Paradise Found


“It has been a long, cold season of waiting for everyone,  everywhere, lately — waiting for jobs, waiting for the resurrection of the housing market, for any hints of thaw across these frozen months. Winter is supposed to be gone, but whatever is meant to follow hasn’t really arrived yet” (NYT, April 11, 2009).
So we wait. And for those of us who have jobs still, our waiting is a kind of resigned take-what-may-come attitude.  If the weather wants to keep on snowing, well, at least we have a warm place to go at the end of a day of work.  Many of us can slog through the tough economy and get by.  But many among us cannot.
An article in last week’s New York Times, described a different kind of waiting for some in New Jersey:

The men who hail from warmer climes had their hands jammed deep in the pockets of their jeans, sweatshirt hoods pulled up over their heads like monks’ cowls. Standing in their usual clusters around the train station, they measured the passing vehicles for signs that a day’s work might be beckoning from inside. But none were stopping.

These men who hail from warmer climates are immigrants, some documented, and some not. For thousands of immigrants across our country, nothing is stopping for them.  And yet, says Rigoberto from Honduras, “I will wait — there is always something.  It is always better here, even if you don’t work for a long time.” And indeed, for the first time a long time, the news for immigrants in our country is less bleak and more hopeful.  Janet Napolitano, from the Dept of Homeland Security is reviewing a several year old law called 287(g) which allows local law enforcement bodies to take into their own hands the arrest and detention of undocumented immigrants.  She does not like what she sees.  No surprise.  Without proper training and oversight, some local authorities have overstepped legal and civil rights bounds in their zealous efforts to rid their communities of people they call illegals.
This issue is not tangential to the Easter story. The other, the outsider, the stranger in a strange land, has long been the target of human scorn and derision.  The  scorn and derision about difference breeds a powerful sense of shame, of human self-worthlessness. When the sheriff of Maricopa County marched his detained immigrants from one jail cell to another under the heat of the midday sun, in striped prison uniforms and pink underwear, he was shaming — he was saying that if you are different skinned, if you speak a different language, not only are you breaking the law, you’re offending us by your presence.  We will not only punish you for your presence, we will make you feel really embarrassed to be different skinned and to have a different language than us.
But to this situation, Jesus says, that no one has a legitimate power to shame.  It is not within the bounds of decent human community to shame another and cast her out of the company of God and humanity.
The author of the gospel from which we read our Easter story this morning, thinks that for Jesus this is so central an idea, so important to his preaching and ministry, that it is the last story he tells before he moves to the narrative of Jesus’ betryal, arrest, crucifixion and resurrection.   In this  story of a group of migrant workers are standing around at the town center waiting for work. Some have waited all day before someone stops.  In Jesus’  story, however, even that one who waited all day, who was hired at the end of the work day, is paid a living wage.  This is not just a story with a happy ending, where the worker goes home after a disappointing single hour of work, and discovers a  job offer in it  in the mail.  Not a story of the way we do business as usual.  This is an unusual story of business dedicated to the idea that a community that really works, is one in which the principles of domination and control are challenged because  we all  do better when individuals can flourish, no matter their circumstances. When no matter our circumstances we can live free of shame and open to life.  Let us not read Jesus’ story of the payment of a full day’s wage to one who only worked an hour, literally.  No one will argue that this story is about paying people for no work.
Jesus’ stories are about life and death.  More specifically, his are stories about snatching life from the jaws of death.  They are about freeing the one shackled by shame and disillusionment, poverty and banishment, about breaking these bonds of death and breathing again. Resurrection, as it is prefigured by this story of the immigrant receiving the wages which give life, is an offer to be free of the institutions of death that have crept up and around us in order to keep us shackled to the old way;  free to do something about those shadows of death, that stalk us when the sun goes down.  Resurrection is another way to express what those first believers expressed so clearly even before Jesus dies — You are life!  You are God! You are the one! It is to recognize, afresh,  as though for the first time, the blessed assurance that our days and our efforts are not in vain, and that a great source of encouragement and love underscores our lives.
Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker are right — for most of the history of Western Christianity, Christians have tried to view Easter as an event that transcends human experience because it is a divine event dislocated from human time and space.  Easter, we have heard,  is an event that awaits us some time in the future after our deaths.   Shaped this way, we have disconnected life from full engagement in the present.  We have been a people treading time until the fulfillment of time.  In this way we have watched our beautiful plant spoiled by people who have learned not to care.  In this way we have erected towers of avarice and greed in the name of doing something to ease our longing.  And in this way we have shamed parts of the human family into standing around on the street corner with hands jammed deep within cold pockets, begging to clean our houses.
Some argue that this is not to the time to be dealing with immigration matters. Financial concerns are more important, they say. Jill Flores begs to differ.
Jill Flores is an American citizen married to Felix, an immigrant from Mexico who crossed the border illegally. Despite their happy life together for over 5 years, and despite Felix’s attempts to apply for legal status, and despite the fact the he and Jill have two children in their family, he has been denied citizenship. Now, Ms. Flores said, she fears that her husband will have to leave for Mexico and will not be permitted to return for many years.
In an interview, Felix Gutierrez rejected the idea that the timing is bad for an immigration debate. “There is never a wrong time for us,” he said. “Families are being divided and destroyed, and they need help now.”
“Do not be afraid,” concludes our story from Matthew’s account of Easter morning. The story might have you thinking that the angel commands Mary and Mary not to fear ghosts.  But if Brock and Parker are right, and if common sense prevails — the imperative not to fear has instead to do with shaping human communities after the fashion of grace. Do not be afraid, in other words, for the power of God is such that the HERE and NOW are redeemed and the possibilities are open to shatter the icy tomb of winter which those immigrants in New Jersey now know. Do not be afraid to believe in a creative power, here and now which can move us, nay, move tens of thousands of us to cry against the injustices of society. Do not be afraid to believe in a creative power within each human breast enabling us to break the bonds of personal pain and to know the hope of new tomorrows. Do not be afraid to embrace resurrection — for when we do it this way, when we live it this way, in the here and now.  It is paradise found.

