Dreams of Heaven

In the Name of the living God, the Alpha and the Omega, the One who was, who is, and who is to come. Amen.

After all of the questions about evil and sin in the world, the second most common questions on our parish survey of “the one thing that I would ask God, if I could ask just one thing,” have to do with heaven:

Am I going to heaven?

Please describe Heaven to me. I hope it’s as glorious as I imagine!

Is Heaven real?

Will my atheist friend go to heaven?

What is it like after death?

Will our pets be with us in heaven?

We all wonder about heaven at some point in our lives. As children, we are curious; later, after experiencing the heart-wrenching separation of death or the bone-breaking pain of terminal illness, we long to join those whom we have lost, or to find a place where death and pain and weeping will be no more. Thoughts of heaven can provide a consoling and compensatory contrast to suffering here on earth: Just think of the generations of American slaves yearning in song for freedom “over Jordan.”

Even our otherwise secular culture these days seems to hold on to an interest in heaven. Many of us have devoured at least one of those books written by someone who has died and been brought back to life through modern medicine, books that almost universally describe a tunnel of light, a sense of watching one’s own body in the hospital room from a perch in a ceiling corner, and an all-pervasive feeling of Love. If you are like me, such accounts provide some reassurance, at least about the experience of death itself. However, there have also been hosts of TV shows and movies about angels or about our longing for deceased loved ones. These shows have colored our modern American cultural understanding of what heaven is supposed to be, coloring it, perhaps, more than the Scriptures do. In the 1998 film “What Dreams May Come,” for example, Robin Williams and his wife and children roam around in a heaven and hell painted entirely by their own individual imaginations, a heaven and hell that perhaps make psychological sense, but—and this is what really got to me—a heaven and hell devoid of God! “Where is God?” asks Robin Williams’ character after looking around. “Oh, God is out there somewhere, watching,” answers another resurrected character with a shrug. And throughout the whole movie, all about the afterlife, God never appears. And not surprisingly, people are just as lost and full of longing in heaven as they are on earth.

While our dreams of heaven tend to be about a longing for changeless happiness, a safe haven from earthly pain, and the fulfillment of the individual soul, the Bible presents for us quite a different dream. Would you be surprised to learn, for example, that our Christian tradition does not include belief in the “immortality of the soul,” in which a spark of “selfhood” separates from the body after death to blend into the unchangeable Oneness of God? That is Greek philosophy, not orthodox Christianity. Are you ever tempted by the logic of reincarnation? That comes from Hinduism and is not part of our Christian belief. Moreover, would you be surprised to learn that our Scriptures do not say that individuals are immediately resurrected in their bodies as they die? Instead, the Bible talks about a common resurrection of the dead, everyone arising at once, a more general kind of validation of the creation of bodies and of the physical world in which we now live.

Let’s us turn to our reading from Revelation. First of all, our text describes God’s presence in a transformed Creation, not in a heavenly realm that is totally divorced from an incomplete, suffering world. Eugene Peterson, in Reversed Thunder, his excellent book on Revelation, points out that, while in English we distinguish between “sky,” the cloudy realm where airplanes fly, and “heaven,” the invisible realm of the afterlife, in both Greek and Hebrew, there is just one word for both sky and heaven. In Greek and Hebrew, “heaven” is ambiguous: it can refer to the skies above us or the place we go when we die.[1] When the author of Revelation sees a “new heaven” and a “new earth,” he is not just seeing sky and land, or even future heaven and present earth, he is seeing the totality of all things “seen and unseen,” God’s total creation. What God is making new is not just the material creation and not just the realm of the afterlife, but the totality of the universe is being transformed; the things that we know, and the things that are beyond us are all being changed. Unlike the God in the Robin Williams movie, our Christian God didn’t just make the world once upon a time and sit back to watch; God is continually making and remaking us and all that surrounds us, making all things new, pouring Himself out into the Creation that He loves, somehow creating life from death, over and over and over again. In this new Creation, the only difference is that the chaos of the sea is banished; the dark threat of non-being is removed.

Note also that God’s new creation comes in the form of a city, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of the heavens. Now, we do joke about the “pearly gates,” but do you really think about heaven as a city? I love cities, and Jerusalem is a beautiful city and a very holy city, but my own metaphor for heaven, it is not. It is full of mosques and synagogues and churches, but it is also full of soldiers toting big guns. Jerusalem—or any of our human crime-filled, poverty-ridden, over-crowded cities—a pure, virgin bride adorned for her husband?! Jerusalem—or any of our polluted, concrete-covered cities—the eternal dwelling-place of God?! Shouldn’t heaven instead be a green pasture filled with flowers and white, gentle sheep? Shouldn’t it be like the Garden of Eden, with crystal clear streams bubbling over glistening stones, with shady glens, and the fresh scent of pine needles?

