Two Noble Deaths

Texts:

Plato
When he had done speaking, Crito said: And have you any commands for us, Socrates?”
“If you take care of yourselves you will serve me and mine and yourselves, whatever you do, even if you make no promises now; but if you neglect yourselves and are not willing to live following step-by-step, as it were, in the path marked out by our present and past discussions, you will accomplish nothing, no matter how much or how eagerly you promise at the present.” – Phaedo 115b-c
John the Evangelist
Early in the morning, Jesus was taken from Caiaphas’ house to the house of the Roman governor. The clergy did not go inside. They wanted to feel decent and respectable, so they could share the festival meal. So Pilate went outside to meet them. He asked, “What have you got against this man?” They answered, “We wouldn’t have brought him to you unless he were a trouble-maker!” Pilate said, “You had better deal with him according to your own rules!” The clergy replied, “We’re not allowed to carry out the death penalty
Pilate went back inside and ordered Jesus to be put in front of him. He asked Jesus, “Are you the rightful Leader of the Judean people?” Jesus replied, “Was it your idea to ask me that question, or have other people been talking to you about me?” Pilate said, “Not being a Judean I can’t understand what this is all about! Your own people, your appointed leaders have brought you to me. What have you been up to?” Jesus said, “I have responsibility for a different sort of world from the one you hold power in. Otherwise my followers would put up a fight to save me from the hands of our leaders. No, I’m not after your sort of power.” Pilate said, “But you’re some kind of leader, aren’t you?” Jesus said, “That’s your way of putting it. My life’s work has been to make people aware of the truth. People who are interested in the truth listen to me.” Pilate said to Jesus, “Truth, what on earth is that?” – John 18: 28-38, Good as New translation

You will have noticed already that in keeping with the plan of action for this Lent of walking with Jesus through Holy Week, one day at a time on each of the six Sundays of Lent, that we’re starting Palm Sunday with readings about Good Friday.  You will have also noticed that we’re going to read the Palm Sunday story again.  My intent is not to take away Palm Sunday, not to do away with the fanfare and the music of the liturgy for the day, but to hear the liturgy again as though for the first time.  That is a tall order, no doubt.
Nevertheless, my proposal, in presenting Lent this way — is that Jesus’ death is not something God ordained for our salvation, on the contrary, I have suggested, Jesus’ death can only really be understood from the perspective of his life and ministry.  Jesus followed God not to the cross, but life.  For Jesus the experience of God trumped all other claims upon him even if to ignore them meant certain death.  This was so, because the God of Jesus encompassed life itself. To remain loyal to the God of his deepest trusting, was the expression of ultimate freedom — and to get swept up into that loyalty was ultimately transformative.   Continue reading “Two Noble Deaths”

April 3 — An Appointment in Samarra

Texts:
Mark 14:1-9
“Reaper” by Billy Collins
As I drove north along a country road
on a bright spring morning
I caught the look of a man on the roadside
who was carrying an enormous scythe on his shoulder.
He was not wearing a long black cloak
with a hood to conceal his skull–
rather a torn white tee-shirt
and a pair of loose khaki trousers.
But still, as I flew past him,
he turned and met my glance
as if I had an appointment in Samarra
not just the usual lunch at the Racoon Lodge.
There was no sign I could give him
in that instant – no casual wave,
or thumbs-up, no two-fingered V
that would ease the jolt of fear
Whose voltage ran from my ankles
to my scalp – just the glimpse,
the split-second lock of the pupils
like catching the eye of a stranger on a passing train.
And there was nothing to do
but keep driving, turn off the radio,
and notice how white the houses were,
how red the barns, and green the sloping fields.
Let’s go for a moment from the sublime to the ridiculous and return momentarily to the sublime.
A man went on vacation and arranged for his mother to stay at his house and take care of his cat.  And, just to be sure, he asked his next-door neighbor if he would look in on them every day and make sure they were all right. “No problem,” said the neighbor.  The man flew off to Mexico and after a couple of days, he called the neighbor to ask how things were going.
“Well,” replied the neighbor, “Your cat died.”  “Geez,” the guy said, “You have to come right out and tell me like that?  Couldn’t you have a little more consideration? I’m on vacation.  Couldn’t you have broken it to me a little more gently?  Like first telling me that the cat was on the roof, then that the cat fell off the roof, then, maybe the next day telling me you had taken the cat to the vet — like that, not, boom, all at once!
“So how’s mom doing?”
“Well,” said the neighbor, “she went up on the roof . . . ”
Of course, nobody likes the news.  We do what we can to avoid being direct.  We protest against death’s intrusion into our lives.  We treat our appointment in Samarra as a secret.
We’re not alone — there’s some cold comfort in the gospels that the twelve named disciples, the men of the crowd that is, all have a difficult time with this too.  Despite the fact that all along, Jesus has been clear that his words and his actions, in short the things he’s interested in are getting him into trouble.  Our story today is the remarkable story of one disciple who was able to process and accept what was very likely going to happen.  And who then reacted in a way to garner Jesus’ high praise — that what she has done will be told in remembrance of her. Continue reading “April 3 — An Appointment in Samarra”