On the Entry into Jerusalem

Within 24 hours the our country has suffered the tragedy of two mass killings.  Last night in Philadelphia, a man angry at the government and freshly out of work called police to his home and then opened fire.  And on Friday, in Binghamton, NY,  a man walked into an immigration center and sprayed bullets into the building’s occupants, killing thirteen.  He was himself an immigrant — tired of being an immigrant in an immigrant unfriendly land, frustrated by barriers of language. What is going on?
We all know the cry  — Hosanna!  Hosanna!  It’s the cry uttered by the people thronging the entry way to Jerusalem.  But these are not just any people.  By and large they are the people of the countryside.  Perhaps they themselves have not yet entered Jerusalem as unaccustomed as they are to the city life.  And as unwelcome.  You see a good many of those people gathered on the outskirts of town where there because that’s where they’ve been banished too.  They are not good enough to be inside where the temple lies in all its clean and holy splendor.  They are sick.  They are too poor to pay the temple tax. They are outsiders. They are immigrants, they are the unemployed.  These were people shamed out of society and turned into expendables.
So, while we, who have re-enacted this scene on Palm Sunday for so many years with a parade of palms,  may carry on, shouting Hosanna! with ticker-tape-parade-like enthusiasm for the hero Jesus, those who first cried it did so with a different slant, with a more plaintive nuance.  They did so, understanding the Hebrew from which that word is derived.  In fact the words are two different Hebrew words joined in the spur of the moment: hosha and na. Hosha means to help and na means please.  These outcasts and expendables were shouting or crying, “Help us, please!”
It seems important to me that we understand this about these people, who they are and what they are saying, lest we get caught up in a confusion that we are only able to resolve by choking on the theological bone of the inevitability of Jesus’ execution because the salvation which the all-powerful God had worked out for the world only functions when there is an exchange of life for sin — Jesus’ life for our sin.  If we are not careful to identify just who these people are and what they were saying, we easily find ourselves denying them and in the processes denying truth and turning justice into a fools game and forgiveness into a hard rod.
This day, Palm Sunday, is no day to get complacent about our tradition.  It is no day to simply wave palms and feel good because our hero, Jesus has arrived to save the day.  It IS a call for our own entry into a kind of world that we so easily and so often forget.  The world of the unemployed, the world of the working poor, the world of the isolated immigrant. The world of the shamed.
Our entry begins, in the words of Christopher Fry, with the longest stride of soul we ever took.  Our entry into Jerusalem is no walk in the park,  but rather a long stride of soul into a world of shame which has been,  like it or not, part of our own creating.  We ask what’s going on?  But don’t we already know?
Fry words in “A Sleep of Prisoners,”  should shake us from the complacency of our simple question and move us to engagement:

