Dylan's sermons

"Touching the Wounded Body of Christ in the World": Second Sunday of Easter, Year A

St. Martin's-in-the-Field Episcopal Church
Second Sunday of Easter, Year A; April 3, 2005
Genesis 8:6-16; 9:8-16; Psalm 111; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31

There’s something that makes me want to chuckle whenever I hear John 20:24’s description of Thomas as the one “who was called ‘the twin,’” because let’s face it: who calls him that now? He’s got another nickname, by which he’s much better known among Christians today, and that’s “Doubting Thomas.”

I think that Thomas needs a better press agent, and I’m ready to apply for the job.

First off, I think the “Doubting” label is pretty unfair. Yes, Thomas wants to touch Jesus. But who wouldn’t? A lot of us feel that way. One of my favorite worship songs (the Wild Goose Worship Group's "Don't Tell Me of a Faith That Fears," from Love + Anger) has a chorus that goes like this:

I need to know that God is real
I need to know that Christ can feel
the need to touch and love and heal
the world including me

That experience of knowing – really knowing – that Christ is alive, still able to touch and love and heal, is something we want and need, especially when times are dark and uncertain. And for Jesus’ followers in this morning’s gospel, the times feel VERY uncertain.

They’ve had a terrifying series of experiences. They saw Jesus arrested and led away without resistance. The ones who were brave enough to watch saw him crucified. And then Peter and John saw that Jesus’ tomb was empty. This wouldn’t be a reassuring sight to someone living in the first-century Roman Empire. If anyone had seen them around the tomb, Jesus’ followers would have been suspected of grave robbery – a crime that carried a death sentence in first-century law.

Small wonder that, at the beginning of this morning’s gospel, Jesus’ followers are gathered secretly, behind locked doors, for fear of the Judean authorities. As possible grave robbers, they were suspected of a capital crime; as known followers of a man brazen enough to conduct a public demonstration in the Temple courts, in full view of the Roman garrison stationed there, the disciples would be considered highly dangerous to the peace of Rome, and to the Judean leaders Rome supported. So the question on the minds of Jesus’ followers is probably not so much “will we be next?” as it is, “how long do you think we can last?” So to reach them, breathe his spirit on them, and commission them to serve as agents of his forgiveness, Jesus has to come through the locked door behind which they’re all hiding.

Well, ALMOST all of them are hiding. One of them is not. Thomas is not with those cowering in the locked room when Jesus appears to them. And so Thomas doesn’t see Jesus, doesn’t experience Jesus’ breathing on his followers, doesn’t receive the commission the risen Jesus gives the others.

Does this mean that Thomas is less faithful than the other disciples? Not necessarily. In the appearance of the risen Jesus that Thomas misses, Jesus commissions his disciples to go out into the world, forgiving as he forgives. I like to think that Thomas wasn’t present to hear those words because he, unlike the others, was not locked inside in fear, but was already out there, in the world.

Thomas, the disciple who wants to touch Jesus, is onto something:

The path of discipleship isn’t a path of safety. Thomas gets that. Heck, he’s the guy who way back in chapter 11 of John says, “let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:16). Thomas knows that there are worse things than death – like maybe not ever really living at all. Because Thomas is not ruled by fear, he’s out there in the world, while the other disciples are hiding behind locked doors. Thomas doesn’t need to hear Jesus’ commission to the other disciples because he’s already out in the place where he can fulfill it. There’s a gorgeous passage in a short story by Sara Maitland ("Dragon Dreams," from Angel Maker) that I think of when I think of the kind of courage that I can almost imagine as Thomas’ words:

When [you] died I knew that there was no safety, anywhere, and I will not sacrifice to false gods. There is no safety, but there is wildness and joy, there is love and life within the danger. I love you. I want to be with you. ... I refuse to believe that we only get one chance. This letter is just a start. I am going to hunt you down now in all the lovely desolate places of the world. ... there I will be waiting for you. Please come. Please come soon.