March 27 — Love on the Edge

I was invited to share lunch last Thursday with Circle II.  At one point the conveersation turned to the book written by a 12 year old that has become a national bestseller.  It’s called Heaven is for Real.  I didn’t know anything about it.  Apparently, the boy, Colton Burpo, was just a few months shy of his fourth birthday when he experienced a ruptured appendix.  He had surgery and woke up to say that he’d been to heaven. The book published 8 years later claims that Colton had seen his great grandfather, Jesus, including, of course, the wounds on his hands.
I must say that when I read about that little detail, my skepticism was heightened.  And when I further read that the author of the book was not Colton, but his dad Todd, who is also an evangelical minister, it made sense.  In the evangelical fold, much hinges upon the acceptance of “Christ’s wounds, open for thee,” as Catherine Booth put it in a famous hymn, “The Wounds of Christ are Open.”
Furthermore, it turns out that the 12 year old Colton did not write it.  Over the years, as he told his story, and we can imagine, was encouraged in telling his story, his father decided to write the book, Heaven is For Real, claiming his son was the inspiration.
It is, of course, my own conjecture to say that the story is just that — a story trying to pass off as a factual account.  Sages and seers through the ages have never been able to agree on this matter.  Nevertheless, the wisest of them seem to agree with Jesus — it’s better to pay attention to other things for there are some things about which we know nothing. Continue reading “March 27 — Love on the Edge”