          Writes Peterson, “Many people want to go to heaven the way they want to go to Florida. They think the weather will be an improvement and the people decent.” By presenting us with a city, a conglomeration of human beings, a mix of all that is good and bad in human civilization, God shows us that “we enter heaven not by escaping what we don’t like, but by the sanctification of the place in which God has placed us.”[2] Let that sink in for a moment. Both the author of Revelation and the Old Testament writers find heaven in continuity with our history. We always look for an escape in God, an escape from humdrum daily life, an escape from the people who annoy us or ignore us, but God keeps showing us that we find God wherever we are, if we let ourselves be transformed. Kathleen Norris tells the true story of a woman who tries to comfort her dying mother by saying, “in heaven, everyone we love is there.” The wise mother, however, replies, “No, in heaven I will love everyone who’s there.”[3] It’s not about the place; it’s about the transformation.

          The theme of God dwelling with us in our passage from Revelation should sound very familiar to us Christians. In what other Bible passage, besides this one, do the heavens open up with a loud voice from God? At the baptism of Jesus in the river Jordan, of course.  Mark writes, “And just as [Jesus] was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”[4] Just as God announces God’s immanent presence among us in Jesus, God once again announces God’s immanent presence among us in the New Creation. The God who is with us in the human flesh of Jesus of Nazareth is the God who makes God’s home “among mortals.” The God who brings new life in Jesus Christ is the God who “makes all things new.” The God who conquers Death after being put to death on the Cross by the powers of the City is the God who gives us a new, divine City in which to dwell with one another.

          If we want to dream about heaven, then, it needs to be a dream rooted in our present lives, a dream rooted in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and a dream rooted in this world that God is still making. When I indulge in trying to imagine heaven, I actually find comfort in the mysteries of modern physics. I think of parallel universes, of the relativity of time and space, of dead stars that still shine in the heavens and black holes that devour matter, and I add heaven, too, as  another dynamic and yet mysterious dimension of God’s ongoing creation: as God’s creative, generative presence with us “on earth, as it is in heaven,” but also, somehow, for eternity. Is heaven a real place? It’s certainly not something that I can locate on a map of the cosmos. Will my loved ones be there, my first puppy, a beloved cat? I think that all of our earthly reality will be there, because all of creation comes from God, rests in God, and is part of God’s memory. I don’t remember my life in the womb, but God does. I am the same person that I was then, with the same DNA, the same relatives, the same future. In God, there is continuity between my life now and my life before birth. In God, assures the Book of Revelation, we will live in that same faithful, loving continuity in the world to come.

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[1] Eugene H. Peterson, Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination  (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), 169.

[2] Ibid., 174.

[3] Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 367.

[4] Mark 1:10-11.

Caught In Between

Do you remember when I asked you on Palm Sunday for your “one question to God,” questions that I promised to preach on each week after Easter? I want to thank you for your wonderful participation, and I will print all of the questions in the May Words so that you can think about them along with me. Today’s readings invite me to address a set of questions that greatly moved me as I read them, deeply spiritual and painfully personal questions: “Why can’t I really know in my heart how much God loves me?” “How do I keep a loving heart?” “Why do I feel so incompetent?” In other words, “How can I live in the world of Easter and in the world of sin and death at the same time?” “How does Jesus’ resurrection affect my regular, everyday life?” Simon Peter and the disciples help us to understand that we are not alone in this struggle, and they provide us with a story that can become our guide.

Have you ever been away to summer camp perhaps, or to a far-away country, where life looks and feels so different, that it is almost impossible to remember what your home is like when you are there and almost impossible to remember that place when you are home? For me, my life in Europe fades to flat picture-postcards while I am in America, but when I go back to Europe for a vacation, that world pops back into reality, as if by magic, and it is my life in Louisville that seeps into shades of misty gray. It is as if both places cannot exist at the same time. My memory is just somehow insufficient to capture such different worlds at once.  I believe that is how Simon Peter and the disciples must have felt right after Jesus’ crucifixion—as if their lives with Jesus had never existed, as if they were back where they started, cut off from God and each other, as if both realities couldn’t exist at the same time.