“The enterprise we are engaged in is exploration into God.  What are you making for?  It takes so many thousand years to wake, but will you wake for pity’s sake!”

You know, in the gospel of Mark, Jesus begins his whole enterprise, his life of service to a calling which ineluctably brought him to this moment of engagement in Jerusalem with one simple word — metanoia.  It’s not love, although the concept implies it.  It’s not forgiveness or grace, though without forgiveness and grace, metanoia is meaningless.  We translated that little word as repent.  But it means literally a change of mind.  In the setting of the gospel, it means to wake up to the that which has been always there, to that root of love and basic confidence to which we bear witness simply by rising again each day and smiling at our partner or our neighbor in the morning.  Metanoia means to realize anew the possibilities that are god-like because they are god given — in our communion of thinking, speaking and acting in God’s way, and not in the way of the fear-filled world, apprehensive about community and nervous of the other.  Metanoia should be the church’s word for the church should be this — a home for adventures on the way to stop before entry into the troubles of the world, a place for brothers and sisters of different kinds to be encouraged in their walk with God.
But let us not lose sight that this walk has so often been a walk down the same old path.  One poem that you’ll not hear me read willingly is that poem about the path along the beach with two sets of footprints.  You know the story — the pilgrim is consternated to discover that at the hardest moments of his life there is only one set.  Jesus has apparently deserted him.  The poem’s putative insight is that despite his complaining, the single set of footprints through the troubled times are Jesus’ carrying him.
This is not a palm Sunday message.
Several years ago, when AIDS was a relatively new and more frightening disease than it is now, if that’s possible, many churches  in their own exploration into God, proclaimed that Jesus Christ has AIDS.  Perhaps that seems a bit blasphemous.  But here is a church whose God is in the trenches with us.  Who is not above change and who cannot be all-powerful but whose power is precisely in the kind of vulnerability that can only be if love is really to be love.
William Slone Coffin, speaking at one point about the church, speaks strong words against it for its refusal to explore this different God and to put aside our dreams of the Messiah come to save us by force of might.  He could have been speaking about the requirement of engagement which is the subtext for Palm Sunday.

Too many Christians seek an all-powerful God so that we might be weak when God Himself in Christ became weak that we might be strong.  Still others — fundamentalists, for example — longing to be spared the insecurity of uncertainty, engage in what psychiatrists call “premature closure.”  They misuse faith as a substitute for thought, when faith, in fact is what makes good thinking possible.  Still other church members suffer defeat at the hands of the world.  But instead of turning their defeat into the occasion for the victory God always had in mind fo rthem, they try to compensate for their defeat by seizing turf in the church and holding onto it for dear life.

If we could let go of that turf.  If we could let go of the old church creed that we’ve always thought about it this way, and we’ve never thought about it that way — and I’m not saying that we are always like that — but if this walk into Jerusalem, this entry, could be an entry into fearlessness before the other, fearlessness before the foreign, fearlessness before the immigrant — then we could really make for a new world, for a paradise where the four streams that flow from it are the streams of hope and love, of mercy and of a humble gracious walk together.  Let us walk now, for pity’s sake.  Amen.