March 20 — Husbandry and Sacrifice

Mark 11:12-19
Just before reading the scripture lesson last Sunday, the story of Jesus’ protest march from Bethany to just outside Jerusalem, I mentioned that my plan for Lent this year is treat each of the 6 Sundays as one of the days during Jesus’ last week.  We’re on week 2 of Lent, which means day 2 of Jesus’ last week.
I’m doing this because I think it might be a good way to deal directly with the sad, old, theme of Lent — the idea that Lent is about feeling guilty for the action God took in killing Jesus for us. In theological language this is called substitutionary atonement.  It simply means that we really should be put to death for our sin, but because God loves us, God substitutes Jesus,”his only begotten son.” and in so doing we are atoned and made acceptable.
It’s all over the place. Turn to almost any hymn in the Lent section of our hymnal, and you’ll see it.  “O who am I, that for my sake my God should take frail flesh and die?”  “Alas! and did my Savior bleed, and did my Savereign die?  Would God devote that sacred head for sinners such as I?”
This kind of thinking about Jesus’s purpose leads to horrific ideas about the cross, also well attested in our hymnody.  When we recall that the cross was the form of capital punishment at the time the glorification of the cross amounts to an modern day glorification of the electric chair.  I am quite sure that the gospel is not about the glorification of violence in culture, ancient or modern.
Why then, take on Holy Week?  Is not Holy Week the epitome of the violence that I am trying to escape?
Yes, there is a good deal of violence in these stories — The brief point I want to make this morning is that when the historical context of these stories are examined, the violence that we might otherwise attribute to Jesus, is in fact Jesus exposing the violence of the empire.  It is well known that the Pax Augustus created a reign of peace and economic prosperity for the empire.  What is less well understood, is that that peace and prosperity was accomplished by discounting from the calculus, the landless peasantry who worked the fields and orchards and seas in order to provide the goods that provide for a successful empire.
I want to simply look a bit more carefully at two stories that are hardly every preached, but are nonetheless widely known, to see if we can’t discover something about the violence imposed in order to maintain the Pax Augustus, and see that the violence of Holy Week is condemned, not glorified.
In the first story, Jesus curses the fig tree — and the tree withers.  What?  Again, it seems proof for the violence that lies at the root of these stories of Holy Week.
In the second story, Jesus “occupies” the great temple of Jerusalem, getting rather agitated and violent.
II.
The first story first.
I have to admit, I was a bit leery about preaching about the fig tree.  In what way could that story possibly be relevant to the question I am posing here?  It’s just gratuitous violence directed at an innocent fig tree.  But I’m anything if not stubborn. And I plowed on with my plan, only to be pleasantly surprised by my research last week that the story fits with the moral arc of Holy Week as about the confrontation of justice with the powers that be.
What I learned was simply fig botany.  One would normally expect to find figs in various stages of maturation on a fig tree in leaf, as this tree was that Jesus spied.
The question, with this tiny bit of information, suddenly changes from “Why would Jesus do this violence?” utterly uncalled for if the fruit tree was not reasonably expected to produce figs, to “Why did Jesus not find fruit on this tree?”  And the simple answer is that figs tend not to grow on trees, at either end of its season, if that tree is not properly cared for.  In other words, the great Peace of Augustus may have ushered in an era of prosperity — but the prosperity was not evenly distributed.  But an empire does not operate without a cheap source and steady source of income.  Figs, which were once farmed by the peasants, where not profitable to the Romans.  Olives were.  As a result, the fig trees “went to wood,”  meaning they were no longer cared for.  A fig tree produces very few figs on old wood and none on old wood at the beginning or end of its season.
The barren fig tree testified to the invisible hand of the Roman empire throttling the throat of the agrarian worker who, in order to survive, no longer even raised his own food.  Jesus curses the artificial famine created by an unjust social system.
III.
Now the second story.
When the editors of the King James Version of the Holy Bible, did their work back in the early 17th century, they also added, free of charge, headings to the various sections and stories of the bible — headings which never existed in the original language.  Well, thanks to those 17th century translators, we now call the story of Jesus in the temple on this second day of Holy Week, the story of Jesus “cleansing” the temple.  Such an idea comes to the fore of Christian thinking a generation after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, when the temple was no longer of any importance to the now mostly gentile Christians.  Prior to that the temple was important to Jesus as a house of worship, even if it was often abused by the priestly class.
That priestly abuse came to a head for Jesus when Caiaphas, the same High Priest who turned Jesus over to Pilate after his arrest, moved the location of the market for the purchase of animals from outside the walls of Jerusalem, across the Kidron Valley near the Mount of Olives to inside the Temple.  While it is commonly assumed that Jesus protested the collection of taxes that day in the temple, it is more likely that he protested Caiaphas’ new system.  Yes, taxes were collected in the temple, but they were also collected at numerous other locations around the country, and a protest in the temple would have been ineffective.
Caiaphas instituted this new system in order to make the temple more efficient.  Historian Bruce Chilton writes: ” . . . the Temple was the center of Judaism for as long as it stood. Roman officials were so interested in its smooth functioning at the hands of the priests they appointed that they were known to sanction the penalty of death for gross sacrilege.”  It is not, he notes, that the animals were unclean (they weren’t) or that the priests were performing the sacrifice improperly (again, they weren’t).  It was all streamlined and proper, but it served the interests of the Roman empire, not God.  And it was this that Jesus could not accept.
Jesus’s purpose had nothing to do with “cleansing” the temple, it had to do with an occupation, protesting that the Roman quest for economic efficiency was being made on the backs of those for whom the temple was a place to worship God, rich or poor.
IV.
Jesus might well have been arrested in the temple that morning, and tried for execution, for interfering with the smooth function of the temple.  But they did not, and the question is why?
The answer may be found in the timing of his arrest.  Several days later, Jesus, perhaps discouraged in his quest to make the temple a place of real sacrifice, abandoned it and in a supper in an upper room in Jerusalem, instituted a new sacrifice, one that could never be usurped for financial gain.  And here Jesus committed the grossest of sacrilege — at which point, at least Judas had had enough, and he turned Jesus over to the authorities.
Jesus was arrested for the high crime of blasphemy against the temple.
Today we share a meal around the table of Jesus with no fear of arrest.  But the implication, whenever we share of it is the same implication it had for the twelve — will we follow on this path, seeking freedom in the name of God, letting loose the waters of justice, and creating communities of husbandry where all are cared for, even if that means challenging the current peace of the day.
The point is simply that Jesus offers communion with God without tying that communion to any condition that has to be met first.  Such a freedom, because it is the freedom that is the ground of our very being, breaks the yoke and cycle of violence by removing the need for our participation in it.
We are free, during Lent, and in all the seasons of the year, to rejoice that no matter who we are or where we are on life’s journey, that we are loved by God and accepted in the communion of God.  Amen.