In our Gospel reading, the disciples have been thrust from their world with Jesus back into the world of their former lives—fishing in Galilee. Their memories of their time with Jesus probably seem unreal. Their messiah has been crucified, defeated by the Roman powers, and the systems of meaning that they built while listening to Jesus’ teaching have suddenly come toppling down under the shadow of the cross. To top it off, Simon Peter now not only drifts aimlessly on the Sea in which he once found purpose and livelihood; he must be especially ravaged by guilt. Whenever he thinks fondly of Jesus--his friend, his Lord--he must remember his own betrayal of Jesus, the crowing of the rooster, and the acrid smell of the charcoal fire that was burning in the courtyard where he denied being a follower of Jesus, not once, but three times. Having rushed to shore to meet Jesus, Simon Peter encounters that dreaded fire once again. And he is no longer called “Simon Peter,” the Rock on whom Jesus will build his church. Jesus calls him, “Simon son of John,” the unknown, insignificant fisherman whom Jesus met at the beginning of his ministry. Jesus may be raised from the dead, but Simon Peter still wanders in that empty space in between our everyday world and our “world with God,” a space filled with regrets and failures.

But look at what Jesus does: He invites Simon to join him in his reality—in his new Easter reality—by feeding him and by giving Simon a chance to repent, to undo his cowardly act. Just as Simon denied Jesus three times--three times, Jesus asks Simon if he loves him. Three times, Simon says that he does. Then three times, Jesus offers Simon his new identity: as one who feeds and tends Jesus’ sheep, one who feeds and tends Jesus’ people, and thus feeds and tends Jesus. Resurrection, as Rowan Williams points out, is not only a raising of Jesus’ past identity but also a raising of the past identities of those who have been with him.[1] The Good News for us, we who suffer inadequacy and insecurity, is that Jesus, the victim who loves instead of condemning, invites us into a new world of meaning and forgiveness as he raises us up with him. Being raised with him, being brought into his new reality, we are no longer forced to choose between distant and opposite shores.

       So how exactly does this work? First, we recognize Jesus in a miraculous abundance of life around us. For the disciples, there is suddenly a huge catch of fish, yet their nets don’t break under the load. In that moment of abundance, the disciples know that Jesus is present with them. We, too, are invited to grasp the abundance of the risen Christ in fleeting yet powerful, singular moments: in a satisfying abundance of love that washes over us-- hugs and kisses, cards full of well-wishes, the company of friends. Or we grasp it in a sudden abundance of grace that carries us through a trial—forgiveness that we don’t deserve, meals brought to us when we are sick, debts forgiven. We even grasp it in the breath-taking abundance of beauty in nature—a sunset, a field of spring flowers, dogwood trees bent over with blossoms. God is always present in glorious abundance. “God’s love” in general is hard to grasp, but we can’t deny the momentary weight of it in our hands, like a net full of fish.

Secondly, like Simon Peter, we might need to jump in and swim before the two realities can be bridged. Commentators scratch their heads over Simon Peter being naked and then getting dressed to jump into the sea. But Raymond Brown points out that the Greek phrase can mean that Simon Peter just belted up his fisherman’s smock so that it would not impede his swimming as he rushed to get to Jesus.[2] Simon Peter leaves the nets full of fish; he leaves the boats—all he wants is to get back to Jesus’ world. When we see the risen Christ, we are compelled to tie up whatever gets in our way, and leap. Yes, there is always leaping involved, and we aren’t usually able to push some kind of magic pause button while we ponder the risks.

Thirdly, Peter and the disciples eat with this Jesus who appears to them. They allow him to feed them breakfast, just as he fed them before his death, all those many times. The meal on the beach is of course the Eucharist, the same meal that Jesus offers us today. Each time we share in the Eucharist, we, like Simon Peter, put one foot into the flat, shadowy world of guilt and inadequacy, as we partake of his body and blood that was given for us. Yet at the same time, we are restored by the forgiveness of the One whom we have condemned. The Easter community is both guilty and restored as it gathers in the name of the one who is both crucified and raised. The Eucharist is an activity that opens up the space between our world and the Easter world and holds them both together. As we share the bread and the cup, we enter a place in which that strange disjunction between two worlds is bridged, a place in which the old comes together with the new, in which the world that killed Jesus meets the world filled with Jesus.

Finally, once we have been fed, Jesus asks us, as he asks Simon Peter, to feed his sheep, to tend the people of God. They are not our sheep to do with as we would like; they are not somebody else’s sheep for us to ignore, but they are God’s sheep, and our purpose, our meaning in this post-Easter world, is to care for them. The way to keep a loving heart is to feed God’s sheep. Our new identity is to follow Jesus—to follow him in his self-giving love for others, no matter where it leads.

