when we agree and feel understood. But I think we grasp the quality of God’s love for us most clearly in moments like the one in today’s gospel – when friends misunderstand and disagree and love and love and love relentlessly. Because while we read the story of Luke with 20/20 hindsight and know we’re supposed to side with Jesus, we’re really a lot more like John. We misunderstand and try to instruct and try to second-guess Jesus all the time – especially if we really love him. That’s just how we imperfect people are. That’s just whom God loves. And that moment – the moment in which we love and misunderstand and hurt and are loved more deeply than ever in return – is the moment in which we glimpse God’s love most clearly.

This is the Body into which we are baptized, with all of its misunderstandings and questioning and conflict. This is where the Spirit descends and you can hear God say to YOU, today, “You are my beloved child. In you I am well pleased.” Hearing God speak these loving words to us in the moment of brokenness is the beginning of the healing we need. It is the grace that comes to us in the here and now, and which we flee from when we run after fictitious “happy days” in the past or the future, or after an imagined ideal in some perfect or better elsewhere.

If we stay in a relationship of love with anyone – God, our family, our friends, our enemies – long enough, we will come to that moment of misunderstanding. When it comes, stay there and breathe and look; God’s sustaining Spirit is coming to whisper the love and encouragement you need to stay, and breathe, and look, and love.

Thanks be to God!