There was danger out there, but the hope of seeing something else out there was stronger. So Thomas doesn’t need to hear Jesus’ commission to the other disciples because he’s already out in the place where he can fulfill it. He is ruled more by hope than by fear, and so he gets it. He knows that a disciple’s place is in the world.

And Thomas is onto something even more important:

The risen Jesus, the REAL Jesus, is the wounded Jesus. If you want to see the real Jesus, if you want to KNOW that Jesus is alive and at work in the world to touch and heal, look for the wounds. The wounds are the surest sign that this stranger is really the risen Christ. Seek them yourself, crying out with Thomas, “My lord and my God!” Thomas gets that. He gets that he’s going to know the risen Christ when he seeks to touch the wounded Christ. Maybe that truth also helps to ground him as he goes out into a dangerous world.

But there’s something about the report the other disciples give Thomas that seems to throw him off. Thomas starts with a presupposition that’s spot on: there is one Body of Christ. But he assumes that even in the life of the resurrection, there’s only one place or one way to see Jesus. If the other disciples saw Jesus, then Thomas missed his chance. If they received the Spirit in that encounter, then Thomas is left empty.

Not so. Thomas thinks that the unity of Christ’s body and the fact of Christ’s uniqueness means that the body he wants and needs to touch, the body of the risen Christ, is the body that had been nailed to the cross. But it’s not like that. Not any more. All of Christ’s followers can touch the wounded Body of Christ because Christ’s risen Body consists of every one of us – every baby, every grandmother, every teenager, every woman and man and child – who is in Christ has been baptized into the Body of Christ.

Every time we take someone’s hand as we exchange the Peace, we touch the risen, living Body of Christ.

A lot of us have had that experience here, at St. Martin’s. Around shared joys or tragedies, watching a row of women wearing goofy sunglasses on Joy Sunday to celebrate their surviving life-threatening illness, in a casserole in an hour of need from a friend or someone we barely know, in a moment of shared vulnerability in the Commit class or over a cup of coffee, we’ve seen and served the risen, wounded, triumphant Christ.

And the temptation, when we’ve seen Christ in one way, in one community, in one person or set of people, is to look for Christ only in those places. I think that’s why Jesus says, “blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” Living things grow, and change. And the body of the risen Lord is changed and changing too. Discipleship is a moving target. Our mission in Christ is calling us out, into the world, to touch Christ’s wounds in brothers and sisters we haven’t yet met, but whose fellowship we share in the mystery of this table, and of the prayers of the saints.

But do you want to feel Christ’s presence even more deeply? Do you want to have an experience of God’s Spirit moving so deeply within you that every fiber and sinew inside wants to cry out, “My Lord and My God!”? Do you need to know that God is real? Do you need to know that Christ is alive, that sin and death itself are not the last word, but are passing away? Do you need to experience Christ’s presence? Do you want to touch Jesus, and KNOW that Jesus is really right there with you?

Then hear Jesus’ commission to those upon whom he breathes his spirit: you are being sent out, into the world, and specifically to the world’s brokenness. You are being sent to TOUCH those places, to proclaim and participate in the reconciliation and healing that is Christ’s work in the world. You are being sent because YOU -- each one of us about to gather at Jesus’ table here, and at every other table at which bread is being broken in remembrance of him -- are now the Body of Christ, Jesus’ presence at work in the world, called and empowered to do what he did, and more.

If we want to know that, if we want to experience that, we’ll have to leave the rooms we lock ourselves in because of fear. We need to do what Thomas did – step out from our locked rooms, our gated communities, into the world. We need to insist upon touching Christ’s wounds. When we try to sequester ourselves and our children away from the world’s pain, we are hiding them and ourselves from Christ’s wounds.

And the world is filled with wounded members of the Body of Christ. One million deaths every year, one child dead every thirty seconds, from MALARIA, a disease that can be prevented with a mosquito net costing two dollars and fifty cents. The life expectancy in Botswana is down to 30 years old. One in five people in the world survive – or don’t survive – on less than a dollar a day. One person in seven tries to stay alive without access to clean water. A child dies in extreme poverty every three seconds. 36.3% – over one third– of all the children in Baltimore City live below the poverty line.