The young Barbara Brown Taylor, tortured by a sense of vocation that she didn’t understand, was caught once in a place of meaninglessness and lack of purpose. She kept asking and asking God what she was supposed to do with her life, and all that she heard back was silence. But then one night, she heard God’s voice:  “[Do] [a]nything that pleases you,” God said to her. “And belong to me.”[3] It doesn’t matter where our wanderings take us in this ordinary world—whether we are fishermen or priests or teachers or lawyers or moms or scientists, when we are raised with Christ into his post-Easter reality, then we belong to him. In Christ, our ordinary lives are not tossed aside but are sanctified; our memories are not erased but are cleared of guilt; and we are made whole to follow Christ wherever he may lead us. Just like Europe will exist across the Atlantic, whether I am feeling disconnected from it or whether it has been momentarily made present by a phone call from an old friend, our new life and wholeness in Christ exists beneath our doubts and lapses, reemerging as we feed and are fed.

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[1] Rowan Williams, Resurrection (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2002), 35.

[2] Raymond Brown, The  Gospel According to John, XIII-XXI, (The Anchor Yale Bible; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 1072.

[3] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 110.

Remembering to Remember

 

Once upon a time during Holy Week, I was sitting in a meeting with our parish leaders, trying to figure out how to solve pressing church problems like fixing the broken lights in the sanctuary ceiling and convincing somebody to serve lemonade on Easter, when a bunch of kids from the Preschool rushed into the office, all talking at once. “Rev. Anne, Rev. Anne,” they cried, “the ‘Alleluia Box’ blew up and all of the Alleluia’s are gone!”

          “What?” I exclaimed, with a bit of impatience, as Vestry members all looked down at their watches. I knew that I am in control of that Alleluia box game; I am the one who locks up the word “alleluia” during Lent and frees it on Easter. It is a fun game, but I knew that the box wouldn’t really blow up. Goodness, kids’ imaginations!  But the kids were all in an uproar, so excited, all talking at once.

“It’s true, we saw it, we saw it!” they cried, when I didn’t react. “It’s just like you told us,” offered one little girl patiently, the way you have to talk to clueless grownups. “You said last week in chapel that the box would open and that all the alleluias would come out. Well, they must have come out and then flown away, because they’re all gone!”

          “OK,” I said, trying to humor the kids. “You better go back to your classroom. Your teacher is probably worried about you. We have to finish this meeting, but I’ll check on it later. You see, it’s not Easter yet. Jesus isn’t alive yet. So the alleluias must still be in the box. It’s OK.”

          The kids trooped away dutifully, with only a faint trace of disappointment on their still glowing faces. They knew what they had seen. They remembered the Easter story that I told them in chapel. The Vestry and I turned back to our meeting. Only one vestry member got up from the table. “I’m just going to go see what the kids are talking about,” he said, and dashed off.

          That’s how Luke tells the story of the Resurrection in today’s Gospel, isn’t it? A group of women, with the business of preparing a body for burial, are surprised to find an empty tomb and are told by angelic witnesses that Christ is risen. They run to the rest of the disciples, full of wonder and excitement, and their testimony is dismissed as a gullible flight of fancy. After all, in the first century, women had about as much credibility as witnesses as preschoolers do today.

          Just like Jesus’ disciples, we have the Story. We read it in Scripture; we recite it every week in the Creed: Christ is risen. God is victorious. Death is vanquished. Sin is forgiven. From that first Easter on, we live in a new creation. We are a new creation. We might say that we believe this story. We might try to believe it. But then we mostly go on about our lives as if none of it were true. We spend our days in meetings worrying about broken lights and lemonade. We spend our nights worrying about death or loss or failure. We live as if gathering enough security and enough possessions is going to make everything all right. Even at Easter, we get caught up in brunch menus and reservations, in decorating the church, in getting the kids or grandkids cleaned up for the photo ops. “Christ is risen!” we proclaim, yet it often feels like a game that we are playing, a game like locking up and freeing the alleluias. All of our preparation is for death, like the women taking spices to the tomb to anoint Jesus for burial. We don’t really expect an explosion of life, do we? We don’t expect that alleluia box to blow up. We don’t expect to see Christ. We don’t expect the world to change overnight. We’re pretty good at showing up at the tomb, but, like the women, even though we know what Jesus has told us, we forget to remember; we come expecting not life, but death. I was struck just this week by two examples in my own life.