Totus Tuus

One of the most curious incidents in the passion, whose story we are beginning to tell again in the days and weeks before Easter, is the story recorded in John:

And that is what the soldiers did. Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. 26When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” 27Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home. – John 19:25-27

It is curious for all sorts of reasons.  In John’s gospel there is no nativity.  So no mention of Mary until the second chapter where she is the one who nags Jesus about the wine having run out at the wedding party.  Whether she nags him or not is a question.  Jesus’ response, “Woman, you don’t know what your talking about,” is not a friendly, intimate, rejoinder.
Perhaps, I suppose, because of the dearth of references to Mary, because of the relatively unimportant role the gospels assign her, and because of the Protestant iconoclastic tradition, we protestants have not paid much attention to Mary.
And, I think likely that many of us having, recited for so long the Nicene and Apostle’s creed which contains that line in it about believing in “Jesus Christ .  . . conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary,” have simply said, Marianism is relic from a past day.  We have been uncomfortable too, with the tradition of veneration which has swirled around Mary, given what we take the essence of Christian faith to be about: namely that in the encounter with Jesus (be that in the tradition, or in the startling encounter of grace in the stranger) God is somehow known again.  We call ourselves Christians, not Marianists, for this reason.
But might there not be some good reason to think theologically about Mary and about other more minor characters in the Gospels, as somehow also re-presenting the reality of God to us?  I’m not advocating a veneration of Mary, just as I would argue that Jesus’ words about not worshipping him, ought to be taken seriously.  But I do wonder if Leonardo Boff, who wrote a liberation theology book on Mary back in 1979, offers good advice for Protestants who have for so long ignored Mary, and for Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox as well, who have venerated her.  He writes:

Christian virginity does not mean only keeping oneself for God.  Before all else, Christian celibacy is a mission to others . . . Hence its maternal character.  It engenders works of care and service. . . Mary is also our model for the basic attitude that we all ought to have before God, the only attitude worthy of a creature: openness and total acceptance.  The Maternal Face of God (Harper & Row Publishers: San Francisco) 1979. Translated by Barr & Diercksmeier, p. 151.

There is, I believe, something for us in the tradition of Mary.  And just like in our tradition of Jesus — we will not, nor cannot take it literally.  Christian texts and Christian traditions are, of course, meant to be a grounding of our tradition.  But that grounding is incomplete, and I would argue wrong therefore, unless the witness it offers be reflected in a life that witnesses to it by stating, in our own words, what we ought to think, say and do, if we are to bear it truthfully.
I want to play one of the hundreds of pieces of music dedicated to Mary this afternoon.  It’s a piece written by a relatively obscure composer from Poland, Henryk Gorecki.  He wrote this music in honor of Pope John Paul II’s third visit to Poland, their shared homeland.  It’s a chorus, unaccompanied, and is called Totus Tuus, which was Pople John Paull II’s expression of his devotion to Mary, translated from the Latin, means totally yours.  I want to play it not because I think that that is a good literally description of anyone’s relation to anyone, but because it describes, in music better than in words, the total openness of thought and integrity between the inner and the outer person that we offer not just to God, but to life itself.
Play the music now.

