Saturday, April 20, 2019

“A Problem Named Jesus” - April 21, 2019 (Easter Day)




Acts 10:34-43



            People sometimes talk about the church as a family.  Now, that may be true.  But you have to remember that not all families are perfect.  The Kardashians are a family.  More to the point, so (at least on screen) were the Huxtables.  The Kardashians put everything out in public and have no real qualms about letting the camera see the whole bit.  The Huxtables, though?  It seems to me that we have more in common with the Huxtables than we like to admit.  On camera, everything looks ideal.  Off camera, there are some awful things happening, and when they come to light, it’s impossible to smile at The Cosby Show the way we once did.

That’s why we go to such lengths to keep things quiet for as long as we can.  When there are problems, we do a pretty good job of managing them instead of fixing them.  (Let’s not even mention the ones we cannot fix.)  When we identify what Al Gore called “An Inconvenient Truth” we know what to do with it.  We ignore it.  We deny it.  We bury it.  Our culture is especially good at it.  We’re the only country in the world that looks at major storms growing stronger and these weird fluctuations of floods and droughts and the ice caps melting and say, “Oh, it’s just a normal statistical variation.  You have to expect this every thousand years or so.”

            It’s a cultural thing, but I would be bold enough to speculate that it’s a more generally human characteristic.  Call it denial, call it avoidance, call it good manners – it’s all the same.  As they say, Jews don’t recognize Jesus, Protestants don’t recognize the pope, and Methodists don’t recognize each other at the state store.  In the long run, though, letting things go unnamed and unaddressed is harmful and destructive.  The whole crisis of abuse that the Catholics are facing right now could easily have been forestalled if it had been dealt with straightforwardly early on.  But scandal is a terrible thing.  Human beings have never, ever been good with scandal.  We have made a habit of burying those who bring it to light.  I mean really burying them.

            Cain and Abel were two brothers who did not get along.  The last straw came, though, when Cain (who was a farmer) offered fruit and vegetables as a burnt sacrifice and Abel (who was a herdsman) offered meat.  Have you ever tried to set fire to a carrot or a cucumber?  The upshot was, according to Genesis,

“The Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.” [Genesis 4:4-5]

It wasn’t that the Lord loved one brother more than the other, but Cain just didn’t connect as well.  His solution was to get rid of his brother, whom he felt had shown him up and made him look bad.  By “get rid of” I mean that he killed him. 

It became a pattern.  It’s all over the Bible.  David served as one of King Saul’s officers and when people commented publicly that he had been more successful than his commander-in-chief, Saul stewed on it to the point where he became so jealous that more than once he threw his spear at David (who eventually realized the problem and cleared out).  The prophets would warn people that they were on a bad path, telling them for their own good, and that would enrage whatever king was running the show, and it did not generally go well for the prophet.  There’s a story of how Jeremiah survived only because when they threw him into a cistern, nobody checked to see that there was any water in it.  He landed in mud, and lived until somebody talked the king into changing his mind and they hauled him out again. 

Jesus himself cried over the city where that so often happened:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!  How often I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing.” [Luke 13:34]

He was very aware of how things went.  It is what would happen to him.  It is how things are done.  I should say add, “at least by us,” because God does not work that way. 

            If the resurrection shows us one thing, it is that God does not play by our rules.

            God created a big problem for us when he sent Jesus.  Even the most faithful of the prophets fell short at some point.  Elijah could confront four hundred priests of the idol Baal and put them to shame.  One man against four hundred.  One man with God on his side, of course.  Then afterward he got word that Queen Jezebel was angry with him, and he ran away.  Moses had his problems with pride, and Jonah held grudges.  Obadiah got mad at some children because they made fun of his bald head, and summoned a bear to eat them. 

            And that’s a problem for us.  We like to say, and we all do say, “I’m only human,” and think and feel that somehow being human means we can be excused from being the human being we are meant to be.  But Jesus?  He was the one human being ever to live without sin.  He was the one person to live totally within God’s vision, spotless from start to finish.  Peter’s speech in Acts that we heard this morning recalls

“how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.” [Acts 10:38]

A sinless man, however, shows up a sinful world in ways that fill us with unbearable shame. 
He could and did and does ask those embarrassing questions that break open our agreed-upon silence.  Just by being who he is, he is a sort of truth-teller who says, “How can we say we love God and treat God’s world with contempt and treat God’s children as nothing?”  Sometimes he used humor to make us laugh at ourselves.  He told a parable about how we go around pointing out the speck in each other’s eye while we have a log sticking out of our own. [Luke 6:41]  The folks who were looked down on loved him right away.  Those who did the looking-down, not so much, though.  And when he was serious, he could be very serious.  Just ask the moneychangers in the Temple whose tables he flipped over.  Eventually, he was too much to take.  The conflict was inevitable, and the consequences.