          There was a video floating around Facebook that charmed me during Lent. It was an ad, actually, for the work of the Anti-Defamation League. Called, “Imagine a World Without Hate,” it portrays people picking up newspapers dated into the future. The camera zooms in on the front page headlines of those papers, which say things like: “Martin Luther King, Jr. Champions Immigration Reform,” accompanied by a photo of the Civil Rights leader with grey hair. “Anne Frank Wins Nobel Prize for Twelfth Novel,” reads another headline. “Matthew Shepard Leads Anti-Bullying Coalition,” reads another. “Yitzhak Rabin Brings Two Decades of Israeli-Palestinian Peace.” After showing what could have been, if all of the hope and promise present in these leaders had not been wiped out by violence, the video ends with the phrase, “If we all stood up to bigotry, we could change history.”[1]

          I was moved by this video, really moved. It made me think. What if all of these people had lived, rather than being assassinated or murdered? How would the world be changed for the better? What wonderful things would they have done for the world? But then, as Easter approached, I started thinking about Jesus. Wait, I thought, Jesus wanted to end oppression and injustice. Jesus healed the sick and confronted the powers and principalities. But we of course don’t ask, “What if Jesus had not been crucified? What amazing good would he have done if he had not died on the Cross?”

          I’m embarrassed to admit that it took me awhile to figure out the difference. I’m embarrassed to admit that I had forgotten what the Resurrection really means. There is a difference in trying to live lives that imitate Jesus and follow his teaching and in trying to live in a creation that has already been made new. It’s not “Jesus stood up to bigotry, so we should, too.” It’s not wishing for what wonders “could have been, if only we had behaved.” It’s not girding up our loins and facing death with courage. Living as an Easter Christian involves trusting that the real victory at the end of Jesus’ story colors all of existence, that the glimpse of abundant life seen in the teaching of Martin Luther King, Jr. is an unveiling of a corner of the new creation that already exists in the risen Christ, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of the hatred that killed Anne Frank and Matthew Shepard have already been defeated, if only we would quit reaching down into the old darkness and pulling them out of the pit. Sure, we need to stand up to bigotry, but not with the illusion that we can defeat it by ourselves. We love like Jesus loved because love has already won the fight.  

A seminary classmate of mine who is now rector of Calvary Church in Memphis alerted his congregation on Friday to a KKK rally that was going to happen across the street from their downtown parish right before their Holy Saturday Easter Vigil service. His advice was to meet the “death” across the street with “holy, intentional silence.” “Let Saturday's rally be the last breath of a group who[se] influence has vanished, gasped in the silence of an empty street,” he wrote.[2] Christ is risen. Bigotry can no longer win. Christ’s victory shines backwards into a KKK rally that is doomed to failure, bound only for extinction, no matter how loud the Klan shouts, no matter how many gather there. The tomb is empty. The only life is in the Light of Christ across the street at Calvary. The alleluia box is empty, and I am not in control.

          Later this week I went to visit the dying family member of a parishioner. I went into the hospice care unit with my prayer book and my holy oil, looking for death. I found an elderly lady whose body had just about almost shut down. It was riddled with cancer, almost visibly decomposing. I was there to prepare the family for death, to prepare the suffering grandmother for dying. I knew that in a few days it would be Easter. I knew that Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life, and the one who believes in me will never die.” I knew the Good News. But I was still preparing for death. What I found, however, was life. This dying woman was wrapped in a cloak of peace. “I’m not in pain,” she said, smiling the same patient, kind smile as the preschoolers in my office. “I’m not afraid.” But it was when I looked into her eyes that I understood. This grandmother’s pale blue eyes twinkled with life, with joyful life. You could light a thousand Easter fires from the strong life in those eyes. It was as if there were little angels in her eyes glittering and saying to me, “There is no death here. Christ is risen. Go and tell the others. It doesn’t matter what this looks like. It doesn’t matter if you are ready for life or not. It doesn’t matter if my body will soon be buried. The alleluia box has blown wide open and the alleluias are flying around out in the world. Go and find them! Don’t forget to remember the story! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen, indeed. Alleluia!

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[1] http://www.upworthy.com/i-never-thought-a-1-minute-video-could-punch-me-in-the-heart-yet-here-we-are-3?g=3

[2] Chris Girata, rector of Calvary Episcopal Church, Memphis http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=5472ab64f8f0fa71714dbebcb&id=056828bc4e&e=c55cac835b.