So much death. Such deep wounds. And yet. And yet. AND YET.
This is Christ’s Body, given for the world. Christ is here among us, despite our locked doors and our security systems. And there is life, and peace, and POWER breathed upon us to do Christ’s work in the world, to carry Good News of resurrection throughout the world. In Christ and through Christ and with Christ, all of Creation is being redeemed, coming to new and abundant life.

What can one person do to heal the world’s wounds? I don’t know, if we’re talking about a hypothetical person, a stranger, nobody in particular. But I know what Jesus can do. We can read about the signs of Jesus’ power and how Jesus used that power in the Bible. But these signs were recorded not to provide us with something to read as we wait behind locked doors, but to inspire us to experience the life of the risen Christ by living as Christ’s Body in the world, touching, loving, healing, forgiving in Christ’s name and to Christ’s glory.

So let the gospel come alive
  in actions plain to see
  in imitation of the one
  whose love extends to me

 

I need to know that God is real
  I need to know that Christ can feel
  the need to touch and love and heal
  the world including me
-- "Don't Tell Me of a Faith That Fears"

The risen, living Body of Christ is in the world – breathing peace, bringing healing, and sending us forth, in love and in power. 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!

"Christ Our Passover: Our Exodus from the Narrow Places" - April 9, 2004

Good Friday, Year C
Genesis 22:1-18; Psalm 69:1-23; John 18:1 - 19:37

Matthew, Mark, and Luke present Jesus’ last meal with his disciples – the meal we remember particularly on Maundy Thursday – as a Passover meal. The Gospel According to John, however, goes out of its way to say that Jesus died on the Day of Preparation, the day before the Passover meal would be eaten. I find the question, though, of which day was the one on which Jesus died far less interesting than the question of what points the gospels are making in presenting things as they do in each of their unique takes on the meaning of Jesus’ death.

John presents Jesus as dying on the Day of Preparation as part of his presentation of Christ as our Passover. In 1998, I was fortunate enough to hear Rabbi Alexander Schindler (former head of Reform synagogues in the U.S.) speak, and I will never forget something he said. Mitzrayim, the Hebrew name for Egypt, means “the narrow place,” Schindler pointed out; God leads us out of the narrow places.

I’d always loved the haggadah, the liturgy of the Passover meal, but each year, as I continue to reflect on what Rabbi Schindler taught me that night, my appreciation deepens further still. The haggadah instructs us to say, in the first person, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor,” from Deuteronomy 26:3-11. The story of our Exodus, as God leads us from “the narrow place,” goes back at least to Abraham. When humanity’s vision of the world and the powers that made it is in the narrow place of thinking that the gods are as thirsty for human bloodshed as humankind is at our worst, in a culture in which parents sacrificed their sons and daughters so they could be more successful in agriculture, politics, or war, God’s voice speaks to Abraham as he loomed over his bound son Isaac, and God says, "Stop it! That’s enough!" God goes with Abraham to that dark and narrow place and led him to a wider place, a wider vision of who God is and what God wants from us.

The Passover haggadah instructs us to say, in the first person, “When we were slaves in Egypt,” from that same passage in Deuteronomy. “When we were slaves in Egypt,” we are called to remember. And in the Passover, we remind ourselves that when humanity sees power merely as domination, when humanity treats difference as a reason to subjugate the “other,” God raises a prophet to say, “Enough,” to lead us out of the “narrow place” of slavery, into the wilderness in which we are freed to become God’s people, and to treat one another as God treats us.

Not that we stayed looking and moving forward on the journey God set us on with Abraham and Moses. Humanity’s history, or even the front page of any major newspaper today, tells of us sacrificing our sons and daughters to all kinds of powers and causes, trading lives for what is far less precious than life. We enslaved peoples captured in wars, from colonies, or by poverty and debt, practicing slavery in legally enshrined and more subtle de facto ways. We experienced how, when we treat human life as cheap, our own lives seem worthless. We found as we enslaved others that our greed had enslaved us. We tried to protect ourselves from death by killing, from violence by violence, from pain by wounding others, and amidst all of our score-keeping and fantasied and practiced revenge, and in the person of Jesus, God said, “THAT’S ENOUGH. Never again.”