“They put him to death by hanging him on a tree.” [Acts 10:39]

            And if the story stopped there, it would have been just one more example of a good man in a bad world, 

“but God raised him up on the third day and allowed him to appear”.  [Acts 10:40]

That move, of course, totally destroys the effectiveness of our human strategy of pretending that we are in charge.  It ruins our strategy of relying on secretive or not so secretive acts of injustice to cover up our shortcomings, because if Jesus is alive again (and he is), then he’s out there in the world still doing everything he’s ever done: doing good and healing and undoing oppression of every sort, and calling our hearts into question when we settle for anything less than the kingdom of God and his righteousness. 

Yes, he stands in judgment of us, of all of us.  But that’s good news, because he is not judging to condemn, but judging to set right, and there is mercy in everything he does.

“He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead.  All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” [Acts 10:43]

You can, if you want, see it this way: he is a judge who sentences us to community service, whose way is not to throw anyone away, but to put them to use so that they can be part of something far greater than themselves.  He became like us that we might become like him.

“Soar we now where Christ has led,
Following our exalted head.
Made like him, like him we rise:
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies.
Alleluia!”

Thursday, April 18, 2019

“Crushed” - April 18, 2019 (Maundy Thursday)



Psalm 143:1-10



            Crushing is a major part of preparing food.

            To make bread, you need flour, and flour is made by taking grain and crushing it to powder between two large, heavy millstones.  To make wine, which was a staple part of the diet in ancient Israel, grapes had to be put into vats and the liquid crushed out of them for fermentation and storage.

            The bread and the wine that were on the table at the Last Supper, the items that Jesus designated for use as an ongoing reminder of his continuing presence among his disciples, were items that intrinsically bear the message of what happened to him in the course of his suffering and death.  His body was beaten, like grain is beaten with a flail to separate the kernels of wheat from the husk, and ground by the weight of the cross that he was forced to carry.  His breathing would be cut off by his own weight pressing down against his lungs and diaphragm in his hours on the cross.  His blood would go everywhere, not just from the nail wounds, but from being whipped and having thorns pressed down onto his scalp, from abrasions and bruises, and eventually from a spear being jabbed into his corpse.

            In the course of all of that, there would be the attempt to crush him not only physically, but also emotionally and mentally. 

“For the enemy has pursued me,
   crushing my life to the ground,
   making me sit in darkness like those long dead.
Therefore my spirit faints within me;
   my heart within me is appalled.”
[Psalm 143:3-4] 

When Jesus cried out at one point, “I thirst!” it was the physical thirst that comes to anyone with the terrible loss of blood and being exposed in the sun for hours.  I cannot believe it wasn’t also the thirst of the spirit that comes in the midst of torment.

“I stretch out my hands to you;
   my soul thirsts for you like a parched land.
Answer me quickly, O Lord;
   my spirit fails.
Do not hide your face from me,
   or I shall be like those who go down to the Pit.”
[Psalm 143:6-7] 

            Yet on that table, too, had probably been another crushed item.  All around the Mediterranean, fresh olives were harvested and taken to presses where they were crushed and the oil that came off them was captured and used for cooking or to dip bread into or just poured onto other food like we might use butter.  And the olives were put through not just one pressing, but were crushed a second and maybe a third time.  Crushing the olives gave oil not only for food, but also to be used in lamps to give light, as Jesus spoke about in his parables.

Moreover, the oil was used ritually by the people of Israel.  Poured on the head of a king or a priest or a prophet, anointing designated someone to a role in the establishment of God’s will upon earth as it is in heaven.  One who was anointed this way was called, in the Greek language of that day, Cristos, “Christ”.  It’s a title of honor, but dependent on the act of crushing, and when applied to Jesus in the way that we have come to apply it to him alone, it connects to what he bore for us.

Only because Jesus also underwent the crushing presented again and again in the broken bread and the full cup would he fulfill his place as the Christ, the Anointed One, as a prophet of God, as the priestly one who offered a sacrifice equal to the sin of the world, as the king who rules from a cross instead of a throne and with love instead of fear.