Friendship

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found this story about Jesus and Peter troublesome.  Maybe that’s why its a Lenten reading — none of this stuff as we approach the execution of Jesus is easy reading.    But for Jesus to cut down someone who seems to be his best friend with the words, “Get behind me, Satan!” has always seemed a bit harsh.
That’s the treatment, though that Peter received after expressing his concern that Jesus was heading into dangerous territory.  Did he realize how negative he was being and didn’t he know that nobody likes seriousness of purpose, that we all prefer our religion lightly? I grew up thinking that Jesus probably was angry at Peter and bellowed those infamous words, “Get behind me, Satan!”  But the more I’ve thought about this lately, the more it seems he must have spoken to him a bit more quietly, as a friend to another.
Remembering that the gospels were never intended to be an historical account of things that happened, but a theological retelling of the meaning of Jesus, it seems a more appropriate to read the phrase with a certain loving inflection. “Get . . . ”  Less a rebuke than a reminder of promises made.  Jesus and Peter had the kind of friendship that allowed each other argue over what those promises meant and to try to set each other straight.
In confirmation class last week, we spent some time talking about the meaning of sacraments in the church.  We began simply by noting that a sacrament was somehow related to the word sacred.  Using the word sacred as I did last week, as a an experience of the holy which is judged to lead us to higher ground we could see that church life is sacramental in all sorts of moments when the grace of God is seen in the blessings of humans to humans, in acts of justice and mercy.  I then explained that in the UCC, we single out two different liturgical moments that are to be understood purely in sacramental terms, baptism and Lord’s Supper.
In talking about baptism, I mentioned that a popular understanding of the dipping of a child in water, if I can judge from phone calls I get about it, is that it effects some kind of change in the child, without which he or she is subject to bad things.  To me that’s more about magic than about religion.  So what makes the dipping of a child in water sacramental?
I then passed around copies of the questions that we ask of parents who are having their baby baptised. We read them and someone asked me how can you tell if their lying?  And that’s when we started getting close to the nub of the issue.  I wasn’t able to quote Plato exactly — but we did seem to understand at the end of the conversation that just this is what is sacramental.  The entire human world is constructed upon the philosophic notion that unless a promise actually be a promise, things break down and human communities suffer.  Ultimately What we call human transformation, the transition from fearful existence to free existence, from being confined by our brokenness and fragmentariness, to being catapulted past it to a broader community of connection and continuity is not just a matter of getting the tradition understood correctly, ie., being properly baptised, but of living — of thinking and acting and speaking in accord with some kind of basic promise about life that we all  make and that lies at the root of our laws as well as our religion.
I am not advocating tossing tradition out.  I am however trying to say that there comes a responsibility with those who would use tradition, as we do who read scripture and baptise children,to not only understand accurately what Christians have said and done in the past, but to actually bear to actually bear  witness to that tradition by stating what what we ought to think, say and do, if we are to bear it truthfully.  The basic human commitment to live as reflective beings in the search for what is best for us and our communities constitutes what I mean by the the promise as the cornerstone upon which society is built.
If we were to translate this thinking of what we ought to say, think and do, into the abstract notion of friendship, we begin to see that  Peter and Jesus, as friends, incarnated something that many of our modern friendships lack, but which our most treasured ones know.  Friendship entails judgement.
We struggle a bit in our house with our children trying to keep from the language of “my best friend.”  Part of our uncomfortability as parents with the language of best friend, for a 3rd grader, has to do with with the level of maturity required to call someone a best friend, and cocnern with the devaluation of  that phrase when used lightly.  How often do we hear people speaking of best friends in a kind of superficial, non-judgemental way.  “I can tell him anything and he totally gets it.”  The point is that anyone can be that kind of friend  What can be easier than hearing and not being heard in return?  Is love love when it cannot judge, or does love also care enough to engage in the struggle to seek the truth through hard questions, and occasionally to rebuke?
Jorgen Moltman, a contemporary German theologian, given usually to high falutin language wrote in one of his clearer moments, “One can rely on a friend.  As a friend, one is a person for other people to rely on.  A friend remains a friend, even in disaster, even in guilt.”  We agree here with Plato that one who cannot hold promises, that one who is intemperate and unrestrained, that one for whom each individual she befriends is a best friend, is a friend neither of God nor man.
Now here we are talking about metaphysics, and not psychology.  Here we are trying to get at what is proper for human life because it is proper and true for God.  And when we are talking about God, we could just as well use a term like Paul Tillich did, the one with whom at rock bottom we are concerned — that is our ultimate concern.  Or, as I prefer, the comprehensive reality, the one of whom to be alive at all, is to be related.
The difference between my comprehensive reality and Tillich’s ultimate concern, is that with Tillich’s idea there is no necessary sense of relatedness.  For Tillich, as for much of Classical Christian theology, God is ultimately above the being friend.  God is the solitary one, influences a world but not at all influenced by it.  Aristotle, to his credit noted that this meant that God could not know the world, while Plato, generally did not understand this, although he understood the to be a friend required adherence to the highest order of things.  Only one philosopher that I know of has observed the irony of this fact.   He says, “Oddly enough, though Plato wrote in dialogue form, he (and, still more, many of those influenced by him) failed adequately to appreciate what a good model of the general nature of reality that form is.  It will not do to reason as though to speak and be heard are noble, while to listen and hear are not.”  Much of our tradition, sadly has rendered this of God — God is the one who speaks and is heard.  But to listen and hear and absorb that hearing in changed being, is denied God.
I mention all of this because I am convinced that an appropriate and credible model for our human relationships must be like unto the kind of being God must be — that is truly influenced by the world God is so deeply concerned about.  For love to be love, God must be more than the immutable stranger, aloof and otiose — God must be, as Plato put it in our reading today, capable of communion, for without that capacity — the which is of ultimate concern turns out to be less that ultimate.
Jesus did not choose his friends from a pool of perfect candidates for discipleship.  These were a rag-tag bunch, and their stories are often stories of them not getting it — of their sheer and utter confusion over the kind of related, personal God Jesus was revealing.  For so long God had chosen only the best (ie, the riches, that healthiest, the ones in charge) with which to be associated.  Certainly not the fisherman nor the Samaritan.  Certainly not the welfare widow nor the AIDS patient.
But Jesus’ God cast judgment upon the structures of power that had for so long defined who was in or out. Jesus revealed a God who was no less perfect because also personal.  As people encountered Jesus, the encountered a God who could transform their lives because God was both the eternal power of love, of friendship, by which alone these ideas make sense, and the real risk of being actually involved in human lives for the sake of these ideals.  It is for this reason, that the gospel writer included in this little dialogue between friends the stern judgment that one must take up one’s cross in order to follow Jesus.  To be a friend is of a different order than to talk about friendship — it requires that one think and act and do in accord with its ideals.
Friendship, as a measure of divine judgment for the good of heaven and earth and gods and men, as Plato put it, comes with a price.  Peter surely rebuked himself after what he said to Jesus.  But he nevertheless went on to become the hero of the church — the rock, as Jesus put it, upon which the future of the community would be built.  A rock prepared and shaped by a friendship that was not without its crosses and burdens.
One of life’s most treasured gifts is the blessing of a friend who cares enough to argue, and to call each other to accounting.  <!– @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>Because God is both the very idea of friendship, in the timeless and unchanging nature which God must be to be God, and the actual friend who cares about who we are and what we do and remembers us for it, we too can found our relationships, not in the shallow waters of hearing but of not being heard, but in the context of the cross which reminds us that our promise to one another runs deeper than the threats which stand in the way of justice. Amen.