The Winter of our Discontent

Introduction to the Scripture lesson:
Before we read the scripture lesson this morning, let me explain briefly why we’re reading what we are.
This year I want to take the bull by the horns. The bull I want to take by the horns is the one that claims Lent is properly a season of self-sacrifice and deprivation in preparation for an event that we ought to feel guilty about: God killing his own son for our salvation.  I want to take that bull by the horns because this medieval notion is not the gospel.
Yes, there were intimations in some of the later writings that God demanded human sacrifice in Jesus.  But the preponderance of evidence, and our own experience of the character of God suggests otherwise.
So for each of the 6 Sundays in Lent, we will focus on the final week of Jesus’ life to see if we can uncover a different Lenten experience, namely the experience of God who so loved the world that he placed Jesus in our midst that we might have his confidence in God’s loving purpose for us.I’m tired of the violence implied at the heart of Holy Week by the usual Lenten story.
Perhaps we can uncover something more constructive, more enduring, ultimately more inviting.  I think we can.
Mark 11:1-11
It was Palm Sunday but because of a sore throat, 5-year-old Sam stayed home from church with a sitter. When the family returned home, they were carrying several palm fronds. Sam asked them what they were for.
“People held them over Jesus’ head as he walked by,” his father told him.
“Wouldn’t you know it,” Sam fumed, “the one Sunday I miss church and Jesus shows up.”
It’s not Palm Sunday, and we’re not going to hold palm fronds over the heads of anyone today, but the question implied by Sam’s fuming is just the question we’re dealing with today: “Is Jesus gonna show up?”
When I first started thinking about dealing with Lent by walking through Holy Week one day at a time, I had no idea that we’d be watching in distress, videos of tsunamis wiping out whole towns in northern Japan.  And asking ourselves, as we inevitably do when a natural disaster strikes — Why?  Can anything be more sad?
I don’t want to trivialize Sam’s frustration by presuming that when we take it seriously we are thinking that Jesus should come and make things right with Japan.  But I do think that the tumultuous events of the past month pose an existential question.  If, during the events of the past month, the revolutions in Africa, the civil war in Libya, the bombing and straffing of nonviolent protesters in Bahrain, the eruption in Wisconsin, we do not presume that God intervenes, I think we do still pause to pray to God, sensing that this sadness is God’s sadness too.  Sensing that the way we honor the dead and show solidarity and support with and to those living in these places, is to not carry on with our usual, preoccupied self concerns, but to somehow extend ourselves so that we might be brother and sister one to the other.
II.
While the citizens of Jerusalem were not being bombed by the Romans, they had been living under the kind of oppression that many in the middle east have been living under  that led to the revolts.
I hove chosen to read Mark’s account of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem because it, more than Matthew’s or Luke’s or John’s reads like a protest march.
It is hard to read Mark accurately because we insert the details we have cherished since we first heard the story and waved the palm branches as a child. Matthew contributes the children to the story, John describes palms and not just “leafy branches,” and all of the gosples but Mark describe the festivities carrying on into the city streets.  But in Mark it’s stripped to a minimum.  Jesus goes from Bethany, a town just east of the Mount of Olives, to Jerusalem.  The march stops at the East Gate — the so called Horse Gate.  There Jesus walks alone into the city.  He enters the temple.  He looks around, and in the great anticlimatic moment of the Gospel of Mark, he leaves the temple, back through Horse Gate and back to Bethany.
But this is not to say that the journey from Bethany to Jerusalem is mundane. Jesus mysteriously commands the disciples to find the colt that has never been ridden. Gallons of ink has been spilled to interpret that moment.  And Mark describes large crowds making noise and chanting the text from Psalm 118 — Hosanna, Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”
In fact, it feels to me like Mark’s story of the first day of Holy Week is the bolder story, at least for us today.
I’d like to say why I think this is the case. It’s a story about why I show up for work.  And I hope it sheds some light on the reason you bother coming to church.