            Isaiah had spoken of the Suffering Servant, the Christ, the Messiah, as one whose pains would bring healing to others. So

“he was wounded for our transgressions,
   crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
   and by his bruises we are healed.” 
[Isaiah 53:5]

He would face the injustice of the world’s judgment, and it would crush him, but it would also lead to the judgment of the world by God, and that would in turn bring a restoration far beyond what anyone could have foreseen.

“By a perversion of justice he was taken away.
   Who could have imagined his future?
For he was cut off from the land of the living,
   stricken for the transgression of my people.
They made his grave with the wicked
   and his tomb with the rich,
although he had done no violence,
   and there was no deceit in his mouth. 

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain.
When you make his life an offering for sin,
   he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days;
through him the will of the Lord shall prosper.
   Out of his anguish he shall see light;
he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge.
   The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous,
   and he shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great,
   and he shall divide the spoil with the strong;
because he poured out himself to death,
   and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many,
   and made intercession for the transgressors.”
[Isaiah 53:8-12]


Saturday, April 13, 2019

“Heights and Depths” - April 14, 2019 (Palm Sunday)


Psalm 130


            Many years ago, when Philadelphia was making a real push to start the redevelopment of the Delaware River waterfront, one of the first, trendy restaurant-plus places that opened up was called the Beach Club.  It was just north of Penn’s Landing, and its big feature was a crane that went out over the water for bungee jumping.  A group of around seven or eight of us who were working together in Frankford at the time were all in our late twenties or early thirties, just the right demographic for that kind of adventure.  I have no idea whose idea it was, but somehow an agreement was reached that one Friday evening we would meet at the Beach Club to hang out and if anybody in the group wanted to bungee jump we would all split the cost evenly among us.

            So there we were at 7:00 or so, watching people lifted up to the top of the crane, almost even with the level of the Ben Franklin Bridge, just off to the left.  Then a horn would blow and off they went, headfirst, almost but not quite hitting the top of the river, and bouncing around upside-down a couple of times before being lowered to a kind of sandbox built for the purpose.  You could see them from where we were, removing their helmets and letting the blood drain back into their bodies from where it had pooled in their skulls.  Of course, these folks were all laughing and you could see how exhilarating it had been, so there was a lot of pointing and nudging in our group.

Around 9:00 we were still debating who wanted to go first.  By that point, the question of whether it was a good idea to bungee jump on a full stomach had been raised.  10:00 came and went, and the quality of the band was more of a preoccupation.  11:00 and the list was probably too full for the rest of the night to bother.  Then people started leaving, and that meant that the cost would go up a little and not everybody would get to watch anyhow.  There was some talk of maybe another time, but it never really got to that point, because there were other things to do and see that summer.

            Maybe there are a few people who are made for that kind of thing, but it wasn’t us.  And we knew it.  You’d have to be trying to do something pretty big to pull a stunt like that, trying to prove something to someone (maybe yourself, even), and none of us in that group were in that boat.  In fact, following through on something that dangerous to impress coworkers would probably have had the opposite effect.  Could you trust the judgment of someone who would bungee jump from a crane on Delaware Avenue?  Probably not.

            Yet everybody there that evening, I feel safe in saying, had already decided to take a longer-term jump in how they would live their lives, consciously taking a step out in faith.  They were all living and working in positions of Christian service that they knew would not put them in control very often.  If they found themselves at the top of things, that might be just when Jesus told them to jump, and it might be just as they thought things were about to end in a destructive landing or, at best, a horrible splash, that would be just when they felt the tug of the safety line catch them and pull them back.

            One man who was there was a brilliant guy who had chosen, very consciously, to go into social work and help children who were at risk.  He understood them, because his own mother, who was single, had died when he was six.  Now there he was, having come through a lot, and doing well when, about a year after this bungee-watching party, one of the parents he worked with was charged with neglect and abuse of a toddler, leading to the child’s death.  He, as the caseworker, went through a very public investigation.  He was totally cleared, but the toll it took on him was incredible.  He looked at his own competence and performance much more rigorously than the official investigators. 

“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
            Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!
If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
            Lord, who could stand?” [Psalm 130:1-3]

What helped was the awareness that if he had not been involved in the situation, there were other children who might have ended up the same way, and he had prevented that. 