Maundy Thursday

Christians are those who remember the story of Jesus within the community of the church, in and for their own time and in their own lives. — Nicola Sleejudas-iscariot1
Join us on Holy Thursday for our own remembering of Jesus and Jesus’ victory, even in death.  We will share a potluck meal together, and theologically enact the events of that night.  We will gather for worship in the dining room at 6:00, share a ritual meal together and witness a play, reenacting that night.
When Jesus gathered his disciples together to celebrate the feast of the Passover in Jerusalem on the  fateful weekend of his arrest and execution, he did so following a tradition that has had Jews remembering, around a ritual meal, their deliverance out of Egypt.  It is hard for us moderns to understand what this means exactly, but the gathering of family around the Seder meal was not just a remembering but an actual participation in, the exodus.  As the family recited the passages from the Haggadah, they spoke with urgency in their voices because they were actually preparing to leave.  When the ate bread, they ate unleavened bread because they had no time.  What is interesting, then, about these seder meals is that the time/space continuum is somehow collapsed and the events of the past are now witnessed firsthand.  In a second century liturgical handbook, the families were instructed: “In each generation, you shall regard yourself as if you personally had been taken out of Egypt.”
When Jesus gathered his disciples together in that upper room, he implied that they should continue doing this, but that now they should understand their gathering to be an expression of the victory of Jesus against imperial forces —  forces that would act in unjust ways in an attempt to protect and perpetuate their power.  Those forces, he had already testified in word and deed, would be impotent to the power of love and their unjust actions would be met with a continued confidence in a life lived with God.
Our play this night ends with this line from Mary Magdalene: “I will never betray his truth.  Maybe that’s what love is.”
Please join us for a evening of fellowship and worship in a new key.