So there is Good News on this Good Friday, in this dark place. And the Cross is a dark place, a monument to how we, “blessed with reason and skill,” in the words of one of our Eucharistic prayers, make use of God’s gifts to engineer darker and narrower prisons for ourselves. The Roman culture that invented the Cross was known for its ingenuity in making use of simple and natural forms for engineering. Shape stones a certain way, and they form an arch that will support tremendous structures, held together by gravity and friction in a way that makes mortar a mere formality. Chart the right pathway for it, and water can be propelled over a tremendous distance solely by natural gravity in aqueducts.

And perhaps the height of Roman engineering, ingenious in its simplicity, was the cross. Take heavy posts, and set them along the busy roads into the city. Set brackets in them to receive a horizontal beam. Nail or even tie a man’s hands to a beam, set that beam across the pole in brackets, and you have an excruciating form of torture and slow death that takes little time or effort to start but days to finish. Rulers like Pontius Pilate didn't hesitate to use it. It was diabolically simple, cost-effective and highly visible as a public deterrent to those who would oppose the might of Rome. During the Passover season, as Jerusalem became clogged with pilgrims remembering how their God liberates slaves from their oppressors, Pilate lined the roads with hundreds of crosses, each filled with a living tableau of how narrow and dark a prison we can make of our imagination when we set it upon wounding others.

In the person of Jesus, God came to that dark and narrow place, to our Mitzrayim. In Jesus’ arms, stretched out on the Cross, God showed us the wideness of God’s mercy. The most powerful person in all Creation became powerless for our sake. The only person who could rightly be called “lord” or “king,” the person before whom all earthly kings will one day kneel, took upon himself the treatment humankind dealt to a slave convicted of treason. The judge of the nations was stripped naked – no loincloth to cover him – set to suffer anonymously among hundreds of anonymous suffering and disgraced men, and violated with a shameful death. How often do I hear someone these days say, “God will not be mocked!” But Jesus, God made flesh, was mocked, and humiliated, and tortured, and murdered, and on that dark day said, finally and for all time, “That’s enough. Never again. IT IS FINISHED.” Not with a decisive blow back at his tormentors to put them to shame, but with words of healing, of reconciliation, bringing together the human family with his last breath. The power of that demonstration has never been equaled, because Jesus’ power is not like the power of worldly kings. Jesus speaks truly when he tells Pilate that his kingdom is not of the order, of the kosmos, of this world. What earthly ruler do you know who would behave as Jesus does in such dark times? But Jesus’ light shines all the more brightly in the darkness of Good Friday.

This is a dark place we visit today. But we need to be here. We need to visit the dark and narrow places, to open our hearts not only to the hungry, the homeless, and the oppressed, but to the contemptuous, the persecutors, the oppressors. Because the dark places in our hearts are populated by all of these; we scorn and despise and persecute and try to kill what we most fear in ourselves. It’s hopeless – or it would be hopeless … but Jesus put an end to that. There is freedom for slaves and slavers alike through the one who became as a slave to all, as we discover in this dark place. All scores were settled in the refusal of this one to settle the score. There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, as we discover in the midst of our Mitzrayim, our narrow place. The darkness and the fear and the pain and death itself have been cast out: IT IS FINISHED. Sacrificing our sons and daughters in Haiti, or for that matter in Baltimore and D.C., to the narrowness of mind that follows poor or no education because of our narrowness of vision: IT IS FINISHED. Enslaving one another and ourselves to ambition and injustice because of our narrowness of heart: IT IS FINISHED. The God of the universe has proclaimed definitively, for all time: Enough bloodshed. Enough shame. Enough suffering. In our narrowness of spirit, we once thought these were needed to set things right, but one greater than Moses has freed us for all time from that narrow place.

And we are free. Free to love, free to serve, freed from every system and every habit that made us, those we love, and our world suffer. It is finished – all of it – and we are free to claim the vision of a world made new, the immeasurable wideness of God’s mercy.

Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.