“But there is forgiveness with you,
            so that you may be revered.” [Psalm 130:4]

            It took a lot out of him, but God’s grace was there.  That is what allows real discipleship that makes a difference, which always matches Jesus’ pattern of surrendering the glory and the good report and the safety and the warm fuzzies to go into the places that call for healing and the power of God.  Jesus left heaven for earth, and then left this life on earth by way of a cross and the darkness of the grave.  For us.  Those who follow him, follow him.  For others.  Along the way they may call out

“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
to the voice of my supplications!” [Psalm 130:1-2]

Their voices, their whole being, may scream out like someone bungee jumping, having that stomach-churning second when they suddenly realize what commitment means.

            Don’t think Jesus didn’t have his own second thoughts.  Oh, his last week began well enough, with the crowds cheering him, and waving palms, and shouting his name.  But by Thursday the tide had turned and he was on the ground in the Garden of Gethsemane praying that if he could possibly be spared all that lay before him, that God would take it away.  Even on the cross he called out to ask where God was, why he who had begun in the glory of eternity, the very glory of God the Father, was now turned over to the angry maw of a fearful system that had condemned him to a slow and painful death, surrounded by mockery and filled with a sense of total failure and the weight of the sins of the whole world, with no one able to help.  Only a handful of his friends would even stick around and there would be nothing they could do.  He would quote a different psalm:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” [Psalm 22:1]

And yet, those who cry from the depths are those whom the Lord hears.  Those who cry out from their hearts in real faith, are those on whom the Lord has mercy. 

            On January 7 of this year, that social worker I mentioned, the one who could easily have given up on it all, was sworn in as the Superintendent of Public Instruction for the entire state of California.  He’s sort of taking another dive into service.  He was in the state legislature for four years where he at least had a vote on the budget.  Now he has less actual political power, having chosen to forgo it.  In the speech he gave that day

“He reflected on the fact that the state schools chief does not have direct responsibility for what happens in districts around the state. ‘It’s a hard job,’ he said.  ‘This is the kind of job when you get all the blame for what goes wrong, but you don’t have the resources to fix what needs to be fixed.’

‘I accept those challenges,’ he said.”[1]

Christian discipleship is following a king who rides a mule, not a stallion.  It means walking the way of one who turned his back on life in heaven itself to be with us.  It means going into situations where we know we cannot win or will not succeed – at least in the ways that the world defines winning or success – and going in with our eyes wide open to the realities involved.  It means praying, like Jesus,

“yet, not my will but yours be done.” [Luke 22:42]

Christian discipleship means faith and trust and reliance on God in those times when you are powerless and everything around is turned upside down and you’re hurtling toward who-knows-what but you say,

“I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
            and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
            more than those who watch for the morning,
            more than those who watch for the morning.” [Psalm 130:5-6]

Saturday, April 6, 2019

“God Holds the Keys” - April 7, 2019

Psalm 102
“God Holds the Keys”
April 7, 2019

I have a friend whose mother now lives in South Florida, where a lot of cruise lines stop.  They offer lower rates to last-minute passengers to fill empty rooms and locals like Mrs. Robbins have discovered that if you have a passport and a sense of adventure, you and a friend can just pack a bag, show up at the dock in the morning, and find yourself on the high seas that afternoon.

So that’s what happened last year.  Her kids knew she was on a cruise ship and figured everything was fine.  So did Mrs. Robbins.  In fact, when she called her daughter a week later from somewhere off the coast of East Africa, she told her how solicitous the captain was for the passengers’ health.  Every night he came on the speaker and announced “Quiet Time”, when they had to cover their windows and turn down the lights and make no noise.  Mrs. Robbins and her fellow cruisers were sleeping so well!  Of course, her family didn’t sleep well after that, since it was clear to them (if not to her) that the ship was evading pirates.  

An article in The Economist last year noted that things aren’t as bad as they were.