 

 

A Suffering God

Years ago, a parishioner confessed to me what many of us feel but hesitate to admit: “I won’t be in church on Good Friday. I just can’t take all the sadness. I have enough sadness and suffering in my life without wallowing in it on Good Friday. I’ll come to church on Easter, when everything is happy again.”

            We do have enough sadness and suffering in life. Why add any more? Perhaps because God refuses to avoid it. Perhaps because God chooses to heal this world that God loves so much by pouring Godself freely into all of its nooks and crannies, even into the dark and frightening ones. God chooses to bring life to the world, not from outside the world, but from within the depths of the world, from pouring the divine being into frail and suffering human flesh and blood and dwelling there in the darkness. God becomes one with us not just in Jesus’ birth, but also in Jesus’ death. Medieval mystic Julian of Norwich describes Christ’s suffering and death on the Cross as “oneing,” as a making complete the oneness or unity of God with us and with all creatures, as we suffer with the crucified Jesus, and he suffers with us.[1]

 I recently read a poem by Wendell Berry that has haunted me this Holy Week. Berry writes:

“…These times we know much evil, little good/ To steady us in faith/ And comfort when our losses press/ Hard on us, and we choose,/ In panic or despair or both,/ To keep what we will lose./ For we are fallen like the trees, our peace/ broken, and so we must/ Love where we cannot trust,/ Trust where we cannot know,/ And must await the wayward-coming grace/ That joins living and dead,/ Taking us where we would not go--/ Into the boundless dark./ When what was made has been unmade/ The Maker comes to His work.”[2]

Isn’t that what Isaiah is saying, too, in his poem about the Suffering Servant? We tend to make Isaiah’s poem into an allegory for Jesus—Jesus punished by God “for our iniquity.” Isaiah, however, writing to the exiled Jews in Babylon, was not specifically writing about Jesus of Nazareth. No one knows exactly “who” the Suffering Servant is, and we can’t draw neat, clean lines that match him up with any historical figure. Isaiah 53 is not a nice prophecy about Jesus that we can drag out on Good Friday, admire, and then put away again. It is not a logical explanation of the mechanics of redemption, either. It is a poem, like Berry’s, about suffering—and salvation.

The first kind of suffering that God dives into in this poem is deformity. Isaiah portrays the Servant as a hideous creature. He seems to have a facial disfigurement so horrible that we almost cannot recognize that he is human. There is nothing about his appearance to make us want him around. He is one from whom we hide our faces in disgust, cringing at the horror before our eyes. He is like all of the parts of ourselves that we hate. He is like the ugliness that war and human greed wreak upon the natural landscape. God suffers deformity with his servant. His suffering presence leads us to Love where we cannot trust,/ Trust where we cannot know,/ And …await the wayward-coming grace… [that takes] us where we would not go—into the darkness.

We reject this Servant; indeed, we despise him. We hold him of no account. He grew up in our midst, yet we didn’t notice him as he emerged like a root out of hard, drought-tormented ground: slowly, painfully, and half-withered. He is like all of the peoples who have been enslaved, like the people who crouch under freeway overpasses. He is like the foreigner, the outcast, like all those who are different. He has no place with us. God suffers rejection with his servant, and his suffering presence leads us to Love where we cannot trust,/ Trust where we cannot know,/ And …await the wayward-coming grace… [that takes] us where we would not go—into the darkness.

The Servant suffers from pain and illness. The Hebrew says that he is “a man of pain;” defined by his physical suffering. Moreover, he does not just bear his own sickness, but ours as well. He carries our sickness and bears our pain; he is wounded, afflicted, struck down by God, and crushed by our sins. Even though we can’t be bothered to look at him, he is ground down by the sickness of the world. He is like all of those suffering from illness in places where doctors fear to tread, like soldiers and civilians wounded in war, like the teenagers bloody from gang violence in no-man’s land, like people in hospital beds that no one bothers to visit. God suffers pain with his servant. His suffering presence leads us to Love where we cannot trust,/ Trust where we cannot know,/ And …await the wayward-coming grace… [that takes] us where we would not go—into the darkness.

The servant suffers unjustly. Like Job, he never does anything to merit his grief. It all happens by a perversion of justice, by life gone awry. He never even complains about his lot. He remains as silent as a baby lamb who doesn’t know enough to cry out before his throat is cut. He does violence to no one and speaks without deceit, but he is still tossed outside of the city walls for burial, dishonored and cast out with murderers, cheaters, and thieves. The world’s justice completely passes him by. He is like the children of poverty, like the casteless and the homeless, the victims of abuse, the millions who never get a chance. God suffers persecution with his servant. His suffering leads us to Love where we cannot trust,/ Trust where we cannot know,/ And …await the wayward-coming grace… [that takes] us where we would not go—into the darkness.