III.
When I graduated from High School, I graduated freed from a very comfortable and protective household and freed from the obligation I felt to attend church with the rest of my family.  For some time I attended enthusiastically.  But it wasn’t long before I was going through the motions.
Despite my professed non-theistic humanism, once in college, I began to help out a couple of good friends who had been leading worship at a small Unitarian Church in a nearby town to the college I was attending.  This was a small, small, small church.  We met every Sunday in a sanctuary about the size of our chapel and filled about 1/3 of it.  These were lovely, generous people.  And they looked like us.  And everyone of them told stories of despair.  Jobs lost, hearts broken, puppies dying, children being taken from them.  They were poor.  They were powerless. And they were beautiful.  We all fell in love with them.
As I reflect back on those Sunday mornings when we were given to preach or to lead a prayer or a song, I see how I grew more and more uncomfortable with the language of my church upbringing.  Prayers addressed to God the Father seemed offensive in the company of women who had been abused and who feared for their children’s safety in their presence of their father.  The creed which spoke of the God of power and might seemed offensive in the company of the mother of a 21 year old son in prison.  She’d had enough power and might.    The doctrine which suggested that Jesus was the only way to God, seemed silly in the light of the pluralistic setting that was Horton Unitarian Universalist Church on a Sunday morning.
I did not know it at the time,  but when I spoke of Jesus as my salvation or our salvation, or when I talked about his healing stories, I was beginning to see a different portrait of Jesus emerge.  Instead of a serenely divine Son of God, I saw Jesus struggling to set us free, even from himself, and from the messianic expectations we had for him.  I saw Jesus warning his followers away from the ever so tempting precipice of institutionalization and the cloaking of human desire for power in his ministry.
The entry into Jerusalem, as it was described by Mark, was a protest march to the gates of a city of power and might.  Jesus rode a donkey consistently with his vision of freedom.  He road a donkey to lampoon the idea of Zecharaiah 9:9 that what the world needed was another figure on a horse battling their enemies.  Emperors road on horses through the Eastern Gate.  Jesus walked in sandals, unaccompanied by a display of power or might or backing.
III.
It was with a great deal of despair that I accompanied our confirmation class to worship at the Islamic Society in Colchester last Friday.  In class the night before, we had spent some time talking about Islamophobia and the most current incarnation of it in the hearings held that day in the senate.  If you did not hear about it, it would be no surprise, for it seemed to be conducted on the hush.  It took some bit of digging to find news articles for the class to read.  Basically the hearings were conducted by the chair of the board for Homeland Security to inquire into the “radicalization of American Muslims.”  There was no equivalent inquiry, nor are their plans for one, into the radicalization of American Christians.  There were two muslims heard from during the day, both of them aghast at what they perceived as a witch hunt and the normalization of islamophobia in American culture.
The openings words of the lay preacher on Friday afternoon were words of anger mixed with sadness.
He moved immediately to a text in the Koran that recognizes and calls all Muslims to recognize that we need not think alike in order to love alike.   My heart thrilled.  Kneeling with that group of men in the mosque that afternoon, I heard the words of my tradition, and the kind of protest I hear Jesus calling me to live.
I believe that there is no higher religion than the religion of Jesus who dealt with the social problems which oppressed his kin by finding in love the power to be free.  In those moments,  I saw Jesus riding up to the great Horse gate on his donkey.  I saw crowds of anxious people who saw in him, not King David, but God; love victorious over fear; hope and life invincible no matter the powers arrayed against them.  I saw my friends, all scattered now, who worshipped a God of love and loved in return,  despite the terrible winter of discontent under which they lived in Horton, Michigan.
Here is Jesus.  Go and walk with him, for the path through Lent is a path of grace in the midst of the winter of our discontent.  Amen.