Ten years ago Somalia’s coast was the centre of the maritime-hijacking world. The country lacked a coastguard or functioning state machinery, which allowed heavily armed pirates to sail up to huge cargo vessels in speedboats before boarding and taking crew and ship hostage. But 2017 was not a good year for buccaneers. According to the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), which monitors crime at sea, global piracy and robbery at sea dipped to their lowest points in over two decades.  According to the IMB, just nine vessels were hijacked off the Somali coast last year. This is in part because regional security has improved dramatically. The Gulf of Aden leads to the Suez canal, through which roughly 10% of global trade flows. After scores of kidnaps and hijackings, the world launched a huge naval anti-piracy effort in 2008. … Along with the introduction of armed guards, barbed wire and evasive-manoeuvre training on merchant ships, this campaign has slashed the number of successful boarding incidents off Somalia... 
What a relief!  
Yet what happens in places without any significant oversight at all?  Climate change has been driving people who live on the edges of the Sahara north and west as the desert is expanding.  The Europeans don’t know what to do with the influx of people riding flimsy boats across the Mediterranean, and so they’ve tightened up on them, and formed blockades.  “But with the sea route shut,” says a report from the Woodrow Wilson Center,
“an estimated 400,000 – 1,000,000 migrants were trapped in Libya, where they remain vulnerable to forced labor, torture, and trafficking. …More than nine million people in Africa are estimated to be in modern slavery – the highest prevalence in the world, and the value of forced labor on the continent is estimated at $14 billion.”
Then there are the women that ISIS enslaved, or those who come to this country from Eastern Europe or Asia thinking that they have found honest work, but whose papers are stolen from them by their supposed employers and find themselves in pretty much the same situation they were in, but not knowing the language and with no place to flee.
Over and over and over again this has been part of human history.  Israel itself, God’s own people, knew what it was when famine and drought drove Jacob’s family to seek food in Egypt, where Joseph had been sold into slavery years before, only to rise to a prominent position that allowed him to offer help to the very brothers who had sold him off.  And when, over time, the Egyptians enslaved their descendants, God raised up Moses, saying,
“I have also heard the groaning of the Israelites whom the Egyptians are holding as slaves, and I have remembered my covenant.  Say therefore to the Israelites, ‘I am the Lord, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from slavery to them.  I will redeem you with an outstretched arm, and with mighty acts of judgment.’” [Exodus 6:5-6]

And he did.

Centuries later, they again were enslaved after the Babylonians captured Jerusalem, and they gave up hope.  God sent the prophet Isaiah to put courage back into them.
“But Zion said, ‘The Lord has forsaken me,
my Lord has forgotten me.’
Can a woman forget her nursing child,
or show no compassion for the child of her womb?
Even these may forget,
yet I will not forget you.
See, I have inscribed you on my hands.” [Isaiah 49:14-16]
And free them he did.  How could he do any less for his other children, those alive today?  How is it happening?  I’m not altogether sure, but I know it happens.  
I look at not only this large-scale and blatant enslavement but also at the small-scale and disguised forms.  I look at the way that drug dealers knowingly tie people into addiction and dependence.  I hear about companies that enticed doctors into over-prescribing.  I wonder about how things like state lotteries encourage gambling addictions and consider what might happen if recreational use of pot is legalized.  In all of those cases, I know and have seen (and you probably have also seen) that God does give people help in getting away from such things.  All of those practices and more have come under scrutiny and I find hope in that.  When I see in the news that a human trafficking ring has been shut down, that is something worth a prayer of thanks.  When a woman from Saudi Arabia or Kuwait is able to claim asylum in a free country rather than be married off at fourteen, that is a miracle in its own way.
On the larger scale, anything that undercuts the conditions that allow one person to seize another or to steal their freedom is a step in the right direction.  If climate change underlies the desperation that drives migrants into the hands of criminals, then it has to be addressed.  If ethnic hatred leads people to treat others as less than human, then let’s get working on that.  It all connects somewhere.
Psalm 102 begins as the prayer of one, suffering person.
“Hear my prayer, O Lord;
let my cry come to you
Do not hide your face from me
in the day of my distress.
Incline your ear to me;
answer me speedily in the day when I call.
For my days pass away like smoke,
and my bones burn like a furnace
My heart is stricken and withered like grass;
I am too wasted to eat my bread.” [Psalm 102:1-4]

Yet in the help that God offers that one person is the sign that God’s care and help and deliverance is there for all.

“For the Lord will build up Zion;
he will appear in his glory.
He will regard the prayer of the destitute,
and will not despise their prayer.
Let this be recorded for a generation to come,
so that a people yet unborn may praise the Lord:
that he looked down from his holy height,
from heaven the Lord looked at the earth,
to hear the groans of the prisoners,
to set free those who were doomed to die;
so that the name of the Lord may be declared in Zion,
and his praise in Jerusalem,
when peoples gather together,
and kingdoms, to worship the Lord.” [Psalm 102:16-22]