The Servant’s world of deformity, rejection, illness, and injustice remains in constant contrast with an ever-present “we” throughout Isaiah 53: “we who like sheep have gone astray.” The “we” of the text—that is all of us human beings—would like to take the Suffering Servant, the Suffering God, the Suffering Christ, the Suffering neighbor, the Suffering land, the Suffering self, and put them aside, where they don’t hurt our eyes and cut into our hearts. But they are all a part of us, and we cannot let any of them go. Not the deformity, not the rejection, not the illness, not the injustice, not the transgression, not the part that we play in all of these things. And so God joins us, remaking our decaying world and our decomposing souls by his constant presence with them, lifting up, exalting, loving, transforming, turning upside down. We participate in that presence on Good Friday. On the Cross, it is concentrated and revealed for all the world to see. Wendy Farley writes that Christ’s suffering is a surge of powerful divine love upon “whatever thwarts, wounds, and incarcerates the divine image” in God’s beloved creation.[3] Shall we return that love and thereby restore the divine image? Far outside of the realm of our categories and understandings, the true power of God works with a “wayward-coming grace,” a grace that can bring a broken Israel back from exile, rebuild Jerusalem out of crushed dreams, or make the Crucified One our Risen Lord and Savior. But the only way to get there is through the darkness—holding the hand of the one who created the Light.

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[1] See Diana Butler Bass’ wonderful essay on Julian’s understanding at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diana-butler-bass/being-with-god-holy-week_b_2949133.html?utm_hp_ref=email_share

[2] Wendell Berry, from “Sabbaths II.”

[3] Wendy Farley, The Wounding and Healing of Desire, 112.

Free to Leave Home

It has happened more than once. I stand in the church entry hall, vestments on, microphone ready, bulletin in hand, on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. I watch the parking lot fill with cars full of young families with children. The parents and children pour out of the cars, dressed up, smiling and laughing, clearly glad to be at St. Thomas and with one another. Sometimes they even speak interesting languages and wear exotic clothing, and their skin tones reflect the amazing diversity of God’s creation. I repeat: this has really happened, more than once. This is not some crazy dream or made-up story that I am telling you today… But here’s the rub: these wonderful people who are filling our parking lot at 5:30 on Saturday don’t join me in the church. They don’t even look in my direction. They skip merrily into the fellowship hall, the fellowship hall that they have rented for a birthday party or a wedding reception. And my shoulders droop as I cry out to God: “It’s not fair! We have a really great worship service going on this afternoon. Harvey has worked hard to pick out just the right songs; I have spent hours writing a sermon; parishioners have brought wine and cheese and friendship to share afterwards. We’re nice; we’re welcoming. We could all be home watching basketball or enjoying the warm sunshine. But we’re here in church! Why don’t the others want to join us? It’s not fair!” And then I grow resentful toward those smiling families. “Peggy, these renters are taking up all the parking places in the lot,” I grumble. “We need to set out cones or put up signs to save spaces for our parishioners. People are going to leave if they drive up for church and can’t find a space. Maybe we shouldn’t rent our hall on Saturday nights. These renters are just in the way.”

What if, while I was stewing over this unjust and troublesome situation, a visiting priest wandered into the church and started chatting with you guys in the pews before the service? What if he suggested, “Why don’t we go join the folks in the fellowship hall? It looks like a great party! I bet they’d be glad to have us there. There are only 10 of us in here, anyway.”

“We can’t do that!” I would no doubt protest. “What about our service?!” At this point, I would be ready to call the bishop and tattle on this rogue priest who is embarrassing me in front of my parishioners and creating havoc at my 5:30 service. In the meantime, I would likely insist in disapproving tones, “If that’s what you want to do, then you just go ahead, but I have to stay here. I have to do this Eucharist …. That’s what I’m here for, that’s my job, that’s who I am. I’ll do lots of things, but I can’t change who I am ….”

It is one thing to leave home of your own free will and then return. It is another thing to have “home” taken out from under you. Yet, that is what happens to us all the time, isn’t it? Ask my children, who have grown up with one parent on each side of the Atlantic, torn between cultures and languages, never completely at home anywhere. Ask a college student who returns with joy to his parents’ house, only to realize that it isn’t really home anymore. Ask the wife who returns to her house after her husband’s funeral, and it is no longer home. Ask the divorced couple, who watch their home disintegrate before their eyes. Ask us baby boomers, even those of us who are priests, as we look at the church, also our home, so different from the churches that we remember when we were growing up. Ask, I imagine, those of you who are long-term members of St. Thomas, as you look around and wonder where you are, with staff changes, friends who have died, and even furniture that is rearranged. Home slips away so easily in all of the changes and losses in this world. Even in church. We want God to fix our homelessness, and we get pretty upset when we feel that it is God who is intensifying it. What we want are the pie-in-the-sky reassurances of the old Appalachian song, I can't feel at home in this world anymore: "This world's not my home. I'm just passing through ..." What we get, instead, is today’s parable.

Here in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus actually tells three parables about lost things being brought home: the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin, and the parable of the two sons. “Lostness” and the joy that comes with finding home again, is the common denominator in the three parables, but they are set up differently. Eugene Peterson points out that the stories are arranged in a spiral of intensification.[1] In the first story, one out of 100 sheep is lost. When that sheep is found, the shepherd is joyful and calls family and friends to rejoice with him. In the second story, one out of ten coins is lost, and when the housewife finds the coin, she rejoices and calls family and friends to join her in celebration. In the third story, one out of just two sons is lost--sons, much more important to us than sheep or coins-- and when he comes home again, the father rejoices and throws a party for the whole village. The pattern is the same (loss, homecoming, celebration) but the higher and higher stakes in these stories deepen our anticipation as we listen to them. By the time the son story comes around, we are expecting the happy ending. After all, God often favors the younger son, the underdog: just think of Jacob and Esau. Peterson imagines that even the Pharisees listening to Jesus would be cheering for the happy endings of these three parables.

But the parable of the two sons does not end when the younger son returns home and his father rejoices. It continues with the story of the elder son. The elder son does not rejoice that his brother has come home. He is angry, filled to overflowing with self-righteous indignation. He stands alone, home and possessions and sense of self destroyed by his father’s wildly forgiving actions, refusing to join the celebration. He sounds like me on Saturday nights when the fellowship hall is full. The father comes out to meet him and shows him the same grace-filled love that he had shown to the younger son. “All that is mine is yours,” the father offers, giving him everything. This part of the parable, however, has no ending. It throws the rest of the story off kilter and is meant to shake us up. Like the fig tree parable that we heard last week, this parable is left open, open to our response. We stand with the Pharisees and watch Jesus rejoicing with sinners and outcasts, and we, like the elder brother, have to decide if we will join them. And our positive response is not assured.

We usually hear today’s parable as a lesson about repentance. Repentance and grace: the Prodigal Son. But it is really a story of reconciliation. It is the story of two sons and a father. Barbara Brown Taylor writes: “It’s about the high cost of reconciliation, in which individual worth, identity and rightness all go down to the dust so that those as good as dead in their division may live together in peace.”[2] “O, how good and pleasant it is,” says the Psalmist, “when brothers dwell together in unity.”

When my children were young, one of my greatest pleasures as a mother was to go in and look at my sleeping children at night, all safe and snug in their beds, all tucked under my wings at home, no longer quarreling, or whining, but peacefully sleeping like little angels. I would go in and bless them and feel that all was right with the world, all was reconciled. When they grew up and would be away at sleepovers or summer camp, or college, I would look over at their empty beds and feel uneasy. I wanted them home, together, where I thought that I could protect them. Even now, when my grown children are home for a visit, there is something wonderful about thinking that they are safe, that home is restored as we gather under one roof at night.

God, however, takes that motherly love one step further. God sent God’s Son away from home, away to a land where he loved so much that we killed him for it. God sent him to us not so that we will refuse to grow up or so that we won’t leave home. God sent him to us so that we can say to ourselves every day:  “I am loved so much that I am free to leave home,”[3] free to mrirror that love in the world.

Pharisees, don’t miss the party. You are loved so much that you are free to leave home.

Sinners, don’t miss the party. You are loved so much that you are free to leave home.

Repentant ones, don’t miss the party. You are loved so much that you are free to leave what has been your home.

Rev. Anne, don’t miss the party. You are loved so much that you are free to leave home.

People of St. Thomas, you who already have one foot out the door in our mission statement to “restore all people to one another and to God in Jesus Christ,” you are loved so much that you are free to leave home. Don’t miss the party.

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[1] Eugene Peterson, Tell it Slant (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 94f.

[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Parable of the Dysfunctional Family,” found at http://www.barbarabrowntaylor.com/newsletter374062.htm, April 17, 2006.

[3] Quote from Henri Nouwen found on a colleague’s Facebook page! J